Sixteen
By the time the lock clicked and the door creaked open, Delilah had fallen asleep. She woke with a start. Early-morning sunlight sent fingers of light into the room from around the boarded-up window, and Delilah looked up to see the man staring down at her. In his hands he held her breakfast, another small bowl of gruel, a curious look on his face.
“How did you get the blindfold off?” he asked.
“I—”
She couldn’t decide how to answer. Maybe it didn’t matter. He didn’t look angry, only intrigued by how she’d managed it with her wrists chained behind her. She stared at him, his jowls, his thick neck, and his slicked-back hair. She noticed a single vein pulsing in his neck, a thick, rope-like cord that came out of his shirt collar and disappeared behind his right ear.
“I asked you a question.” He clomped toward her, his heavy boots creaking the worn wooden floorboards. “How did you get the blindfold off?”
“I rubbed it off,” she said.
“Rubbed it off?” he repeated, and she nodded.
“Hmm,” he said. “I haven’t had any of them do that before.”
He put the bowl down on the chair, then leaned over and pushed her face toward the wall with one rough, meaty hand while he yanked at the chains on her wrists and ankles with the other. Satisfied, he picked the bowl back up and announced, “Those seem okay.”
“They’re…” She stopped, tried to clear her throat. Her empty stomach painful from hunger, bile again worked its way up her chest. “I didn’t do anything with those. They’re tight. Too tight. They hurt.”
“I bet they do,” he said. He pulled the lone chair toward her. Once he had it positioned in front of her, he sat down. “You hungry?”
She nodded.
First he leaned toward her and pulled the blindfold off her head, threw it in the corner. When he did, the button fell out.
While he spooned the meager offering into her mouth, giving her barely time to swallow, she tried to decide if he looked familiar. She felt certain he wasn’t anyone she’d ever actually met, but he could have been someone she’d seen around town, maybe when she was with her parents, or at school. She wasn’t sure. Before the troubles, the exodus where so many of the fathers left, there were a lot of big men like him in town. They were her friends’ fathers, the loggers her father catered to at the mill.
She’d never paid much attention to any of them.
While Delilah ate, the man said nothing, just brought one tablespoonful after another to her lips and waited for her to take it. When she finished the last of it, he wiped her mouth with a paper napkin covered with cheerful pink and green flowers.
“Where’s the lady who usually feeds me?” Delilah asked.
“I decided to do it myself today,” he said. “Didn’t need her.”
Delilah curled her mouth into a worried knot. “When will you let me go?” she asked.
“I won’t.” He shook his head. “You belong to me.”
Delilah gulped hard. Her voice thin with fear, she asked, “But I don’t want to be here.”
The man snickered at her, as if she sounded foolish. “What you don’t want? That doesn’t matter. I chose you. That’s a great honor. You’re mine.”
She coughed to clear her throat, trying to dislodge a lump of fear. “What are you going to do to me?”
He sat back in the chair and looked at her. “Nothing right now, little one.”
She thought about that. “Later, will you let me go?”
This time he pursed his lips. When he did, the vein on the side of his neck stood out more. “No.”
Delilah took a long breath. “Please. I want to go home.”
The man examined her, unblinking. “Delilah, you won’t ever leave this house. You will live here until the day you die.” He leaned forward, closer to her, and lowered his mouth until it met hers. She smelled his stagnant breath as he pushed his rough, weather-worn lips against her soft ones. Her eyes flared wide with panic, as his closed and a look of pleasure softened his face.
Terrified to move, she froze and waited. When he finished, he pulled away.
“When I judge it is time, you will become sealed to me forever. We will be man and wife.” He stood and returned the chair to the center of the room, then began to walk away.
“Sir,” she whispered, and the man stopped. He looked back at her. “Please, take the chains off. They hurt.”
“Not until you prove you can be trusted.”
“How do I do that?”
“You do what your parents taught you to do,” he said. “You obey.”
Seventeen
From the Heatons’ trailer, I drove south on the road that traced the cornfield. When we reached the first intersection, Hannah instructed me to turn left. I did, and we drove east, following the road along the cornfield’s southern edge, the sun still low and in our eyes. We passed my family’s double-wide, and I saw my mother and Mother Naomi hanging sheets on ropes suspended from two spindly trees. My mother had on her wide-brimmed straw hat, the one with the flowered sash I remembered from when I was a kid. Behind them young brothers and sisters I didn’t know played. Hannah noticed me watching them.
“Should we stop?”
I’d been considering it. I didn’t see Lily. If I had, I would have answered differently. “No.”
“They might—”
“It will only cause another scene. Mother won’t let them talk to me,” I said. “Since she’s there, the others will follow her orders.”
A dozen or more trailers later, we slowed to pass the tractor pulling the wagon along the edge of the cornfield. The pickers had grown to a small army of women and children; some looked as young as ten or eleven. They worked their way through the rows of corn, snapping off the cobs and throwing them into cloth bags they dragged across the field. A dozen or more men collected the full bags and lugged them to the tractor, dumping them into the wagon. They’d been busy. At least twenty rows had been harvested, but another eighty or more needed to be cleared.
In their wake, a second battalion of men and teenage boys followed, using machetes to cut down the empty stalks. They left behind a carpet of debris, a thick thatch that would be turned into silage.
Hannah motioned. I turned left and drove north, continuing to outline the perimeter of the field, heading toward the mountains. As we approached the road’s end, Samuel’s Peak grew closer, and then loomed nearly overhead. Hannah pointed at not a trailer but a ramshackle cottage. Little of the structure’s last coat of white paint remained, leaving the wood exposed. Over the decades, Utah’s harsh sun had turned it silver.
I pulled over and parked.
The trailers were old and weary, many pockmarked with rust, but they looked like palaces in comparison to the house before us. A substantial branch, twisted and rotting, had fallen off an oak in the front yard, blocking the path to the house. Rather than cut it up and dispose of it, someone had removed a section of fence, making a second way to get into the yard. A large hole in the front wall had been repaired by nailing boards across it, big gaps between the wood letting the elements in. Jagged-edged screens tacked on with staples covered broken windows missing panels of glass. I wondered how the family fared during the winters, when instead of letting in mountain breezes they needed to keep out harsh cold.
“Even before the troubles, the Coombs family was among the poorest in Alber,” Hannah whispered. “But now, with just the wives and children, no husband to work, they have nearly nothing.”
As we had at the Heatons’, I led Hannah around the side of the house toward the back. The yard was covered with refuse, broken toys, rusty sheets of metal and pipes, and piles of boards and logs that struck me as a good place for rattlers to breed. An old outhouse with a hole in the wooden roof that had to let in rain stood to one side, the odor emanating from it nearly overpowering. The cornstalks behind the house had already been mowed down fifteen feet deep. To our left, in the distance, the crew of harvesters wo
rked their way back toward the house. I heard the murmurs of the women and children talking as they snapped off the cobs, the men shouting at each other as they cut the stalks. The sun rising ever higher, the heat had begun to build.
I again motioned for Hannah to follow, and we made our way to the front door.
On the porch, I had to dodge a dinner-plate-size hole to get close enough to knock. I rapped once, twice, then stepped back to wait. No one came. I tried again. This time I heard footsteps from inside the house, squeaking floorboards. Hannah and I stood back and waited. The door creaked open far enough for one eye to look out, the height of someone young.
“Well, hello,” I said. I bent down a bit. “I’m Clara Jefferies. This is Hannah Jessop. We’re looking for your mothers.”
A tiny voice said, “They ain’t here.”
“Where are they?” I asked. “It’s important that we talk to your mothers. Someone older.”
“My momma, my whole family’s working in the field. Every one of them. But I gets to stay home, cause I’m too little to reach the cobs,” the child said. Gradually the door edged farther open, a bit at a time, until we saw a young boy of eight or so staring at us with saucer-round pale blue eyes under a sparse fringe of blond hair. “What’d’ya need my momma for?”
“We need to talk to her about Jayme.”
The boy frowned.
Hannah moved forward. “I think we’ve met, haven’t we? The time you came to the shelter with Jayme to pick up her earnings. Isn’t your name Samuel?”
The boy appeared to have reservations about answering, but eventually, he nodded. “Yeah, like the peak. My momma named me after it.”
“What a wonderful name,” I said. “And we’re Clara and Hannah, as I said. We’ve come to talk to your mom. Or better yet, we’d like to talk to Jayme.”
“’Bout what?” His face cocked to the side, he looked up at us out of the corners of his eyes.
“About…” Hannah hesitated, and then said, “To tell Jayme that she still needs to pick up the rest of her pay for helping me at the shelter.”
That seemed to make sense to Samuel, and he swung the door the rest of the way open. His ragged and soiled clothes drooped on his reed-thin frame, and he had a faint swath of dirt across his left cheek. From inside, the house emitted the mingled odors of sweat and rotted meat. Since Hannah seemed to be making a connection with the boy, I stepped back and let her move closer.
“We’d like to make sure that Jayme gets her money, Samuel,” she explained. “But to do that, we need your help.”
“We needs that money.” A spark of excitement in his eyes, Samuel suggested, “You could give it to me, and I’ll give it to Momma.” He appeared to think that through for another moment, and then he said, “But you was here before to see about Jayme, weren’t you? How come you didn’t tell Momma about Jayme’s money?”
“That’s right, I was here,” Hannah said, taken a bit aback. I was rather enjoying her predicament. The boy and his questions were giving her pause. “You must have been listening that day I came to your house to try to find Jayme.”
“You told Momma that Jayme was in trouble,” he said. “Momma said Jayme weren’t in any trouble at all.”
Hannah beamed at the boy as if he’d answered a difficult test question correctly. “What a smart boy you are.”
“Momma told you to leave,” he said, giving her a doubtful frown.
Hannah hesitated just a moment, and I decided to take over. “She did. But you see, Samuel, Miss Jessop needs to talk to Jayme, to get her okay to give your mother the money. Miss Jessop can’t just hand out your sister’s money unless Jayme agrees to it.”
Samuel thought about that and his smile wilted with disappointment. “Jayme’s not here. So how’s my momma gonna get the money?”
“Well…” Hannah began.
“We don’t have to talk to Jayme in person,” I suggested. We had an inroad. This was working. “We could talk to her on the phone, assuming you know how we can reach her.”
At that, his small face brightened. “Momma gots it,” he said. “Wait here.”
The door slammed, and I heard footsteps again, this time running away from the door.
From the cornfield, the clatter of the harvesting crew grew ever closer. I thought about the boy inside, the prospect that he could help us. The arrival of his family, among the workers, could prove our undoing. Once they reached their house, one might spot us. His mother could come and send us packing. I opened the door a few inches and called out, “Samuel, please hurry. We need to be on our way soon.”
“I am,” he shouted.
Seconds later, he stood at the door holding onto his britches with one hand, trying to keep them from sliding down his scrawny frame, and clutching a scrap of paper in his other.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“That’s where Jayme is,” Samuel said, pride at his great accomplishment shining on his smudged face. “You can call her and give us that money now, right?”
Hannah and I looked at the note.
“Are you sure she’s here? That this is where we’ll find her?” I handed the scrap of paper back to the child.
“My momma says it is. The man told her that she could find Jayme there anytime she wanted. He said she could call and talk to Jayme if she wanted. But Momma said she had no reason to talk to a daughter who runned away,” Samuel said.
“I see,” Hannah said.
The boy bunched his lips up as if he didn’t approve. “The man said there’s a lotta kids there from Alber, the ones who runned away.”
“What man gave your mother this information? Do you know his name?” I asked.
Samuel appeared apprehensive. “Do you need to know that to give us the money?” he asked. “’Cause I don’t know no name or anything. Momma just said it ’twas a man.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “This is what we need, Samuel. A way to reach Jayme. Thank you.”
“How long till my momma gets the money?” he asked. “We could use it quick, ’cause we ain’t got any electric right now. Momma couldn’t pay the bill.”
I’d noticed the house was dark inside. A nonfunctioning refrigerator could account for some of the smell. I looked at the child’s face, the dilapidated house, and I opened my bag. Hannah gave me a sad frown, the kind that said she understood. Out of my wallet, I pulled $160 in twenties, leaving forty to tide me over until I found an ATM. I wondered briefly if the bank in Alber had ever installed one. “Tell your mom that Miss Jessop stopped by and this is your sister’s pay,” I said.
He looked doubtful. “You don’t have to talk to Jayme first, like you said?”
“When we tell her you needed it to pay the electric bill, she’ll understand. We’ll give her a call and explain,” I said.
The boy grabbed the money in his dirty little hands and held it before him as if I’d handed over a fortune. “Thanks,” he said.
We turned to leave and were nearly back to the Pathfinder when he shouted at us to stop. “Lady, tell Jayme something for me, okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Tell her that Samuel wants her to come home. I miss her. We needs her here.”
“We will, Samuel,” Hannah said. She turned and we started off, but then she stopped again. The boy lingered at the door. “Samuel, if you need anything, if you need help, you know where the shelter is in town?”
“Where I comed with Jayme and saw you?” The harvesters drew closer, and I saw a woman splinter off and stride toward us. In a few minutes, she’d be upon us.
“Yes,” Hannah said.
“Yup,” he said. “I got good direction sense. Momma always says that. I can find anything.”
Hannah laughed, as I urged her to move. She started walking, but she called back over her shoulder, “Samuel, if you need anything, you come see me. Don’t forget.”
Worried, I motioned for Hannah to hurry. The woman from the field stormed toward us. Moments later, we passed the house
in the Pathfinder. I saw Samuel run to the woman, holding my twenty-dollar bills and grinning as wide as I’d ever seen a child smile. The woman took the money and dropped to her knees, my guess to question the boy.
As the house disappeared behind us, I handed Hannah my cell phone. “You know the place? Where Jayme is supposed to be?”
“No, but there can’t be more than one Salt Lake Youth Crisis Center.”
“Get someone on the phone,” I said. “Let’s give this a shot.”
A brief web search yielded the organization’s phone number. Hannah clicked onto it, it rang, and a woman answered. “Salt Lake Youth Crisis Center. May I help you?”
Hannah handed the phone back to me.
“I’m Detective Clara Jefferies. I need to talk to your director.”
“He’s not here right now.”
“Is this a shelter? Do young people live there?”
“We place homeless youth,” the woman explained. “We find temporary housing with foster homes and shelters. Help them find jobs.”
“We’re looking for a young woman. We need to verify that she’s used your services. Who would you suggest we talk to?”
“I’ll get Samantha for you,” the woman said. “She’s our program admittance officer. She should be able to help.”
As we drove down the road, I noticed the workers had expanded their reach into the field. More corn had been harvested and mowed down. The crew had turned the corner and headed back, spreading out to tackle the next row. Down the road, Jim Daniels pulled the tractor out in front of us, filled with the bags bulging with corn cobs.
“Where is he taking it?” I asked Hannah.
“The park across from the Meeting Place. Or I guess I should call it the diner now,” she explained. “They divide it up and parcel it out. Last year each family living in the trailer park got one bag per person. They expanded the field and planted more this year. I heard they were hoping for a bag and a quarter.”
As Hannah predicted, across from Danny’s Diner, the tractor pulled off the road into the old city park. It stopped in the shade of three aged oaks. There, families gathered with hand trucks and children’s wagons. Someone had a gator—an ATV with a cart on the back. It looked like they used anything they had with wheels to haul home their shares of corn. Once there, they’d dry it and grind it into cornmeal, or cook and can it.
The Fallen Girls: An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller (Detective Clara Jefferies Book 1) Page 12
