by Pat Powers
I put my van in gear and headed off for Alpharetta. Or Roswell. Whatever. Lavender Acres was a gorgeous piece of land set in the middle of prime real estate almost on the border of Alpharetta. To the south of it, brand-new strip malls with upscale stores competed with brand hew strip malls with solidly middle class stores to the north of it. The land itself was enclosed by a thick screen of trees, and it was huge.
I had envisioned a small apartment complex with a few nice amenities for seniors thrown in, but actually Lavendar Acres consisted of a quite a few small but very nice homes set along a winding drive that kept them all separated by a great deal of leafy green woods. I had been thinking retired women, but these were retired female executives, and they liked their amenities.
I had also been expecting older women, but as I drove down the narrow paving surrounded on all sides by leafy woods I saw a woman walking down the road, and she wasn't old at all -- maybe early 30s, but with a very solid build to her. I smiled and waved as he passed her, and she waved back, but her face was not smiling at him, just the studied indifference of someone out to do something. Though it was awfully hot to be walking. And she was wearing a walkie-talkie on a clip at her hip. Might not be just walking.
The twisty road soon curved and she was out of sight, which was why Bowman didn't see her reach down, unfasten the walkie-talkie and say into it, "Got a visitor. Male. Doesn't look like anyone we know. Wearing a suit. Dark blue minivan."
The road branched off after a half mile or so -- this was a HUGE piece of property, hundreds of acres at the very least -- and there was a sign indicating "This way to check-in and the clubhouse."
I followed it to a modern clubhouse that had been cleverly designed to look pleasantly rustic. A weathered wooden facade concealed the sheetrock and wood frame construction, and a wide porch featured half a dozen or so rocking chairs, none of which were occupied in the early afternoon heat.
There was a large swimming pool off to one side of the clubhouse, and it was well populated by a crowd of women who were either sunning themselves or swimming or sitting at shaded tables and drinking cool drinks. They looked like a mixture of young and old women, and the sound of their voices was cheerful and relaxed in the bright summer afternoon. If they were paying any attention to me, I didn't notice it.
There were two or three squirrels on the wide lawn in front of the clubhouse, but either the heat or the general lack of attention from humans had left them so indolent that they didn't do any scampering to escape me as I walked past them.
Inside the clubhouse the air was cool and dry. The air conditioner hummed softly in the background and the room was tastefully lit by indirect lighting instead of fluorescents. A hearty-looking woman with a shock of white hair and tanned skin blotched with dark sunspots sat at a desk and stared into a computer terminal. She wore a telephone headset and looked very professional, though well past retirement age. The eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses were sharp and clear though surrounded by a fine network of wrinkles.
"And what can we do for you today, sir?" asked the woman.
"I'm here to see Gretchen Kanooly," I said.
"Gretchen Kanooly," said the woman in even tones.
"Yes, she's my aunt," I said. "My name's John Blackshear, I'm up from Cordele on business and thought I'd drop by and see her."
"John, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Gretchen died last week of a stroke," said the woman.
I let my face go a little slack. I hoped I looked confused. The info I'd gotten from Thomson had all been correct. Gretchen was dead, she did have a relative named John Blackshear in Cordele.
"Mind if I sit down for a minute?" I asked.
“Certainly," said the woman. "Are you all right?"
"I'm OK," I said. "This is a shock and all. I mean, I knew Gretchen was getting on in years, but I hadn't heard about any hospitalizations or anything."
"It was a sudden, massive stroke," said the woman. "My name's Mary, by the way, Mary Matthews. We were all shocked too, Gretchen was so healthy. But that's the way it happens sometimes."
"Well, I had heard she was very happy here, had a lot of great friends and so on," I said.
"Oh, she was," said Mary. "Everybody liked her. She and her roommate Kelsie were very close. Say, would you like to meet Kelsie? I think she'd enjoy meeting another member of the family. She says she met quite a few at Mary's funeral, but not everybody and of course they were all kind of a blur."
"Sure," I said hesitantly. I didn't really want to meet someone who knew Gretchen well -- my cover wasn't very deep here, and could be easily blown. But I did want to look the place over a little more, and this was a chance to do so.
"Sure," I said. "I'd like to meet her and pay my respects, as it were."
"I'll take you over to Kelsie's place," said Mary. "The roads here can be confusing."
"Tell me about it," I said. "The way in was so twisty I kept thinking I'd made a wrong turn, even though I knew I'd never made any turns until I got to the sign about the clubhouse."
We walked out into the heat and Mary got into a golf cart while I got into my van. Mary invited me to ride with her in the cart, but I said I'd rather not put her to too much trouble as far as taking me back. What I didn't tell her was that I wanted a fast getaway in case my cover got blown, and a way of casing the place further-- if it wasn't blown.
I followed the golf cart around a few tight curves and turns to a cottage set well back from the road -- they all were set well back from the road, come to think of it, and the screen of undergrowth was so thick that the only part of most cottages visible from the road was the driveway leading to it.
Kelsie Kleschmer was a hale and hearty woman in her 60s who had that distracted air that the bereaved often had. And one look at the cottage she had shared with Green showed me why -- there were lots and lots of pictures of Kanooly and Kretschmer together, and very few of them with their respective families. Looking at the two of them smiling and holding each other by the shoulders in various touristy locations, and lounging by the pool and so forth at Lavender Acres, they didn't look like roommates. There was an ease, a familiarity to the way they held each other that looked more like an old married couple.
And it was not the sort of photo collection you'd expect to see from two women who were just sharing a cottage. That would involve a lot of photos of their families and friends, with a few of them together. Here the vast majority were of the two of them, separately and together, along with some family photos from each of them. The sort of thing you'd expect to see in any couple's house.
Kids would have clenched the deal, but of course they were both of the same sex. But it wasn't hard to guess the deal, especially with Kletschmer so clearly in mourning.
"It's so nice to meet you," Kletschmer said, giving me a faint smile, which was probably about all she could manage under the circumstances.
"It's nice to meet you, too," I said, shaking her hand firmly and smiling, playing the part of the professional businessman.
“Gretchen told me so many nice things about you," said Kletschmer.
"I'm kind of amazed she remembered me at all," I said. "I didn't see her all that much as an adult, and as a kid I was just one of a cloud of kids that came to visit now and then."
"Even so, she did remember you, and very nicely," said Kletschmer. "She did say you were a very ACTIVE boy."
"I'll have to admit to that," I said. "My mother used to say she always wanted to give me horse tranquilizers, because the stuff for human beings just didn't work. She always said visiting you was one of her favorite things to do, though."
"Gretchen's favorite thing to do in the last few years was to go to folkabilly concerts out in the mountains," said Kelsie. "We'd go, and the weather would be so nice, and there's be great music and cute things to buy and all these nice young people enjoying the music, too. But even with a crowd there, you could find a place where you'd feel so all alone and in touch with nature and God out there. There's all s
orts of hollows and hills in the mountains where you can just vanish from human ken by going around a corner. So we could enjoy the crowd or have a nice picnic in relative quiet, all within a few acres. It was so nice."
Kelsie started telling me about other things she'd said and done with Kanooly and I let her go on because that's what I was supposedly there to do ... to meet with Kelsie. I had been afraid I'd have to make up specific details about Kanooly and that would have blown my cover very quickly, but mostly all I had to do was listen. Pretty soon she was crying so I hugged her and said comforting words to her, which was in a sense a wrong thing to do, but I thought she needed to be hugged right about then and my sympathy for her in her grief was real, so I didn't feel all that bad about it. Being on a missing person's case made me a little more appreciative of Gretchen's loss -- because missing person cases sometimes turned out badly.
I wasn't getting a hell of a lot of investigating done, though, and I disengaged with Kletschmer as fast as I could gracefully manage it, which in traditional Southern culture is ... extremely slowly. We had to talk about this and that and promise to see one another again very soon, even if neither of us ever intended to set eyes on the other for so long as we both should live.
Chapter 35
Return to the ways of the Lord
"Don't you want to return to the ways of the Lord?" the kind voice asked.
April nodded. Of course she wanted to return to the ways of the Lord. It was the only way she could save herself.
"You understand that the Lord is the only one who can save you?"
April nodded vigorously. She understood that. She had been prepared to understand almost anything they told her, from the beginning. But only recently had she stopped being simply PREPARED to understand, and instead UNDERSTOOD. This was very, very different from the pretend-submission she had indulged in during her slavegirl days, which now seemed distant and strange to her, as if her memories were immersed in water. There was nothing pretend or play here. Although no one had threatened her with death or physical harm of any kind (unless you counted the prolonged bondage they kept her in) April knew, deep within her, that if she did not become what they wanted her to become, they would kill her.
Perhaps it was because of the very nonconsensual way they treated her, or because of a certain distance in their voices and the way they handled her -- April's status with these people was Outsider, Bad Person, Evil One, Provisional Human, etc. She was not an accepted part of their group and April absolutely craved that acceptance because she sensed that it meant life itself to her.
But April was also afraid that she might not be able to become what these women wanted her to become as fully and completely as they desired, and that they would somehow sense it, and so reject her, and so she might die. As a submissive and a dancer, April was an unusually strong-willed woman. And as a submissive she had learned to hide her will within the forms of submission. April was afraid her strength of will would be too great, and most of all, too apparent.
Her great hope was that the people she was dealing with were too unfamiliar with kind of fun submission she'd enjoyed to know it for what it was. It was a slender reed to hang her hopes of survival on, but it was all she had.
So April was very, very glad, when she heard the voice say, "We believe you are ready to talk to us, April. We are going to take your gag out now."
She felt hands working the buckles that held the gag in place, and in a few seconds she felt the gag being pulled out of her mouth. She retched when they did it. She felt a glass being pressed to her lips and drank gratefully. Her mouth was so dry. They'd been good about giving her food and water, so she wasn't dehydrated overall, but wearing a gag for so long definitely dried out the mouth. And of course there was the pain in her jaw. It wasn't all THAT bad -- April had plenty of experience wearing gags for long periods of time -- but she'd never spent several days being gagged nonstop with no recovery periods except for very brief feedings and waterings.
"Thank you," she said to her unseen beneficiary when the water was all gone.
"You're welcome," said a voice in very happy tones. "And we're so very happy to hear you speak without first getting permission to speak. That's slavegirl ways, and you're not a slavegirl any more, you're a woman. A polite and well-mannered woman but a woman nonetheless, with the same rights as any other adult."
"Yes, ma'am," April said firmly. Ordinarily in such a situation her every instinct would be to say, "Yes, mistress" in a very soft voice, but there hadn't been the slightest stumble or hesitation in that regard. Evidently her survival instincts were kicking in. Well, there was nothing like the imminent prospect of death contemplated over a prolonged period of time to make that happen.
"I'm glad you understand that," said the voice in very pleased tones. It gave April a thrill all over her body to hear those pleased tones. "What are your feelings about dancing now, April?" asked the voice.
April knew the answer to that one, she'd heard it from them often enough. "It's wrong, it's improper," April said. "It leads men into temptation and devalues women generally."
April said the word firmly, decisively, though they were a repudiation of what had once been her second greatest pleasure in life, and the means by which she had achieved fame and fortune. She believed those words now with every fiber of her being, except for the one tiny fiber of her that lay buried in her mind under many layers, like the heart of an onion. If it went -- if they got to it -- there wouldn't be an April Dancer any more, just a shell where April Dancer had once been.
Chapter 36
She was about to find out what it was like to REALLY be corrupted by patriarchal culture
It was a good thing Sandy couldn't see what was going on around her, or she would have been considerably more worried than she was, and she was extremely worried as things were.
One of her captors sat at her computer and hooked up a CD-ROM burner to it -- a very high speed CD-ROM burner. Another rifled her desk until he found some papers she had written. Grinning triumphantly, the captor handed them to another who sat at a desk and began examining them carefully, then copying words and letters onto a blank sheet of paper.
All of her captors wore latex gloves and had latex appliques on their faces that disguised their features.
The one who had been rifling through her papers scrawled a note and passed it to the one who sat practicing handwriting. It said, "Her dance group goes out of town on short notice a lot, according to her day planner. Somewhere in the Southeast. No conflicts in day planner."
The writer took the note, nodded, carefully folded it up and stuck it in a pocket, and continued writing. Eventually, the writer produced a note that read, "Melissa, we're going to Mount Pleasant for a show this weekend. Sorry about the short notice, but you know how it is. You can reach me through the Mount Pleasant Theater League at 609-551-2335."
Before she wrote down the number, the writer wrote "Cell phone?" on a piece of paper and handed it to the desk rifler. He read it, shook his head “No” and continued rifling.
But they DID find a landline phone, the sort that came with internet service on a desk. And it had a messaging feature. And so one of the captors used her phone to make a recording of all the messages on Sandy's phone. Many of them were from Sandy's roommate, Melissa. “Perfect,” thought the rifler as she listened to the messages. The sound was plenty clear enough that she could use the recordings to develop a good imitation of Melissa's voice and there was enough length and variety to the messages that she could learn Melissa's diction. It saved a lot of time looking for videos Melissa might have left on social media. She left the room and went down to the van and got in the back and began practicing Melissa's voice, using the phone messages as a guide.
The writer handed the note to the rifler, who went searching through the house. He very quickly found that the refrigerator had notes taped to it about garbage removal, old trips and such. Looking carefully at it, he noticed a build up of tape debris on the d
oor just above the handle. Of course. That would be the place. He taped the note down in the position indicated by the tape debris, so that the paper extended down over the door handle. Now the refrigerator could not be opened without seeing the note. Logical enough.
The captor gave the thumbs up to the other captors who stood waiting in the bedroom. One of them took a sack and tossed it in the laundry bin which held Sandy's box. It had been found in the closet, and contained several dance costumes, some cosmetics, and a V.I. Warshawski novel bookmarked halfway through. There was also an anime videotape entitled "Stainless Nights" in the bag, and a tube of "Full Body Massage Oil."
Obviously, Sandy's travel kit. Just the sort of thing she would never leave behind. Her wallet went in the travel kit. Her keys went to a captor roughly Sandy's build and height, who was wearing Sandy's jeans and T-shirt. She pulled the travel kit out of the hamper and sat in a chair, waiting.
She didn't have to wait long. One of the captors peered out of Sandy's door window. No one was visible in the fishbowl view of the apartment house hallway. The captor opened the door a tiny crack and peered up and down the hallway. Empty. Good. The lookout stepped out, and then the other three captors came trundling out of the room, pushing the hamper. They wore jumpsuits that said, "Clyatt Services." They moved casually, speaking in calm voices as if they were just workers on a job.
Sandy, awakened by motion, was squirming and moaning inside the box, but even if you put your ear right up to the box and listened close, you couldn't hear her. And none of the several people that the group passed on their way to the "Clyatt Services" truck gave the laundry basket or its attendants so much as a second glance.
