The Orchid Sister

by LeClaire, Anne D.

  What about drugs? the detective had asked. Any problems or history there?

  No, she’d answered, completely confident of this.

  Nestled between the folds of soft terry lay a syringe.

  KATHERINE

  Damn you, Kat.

  The voice was so clear, as distinct as if Maddie were there in the room with her. The echo rang on and on. Damn you, Kat. Impossible, of course. She had been dreaming or hallucinating. Again. It was becoming more and more difficult to separate reality from the dreams and drug-induced imaginings caused from the pills she had twice given in to and allowed herself for release from her situation. Nor could she trust her perceptions of time. When had Verner last been in to examine her?

  The night sky shone down through the skylight. The moon was nearly full, its phases her only method of tracing the passage of days. Soon Helen Mercer would arrive to give her the evening medication. She was brisk and struck Kat as being void of emotion, but she had observed the woman touch Verner’s shoulder in a way that suggested an intimacy between them. Since the day Kat had been found unconscious on the hall floor, Mercer had been checking on her more frequently and taking more care to ensure the door was locked when she left. The Mayan women, too, seemed more wary. She had been foolish to try to escape after taking the pill. She would be more careful in the future and not squander an opportunity when it arose. The way they were watching her, she doubted she would have more than one chance to escape. She had to be patient. Watch for it. Take it.

  She had tried to speak to the two Mayan women who brought her meals and explain that she was being held here and wanted to get out. She didn’t know if they understood what she was saying, or if they only pretended not to. One of them—the one whose name she did not know yet—even avoided eye contact, but several times Kat had looked up to see the other one staring at her with an expression she couldn’t read. Her name was Rosa, and she was the kinder of the two, always taking an extra moment to rub Kat’s back after she had bathed her. Kat was unsure how much the woman understood of what happened in this place. Her face was impassive, and when Kat had tried to speak to her, hoping to enlist her as an ally—trying both Spanish and English—the woman had not responded. Once, relying on her compassion and the times she had brushed her hair even though this was something Kat could do herself, she had asked her for help, but a look of panic had crossed her face and she had fled.

  Mostly Kat pretended to be passive and did what she was asked, giving them no trouble, playing possum while figuring out a way to get out of there.

  She continued to mentally compose the piece she would write exposing Verner and the many questions that remained unanswered, questions an editor would want her to pursue. Where did Verner find the pregnant girls? Had they come willingly to the clinic? How did he get away with it? Did people in the village know? She remembered the time she had spent in Playa del Pedro on her first two trips to the clinic. At the memory, unbidden, a smile softened her face.

  In this whole nightmarish experience, there had been that one lovely promise. Where might it have led? She wondered what the handsome diver was doing, if he thought about her, if he wondered why, despite her promise, she hadn’t returned. Occasionally she allowed herself the fantasy that he would come looking for her, would rescue her like the hero from a fairy tale. She had hated those stories, even as a child, believing that the princess locked in the tower or cooking for the dwarfs while they toiled in the mine, the girl sleeping in the glass coffin, all of them should have rescued themselves. Yet here she was, fantasizing that a tall, handsome diver would arrive in the night to save her. Hell, she would scold herself, he doesn’t even know where I am. But in the night she continued to think of him. His eyes, which seemed to suggest he understood all the things she had long ago learned not to speak of. If she believed in such things, if age and experience had not disabused her of the romantic notion, she would have called him a soul mate.

  She passed time, too, lost in memory. When her grandmother was dying, Kat had visited her in the nursing home. “What do you do all day, just lying there?” she had asked.

  Her nana was legally blind at that point and could neither read nor watch television. “Oh, I have my memories,” Nana had replied. “In the end, that’s all we have. Our memories.” So Kat would go over the past. She would think back to when she was young and had the arrogance of youth, a time when—what was it an older man she’d dated when she was in her twenties had said?—when the world was her oyster. She traveled through the geography and geology of her life, thinking about the places and countries she had visited. The people she had interviewed. The wonders of the world, of life, so easy to take for granted. She recalled every man who ever loved her. Every man who had left her. Every man she had loved and left. Again, she thought about the diver and felt the loss of something that had only just begun. Only begun but filled with such promise.

  Occasionally she would travel back to her childhood. Even now, after all these years, she could recall the sound of her mother’s laughter, the manly scent of her father. After the plane crash she had had little time to explore or express her grief because her time and energy were focused on Maddie. Now, long-suppressed sorrow would take her in the morning hours, and she would find herself fingering the gold K on the chain at her throat and missing them with a pain that burned. Sometimes, half-asleep, she could almost hear them. You always were the practical one, she could hear her father say. And smart, her mother would chime in. So smart.

  Not so smart or practical now. She remembered all of her sins, her acts of foolishness and transgressions. Pride and lust. Always, she remembered Maddie. The recollections of Maddie in the burn unit were particularly vivid. She was amazed at the power of memory.

  “You have a killer memory,” Carl had said when they were first married, like it was a good thing, and then later, right before the divorce, he said it more like it was a curse. But she knew memory didn’t kill. It made her whole.

  A key turned in the lock and her attention snapped back to the present. Would it be Verner? It was too early for an excursion to the pool. Was he coming to draw more blood to see how her profile was changing?

  “Hola.” The Mayan woman came with the tray, avoiding Kat’s gaze. A moment or two later, the door opened and Mercer entered. The Mayan left, and Verner’s assistant sat on the end of the bed and watched while Kat ate a few mouthfuls of rice, of black beans and sliced banana. There was no coffee today, only a cup of a liquid that tasted of cinnamon and honey. She took a cautious sip, trying to discern any bitterness that might reveal a drug, and finding none, drank it all. When she was finished, Mercer handed her the little paper cup holding the white pill, watching while Kat took it. She lay back and closed her eyes, conscious even behind closed lids of Mercer watching her. Finally she heard her walk away, the door close, the lock turn.

  She waited a moment or two and then poked her finger in her mouth and dislodged the pill from where it was tucked in her cheek. She stared at it, then wiped the pill clean of her saliva and concealed it with the others.

  Her last thoughts before sleep were of Maddie. It had been a mistake not to tell her sister her plans. She had kept them hidden out of shame, of appearing foolish and vain. And the very last thing she would ever do was make Maddie feel bad about her own scars while Kat focused on preserving her own looks. But Maddie wouldn’t have judged her. Too late to rectify that mistake now. Maddie would be worried as the weeks passed with no word from her. More than worried. Probably frantic. The thought of causing her distress made Kat’s heart race. Would Maddie call the police? The idea brought a slender ray of hope, a light almost immediately extinguished. No one would ever find her here. She had left no track to follow. No one knew she was here, with the slight possibility of Víctor, the diver, but when she returned to Playa she hadn’t even gone to see him, unwilling to reveal to him what was happening to her. And even if by some miracle he or Maddie managed to find her and rescue her, what then? She raised a
hand to her face. What then?

  “Maddie,” she whispered aloud. “Forgive me.”

  MADISON

  The overnight bag where she had stashed the syringe occupied the front passenger’s seat, its presence so huge it might as well have been a person. Might as well have been glowing with radioactive material. She should have stored it in the trunk. Out of sight. Out of mind. As if that were even possible. The questions it posed circled through her mind. Insulin? Some other medication? Or a more dangerous drug. She pushed the last thought away.

  The trip back up the coast seemed endless. As the miles rolled by she surfed from station to station on the radio, eventually giving up. Music stations grated, even the classical ones, and her mind was so active, thoughts and fears circling endlessly, that talk shows were impossible to follow. When she wasn’t thinking about Kat, or Jack, she kept returning to the worries and regrets of the past and ruminating over fears about the future, both of which were as futile to effect as a fly’s ability to stop a tornado.

  The hours of sitting in the car had aggravated her lame leg. The ache progressed from dull to throbbing. She alternately tensed and relaxed her calf muscles and shifted her weight in her seat. If she wasn’t able to stand and stretch pretty soon, her thigh muscles would start to spasm.

  She stopped to get gas just after she crossed over the state line into Rhode Island. She stood outside the restroom and did some standing yoga poses, which helped a bit. She consoled herself that she was on the last stage of the trip and soon would be home, where a hot bath and her own bed awaited.

  Winks met her at the door, winding in and around her ankles, mewing in reproach at being abandoned. His food bowls were empty. Maddie was glad to have something to do, glad for the companionship. She dropped her stuff on the kitchen bench, but avoided looking at the radioactive overnight bag. She filled Winks’s bowl, gave him fresh water, and changed his litter box. “There you go. Am I forgiven?” Her voice echoed in the emptiness of the house. She turned on the CD player to fill the echoing stillness. She passed over the Chris Botti disc. It would be a long time before she could listen to a trumpet without thinking of Jack. She selected another, and the first notes of a blues guitar wove through the air. Muddy Waters wailing about the seamy side of life. Perfect.

  She made herself a peanut butter and orange marmalade sandwich—comfort food from her childhood—and ate it standing at the kitchen sink, trying not to think about Kat. She kept her eyes averted from the overnight bag while she finished the sandwich. She would deal with it in the morning.

  Overcome with exhaustion from the long drive and the events of the past days, she opted for two Advil in place of a hot bath, switched off the CD, and headed up to bed. The ghost echo of a wild-voiced blues man crying that he couldn’t be satisfied lingered in the air.

  After an hour of tossing, she gave up on sleep and descended to the kitchen. The luggage was on the bench where she had dropped it. Waiting. Unable to ignore it any longer, she opened the bag. The green washcloth was where she had packed it. She unfolded it and stared at the syringe. There was a reasonable explanation. Detective Miller had asked about Kat’s health. The staff at the salon had said she looked tired, worn. She reconsidered the possibility that her sister was ill with something that required self-administered injections. But surely Kat would have shared this.

  Drugs? Miller had asked about that, too. It seemed inconceivable that Kat would use drugs. She had once broken off a friendship with a woman when she discovered she did coke on the weekends. “I don’t need that shit in my life, and I don’t need friends who do,” Kat had said. Even so, Maddie couldn’t deny the reality of the syringe: physical evidence of a Kat she didn’t know; it mocked her. What version of herself had Kat kept secret? What secrets had she concealed?

  Her throat closed with fear. And anger, too. She folded the washcloth over the syringe and put it in a drawer, as if once it were hidden the secrets it suggested would also disappear.

  TIA CLARA

  Tia Clara watched as the white van with blue lettering on the driver’s door passed on its way from the airport in Cancún through the village to its final destination. There was no dust on the sides of the van or dead bugs smeared on the windshield. Everyone knew it belonged to the norteamericano doctor who owned the sprawling compound on the outskirts of the village. Tia Clara knew evil could be concealed behind many masks and, despite the man’s occupation and money and the steady flow of foreigners who arrived to stay at his spa, the doctor was a wicked man. She kept her fingers crossed inside her apron pocket on those few occasions when he passed by, enclosed in his second shell of putrid green, a vibration so vivid she was always amazed that even those without the gift couldn’t see it. Although she would have admitted this to no one, she was afraid that in a contest, his power—that of wealth and bad medicine—would be stronger than hers.

  The name of his place was Retirada de la Playa, but whenever they spoke of it, the villagers, openly blessing themselves, called it El Lugar del Diablo. Once, more than twenty years ago, a chapel stood on the same site. It had been a thick-walled adobe hut that smelled of greasy wax and mice. Women brought offerings there to set before the statue of the Virgin. Stubby candles and tortillas, calabaza, and plaits of their children’s hair. Their husbands, conch fishermen and poor farmers, left cigarrillos and, on occasion, cervezas. In this way, the people asked for her blessings. Once, long ago, Tia Clara had done this, too.

  Like much of Quintana Roo, the village occupied land composed of limestone and coral, no more than a living rock, a stone sponge really. From this they wrested gardens, rough patches of earth where they grew squash and peppers, beans and thin rows of corn. From the gulf, the men pulled conch and huachinango. All this they received as a benediction from their Virgin.

  Tia Clara cast a glance to the heavens, calculating the date the chapel had fallen. She remembered that the job had taken less than half a day and had been carried out by a crew of gringo workers who had been brought in to construct the new clinic. From a stand of nearby brush, she had watched the demolition with others from the village, listening as the crew laughed among themselves at the offerings, the fading photographs and limp paper flowers, moldy oranges and squash, cigarettes and beer. But their laughter was hollow, and when the first wall collapsed, the operator of the bulldozer had crossed himself with a furtive movement.

  In place of the adobe chapel, an immense wooden building had been erected, an H-shaped structure with a courtyard in the north cup of the H and an azure-tiled pool in the south, near an opening to a deep underground river. Two additional buildings—a residence for the doctor and a low structure constructed of concrete blocks—completed the complex. The entire compound was enclosed by a fence of concrete.

  The doctor was a man of shrewd eyes, and although he offered generous wages, because he had leveled their chapel, no one from Playa would cook or clean for him, so he was forced to hire Mayan labor from Ramul, farther down the coast.

  Some believed it was called El Lugar del Diablo because of the whispers that a girl in trouble could go there to make her baby disappear, although these were only whispers and were never proved. The old ones, like Tia Clara, knew it was because who but a devil would destroy a chapel?

  Tia Clara watched the white van disappear around the corner as it headed down the highway toward the complex. She wondered who rode within. She turned away. The foolish souls who went there were deserving of their fate. It was not her concern.

  MADISON

  The DC area code appeared on her caller ID. It wasn’t Kat’s number.

  “Ms. DiMarco?”

  “Yes.”

  “Detective Miller.”

  She remembered him as he sat in Kat’s kitchen, ignoring the cup of coffee he had accepted. She sank onto a chair and tried to prepare herself for what he had to say.

  “I’m glad I reached you,” he said. “We’ve made a bit of progress here.”

  Progress. Progress was good. Hopeful
. No one called bad news “progress,” did they?

  “First of all, we managed to get hold of Mrs. Duncan, your sister’s neighbor.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine. She was away overnight visiting her daughter and grandson in Richmond.”

  Maddie had no idea Izzy had a grandchild. “Does she know where Kat is?”

  “She doesn’t.”

  Disappointment stabbed her chest. “And this is what you think of as progress?”

  “No. There’s more. Before your sister left, she asked Mrs. Duncan to pick up her mail. One mystery solved.”

  “So Kat planned to go away?” But if this were so, wouldn’t Kat have arranged to have Izzy water the orchids?

  “Yes.”

  “Did she tell Izzy—Mrs. Duncan—where she was going?” Or maybe she hadn’t planned to be gone long. A few days—enough to ask to have the mail picked up—but not long enough to worry about cream in the fridge or watering the plants.

  “No.”

  She waited for him to go on, to tell her what the next step would be, heard the rustle of paper on his end. The little he had told her was a tease. She wanted to know more. Wanted action. Miller’s silence stretched on. Finally she broke it. “Detective? Where do we go from here?”