Scare Crow

by Julie Hockley

The nanny ran to him, wiping his tears and hugging him while he dug his face into her shoulder. They held on to each other so tight, so naturally.

  She was his mom, not his nanny, I realized. And something inside of me triggered.

  I took Meatball back home.

  As soon as we walked through the door, Meatball fled to the kitchen before I could fly to my room. I poured dog chow into what used to be a salad bowl, and he sat next to it, waiting.

  I sighed. My nausea was creeping back, and the last thing I wanted to do was put anything in my mouth. But we had a ritual: if I didn’t eat, then Meatball would sit there all day until I did. I opened my designated cupboard. There was a ketchup bottle, a pouch of Lipton soup, and a deflated bag of bread. I pulled out the last piece of bread and forced myself to chew. Meatball scarfed down his meal.

  “Hey, puke breath,” Hunter said as he strolled in. “Heard you made a scene in class yesterday. Puking on command to get out of school. That takes serious dedication.”

  I quickly closed my empty cupboard while he was busy riffling through his own overflowing cupboard. His mom regularly sent him totes stuffed with food and underwear.

  I waited for Meatball and wondered whether dog food was fit for human consumption—though the half empty bag wouldn’t last much longer either.

  Hunter was shifting his weight from foot to foot and finally turned to face me. “I hate to bug you with this,” he started, “but the landlord’s coming by soon to pick up all the rent checks. Yours are the only ones that I’m missing.”

  I was having difficulty breathing but still stuck a smile on my face and called Meatball over. “I’ll go get them right now.”

  Meatball and I went back to my room, and I fell onto my bed.

  Spider. Victor.

  Spider. Victor.

  Every night I would rhyme off the names of the ones who had murdered Cameron and Rocco. Every night I had imagined myself ruining them, killing them, even if it killed me. But now, even this thought wasn’t enough to calm the panic that was rising inside me.

  I was broke and soon to be homeless. I was alone.

  And I was pregnant.

  I can’t even take care of my dog or myself, I thought. How can I take care of a child? How can I be a mother when I’ve never really had one? How can I protect a child against a whole other world?

  I had never heard my mother say, “I love you.”

  Apart from my brother, Bill, Cameron was the only person who had ever said those three massive words to me. There was one time when my mother had mentioned in passing that she liked the way the nanny had styled my hair that morning. I refused to wash my hair for five days, until my mother told the nanny that I looked tres sale, which was her French way of saying that I needed a bath.

  I grew up loving nannies who were not allowed to (or paid to) love me back. My mother forbade them from ever showing affection, as this would not have been proper. For good measure, to ensure that none of them ever got too attached, she would change nannies every two years. Our maid, Maria, was the only constant in my life—she was the one who would fill in when we were between nannies. She was promoted to head maid when I got too old for nannies, but I still considered her as my nanny.

  My mind wandered back to the park, where the mother was soothing, hugging, loving her child. And I wished I knew what that felt like.

  I stuffed my face into my pillow and started to sob.

  I cried so much that it felt like the fear, the pain, the loneliness were getting rung out of my heart and escaping through my tears.

  I cried my heart out, and Meatball never left my side.

  When I was a kid, my mother made me go to the Canadian Muskokas for a couple of summers. My so-called vacations were always impeccably timed with the nanny du jour’s vacation. It was kind of a summer camp—if summer camps had executive chefs and a butler for every bunker. Most kids arrived in their driver-driven Bentleys or limousines. My mother made me go in the Sheppard helicopter, even though I was terrified of heights. The helipad was conveniently floating in the middle of the lake, for all to see. The Sheppards always needed to put on a good show.

  There was a dock where none of the well-to-do kids ever wanted to go swim because a fish kept nipping at their toes as soon as they would get in the water. Every summer, a mother fish would lay her eggs under the dock and attack anything that came close. One year, one of the boys had the bright idea of putting a fishnet near the fish’s eggs. The mother fish immediately started attacking the net, and the boy scooped her out of the water. One of the counselors stopped the boy from killing it and ordered him to put the fish back in the water.

  “She’s only protecting her babies,” the counselor explained.

  The next summer, the fish was gone, and so was the dare-to-chastise counselor. I was left wondering why the fish valued the life of eggs more than its own when it had never even met the babies.

  For a split second, I thought about going to my parents for support. After all, they had more money than they knew what to do with, though they never parted with it unless they got something in return. In the Sheppard family, charity rhymes with “what’s in it for me?”

  But a daughter coming home pregnant … this would be worse than having a son who was a troublemaker and a drug addict. Of course, my mother had gotten pregnant with me after she’d had an affair with my then-married father. But this was different. Cameron could not bring my father’s company a highly sought-after international merger as my mother’s well-to-do family had. The ultimate shame for the Sheppard family wasn’t getting pregnant; it was getting pregnant for no reason, without any financial gain to the family. The child growing inside me was worthless to them.

  The thought of anyone thinking, let alone saying, my child to be worthless made me immediately stop crying. I clenched my fists and eventually flipped onto my back, lacing my hands behind my head and watching the stars on my ceiling again.

  Victor and Spider would come, eventually. Before dropping me off at home, Spider had put forward that they couldn’t touch me because of who I was—because sooner or later, someone would notice that the heir to the Sheppard empire was missing, and this would be big news, something the underworld would avoid at all cost. But this didn’t change the fact that I would always be a threat to them. I knew too much; I had seen too much. I was a loose end, and loose ends did not exist in the underworld. Victor and Spider were just waiting for an opportunity. Timing was everything with these people. Like my parents, they were only out for themselves.

  My child belonged nowhere. Not in my parents’ world and certainly not in the underworld. But there was still my world, wherever that was. I brought my hands to my belly and whispered, “I love you.” Because I did, more than anyone, anything, and everything else in the world.

  Cameron’s voice suddenly echoed in my head. “Sometimes the person you love is killed just because you love them.” I shot up as though a tarantula had crept onto my pillow.

  My child, Cameron’s child, might not have had any value in my parents’ world, but in the underworld, this child was priceless. If they wanted to shut me up—quietly—my child would be their leverage. If they couldn’t come for me, they would come for the former drug lord’s child. Of this, I was certain.

  Everyone in my life would sooner or later leave me. Even Cameron had given up. I would do what Cameron didn’t. What he wouldn’t.

  I would stay and fight.

  All the money in the world could not have made my own mother love me or even give me a second thought. I had no idea how to be a mother, but I would try; I would do everything in my power to be a good one. Like the mother fish, I would fight for both of our survival, until my last breath.

  I went from counting stars to counting fingers. According to my calculation, I was about two months pregnant. Killing Spider and Victor was still an absolute. But I had to kill them before they figured out my little secret. Time was running wild.

  I fell asleep with one hand on my b
elly and the other on my chest. My index finger was entwined in the chain that Bill had given me before he died.

  ****

  I was awoken in the afternoon by my cell phone ringing. The caller ID warned me who was calling.

  “Jeremy?” I answered, half asleep, half incredulous.

  “You owe me big-time,” Jeremy said. “I found you a job in the admissions office. You have a meet and greet with the admissions director on Monday. It’s not in one of the departments, but at least it’ll look good on your resume.”

  If Jeremy had been in front of me, I would have kissed him.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t get too excited. You’re mostly going to be stuffing envelopes and carting mail back and forth. And the pay sucks. Just a couple of cents above minimum wage.”

  This was even better news. I had been making minimum wage in my previous job.

  I must have thanked him at least twenty times in a row before Jeremy finally stopped me.

  “No big deal, Em. I saw on a bulletin board that they were looking for a scholarship student. I called them and gave them your name. You’ll just need to keep your grade point average up.”

  I had no idea how I was going to keep my grade point average up or how long it would take for the school to notice that I had stopped attending classes, but I was thankful nonetheless. I had really underestimated Jeremy.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come and work in the store? With me?” He paused for a second. “We’d be able to hang out again.”

  I knew that nothing came without a price. While I was grateful, I did not want to lead Jeremy on. He was better off without me; he just didn’t know this yet.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jeremy.”

  “Sure thing,” he quickly responded. “I was just saying that because the pay’s better at the store.”

  After we hung up, I realized that I would have to be more careful whom I sought favors from.

  When everyone had finally trickled out of the house, it was past lunchtime. I left an exhausted Meatball snoozing under my bed and took a bus downtown.

  The bus stopped outside my bank. There was a huge lineup leading up to the cashiers. While I waited in line, I fished a pen and a bubble-gum wrapper out of my purse and pulled my pendant off my neck.

  Before he died, Bill had given me a silver chain with an angel pendant. It was a humble present, by Sheppard standards, but I never took it off. For years, I had assumed the pendant was a thoughtful gift, but Cameron had advised me otherwise. What I had once thought were product codes under the pedestal on which the angel sat were in actuality numbers for a bank account that Bill had put in place for me. I had no idea how much money was in the account, but from what Cameron had said, it was substantial. Enough for me to make plans; enough for the baby and me to survive Spider and Victor.

  While I waited in line, I quickly transcribed the sequence on the bottom of the pendant, keeping an eye out to ensure no one noticed what I was doing.

  “I’d like to access the money that’s in this account,” I announced as I got to the next available cashier. I handed her the bubble-gum wrapper.

  The cashier looked about as old as I was. Her dark hair came down to her chest and ended at a point, like arrows to her abundant cleavage. She picked up the wrapper by the corner as if it were diseased and stared for a minute.

  She gazed up, doe-eyed. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I need to get the money that is in this account out of this account and into my hands,” I rephrased for her, like she was a five-year-old.

  “But this isn’t an account number.”

  “It isn’t an account number here. The account is offshore.”

  When we finally understood each other, the clerk directed me to the second floor, where I sat on the chairs by the elevator.

  Cameron had told me that the account was in a Cayman Islands bank. I had assumed getting money out of the account wouldn’t be as simple as going to a cashier and asking for it. I just didn’t have any idea how to go about it. So I sat waiting for the personal banking manager, hoping he would know.

  Another kitten walked up to me. She had a little bit less cleavage showing, but still left little to the imagination. Her blouse was so tight it looked like the buttons were torpedoes in waiting.

  “Ms. Sheppard?” she asked. I nodded, and she led me to an office.

  When she sat down, I realized she was the banking manager. The multiple degrees on her wall still gave me some hope that she might be able to help me.

  I handed her the bubble-gum wrapper. “The bank account is in the Cayman Islands.”

  She took a look at the paper and wrinkled her forehead. “Are you sure you wrote the numbers down correctly?”

  She handed me the piece of paper back. I knew I had copied them exactly as they were on my pendant.

  “They’re the numbers that were given to me.”

  “Well, your numbers don’t add up,” she told me. “They’re not bank account numbers anywhere.”

  She turned her computer screen and showed me what she meant. “All banks follow a certain code in setting up bank accounts. The codes may not be the same in all countries, but each country has its own identifier so that there is no repetition in bank account numbers across the world.”

  She showed me what the numbers for a Cayman Islands bank account should look like. It was obvious that the sequence on my pendant was far too long and complicated to be a bank account number.

  I thanked the account manager for explaining something that she had probably learned on her first day of training and left the bank empty-handed.

  I knew that Bill would not have made a mistake. And I knew that Cameron would not have lied about the money that Bill had left me. Cameron had once showed me something Carly had devised to avoid detection by the authorities—an encryption system.

  I sat on the bank’s steps and unfolded the bubble-gum wrapper. Now that I took the time to really look at the sequence, it looked a lot like their encryption system. And I realized that I would not be able to access Bill’s inheritance unless I could crack Carly’s code.

  “Merde,” I muttered. I never swear in English.

  I stuffed the wrapper back into my bag and stomped away.

  People like Spider and Carly did not exist in the normal world. They only existed in Cameron’s world. So finding Spider was going to be tricky, especially since I didn’t even know his pre-underworld name. But I had an idea where to find Shield, also known as Victor Orozo, my brother, Bill’s uncle. He trekked between worlds.

  When I got to the police headquarters, it was almost dark; the days were already getting shorter. There were so many steps leading up to the edifice doors that I almost did a Rocky dance at the top, but I was way too winded and tired.

  I pulled the hood of my jacket over my bright red hair before walking in.

  Past the doors of the Callister City Police Department, it was total mayhem. People getting lugged around in handcuffs. Two women screaming at each other by the water fountain. Some guy in pajamas walking around with a sign that he had written in blue crayon on the back of a cereal box. According to his sign, only God could make him pee in a cup.

  Luckily, the line up to the desk was fairly short and moving quickly. It wasn’t until I got to the front of the line that I realized that this was a lineup just to get a number, and the number that the little red printer spit out told me that there were at least fifty people ahead of me. And there was only one clerk serving clients. Seemed like the whole city was ahead of me today.

  I took a number and looked for a seat. The only one available was between someone who looked like she was possibly a hooker and an old man who was doubled over and seemed like he might have already peed himself. I was exhausted but stood and waited my turn. I found free wall space and leaned against it.

  It wasn’t hard to eavesdrop on the reasons why people were there because all of them were bellowing t
heir issues at the police clerk. And everyone was there to complain about something. A noisy neighbor. Police brutality. Stolen wallet. Police brutality. Bailout. Police brutality.

  I, too, was there to complain, in some measure. The difference was that I would be asking for the sheriff and my complaint would rock law enforcement and the underworld.

  Victor was a police officer, who longed to rule the underworld. He had abused his status to steal me from Cameron with the hopes of using Cameron’s love for me to control him and the underworld. Victor was a bloodsucker, but Cameron could not touch him because he was a police officer; killing a police officer, like killing a rich man’s daughter, brought too much unwanted attention to the underworld.

  I, on the other hand, was not bound to the underworld and had no aversions to killing Victor. I also had no way of making this happen quickly, before the baby came. The only way I could protect the baby from him was to get him off the streets and put a spotlight on him. After that, anything Victor did or planned would be watched, including putting a hit on me. One day, when I was ready, when he wasn’t looking, I would come find him and seek justice for what he had done to Rocco.

  I imagined myself going into the police protection program. But I knew there would never be a safe place for me once I ousted Victor and his enterprise. Luckily, Victor’s reign over the underworld had petered out after Bill and Cameron had taken over. If I could figure out how to get hold of Bill’s inheritance, then I could hide us, better than the cops would.

  When the water fountain ladies’ argument turned to fisticuffs and hairpulling, two police officers came to pull them apart. It took me a little while to recall where I had seen them before. It was the third officer who came to help them that refreshed my memory. He was a tall baldheaded guy with sunken eyes and puffy cheeks that reminded me of beanbags from a summer-camp toss game. I had once whispered to this man through a locked door. I had once stolen his gun and held it to his head. The baldheaded officer was named Mickey. And his fellow law enforcers were also Victor’s minions.

  I was an out-and-out moron. How could I have not assumed that at least some of the men under Shield’s reign would have also been police officers? One dirty cop will attract more dirty cops. Street thugs, dirty cops—all bad guys are genetically created to gravitate toward each other.