Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller)

by Jude Hardin

  “Did they abuse you?” I asked.

  “Not at all. They treated me like a princess. I didn’t know about that sacrifice crap until the night they came and got me. I was under the impression they were going to make me have babies, like some of the other girls. I thought they were just waiting until I got a little older.”

  “What a nightmare,” I said. “You know, I took her to Point Conception.”

  “Who?”

  “Jennifer. I took her ashes there. I’ll have to try to get in touch with her family somehow.”

  The first few times I asked Brittney about the videotape I’d found in her bedroom, she acted too upset to talk about it. I didn’t push it, but then one day she walked in from school and opened up on her own.

  “I needed a tape for my tennis lesson, so I grabbed one from Doctor Spivey’s study. I thought it was blank, but when I played my lesson back later I saw something horrible. A little girl who’d gotten burned. Not just any little girl—see, when I first went to live with the Spiveys, I was digging around in a box of junk one day and found a picture of an infant. She was pretty, except she had this weird birthmark on her face. I asked Doctor Spivey who she was, and he said she was his niece and that she’d died of pneumonia soon after that picture was taken. I didn’t think anything about it, really, until two years later when I saw her on the tape. I recognized her because of the birthmark. I said, ‘Hey, isn’t this your niece? I thought she died when she was a baby.’ Doctor Spivey freaked out. His whole expression changed, like Jekyll and Hyde or something. He grabbed me by the arm and forced me into one of his spare bedrooms. He slapped me, hard enough to knock me down. He called me a stupid little bitch and said I needed to be more respectful of other people’s property. He told me not to leave the bedroom. A little while later, I heard him talking to his wife about their yacht. He said he was going to take me for a sunset cruise. I got really scared. I thought he was going to sail way out and throw me overboard. I had to get out of there. I snuck back into the study and stole the tape, climbed out a window, and hitched a ride home. I knew Doctor Spivey would eventually be coming after me, so I left the note on Leitha’s windshield making it look like I was running away. I didn’t want her to get hurt—”

  She hugged me and cried on my shoulder.

  We would never know exactly how it went down, but my guess was that Massengill stole the original tape from the emergency room and sent a copy to Spivey to set up the blackmailing scheme. Brittney then inadvertently taped her tennis lesson over most of the incriminating footage on that copy. When she watched it and saw the scalded two-year-old, Spivey suddenly considered her a threat. He panicked. He was guilty of performing a third-trimester abortion, among other things, and his wife Corina was guilty of manslaughter when the child died.

  Brittney had caught Dr. Spivey in a lie. He couldn’t risk exposure.

  Neither could Massengill. That’s why he went to Leitha’s house in search of Spivey’s copy of the tape. Unfortunately, I had already taken it before he got there. When he couldn’t find it, he tried to torture Leitha into giving up Brittney’s location.

  Leitha died protecting her sister.

  Brittney suffered night terrors for a while, but those episodes gradually became less severe and less frequent. Slowly but surely, she was beginning to heal.

  I was determined to give her the best life I could. I asked her what she wanted to do to celebrate the big day, the day Juliet and I officially became her parents. Anything she wanted, I told her. I would have taken her to Paris for a month. I would have gone back to Point Conception, if that’s what she had wanted.

  She wanted to go fishing.

  We packed a big lunch and the three of us went to Lake Barkley. The old Airstream was still there, and it made a fine weekend getaway for my family. My family. There was a time when I thought I’d never say those words again.

  It was a sunny afternoon in May. We fished for hours and ate fried chicken and rested on blankets and fished some more and ate some more and rested some more. It was the kind of day you wished would last forever. Warm and kind and happy, and quite conducive to somnolence.

  In other words, perfect.

  As the day faded, I lay in the grass with my guitar while Juliet and Brittney fished from the shore. I gazed past their silhouettes, past the concentric circles of their lures plopping into the still water, past the sailboats anchored in the distance. I gazed beyond the gold and turquoise sky, and prayed no harm would ever come to either of them.