Gold Promise

by Ninie Hammon

  He saw a horrible injury, a compound fracture. Was that …?

  Then he spotted her.

  Bailey was on the other side of the pile of girls, her arms draped across a small black girl with close-cropped hair. Her face was a mess, too. Dirty, bruised and bleeding.

  He was kneeling beside Bailey then, didn't know how he'd gotten there. He took her arm, felt her wrist. Was there …? His own hands were trembling. Please …!

  No … Yes!

  There was a pulse!

  "All units, west wall, four — five victims. Alive."

  Then his voice broke and he couldn't continue. Fletch was right there to finish for him as Brice leaned over and gently lifted Bailey into his arms.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Bailey knew she'd regret adding her special treat to the traditional Thanksgiving menu. The guys would make jokes and she'd laugh and her ribs could still launch rockets of pain into her chest if she wasn't kind to them. Of course, the No Wisecracks rule hadn't stopped T.J. and Dobbs from "doing what they do" in the four weeks since she'd been released from the hospital, so why should today be any different?

  When she extended a steaming mug of amber liquid to T.J. and told him what it was, the look on his face was worth the pain laughing caused her.

  "Underwear cider."

  He just said the two words and looked at her with what appeared to be concern that she'd sustained a head injury along with the cracked ribs, broken fingers, sprained wrist, dislocated thumb and uncounted cuts and bruises. "Surely, I didn't hear you right."

  "What did you say this was?" Dobbs looked suspiciously at his own drink.

  "I just want to know whose underwear you used," Brice said. She laughed so hard, her ribs protested loudly.

  Pointing to the bag of spices — cloves, brown sugar and stick cinnamon — that floated in the crock pot full of cider, she explained that in one of her many childhood "homes," her foster mother had not had the cheesecloth she needed to make the bag. So she'd cut out the back side of a pair of underwear to take its place.

  "New underwear!" she cried, over the chorus of ughs and ewes that followed. "Still sealed in plastic. She'd bought one of the boys the wrong size and hadn't gotten around to taking it back to the store. After that, it became a tradition — every Christmas, she'd go to the store and buy a new pair of underwear."

  Bailey'd been in that home for a couple of years — it was where she'd met and bonded with her "little sister," María — so she'd carried the image of the floating bags of "underwear" with her when she left.

  "It's a tradition in my family."

  She turned away quickly, so the guys wouldn't spot the momentary longing that washed over her face every time she dropped the "F-bomb." Family. Her only real family, Aaron and Bethany, had enjoyed underwear cider the two Christmases they were together. That's why Bailey was serving it now, at Thanksgiving instead of Christmas. She'd learned to avoid the emotional triggers that sent her into that dark, empty place of loneliness and despair, and underwear cider coupled with Christmas carols would be an express ticket on a fast train there.

  Now, at Thanksgiving, she could enjoy it with what had become her new family: T.J., Dobbs and Brice. Thanksgiving was a celebration of gratitude, and given what the three of them had been through in their brief acquaintance, they had a lot to be grateful for. Brief acquaintance — yeah, it was brief if you only counted elapsed time. Only a few months. But Bailey measured their relationships in dog years. One human year equaled seven dog years. That was about right.

  Even though Dobbs had been injured far worse than she had in the mine a month ago, he had joined the other two in an adamant refusal to allow her to help prepare the meal. Her dislocated fingers and sprained wrist were fine now, but the men wanted the whole celebration to be "their treat."

  The fragrant aroma of roasting turkey filled the whole first floor of the Watford House. Bailey hadn't realized how hungry she was until she'd started smelling it about 6 a.m. There was no sleeping after that. T.J. had said he'd come in quietly at 2 a.m. to put into her oven the masterpiece he'd been doing who-knows-what to at his house all day. In and out, he'd said, wouldn't disturb her. Right, like Bundy wasn't going to announce his presence as soon as he pulled up in the driveway. Maybe even before he turned off the street.

  So she'd watched, bath-robed and slippered as he slid the beast into the oven, listened as he admonished again that she was not to get out the dishes, that the rest of them would set everything up when they got there.

  "My turkey, I carve," T.J. had announced when the four of them were seated around the festive table in the kitchen of the Watford House … where all those years ago Sophia Watford had died, Eulalie Hamilton had hit her head and …

  Bailey let the thoughts go. No images of nightmare paintings … and the quest the portraits had sent the three of them on. Not now. Now was thankful time.

  Brice had shielded her from most of the prying and questioning by the federal agencies that got involved in the "international sex trafficking case." He'd told them Bailey had been dragged into it when a stranger slipped her a note at the casino, saying she was afraid she was about to be murdered. The next day, the stranger's body was fished out of the lake, and when Brice started asking questions, the kidnappers had come after Bailey because they thought she knew what they were doing. Everything had mushroomed from there.

  The girls had answered all the questions put to them with innocent honesty — said they had no idea how Bailey and the others had gotten involved in the effort to save them.

  Yeah, eyebrows probably went up in the offices of several federal agencies when they put it together that this was the same Shadow Rock, West Virginia that just a month ago had been the site of three kidnap-murders and a strange infestation of spiders.

  It was likely they suspected more was going on than they were being told. But they had nothing to back up that suspicion — and all the bad guys were dead so there was no reason to chase that rabbit down a hole.

  They had celebrated with Jeni, Lora, Ana, Christina and their parents with a quiet dinner when all the girls were ready to go home earlier in the month, then put the reunited families on flights to London Heathrow, and then "home" where their whole villages awaited their return. Jeni and Ana had remained with Christina and Lora after their release from the hospital. Christina had required orthopedic surgery to repair the compound fracture she'd suffered, and Lora had remained hospitalized an extra couple of days because of her concussion. So Dobbs had paid for tickets for the parents of all four girls to fly to Shadow Rock to be with them — and they had all stayed at the Watford House, cared for by a crew of local people hired by Dobbs to help out.

  It had been a glorious madhouse, filled with laughter and tears that had done more to heal Bailey's mind and spirit than the splints on her fingers and thumb and the brace on her wrist had done to heal her body. She showed no one the portrait of Poli — with Jeni's face peering out from under the bed and the shadows of the other girls in the closet. Bailey had asked Brice to burn it the day she woke up in the hospital. She'd promised Jeni the story, though, and she'd told it … in bits and pieces. It was too much to absorb in one sitting. She hadn't been surprised that the girls had so little trouble believing what she said. Regardless of the nightmare they'd endured, they were in many ways as innocent as Macy Cosgrove had been.

  The emotional bond between Bailey and the girls would last a lifetime. But the strange connection she'd had to them vanished when Brice burned the painting.

  The bodies of the other girls — Poli, Rayna, Nikolina and Sophia — had been shipped home for burial.

  When Dobbs was released from the hospital shortly after the girls returned home, Bailey had insisted, would not take any answer but "yes ma'am," that he come to the Watford House to stay while he recuperated from the bullet wound in his shoulder and from the particularly nasty case of pneumonia he came down with from the water in his lungs. He'd only gone home a few days ago and Bai
ley missed him. He had always seemed to be standing in T.J.'s shadow, absurd as that might seem, given he was twice T.J.’s size. Still, T.J. was such a firebrand, so full of piss and vinegar that he sometimes left Dobbs in the shade. Not that Dobbs minded. She could tell the two of them had worked out the yin and yang of their relationship before their ages were two-digit numbers. Not only were they supremely comfortable with what they had forged half a century ago, they had grown into each's image of the other in the way of men secure in who they were and who love each other more than brothers.

  "I want a leg," Dobbs called out as T.J. set knife to bird.

  "Me, too," said Brice.

  "The leg is my favorite piece," Bailey moaned.

  T.J. gestured with his carving knife to the carcass of the bird on the platter.

  "This is a turkey, not an octopus. Work it out."

  The three had adjourned to the living room with mugs of cider, and Brice settled on the couch beside Bailey after he took Bundy outside to "do his business."

  "I've got something you're all going to want to see," Dobbs said and reached into the manila envelop he'd left on the mantle. "Maybe you don't remember, but we had a group picture made the night of Bailey's birthday celebration at the Nautilus. I found it when I finally got around to going through the stack of my unopened mail."

  The three gathered around where he sat in the wingback chair. He held an eight-by-ten photo that grabbed a moment from the past and dragged it into the present, the moment when the four of them had assembled on one side of the white-table-clothed table in the dining room of the Nautilus Casino. Bailey in her green dress. The three men looking suit-and-tie handsome on both sides of her. They were all grinning into the camera.

  "You've got your eyes closed," Bailey told T.J.

  "I don't think I've ever seen a picture of him with his eyes open," Dobbs said.

  Bailey studied the picture, each face, thinking about—

  And then she couldn't breathe.

  Couldn't think.

  She snatched the picture out of Dobbs's hands and turned to the lamp, holding it up beneath the shade into the bright light.

  "Bailey, what's—" Brice began.

  She let out a little piece of a cry then, a strangled sob that expressed an uncountable number of emotions all detonating like military ordinance in her chest.

  "Sit down, child." T.J. took her by the shoulders and guided her to the wingback chair that was the mate to the one where Dobbs sat. She collapsed into it, her knees bags of water, her eyes riveted to the photograph she clutched in her hand.

  Then she began to cry, not great heaving gulps of sobbing, but a condensed, airless cry that spoke of pain too deep to express with any sound she possessed.

  Brice knelt on the floor in front of her and took one of her hands.

  "What's wrong?"

  "It's … him."

  She somehow gasped out the words and continued to cry at the same time, pointing to an older man in the background of the photograph. He was with a group of people standing only a few feet behind where the four of them were mugging the camera. His face was clearly visible.

  "He's back."

  And she was instantly transported to the night almost two years ago that had changed her life forever.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Aaron gets out of the car and fishes the big golf umbrella out of the back seat as Jessie calls out "We'll give you a ride!" to the homeless woman standing in the rain at the bus stop.

  Hurrying to her with the umbrella, Aaron ferries her back to the car under its protection — as if she weren't already soaked to the skin. She slides into the back seat behind Aaron, the smell of wet clothing — not very clean clothing — wafting into the car with her, babbling her thanks.

  Aaron opens the back door on the other side, collapses the umbrella and tosses it into Bethany's car seat, which occupies the whole right side of the back seat behind Jessie, then hops back into the car. Even in his brief rescue mission, he'd have been soaked to the skin if he hadn't been wearing a rain jacket. As it is, his shoes, the new Rockports she had given him for Christmas are oozing water all over the floor.

  "Thank you sooooo much," the woman gushes from the back seat. "I was near about to drown out there!"

  She's younger than Jessie had thought when she first spotted her huddled under the awning, holding a plastic grocery sack over her head. She could be any age from twenty-five to forty. Her face is lined and worn. She looks used-up in a way that only the homeless can look. The rain has rendered the color of her long hair indiscernible — brown, maybe black like Jessie's. Her face is so thin she looks anorexic, or like she's just been released from a concentration camp. She's wearing a soaked denim jacket, jeans and running shoes, carrying a soaked sleeping bag under one arm and a trash bag jammed full — with probably every item she owns — in the other. Every garment she's wearing is holding maximum density of water, which is now oozing out and onto the back seat of the car.

  "I'm getting water all over everywhere," she bemoans. "I'm so sorry. I was trying to get to the shelter before the rain started but I didn't make it."

  She must be talking about the Overland Street Homeless Shelter. Jessie glances at Aaron and he meets her look. If they take the bypass to the airport instead of the interstate, they'll go through the industrial park and pass the shelter on their way. No sense dropping the woman at the next bus stop and let her wait there in the rain for a bus when they could take her all the way themselves.

  When Aaron offers a lift all the way to the shelter, the woman beams and relaxes back into the seat.

  "The good Lord'll bless you for doing this," she says. "He'll shine his light of good providence down on you this day. You'll see!"

  Less than five minutes later providence strikes.

  Jessie had been taught that all good gifts come from God, so this stroke of providence has obviously been conceived in some other, darker region.

  It happens so fast it's hard to track the exact sequence later. Sometimes, when Jessie — or Connie Bradshaw, or Amanda Prichard, or Alexis Stevens or Bailey Donahue — lies in bed at night, her pillow so soaked with tears she has to turn it over so she can put her face on the dry side, she's able to see the events in a kind of slow motion, frame by frame, like a series of still photographs.

  Other times, the handful of minutes that will forever change every day of the rest of her life fly by in a frenetic fast-forward that looks like a herky-jerky video from a convenience store surveillance camera.

  The rain has let up, ratcheted down from a monsoon to a steady downfall. They have crested Blanchard Hill and the empty street narrows at the bottom at the Akron Street traffic light. On the right corner is a collection of big green dumpsters, obviously repositories for trash from the warehouses and storage facilities that line the streets of the industrial park, and behind the dumpsters is a vacant lot, overgrown with waist-high weeds and littered with piles of trash.

  The only other vehicle in sight is coming down Baxter Street toward them. It is white, one of those sport utility vehicles, a Honda CRV maybe. The traffic light is green. The CRV enters the intersection as she and Aaron are still approaching it when suddenly Jessie sees something on the right, out of the corner of her eye. There is a flash of red — so fast you can't follow it. Another car comes roaring down Akron Street, through the intersection, flying, never makes any attempt to stop at the red light, plows into the side of the CRV with a horrible whump, a sound of screaming, protesting metal and breaking glass that awakens Jessie in the midnight dark every night after that for months, panting in sweat-tangled sheets, a silent scream on her lips that hadn't been silent that day.

  She shrieks, wails as the red car rips open the white car like an ax has sliced into it, hacks it apart at the driver's side door, tears the vehicle in half, flinging pieces of it in every direction. The force of the impact drives the two conjoined cars, red and white, fifty feet down Akron Street until the tangled mass of twisted metal sli
des off the asphalt and slams into a utility pole.

  Two seconds, maybe three.

  The world as Jessie has always known it comes completely apart in seconds.

  Screaming.

  Jessie realizes she's the one screaming and clamps her mouth shut. The silence that rushes into the car with the slushing of the rain is broken by a car horn honking, a long, mournful cry that goes on and on.

  Then she's out of the car in the rain, Aaron at her side, running toward the tangled mass of metal where steam rises up into the rain to form a halo of mist around the ruins. She gets to the portion of the white car where the driver's side door is caved so far into the vehicle that the top of the car has exploded upward from the compression and the undamaged sunroof window, torn from its moorings, stands upright in the rain.

  Inside, beneath the crushed door is … a woman. Jessie thinks so because long blonde hair hangs in curls on her shoulders. But her face, above the bridge of her nose, and the whole top of her head is … gone. Jessie sucks in a gasp, turns away, thinks she is going to be sick, staggers backward. After that, she's never able to order her memories sequentially. Several things happen, but it's like they are individual events totally unconnected in time and space to each other. The order in which they happened remains forever unclear.

  Aaron is beside the red car pulling on the door, and it comes off in his hands. He reaches out and the driver of the car takes his hand and Aaron pulls him out of the wreckage. The car, it's some kind of small sports car, is as collapsed as a stomped Pepsi can, but somehow the man unfolds himself out of it and steps away. His face is bloody from a cut on his forehead and he's staggering, takes a couple of steps and then trips and Aaron has to grab him to keep him from falling.

  That's when Jessie sees the car seat in the street. Or maybe she had seen it before that. She must have run right past it because it's between her and her car, where she can see the homeless woman out of the car now, standing beside the open back door on the driver's side, the umbrella Aaron had dropped on the back seat open and over her head.