And there were strict guidelines for how to write those announcements. No Shakespearean Sonnets to describe the events. No colorful language of any kind that crossed a boundary into anywhere outside the ordinary. No swear words, no waxing poetic in a literary way. Just the facts, ma’am. No coloring outside the lines.
I liked the environment, though. The Daily Buzz was a small office, so it didn’t include many workers—just a handful of reporters, a secretary and a few other people who came and went, although I had no idea what they did. I imagined the office as bigger. I pretended there were hundreds of reporters instead of the small number I saw whenever I showed up for work. I pretended they were all covering hot stories, competing with rival newspapers to uncover crime and greed at the highest levels. Some days, I pretended that I was Leotard Girl, covering important stories as well. On those days, I wore red tights.
I liked the atmosphere of a newspaper environment—the idea that stories were being written about real-life events, that the world might be changed and taken down a better path by writers stringing words together and tapping them into their keyboards until a bright light shined into the darkest places.
I really liked that.
By my second day on the job, I had decided beyond any shadow of a doubt that I would apply to the best colleges to major in Journalism. I felt empowered. I started daydreaming of maybe someday being someone important. Me. It kind of blew my mind.
Starting to type my very first newspaper announcement, a wedding announcement, I tapped into a computer assigned to me at The Daily Buzz the name Quintina Hicks. I paused to reflect on that name. Poor girl. Wished I could talk to her about her lifelong struggles with that name. In the next second, I realized that Galactic Shade Griffin was much, much worse.
Then I launched into another session of daydreaming. If I made it big as a journalist someday, what would my byline be? I imagined its appearance—black letters in print, maybe blue letters online. Would I go to court and change my name? Maybe I’d adopt Leotard Girl’s birth name: Jane Smith.
Hmmm. On second thought, that sounded so plain, I’d never stand out as a reporter.
I stared at the computer screen, grappling with the sudden realization that I might actually like to go by the name, to keep the insanely awful name my mom had given me, of Galactic Shade Griffin. It would make me stand out, give me a chance to brand myself as a reporter.
I played around with alternate pen names: maybe just going by Shade or Griffin. Galactic would probably be a bit too weird all by itself.
Did reporters ever become famous enough to go just by their first names alone? Like rock stars do? Could I rock the news world with the name of Shade?
My gaze drifted back to the screen. Obviously, despite my wild and fanciful dreams of glory, I was getting nowhere fast. In fifteen minutes, I had only typed the name of the bride: Quintina Hicks.
In my mind, I slapped myself across the face, then threw water in my face—a mental image to wake myself up enough to concentrate on the task at hand.
Within the next twenty minutes, I wrote a perfectly acceptable wedding announcement. I hoped the bride ... and my boss ... would be thrilled.
Two hours later, I had written two more wedding announcements, a birth announcement and a death announcement.
The death announcement had been difficult to write. It was for a five-year-old girl who had died of cancer. I studied her photograph. In that particular picture, she was cute and bright-eyed and vivacious. Somehow, cancer had sucked all that away. I pictured her tiny coffin.
Then I thought of Brandon and Neil and felt real sympathy for what Brandon must be going through.
I emailed my announcements to Ms. Sims and shut down my computer. She was busy in a meeting, so I just wished her good night in the email and left the office.
As I hopped on a bus to go home, my phone buzzed with a text message from George. He sounded frantic and he hardly ever sounded frantic. The message read: R u still at work? I wanted 2 call u, but dont want 2 get u in trouble with ur new boss. Another girl is missing, also from tigers den. Call me!
I panicked. My heart pounded all over the place. My chest was a drum, beaten from inside. My hands became slippery with sweat.
Oh-My-God-Oh-My-God-Oh-My-God-Oh-My-God! It was Kailee, I just knew it! I didn’t want to call George back and talk out loud about all of this on the bus. So I tried texting him back, my hands sweaty and my mind causing me to type a nearly incoherent message, with spell-checker making everything so much worse. My first attempt read: K Lee? Is Mailer OK?
What the hell? Mailer? I slowed down. I forced my heart to work at a slower pace. I made my hands stop sweating so profusely. Light-headed but more in control, I deleted the nonsense questions and typed: Is it Kailee? Is Kailee missing? Oh God, I hope not! Let me know ASAP!
I leaned back against the cushion of my bus seat. I waited for George to answer. It felt like an eternity.
I noticed the head of the lady in front of me much more than I normally would have. For some reason, I found it incredibly annoying. She was wearing pink curlers tied up in a thin scarf. I found my brain asking inane questions. Why was she wearing curlers in her hair on a public bus? Did she feel that the event for which she had wrapped her hair around plastic pink cylinders warranted her ugly public display on this particular bus at this particular time? I imagined the pink tubes as alien worms from another planet. If that were the case, that lady’d be ripping those horrid things right off her head, now, wouldn’t she? That I’d like to see.
As I pondered The Incident of the Lady in the Ugly Hair Curlers, a kid started acting up in the seat directly across from her. Boy about three years old, whining about being hungry.
The lady shushed him and slapped him on the knee. In an exasperated tone, she said, “Settle down. We’re almost home.”
Oh my God, they were related. Well, in the annoyance category, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Or maybe it was just me. I felt wound tighter than a boa constrictor around a fat, juicy rat.
My phone buzzed. I jumped. Then, practically dropping it on the floor in my nervous handling of the device, I checked my phone for new messages.
It was George, answering my questions: No, not Kailee. But another girl who visits our forum. Last date she posted anything: few weeks ago. Had a bunch of questions about pregnancy, how to give a baby up for adoption. Her last question: whether or not it’s illegal to sell your baby to another person. Her name is Ursula Wooten.
Ursula Wooten. Ursula. Ursula. I racked my brain to remember where I had seen that name before. I was sure it was in The Tiger’s Den. But which post.
Then I remembered. She had asked a weird question about whether or not you could safely abort your own baby at home. I was really scared for her when I saw that question. It had been late at night. Then, suddenly, the question was deleted as though it had never been posted. Two days later, the same girl started asking questions about where to buy cheap maternity clothes and how to go about putting a baby up for adoption.
Back then, I had sighed a big sigh of relief.
Now, I was a mess again. My stomach felt like snakes in a nest. I hoped not to throw up in the nest of curlers in front of me.
When I finally arrived home and walked through the front door, my mom was there. She was acting weird. I couldn’t place my finger on exactly what it was about her behavior that made me feel that way. I didn’t have time to think about it either. She seemed nervous. Well, more nervous than usual. And she wouldn’t look me in the eye. Was that all it was?
I tried to quickly say, “Hi,” and run upstairs; but my mom stopped me. She said, “Shade, I need to ask you a question.”
I figured she was just going to ask me to make dinner or do her some other favor, so I slowed down and waited for her to ask me the question.
And, then, from my mother’s red-lipstick-stained mouth: “Shade, do you know any girls at your school who are pregnant?”
; I stood my ground and lied through my teeth. Or was I lying? I did not know for a fact that Ursula Wooten was pregnant. Not at all. I didn’t even know her. She was missing and that was serious enough. All the pregnancy stuff was just a series of posts on a computer forum. For all I knew, she was asking for a friend.
I glared at my mother. “Nooooo, I don’t know anyone who’s pregnant. Why do you always ask me such dumb questions, anyway?”
I continued to stare her down.
My mother looked away. “Geez, Shade, what’s the matter with you? I was just curious, that’s all.”
Just curious? What the hell? I answered as calmly as I could, “I have a lot of work to do, Mom. School’s busy, lots of tests and all. And I have so much work to do for the school forum. And I’m also working part-time for the town newspaper now. I don’t have time for stupid questions.”
She muttered her response to my tirade so low, I could barely hear her, “OK. Sorry. I just wondered how many teens in your high school got pregnant ... as opposed to, you know, graduating.”
I looked at her for one brief moment with the widest of eyes, I’m sure, before responding, “Well, I don’t know, Mom. I know no pregnant girls. Zip. Nada. I got nothing. But I do have a ton of work to do.”
Changing the subject so fast it would make your head spin, my mother asked sweetly, as though we had been discussing dinner menus all along, “How about pizza for dinner? Does that work for you?”
I played along. “Sure, pizza would be great.”
“Everything on it? Or just pepperoni maybe?”
I tried to sound enthusiastic. “How about everything? I’m starving!”
My mother said OK and punched numbers into her cell phone, ordering pizza I supposed.
I dashed up to my bedroom.
I locked the door.
I got out my Ouija Board. I tried contacting Brandon and then his grandmother. Nothing. Nobody home in the afterlife.
Then I called George and Kailee in a conference call. We decided we’d meet that night at our clubhouse to talk about the girls that were going missing.
At 7:00 PM, I wolfed down pizza-with-everything-on-it. I tried to avoid any and all controversial subjects with my mother. I asked her what she thought we should have for Thanksgiving dinner. I asked her if she’d like me to make something, maybe try out a brand new recipe.
My mother started crying. Then she stood up and threw her plate into the sink. “You don’t like anything I make, do you? You always want to undo what I’ve slaved away doing for years, don’t you?”
Seriously? I remember having frozen turkey dinners for quite a few Thanksgivings. Not to mention the year I spent Thanksgiving with some weird neighbor family because she went away on vacation with one of her boyfriends.
I swallowed the memories. I reassured her that I just wanted to help. That I couldn’t possibly make her holiday dishes any better than she could. That I felt I should add something, though, so that all the hard work didn’t fall on her shoulders, that’s all.
She liked that. She smiled. “You could make a Jell-O mold, maybe?”
Ummm, sure, a Jell-O mold. I pictured some shaky gelatinous lump in lime green pocked with fruit chunks. Ewwww. Sounded more like a science experiment gone horribly wrong than a Thanksgiving dinner side dish. I replied, “Absolutely! That sounds great!”
Then I got ready to go to the clubhouse—house number 1052, as I’d started to refer to it.
Having spent too much time eating pizza and discussing shaky side dishes, I was the last to arrive at the house. George and Kailee were already there. They both looked pale.
We decided to meet down in the basement. After we got settled as comfortably as we could on the couch and chairs down there, considering the problem we were about to tackle, George started the conversation. “I’ve been thinking. Girls involved with The Tiger’s Den keep going missing. I’m starting to wonder if there’s a connection. Maybe someone reading posts at The Tiger’s Den is watching these girls and choosing victims to kidnap.” He paused and rubbed his chin, going deep into thought. Then he said what we all had been thinking: “Maybe we should shut down The Tiger’s Den until the cases of the missing girls are solved.”
I gave it some thought, then suggested something totally different. “Maybe that would be a huge mistake. The missing girls might eventually try to contact us in the forum. Also, the kidnapper may be lurking there and we might be able to ferret him out.”
George brought a bias to my attention. “Him?”
I hesitated. “Well, I just assumed.”
George replied, “I wouldn’t assume anything. Maybe the girls ran away. Maybe a man kidnapped them. Maybe a woman did. Maybe a team or a gang did. At this point, we have no idea.”
We were thinking like investigative journalists. This was good.
And then I had to mention something that sounded straight out of fantasyland. “Hey, do you guys believe in ghosts?”
George looked puzzled. “What?”
Kailee chimed in, enthusiastically, “I do. My great-aunt, with whom I was very close, died a few years ago. For several months after her death, she appeared to me.”
George asked Kailee in a strained voice, as though he was just trying to be polite, “How many times?”
Kailee thought about it, then answered, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe five times or so.”
I told them all about Brandon and his grandmother and his grandmother’s advice about looking for the missing girls—to look closely at the exact house where we were hanging out and to look at another house, address number 1044, on the same street.
I looked up. The clown lamp caught my eye. It was glowing orange through its eyes and mouth. The eyes seemed to dance with mischief.
I shivered.
Kailee said, “Well, what have we got to lose, really? We have no other facts to go on. We probably ought to talk to a psychic, too, if we can find one that seems normal.”
George shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why not? We’ve gotten real information from the Ouija Board. Perhaps it is actually ghosts from beyond that communicate through that thing.” He looked around the room. “Well, if that’s going to be our approach, we probably ought to start by investigating down here, see what we can find. What do you think?”
We agreed. We stood up, all at once, and started poking around the basement. There sure was a lot to look through: boxes, newspapers, piles of stuff.
Most of the boxes were labeled. Some weren’t. I opened a bunch. There wasn’t anything of interest in the first few boxes I looked through.
Kailee called us over to look at some books she had found in a trunk. They were ledgers of some kind. The covers were made out of dark green leather. The inside pages contained columns and lists. On the left-hand side were names. To the right of the names were ages and a strange column labeled “Sold For:” with amounts of money. For example, a two-day old boy apparently sold for $10,000. If that’s what this meant.
We talked over what this could possibly mean. We decided the ledgers were probably old slave documents. We decided to take three of the books home with us—one for each of us to study in our free time. We wanted to take them all home with us, but we decided that could be too risky if the owners came back for them and found them all missing.
CHAPTER 15
Back home, I immediately started studying my ledger. Before opening it, I ran my hands over the green leather cover. It felt thick and textured. I imagined it had once been expensive. Now, it was torn in places, with bashed-in corners and dark stains.
I opened the book and flipped through pages. They were yellowed and dotted with what appeared to be coffee stains.
I sniffed the ledger. It carried the scent of cigarettes and something akin to dirty feet.
I pulled my nose away.
I studied the wording. It made no sense. First column was labeled Name. Next column was labeled Birth Date. Then: Age Sold. Then: Date Sold. Then the troubling column labeled Sold For: w
ith varying amounts of money spiraling down the page.
I looked more closely at some of the entries:
Belinda Black 01/09/2000 5 days 01/14/2000 $30,000.00
Thomas Black 01/09/2000 7 days 01/16/2000 $30,000.00
Odetta Smith 04/6/1981 18 years 01/17/2000 $5,000.00
Nathaniel Robbins 01/13/1984 16 years 01/22/2000 $7,000.00
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