“I have a picture,” she said.
At first, she tried to flip through the items in her purse, but when this proved fruitless, she just started pulling things out and tossing them haphazardly onto the officer’s desk.
“She was wearing gray sweatpants; you know, the tight kind, like leggings?” Arielle told Jenkins as she searched for the photo. “And a green t-shirt. It was a plain t-shirt—a light green. Seafoam.”
C’mon, where the fuck is the picture?
“That’s good,” the officer said. “Anything else you can tell me about her that might help? You said her name is ‘Hope’?”
“Hope McLernon—she just turned four last week. She has long blond hair, almost white, that comes down halfway down her back.”
Where is it?!
“Fuck,” she swore, staring at the mess that she had made on the officer’s desk. Almost every personal item she owned was on that table—everything from her credit cards to her foundation, her lipstick, and a prescription bottle full of pills that she hadn’t seen in years. Everything but the photo of Hope.
Finally, only when her purse was completely empty, she found the photograph. It was pressed up flat against the inside of the purse.
“Okay,” Arielle said with something that might have been construed as a sigh, “found it.”
With the back of the photo to her, she reached over the desk and held it out to Officer Jenkins, who grabbed it and brought it close to his face. One of his light-colored eyebrows rose up his forehead.
“This is your daughter?”
“Yeah, that’s her.” Arielle nearly cried with frustration. What little patience she had was waning fast. “I’ve seen the shows, Officer; we have twenty-four hours to find her, and that’s it. After that—” She swallowed hard. “After that, the chances are next to nothing. We have to do something now.”
Why did I look away? Why did I listen to that fucking lady and her stupid kid?
“This”—the officer pointed at the photograph that only he could see—“this is your daughter?”
“Yes, yes! For Christ’s sake, it’s my daughter—Hope McLernon. What’s the problem?”
The officer lowered the photograph and stared at her more intently.
“Is this a joke? Do you have a birth certificate for Hope?”
Birth certificate? Why does he need a birth certificate? What the fuck is going on?
“No, but there’s the picture right there. Why are we just sitting here? We have to get out there and start looking.”
“What about the girl’s father, is he around?”
An image of Martin’s handsome face flashed in her mind.
Birth certificate. Father. She hadn’t expected all of these questions.
“No, no, he’s not around. What’s wrong? Why aren’t you doing anything?”
“Well, Mrs. McLernon, it’s just that this photo—”
“What is—?”
She reached out to grab the photograph, but the officer turned it around for her to see and her breath caught in her throat and her hand hung in mid-air.
What the fuck?
Arielle jumped to her feet, toppling the chair behind her.
“Is this a joke?”
A look of confusion crossed Officer Jenkins’ face.
“Ma’am? You gave me this—”
“Did she put you up to this?”
The officer gaped.
“What the fuck is that? I’ve never—I’ve never—”
She couldn’t get all of the words out. The photograph didn’t show her daughter’s smiling face; instead, it depicted a dark corpse… a blackened, burnt corpse.
“What the fuck?”
Is the girl’s father around? Do you have a birth certificate? Why do you have a photograph of a fucking burnt corpse?
All these goddamn questions.
And where the fuck did that picture come from?
“Ma’am, you sure you’re feeling all right? It’s pretty hot out there, and people have been coming down with all sorts of sun stroke.”
Arielle swallowed hard.
Too many questions that she couldn’t answer to anyone’s satisfaction, let alone the police.
Her heart sank. The police were not going to be able to help her. She knew that now.
“I… I do feel hot. I was out all day.”
Arielle slowly started scooping her belongings from the officer’s desk and jamming them back into her purse.
Slowly, don’t raise concern.
Officer Jenkins nodded and then made a motion to someone behind him. It was clearly meant to be a subtle gesture, one that she wouldn’t pick up on, but she caught it nonetheless.
“You should probably get looked at, have one of our EMTs take a peek to make sure you’re okay. And what about the other lady at the park? MacKenzie? We haven’t been able to find her, either.”
Arielle shook her head.
“No, no, I’m feeling much better now. I think… I think I’ll just stay inside and make sure to drink plenty of liquids. I’m sorry, I was just confused. I—I—” She could barely speak. “I don’t have a daughter. I just get confused sometimes. I’m very sorry.”
She offered a tight smile.
“I’m gonna insist, Arielle. No offense, but you really don’t look that great. And, uh, we need to talk about this,” he said, indicating the photograph that was still clutched in his hand.
‘There is one condition: when your daughter turns four, you must bring her back to me.’
A life for a life.
Filius obcisor. Filia obcisor.
Arielle readied herself.
She was going to have to find Hope on her own. And she knew just where to look first.
“I’m fine,” she insisted.
Before the officer could utter another word, she turned and started to run.
Officer Jenkins didn’t even make it to his feet before Arielle was already racing through the station toward the front door.
“Hey, wait! You can’t just leave! Hey!”
A few more strides, and the warm outside air hit her in the face like the blast from a hairdryer, Jenkins’s shouts chasing her into the street.
Chapter 39
Martin waited outside the apartment building until the clock on the dashboard hit 9:55 PM.
Then he opened his car door and stepped into the night.
The day had remained overcast, but now that darkness had swallowed the sky it had become cool; frigid even. He wished he had worn more than just jeans and a t-shirt.
As promised, the front door of the apartment complex was held open by a brick, and Martin stepped inside.
The foyer smelled of weed and sweat, but this dissipated when he entered the stairwell, and was completely gone by the time he made it to the fourth floor. As he approached the door to apartment 441, another smell became apparent: burning incense.
After a deep breath through his nose, Martin knocked lightly on the worn wooden door, just as he had been instructed. A second later, the door opened a crack and Martin caught a glimpse of a dark eye peeking out from behind a chain.
No words were exchanged; just that eye peeking out, first looking at and then looking around Martin. A moment passed, and then the eye closed and the door followed suit. He heard the sound of the chain being unlatched before the door was opened again and he was ushered inside.
The smell of incense was so strong in the apartment that Martin instinctively scrunched his nose. The cloying scent tickled the hairs in his nose and throat, and it was all he could do to avoid sneezing or coughing.
Much like the hallway, the inside of the apartment was in rough shape: all peeling paint and rotting wood—what he could make out, anyway. The room was dark, with the only light being offered by a series of candles seemingly placed on every flat surface.
“Sit on the couch,” the woman whispered. Her voice, so strong in the church all those years ago, was but a meek, pathetic whisper now.
Martin did as
he was instructed, but he took his time, trying to better gauge his surroundings as he made his way to the couch.
Like the candles on the surfaces, there was a series of photographs that seemed to cover nearly every square inch of wall space. And they all depicted the same young girl with long, blond hair and a radiant smile. There were nearly a hundred photographs on the walls, Martin surmised, and a couple dozen more leaning on the mantle, coffee table, and kitchen counter. As he strained to get a better look, he realized that they weren’t just all of the same girl, but that there were only three unique images, repeated over and over again: one was a professional portrait, one was of the girl on a swing, her head thrown back in laughter, while the third was a candid shot of her sitting on the floor opening a present.
“My daughter, Charlotte,” the woman informed him, noting his gaze. “She went missing more than a decade ago.”
Martin, unsure how to reply to this, kept his lips pressed tightly together. He didn’t want to offend the woman by not commenting, but he didn’t want to yank the scab off an old wound, either.
Thankfully, the woman seemed unfazed by his lack of response.
“Please, sit,” she instructed again, and this time Martin obliged.
There weren’t just pictures and candles strewn about the room, he realized, but there were crosses as well. Ornate wooden things, shiny metal ones, even some that seemed to be made out of some sort of fabric—religious crochet work.
Martin was beginning to think that coming here might not have been a good idea; that it was probably best to leave this strange, thin woman alone.
But then she spoke, and Martin figured what the hell. He was here; what could it hurt? And maybe, just maybe, she might know something about Arielle…
“Please, tell me what happened to your wife.”
The words came more easily than Martin would have expected, and he found himself uncharacteristically opening up, recounting his story to this stranger. He started with his and Arielle’s difficulties conceiving, to Arielle’s blow-up, the mud tracks in the kitchen, her going missing, and then bumping into the woman across from him just a few days ago. The only thing he left out was he and Woodward breaking into the house, and the gardener nearly choking him to death.
The words came out in a rush, and while his openness was initially surprising, Martin came to the quick realization that it should have perhaps been expected, what with him being alone for so long, and being completely engrossed in his work.
After all, the only person that he had told this to was Woodward, and they hadn’t spoken in years.
The woman, who was pale to begin with, went stark white as Martin recounted his tale.
After a moment of silence—of awkward, dead silence—the woman’s lips started moving. There were sounds coming out of her mouth, Martin was sure of it, but they were too quiet for him to hear.
He leaned forward on the edge of the dusty couch, trying hard to make out what she was saying, but the words didn’t seem to make any sense.
Martin was tempted to reach out to her, to ask her if she was alright, but her eyes rolled back in her head and her eyelids began to flutter, and he hesitated. When she brought an arthritic hand to her forehead and started crossing herself, the candles in the room flickered.
Or maybe they didn’t. Martin couldn’t be certain.
What was clear however, was that the woman was praying.
I’m going to leave. I’m going to get up and get the hell out of here right now.
But then the woman’s eyes rolled forward and they appeared surprisingly lucid.
“Have you ever heard of mater est, matrem omnium?” she asked, her throat dry.
Martin shook his head. Now that the woman seemed to have regained her faculties, he relaxed a little and sat back down.
Five minutes; I’ll give her five minutes, and if by then she hasn’t revealed anything about Arielle’s whereabouts, I’ll leave. I’ll leave and put this behind me, once and for all.
“It’s Latin; it means mother of one, mother of all.”
The woman slowly moved toward an adjacent room as she spoke.
“You know, there was a time when not being able to carry a child was more than something that derailed the quest for the perfect suburban family.”
Martin waited as the woman flipped through a stack of papers.
Where is this going?
“Back in the sixteen-hundreds, people farmed for their food, and the more children you had, the more prosperous you were. Back then, people—children—got sick all the time—they died all the time. And if you only had two or three kids when dysentery struck, well, you were in serious trouble. Lose enough children to disease, and you would starve.”
A history lesson. I came all the way here for a fucking history lesson. What the hell does this have to do with Arielle?
The woman cleared her throat and continued.
“Having kids was so important back then that even without even a basic knowledge of medicine, so-called doctors—charlatans, really—were hocking conception aids, be they herbs or roots, tinctures or potions. But none of these ever worked. Nothing worked, until Anne LaForet—a young girl herself at only twelve years of age—gave birth to a beautiful baby girl with blond, almost white hair. You see, Anne was just a normal peasant girl—normal until she had her baby. After she had her baby, she found out that she had a special talent.”
Martin made a face.
What the fuck is this woman talking about?
“No one knows for sure how Anne came to learn about her talent—some think that she ran out of cow’s milk when guest came for tea and she substituted breast milk, while others have proposed more lewd theories—but it doesn’t really matter how. What matters is that Anne’s milk had a way of… of, well, helping women become fertile.”
She turned to face him then, and once again Martin was struck by the angularity of her face. The woman’s gaunt features were so obtrusive that he had to look away, and instead he focused his attention on the blue notepad clutched between her thick and knotted fingers.
“And it worked… it worked so well, in fact, that little Anne wasn’t able to keep her special milk a secret for long. And once word got out, women came from all over the South East to visit her and drink her milk. Which said something; keep in mind that travel back then was no trivial undertaking. Travel back then, even traveling only a few hundred miles, was a significant ordeal; it was a real commitment.
And these visiting women taxed Anne. You see, unlike most girls her age, she didn’t have a husband, and it isn’t clear—even to this day—who the father of her child was. As a peasant without a husband, Anne had no means to support herself. So she became an accidental business person, and eventually she started to encourage financial compensation in return for her services. For a time, rumor has it that it even became a very profitable business. Even her daughter, four now, got into the act and helped out; she would help take care of the visitors, keep them company in the swamp. Truthfully, it was probably one of the—or perhaps the—first fertility clinic ever.
For a while, things were going quite well for Anne, but she knew that this was not something she would be able to keep up forever. So when Jane Heath came to visit, Anne thought that this was it; help this woman, and she would be set for life.”
She paused to clear her throat.
“You see, Jane wasn’t one of her ordinary ‘customers’, if you will. Nope, Jane Heath was married to Benjamin Heath, one of the wealthiest men in all of the South East.”
The woman looked at Martin as if he were supposed to react to this, as if he were supposed to know who the hell Benjamin Heath was.
He did not.
“Anyways, so it was no surprise that Anne canceled all of her other patients to tend to Jane. Jane was older than most of her visitors, but she wasn’t the oldest—not by a long shot. But after only a few visits, Anne thought that there was something different about Jane—well, not about Jane directly, bu
t her husband. You see, while Benjamin Heath was one of the richest men in the South East, he definitely wasn’t one of the nicest. Now, you have to remember that smacking your wife around here and there was not horribly uncommon in those times. But Benjamin was different. Benjamin would beat Jane. He would beat her badly—very badly—and often she would make the long trek to visit Anne with broken ribs, black eyes, and horrible bruises marking her skin. And every month when Jane visited, the beatings got worse, and her need to conceive more desperate. It soon became clear to Anne that if Jane wasn’t with child soon, Heath would be beat his wife to death.”
The woman paused and took a seat down on the chair opposite Martin, placing the blue folder flat on her lap. Her arthritic hands smoothed the cover one, twice, and then she continued speaking.
“Jane came every month to drink from Anne’s breast, but no matter how often she came to visit in secrecy, she would return the following month without child. It’s not clear how long this went on for—some say months, others the better part of a year—or even why what had worked for so many others failed to work for Jane, but eventually Benjamin grew suspicious of her monthly outings and—”
The woman swallowed hard, her throat parched. Martin opened his mouth to say something, to offer her some water, but the woman stayed him with a finger. It was clear that she was determined to finish.
“—and one time—one time Benjamin followed Jane. With his most trusted friend in tow, he followed Jane all the way from their luxurious estate to the dredges of the swamp—to Anne’s simple lodge. And then they sat and waited; waited for Jane to drink Anne’s milk, and remained hidden in the swamp until she left again. And the whole time, Benjamin’s fury grew; to him, what he had seen was not only disgusting, but it was also offensive. After all, people of his standing should not interact with, let alone suck from the breast of a peasant. He was incensed. So after Jane left, he slipped into Anne’s home and tried the beloved nectar for himself. And then he raped her—while his favorite henchmen, a despicable creature by the name of Jessie Radcliffe, kept watch outside, he raped her.”
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