by J. S. Bailey
“I said get out!” Bobby lunged toward Jack and held the tip of the knife a millimeter from his throat.
Jack held up his hands. “No need to get so upset. You asked for the truth and I gave it to you just like you wanted.”
Bobby wished that Jack was lying but knew he could only have known Adrian’s name and what she did to Bobby’s family if he’d actually spoken to her. “Get out now.”
A flash of headlights lit up the interior of the car. Jack’s eyes flicked toward the parking lot entrance. “Oh, look. My friend is back. It was lovely talking to you, Bobby. We’ll have to do this again sometime.” He opened the passenger door and, without further ado, vanished into the night.
Bobby sat there for a long time without moving. How could you do this to me? he thought as shameful tears spilled from his eyes. I’ve never done anything to deserve this.
The Spirit didn’t respond.
DISCONNECTED MEMORIES swirled through Adrian’s head. Driving down the interstate, passing the Welcome to Oregon sign, stopping for gas and picking up Mountain Dew and beef jerky to snack on for the rest of the trip, stretching her legs at a rest area, taking some travel brochures advertising parks and attractions in the area, checking her wallet to see how much money she had left, realizing she would need to find employment before she ran out of funds…
And then a blond, blue-eyed man young enough to be her son who’d seemed so interested in her story. Adrian reached out her hand to him like one drowning in a lake. Please help me. Something’s gone wrong. Please help. They’ve got me.
Adrian was startled awake by the sound of the metal door swinging open. She blinked to adjust to the light given off by the bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling and watched in wordless horror as the cell’s newest occupant arrived in the arms of one of the men she’d seen before.
Mother of God, have mercy on us all.
Another man helped lay the girl’s still form on the cot previously occupied by the Asian woman who had departed for horrors unknown. The Hispanic woman followed them with folded arms and observed the scene wearing a smirk, throwing a sneer at Adrian when the men had their backs turned as if to say, Don’t like it? Try doing something about it.
How any woman could sit idly by while others were locked up and then sold like cattle was beyond Adrian’s comprehension. This woman’s eyes were cold, like a pair of lifeless brown marbles. Did she have no pity?
She’s just like you, a voice whispered. You care more about yourself than anyone else.
But Adrian would never kidnap anyone or lock them away.
But if you knew a woman had been kidnapped, would you ever try to help her?
Adrian wasn’t sure she wanted to answer that, so she looked to the girl on the cot the moment the threesome departed.
The girl had dark hair tied into a wild bunch of braids fastened with pink ties, coffee-colored skin, and looked no older than nine—the age when little girls were supposed to live in blissful worlds of tea parties and dress-up. Adrian’s chest tightened. This child would likely never know such innocence again. What kind of person would snatch one so young and then sell her so men with too much money to spend could…could…
Adrian scrunched her eyes shut. The fact that girls this young ended up here meant that demand existed for them. Forget why a woman would work here. What man—who might be a father himself and read his kids stories and tossed baseballs to them—would choose to destroy a child’s purity? Could someone truly be that selfish?
Look at yourself, Adrian.
She bit her lip in anger. Abandoning her children had destroyed no one’s purity. Their self-esteems, yes; and maybe even their faith in the goodness of humanity, but Adrian’s actions had never caused anyone direct harm.
She sat up on her cot and continued to stare at the girl. She wore a bright pink shirt that had a stain from a spilled drink, purple pants, and yellow sneakers that stood out like a pair of rubber-soled highlighters. Her chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, and her eyes rolled around behind closed lids as she dreamed of terrors that Adrian hoped she would forget upon waking.
Any person who tried to hurt this child for his or her own pleasure was selfish beyond any kind of reason.
And Adrian had been selfish for leaving her children behind with their fathers; to be left wondering why their mother had not loved them enough to stay.
“I won’t be like those men,” she said in a low voice as blood simmered in her veins.
She stood. Looked at the girl, then to the door she couldn’t open.
“Honey,” she said, though since asleep the girl couldn’t hear her, “I’m going to get you out of this place. I’ll get you out if it’s the last thing I do.”
MORNING LIGHT roused Bobby from slumber, but he refused to climb out of bed, in part because of the headache raging behind his eyes.
He rolled over and jammed a pillow over his head. Why did he have to wake up so early? Heck, why had he awakened at all? A lot of good a new day would do him, considering what he’d learned last night.
Don’t just lie there, the Spirit chided. Get up.
“No. I’m kind of mad at you right now.”
Though Adrian’s kidnapping had not been the fault of God. It had all been Jack’s doing.
He knew full well why Jack had gone into detail about what he did to Adrian specifically and women in general. He’d wanted Bobby to know what horrors his birth mother would be suffering that very moment. Jack was right: he did know how to push Bobby’s buttons, and there wasn’t a thing Bobby could do about it.
Bobby had the sudden mental image of holding a gun to Jack’s temple and pulling the trigger, and he relaxed.
The sound of an approaching engine outside grew too close before falling silent. Please be at the neighbor’s house. The thought of having to talk to anyone right now made him cringe.
Light footsteps moved up the driveway and onto the porch, and though he expected it, he made an involuntary flinch when a knock sounded on the front door.
“Go away,” he muttered. “I’m not home.”
The knock came again. “Open up, Roland. I know you’re in there.”
Groaning, Bobby swung his skinny legs over the side of the bed and got to his feet, lightly tapping the back of his head with one hand. The knot he’d received at The Pink Rooster had shrunk overnight but the pain was still sharp and raw.
He wobbled a little as he crossed the tiny front room and undid the chain and deadbolt before swinging the door open. Carly awaited him, her auburn hair tied back and gleaming in the sunlight.
“You look terrible,” Carly said, thoroughly assessing him in about two seconds.
Bobby dragged a hand over the stubble on his chin. “You don’t look too great, yourself.” Carly’s face was pale, and she had uncharacteristic bags under her eyes.
At least she wasn’t crying.
She smirked and shoved past him into the house. “You’re not supposed to say that kind of thing to a lady, you know. You’re supposed to lie and tell me I look beautiful.”
Bobby’s head throbbed even harder as he closed the door. “But when I do that, you tell me I’m full of crap.”
“At least you’re learning what to expect from me. We have to be on the same page now that we’re working together.”
Bobby went to the freezer and got out a fresh icepack. He wrapped it in a dishtowel and pressed it to the lump beneath his hair. “Dang, my head hurts.”
“What happened? Take a nasty spill?”
“Not exactly.” He recounted what happened in The Pink Rooster, and by the time he finished, Carly held a hand over her mouth in shock.
“That’s awful!” she said. “You should have reported the creep before he hurt someone else!”
“I was a little too busy to call the cops.” Bobby moved over to the coffee maker and dumped in a scoop of grounds without checking to see if the filter basket was in place. Thousands of tiny brown granules scattered across the countertop and ont
o the floor.
He was grateful that Carly didn’t make fun of him. “Here. You sit down and I’ll take care of it. You’re lucky you have a lump. Phil told me it’s bad if a hit like that doesn’t swell because it means it’s swelling inside your brain instead and can potentially kill you.”
“That’s nice. And thanks.” Bobby lowered himself into one of the chairs and closed his eyes as the chill from the icepack moved through the towel and into the lump. “Why are you here?”
Carly bustled around behind him as she cleaned up the spilled coffee grounds. “Because we’re still looking for Mystery Woman, right? I figured I could help you brainstorm some more ideas.”
Bobby’s stomach gave a turn. “I think I’m done looking for Mystery Woman,” he said, opening his eyes and staring at the crumpled image of Adrian Pollard he’d thrown onto the table upon returning home last night.
“What? Why?”
“Because if she really is locked up by some creep somewhere, she deserves it.” Even as he said the words, he felt ill. Does anyone deserve that?
Carly fell silent. Shock appeared on her face for the second time in as many minutes. “How could you say that?”
“I found out that Jack Willard’s the one who had her kidnapped, and he told me who she is, only I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone where I found him so I can’t even call the cops on him.”
Carly pulled out the other chair and sat down across from him, giving him a stare so sharp that Bobby felt it cutting him open. “Well? Who is she?”
“You wouldn’t know her.”
“Obviously.” She raised an eyebrow. “What’s her name?”
“Adrian Pollard.” The name came out of his mouth sounding flat, and he gave a start when he realized he’d never uttered her full name aloud to anyone in his life.
“That’s pretty. Now why do you think Adrian deserves to be locked up? To be honest, I really don’t think that’s something you should be thinking right now. Certain entities might end up using it against you.”
Bobby tightened his free hand into a fist. “I can’t help how I feel. If you knew anything about her, you’d want her to be locked up, too.” He stood up abruptly and went back to the coffee maker, which Carly had yet to set. He whisked the filter basket out of the dish strainer, shoved it into the top of the coffee maker, and dumped in a fresh batch of grounds.
“You know,” Carly said as Bobby poured half a pot of water into the machine, “it’s okay to talk to me.”
“I am talking to you.”
“You know what I mean.”
The brew trickled into the pot. Bobby watched it rise past the first two lines on the side of the carafe. Carly didn’t need to know about all the emotional baggage he’d long ago shut away in a closet somewhere in the back of his mind—a closet he’d not opened since he left Ohio two years before.
And while he’d never thought about it, maybe Adrian was part of the reason he’d left Ohio in the first place. Putting so many miles between him and the ghost of what might have been had been his way of erasing the pain he hadn’t acknowledged in years.
And now Adrian was here. In Oregon. To find him. Her son.
Charlotte told her where I am, he thought as a new lump rose in his throat.
“Bobby?”
He turned. Carly’s expression had softened, and for some reason her demeanor made hot tears spring into his eyes. “What?”
“Who’s Adrian?”
There was no point in keeping it a secret. “She’s my mother.”
At first Carly gave him a quizzical look, but then she clapped a hand to her forehead. “Oh my gosh. I didn’t realize you were adopted.”
Bobby gave a hollow laugh. “Oh, I’m not adopted. She ran off when I was a few days old and we never saw her again. My dad had to hire a nanny to take care of me while he worked, and he ended up marrying her a few years later.”
“Bobby, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It’s not something I wear like a badge.”
“But you’re from Ohio. How did she end up out here?”
“I’m assuming she drove.”
Carly’s mouth formed a thin line. “So Graham’s grandson is the one who kidnapped her? It’s too bad you promised you wouldn’t call the cops.”
Bobby didn’t feel like going into all the details he’d learned from Jack last night. “He arranged for her to be kidnapped and sold to a brothel after they ran into each other and she told him who she was. He says he doesn’t have a clue where she is.”
“Do you believe him?”
He thought about the things Jack had said about what he did for a living. Someone who sold women into what amounted to modern-day slavery might not want to know everything about the network they were a part of so if one of them was arrested, they wouldn’t be able to confess everything and bring the whole ring down.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.” When the coffee maker beeped, he grabbed two mugs off the tree on the counter and filled them both to the top.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing, I guess.” Inwardly, he cringed. Sure, he could do nothing, but his conscience would never let it go.
“You know that’s not right. If she came out here, that means she wants to see you. Maybe she’s trying to put things right.”
Bobby accidentally sloshed coffee out of both mugs when he plopped them onto the card table. “What’s the point after all this time?” He drew in a deep breath. “Do you have any idea what it’s like growing up knowing your mother was a deadbeat? Charlotte was always nice to me and treated me like her own kid, but for my entire life I always felt like the odd man out. Her family never accepted me. They knew Adrian before she ran off because she grew up on the same street where Charlotte’s parents lived, and it’s like they thought I had some kind of disease since she’s the one who gave birth to me. Just imagine going to her parents’ house every Christmas Day. Your brother gets about seven hundred gifts from them because he’s their real grandkid, and you’re lucky if you come away with a wrinkly ten-dollar bill stuffed inside a card. Charlotte used to go off on them about that but they didn’t care.”
Carly’s face grew even whiter. “I’m sorry.”
Bobby wasn’t finished. The closet he’d kept locked for so long had broken open and couldn’t shut because of the tidal wave of garbage washing out of it. “In school kids knew I didn’t live with my real mother and they’d keep asking and asking what had happened to her, and I finally just said she died a long time ago so I didn’t remember anything about her. She might as well have been dead, and sometimes I hoped she really was. Is that bad?”
“It’s bad if you feel that way now, but you were just a kid.”
“I can’t help how I feel.”
She was silent for several long moments. “Can you?”
“Put yourself in my shoes and see how you feel.”
Carly opened her mouth as if to say something else but then closed it. Her brow scrunched, and she nodded a few times to herself.
“What?” Bobby asked.
“You promise you won’t go off on me?”
Bobby braced himself for a lecture. “I’ll do my best.”
“Good. Now I’m going to ask you to listen without interrupting or blowing another fuse. Bobby, everyone gets hurt at some point. I’ve been hurt. You’ve been hurt. Randy’s been hurt. Phil’s been hurt. Even Lupe and Allison and my parents have been hurt. Now tell me what you’ve seen in each of them. What are they all like?”
“Phil worries too much.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And Randy’s a lot mellower than Phil, but I think he worries a lot, too.”
“He also finds humor in things more than Phil does. It’s a good coping mechanism. Randy has every right to hate the world, but instead he does his best to have a positive outlook.”
Bobby took a sip of coffee and winced when he discovered it was still too hot. “What’s your point?”
“I want
you to think about what you’re going to do with your pain. Are you going to let it fester inside you like some kind of cancer, or are you going to use it to improve yourself and grow?”
“I don’t know.”
At once Bobby remembered part of the exchange he’d had with his father in his vision the day before.
You need to love your mother.
What?
I mean it. No matter what’s happened, and no matter what will happen, you need to love her if it’s the last thing you do.
Now Bobby understood.
He put his head into his shaking hands and stared into his coffee cup. “God help me,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
CARLY’S PHONE rang in her purse, dispelling the heavy silence that lay upon the room. She withdrew it and accepted the call, her face brightening. “Hey, Mom! Uh-huh. That’s great!” She moved the phone away from her mouth, eyes sparkling, and Bobby had the sense that some great weight had just been lifted from her chest. “Bobby, my parents are just a few hours away from here. They’ll be home by lunchtime.”
“Cool.” Bobby sipped on his coffee some more, not particularly caring about the Jovingos’ return to Autumn Ridge. In fact, the only thing he found himself caring about at the moment was trying to find a way to get Carly to leave him alone so he could properly sulk in silence.
Carly redirected her attention to the conversation with her mother. “I’m at Bobby’s right now, but I can hurry home and throw some stuff in the crockpot so you don’t have to fix anything tonight. Is that okay? Great! Love you, Mom. Bye.”
Bobby breathed a sigh of relief as Carly ended the call. “Did she say where they went?”
“No, but I’m guessing I’ll find out once they get back. Knowing Dad, he probably picked another random town to go preaching in. I wonder if he got two black eyes this time instead of just one.”
Bobby’s stomach turned at the thought of someone slugging Frankie Jovingo in the face. “Someone gave him a black eye?”
