by Nevada Barr
“Hypnotize, baby girl,” Delilah said.
“I changed my mind,” she said sulkily. “I don’t want any hippotizing.” She swung her plump legs over the side of the bed, planting her feet on yesterday’s Levi’s.
Clare shot Anna a desperate look.
“You’ll like it,” Anna said. “It’s fun.”
Candy looked unconvinced.
“It’s like knocking back three beers in a row,” Anna said, feeling a twinge of guilt. For what, she wasn’t sure. Maybe appealing to alcoholism in a minor crossed some internal line between right and sleazy.
Candy thought about that. “Can I have a beer first?”
“How about after?” Anna said. Again the twinge. “It’ll be more fun that way.”
Delilah had a sour look on her face. “With lunch,” she said firmly.
One couldn’t but respect a woman who wouldn’t let the children drink before noon. Anna put aside her judgment. At least Star and Delilah looked after the girl; that was a whole lot more than anyone else had done.
“Okay,” Candy said resignedly. “Do me.”
Coming from a child stripper and, once, prostitute, the phrase jarred.
“Okay, then,” Clare said. Her sweet motherly voice coming from Jordan’s black-clad frame, a tattoo of thorns across his brow, seemed almost like reverse demon possession.
Clare settled Candy on the rumpled bed, her back comfortably supported by the headboard. She sat tailor style in front of Candy.
“Just relax, sweetie, and listen to my voice. We’re going on a walk together, okay?”
“Don’t you need one of those gold watch things on a chain?” asked Star, who’d come to stand in the doorway to view the proceedings. “You know, to swing back and forth?”
Clare shook her head, her eyes never leaving Candy’s. Star took the hint and kept quiet.
Clare raised her index finger and said, “Look at the tip of my finger. See how pink it is, and the lines on it? Keep watching it.” She began moving the finger in smooth arcs back and forth in front of Candy’s face as if drawing a big smile in the air. As the finger moved she spoke in a near monotone, her voice low and soothing.
“You’re snug in your room, in your own bed. All your friends are here. You feel so safe and so loved. The bed is soft and comfortable, and you can feel yourself sinking into it deeper and deeper.”
Anna was fascinated. Candy’s eyes were drooping and unfocused after less than a minute of the process. Even Delilah and Star were looking a little hazy. Other than interest, Anna felt nothing.
Another half minute and Candy was clearly transported into another state. Her facial muscles grew slack, and what few years she’d racked up were erased. She looked no more than ten and as innocent as if she hadn’t seen the ugliest the world had to offer.
Gently, Clare led her back to Dick’s, then to the streets where Delilah and Star had found her. At the strip club, Candy was happy, and the images were clear and detailed. The same wasn’t true for her time on the streets, and Anna wondered if her mental disability carried with it a hidden strength, the ability to forget the bad times.
As Clare and Candy regressed through the fog of the girl’s streetwalking days and closer to the information they sought, Anna’s agitation began to make itself felt. Had she been sitting, she would be on the edge of her chair. Clare remained cool and measured, and Anna was impressed with the woman’s self-control. She’d seen so little of it, it came as a pleasant surprise.
From the fragmented history Clare was eliciting, it looked like all of them had gotten Candy’s timeline wrong. Unless there was much she had forgotten or blocked, it sounded like she’d been on the streets no more than a few months, a much shorter time than Delilah and Star had supposed. They knew for a fact that she’d been a dancer at Dick’s for four months. If she had been cast out of the “fancy house” when she turned eleven and her period started, as she’d intimated, that made her not thirteen but twelve, and the child she carried the result of hooking or rape.
Twelve and retarded and pregnant; Anna pushed a chunk of sadness aside and was surprised at how heavy it was.
“Come on, Candy, honey, let’s leave the streets and go to the fancy house. Ready?”
“Yeah,” Candy breathed, and the smile of a child expecting a treat teased the corners of her mouth up.
Clare glanced at Anna. Both of them were tense. Too much was hanging on the memories of a mentally challenged girl.
“Take my hand and take me to the fancy house,” Clare said. She folded her fingers lightly around Candy’s hand where it lay palm up on the wrinkled sheet. Candy’s fingers twitched but didn’t close. “Where are we going?” Clare all but whispered.
“To the fancy house,” Candy murmured.
“Are we walking?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tell me what it looks like.”
The description was sketchy and could have fit any street in the Quarter. Candy was not agitated about walking to the fancy house; she just wasn’t observant. She came up with only one detail, and that was a big pile of dog poop in the middle of the sidewalk that she got on the edge of her shoe. Though that, in itself, wasn’t of use, it was heartening to know she was in a specific time, the day she had dirtied her shoe, and not merely wandering.
Clare continued to let her lead her down streets, not hurrying, just softly interjecting a question when Candy slid off course or deeper into the trance. Anna clenched her jaw to keep from blurting out questions of her own. Delilah and Star were transfixed; evidently this was more information than they’d ever heard from their lodger in the months they’d known her.
Clare led Candy to the fancy house, but the girl was unable to describe it any better than big and nice and blind. Whatever that meant. Anna wondered if Candy had ever seen the outside of the house.
Likely as not, she hadn’t. She would have been brought in through another building or a back door or gate lest she escape and be able to lead someone back to the place. That’s the way Anna would do it if she were abducting children and keeping them as slaves. She suspected Candy was still in the time of being a streetwalker.
Finally Clare gave up on the architectural aspects and said, “Good, good. Now we are in the fancy house.”
Candy’s voice lost the vague aspect it had when on the street looking for the building and perked up with, for lack of a better word, joy, the joy of homecoming.
What followed was a fairy tale, but one so twisted and sick that no self-respecting fictional ogres would dream of haunting it. The real ogres were too evil for those that merely consumed the flesh of princesses.
Candy described a bricked courtyard filled with fountains and lanterns. Wrought-iron benches were tucked into corners screened with blooming plants. The air was perfumed, and from somewhere music was piped in. The kind without words, Candy said, and Anna guessed it was chamber music or classical. All very high-class. All used to try to dress a heinous crime so it would seem a refined taste.
On one side of the courtyard was a vine-covered wall with a door but no windows. On the other was the fancy house. Three stories high with balconies where the patrons could smoke and drink and the girls could come when they weren’t “entertaining guests.” Flowers cascaded down one side in a curtain of “pointy pink”—bougainvillea, Anna guessed.
Inside, the fancy house was lit with “candles in boxes,” and the walls were “red and fluffy” and the furniture “fat and soft.” Probably a re-creation of somebody’s idea of an expensive Victorian-era whorehouse. It seemed no men worked at the house, just girls and little boys and their “governess.” The “governess,” according to Candy, didn’t get to wear nice things and went around in plain gray dresses and had to wear her hair pulled back.
Candy waxed nearly eloquent on the clothing she was dressed in. The dresses for the children were tiny versions of midnineteenth-century fashions, with low-cut bodices and lots of petticoats, lace, and cotton underthings. Their hair was piled
up and decorated with feathers and bows, or covered with ornate wigs, and their baby faces painted. Candy was particularly enamored of the fans and the little gloves.
The boys had to wear “stupid pants that were short and stupid coats with buttons or diapers and nothing fun.” Candy said she was glad she wasn’t a boy.
The “guests” were “men who smelled good and weren’t supposed to mark anybody.” To Anna that suggested that some violence was allowed, just not the kind that would damage the goods.
“How did you ‘entertain’ the guests?” Clare asked.
Then Candy told them. As one horrible act after another was described, Anna felt sicker and sicker. Clare, her children undoubtedly on her mind, grew so pale Anna was worried she wouldn’t be able to continue. Candy finished with “It wasn’t so bad because I’d get ice cream after. Till I got fat. They liked me some fat but not real fat.”
Pleasingly plump, Anna thought, and a tide of nausea threatened to send her running to the bathroom.
Blessedly, Clare changed the subject.
“Did you have any friends there?” she asked.
“Dolly was my friend,” Candy said; then sadness aged her face. “She was real little and she got broke and they took her somewhere. A broke jewel got given away.”
“Who were the broken jewels given to?”
“People. Sometimes to Dougie. He was bad. He sounded good, but he was mean.”
At the name Dougie, Clare looked at Anna. That was the name the Cajun had called the pervert.
“I had a baby for a while. A real baby, and they let me carry her around and feed her, but she got broke so bad she was dead afterward.”
Star groaned, and Anna thought of the infant Helena she’d cared for and was blinded by a white-hot need to kill somebody.
“Did you have any other friends?” Clare pressed on.
“No. Maybe Blackie. When I got broke he was supposed to give me to Dougie, but he said since I was a retard I could just go away and he wouldn’t tell anybody.”
Blackie, the Cajun; it was he who turned her loose on the streets to survive the only way she knew how. Charity of a kind, Anna supposed.
Interesting as this all was, it brought them no closer to the location of the house, if, indeed, it was still operating out of the same space it had been when Candy was there. Since it had been less than a year since she’d been turned out, it was likely, but not certain by any means.
Despite the hypnosis, Candy was growing restive under the questioning.
“Ask her if she could smell anything or hear anything from the outside world,” Anna whispered.
Clare nodded and turned back to the girl on the bed. “We’re nearly done, Candy. There’s just one more thing I’d like to ask you. Let’s go into the courtyard in the morning after all the guests have gone and sit by ourselves on a bench. Are we there?”
“I guess.”
Anna didn’t know if hypnosis wore off after a time or if people could get bored or annoyed or scared and bring themselves out of it, but it sounded like one or the other was happening. Candy’s voice was a bit more distinct and her eyes active beneath the closed lids.
“Listen,” Clare said. “What do you hear?”
Anna found herself listening so hard that, even with the low hum of the city, her ears were ringing. For a long time Candy said nothing. Clare’s shoulders slumped. Then Candy opened her mouth and sang. “Da, da, da, da, da, da dah.” Scales, sung in a clear sweet voice. She sang it again in a higher register. Then again.
“Anything else?” Clare asked.
“A piano.” This time Candy sang low, using the word “dunk” to imitate scales being played on a keyboard.
Music lessons, singing lessons. For the first time since the hypnosis began, Anna had hope they might learn something after all.
“That’s good. That’s good,” Clare crooned. “Let’s listen some more.”
Candy quieted but for a tiny voice in which she sang the scales again. Just when Anna thought that well had gone dry, the girl erupted with a great hiss.
Crawfish dumped into boiling water? A steam cleaner? An industrial-grade iron for pressing sheets? There were too many things it might be.
“Thunk, thunk, thunk like big darts hitting, or a gun with a silencer,” Candy said.
A child who probably didn’t know the world was round—or care—lived in a city where guns with silencers were common enough for her to know what one sounded like when fired. Anna longed for her parks, her mountains, and her quiet home with her kind husband, her soft cats and silly dog. Cities were too grating.
Clare looked at Anna, and Anna shook her head. The sounds, the thunk and the hissing put together, brought nothing to mind.
Clare rubbed her eyes wearily. “One last question,” she said. “Do you smell anything?”
“Perfume,” Candy said. “Nice kinds.”
“Flowers?” Clare asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Anything else?”
“Other flowers.”
“You’ve done so well, Candy. I’m going to count backward from ten, and you’re going to come up slowly like you were floating, and when I get to one you are going to open your eyes. You’ll feel real good and rested and happy.”
Candy got her beer and her hundred bucks.
Anna and Clare got three vague clues and a memory of misery that would last a lifetime.
TWENTY-NINE
They walked the streets of the Quarter. They sniffed and listened for thunks, hisses, and scales being played on a piano. Clare put one foot in front of the other and fought images that slammed into her mind with the force of sledgehammers, making it a struggle just to remain upright. The swift dark Mississippi River called to her, and she wanted to throw herself into its deadly embrace and never think or feel again, but, until she knew her daughters were dead, that was a release she had to deny herself.
Anna Pigeon walked with her. She talked of the clues they had, of the names Dougie and Blackie, proof of the connection between the fancy house and Seattle, of the possibility that David had been killed because he learned what was happening to the children and turned to the FBI.
Clare heard her and knew the woman was trying to prop her up with hope. Clare wanted the hope but couldn’t get hold of it. Each time she tried to grab on, it slipped from her fingers and was replaced by pictures of men’s hands on her girls. The depth of the depravity shamed her, made her not want to be a human being anymore, if humans could do these things; made her hate men for what they did and thought and wanted; made her want to be a man that she might atone by killing herself.
They made copies of the sketch the Jackson Square portraitist had drawn from the description of Dougie. Anna kept one. Clare gave the rest to Danny and his gang of punks. Handling the page, seeing the lines coalescing into the cramped face of the man with the yellow coat, the words “broke jewels” cut into her brain like a razor blade held too tightly in the hand: children as commodity, as things, things that could be broken and given to scum like Dougie to use or kill or both, precious Dana with her olive and alabaster skin, dark eyes brimming with love; little Vee always moving, too full of fun to stay still; jewels, broken toys, used up and thrown on a trash heap to be picked over by rats like Dougie.
“Hey!”
Clare dragged herself from the chamber of horrors. Anna Pigeon was standing in front of her, her hazel eyes so penetrating they burned some of the fog from Clare’s brain.
“What happened?” Anna demanded.
Had the fool woman been listening? Had she not heard what Clare had? Did she not see the fancy house?
“Are you a fucking idiot or what?” Jordan snarled.
Oddly, the pigeon didn’t look offended, only concerned.
Clare was outside of herself, above and to the right, looking down from the space she inhabited when she was being her own director. What she saw was not Clare Sullivan the actor playing a role; she saw a man who had no conscience, no regrets, no et
hics, no friends, no hopes or fears, a man who was as free as he was reprehensible. She envied him.
“Clare?” An iron grip closed on Jordan’s arm, and Clare slammed back into the body and the costume. Metaphorically speaking, Clare had lost herself in roles before, becoming enamored of the accent or the time period or the internal workings of a character she played—but only metaphorically. Never had she confused herself with a fictional person. Never thought their thoughts but with full knowledge that she was merely walking a mile in another’s shoes, not morphing into flesh of their flesh. The line between art and insanity was always clearly drawn. Actors were the world’s great realists. One couldn’t focus intently on what made humans do as they did and have many illusions left.
Jordan was different. More and more Jordan was the only person Clare could bear to be. He’d become more than pretense; he’d become her fate, what she was becoming, cell by cell, thought by thought.
When Anna asked what happened, she wasn’t harking back to Candy’s revelations. She was asking why Clare had stopped and was standing in the middle of the sidewalk staring at a construction Dumpster.
“Sorry,” Clare said. Unable to say more, she began walking.
Mackie greeted them at the gate. For once the joyous little face, the tongue that would not stay in his mouth, the ears flopping and bouncing as he ran, his obvious delight in her existence, did not lift her spirits. In a way, she had seen what she had let happen to Mackie’s kids, the little girls he’d slept with most nights of his life and every night of theirs, the girls who doted on him and to whom, in return, he gave complete love and loyalty, even unto allowing them to dress him in doll dresses and bonnets and wheel him up and down the street where other dogs might see. His unquestioning love only served to remind her that she had betrayed him; he trusted her to keep his world with its two suns, Dana and Vee, intact. Having failed, it physically hurt to be greeted like a returning hero. Jordan pushed at Clare, and she had to fight not to kick the little dog away, yell at him to get down.
This cruelty, on top of the others she had borne this day, knocked her to the ground. Her knees slammed into the brick, and the pain was welcome. She opened her arms and gathered up her children’s dog, burying her face in the fur of his neck as he wriggled and licked and made small happy noises.
