The Last Friend

by Harvey Church

  “Lizzy was two years older than me, and she said that once Roger was done with the girls, he would have one last farewell with them. For him, the girls speculated that it wasn’t about getting off. It wasn’t sexual for him. For Roger, it was about doing unthinkable things. Some girls said they’d seen the room where this farewell ritual happened.” Gulping, Monica glanced back toward the grave.

  Donovan followed her gaze. Once again, he noticed some of the stray remains—the femur, forearm, shins, whatever else. Roger’s farewell ritual didn’t end well. He was a monster. And now Donovan wanted to be the karma that paid Roger a visit for his farewell ritual.

  “We all knew that one day we would become less desirable. It wasn’t too difficult to put the pieces together. A girl starts menstruating; she’d get pulled out of the dungeon. Alone. We’d never see her again. There’d be talk of rape and dismemberment. The worst kind of abuse that the other men, the customers, weren’t allowed to do to us, followed by a slow and painful death. We had no value at that point.”

  “It sounds awful,” Donovan said, checking in on her again and noticing the firm defiance on her face. The stare of a survivor. If he wasn’t so numb and overwhelmed, he’d probably want to hug her. “How did you escape?”

  She nodded, but to Donovan it seemed she wasn’t ready to talk about that part. “I had a different view. Lizzy told me that sometimes the most obvious things lead us to make the least correct assumptions.”

  He’d always told Elizabeth that, sometimes, the majority could be dead wrong. As a philosopher, he’d often referred to it as the bandwagon theory or the false consensus effect. He’d quoted these theories often, forcing his students to ask: What if the minority of people who thought something different than everyone else were in fact the ones who were correct? There were many instances in history where the minority was correct, and the majority dead wrong. The housing crash of 2007–2008 was an obvious economic example.

  “So she said, ‘What if Roger wasn’t like that at the end? What if, on that last day, he showed some form of mercy? What if he actually let us go free?’ So I started thinking about that, this idea of mercy and Roger trying to restore some sort of balance,” Monica said, nodding her head with a finality that suggested she still wanted to believe in that fairy tale. “Lizzy convinced me that it wouldn’t be all that bad when my time came.”

  A tremendous amount of pride swelled inside his chest at the thought of his daughter being so brave and taking on such a big leadership role among those scared, abused, and damaged girls.

  “I remember when it came to being her time to go, Mr. Glass.” Monica seemed to be telling the story to her knees. “At first, she kept to herself. It was all so new, what she was going through. A lot of girls got scared, and that environment didn’t make it any better. But after a half day of worrying, she came out of her shell. I remember she went to each of the girls, talked to all of them. She made some of them cry. The ones who feared the worst couldn’t see past what they all believed to be true: that the happiest person in the dungeon was going to die. She motivated some of the others to stay strong and fight, and you could feel the energy in the dungeon change after that. In a big way, a good way that helped me with my escape.”

  Donovan thought it might be a good time to start playing with the pebbles in the earth between his own legs.

  “And then she came to me, Mr. Glass. She saved me for last. She said it was because she thought I was special. I believed her, too. I believed that I had something inside me that the others didn’t. She convinced me to fight. She also convinced me that she was going to be set free, and she didn’t think she’d make it back to her parents—to you and your wife—because she’d changed so much, she was just too far broken that you wouldn’t recognize her. Or you’d be as disgusted with her as she was with herself.”

  “She thought that?” he choked out.

  Monica didn’t bother to respond. “I remember arguing with her that it was obvious her parents loved her so much that no amount of change or damage should keep her from going home, but she convinced me that it was just time for her to move on. She said she’d find a new life, one without pain and bad people. But she wanted me to tell you and your wife about the things we’d talked about. Like how much she loved you for everything you’d done to give her a perfect life. And then she told me to come looking for her once I was an adult. Said I’d know her from the scar behind her ear.”

  At that point, the obviousness of what Elizabeth had been telling Monica struck Donovan. His heart pumped faster and his eyes widened with the realization. “She knew she wasn’t being set free . . .”

  Turning her stare on him, Monica shook her head. “She knew. She wouldn’t admit it, but she knew she wasn’t being set free,” she repeated. “She also knew that if one of us ever got out, it would probably be me.”

  Donovan reached out and draped an arm around Monica’s shoulder. He pulled her tighter into a half embrace. Biting down on his lower lip, Donovan rolled away from Monica and returned to the grave site. He stood over the shallow hole for a long moment, once again remembering the smile on his daughter’s face while the Ferris wheel rotated into its ascent.

  “When it was my turn,” Monica said, her voice reaching him from the lookout, “I was twelve, a late bloomer compared to a lot of the others. Lizzy had been gone a few years already, and I was on my own. I was so scared. I remembered everything she’d told me. I remembered my promise. Like her, I didn’t want to go back home, but my family life wasn’t as happy as hers.”

  Donovan remembered her Facebook timeline: there was a French-language private school in Louisiana followed by a long gap, and then the recent emergence of posts and photos. If Donovan made some quick calculations, he realized it wasn’t quite a decade’s worth of a return.

  “Sometimes, survival is icky, and when Roger came into the dungeon for me, I definitely felt icky. There was no chance I would let my parents see me like that, not after everything.” Her footsteps approached from behind, her soles cracking the branches and twigs with each step. “As he dragged me up those stairs to the van, and then let the heavy door slam shut, I knew I’d never be back unless it was to rescue the girls I was leaving behind. For two nights, Roger proved to me that like-minded people hang out. He was no different than the perverts he’d forced me to spend nights with. I’d managed to create a profile for those types of perverts. Just like anyone would, after going through what I’d been through in those four years of slavery. And if there was any difference at all between Roger and those other men, it was that Roger owned us. He had no limits. He didn’t have to stop at the things that the others couldn’t do.”

  The talking and cracking branches had stopped. Donovan could feel her breath on the back of his neck. He wondered if she’d removed the gun from the waistband of her pants, if she might be aiming it between his shoulders or at the back of his head, if she would be so kind as to pull that trigger and let him hold his daughter again. Closing his eyes, Donovan said a quick prayer. He would love to hear Elizabeth’s voice, love to feel her forehead underneath his lips as he kissed her good night and goodbye.

  No longer caring if Monica held a lethal weapon to him, Donovan lowered himself to his knees. He edged forward, bringing his lips to the cranium in the dirt and pressing them against the cold, grainy surface. With his eyes closed, he imagined his daughter’s face—the graduations, the celebratory dinners, the walk down her wedding aisle, the way she introduced him to his first grandchild—instead of the horror of this reality.

  “You’re still my only sunshine.” When he pulled back, he stared at the empty sockets that had once housed her eyes and nose. “Goodbye,” he said, sighing as he turned around on his knees.

  * * *

  As Donovan stared down at the grave, Monica pulled a heavily scarred arm out of her shirtsleeve. She wasn’t aiming the gun at him, wasn’t looking to kill him and reunite him with daughter.

  “Let me finish telling you what ha
ppened to me. Because after Roger had beaten me inside and out in the back of the van, it was time to cut me up and get rid of me, just like he’d done with the others before. So he brought me up here, in the dark. He had a gun, bigger than the one I have now.”

  “Jeez,” Donovan muttered, shaking his head as if that could take away the tingle of disgust that crawled across his skin.

  “When we got to this part here, up top, I noticed there was another mound over there.” She pointed to another tree, the growth concealing the graves underneath. “He said that that mound was for me, but then he pointed to this tree where Lizzy was buried, and he asked me if I wanted to be close to my old friend while he made me bleed the way he made her bleed.”

  Shuddering, Donovan clenched his jaw to suppress the rage and asked, “What was the alternative?”

  A tear slipped down her face. “He wouldn’t shoot me. He’d drag it out longer. So I limped over to this tree. It was getting dark, but he had one of those big flashlights so he could see just how bad I was getting. He pressed me up against the trunk and assaulted me again. I knew if he kept going, if he continued hurting me, I wouldn’t be able to walk out of here. And that was when I realized I wasn’t leaving anyway. While he was raping me, I managed to tear away a piece of bark or maybe it was part of the tree’s trunk.” She nodded at the three hollow, a small hole in the trunk that was barely large enough for Monica’s slender hand to slide in. “It was so dark. And in that moment when all men are vulnerable, I jammed whatever it was into his eye.” She grinned at the memory. “It was probably as long as a fork, and I plunged it a good half inch or so into his eye socket. The assault finally ended, and that was all that mattered. He went down, and I ran.” She pointed past Elizabeth’s tree where the ground gradually declined, rolling down into something of a valley.

  “You got away?”

  She looked away, nodding. “It was dark. I was barefoot, naked, and I ran as far as I could go, staying in the dark. Eventually, he came looking for me, and that was when I settled and hid in the brush. I was bleeding. I was humiliated and sore.” She choked on her words. “But I wasn’t going to die.”

  Donovan watched her, unsure of what he could say after hearing a story like that. When Monica remembered that she’d freed her arm for some reason, she pointed to the scar that wrapped around her shoulder. It looked like a burn. After hearing the story about what her fate should’ve been, the scar looked like nothing more than a speed bump, and a mild one at that, compared to the assault she’d endured.

  “He started to cut me. I thought I was going to lose my arm that night in the van before he dragged me up here. But he must’ve caught his second wind, because he spared me. I don’t know why, but he did.”

  “You’re a survivor.”

  “No, I was lucky,” she corrected him as she pushed her arm back inside her sleeve. “That’s the only thing that separates me from the others. From Lizzy. It’s luck that he caught that second wind. Luck.”

  Now it was Donovan’s turn to remove his shirt. As he unbuttoned it, he noticed how Monica watched him, as if curious about his story. “It’s nothing like yours,” he said, explaining his actions. “See, when Elizabeth was young, she’d often want either me or my wife to sleep in her bed with her. Almost like nightmare insurance. But as parents, we felt we wouldn’t be doing her any good if we stayed. We didn’t want to send her off to college and have her expect one of us to sleep in bed with her.” He smiled at just how silly they’d been; he’d give anything for another sleepover with his daughter. “It was always heartbreaking to leave her at night while she’d beg for me to stay. So I offered my shirt. I’d wrap the arms around her and say she could pretend it was me holding her and keeping her safe from bad dreams. Those nights with my shirt, she always slept through till morning.” Clamping his teeth over his numb lower lip, he glanced down at the shallow grave. “I’m going to bury my shirt with her remains so she can rest better.”

  Monica turned away and let out a long, emotional breath before whispering, “I’ll wait at the lookout while you say your goodbyes, Mr. Glass.”

  CHAPTER 20

  From his front porch, Donovan watched the taxi drive off with Monica in the back seat. She seemed to stare back at him, at least until it hurt her neck to maintain eye contact, at which point she lowered her attention as if staring at something in her lap. Once the taxi’s brake lights were no longer visible, Donovan retreated inside the house, locked his door, and wandered to his reading chair.

  Grabbing his new iPhone, Donovan noticed how badly his hands trembled as he tried tapping his passcode into the lock screen. After hitting the wrong numbers twice, he replaced the phone on the table and buried his face in his hands.

  He wept for half an hour.

  * * *

  Once he regained his composure, Donovan grabbed his phone and dialed Agent Klein’s number. It belonged to a cell, judging from the hollow way the federal agent’s voice sounded when he picked up. And it also appeared that Klein was driving.

  “How are those renovations coming?” Klein asked.

  “That’s exactly why I’m calling, Agent Klein,” Donovan said, catching himself yelling into the cell phone. “Would you mind swinging by the house?”

  Groaning on the other end, Klein said he couldn’t. “Not tonight anyway. I’m on my way out of town on another investigation.”

  Donovan hadn’t expected that.

  “Is it urgent, Donny?”

  Shifting in his seat, Donovan didn’t know how to answer. As with every question Agent Klein asked, it felt like a setup of some sort. Like when he’d mentioned using the money for companionship.

  “You still on the line?” Klein asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it urgent?”

  “Sort of, yeah.”

  “Then I can have one of the other agents swing by. Are you around now?”

  Closing his eyes, Donovan used his free hand to massage his forehead. “No, no. I want to speak with you, if that’s okay.”

  There was a pause on the other end, and if not for the traffic sounds, Donovan would’ve asked Klein if he were still on the line.

  “It can wait until tomorrow,” Donovan said.

  There was a long sigh, and Donovan imagined the federal agent calculating his next move, as if they were playing a game of chess instead of picking up their discussion where they’d left off yesterday.

  “All right, Donny, why don’t you swing by the field office around nine tomorrow morning. You remember where we’re located, don’t you? On Roosevelt?”

  Donovan massaged his forehead a little harder. “You were located downtown last time I was at your office, Mike.”

  “Oh, right. That was a long time ago. We’ve moved. Nice building with a lot more windows now. You’ll like it—reminds me of some of those fancy university campuses you see these days. So nine o’clock? See you then?”

  The offer just didn’t feel right. Making a trip into the FBI field office could turn into something ugly. Donovan knew that. Klein was always a couple of steps ahead of him. And once Donovan showed him what he’d taken from Elizabeth’s unmarked grave . . .

  “Actually, Agent Klein, is there any way you can swing by the house?” Donovan squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head. He realized he was showing far too much of his hand. Now Klein knew he didn’t want to step on FBI turf, didn’t he? For a moment, Donovan hated himself for being so bloody transparent. He never should’ve engaged in a conversation like this. Klein had shown up unannounced and ambushed him in his own backyard; all Donovan had to do was call him and tell him to swing by as soon as he could and then hang up.

  Chuckling on the other end, Klein took a deep breath. “I like you, Donny. So tell you what; I’ll drop by tomorrow morning.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, but one last thing.” He paused. “Whatever you’ve been up to, it better be legal.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Friday morning at nine o’clock, Agen
t Klein knocked on his door, just like he’d promised. Donovan noticed that the federal agent had made the trip out to his house at the same time that Klein had asked him to show up at the field office. He wasn’t sure what to make of that, if anything.

  “You still look like you haven’t slept,” Klein said once Donovan unlocked and opened the front door.

  “Coffee?”

  Klein didn’t waste time removing his shoes. He walked into the living room and stood in the opening that separated it from the main hallway. Donovan watched him dig his fists into his hips while he inspected the space.

  “Agent Klein? Can I grab a coffee for you?”

  He gave an upward nod at the fireplace. “You haven’t begun the renovations yet, have you?”

  “Since Wednesday?”

  Turning around, Klein seemed confused. He scratched at his chin. “You don’t have the cash anymore, do you?”

  How had he known? Donovan half smiled, trying to play it cool. “Let’s start with coffee, shall we?”

  Klein shook his head no. “What’s really going on, Donny?”

  Raising his hands—a motion that only the guilty performed, Donovan realized—he offered a smile. “I’m going to grab my coffee, okay?”

  Unimpressed, Klein asked, “What am I supposed to do?”

  Donovan pointed into the room. “Sit down. Tell me where I should start with the, uh, renos.” Before Klein could object, Donovan rushed into the kitchen, dropped a pod into the Nespresso machine, and brewed a quick cup of liquid adrenaline despite his heart already racing.

  When he returned to the living room, he found Klein standing at the reading chair, staring down at the new computer and the packaging on the floor. He heard Donovan’s approach and spun around.

  “So what’s going on, Donny? I already know you’re lying to me more often than you’re telling the truth, and I’m not sure what to make of that.”

  Stepping past Klein, he settled into the reading chair and waited for the federal agent to sit on the sofa.