by S. B. Caves
They rode the elevator up, Francine covering her nose as discreetly as possible while Lena rifled through her backpack taking a rough inventory: a rumpled navy-blue sweater, a pair of socks, a fork and a can opener.
The doors dinged open and Francine stepped out, but Lena remained crouched, pulling items from the bag and discarding them on the floor beside her.
‘Lost something?’ Francine asked.
Lena didn’t answer but instead tipped the bag upside down and shook it vigorously. A tangled pair of panties, a nail file, some twigs and a few small trinkets fell out. She peered inside the backpack to ensure it was empty before tossing it behind her. The elevator doors began to close, so Francine held them open.
‘It’s here,’ Lena said, fiddling with something in her hands.
‘What is?’
She held out a tattered Polaroid, creased almost to the point of obscurity. It had been folded and refolded so many times that there was a hole directly in the centre along one of the fault lines. The picture was blurred, but showed two girls sitting on the porch of a house, one with dark hair, the other blonde. She pointed a grubby finger at the dark-haired girl.
‘Mel,’ she said. ‘Autumn.’
Francine looked at her. She saw those crazy eyes that stared off in opposite directions. She tried to speak, but tripped over her tongue.
Gathering up her scattered belongings, Lena said, ‘That’s me and Autumn. Our friend Tammy took it.’
The picture was too wrinkled to make out anything other than a vague impression. Francine held it close to her face and began walking toward her apartment, but the floor had lost its solidity, like she was stepping on sponge. She reached the door but couldn’t take her hands off the Polaroid to get out her keys. ‘Is that you, baby?’ she whispered, and suddenly had to cover her mouth to stifle the sobs. She didn’t want Lena to see her like this. It would make her too easy to manipulate. After all, it might just be a photo of two completely different girls. She couldn’t even say for certain that the blonde one was Lena, though perhaps if she looked closely she could see a resemblance.
A yell from the elevator distracted her. Lena was using her foot to keep the doors open while she packed her things away, muttering incoherently. Once she was organised, she stumbled out of the elevator and started down the corridor.
‘You see the flowers in her hair?’ She stood next to Francine and pointed at the white garland sitting in the mass of dark curls. ‘I made that for her. She looked pretty in it. She was always prettier than me.’
Francine nodded, swallowing a dry lump in her throat. She coughed, dug out her keys and opened the door.
The apartment shrank with Lena inside it, as though the girl’s presence caused the shadows to stretch across the walls.
‘Do you drink coffee?’ Francine asked, setting her keys in the little bowl atop the kitchen counter. She saw that the girl had become distracted by her new surroundings; her hand testing the texture of the wallpaper, running her fingers over the glass of the framed ship painting that’d been hanging there since before Francine moved in. ‘Lena? Would you like a drink?’
Lena’s head swivelled slowly. ‘You have hot chocolate?’
‘Yeah.’ Francine opened the cupboard doors above the counter, thankful to be distracted from the girl’s gormless face. ‘I’ll make you some.’
‘You mind if I use your toilet?’
‘No, of course not. It’s just there.’ She pointed to the door on Lena’s left. Lena opened it cautiously, a few inches at first, and then wider. She reached inside and fumbled for the switch on the wall, waiting until there was light before entering.
With Lena out of sight, Francine hunted for the bottle of vodka that she kept in the fridge, twisted the cap off and took two large slugs. She went to put it back, then decided on one more mouthful for luck. The alcohol did little to calm her. She steadied herself using the kitchen counter for support and stared down at the Polaroid. The girl in the photo was nothing more than a blurred face, her features indistinguishable, yet still Francine gazed, hoping some resemblance would swim into focus.
She’d started setting up the cups for the drinks when she heard a muffled noise from the bathroom. She froze, her hand hovering over the spoons in the drawer. It sounded as though Lena was talking to someone. Herself? Francine certainly wouldn’t put it past her. Yet the cadence sounded different to what she had heard previously; there was a start-stop rhythm to it as though Lena were engaging in a conversation. Was she on the phone?
Treading softly, Francine approached the bathroom door, cocking her head in an effort to decipher the dialogue. The girl’s garbled speech reverberated off the tiles, distorting the syllables. The only words Francine could make out were ‘sure, sure’ and ‘no, not tomorrow, tonight’. Then there was silence. She stared down at the floor and saw Lena’s shadow filling the portion of light spilling out from beneath the bathroom door. Then there was a gentle bump and the door trembled. An image of the girl standing with her ear pressed against the wood popped into Francine’s mind. The thought – and the silence – was abruptly broken by Lena’s loud cackling. Francine covered her mouth to stop herself screaming out in fright and quickly scooted away. She flicked the kettle on, then drew a knife from the block and placed it next to the breadbin.
The toilet flushed and Lena emerged with her hair slicked back away from her face, her ears sticking out like jug handles. Francine forced an awkward smile. ‘Take a seat there,’ she said, gesturing at the stool by the counter as she stirred milk and cocoa powder into a cup. ‘You didn’t eat much back at the restaurant. Are you hungry at all?’
‘No.’ Lena shook her head, seemingly fascinated by the cube pattern of the kitchen counter.
Francine heated the cocoa up in the microwave; when it was piping hot, she set it down in front of Lena. Lena picked up the mug and said, ‘Cheers,’ before clinking it against Francine’s, slopping coffee and cocoa in the process.
‘So,’ Francine began, warming her hands around her cup, ‘you’re saying that the girl in this photo is Autumn.’ She held up the Polaroid and Lena looked at it as though she had never seen it before. Then she blinked rapidly and comprehension returned. ‘You say you were with her in a house in the woods.’
‘Mmm,’ Lena said, licking her finger. ‘Yep. The big house.’
Francine opened her mouth to ask another question but realised she was rushing. She briefly considered whether it might be worth recording Lena on her phone, but decided against it. She suspected the girl might start playing up if she knew she were being recorded. She got up, went into her bedroom and retrieved the legal pad and pen from the bedside table.
* * *
Ever since Autumn had gone missing, Francine had been plagued nightly by a mosaic of bizarre dreams. What little sleep she was able to salvage was usually perforated with snapshots of her daughter in a range of scenarios. She was always trying to tell Francine something, as though subliminally – or psychically, as paranormal expert Vikki Clements would have her believe – providing her with clues to her whereabouts. ‘Your bond was so strong that on some extrasensory level, she can still reach you,’ Vikki would say before pausing and rolling her eyes heavenward, listening to instructions from Felix, her spirit guide. ‘She hasn’t forgotten your love. She wants you to find her.’ Then she would ask Francine things like, ‘In the dreams, is she talking? What is she saying? Is she pointing at anything, trying to focus your attention on something in particular?’ And the answer was always yes. In the dreams, Autumn would speak to Francine as though she had no idea she’d been kidnapped. But Francine knew, and no matter how desperately she tried to relay this to her daughter – that they had to flee, that they had to run and get away from whatever mercurial realm her subconscious had placed them in – the result was always the same: Autumn would not follow her mother to safety.
‘Everything you need to find her is right there in your dreams,’ Vikki had said, imploring Francine to write the d
reams down and make sense of them. So Francine had filled volumes with the details, straining to chase the phantoms from the back of her mind when she couldn’t quite remember all the little nuances. She recalled words, phrases, the environment, what Autumn was wearing, who she was with. Then she would make a spider diagram on a separate page and try and shape these dreamscapes into something viable, to reawaken the part of her mind that held the key to solving the mystery. She did this even after the footage went viral of Vikki Clements openly admitting to an undercover reporter that she was a phoney.
* * *
When she sat back down, Francine flipped to a clean page in the legal pad and said, ‘Can you tell me when you first met Autumn?’
Lena nodded, her lips curling into an oddly childish grin.
‘Sure. The first time I met her was the day we took her.’
4
Francine’s breath tangled in her throat. She coughed, fighting to suppress her sudden nausea.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Lena asked.
‘You took her?’
‘Not just me,’ she said sternly. ‘But me and Les did, yeah.’
Francine sipped coffee too quickly, scalding the roof of her mouth as she tried to remain calm. It burned on the way down her throat but washed away that stomach-acid taste. ‘Do you remember a lot about that day?’
‘Bits and pieces. It was a long time ago.’
‘Try for me.’
‘Maybe I don’t remember any of it.’ Lena shrugged.
‘I’m sure you can, Lena. You can try for me, can’t you?’ Francine bit the inside of her cheek until the taste of copper tinged the coffee coating on her tongue.
‘We watched you for a long time,’ Lena began, scratching her cheek. ‘You went into a bunch of stores and we just followed you around. I held Les’s hand and pretended to be his daughter even though … shit, we joke about it now, but we don’t look anything like each other.’ She found this funny and snorted laughter. It sounded like a pig grunting for truffles.
‘How did you take her?’
‘Are you mad at me?’
Francine clamped her teeth together tightly, the muscles in her jaw bulging. ‘How can I be angry with you? You were only little yourself. Can you tell me more?’
‘We were waiting for you to turn your back. The way it would’ve worked – well, if it hadn’t worked out the way it did, I mean – was that he was going to get you in the parking lot. That’s how we got the others, when they were loading up their trunk and stuff. But that day we didn’t have to.’ She used her finger to stir the hot chocolate, then sucked it clean. ‘She went to the doughnut stand and so Les said to me, you know, go get her.’
Francine closed her eyes for a second. She took a deep breath, the pen quivering in her fist. ‘Get her how?’ she asked, slowly and coolly.
‘I told her they were giving away dolls upstairs.’ Lena shook her head, giggling goofily. ‘She didn’t believe that, though. So I said, “If I’m lying, I’ll give you ten bucks,” but that didn’t work either. She was really smart.’
‘Was? What do you mean, was?’ Francine could feel her lips pulling into a snarl.
‘When she was a kid, I mean, that’s all. She was smart for her age. If someone had told me they were giving away bars of gold, I would have probably believed that. I don’t know. I don’t care.’ She stood up and walked past Francine towards the window by the sink. She prised the blinds wider with her fingers and squinted out into the gloom. Then she closed them completely.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I don’t want anyone seeing in.’ She gnawed the edges of her fingers, her bug eyes widening. ‘I don’t want them to find me talking to you like this. They could be watching from out there.’
‘Nobody is watching us, Lena.’
‘You don’t fucking know that,’ she returned in that low, angry voice she’d used before. The hairs sprang up across Francine’s nape. ‘You don’t even have a gun here, I bet.’
‘We weren’t followed; I made sure of that.’
‘I made sure of that,’ Lena mimicked. ‘You made sure of shit. You don’t know anything. But I do.’ She stood with her back against the hallway wall, her head turned to the kitchen window. ‘I know what they’ll do if they catch us.’
‘Sit down, Lena,’ Francine said with as much bass in her voice as she could muster. She pointed at the stool. ‘Sit.’
Lena’s face pulled into a facetious smile for an instant then fell back into that dopey, vacant expression.
‘So Autumn wouldn’t go with you. Continue.’
‘I said something about Santa Claus giving out free candy too, and she believed that. I guess that’s easier to believe, right?’
The circumstances of Autumn’s disappearance had been featured in three books that Francine knew of and God only knew how many blogs online. Lena’s version of the story tied into what had already been widely reported in the media. Eyewitnesses had last seen Autumn leaving the Blue Cloud Mall with a man and another little girl. Like one big happy family. It’d been big news back then and Lena could quite easily have researched the facts of the case and added her own unique spin on it. Whatever nonsense tumbled out of her mouth could be real … to her at least. There was no way for Francine to gauge when the girl was lying because Lena probably believed every word of it. But that didn’t mean Francine could afford to invest in these fantasies, no matter how convincing. She wanted to believe that Lena’s story was true because at least that would rekindle some small cinder of hope. Dying embers were all she had left.
She stared at the swirl in her black coffee. Her headache had gone, but so had every modicum of strength she had. She felt boneless, a helium balloon.
‘This man, Les,’ she said. ‘What’s his surname?’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘You were kidnapped by Les too?’
‘Mm.’ Lena nodded, peeling chapped skin from her lower lip.
‘How many others?’
‘I don’t know.’
Francine tensed, her heart double-tapping in her chest. ‘How many, Lena?’
‘A lot.’
‘And they all stayed in the big house, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Mostly. The house has a lot of secret places so we can stay hidden. We go up to other houses that ain’t in the woods and they all have rooms nobody is supposed to know about too. They blindfold us when we drive and the journeys take forever.’ She shrugged. ‘But our house, the big house, is in the woods.’
‘And what … what happens at the big house?’
‘They fuck us,’ she replied. ‘Put babies in here.’ She tapped her stomach.
‘Excuse me,’ Francine said and slipped off the stool, clutching the counter for support. Her legs trembled uncontrollably as she strode past Lena and hurried into the bathroom. She ran the taps in the sink, then crouched by the toilet. Mouthfuls of sour coffee roared out of her. Once she’d expelled everything she had to give, the dry heaves began and stars exploded in her vision. Her groans echoed around the toilet bowl and she wept – suddenly and sporadically – pillowing her head on her arms. Gradually the sobs descended into breathless moans. Every time the image forced its way back to the surface, she bit down on her hand: Autumn, small and fragile, her face soaked with tears and the sweat of some man. Les.
She rinsed her face with cold water. Puffy, bloodshot eyes stared back at her from the medicine cabinet mirror. Keep your cool, goddamn it, Francine; you keep your cool. If she sees you’re rattled, that’s it, she’ll run all over you. She flushed the toilet, not bothering to towel her face dry, and went back to the kitchen. She could feel Lena watching her, perhaps savouring the distress she’d caused. She opened the fridge and removed the vodka. Yes, technically it was Friday, but under these circumstances she could break the rule. Technically she’d broken it already with the sneaky sips she’d had earlier, but just then she didn’t care. She didn’t think she’d be capable of getting drunk ev
en if she downed the entire bottle.
‘Sorry about that,’ she began, sitting back at the counter, blotting rogue tears with the back of her finger. She unscrewed the bottle and took a swig, swirling the vodka around her mouth before swallowing sharply. ‘I don’t think that McDonald’s agreed with me.’ Lena didn’t reply. ‘You said earlier that the police knew about all this. I don’t think that’s correct.’
‘It is.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘Because half the police force used to come up there to the house. They used to take turns on us. It’s like a joke that they’re all in on, except we don’t get it. It’s only funny to them, I suppose. We just lie there and let them do what they want. Easier that way.’
Francine drank. ‘But what if I told another police department?’
‘They’ll deny it. What, are you stupid or something?’ Lena stabbed an index finger into her own temple and began tapping. ‘Anyway, with me gone they probably think I’m going to go blabbing, so they most likely moved her.’
Francine began to doodle listlessly on the legal pad. So far she’d written: House – woods, Les, multiple girls – other house far away, houses with secrets.
‘You said they took you to other houses. Can you describe them?’
‘I’m tired. I want to go to sleep now.’
‘Give me ten more minutes, Lena. I know it’s been a long day.’
‘I’m tired,’ she repeated sulkily, elbows on the counter, holding her head in her hands. ‘I don’t want to do this any more.’
‘A little longer. I think you have the strength to do it.’
‘No, I don’t. Please, just let me go to bed.’
‘No.’ Francine shook her head. ‘Not yet.’
‘I’m through with talking.’
‘We’re through when I say we’re through,’ Francine yelled, her voice booming through the quiet apartment. Lena peeked through her fingers, both pupils acutely focused. It was like some party trick she pulled, training her eyes to look straight on command, her face realigning into something completely different. ‘Now, I say ten more minutes and then you can have a shower and sleep.’
