by Amber Stuart
“Eric,” I prodded, “we don’t have all night.”
Technically, we did, but the only thing that made me more uncomfortable than having to confront or talk about my own emotions was listening to someone else talk about theirs.
Eric pushed his chicken tandoori away and stood up though. He looked between us, at our hands still woven tightly together, and I knew that look in his eyes. “Yeah, I guess you don’t.”
Asshole.
There were only two bedrooms in this house, and we followed him into the first one where Abram Mirowski sat bound and gagged in the middle of the room.
Abram was a short, fat man, in his early 60s, and by the way he was squinting at all of us, he probably normally wore glasses. I quickly scanned him and could tell Mark and Eric had gone to a lot of trouble to hide the fact that Abram Mirowski had not reached Baton Rouge unharmed.
Eric crouched in front of him so that they were eye level. “Remember, old man,” he warned him, “remember what happens if you get too loud.”
Lottie pressed closer to me. Eric reached out and removed the tape over his mouth with a sickening ripping noise. I could see the strands of hair and snow-white specks of skin stuck to the side; his mouth and cheeks were red and raw. This wasn’t the first time Abram Mirowski had had his mouth taped shut recently. He spit out the wad of cloth that had been forced into his mouth.
“Water?” he asked, his voice scratchy and small.
There was always a danger of allowing someone to drink too little or too much. Too little and he would die. But a prisoner who continually pissed all over himself was a smell that was hard to forget.
Eric stood up. “Not yet. Answer her questions, don’t waste our fucking time, then you can have it.”
Lottie was trembling. This had been a really stupid fucking idea. But Lottie wasn’t just Lottie anymore, and as so often happened now, she surprised me. Lottie would have done anything to keep her friends safe, but this would have unsettled her, nauseated her, pained her to see another person – no matter how despicable he was – suffering. Kyrieana apparently didn’t share those reservations.
“You sent David to kill me.” Kyrieana was pissed.
Abram squinted at her, perhaps realizing for the first time who she was. He tried to swallow but there was nothing left in his mouth.
“Yes,” he said simply. God, I wanted to hurt him.
“Why?” Lottie’s hands had balled into fists again and I wondered if she was going to do it for me. No one would have stopped her.
“Because you shouldn’t exist.” He said it so matter-of-factly. I thought about being a smartass and pointing out that, really, none of them should exist. I didn’t think Lottie, or Kyrieana, would find me funny.
“But I didn’t mean for any of this to happen!” She was trying to keep herself from shouting. He was irritating. I couldn’t blame her.
“Doesn’t matter.” If he hadn’t been so tightly restrained, he probably would have even shrugged when he said it. At some point, I was coming back just to beat the shit out of him.
“How? How does it happen? I never thought about it… about bringing her back, I mean. I felt sorry for him, I felt sorry for them all, but who doesn’t? It’s a fucking funeral! Someone was dead!”
“I don’t know. I never had the kind of power you must have had.”
He was lying. We all knew it. Even Lottie knew it.
Eric stepped closer to him. “You’re wasting our time,” he reminded him.
Abram’s eyes widened but he shook his head. “No, I’m serious. I couldn’t have done it. We don’t know how she did.”
“He’s lying,” I said. Abram started to protest but Eric cut him off.
“Dietrich, take Lottie out in the back. I’ll come get you.”
Abram had started to make gurgling animal noises, that primal fear overpowering him, and I grabbed Lottie’s arm and led her into the backyard. The mosquitoes were out in their full summer force. Fucking Louisiana mosquitoes. As I swatted at them, Lottie kept looking back toward the house.
“Lottie,” I said gently, but I didn’t know what to tell her. She knew what was going on in there.
She looked at me, and in the dark, it was so hard to read her expression – disgust? Repulsion? “Do you do that, Dietrich?”
Shit. This had definitely been one of my worst ideas ever. I could have lied to her, but this was Lottie… sort of. I couldn’t lie to her. “Sometimes.”
She was quiet again except for the occasional slapping of a mosquito as it landed on her skin.
God, I thought, what is she going to think of me now?
She exhaled slowly, and stepped closer to me, pressing her head against my chest and I immediately wrapped my arms around her. “I guess,” she said, “the world must be a much more horrible place than I’d ever imagined. You and Eric… you’re the best men I’ve ever known.”
I kissed the top of her head. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t, that this was such a rarity, that really we spent most of our time tapping away at a computer like most of the industrialized world now, that this world she had been born in, the world she had chosen to come to, was a good place, a safe place, a mostly benevolent place. But I still couldn’t lie to her.
“It can be,” I said instead. A half-truth was better than a lie.
We waited without talking anymore until Eric opened the backdoor of the house and beckoned us inside. I hoped they wouldn’t have to do this again. I hated these fucking mosquitoes.
Abram looked sickly and ashen, but again, whatever they had been doing in here, they had disguised it for Lottie’s sake.
She hesitated only briefly before asking him again. “How did this happen to me?”
Abram looked warily between Eric and Mark, then tried to swallow again but his mouth was still pasty and dry and made a sticking sound when he opened it to speak. “We’ve never been able to find out. The few times it’s ever happened, they were just…” He trailed off, looking at the men again much the same way Jackson had watched me, wondering if the wrong words would bring about the same pain.
“Killed?” I finished his sentence for him.
Abram nodded.
A sudden thought occurred to me, and it seemed meaningless and trivial but I asked him anyway. “Why were she and Lydia allowed to come in the first place? Isn’t this usually a men’s only club?”
Abram’s brow creased, his eyes narrowed. His nostrils flared so slightly, almost imperceptible, but Mark and Eric had surely noticed it, too.
Eric was about to remind him about wasting our time again, but Abram answered. “It’s my understanding she had a lot of money.”
Eric looked at me curiously, but truthfully, I wasn’t even sure why I had asked him. The story Lottie – or Kyrieana – had told me about her engagement to a man she hadn’t wanted to marry, Lydia being sold into a marriage because she had been expendable when she had lost her job, bribing someone to get them both here, and then this?
“These doctors,” I continued, “can they fuck something up when they’re healing these bodies?”
Abram looked confused. “Something can always go wrong, but having a doctor present is relatively new for us. The doctors don’t heal anything. We heal our own bodies.”
He was getting hard to understand now. Dehydration and repeated pain will have that effect on a person.
Lottie had caught on to what I was getting at though and she took a step toward Abram. The rest of us tensed reflexively. He couldn’t touch her. He would probably never get out of that chair again, but we didn’t like her being so close to him.
“Can someone have done this to me?” she asked. There was something in her voice. She wasn’t angry about the possibility that someone had tampered with her body, her mind; she sounded hopeful.
She needs hope; she knows this isn’t her fault. How can they hold her responsible for something that isn’t her fault?
Abram’s eyes wer
e struggling to stay open now. They would have to let him drink, sleep, maybe even eat some chicken tandoori and lamb vindaloo if they were feeling really charitable. We would have to come back. Abram knew more than Jackson and getting him to talk to us wouldn’t be a process of beating information out of him but wearing him down. These things had a tendency to take a while.
But Abram reopened his eyes just long enough to look at her and mumbled, “Impossible.”
Lottie crossed her arms defiantly and mumbled back, “Story of my life.”
Chapter 14
We didn’t get a chance to go back to the little house where Abram Mirowski was being held because the next morning, the Judge arrived in Baton Rouge. I thought it had been a clichéd title Jackson and Abram had bestowed on him, but as it turns out, Willis McGrath actually was a judge. He sat on an appeals court in Delaware and had graduated from law school forty years ago. Willis had been here a very long time. He was older than Abram, tall and dignified, with thick gray hair that was neatly combed. Everything about Judge Willis McGrath seemed orderly, clean, polished. And he did not look happy about being in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Lydia was at work, so it was just the three of us in their apartment. And Lottie was not afraid. She sat across from him, her eyes blazing with such an intense hatred that teetered on the edge of defiance and righteousness. He was trying to get her to retell the same stories she had told before, the same ones he had probably read a hundred times and knew by heart, and she wasn’t playing along. Last night had changed Lottie. And I was incredibly proud of her.
“Why are you here?” she shot back at him, after he had asked her for the third time in a row if she believed she was really Charlotte Theriot.
Willis was unfazed. “You’ve been told why I’m here. You’re not helping your case, Lottie.”
“Fuck my case.”
God, I wanted to kiss her.
“Do you even want to remain a part of our community, Lottie?”
“What I would like is for people not to try to kill me. That would be a good place to start.” She crossed her arms over her chest, not so much defensive this time but with a new kind of confidence both in herself and in me. She couldn’t unlearn what she had discovered last night; Lottie felt like she was sitting next to Superman and it stroked my ego more than a little. Quite a lot actually.
“Nobody’s trying to kill you.” Unlike Jackson, Willis never flinched or looked away; the tone of his voice never even changed. He was a much better liar. But Lottie was unfazed.
“Is that why you sent David here? Why else would he be here, as some sort of messenger in training?”
“I didn’t send David. And I’m not the one on trial here.”
Lottie leaned forward, just slightly, just enough to let him know she wasn’t intimidated by him. “I’m not on trial either. And you can go back to Delaware and leave me and Dietrich and Lydia alone. Leave all of my friends alone.”
Willis just shook his head. Not a single hair moved. I wondered if he used hair spray. Or maybe it wasn’t real. “No, Lottie, that can’t happen. I’m afraid even if you wanted our help, we couldn’t help you. And it’s not in Lydia’s best interest to stay here.”
For the first time that morning, Lottie’s confidence faltered. She looked at me expectantly.
“Lydia can decide for herself what’s in her best interest,” I told him. “That’s how it works here. You should know that by now.”
“That’s how it works in some places here. We don’t throw acid on women who reject our sexual advances. Don’t try to make yourselves sound so superior.”
He had me there. “Fortunately for Lydia, she’s not in south Asia. And don’t argue every single fucking instance of gender inequality in the world. At least some of us have tried to change. And Lydia is going to be allowed to decide what she wants. She can stay with us or go wherever it is you want her to go, but it will be her choice.”
Lottie was beaming. Maybe some part of her was secretly hoping we’d tie him up too and throw him in the same room as Abram. Or maybe that was just me projecting what I wish I could have done onto her. It wouldn’t be the worst idea I’d ever had.
“Well,” Judge Willis McGrath was done with us. “I’ve made my decision. It will be passed on. The rest isn’t up to me.”
It had taken less than twenty minutes for Lottie and Lydia to have their fates sealed by an asshole septuagenarian judge from Delaware. He left quickly after that and Lottie and I talked about whether or not we should call Lydia, but there was no point in upsetting her at work. I figured there was going to be a lot of crying and consoling and wine drinking in store for them that night and a lot of feeling completely useless and helpless in store for me.
We drove out to the house off of Greenwell Springs Road later that day to talk to Abram again, and to tell Eric and Mark about Willis’s appearance at Lottie’s apartment that morning. We found Mark surrounded by paperback books on the slightly-off-beige-colored sectional sofa in the living room. Lottie spotted the bookstore’s signature bag quickly.
“Did a little shopping this morning?” she asked. She was smiling, teasing, but he just glanced up at her from his book and returned her smile.
“I got bored.”
I would have bet the very expensive engagement ring I had hidden in my Baton Rouge bedroom that I knew exactly who had helped him pick those books out.
Eric came in from the backyard, his hands and knees covered in dirt. I couldn’t help myself. “You weren’t burying a body in broad daylight, were you?”
Eric snickered and looked at his hands, his face full of fake disgust. “Worse. I tried to save the life of a rose bush. It was getting too much shade.”
I was convinced Eric had been a horticulturist in a past life.
“So is he in a better mood today?” I asked, as Eric washed the mud and dirt from under his fingernails.
“He should be. He’s still alive,” he muttered.
“Hm. You know, he probably tortures plants in his spare time.”
“He’s probably the kind of asshole who would plant Perle d’Or roses in the shade.”
Lottie didn’t think we were funny. She went back to the living room and flopped down on the sofa next to Mark.
“I don’t know what’s worse,” she grumbled, “that they can joke about shit like this, or that Eric actually knows what Perle d’Or roses are.”
Mark lowered his book. “Definitely the part about the roses.” There was more. He wanted to ask her something, and I had a terrible feeling what it was. “Does Lydia like roses?”
I groaned. They both ignored me.
“Of course. What woman doesn’t like roses? Nobody’s ever sent her flowers before, by the way.”
Mark smiled and I half expected him to pull his phone out right then to have flowers delivered to her at work. Instead, he asked, “How is that even possible?”
Lottie shrugged, her smile so sweet and full of the love she had for her friend. “Guys hit on her all the time, but she’s so child-like, it’s like they lose interest once they think their chances of getting laid are gone.”
Mark uttered some very unsavory things about men in general which I would have protested against if I hadn’t just had that same conversation with Judge Willis McGrath that morning. Which reminded me I needed to tell them both about our visit with Judge Willis McGrath.
Mark was furious, as I had anticipated. He wanted to drive back to the bookstore right away to keep an eye on Lydia, and Eric and I just looked at each other helplessly. We were starting to feel like we no longer knew where the boundaries were of trying to help these women and being just as overbearing as everyone else in their lives. But it was Lottie who finally spoke.
“I think that would be a good idea. Her shift ends in an hour and a half. Don’t worry her though. Can you just wait outside and then tell her you had come back to see if she wanted to get dinner or something?”
Mark no
dded and swept his new books back into the bag. He had just fished his keys out of his pocket and was ready to leave when Lottie called “Wait!”
He stopped by the door, his hand still on the doorknob.
“I’ll be right back.” And she ran out the back door. We all just looked at each other. No one expected me to be able to explain.
Lottie came bouncing back in the living room, a single pinkish white Perle d’Or rose blossom in her hand.
“Here,” she handed it to Mark. Even through his deeply tanned southern Mediterranean complexion I could see the color flushing his cheeks. Even men like us fell in love all the time.
I was about to make a smartass comment but Eric poked me hard in the ribs. So I kept my mouth shut as Mark, rose in hand, left to meet Lydia at the bookstore. I waited until I heard the gravel underneath the tires of his car as he backed out of the driveway then pushed Eric off the sofa. Sometimes, we really were as mature as a couple of nine-year-old kids. Lottie apparently thought so, too.
“Do men ever grow up?”
“No,” we answered at the same time.
She was the only one who was profoundly disturbed by this house, by the secret it held, and I almost felt bad for not sharing her discomfort. It reminded me how normal some things could become. So I didn’t touch Eric as he sat back on the sofa next to me again, although he watched me carefully the entire time.
Instead, I waited for him to get comfortable again before saying, “I guess we should go see what Abram has to say.”
Eric glanced back at Lottie then shot me one of his you’re-going-to-fucking-pay-for-this looks. I don’t know about other men, but these two would apparently never grow up.
Abram was in the same chair, still bound and gagged, and he didn’t look as desiccated as yesterday but there was no overpowering stench of urine or feces; they were obviously letting him up to go to the bathroom.
Eric ripped the tape off his mouth again; it was fleshy, bleeding, and angry red welts spread up his cheeks. Abram Mirowski’s face was getting infected.
