The River Killings

by Merry Jones

  I moved to the sofa, my limbs weighing tons, my head pounding, my whole body wanting to crawl back to bed and hide under the comforter. But instead I picked up the phone and made a call.

  “Thank God,” Susan breathed. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling you all morning—”

  “I didn’t answer the phone. I thought it was the press—”

  “Oh, God. It’s been a damned circus here. All we needed were dancing elephants. The contractors couldn’t get past all the cameras and trucks. And, right in front of the microphones, the bathroom guy tells me that our plumbing’s so old, they’re going to have to replace all the pipes with copper. It’ll cost a fortune. And the deck guys are scurrying around carrying saws and lumber, so I’m waiting for someone to break a camera or a head, and—guess what—I’d be liable—”

  “Susan, stop.” I had no patience, couldn’t listen to her tales of household repairs.

  “Sorry, I’m going nuts.” She raced, manic. “Tim’s ballistic. You know how private he is. When he saw the press at our door, he started cursing and threatening to sue. His veins popped out like sausages. I thought he’d have a stroke.”

  I pictured stocky Tim with strings of purple hot dogs in his forehead.

  “And the school bus couldn’t get through. The kids got tired of making faces out the windows, so they went upstairs and—oh my God—Julie and Lisa threw water balloons at the TV crews.”

  “You’re kidding.” I couldn’t help laughing. “Really? They hit anyone?”

  “Dead-on. Some reporter from Channel 10 was drenched. So, I’m screaming at the kids, and Tim’s screaming at the press, and the press is screaming at all of us—dear Lord, I can’t imagine what they’ll write about us—”

  Headlines flooded my mind. “Press coverage all wet. Man’s head explodes into kielbasa.”

  “If they air what went on here, we’ll have to move.”

  “No, you won’t, Susan. If they show it, their ratings will soar. And you’ll probably get your own reality show.”

  “Not funny, Zoe. None of this is funny. And maybe we shouldn’t discuss it on the phone.”

  Why not? Were our phones tapped? Who was listening in—the feds? INS? The slave traffickers?

  “I’ll meet you at the deli.” She didn’t offer an option. “Before we do anything, we’ve got to get the boat back—”

  “No, it’s done. Nick took care of it.”

  “Really? We don’t have to row it back?”

  “No. He got Tony to do it.” Thank God. I couldn’t imagine rowing again. Not yet. Not ever.

  “Great. Then let’s go eat.”

  I couldn’t think about food, either. “You’re hungry?”

  “What does hungry have to do with it? Be ready. Ten minutes.”

  I looked at the clock. Almost nine thirty. As we hung up, the phone rang again. I picked it up reflexively, expecting Susan again, hoping for Nick, ready for a reporter.

  “Hello?” I heard background noises, but nobody answered. “Hello?” I said again.

  Nothing. Hanging up, I hurried to get dressed.

  ELEVEN

  ONLY A FEW PEOPLE SAT AT BOOTHS IN THE DELI; AFTER NINE, the place generally quieted down until lunch hour. Susan and I sat in the middle aisle near the back, away from the others.

  Shadows circled Susan’s dark eyes; her normally shiny dark hair was pulled back, tucked under a baseball cap. She wore tan baggy capris and a too-tight-under-the-arms-and-around-the-bust pale green T-shirt advertising Smokey’s Bar-B-Q Ribs; probably, she’d thrown on some of her daughter Lisa’s clothes. She’d picked me up in Tim’s Lexus and hadn’t stopped talking for a moment.

  “So I was up all night,” she continued as we slid into the booth. “Baked banana bread at four in the morning, washed the kitchen floor and the Venetian blinds. And then the phone started around six, with the press calling, and the phone woke up everyone but Tim, who can sleep through an earthquake. Worse than that, he can sleep through his own snoring. The kids got up, though, so it turned out good that I had the banana bread. And then the contractors started showing up. pure chaos. And, sometime, I have to get to the office; I have to prepare depositions for the Jason White case.” I had no idea who Jason White was, maybe a defense client, maybe a murder victim. Susan rattled on in an adrenaline rush until Gladys, our waitress, interrupted.

  “What’ll it be?” Gladys was usually glum, but that morning she actually smiled, revealing the stainless-steel star on her right front tooth, and offered a “How ya doing?” in my direction.

  I ordered for us both; Gladys had a long-standing grudge against Susan and hadn’t spoken to her for years. No one, probably not even Gladys, could remember why. But if Susan was to eat, I had to order her food.

  “Bitch,” Susan said when Gladys left. She always said “Bitch” when Gladys left. “Here—have you seen this?” She took the paper from her bag and shoved the front page at me. There were photos. The river lit by spotlights, body bags lined up on the dock. Headlines screaming, “Nineteen Bodies Floating in Schuylkill.” And a subheadline, suggesting that the women, all Asian, had been intended sex slaves.

  I scanned the article. Authorities estimated that a million people each year were sold into slavery. … Human trafficking was a thriving worldwide industry. Someone from INS said that the deceased women had probably been brought to the United States to be forced into prostitution. …probably had been told that, if they went to the authorities, they or their families would be killed. Last night, nineteen women had been found…. And then I stopped reading. My eyes froze, staring at the newsprint, unable to go on.

  “Zoe Hayes,” it said. I gazed at the newsprint, blinking, seeing “Susan Cummings” in the same sentence. Oh dear. Our names were in the paper. In print. On the front page.

  “We got ink.” Susan clasped her hands together, her knuckles white. A criminal defense attorney, Susan generally saw publicity of any kind as a good thing. But today she seemed edgy, bothered by it. “people know who we are.”

  People? Did she mean traffickers? Gladys swooped by, dropping two mugs of coffee in the center of our table as she passed.

  “So, tell me,” Susan asked. “What did Nick say?”

  I hedged, reaching for a mug. “Not much. You know Nick.”

  “But he must have said something.” She poured sweetener and cream into her mug.

  All I could think of were the things I’d promised not to mention. The hat from Humberton Barge. The tattoos on the women’s shoulders. “Nick was pretty wiped when he got in. I mean, there were nineteen bodies to process.” I shivered.

  “Yeah, I know. But what about the slave thing?” She pointed to the front page. “They were being sold right here, in philadelphia—didn’t he even mention that?” Her voice was too loud. I didn’t look around, but I could feel scattered stares.

  “Of course.” I kept my voice low. “But mostly, he was pissed that the FBI and INS are taking over the case. Because of the international stuff.” I hated being in the middle, having to hide what I knew. “But honestly, I wasn’t in shape to hear many details last night.”

  “So what do you think?” She lowered her voice. “How’d a bunch of Asian sex slaves end up in our river?” I had no idea.

  “Do you think they drowned? All together? That doesn’t seem possible. I mean, they’d have made a racket kicking and splashing. They’d have screamed for help—unless . . .” She stopped to think, taking a sip of coffee.

  “Unless?”

  “Unless they were unconscious when they hit the water. Maybe drugged or something. But why? I don’t get why they’d kill them. It’d be bad for business. You wouldn’t throw a truckload of cattle into the water on the way to market.”

  My head was throbbing again. “Cattle?”

  “From the trafficker’s point of view, the women were just like cattle or cabbages. Or soda cans—”

  “I get it.” She was probably right. But my stomach was in a knot, twisting as she
continued her list.

  “—Or heating oil. They were just a product to be marketed. So, instead of selling them, why would they dump them and lose the profit?”

  I rubbed my temples.

  Susan wouldn’t stop. “Unless—maybe they were damaged goods. Unsuitable for market. Maybe they all had AIDS—”

  A gust of lilac announced Gladys’s return. “French toast, bacon, OJ, toasted bagel with.” Our plates clattered onto the table. “Anything else?”

  “No, thank you, Gladys,” Susan said.

  Gladys ignored her and stared at me, waiting for my reply. “We’re fine, thanks,” I managed.

  Gladys winked at Susan. “Enjoy your meal.” She smiled. “What was that?” Susan asked. “Did you see that? She spoke to me!”

  “Who knows. Maybe she spit in your food before she served it.”

  “Eeww. She wouldn’t, would she?” She picked up a piece of bacon and turned it over, eyeing it closely.

  “It’s probably okay. Gladys’s saliva can’t be as toxic as the river water we swallowed.”

  “Yes, it can,” she shuddered. “The woman’s venomous. Speaking of river water, though”—Susan rotated a forkful of French toast, looking at it from all sides—”we can’t let this defeat us. We need to get back on the horse. The longer we wait, the harder it’ll get.”

  Oh, no. She wanted to row again. “We haven’t waited all that long, Susan. It’s been like fourteen hours.”

  “That’s not the point. We should have gotten into the boat last night and rowed the damned thing back to Humberton.”

  I watched her chow down, knowing better than to argue. I recognized the signs. Normally, Susan was a powerhouse, capable of dictating legal briefs into a recorder while kneading pie dough, braiding Emily’s hair and organizing repairmen while composing a closing argument. But, for all her routine energy, there were times when Susan had dramatic mood swings, flipping in a heartbeat from elated to glum, energized to enervated. She was probably a touch manic-depressive, and when she was at either extreme of up or down—which she seemed to be at the moment— reasoning with her was futile. She could be at once fragile and ferocious; it was best to let her mood run its course. I regarded my toasted bagel in silence without appetite and took a sip of coffee, its murkiness reminding me of another dark liquid, how it had immersed me, flooding my throat, my nose.

  “Anyhow, we still have a date with Coach Everett tomorrow afternoon. Five o’clock.”

  “Oh, hell, we do?” No way. I couldn’t face getting into a boat again. Or enduring Coach Everett’s ego. “Can’t we postpone it?”

  “Come on, Zoe. You can’t give up just because of one bad row.”

  Is that what it was? “Swimming with nineteen dead women was ‘one bad row’?”

  “That’s the point. It wasn’t our rowing that was the problem. It was the bodies. We’re getting good. Remember how it felt right before we hit them?”

  Of course I did. We’d been flying. Out of control.

  Susan went on, pressing me to row. At five o’clock, she argued, it would still be bright daylight. And Coach Everett would be there in a launch in case of emergency. And besides, rowing was the only thing without calories that calmed her down.

  “Really?” I shouldn’t have asked. “What about sex?”

  “It’s fattening. Sex makes me hungry.” She gulped coffee, washing down a mouthful of French toast. “Actually, Tim and I eat more after sex than any other time. Tim’ll get out of bed and put away half a gallon of ice cream, seriously.”

  “Thanks for that, Susan.” I pictured Tim standing naked at the freezer, spoon in hand. Lord. No wonder Tim had such a hefty paunch.

  Luckily, Susan didn’t pursue the topic; she went back to rowing. “If we don’t go tomorrow, we’re wimps. We’ll never get over last night. We’ll be stuck in that night.”

  I reached for the cream cheese, stalling, hoping to come up with an excuse. I smeared the stuff slowly, coming up with nothing. “I don’t know,” I finally managed. Great, I thought. How pathetic. Why couldn’t I just say no?

  “Zoe, we’ve got to get out there sooner or later. Sooner’s better.”

  I sighed, took a bite of bagel, chewed it with a dry mouth. Swallowed with difficulty. I had no escape. No excuse, except dread. And dread, I told myself, was no excuse. Don’t be a wimp, I scolded. I pictured horseback riders falling and climbing back on. Skiers falling and getting back up. Rowers flipping, and cold black water rushing up my nose and into my ears. Stop, I told myself. Get over it. “Okay,” I muttered. “Five o’clock.”

  “Good girl. I’ll call and confirm.” She chomped. “After all, the regatta’s only a couple of weeks away.”

  Oh, Lord. The thought of the regatta knotted my stomach. I gulped lukewarm coffee and changed the subject. “How were your girls today? Still mad at Molly?”

  “No, that’s history. Lisa saw the headlines and—poof—I was a celebrity. And the press was calling and the TV vans outside. Believe me, they’ve moved on. How about Molly?”

  “She figured out that somebody died in the river. Now she’s afraid I’ll drown. And she doesn’t want to go to school anymore.”

  “poor kid. She must be scared. She’ll calm down after a few days. Once things get back—”

  “All finished?” Gladys grinned in my direction, flashing her silver star. “Anything else?”

  “No, thank you,” Susan sat up straight as she answered. “Everything was delicious.”

  Ignoring her, Gladys caught sight of the newspaper folded on the table. She lost her grin, nodding at it. “What about that?” She frowned. “You two got yourselves in the paper. You’d best keep your heads down now. Nobody’s safe anymore, not anywhere. Not in this world.” She laid the check down with slender ring-covered fingers, displaying long acrylic-extended nails and sashayed off, leaving us in a scented cloud.

  “Ready to go?” I started to get up, but Susan didn’t budge. Her eyes widened, aiming behind me, over my shoulder. I started to turn around, but before I could, someone landed on the booth beside me, blocking me in.

  TWELVE

  THE WOMAN WAS SOLID, HER SHORT BROWN HAIR HELD OFF HER colorless face by heavy black-rimmed sunglasses, and she slid into the booth smoothly, looking smug.

  “Ladies,” she greeted us through lips that were thin and dry, devoid of lipstick. “You’re not leaving, are you?” She reached over to Susan’s plate, helped herself to a leftover piece of bacon.

  “Who the hell are you?” Susan slid across the booth, starting to get up.

  “Settle down, Mrs. Cummings. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself.” The woman cupped her meaty hand, revealing a badge and ID. “Special Agent Darlene Ellis, FBI.”

  Darlene Ellis wore a short-sleeved white shirt that revealed sturdy biceps and loose gray khakis that had been cut for a man; her hands and wrists were thick; her fingernails clipped short, coated with colorless nail polish. Agent Ellis was crisply ironed and smelled like Old Spice.

  Susan sat still and said nothing. I mirrored her, doing exactly as she did. She was a lawyer, after all; she must know how to act around the FBI.

  “You know why I’m here.” It sounded like an accusation.

  We did? I looked at Susan. Her face was blank. Neither of us spoke.

  “Frankly, I read the so-called statements you gave the police, and you know what? I got the feeling you left some things out. There’s nothing there. No beef. So, I’m thinking there’s more. Stuff you remembered later.”

  Susan and I remained silent.

  “Or stuff you held back.”

  We were motionless, mute. Two statues.

  “Ladies.” Agent Ellis lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “This case is bigger than either of you can possibly imagine. It’s worse than your worst nightmare. You don’t want to mess with the people involved in it. And, trust me, you don’t want to impede an FBI investigation. Anything you know or remember, any thoughts you have, no matter how small, be
long to me.” She looked at Susan, then me. “Anything you want to share?”

  We sat, blinking at her. No, there was nothing.

  “Well, you think of anything, you call me. Report directly to me, and only to me.” Her eyes narrowed. “If you don’t, if you withhold a single fact or detail, you can be charged with obstructing a federal investigation.” She smiled thinly, the face of a schoolyard bully. “Any questions?”

  I shook my head. No, no questions at all.

  “I have one.” Susan’s voice had a playful, lilting quality

  “Shoot.”

  “How did you find us here, Agent Ellis? Did you follow us?”

  Agent Ellis leaned on her elbows and glared. Susan glared back. Oh, wonderful, I thought. Susan had started a staring contest with a testy FBI agent.

  But Susan was undaunted. “Because we’re just two private citizens out for breakfast here,” she continued, her voice gaining power and momentum as she went on. “And the FBI has no business hindering our movements or badgering us. And I don’t remember inviting you to join us. Did you invite her, Zoe?”

  “Me? Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “I assumed you had.”

  Agent Ellis glowered. “Your attitudes are unfortunate, ladies. Because you two should celebrate that I know where you are and that I’m watching you. You two stumbled into a nasty—I repeat— a very nasty arena. These people have seen your names in the paper. They know who you are and where you live, just like me. So, yes, I got my eye on you, and I’m betting they do, too. I’m watching who approaches you, who makes contact with you, who even looks at you. Because these people . . . they even imagine you know something about them? You’re gone—poof. Just like that. You got it?”