by Sharon Sala
“What do you mean?” Tara asked.
Jordan looked up. “You know how you’re always telling me to look at the bigger picture...that there’s always more than meets the eye.”
Tara nodded.
Jordan shrugged. “So, if I’d never been taken there, then you would not have sent Charlie to find me, and the girls would still be there with no hope of ever being found.”
Shock washed through Tara in waves. She hadn’t seen that coming, but she couldn’t deny the truth of it. The irony was that Jud Bien’s betrayal had been the step needed to bring those other children home.
“I never thought of it like that, but you’re right. You were the sacrifice they needed to go home,” Tara said.
Jordan sighed. “I know. And it’s okay, but I want to lie down. Do those seats recline?”
“Yes, and there are pillows and blankets,” Tara said.
Jordan’s eyes welled with tears. “I’m tired. I’m so tired, Mama. Inside, I feel a hundred years old.”
* * *
After the plane ride and then a long drive through Dallas, Tara pulled up into her driveway and shook Jordan awake.
“We’re home, baby.”
Jordan opened her eyes just as the garage door was going up.
Tara parked inside, then lowered the garage door and disarmed the security system before getting out.
Jordan picked up her bag and followed her mother into the house. She was home. This was her world. She had such an overwhelming sense of relief she could hardly speak.
“I’ll bet it feels good to be home,” Tara said.
“Yes,” Jordan said, following her mother up the stairs. “I’m going to unpack and change,” she said, and then went into her room and closed the door.
The first thing she did was look around for her phone, and then saw it on the charger on her desk. She began going through the messages and found the one from Charlie, with the pictures he’d taken of her at the compound.
When she saw herself in the middle of the floor in that empty dormitory, her face swollen and bruised, her dark hair all wild and messy around her face and holding that spear, a wave of emotion swept over her. She had become her own version of Wonder Woman, and that was what saved her.
She didn’t know he’d taken the other pics of her walking toward him, or the several shots of the empty compound, but in that moment, she knew she would never think of herself as a victim again. Eventually, she’d show her mother the photos, but not today.
Instead, she went to change clothes. She wore a pair of sweats, dropped her phone in the pocket and put on her oldest T-shirt because it was the softest. She went downstairs, relishing the cool feel of the hardwood beneath her bare feet.
She was home. She was safe. And she had the satisfaction of knowing that no matter what else life threw at her, she could handle it.
Tomorrow was Wednesday. She wanted the rest of the week to be home with Mama, and then on Monday, Mama would go back to work, and she would go back to school.
* * *
Wyrick made up for the days she’d been with Charlie in jeans and T-shirts and no makeup between her and the world, by showing up for work the next morning in a pale pink catsuit, yellow ankle boots with three-inch heels and pink-and-green eye shadow. Just for kicks, she’d added two silver glitter teardrops beneath her right eye, then left her lips devoid of color to avoid being ostentatious.
On a whim, she’d stopped at a florist on her way to work, bought herself an arrangement of a dozen yellow roses and put them on her desk.
By the time Charlie arrived, she had coffee ready, mini pecan pie tarts on the pastry stand in the butler’s pantry and a sheaf of messages transferred to the iPad on his desk.
It wasn’t the outfit she was wearing or the makeup that stopped him in his tracks. He was used to that.
It was the flowers. He counted a dozen yellow roses and was suddenly curious who sent them.
Wyrick looked up. “What?”
“You have flowers.”
“And you do not get a gold star or a smiley face for that very obvious observation,” she drawled. “You have messages on your iPad that need a response.”
Charlie frowned. She had secrets. She always had secrets. But he’d never known one of them might be an admirer. He reminded himself that her private life was none of his business, and stopped to get coffee on his way to his office.
The mini tarts were a nice surprise, and he snagged three to go with the coffee as he sat down and went to work.
He could hear voices in the outer office and then realized she was responding to messages left on voice mail. Everything was back to business, which was exactly the way he liked it. The presence of those roses bothered him a little, but not much.
The morning passed quickly, and it was nearing noon when Wyrick suddenly bolted into his office and turned on the TV.
“What’s happening?” Charlie said.
“The girls. They’re being returned to their parents and the media is having a field day with them.”
Charlie recognized Katie at her home and then Randi being returned to her parents. He saw the little blonde hiding her face from the cameras and remembered how shy she’d been. Barbie...they’d called her Barbie.
They had clips of every one of the thirteen Sprites, and clips of the girls who’d gone home with babies.
“This is going to be a tough transition for them,” Charlie said. “Hollywood will be after them, next.”
“Jordan isn’t mentioned,” Wyrick said.
“Because I told Special Agent Raines to keep her name out of it. Technically, the Feds didn’t go in after her, because she wasn’t in the missing children database, so he didn’t have a problem with that.”
“Her friends know. Her school knows. And Tara’s colleagues and everyone they told about it know,” Wyrick said. “And when Jud Bien’s name comes up as the cult member who turned on them, someone will find out why he did it.”
Charlie glanced up. “What are you trying to say?”
“That she can’t hide from her own truth for long. Are you going out to lunch, or do you want me to order in for you?”
“Out, I think. Want me to bring you something?”
She shook her head. “I’m on a diet,” she said, then swung by the coffee station long enough to get a mini tart and took it back to her desk.
Charlie’s eyes narrowed. There wasn’t an ounce of fat anywhere on that freaking body of hers and she knew it. First the roses, now a diet? There was a budding relationship happening, for sure.
* * *
Tara had taken Jordan to their favorite pizza place for lunch, and they were working their way through a thin-crust supreme when Tara’s phone began to signal texts, one after the other. They had a long-standing rule about no phones at their meals, but Tara sensed something was wrong.
“I’m sorry, honey. I think I need to see what all these are about.”
Jordan nodded her okay as she picked a piece of green pepper from her slice before taking another bite. Then she heard her mother’s swift intake of breath.
“What’s wrong?” Jordan asked.
But Tara didn’t answer. She was pulling up her app to CNN, and then like everyone else in the nation, she became an instant witness to the ongoing chaos in the little girls’ lives.
“Oh no! Thank God, this isn’t happening to you,” she muttered.
“What is it, Mama?” Jordan asked.
“The girls...there’s a story about them on CNN.”
Jordan got up and scooted into the booth beside her to look.
“Those poor kids,” Tara said, unaware Jordan was in shock.
She was watching the girls who’d become her friends being harassed outside their homes, coming out of stores, even being filmed in the family cars as they were driving down the street
.
And when the piece segued to the girls with babies, and a reporter shoved a mic in front of one young mother’s face and asked if she was going to miss her husband, Jordan didn’t hear her answer. All she saw was the look on her face.
“Oh, Mama, why would they ask her something like that? They don’t get it. They really don’t get what happened there.”
“I’m sorry, honey. You’re right. No one can understand something like that unless they’ve experienced it,” Tara said, immediately dropping the phone back in her purse.
Jordan moved back to where she’d been sitting, then picked a slice of pepperoni from her pizza and popped it in her mouth, trying to pretend nothing was wrong.
She knew her mama was trying hard to understand, and she knew her mama felt guilty. But having seen the other side of hell, it was hard to be in this world again. It took everything within her to look up and smile.
“Gosh, Mama, I’m getting full. Can we take the rest of it home?”
Tara sighed. Their lunch together was ruined and she knew it was all her fault. She could have handled this better.
“Of course,” she said and signaled a waiter.
The drive home was silent, and when Jordan went up to her room to change, Tara stopped in the kitchen and sat down on one of the barstools.
The box with leftover pizza was at the end of the island. The cuckoo clock on the wall above the pantry was ticking away the time, even as she sat. The time she’d lost with Jordan was something she’d never get back, and what happened to her daughter while she was gone was something Tara couldn’t change.
The rage within her was so thick and hard it was filling up her chest. She had to say what she was feeling. She had to spit it out or go mad. Even if he wasn’t around to hear it.
“I hate you, Jud Bien, with every cell in my body. You destroyed our child. I don’t know this girl who came home. I don’t know how to reach her. I don’t know how to help her. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I wish you were dead.”
Friday morning, two days later
Charlie was on the way to work when his phone rang. He answered, then put it on speaker.
“Hello, this is Charlie.”
“Charlie, Hank Raines here. I wanted to give you an update before you got to the office.”
“What’s up?” Charlie asked.
“We have unearthed the bodies of four young girls outside the compound, two of which had been buried with babies.”
Charlie sighed. “Well, hell. Have you been able to identify them?”
“No. That will have to be done through DNA testing. But we’re all well aware here that if it hadn’t been for the assistance you and Wyrick gave us during this investigation, the possibility of more children dying there would have been high.”
“Look, pooling our resources on this case is what made the raid successful. I’m sorry to hear this, but after the bodies have been identified, it will bring closure for four more families somewhere. I’ll pass your thanks along to Wyrick, as well.”
“Thank you,” Hank said and disconnected.
Charlie was sick at heart, and by the time he got to the office, he was in a mood.
Walking in to Wyrick wearing funeral black slacks and a sheer black top so low that the dragon’s head appeared to be emerging from below did not help it, nor did the dozen bloodred roses replacing the yellow ones that had been on her desk.
Wyrick didn’t need to look twice to know he was upset.
“What?” she asked.
“Special Agent Raines called me on the way to the office. They found the bodies of four girls just outside the compound, two of which had been buried with babies.”
Wyrick flinched as if she’d been slapped. The urge to weep came swiftly, but she wouldn’t do that in front of him, and she promptly stowed every emotion she was feeling. Charlie strode past her in long, angry strides, slamming the door shut between them, but she didn’t take it personally. Charlie wasn’t mad at her. He was just mad at life and the ugly people in it.
Twenty-Four
It was evening before the news broke regarding the discovery of bodies outside the Fourth Dimension compound. Jordan was in the kitchen helping Tara make their dinner when the story was announced. Tara immediately stopped what she was doing and went over to the island where Jordan had been chopping vegetables and pulled her close. They stood together, watching the video footage, listening to details in disbelief.
Jordan was stunned, trying to imagine how that could happen.
“Mama, why would they kill them?”
Tara pulled Jordan even closer as she began to explain.
“I don’t think they were murdered, sweetheart. The most likely explanation is that at least two of them died in childbirth, and the other two could have bled to death during miscarriages.”
Jordan’s eyes widened in sudden understanding.
“So they died because they didn’t take them to a hospital?”
Tara sighed. “Partly, but girls that young aren’t made to have babies. Their bodies haven’t matured enough for a full-term baby to have room to come out. If those girls did die in childbirth, without access to a doctor, they suffered long and hard as it was happening. There isn’t a punishment on earth harsh enough to make up for what those men did...what they let happen.”
Jordan nodded, but the image of that suffering and death stayed with her, and that night, long after they’d gone to bed, Jordan was still awake.
The media kept calling the girls victims, but she saw them, and herself, as survivors. She kept looking at the photos Charlie took the day of the rescue, and remembering, over and over, everything she and the girls had to endure. It wouldn’t go away, and she couldn’t turn it off. It had become a whirlpool of dark images, and she was afraid to close her eyes for fear it would suck her under.
It was a little after midnight when she realized she had to tell their story. She couldn’t go back to school on Monday without telling her truth—their truth—in the only way she knew how.
So she sent the photos to her laptop, then went to the desk where she did her homework, pulled up a blank page in a new document and started typing. One hour passed, and she was well into the second when she finally stopped editing to read her story through one last time.
Satisfied that she’d told the story the way it deserved to be told, she attached Charlie’s photos and then emailed it to every newspaper and every television station in Dallas. The way she looked at it, maybe one of them would take the time to read it, and to care enough to run with it. But if not, at least she would know she’d tried.
What she didn’t realize in her twelve-year-old wisdom was that she’d just set the media on fire in the city of Dallas, and that by nightfall it would be running nationwide throughout every social media outlet and every television in the country.
She didn’t know she would put a knot in Cyrus Parks’s belly and the last nail in Aaron Walters’s coffin. She didn’t know it would be the trigger Jud Bien would pull on his own life, and if she had, it still wouldn’t have changed a thing.
It was after 3:00 a.m. when she finally went to bed, and for the first time since her kidnapping, she slept without dreams.
* * *
Tara was downstairs making coffee and thinking about mixing up some pancake batter for Jordan’s breakfast when she picked up the remote and turned on the TV for the morning news. The last thing she expected was to be staring at photos of Jordan that she’d never seen, or that for the first time, she’d see the actual place where Jud had taken her. The news anchor was relating full stories with details to the viewing public that Jordan had barely managed to tell her.
“Oh my God, oh my God!” Tara moaned, and grabbed her phone to call Charlie, but when the phone rang and rang without answering, she didn’t know what to do.
Just as she was about to hang up,
she heard his voice.
“Hello?”
“Charlie! This is Tara Bien. I’m sorry to wake you, but I thought you told me the FBI wasn’t going to release Tara’s name, and she’s all over the morning news, and I’ve never seen the pictures they’re airing, and did you tell—”
“Shit,” Charlie said. “Hang on a sec. Let me turn on the TV.”
And then Charlie was hearing what she was hearing, and seeing what she was seeing, and he realized the only person who could have done this was Jordan.
“Listen to me,” Charlie said. “The Feds didn’t do this. They don’t have this knowledge. Jordan never talked to them at all, and told very little of this to me. I heard parts of this from the girls, but not from her. I took those pictures, but at her request. She asked me to send them to her phone at home, which I did. I asked her if she was going to show them to you, and she said you weren’t ready to see them.”
“Oh my God,” Tara said and started to cry. “I don’t know how to help her, Charlie. I don’t know this girl.”
“She knows who she is. The two of you need to go to counseling, but I’m sure you know that. And I don’t know what triggered her to do this, but Wyrick said something to me the other day that once again proves she is always right. I’m paraphrasing here, but basically, she said Jordan couldn’t hide what happened to her if she wanted to, because her school knew. Her friends knew. Your friends knew, and whoever they told knew. Jordan’s presence there made her one of them, and you can’t protect her from that. What I do know is that your daughter didn’t want to be thought of as a freak. So maybe this is her way of stating her truth.”
Tara moaned. “The other day I showed her the footage of what the girls who’d been rescued were going through, and last night we heard about the bodies they found. It must have been the last straw for her.”
“Well, she certainly put the media to shame with how they’re handling all this, and I’ll lay odds that she’ll have public opinion on her side. If she does, the media will back off. They won’t want to be viewed as the vultures they are. Bottom line, what you don’t do is freak out on Jordan. If she’s ever going to heal from her father’s betrayal, let her do it her way,” Charlie said.
