Oath Keeper

by Jefferson Smith

  And the longer she talked, the odder things began to sound. Missing Persons was the biggest part of his job, and missing kids made up the largest chunk of the cases. About two thirds of the kids reported missing each year were runaways, and more than half of those were from orphanages and foster care.

  So how come Detective Martin DelRoy of the Missing Persons squad had never heard of Our Lady of Divine Suffering’s Home for Orphans and Evictees? It was like a baseball scout going half his career without ever learning that the local high school had a team. It just didn’t seem possible.

  But to hear Sue tell it, that was only the beginning. Apparently, the kids at this “Old Shoe” place were treated like they were living in some kind of Charles Dickens novel, rather than a care facility in a modern city. But that didn’t make sense either. DelRoy knew the people at Children’s Services personally. There was no way that any of them would have allowed that kind of facility to stay open for even a weekend—let alone the fifteen or so years that Sue claimed it had been in operation.

  The waitress approached to refill their cups and DelRoy thanked her, then they busied themselves with the sugar and cream for a moment, until the woman had bustled herself out of earshot.

  “So the kids do all the cooking and the cleaning?” he asked, leaning in close and keeping his voice lower than the background din. “You’re sure about this? Could Eliza have been… exaggerating, maybe? Trying to impress you with the hardships of her life there?” But Sue was already shaking her head.

  “It wasn’t just what she told us. We actually saw it. Mr. Nackenfausch and I—Ned—visited one day to have lunch with Eliza, and we actually had to wait until she’d finished serving, and then cleaning the dishes, before she herself was allowed to eat. It was heartbreaking…” Sue’s voice trailed off, heading toward another spasm of guilt and loss. DelRoy reached out and patted her hand. Somehow, being in a coffee shop made little gestures like that seem more appropriate than they would have been in the total privacy of the library.

  “Well, kids in care are expected to do chores,” he said. “It’s good for them. Sets an expectation of making a useful contribution to society, and all that.”

  Again Sue shook her head. “Chores I agree with, but serve all the meals? Do all the cleaning? All the repair work? And always the same dozen girls, in a facility that holds sixty?”

  DelRoy leaned back from the table and shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what to tell you, Sue.” Somewhere along the line, they had graduated to first names too. “I can look into it if you like, but if what you say is—”

  “No!” Sue’s hand shot across the table and clutched pleadingly at his own. “There’s something going on. I’m sure of it. But if you start asking questions through your channels, word will get back to the Goodies and they’ll know we’re onto them.”

  “Goodies?”

  Sue blushed. “It’s what Eliza and her friends call them. The Sisters of Good Salvation. The order of nuns who run the place.”

  “I’ve never heard of them before,” DelRoy said. He was getting used to saying that today.

  “Nobody has,” Sue said. “I’ve asked the Bishop and several ministers, priests, and whatnots, but nobody seems to have heard of them. I can’t even find out what church they’re affiliated with.”

  “Well, if the place is as bad as you say, I suppose that could explain why nobody knows about it. Or rather, why nobody will admit to knowing about it. Who would go on record saying they’d known something like that was going on, but hadn’t reported it?”

  “Frankly,” Sue said, “I couldn’t care less who’s to blame. I just want my little girl back. I’ve been searching for so long. And then to lose her on the very day we were supposed to… What’s the word? Become a family. How come we have words for getting married and getting divorced, for being born and for dying, but we don’t have a word for that moment when that whole purpose of marriage suddenly comes together and the circle of your family closes into being? Where’s that word? I find I need it a lot.”

  He couldn’t help but smile. Even frustrated and angry, Sue kept coming at him from directions he couldn’t anticipate. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been good at finding the just-right words for things. You were saying?”

  Sue sighed heavily. “Oh, I don’t know what I was saying,” she said. “It just feels so good to be saying anything, and having somebody hear me, and acknowledge that it’s weird, and that it’s important.”

  “If even half of what you’ve told me turns out to be true, this might turn into a major case,” he said.

  “But you will be discreet, won’t you?”

  DelRoy sipped his coffee and thought about it for a moment. Sue was right. If something this foul had been kept under wraps for this long, they couldn’t afford to give those responsible any warning at all, or their cloud of secrecy would probably just rise up again and swallow the entire case. Maybe even Sue along with it. He nodded.

  “I’ll be discreet,” he said. “Do a bit of digging, check a few facts. First thing we’ll want to do is try to find out who owns the building, where their funding comes from, that sort of thing. It’ll give us some names and organizations to start digging into.”

  For a moment, Sue just stared at him, her eyes shining with tears. “Thank you, Detective. You cannot know how long I’ve waited for somebody in authority to say something like that.” She stared at him intently for a moment, then she broke eye contact and gave a little laugh. “Sorry. I just wanted to bask in that for a moment. Now tell me, is there anything I can be doing while you’re looking into all this?”

  DelRoy was about to say no, but then he thought about the need for discretion, and realized that a city detective asking questions at a black-market orphanage wasn’t exactly going to count as “discreet.”

  “You might try to talk to some of the kids there,” he said. “If you get the opportunity. See if they’ve heard about any companies, or owners, or board members… anything. Even a name on a letterhead would be a start.”

  “I’ll do that,” Sue said. It was good to hear a ring of confidence in the voice of this woman who had seemed so lost just a short time ago. And it occurred to him that he was the one who’d put it there, which made him feel good about himself too.

  By the time they’d settled up—with Sue insisting that coffee was her treat—DelRoy was feeling so energized that he decided to do something that he hadn’t done in years.

  He was going to go back to the station on his day off.

  * * *

  DelRoy sat still and placed the folder carefully back on his desk. Other detectives and clerks wandered around the room in their usual state of distracted intensity. But he couldn’t make eye contact with them. Couldn’t look at them. He couldn’t not look at them either. It was as though he’d been paralyzed by the two conclusions he’d just reached. One: there really was something going on.

  And two: somebody inside the department was involved.

  His first task upon reaching the office had been to go back and look through the old case reports. Was it possible that an entire orphanage, an entire religious order, and a dozen different caregivers had all simply escaped his memory? But the records backed him up. It wasn’t just his mind playing middle-age games with him. There was nothing there to remember. Not one reference to any of this in any of his files.

  The simple explanation, of course, would have been that Sue was some kind of paranoid, but she hadn’t seemed the type. And all her seeming aside, there was something else too. She had shown him a copy of the report she had filed when her daughter went missing. A report for which he could now find no trace anywhere in the system. Somebody had removed it. And not just from the computer. He couldn’t find the paper copy either. He couldn’t even find references to it on the duty sheets and shift reports. Every piece of paper and every mention of this case was gone. He wasn’t naive. He knew that no system was invulnerable, and it was easy to imagine that hackers migh
t have managed to wipe the digital stuff. But only an insider would have known where all the paper information was kept, and how to remove it.

  So had Sue made up the whole story? If she had, then she had also made a perfect forgery of the standard missing persons form and filled it in correctly—even to the point of following the department’s idiosyncratic practices, such as circling the year of disappearance, and jotting the complainant’s email address in the “Country” box. Could she have forged that as well? In short, not bloody likely.

  No matter how he looked at it, there was only one explanation that made sense of what he was seeing, and it sent a shiver of dread down his spine. The kidnappers were real, and somebody in this room was actively collaborating with them. As crazy at it sounded, it was the only explanation that fit the facts.

  When he was sure that he had put everything back and that nobody was paying any particular attention to him, DelRoy gathered his things and headed toward the stairs.

  “Clocking out early, Marty?” DelRoy rolled his eyes. Goreski. Every department had one. The guy who seems to think it was his job to watch everybody else’s clock for them.

  “Yeah, Jay,” he said with a forced smile. “About nineteen hours early. It’s my D.O.”

  “Well! Don’t let us working stiffs get in your way, then.” Goreski made an elaborate bow. “We’ll see you again when you’re actually supposed to be here.”

  DelRoy kept his smile in place. Robbed of any actual wrongdoing to call attention to, Goreski was the kind of guy who would simply switch to snide implications, just to maintain his sense of superiority. A couple of choice retorts occurred to him, but he couldn’t be bothered wasting them on that goof, so he just grinned his way past the guy and kept going.

  But the altercation got him thinking, as he clattered down the old staircase and headed out to his car. Could it be Goreski? Could he be the scurrying little weasel who had vanished Sue’s case file? The guy was seven kinds of idiot, but DelRoy had never thought of him as actually evil before. Had he been wrong about that? And if Sue’s file had been snuffed, then were there others missing too?

  The sense of unease stayed with him all the way to the city records building. Whoever it was, they’d made a kid disappear, and then they’d done a good job of making all the records of the search for her disappear too. From an investigating perspective, it was almost as though they’d wiped Eliza Drummel from the universe’s memory. With no person to look at, and no pieces of paper pointing at her, she might just as well have never existed at all. But there was one thing in all this that they couldn’t disappear.

  The Old Shoe.

  It was a building. It had weight. Presence. It occupied space—in a formidable way—and it could not be shredded, redacted, or stuffed into the trunk of a car. It was unavoidably there. And one of the perplexing things about cities is that they tend to invest far more energy into tracking their own inanimate parts than they do their living inhabitants.

  The records building was a grim, blank-nosed box of mostly concrete, tucked neatly in behind City Hall. People drove past it all the time without the faintest idea what it was. Those that did wonder, probably thought it was an insurance company, given its drab, unimaginative facade. But even insurance is a wild party compared to the plodding dullardry of municipal record keeping. This building wasn’t going anywhere, and by extension, neither would your buildings, if you kept your records about them here.

  DelRoy parked in the visitor’s space and went inside, waving his badge at the little reception booth just inside the door. The radio in the waiting area had been tuned to the frequency exactly between the polka station and the Latin rhythms station, and the resulting sound of static, throbbing in and out to a syncopated beat while accordions wheezed all around, was enough to qualify that room as the first circle of Hell. A designation only confirmed by the zombifying light of the fluorescents above. He was glad when the girl buzzed the door and allowed him to escape that pit of damnation.

  But as hideous as it had been, the waiting room had offered more warmth than the entire rest of the building, and he soon found himself sitting in the microfiche room on a hard wooden chair, zipping through the miniaturized records of land sales from decades past. The most recent transactions would be accessible by computer, but for anything older than ten years or so, fiche was the place to be. The ancient paper records of bygone eras had all been updated to the little plastic films, but those had not yet degraded anywhere near badly enough to make digitizing them any kind of priority. And Sue had said that the orphanage had been in operation for at least fifteen years, so microfiche it was.

  Unfortunately, the files were cataloged chronologically, rather than by location, so he had to scan back through years worth of land sales, foreclosures, and auctions, and his eyes were getting numb by the time he had gone back thirty years, still without finding any mention of the lot and parcel he was looking for. He’d probably started too far back. So, with a sigh of resignation, he trudged across the room to the cabinets to find the more recent spools. Then he reversed his trudge back to his chair to repeat the search all over again.

  When he found it, half an hour later, he was somewhat surprised. The orphanage had been in operation for fifteen years all right. But the nuns had only purchased it ten years ago.

  “Who buys a five year old orphanage?” he muttered, as he leaned back from the table to stretch his aching neck muscles, cocking his head from side to side and straining until he heard a little popping sound from the base of his skull. There was something about these machines that always gave him a crick in his neck, no matter how good his posture.

  Now that he’d found the title transaction, things got a little easier. That document had given him the name of the purchaser, Regina Finch. The name seemed familiar, although DelRoy couldn’t recall from where. But with that thread to pull on, unraveling the rest had been pretty easy, and DelRoy was soon gathering his printouts and notes into a folder and heading for the door.

  He couldn’t wait to tell Sue what he’d found. Even the way they were registered was weird. You’d expect nuns to be set up as a charity, or as some kind of subsidiary of a church, right? But not these ladies. Nope. The Sisters of Good Salvation were set up as a for-profit company.

  And business had been very, very good.

  * * *

  Sue sat and watched the front entrance of the Old Shoe from the shelter of her parked car, half a block away. All morning she had been sitting there, but with the cold wind blowing gusts of ice down the empty streets, not a single soul had ventured in or out. The weather was a cocoon of sorts, isolating the self-contained little universe where the Great God Regalia boomed and thundered and a dozen Harpy angels trumpeted her will to the wide-eyed and terrified masses: the children of the Old Shoe.

  Meeting Detective DelRoy that morning had completely rejuvenated her, and for the first time since Eliza had gone missing, Sue felt like she was getting something done. Something constructive. On the detective’s advice, she had taken up observation at the Old Shoe, and she planned to spend her day here, making notes of any comings and goings, and in particular, keeping her eyes open for a chance to make contact with the children. She had her camera, and a good, long-distance lens, and she was just going to watch. And take pictures, of course. If anything interesting happened. She was on a stake-out, and being here made her feel powerful again.

  The afternoon hours crept across the dull gray sky, and aside from a slight change in the angle of the light, nothing happened. Nobody came out. Nobody went in. No faces appeared in any of the windows. No silhouettes peered over the edge of the roof. No deliveries. No visitors. No children. No nuns. No nobody. It was a singularly boring afternoon.

  From time to time, Sue would take up her camera and peer at the building through the long, telephoto lens, bracing her hands on the steering wheel to keep the image steady. She took a picture or two each time, more for something to do than for any practical value. Sure, when she got b
ack home, she would play with them in her editing suite, on the off chance that an enhancement might reveal something that she hadn’t been able to see with her naked eye, but the chances of that were pretty remote. It was busywork really, but without it, there was nothing else to do at all but to wait and to watch.

  She was flipping back and forth between the day’s photos when a slight flicker caught her eye. Sue pushed the back button and reversed the shuffle. There it was again. Nothing exciting, unfortunately. Just one of the basement windows, at the far end of the building, at sidewalk level. All day it had been a dark hole of shadow, but in the last photo, it was suddenly lighter. Not light from inside the building, but the brighter grayness of a winter sky. Between one set of photos and the next, somebody had tilted that window open, changing the reflection. If she hadn’t been desperate for something to do, she’d have ignored it completely, but she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving with nothing to show for her day, so she set the camera on the floor and got out of the car.

  What could it hurt to go take a look? After all, it was a basement window, and as she recalled, the basement was where Eliza and her friends had been relocated, shortly before she had disappeared. Maybe she’d be able to overhear something useful.

  As she approached the orphanage, pulling her coat around herself against the biting wind and trying to act inconspicuous, Sue wondered if detectives ever felt this self conscious. She felt like she was a little girl again, sneaking out of bed to go sit by her cracked-open door so she could read by the hallway light. Only she wasn’t a little girl, and this was not some cute infraction. Now she was a full-grown woman, sneaking up to an orphanage so she could spy on the children.