by Dan Jolley
No answer.
“Can you talk to me?”
No answer.
“Can you talk at all?”
She only stared.
Slowly, trying not to spook the girl again, Janey moved to the bracket where her chain attached to the wall. Above it she noticed a short ladder, folded and nestled between two of the crossbeams, covering what looked to be a trapdoor. A trapdoor leading up to the house above.
She heard the chain clink, and the girl joined her, staring up at the trapdoor. The girl made a sound...a low moan—a sound that shouldn’t ever have been made by someone so young, saturated with pain and hurt and longing. Janey’s eyes filled with tears, and her jaw muscles clenched tight. She turned to the girl.
“I don’t know if you can understand me or not. But I want you to know that I’ll be back for you. You’re not going to stay here. I don’t know how you got here, or who put you here, but you’re not going to stay here. I promise you that.”
The girl’s stare didn’t change, but Janey thought she clutched the bottle bottom a little tighter.
Janey went to the window and began pulling the bricks away from it. The girl followed her, but the chain stopped her short. The mortar was old and poorly applied, and Janey soon had the window completely exposed. A square, solid beam of light made its way into the cellar now. The girl stayed out of it, squinting her eyes, but she never stopped watching Janey. Janey looked outside for a moment, moved away from the window into the darkness, pulled her mask back on and flickered out.
The world transformed outside the cellar. This far into the wee hours, the night had grown cooler, but the neighborhood Janey saw seemed to exude warmth no matter what the temperature. Tall, beautiful pin oak and pine trees lined well-lit streets. Immaculate sidewalks framed manicured lawns, and most of the mailboxes were brick, many with ivy or flowers growing on or around them. The houses themselves, while not huge, were decidedly upper-class, each of them with enough yard space for children and dogs to play in, yet not so much that a neighbor would seem far away. Janey turned slowly, taking it all in, and finally stopped when she faced the house from which she had just emerged. It was beautiful, and at a glance seemed to be the oldest in the immediate area. Lights burned inside, several on the ground floor and one on the second. An expensive mountain bike rested against the front porch railing. A mini-van sat in front of the garage.
Janey’s chest throbbed again, joined by a white-hot spear behind her eyes as her teeth ground together. The grass underneath her burned and died, and two more batons nestled into her hands. She snapped them open, walked steadily to the side of the house, flickered into a shadow, and emerged in the dining room.
The interior of the house seemed to be just as well-appointed as the exterior. Heavy, dignified oak filled the dining room, a table seating at least eight surrounded by chairs upholstered in a stately sea green. Light glimmered from an open doorway to Janey’s left, and she approached it, moving silently.
The living room.
A teenage boy, maybe seventeen, sat slumped on the plush couch, watching a huge TV with the sound piped to a set of headphones. A premium channel was showing the original RoboCop, and the boy sat mesmerized. His mouth hung slightly open, his eyes glazed. A bag of Bugles rested next to him on the couch, and he held a two-liter bottle of soda laxly in one hand.
Janey backed away and moved to the other side of the dining room, where a stairway led to the second floor. Shadows draped the house, and a flicker took her to the top of the stairs.
Light shone from a door to her right. It stood slightly ajar, and she peered inside. Another teenager, this one a girl slightly older than the couch slug downstairs, lay in bed reading a magazine. A box of tissues lay beside her on the bed, and every few seconds she sniffled. Janey stepped away, still totally silent. The door she was looking for stood at the end of the hall, also slightly ajar. Not that a lock would have made a difference.
The man and woman asleep in the king-sized bed looked blissfully happy.
He was big, barrel-chested and thick-armed, with a full head of silver hair. One of those arms rested under the head of his wife, a handsome dark-haired woman in a silk nightgown. Janey stood beside their bed, stared down at them as they slept, and couldn’t decide which she felt more, fury or disbelief.
Two worlds sat atop one another: one filled with PTA meetings and apple butter and house payments, the other narrow and crusted with dirt and mold and stench. These people lived their lives, walked among everyone else, while they kept a ten-year-old girl chained in their crawlspace.
With sick fury gnawing at her heart, Janey knew that if she had had a gun at that moment, she would have blown the man’s head off, and the woman’s right after.
She stood there, trembling, for so long that her muscles began to cramp. Her chest ached unmercifully, as did her side, where the first bullet had struck her. Her breathing grew erratic.
The big silver-haired man rolled over, opened his eyes, and looked directly at her, and Janey didn’t think she’d ever seen a human being look more surprised in her life. The silver-haired man tensed and opened his mouth, probably to scream, but before he had the chance Janey stepped backward, into the thickest of the room’s shadows, and flickered away.
* * *
The silver-haired man lay very still as the gray wraith vanished in the darkness, and didn’t move as the temperature in the bedroom skyrocketed. He got up, staring into the shadows all around him, and turned down the room thermostat as sweat popped out across his brow. Scared witless, he got back into bed, pulled the covers over his head, and spent the next forty-five minutes telling himself that what he had seen was just a nightmare.
Long accustomed to convincing himself of his own version of reality, he finally drifted back to sleep.
* * *
For close to an hour Janey crouched on the roof of a Wal-Mart, grinding her teeth and hurting and hating.
What if it was some kind of special circumstance? She had no proof the child’s captivity was long-term, she’d only seen her this once.
Except that the girl was encrusted with dirt, and unable to speak.
But maybe...maybe she needed to be kept down there. Maybe she was a psychotic killer.
Sure. That explained her timidity.
But what if the people in the house didn’t know about it? What if a neighbor, or someone else, kept her there, chained up like that?
With only one access, through the house. Right.
Janey opened and closed one of the police batons. Snap. Click-click-click. Snap. Click-click-click.
Eventually she remembered a name, and made a decision, and vanished into a patch of darkness.
* * *
7:09 a.m.
Zach Feygen’s apartment was a modest townhouse on Briarcliff Road, narrow and squeezed into a line of six identical units. Janey stepped out of the shadows into Feygen’s living room.
A light burned in the kitchen, and Janey pressed her back to a wall and sidled closer to it. Upstairs a radio played. A pass-through bar linked the kitchen and the living room, and Janey stooped to look through it. A bowl sat on a counter next to a box of Grape-Nuts and a drinking glass.
A board creaked over her head, and Janey’s pulse sped up. Either Feygen came downstairs, started to prepare breakfast, then went back upstairs for something, or there was someone else in the apartment. Feeling stupid that she hadn’t considered that, Janey leaned against the wall and tried to decide what to do.
Just then a door off the kitchen popped open, and a slender young woman wearing only a pair of white lace panties stepped out into the room, carrying a shirt and a pair of slacks that looked as though they’d come straight from a drier. Her skin was as dark as Feygen’s, but her eyes and cheekbones indicated Asian blood, probably in the immediate family. She missed Janey entirely, hung the clothes over the back of a
chair, and poured the cereal bowl full of Grape-Nuts.
Caught flat-footed and embarrassed beyond belief, Janey was set to flicker right back out of the townhouse when she heard a handgun cock about three feet behind her head. Simultaneously the living room’s overhead light flipped on. Janey carefully stepped away from the wall and slowly raised her hands, fingers splayed.
“Heather, put my shirt on.” It was Feygen’s voice, and from the sound of it Janey thought Feygen might shoot her in the back of the head without further preamble. She didn’t try to turn around.
Heather came out of the kitchen, still mostly nude and holding her bowl of Grape-Nuts. “Why, what’s—” When she saw Janey, she set the bowl down on a counter, wordlessly snatched up the shirt and covered herself with it. She stepped back into the kitchen to put it on.
Janey remained motionless, hands in the air, and fervently wished she could go back out and try this again.
“All right,” Feygen said. “When I tell you, you’re going to take two steps forward, real slow. Then you’re going to use two fingers to take out those batons, and you’re going to toss them on the couch. Nod if you understand.”
Off the top of her head, as she nodded, Janey thought of eleven different ways to disarm Feygen. Still, she took the steps forward and dropped the batons onto Feygen’s couch, exactly as ordered. “This isn’t necessary. I’m here to talk to you.”
Heather came back out of the kitchen, practically swimming in Feygen’s shirt, and edged past Janey with wide eyes. She stood behind and to one side of Feygen. Janey said, “May I turn around?”
“No, you may not. I’m trying hard right now to think of a reason not to put five or six big holes in your ass. The hell do you think you’re doing, coming into my home?”
Janey closed her eyes and let her shoulders slump. “I can only ask you to believe me on this. I’m here to talk to you. I didn’t realize you weren’t alone. I didn’t mean to scare anyone.”
“Heather, baby, call 911, all right? Get your phone and dial the number, then hand it to me, all right?”
Janey said, “Wait, wait a minute, please. I’m here asking for your help. There’s a little girl who desperately needs help, and much as I’d like to be the one to give it, the kind of help I can give isn’t the kind she needs. Please listen to me.”
Janey waited, still with her back turned to them, and when she didn’t hear the beeps of a phone being dialed, she took a deep breath and very slowly turned around.
Heather stood with a phone in her hand, uncertain, and kept shooting glances back and forth between Janey and Feygen. Heather had long black hair in loose ringlets, and Janey figured her for early twenties, maybe twenty-two. Feygen stood like a mahogany carving, thick arms locked forward and feet set apart at shoulder-width. He wore a pair of pajama bottoms with little sailboats all over them, and no shirt. Janey would’ve smiled about the sailboats if Feygen hadn’t looked so competent with the gun.
“Please. I’m not kidding about this. There’s a little girl, and she needs help, and I’m only asking you to listen to me for two minutes. I’m serious. She could die.”
The detective held a Beretta nine-millimeter. The Vylar would stop the rounds effectively enough, but Janey really didn’t feel like getting shot again. She kept her hands up and waited.
Finally Feygen said, “Put the phone down, baby. Let’s hear what the woman has to say before we haul her ass in.” His eyes were solid black and cold and sharp, and Janey hadn’t seen him blink yet. “So go ahead. Talk.”
Now that she had the chance, Janey couldn’t think of where to start. She tried twice before she got it right. “I want to see some justice done. And I want it to be final. By the book.”
Feygen didn’t lower the gun, and Janey started to get annoyed. “Look, could you just put the gun down? I’m sorry I scared your girlfriend, I didn’t mean to, it was an accident, but in case you haven’t made the connection, I’m the one who saved your thick neck at the Hargett Theatre. The same one you saw bring that clerk to the hospital. You could at least give me the benefit of the doubt here.”
Feygen studied her with slitted eyes. Finally he uncocked the gun and lowered it. Janey crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back against the edge of the pass-through bar. Heather said, “This is her? This is the woman from the theatre?”
Feygen’s eyes never left Janey. “...Could be.” To Janey: “The chick who showed up at the theatre that night kept me and a friend of mine from getting cut to pieces. If that was you...all right. I’ll listen. Talk.”
Janey told them about the little girl. She fudged on a few of the particulars, but didn’t hold back on the details of the girl’s living conditions.
Feygen shook his head when Janey finished.
“Well, that’s the most full-of-holes story I’ve ever heard. Granted, if you are who you say you are, I’m in your debt. But that’s a big if.”
Janey sighed, exasperated. “That’s why I came to you in the first place. I figured, since I’d already saved your life once, maybe you’d be a little more inclined to believe what I say. Listen, I swear to you, I’m telling you the truth. I couldn’t just take the girl away. There’d be no way to prove her family had done that to her. People would think I’d taken her and abused her myself. The only way to help her is through Family and Children’s Services, or some other agency with the proper authority, somebody to go through the right channels.”
Janey leaned forward, her voice rising. “I don’t want that girl near those people anymore. Not ever again. I want them in jail, for the rest of their worthless lives if possible, but more than that I want that girl taken care of. Cared for. Educated. They’ve already taken away most of her childhood. I don’t want to let them have any more of her life.”
Silence fell on the three of them. Feygen stared at Janey, Janey stared back at him, and Heather’s eyes flitted from one to the other.
“All right. There was some weird shit at that scene, stuff we kept out of the papers. You tell me what that was, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Janey laughed once, short and sharp. “You mean the disappearing act, or the heat?”
Feygen’s dark skin went a little gray around his face. He said, “Give me an address.”
* * *
At 9:30 that morning, a patrol car pulled up in front of the home of Reggie Troland. Troland sold wholesale air conditioner parts and had already left for work. So had his wife June, a health care specialist at a nearby nursing home. Their son Chet was already at school, and that left only the daughter, Yvonne, still in the house.
Zach Feygen, along with a well-dressed, dark-haired woman and a uniformed officer, got out of the car and walked up the front steps. Feygen knocked on the door.
A minute later the door swung open and Yvonne greeted them, pasty-faced and in her bathrobe. “What do you want?” she asked through a cough. “You got me out of bed. I’m sick.”
Feygen showed her his badge. “I’m Detective Zach Feygen. This is Officer Cardi and Kate Rodek, from the Department of Family and Children’s Services.”
Yvonne Troland’s eyes got huge, and her face drained of what little color it had to begin with.
Feygen continued, “We’d like to ask you a few questions. About a little girl.” He handed her a search warrant and walked past her into the living room as he spoke, so he didn’t see her face and the further effect his words had on her. Kate Rodek did, and knew in an instant that everything Feygen had told her was true.
Without any further prodding, Yvonne Troland slumped to the floor, pulled her knees to her chest and curled her arms around them. Hid her face. She started crying. Feygen glanced at Rodek and Cardi, motioning with his head for Cardi to look around. Feygen found the door to the cellar himself, in the floor of a utility room at the back of the house. Taking a deep breath, he opened it, pushed down the short wooden steps, and ma
de his way down into the darkness.
Kate Rodek stayed with Yvonne in the living room, in front of the open door, as the girl cried. Yvonne tried to say something through the tears, but she couldn’t stop sobbing long enough to speak clearly. Rodek looked up as Feygen came back into the room, his eyes ancient, and pulled out his cell phone.
* * *
An ambulance and two more squad cars arrived a short time later. The paramedics brought the little girl—Yvonne said the child’s name was Laura Jean—up out of the cellar on a stretcher. Her arms and legs were restrained, but still she kicked and thrashed and howled, partly at the strangers, but mostly at the light. Her eyes stayed screwed tightly shut. Kate Rodek stood close to Feygen as they took the girl away.
“It was just like you said,” Rodek murmured.
Feygen’s low voice rumbled just loud enough for her to hear. “The Gray Widow…I can’t believe I’m gonna say this. And I hate to say it, I really do. But the Gray Widow’s a good woman, Kate. I can feel it.”
Rodek was silent for a moment. “Good or not, she’s still a vigilante. You can’t just decide the law doesn’t apply to you. She’s still a criminal.”
Feygen didn’t answer her.
At ten minutes after ten o’clock, in response to a call from one of her neighbors, June Troland arrived at her home to be met by Zach Feygen and six other members of the law enforcement community. Slamming her car door, she stormed up the sidewalk and shouted, “What the hell is going on here? Who’s in charge?” Officer Cardi met her and tried to read her her rights, but she cut him off with, “Get off my lawn, you assholes! You’re screwing up my grass!”
Feygen approached her. “Mrs. Troland.”
June Troland rounded on him. “Are you in charge here? What the hell are all these people doing at my home? Where’s Yvonne?”
“We have your granddaughter, Mrs. Troland,” Feygen said.
He found June Troland’s reaction to that immensely satisfying. All the blood drained from her face, seeped away down into her neck and disappeared. Her mouth hung slackly open. Feygen stepped forward, took her hands, cuffed them together, and finished reading her rights. She didn’t reply or make any sound as he put her in a patrol car.
