Portrait of Death: Uncovered

by Isabel Wroth

  Eliza might have given birth to a pair of sociopaths but that woman had been among the strongest females I'd ever known.

  I wondered how she would have rated my performance as I did my best to remain cool an unaffected.

  “Aaron, we discussed this. It's all a big misunderstanding, right, Josie?” The sickly-sweet coo of my mother's voice made me physically sick to my stomach.

  I had to take a few deep breaths to dispel the nausea, watching the simpering, manipulative mask slide down over her face as she looked from her red-faced husband to me.

  She should have tried her hand at being an actress.

  I could count on one hand the times I remembered Janet Beauchene standing up to her husband or arguing with him. Rebecca’s comment about how Janet was more passive-aggressive in her attacks came back to me.

  Janet was a trophy wife. Had been, always would be, but that didn’t mean she was stupid. She was very clever, actually, and though the majority of the time she appeared to be in complete agreement with her husband, Janet responded to Aaron’s bullying by spending his money and doing whatever she wanted to behind his back.

  She was loyal to him—or had been during those years of my childhood when there was more money than Janet knew what to do with—and had done whatever she had to, or rather whatever he told her to do, in order to maintain the lifestyle she was accustomed to, but there hadn’t been much love lost between them.

  Maybe at some point they’d been in love but that time was long gone, and now it was a relationship built on mutual misery and resentment.

  It baffled me beyond comprehension as to why two people, who loathed one another to the point Janet and Aaron Beauchene did, would still be together after all these years.

  I wondered why they hadn’t divorced and remarried someone with money.

  I supposed the rumors of what they’d done to me as a child might have made the rounds through their social set, which might have made it more difficult to find another cash cow to leech off of.

  Grandpa Beauchene’s death not long after my emancipation and the steps he took to disown his son and daughter-in-law before kicking the bucket might have hindered Aaron’s ability to find a new trophy wife.

  I hadn’t touched a penny of it, but after my grandfather’s death, any inheritance to be had reverted to me.

  Yet another reason for Aaron to hate my guts.

  “Right, Josie?” Janet repeated, her eyes wide as though prompting me to agree to this all being a misunderstanding.

  I hated being called Josie. I detested it, and the more my father ranted about the injustice of being arrested for a crime he couldn't possibly have committed, the more that door in my head threatened to splinter into a thousand pieces.

  After a few more minutes of silence on my part, my father got angry and smacked his hand on the table, demanding to know why they were here.

  “We've been held on suspicion for two different crimes we didn't commit, questioned like criminals for a body anyone in the past twenty years could have buried in the damn yard, and you're just sitting there like a damn statue.

  “You're doing this on purpose because we went on TV and told everyone the truth about you, right? Right?!”

  My father attempted to bully and intimidate me, but I rudely cut in, “The truth. Does it taste funny when you say that word?”

  I stared at his face, noticing the way his mustache quivered as the muscles in his jaw tightened.

  “What the hell are you talking about? I asked you, why the hell are you just sit—”

  “P-H-T-L-L-C,” I chanted slowly, lifting my finger and pointing back and forth between my parents like I was playing a game of eeny-meany-miny-moe.

  My mother turned white, and a ruddy flush painted my father's cheeks as he finally clenched his teeth together.

  Mr. Garcia, their lawyer, pushed his wire-rim glasses up the bridge of his nose and uncomfortably cleared his throat.

  “Is that supposed to mean something to my clients, Miss Beauchene?”

  The smile that slowly spread across my face was neither pretty nor kind. “Oh, yes. Have you ever heard of PHT, LLC., Mr. Garcia?”

  “No, ma'am, can't say that I have,” the lawyer answered primly.

  “It's the bogus name of an adoption agency that no longer exists,” I began, undeterred when my mother made a weak attempt to interrupt with a simpering smile, like I was telling a bad joke.

  “It was shut down by the FBI about seventeen years ago, once it became clear the agency was a front for a trafficking ring run by a section of the Russian mob.

  “On the fraudulent business documents PHT was an acronym for Peterson, Harris, and Tomas. It actually stands for Pirogov Human Trafficking.”

  Mr. Garcia reached up to tweak his tie, as though it were suddenly too tight around his throat. “I don't see what this has to do—”

  “Not very original as far as an acronym goes, but from what I’ve read, if Mr. Pirogov owned something, he wanted his name on it.

  “Did you know, in 1985, you could purchase a newborn baby for ten thousand dollars, Mr. Garcia?”

  “N-no,” the lawyer stammered, and from my peripheral vision, I saw him take a half step back from my parents, as though he instinctively knew he'd bit off more than he could chew when agreeing to represent them.

  “I didn't either, but that was the value placed on me by the illegal adoption agency your clients bought me from.”

  “I have no idea what you're talking about!” my father roared, his overreaction surely a sign of deception.

  My mother remained mute.

  I kept talking, my tone moderate and calm as I told a story I had hidden away in a corner of my mind, kept behind doors locked and barred as a result of the torture I’d suffered in Franklin Banes’s care.

  “I went looking for Katya Siyankova's passport in my father's office when I was a child. I'd caught her in there earlier and believed her when she said my father was keeping it safe for her.

  “I adored Katya and believed that she needed this thing. So later, when everyone was asleep, I went downstairs and looked in the one place Katya hadn't been able to.

  “I had no idea what I was looking at when I opened the safe and started going through the papers. I later asked Katya what it meant to be adopted, and she explained it to me.”

  Janet licked her lips nervously, glancing at her husband for direction, but he was so red in the face I could practically feel the heat of his rage from four feet away.

  “His father knew how desperate Aaron was to greedily claim every penny of his family money and must have suspected the truth about Aaron’s problem with his swimmers because Grandpa Beauchene put Aaron's inheritance in a trust for his yet-to-be-born son.

  “I wasn't making the same kind of money from the sales of my paintings as before. The reporters weren't banging down the door, and I wasn't getting as much air time as an art prodigy.

  “Aaron’s shooting blanks, so to speak, but he was desperate to get his hands on more money, so these two figured the ruse had worked once, why not try again?

  “It cost fifty thousand dollars to buy Elliot from the baby traffickers. I guess blond-haired, blue-eyed little boys are more expensive than dark-haired girls, huh?

  “Shut up!” Aaron Beauchene hissed, banging both fists on the table. “SHUT UP! You're pulling this out of your ass! This is bullshit!”

  Callum was around the table, slapping cuffs on Aaron Beauchene so fast to keep him from coming at me, I'm sure his head was spinning.

  “Mr. Beauchene, I strongly suggest you shut your fucking mouth.” Aaron reacted like Callum had physically struck him, shocked to be spoken to like that, and even seemed a little intimidated.

  He blustered, spluttered, looked to the public defender for help, but Mr. Garcia wasn't doing a very good job.

  “Josie, sweetheart, I think you're confused. This is a story you made up as a little girl, don't you remember?” Janet cooed, leaning forward to lay her hands over
mine, smiling kindly at me. Gently, like I was crazy and suffering a delusional relapse.

  “Of course I remember,” I answered, in the same sweet tone, turning my hands over to clasp hers, smiling at her as complacently as I could manage.

  “I remember the way you looked Dr. Banes in the eye and asked him how many rounds of electroshock therapy it would take before I no longer remembered asking you who my real mother is.”

  The fake smile froze on Janet’s face, making her look like a mildly deranged kewpie doll.

  “I remember how you and he discussed—in detail—what behavioral programming was. I remember how impatient daddy was to know how many treatments of ECT it would take for Dr. Banes to twist the memories I had of finding those bogus adoption papers into something else. Or to erase them completely.”

  Aaron Beauchene was so red in the face by now, I expected to see steam clouds spewing out of his ears.

  “It's really odd. I never put much stock in the Six Degrees of Separation theory, yet what a coincidence it is, that the last time I sat across from a murderer, he turned out to be the son of the man you bought Elliot and me from.

  “Did you know that when the FBI busted down the doors of PHT, they found a literal stable of human broodmares in the basement?

  “Teenage girls snatched off the streets of New York and women smuggled in from Russia with the promise of a better life, were raped until they got pregnant, and when the baby was delivered, he or she was sold to people like you?”

  “You're insane! How can you stand there and let this crazy woman say shit like this? You're my lawyer ... Do something!” Aaron Beauchene demanded, belligerently shaking his cuffed hands at me while he glared daggers at poor Mr. Garcia.

  There was no stopping this. The lies I’d been fed, the truths I’d been forced to forget had festered inside my mind for twenty years, but now, the wound was open and the pressure of the truth forced the putrid rot to flow.

  “Katya was going to the police, wasn't she, Mom? She was going to tell the world that you were greedy, low-life, manipulative, evil people who bought children from human traffickers just to inherit a little bit more money.

  “Just to keep from having to work for the lifestyle you'd become so accustomed to.”

  “Don't you say a word, Janet!” Aaron ordered hoarsely, the pulse hammering so hard in his throat I could almost hear it.

  He was sweating buckets, his eyes too huge for his face and demanding his lawyer do something. Anything.

  The lawyer finally found his balls, uncomfortably clearing his throat. “Miss Beauchene, that is ... some story, but you need to let go of my client—”

  Janet tried to jerk her hands out from my grip, but I held on. The pain, the rage, the helplessness I'd felt as a little girl pushing more and more of the infection out of the wound in my heart and in my head, and even though I felt relief—release—it too was painful.

  “It's not a story. These people who called themselves my parents, bought me from human traffickers and bought my brother from the same people.

  “To prevent me from telling Big Papa Beauchene—who held all the purse strings—what they'd done, they put me in an insane asylum and paid a sadistic, real-life mad scientist to re-program my brain until I no longer remembered my own name. But Katya new my name, didn't she, Mom?”

  “Let-let go. Let go, Josie,” Janet stammered, her choked whisper barely audible because she was frozen with fear.

  “When you came home from the asylum without me, Katya confronted you. She told you she knew everything: where I'd come from, why you'd needed me and Elliot, what you'd done, where you'd taken me, and she was going to expose you.

  “It was dark when you chased after her, but her yellow sundress was bright enough to see, and the sound of her boots were loud on the pavement as she ran toward the garage.

  “You both followed her. You couldn't let some crazy Russian girl ruin everything you'd both worked so hard to keep.

  “Daddy never played baseball in high school, but he knew how to swing a golf club, and the shovel wasn't much different.

  “It sounded like a carton of eggs breaking when it slammed into Katya's skull. There was so much blood, but it started to rain, so you figured it would wash away all the evidence, and no one would ever know.

  “But she was heavy, wasn't she? It took everything you had to help drag Katya across the yard to the flowerbed by the forest, and you still had to dig the hole.

  “Your husband made you help him dig, and when you tried to say no, he slapped you so hard you tasted blood in your mouth.

  “The rain made the dirt soft, but your hands hurt so much because of the wood handle of the shovel, slick with blood and rain, formed blisters on your soft palms.

  “You were so scared the hole wouldn't be deep enough, weren't you? That Mr. Echols would find Katya's body when he planted flowers in the spring, so even though your hands were hurt and bleeding, you and Daddy kept digging.

  “There was a moment as you stood in the hole next to Katya's body, that you were terrified it was too deep. That you wouldn't be able to climb back out.

  “You tore your acrylics trying to claw your way out of the dirt, the thunder drowning out your screams for help, and your husband just stood there laughing at your panic while you were forced to step on a dead woman's face to get out of her grave."

  Janet finally threw herself away from me with enough force to make her chair screech back. Her mouth worked soundlessly while Aaron continued to tell her to shut up, shouting obscenities at his wife even as Callum hauled him up by the back of his shirt and half-dragged him out the door where Davidson was waiting to take him.

  The horror on Janet's face was as plain as the tears streaking down her cheeks, her voice an ugly rasp, clutching her hands to her chest, as though remembering the pain of the blisters formed that night.

  “You weren't there ... how could you ... You-you weren't there!”

  My vision blurred from tears, but the rage kept me from sobbing. The rage let me keep my voice because I wasn't done.

  “Don't you remember, Mom? You told the entire world how special I was and what an unbelievable gift God had given me.

  “I painted Katya's story; I saw it. Just like I saw what would happen to Elliot. Did you even care when I told you how scared I was someone would try to hurt him?

  “Or were you so desperate to get your hands on your father-in-law's money that you drowned a baby to get it?

  “Was murder easier the second time? Elliot couldn't run away from you; he couldn't fight you. He was so little, it must have been easy to hold him under the water.”

  “No. NO!” Janet shouted, pointing a trembling finger at me as some fire came back to her. “I did not kill my son! It didn't matter that we bought him, Elliot was my baby and his death was an acc-accident! An accident!” she repeated hysterically, and I didn't need some fancy badge to tell me that was a big fat lie.

  Without her husband at her side to shout orders at her, Janet Beauchene snapped in half. “I didn't kill Katya, that was all on Aaron. I helped bury her, but I didn't kill her! And who cared? She was a nobody!

  “No one came looking for her. No one missed her! She would have stayed buried if you would have just stayed away—”

  The confession came in a rush, but Janet had it all wrong. “No, Katya would have stayed buried if you and your husband hadn't come running back to New York at the promise of earning a few hundred dollars and a chance to be on live TV.

  “I found her because you wanted to be someone again, even if it was the mother of a crazy person.”

  “Josie, please,” Janet blubbered, pressing her hands to her pale cheeks and wildly shaking her head in denial.

  “Katya never called me that.”

  Janet was aging in front of my eyes, curling in on herself as I leaned forward, like huddling up in a little ball and covering her ears would protect her from what else I had to say.

  “Not one time. She never called me, Jo,
or Josephine, or Josie. Katya called me Dasha, because that was the name she whispered in my ear the day I was born, right before I was ripped out of her arms and sold like a designer dog to a spoiled, privileged woman who never knew one single day of suffering in her entire life.

  “She called me Dasha because she was my mother, and you buried her in a shallow grave for more money.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The autumn air froze in my lungs. It hurt to breathe too deeply, but it didn't stop me from sucking in breath after desperate breath, purging the last lingering traces of agony left behind in the aftermath of the truth finally coming out.

  The lies were gone, the infection was clear, and maybe now the pain I’d held onto for twenty years would finally start to heal.

  Aaron Beauchene was a murderer, and his wife was an accessory.

  They were both guilty of so much more, and Callum was on the phone with some contact he had in the FBI, quietly verifying my story about Tomas Pirogov's baby trafficking ring.

  I was reeling from the emotional toll that came from exorcising the demons from my past, but more than trying to find my footing, I was trying to figure out where the words had come from as I'd explained how Janet and Aaron murdered my biological mother.

  I hadn't seen it in a dream or during my hypnosis session. The memory obviously wasn't mine and holding onto Janet's hands, like I had been, hadn't plucked the real story out of her mind or seen it like I was watching a movie.

  The information had simply ... came to me. Like Katya—like my mother—had been standing behind me, whispering in my ear.

  If her ghost had been there with me, I hadn't sensed it. I hadn't felt her presence, but I couldn't help fancifully imagining she had been with me in the interrogation room.

  That after all these years, she saw me get justice for what was done to her. That she knew, I knew who she was now. Who I was.

  Who I might have been in another life if she hadn’t been the victim of Pirogov’s breeding operation.