by Rene Denfeld
And the posters for the missing street girls. Naomi read these with a chill in her heart. Most of the missing girls didn’t even have real names—they went by street names like Mercedes and Diamond. Rich objects, dream worlds a life away. With relief, Naomi saw a name she trusted on the older posters: Please call Det. Winfield, state police. But underneath them were the crime stopper flyers for those found murdered, and these listed the number for the local FBI. Naomi frowned.
Naomi took a flyer from her messenger bag, the text circled in bright yellow so it would get attention. She pinned it in the center of the board.
I am looking for my sister. She is about twenty-five, the flyer said. Naomi had added the few details she could remember: the Oregon farm valley where they had been held captive, the bunker underground where a man had kept them, the year of her escape. She didn’t know her own sister’s name, so she couldn’t add that. And then: If you know her, tell her I am sorry and I miss her.
Naomi stepped back.
An old man, querulous with alcohol or other shakes, had come up behind her, as silent as a whisper. Naomi could smell his gummy breath. He blinked, reading her flyer. “There’s a lot of girls in this world,” he said, grinning at her with horsey teeth.
“I know,” Naomi said, huskily.
“What does she look like?” the old man asked, friendly.
“I don’t know,” Naomi had to admit.
“You ain’t got a picture?”
“No.”
“What kind of sister are you, to not even have a picture?”
Outside now the line was gone, the sidewalk empty. Behind her, through the dusty window, the tables were all full, the customers eating piles of the delicious-looking beans and the cornbread, cut in slabs and drizzled with honey at the table. A little girl with lank blond hair looked up at her. The mother touched her head, and the child’s eyes returned to her plate.
Naomi felt tinny with despair. Night had fallen and she wanted to fall with it. She moved down the street, approaching every makeshift shelter and human sleeping in a doorway. “I’m looking for my sister,” she began, each time, but at the end of the block she stopped, suddenly flooded with hopelessness.
This wasn’t like her other cases. The fact those other missing children were not her family had allowed her to face the possibility they were never going to be found. Naomi understood now the panic of the parents, how they told her they couldn’t breathe as long as their child was missing. Even in her sleep she was searching. If there was any chance her sister was connected to the missing street girls, she would find out. She knew from experience that those on the streets watched out for each other. They might help her.
She passed RVs crowned with tarps, a drunk retching on the curb. Tent camps that appeared overnight in parking lots, the wet sounds of sex in an alley. The lights of bars were ahead of her, the smell of exhaust, the sound of car doors opening and shutting. The red-light district. Naomi could see shapes of what looked like children, begging in the half dark. Begging and maybe something worse.
She moved towards them.
Chapter 5
Celia was standing on the corner, the car lights white eyes in the dark. She hated the men in the cars, hated them and their reaching hands, their spongy needs, even as sometimes she, too, got in.
It was better than dying.
That was when she saw the woman coming down the street. The woman was medium-sized, not skinny and not fat. She looked strong. She had long silky brown hair that fell over her shoulders, and she pushed it back, impatient. Celia caught the wink of a ring on her hand. Her skin glowed in the night.
The woman clearly did not belong here, not in these days of sea creatures washed up onshore. What happened in the night was meant to stay secret—like what had happened with her stepdad, Teddy. Celia had made the mistake of telling. She had found out that the people of the day don’t want to know what happened in the night.
This woman was a day person. Celia could see it at a glance, and her lip curled.
“Check her out,” Celia said to Rich. The big boy looked down at his little friend, eager to see what sparked such scorn. Usually Celia was soft. Not now.
“Probably one of those church types,” Rich said.
Celia’s eyes were hard and green. “She should go home, then,” she said.
The two watched the woman make her way down the sidewalk, talking with the other street kids. The cross-dressers were gone, blown away to the bars like so many drifting feathers from their boas. As the night got later, the people got smaller and harder, until the night whittled them away to nothing. Then it was time to run.
The woman walked into the street to talk to a kid. He was in the middle of what you might call a transaction, hanging in an open car window. The kid turned towards her, shocked at the intrusion, and behind the wheel Celia could see the astonished O of the john’s mouth.
“What the fuck is she doing?” Celia asked.
“Maybe she’s trying to find her good friend Jesus. He needs his nails redone,” Rich cracked, and then looked disappointed that the sick joke had gone right over Celia’s head.
Celia felt hot jealousy. She hated the woman instantly. To be so beautifully bold in the night—to walk and ask questions with her shoulders thrown back like she had the right. To act like she mattered.
Behind them their friend Stoner emerged from a car, all arms and legs, uncoiling until you could see his skinny height. His long limbs reminded Celia of how butterflies had six jointed legs so they could escape predators. It wasn’t working for Stoner. He wiped his mouth, and no one said anything about where he had been, what he had done. He would feel the stain enough on his own.
“Let’s go,” Rich said, shifting his backpack. They left as the woman turned, the moon lighting her face into something beautiful.
The street kids crossed the river on the creaking footbridge, smelling the muddy water that ran thick below them. The cars on the bridge above them thudded by. Celia thought about the way life was lived overhead: the tall buildings, the big sedans, the groomed drivers. On the other side of the river rose the freeways, and under them a network of nests. The biggest was called the Caves. The homeless had tunneled underneath the concrete overpass, creating a labyrinth of caves. The Caves were ruled by rape, and the street kids stayed far away. Other overpasses were also viciously fought over, sometimes to the point of death: a crumpled body would roll off the freeway incline, only to be picked up the next day with a shrug by the city trucks.
Celia and her friends had no power and got no mercy from the others. They took what was left, the table scraps. But sometimes they found treasures, including a forgotten freeway ramp behind a closed paint factory, the entrance hidden by bushes. They called this place Nowhere. It was code, a way to keep this sleeping place hidden: Where are you guys crashing tonight? Nowhere.
The kids darted across the emptying freeways, between the whistling cars, until they came to the paint factory, then slipped under the torn cyclone fence around its parking lot. From there they climbed a steep hill to the overpass above, blackberry bushes tearing their hands. Where the rising freeway ramp met the dirt was a hollow the size of a small room. The ceiling was just high enough for anyone inside to stand up straight.
As they parted the bushes, Celia and her friends smelled old sweat and dust and urine. In the darkness they crouched, pulling food from their backpacks, gulping and tearing in their eagerness to be fed. They forced the food down in soft chunks, afraid even of the sound of their own swallowing. When they were done, they collapsed, simply falling over. But sleep didn’t come, not for a long time. The boys lay wide-eyed listening to the cars passing overheard, and as night paled to dawn, these sounds became the metronome of their insomnia and fears. Every rustle of the wind in the bushes outside their cave was a night prowler.
Stoner put his long hand over his eyes and wept in the dark.
Celia lay awake, too. The air around her was blacker than darkness. She thoug
ht of the woman they had seen. She felt the jealousy return. The woman was going to sleep someplace, and it was not a dirt hollow under a highway, with spiders biting in the night. It would be a place with a bed that was safe. Not like her—or her sister, Alyssa.
Celia thought of Alyssa. She saw her stepdad, and her eyes glossed with tears. She made herself breathe deep. Butterflies never sleep, she remembered. They rest with their eyes open. This helped her calm down. She focused until she could see them in her mind, flying towards her, surrounding her with gentle flutters. Their wings cupped her ears, soft velvet on her cheeks, their tendrils tracing her closing lids, murmuring reassurance. More of them flew under the overpass, flying in great soft clouds until she was completely covered. They landed on her jeans, her tired feet, her empty middle. They drank her tears. They turned her into a cap of radiant color, and it was only when she was fully covered did Celia finally feel safe.
Chapter 6
“You don’t want me coming with you?” Jerome asked Naomi.
It was morning, and they were standing on Diane’s porch. The charming Victorian was painted bright colors. Their guest bedroom overlooked the street—Diane had the master in the back, above the quiet gardens. Naomi had met Diane when they both were testifying in a case. They became fast friends, perhaps because Diane accepted the way Naomi moved in and out of her life as she traveled the country for her cases. She had even let her store her case files in the empty attic.
But now Naomi and Jerome were broke. The past year had burned through what little savings they had been able to put aside. Naomi had refused to take on any other cases until she found her sister, and the travel meant Jerome couldn’t find work either.
“We need some money, honey,” Naomi said with a smile.
“I’m trying,” he joked, flexing the one arm. The missing arm spoke for itself: You try finding work with one arm.
Jerome, who had been both a soldier and a sheriff, knew he was an excellent officer and investigator in his own right. But that didn’t mean he was going to get hired into a local law enforcement agency, and he didn’t know if they would stay in the city anyhow. He’d much rather live out in the country. But that conversation was waiting until they found Naomi’s sister. If they didn’t find her . . . well, he didn’t want to think about that.
The one option he could think of was to become a private investigator like his wife. He wasn’t exactly sure what Naomi would think of that. The failures of the past year had left them uncertain with each other. For the first time since she had come into his life, Jerome was hesitant to speak his mind with Naomi.
Jerome wished that someone had taught him how a marriage worked. Without a mother or a father, all he had known growing up was their foster mother, Mrs. Cottle, who, bless her soul, had been widowed. He wanted to be a good husband to Naomi.
She came closer, in for a hug. Surprised, he put his one arm around her, remembered the first time they had made love. Her face under him. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her, wishing he felt better about himself.
* * *
In Jerome’s earliest memories of Naomi, she was a new child in their home, first scared but then full of bravado that slowly stilled into courage. Running along the rock ridges outside Opal, finding the miracle stones left by the petrification of time: quartz and jasper, shiny agates they polished with their shirts, and the ever-present opal. Spit and it will shine.
Their other favorite thing to do was search for old Native American artifacts. Parts of his heritage, like pieces of his own bones picked from the ground. Sometimes they found arrowheads—or what they pretended were arrowheads but were probably just triangular pieces of rock. A few times they found what appeared to be ancient campsites in the woods, with unusually large clearings where the plank houses might have stood. In such places were piles of rocks that did bring treasures, which Jerome was sad he had not kept. Horn spoons and rotting skin bags that fell apart at a touch.
Sometimes in the woods the fir trees gathered in a certain way, and Jerome could see on Naomi’s face that there were things she was remembering even if the rest of her had to forget. At these times he took her hand and led her away. He distracted her by telling her about what he had read of his people—information that he would discover was true only some of the time—like how when his ancestors died, their families would tie their belongings in trees.
He and Naomi would walk back to the farmhouse, looking on the underside of every tree, hoping to see a relic from his ancestors. It didn’t matter that they never found anything. He was with her, and that was what counted.
* * *
“If it isn’t the child finder!”
Detective Lucius Winfield rose from his desk, one large hand held out, the office lights glistening in his short natural hair. Naomi smiled right back. She always felt comfortable in his presence. She took the leather chair, moving restlessly. Naomi could feel the clock ticking.
“What’s up?” the detective asked. Winfield had known Naomi for almost a decade—they went back to her earliest missing child cases, some of which had been his cases. Parents often hired Naomi when police cases stalled. Winfield didn’t mind sharing, if it got the job done.
“Still trying to find my sister,” Naomi told him. She explained all they had done the past year, based on the slim handle of her memory. She told the detective how she and Jerome had combed old farm censuses, visiting dozens of strawberry fields in the Oregon farm valley. They had gone to Arizona and California to inquire after the makers of underground bunkers, seeing if there was a list of buyers. They had interviewed dozens of men imprisoned for stealing children. Her DNA had been swabbed and entered into databases to see if there was a match with unidentified bodies. They had even looked into international child trafficking. Nothing. She couldn’t even find out who she was. It was as if she had been born the day she escaped, rising from the earth.
But then one day she and Jerome had stopped at a gas station on a country road deep in the valley. A truck of migrant farm workers had pulled up. The women and children were in the back, dark and swaying from the sun. They had pulled out empty plastic jugs to fill with water from the hose. It was Jerome, polished in Spanish, who struck up the conversation. An old woman, crossing herself, said yes, she remembered such a place. It had been an evil place, near a town called Elk Crossing.
“From there it was a race,” Naomi told the detective. She and Jerome had finally found the fields, and the bunker in the forests nearby. But the rotten trapdoor was broken, the underground rooms empty. Her sister was long gone. Their captor, Naomi figured, had taken her sister away after Naomi’s escape.
“I’m sorry,” Winfield said, his voice full of sympathy. “It must have been awful for you to go down there.”
Naomi nodded, swallowing the pain. “So we went back to the task force offices, and that’s when I heard you got some missing street girls here. Some have turned up murder victims.”
Detective Winfield leaned back in his chair, put his hand on his desk. “I should have known that would bring you to town.”
“Five girls, all stabbed and found in the river,” Naomi said. “At least a dozen other street girls have gone missing according to their friends. You could have another Green River Killer on your hands.”
“I know,” Winfield said. “We’re drowning out there.” He waved his worn hand at the city outside his office walls. “You’ve seen what it’s like. Homeless all over the place. And all the ways the vulnerable get preyed upon. Trafficking. Crime. Disease. Murder. I’m up to my neck in cases.”
Naomi frowned. “What about social workers and community agencies?”
“They’re drowning, too.”
“That why you gave the case to the local FBI?”
“I didn’t give—they took.” His voice was sharp. She saw a flash of anger. “You want to help, be my guest.” His voice softened. “Look, we all care. I know you do, and so do I. But I can only do so much. I got over fifty open cases right n
ow. How many you got?”
Stung, Naomi said nothing. She had exactly zero cases if she didn’t include her sister. It was easy for her to judge. She felt bad and said so. “I’m sorry.”
“Forgiven. If you find anything, if you need my help, you just say so,” Winfield said, looking at his watch. “Now, I gotta go. You should go pay the Feds a visit. I think you might be surprised.”
“At what?”
“You’ll see.”
Chapter 7
Celia woke to a dome covered with the hieroglyphics of their times. Graffiti saying, Sweet sickness. Dope. Death was here. Suicide?
Stoner was at the lip of the overpass, pissing into the bushes. The sun filtering in the thick foliage looked bright. Celia had no idea what time it was. She wore no watch—watches were things of the past—and she couldn’t afford a phone.
Her pockets were as empty as her eyes this morning, staring blankly out at the shimmering leaves, tipped with white shadows. Behind her Rich was still asleep, his arm thrown over his face, belly sloping against the dirt.
“Come on.” Stoner came and kicked Rich in the leg.
Rich opened his eyes. “I was dreaming,” he said.
“Don’t tell me.”
“Pancakes. A big stack of them, with butter and syrup. And orange juice.”
“Fuck you, Rich,” Stoner said. Rich rose slowly, groaning from sleeping on the hard ground. Celia shook out her dirty jeans and stomped the dust off her sneakers. Her denim jacket was as filthy as the rest of her. Sometimes she liked being dirty. It felt like she was part of the pavement, part of the city. Or nestled inside a cocoon, waiting for a brilliant birth.
She went to the corner of the cavern and lowered her jeans, pissing in the dirt. “I’m glad I’m not a girl,” Stoner said, watching her.
