by Alex Dolan
Gracie favored corporal punishment, both in and out of her blackouts. Specifically, when she wanted to discipline her children, Gracie stabbed them with kitchen forks. Neglect, abuse, and little contact with anyone other than Mom, and voila—you got two kids who loathed humanity.
Polaroids chronicled their time together. Walter wasn’t much taller than Helena. There was something frighteningly confident in the way he glared at the camera. Unlike his sister, who simpered in her photos, Walter didn’t smile. He defied the camera. For each photographer, from his parents to prison, he tucked his chin the way a wolf might look at a snowshoe hare before the lunge.
I wondered how Helena Mumm could have disregarded one of society’s biggest taboos. I suppose they would have clung to each other when the rest of the world shut them out. Maybe his tortured fish face brought out her nurturing urges. Plenty of bullies find spineless mates—Gordon and my mom were examples—but Helena didn’t strike me as that kind of dummy when I met her. Remarkably, she’d stayed with him when things escalated—when the children came into the picture. She might have been like the frog in a pot that didn’t have the sense to jump out as the water slowly boiled. That would be the kindest way to see her. Regardless, she most definitely loved Walter. I didn’t need the press clips to convince me, not after hearing her pine away in the Excelsior.
After a while, the articles on Walter and Helena just retold the same story, and what I knew of them didn’t give me any stronger a sense of how they connected to Leland. And Leland was the one who was after me. The only real lead that I had was Cindy Coates, one of the victims of Mumm and Gretsch. I went to the website Lisa Kim had found for me, the one that promoted her book account of Cindy Coates’s abduction. The site didn’t say much. Out of desperation, I e-mailed her with a fake story about being a recently released abductee. This was nowhere near my proudest moment.
The rest of the day, I stayed inside my crappy motel because I didn’t know where to go. None of my research had given me an idea of how to move forward. If I stepped out the door, I was convinced Leland would find me. He’d tracked me to Shallot, Oregon. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t find me in the Santa Rosa motel. If I jumped to another hotel, there was no reason to think he wouldn’t find me there. In public, I stood out, even without the Kali costumes. As a tall woman with muscles, people noticed me no matter what I wore. Those people would remember me when Leland came around asking questions. My best bet was to stay hidden.
I missed my own apartment and wondered if Leland Mumm, or whatever the hell his name was, had already plundered it. I thought about my dad’s baby grand, one of the items I couldn’t replace. I wondered how he would vandalize it, raking scratches into the side, bringing an axe down on the keys. Worse yet, he might have emptied my two urns, spreading my mother and father all over my apartment as if spilling a vacuum cleaner bag. I couldn’t save them or the piano right now. I couldn’t go anywhere near my apartment.
Because Leland had separated me from my possessions, I no longer owned anything. It struck me how much of identity is tethered to ownership. My money sat in a few accounts, but without access to it, I couldn’t rightly say I was wealthy, certainly not in my motel. My laptop and car were borrowed. My clothes had been purchased for me by Dr. Jeffrey Holt. If ever there was a good time to convert to Buddhism, now was it.
Jeffrey had planned for this sort of emergency. He’d socked money away and kept a safe house in an undisclosed location, his own Abbottabad compound, someplace even farther off the grid than Shallot, Oregon. I had done no such planning, because I was twenty-six years old and untouchable. Thinking back, I should have buried a tin of cash and kept a treasure map. Without it, I was dependent on my thin stack of dwindling dollars.
By the next morning, I was already sick of candy and fake cheese powder. Left to spiral through hopeless thoughts, I began to understand what true desperation could do. At any moment, a knock on the door could herald another plainly wrapped mystery package on the doorstep. Leland seemed so sure that he could find me again. Having no contact with Jeffrey Holt or the network, and no sure way of protecting myself against the unexpected, I would have entertained anything to save myself.
In the middle of ab crunches to CNN, Cindy Coates e-mailed me back.
• • •
Alameda might as well have been Oregon, since it felt similarly removed from any metropolis. A small flat runway of land just across the water from San Francisco, and cut off from Oakland by canals and the highway, the community was a cut through to shipyards.
Here in a small coffee shop, a long queue waited for their caffeine. I tucked myself behind a table away from the windows with an espresso and an iced mocha, neither of which I’d touched. To disguise myself, I’d purchased a roomy hoodie and mirrored aviator sunglasses, which probably made me look more suspicious. Coffee soot gave the room a rustic scent, and when the grinder discharged its invisible plume of coffee dust into the air, I sneezed into a napkin.
I was here to meet Cindy Coates. She’d asked to meet me in Alameda, and I’d agreed despite that it brought me to Leland’s backyard. I remembered his badge—Alameda County, number 5417. The county region covered Oakland, Berkeley, and busier areas of the East Bay. The town of Alameda was sleepier, but I still had a greater chance of stumbling into the man who was chasing me. On the way here, Alameda felt as quiet as the Excelsior. But with all those commuters in the coffee shop, a café was possibly the worst place for me to avoid strangers. Or police.
A pair of local patrolmen stood in line for java. They looked at me, but not in the way I was used to being looked at. Kali was typically regarded with admiration or fear, if not outright objectification. My droopy sweats and lack of makeup neutered me. I hunched my back and sank lower in the chair. As far as I knew, the police weren’t looking for me, so there was no reason to think they would detain me. But I wasn’t thinking rationally, and the cops stared too long. For all I knew, anyone in a uniform could have been Leland’s ubiquitous eyes and ears, the “Elf on a Shelf” of law enforcement. The police uniforms made me blench. I pulled my hoodie farther down around my face and chewed on the sweatshirt collar so I could cover my cheeks and chin, until I was just a nose in a sea of cotton. They kept staring.
Then a young woman walked into the café and recognized me instantly, even though we’d never met, even though I was covering my face. Proving my point—even in camouflage, I stuck out.
Cindy Coates walked with a deliberate bounce in her step, which was no euphemism. Her right leg was missing below the knee. She walked on a prosthetic called a running blade, designed for runners with below-knee amputations. It was shaped like the “xistera” they use to fling balls at the wall in jai alai. The blade made her bob. On the phone, Cindy had explained, “I’ll be the one on stilts.”
“Are you Cindy?”
“Of course I am,” she said brightly.
Her body reminded me a little of Lisa Kim’s, but her athleticism was more obvious. Her shoulders were bulkier, and her biceps were blessed with that sinuous vein earned by the ultrafit. She was dressed in tight black Lycra, and her horse-mane ponytail lashed out side to side in time with her gait. The patrons in line admired her from the waist up, and then gaped at her leg.
Even behind sunglasses, I felt it was apparent I was staring. The two officers were as well. However, now that she was there, their attention was drawn to her instead of me. After studying her running blade, they caught me watching them. Busted for gawking at the amputee, the officers pivoted on their heels and focused on the menu board as they shuffled forward in queue.
Cindy possessed a radiance I wished I had, a deep love of herself that made her skin glow. Perhaps it was simply the sheen of sweat from running. Her pert musk smelled clean as tea steam. “Are you Pamela?”
In many respects, Kali felt more like my real name than Pamela Wonnacott, so giving her my real name felt like I’d provided an alias.
“Thank you for meeting me.”
I stood, removed my glasses, and unhooded my face.
“There you are,” she remarked. She took my hand in both of hers, embracing it as if holding a dying bird. “It took guts for you to reach out. I’m glad you did. That’s why I have the website.”
Cindy maneuvered herself into the seat with gymnastic balance on the good foot. She wiped her face with a spare napkin on the table. “I hope you don’t mind—I usually train in the mornings, and I just finished.”
“Not at all.” Even with her legs below the table, my mind lingered on the prosthetic. I imagined what her injury would have looked like fresh and how she might appear if I’d tended to her as a paramedic.
“Cool, isn’t it?” Cindy was used to stares. Maybe it felt similar to when I fielded comments about my height, but I suspected it would seem more dehumanizing. She joked, “It makes me feel like a cyborg.”
“I’ve only seen them in photos.”
“It’s a Lightning-Flex. Do you know anything about them?”
“I’ve seen them on that Australian runner.” I added before I could stop myself, “The one who killed his girlfriend.”
“He’s from South Africa. He uses something a little different, but the principle is the same.”
I asked, “Do you wear them when you’re not training?”
“I’ve got others for daily use. But, honestly, I like the way it looks. It’s badass.”
I slid the lukewarm espresso I’d ordered for her across the table.
“Thanks. I hope you don’t mind that we met someplace public. I have to build in safeguards. You’d be surprised at how many people try and find me. Most of them are nuts.”
“It makes sense to be careful.” At that precise moment, I felt like the world’s grandest asshole. To meet Cindy Coates, I’d spouted a sonnet of lies, first by e-mail then by phone. She was so eager to help me. Rapt, she listened to a story of my abduction trauma, all of which was pure fiction. When I was finished, she said I was brave. That’s why she wrote her book, she’d said—so others would come out and share their stories. So none of us would be afraid. My Lord, did I feel like a rodent. Leland’s detainment in Clayton might have counted as kidnapping, but that wasn’t the story I gave her. Over the phone I’d spilled out an elaborate yarn of being thrown in a van and bound to a radiator for three weeks. In my story, the kidnapper made me eat dog food—both the dry kibble kind and the moist horse meat kind. The postman heard me one day when I chewed through the gag, and I’d been released the previous week. That explained the bandages on my wrists—this was where I was handcuffed to the radiator in my fabrication. In my story, my kidnapper was out getting groceries when the postman found me, and when the police caught up to him, he was ripped apart by bullets in a bodega gun battle. All bullshit.
Over the phone she’d said, “You know, the post office rescued me too, in a way.”
I did know, and it made my insides squishy.
At the café, Cindy asked, “Are you comfortable talking where people can hear us?”
I hesitated. “I am if you are.”
She reached across the table. “Is it okay if I touch you?”
Funny—I asked a version of this question when I picked up people on medical calls. I nodded, and she grasped my fingers. Her hands were smaller than mine, soft and dewy from the run.
“It’s nice to meet you, Pamela.”
Across the room, the police officers picked up their drinks. One of them shook a few sugar packets and stirred while his partner gave me an over-the-shoulder glance, again stealing a glimpse of Cindy’s prosthetic. I boldly smiled at him, and understanding that it was rude to stare at Cindy, he gave me a good-neighbor grin back. They left moments later.
The night before when we spoke, I’d told Cindy I’d read as much as I could about her, but I hadn’t had time to purchase the book. This was true. If I’d had the time, I would have gone through it before I reached out. Since Clayton, everything had unraveled so fast, I had little time to prepare. So now that we were speaking in person, Cindy gave me the rest of the details about what had happened to her at the hands of Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm. The more she talked, the less I had to speak about my own fictional abduction.
Of the three children abducted by Walter Gretsch and Helena Rice, Cindy was the only one who spoke about it in public. In her book, she chronicled her own experience, but was mindful not to call out the other two kids by name. Both families had apparently requested privacy. Several years after she was found, Cindy made the rounds on talk shows. She reinvented herself as a paraplegic athlete and trained disabled runners when she wasn’t competing. At the London Paralympics she’d earned a silver medal in the 100-meter sprint. In her victory photo, she’d reached to the sky with two fists, looking like she was dropping down a roller coaster decline.
“You look like you’re still all nerves. That’s normal,” she said, mistaking the cause of my anxiety.
“That’s good to hear.”
“It’s too soon to really think about this, but have you thought about writing a book? It helped me work some of it out.”
“I’m not sure my story is worth a book,” I said, fidgeting in my seat.
“Don’t diminish your own experience. Sometimes it helps just to get it down on paper. Why do you think I wrote my book? It helped me find peace. I wanted to help other people like yourself who’d lived through the same thing, but to be honest, writing about it helped me as much as anyone else. You don’t even have to make it public. It can be a diary, something to help you make sense of what happened and put it in perspective.” Her compassion reminded me of how Kali would treat a client. I was such a bird turd for doing this. “Later you can worry about whether you want the publicity. Once you put yourself out there like that, it will draw attention. For me, it helped by giving me community. I’ve met a lot of friends this way. People like you. But the publicity isn’t for everyone.”
“I’m not ready for the publicity.”
“Have you been approached by the press? ’Cause those vultures are relentless.”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. Tentatively, I said, “Yes. But I don’t talk to any of them.”
“Good for you. I have to admit, I dug around the web to find out more about your case and was impressed that you’ve been able to keep it out of the media. I thought maybe I didn’t spell your name right.”
It seemed like she was asking, so I spelled it for her now. The Internet didn’t have much to say about Pamela Wonnacott, so I didn’t see the harm in sharing. She whipped out her phone and typed it into her browser. I didn’t think anything interesting would come up, but I suddenly second-guessed whether it had been safe to give her my real name.
Something came up in her search results. “You’re a firefighter?”
Huh, so that’s out there, I thought. “For the past four years.”
“That explains how you’re in such good shape. We should go running sometime.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“Fireman,” she mused. “That’s real superhero stuff. Must have been a tough kook to try and pick a fight with you.”
I nodded, “Pretty tough.”
She reached across and squeezed my hand again. Mine felt cold compared to hers.
Cindy interpreted my nerves as a symptom of recent trauma, and not guilt for being a rotten human being. “Those wrists look pretty raw.” I’d unwrapped the gauze from around my arms, and my wrists were purple and scabby from where they’d ground against Leland’s handcuffs. The abrasions had authenticated my crap story. She said, “They threw manacles on me too. On all of us. They suck, don’t they?”
“They do.” Finally, I got to say something honest.
“There’s something about losing your freedom. Not being able to walk across a room if you wanted to, because you’re shackled to a pipe. That freaked me out, even before any of the really nasty stuff happened.” She showed me her own wrists where thin scars crisscrossed along the undersides. “I fought again
st my handcuffs until I cut myself.”
“Same here.”
My time with Leland shared similarities with her experience. I wondered if Leland found me again, how he might torture me before fulfilling his promise of killing me.
Her forearms were dotted with a different type of scar. Clusters of four small points in alignment stippled both arms. Cindy saw me looking and explained, “Helena stuck me with a fork if I got out of line.” She added with some pride, “I was out of line a lot.” She winced at the memory, for a moment shedding her veneer of confidence. Then she remembered herself and beamed like she was invincible.
Now that we were talking details, I had the chance to extract information from her that could help me. I fumbled through it. When I asked for details about her abduction, I explained that they might help me make sense of my own experience. I could tell this made her uncomfortable, but she told me anyway. I asked her how she escaped, and she said, “I didn’t escape.” Her perennial smile vanished for a moment. “I tried. We only tried once.”
Walter and Helena had kept the kids in a cabin on the compound. This much I’d read in the news articles. It was a glorified tool shed. Walter had soundproofed it because he’d tried to be a musician, and he’d built a modest recording studio like the Manson Family. Walter had recorded a handful of songs from that shed. The MP3s I found online played a lone, canned voice and an aggressively strummed acoustic guitar. His lyrics bitched about things—the government, women, white folks—in a blues voice inspired by Howlin’ Wolf.
I had found maps of the property. Behind the house, the yard extended in a long, thin rectangle. Halfway to the rear border, they’d grown a hedge that bisected the property, so the yard looked about half the size. Once, police visited them when neighbors reported screaming. Officers came to the house, looked around, and walked around the backyard but never got farther than the shrub.
