Dead and Gone

by Tina Glasneck

  Even worse, Franklin had never seen any of the girls leave the building afterward. It was a fact he had not given much thought to until recently, because Strange Dude invariably brought the girls into the building in the middle of the night, three a.m. or later, and by that time Franklin had usually finished guzzling his nightly bottle of Mad Dog and was ready to pass out on his stolen wool blankets. So it stood to reason he wouldn’t be conscious by the time the girls exited the tenement.

  But then another thought occurred to Franklin. A terrifying thought. Why would Strange Dude run the risk of using his own place to rape the girls? Wouldn’t he be concerned that he might eventually grab one who possessed enough self-respect to go to the police afterward? And if she did, wouldn’t she then know exactly where to lead them?

  Of course she would.

  Unless, of course, the victims never left Strange Dude’s pad. Unless, of course, he kidnapped them and raped them and then, holy shit, killed them.

  Was that really possible? Could the strange man living on the third floor of the building across the alley really be not just a rapist but a murderer as well? Franklin decided he had to find out. Because if that was the case, and Franklin didn’t do something about it, he knew he couldn’t live with himself.

  Franklin slammed down the last of the MD and belched as it crash-landed in his belly. He felt good about himself, better than he had in a long time. He would figure out just exactly what was going on in Strange Dude’s third-floor love nest. And if the situation was as he feared, he would goddamn well go to the cops. Not in person, of course, Franklin hated the cops almost as much as he hated himself, but via anonymous phone tip, which would work just as well and represent less personal risk.

  And that’s exactly what he would do.

  Tomorrow.

  Because tonight Franklin was so fucking drunk he doubted he could stand up, and he knew he couldn’t punch the numbers on a phone with any degree of accuracy. What Franklin needed to do tonight was sleep. He rolled the empty bottle along the pavement of the trash-littered alley and watched as it skittered and bounced, eventually coming to rest against the side of Strange Dude’s building.

  Then Franklin stretched out on his blankets, determined to take action, proud he was still capable of doing some good in this world. In a matter of seconds, Franklin Marchand was fast asleep.

  17

  “What do you suppose the chances are that my mother will actually agree to see us?” Cait clutched the taxi’s worn vinyl door handle with one hand and held tightly to Kevin’s forearm with the other. They had just left the hotel for the cab ride to the address Arlen Hirschberg had supplied for Virginia Ayers, and the driver seemed intent on performing the same vehicular ballet as last night’s cabbie, changing lanes frequently and shooting in and out of gaps in the heavy traffic that seemed too small for a motorcycle, much less a full-sized sedan.

  Kevin seemed unruffled and grinned, enjoying her obvious discomfort. He pried her index finger off his forearm and she chuckled uneasily.

  “Sorry about the death grip,” she whispered. “Do you think any of these guys actually, you know, have a real driver’s license?”

  “Think of this as a little bonus. Along with a scenic trip through Boston we get a free amusement park thrill ride.”

  “Free?” she said. “Obviously you don’t have a clear view of the meter.”

  “Okay, maybe not free, but you get my point. Relax and enjoy the roller-coaster ride. This cabbie’s gotta be at least fifty, which means he’s been driving for close to thirty-five years and hasn’t been killed yet. How likely is it that this will be the exact moment he suffers his fatal accident?”

  Cait punched her boyfriend in the arm and he laughed. The driver glowered at them through the rearview mirror and said nothing.

  “Anyway,” Kevin continued, “to answer your first question, I think it’s a toss-up. This woman”—he glanced at a small wire-ring notebook containing the information given to them by Arlen Hirschberg—“Virginia Ayers, turned Hirschberg down flat when he requested an interview, so it seems unlikely she will have changed her mind in the last twenty-four hours. I think our only realistic chance is to get her face-to-face and somehow convince her to share a few minutes of her time. Hopefully once she catches sight of you, once she gets an actual view of her long-lost child, she’ll have second thoughts about her refusal.

  “So I don’t know, babe,” he said again, giving her hand a squeeze. “I wouldn’t give it any better than fifty-fifty, and even that might be a pipe dream.”

  The ride continued in silence. Cait tried to push last night’s horrific Flicker to the back of her mind. She stared out the window and watched the cityscape roll by, the cab moving past tall steel and glass skyscrapers, past men and women in business suits carrying briefcases and walking briskly between buildings, through narrow one-way streets, some barely wider than alleyways, past restaurants and bars and universities and apartments, block after block of four-hundred-year-old city.

  Finally the taxi left the skyscrapers of Boston behind, entering the smaller city of Everett. They drove a few minutes, the traffic still nearly as heavy, and eventually made a right turn at a weathered sign reading, “Riverfront Acres.” The driver cruised into a small neighborhood consisting of a half-dozen tiny cape-style homes huddled in a cluster around a narrow cul-de-sac. The pavement was cracked, desperately in need of repair, and the taxi bounced along crazily. All of the homes looked nearly identical except for their paint color. Cait couldn’t see any water and wondered where the river advertised on the sign might be.

  The cab rolled slowly into a driveway barely long enough to accommodate its length. Cait and Kevin exited and while Kevin paid the cabbie, Cait examined the outside of her mother’s house, doing her best to ignore the nervous tension building inside her. At one time it appeared the house had been painted a deep ocean blue, but that had been years ago. Decades of New England weather and salty Atlantic Ocean air had rendered the siding a dull monochromatic gray, and the once-white trim had long since given way to encroaching mold and mildew.

  In the picture window the curtains had been drawn against the morning sun, and it was impossible to tell whether anyone was even home. The place felt still, abandoned, and Cait supposed the same could be said for the entire neighborhood. No children played in any of the fenced-in front yards, no barking dogs marked their arrival. Nothing moved.

  The cab backed out of the driveway and accelerated slowly down the street toward Everett and the land of the living.

  Cait grabbed Kevin’s hand and held on for dear life. “Am I making a mistake?” she asked in a small voice as they approached the front steps.

  “Ever since I met you, you’ve had questions about your past,” Kevin said. “Now you finally have an opportunity to get some of those questions answered. Of course you’re not making a mistake. You’re just nervous. Settle down and let’s see what happens.”

  “What if she slams the door in our faces?”

  “Then we try to convince her to open it up again. If she refuses, we get that cab back here and enjoy another thrill ride back to the hotel, where we’ll get our things together and then fly back to Florida. Even if that happens, you’re no worse off than you were before, so you have nothing to lose,” he said, returning her hand squeeze.

  He rang the doorbell. Cait could hear it reverberate through the house, loud and jarring, and she jumped.

  For a moment nothing happened and then as Kevin was reaching out to ring the bell again, the heavy wooden door swung open and Cait’s mother peered through the screen at them, dressed in a threadbare robe and holding a cup of tea. Cait knew she was in her mid-sixties, Arlen Hirschberg had told them her age, but she looked much older. Deep creases lined her haggard face, and her hair, although the same auburn color as Cait’s, had somewhere along the line lost its luster and now looked dried out and brittle, as though it might snap off and clatter away in a stiff breeze.

  The woman blinke
d twice, staring uncomprehendingly for what felt to Cait like hours but was undoubtedly only a second or two. Then she clapped her left hand to her mouth and took a step back, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, my God,” she mumbled through her fingers. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

  Tears rolled down Virginia Ayers’s cheeks and Cait felt her own eyes fill and the three people stood motionless, one inside the house and two outside.

  Finally, Kevin said, “This is Caitlyn Connelly, Mrs. Ayers. This is your daughter.”

  The inside of Virginia Ayers’s kitchen looked exactly as Cait had pictured it since learning she was going to meet her birth mother. A gas stove, decades old, sat against the far wall, its ceramic finish worn and chipped. Next to the stove and of the same vintage stood a small refrigerator with rounded corners, originally white but now yellowed with age.

  The threesome sat awkwardly around a Formica kitchen table that had probably been new in the 1950s. The surface featured an unidentifiable pattern that looked a bit like spilled ice cubes and had been dulled by age and use. The same was true of the wooden chairs upon which they sat. The finish had been worn completely off the seats but the chairs were solid and sturdy and surprisingly comfortable.

  The kitchen was impeccably clean, spotless, and Cait thought she could probably eat off the floor’s ancient linoleum tiles, which, although worn and faded like everything else, sparkled as though they received a thorough mopping once a day. Maybe twice.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Virginia Ayers said softly, blowing on the steam curling into the air out of her teacup. Identical cups had been placed on the table in front of Cait and Kevin. Both had so far been ignored.

  After her initial shocked reaction at the door, Virginia Ayers recovered quickly, and instead of having the door slammed in her face as Cait had feared might happen, the woman had bustled forward, crying, and ushered them inside. She led them down a short hallway to the kitchen where introductions were made again; then she invited her guests to sit while she busied herself boiling water for tea. Cait and Kevin sat silently.

  Now Cait picked up her tea and blew away the steam like her mother had done. The delicate porcelain cup was bone-colored with a silver plated rim, clearly reserved for special guests.

  “Why did you invite us in if you don‘t want to see me?” she asked timidly. “After hearing your response to Mr. Hirschberg’s request for a meeting, we almost didn’t even bother flying up here.”

  “Oh, child, I never said I didn’t want to see you. I’ve wanted to see you for the last thirty years. I’ve wanted nothing more than to lay eyes on you myself, even if for just a few precious minutes. This might be the happiest day of my life. I only wish your father had lived to see you, too.”

  Cait sipped her tea and shook her head in confusion. “Then I don’t understand...”

  Her mother’s face darkened. It was as if a storm cloud had rolled in and taken a position directly over her head. “This is so difficult,” she said. “It’s very complicated, in ways you may not be able to understand. I’m not sure even I understand completely. I…I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “I do,” Cait interrupted gently. “Begin at the point that matters the most, at least to me. Why did you give me up? No matter what hardships you were facing in your life—money problems, job woes, personal issues, whatever—how could you believe they would be solved by giving up your newborn baby?”

  Virginia held her tea in two hands, elbows on the table, looking into the cup like it was a crystal ball.

  She shook her head. “I never wanted to give you up,” she whispered. “Neither did your father. My God, we were never the same after the night we…watched you leave. Before you were born, we were a normal couple, at least as normal as possible. But after that horrible evening…”

  Cait waited, spellbound. She glanced at Kevin and he was riveted as well. Virginia Ayers’s eyes were red-rimmed, tortured.

  She said nothing for a moment, composing herself, and then continued. “You were born in this very house, you know, and then taken from it just a few hours later. After that cursed night, your father and I never looked at each other the same way again. We blamed ourselves, we blamed each other, we blamed fate, we blamed God. We laid blame everywhere, even though we both knew we were doing the right thing by giving you up.”

  Virginia looked at Cait bleakly. “Eventually your father couldn’t take the guilt. He hanged himself in a men’s bathroom at South Station a few years later.”

  Cait gasped and even Kevin seemed startled. “But I don’t understand. If you both wanted me…why?” There seemed to be no need to finish the question.

  “As I told you before, it’s very complicated. More to the point, it’s dangerous. It’s bad enough that you’re here, but the more you learn, the worse the situation becomes.”

  “Well, it’s too late now,” Cait said. “The genie is out of the bottle. How bad could it be? Please tell me; you owe me that much after making me wonder about my history for the last thirty years, making me wonder what a tiny baby could possibly have done that was so horrible her own mother had to abandon her. Please.”

  Virginia Ayers shook her head in mute protest at the words coming from her daughter’s mouth. She had begun crying again and the tears ran down her gaunt cheeks, dropping off her jaw and splashing on to the table around her teacup like a tiny rain shower.

  “I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “It wasn’t your fault; none of it was your fault. Of course you didn’t do anything wrong. But we simply had to separate you from your twin, we had no choice in the matter.”

  Cait froze, teacup halfway to her mouth, staring at her mother in astonishment. She set her cup down on the table with a clatter and tea sloshed over the side unnoticed.

  For a long moment, no one moved.

  Then Cait said, slowly, “I have a twin?”

  18

  The chair occupied a position of honor, placed by Milo Cain squarely in the middle of the mostly unfurnished room. Dust bunnies surrounded it like tiny sentries on the scarred hardwood floor. Occasionally a stray breeze would catch one, sending it skittering through the accumulated trash into a corner, only to be blown back to the center of the room with the next air current. The chair looked like a bare-bones throne for a deposed king.

  Atop it lay the disheveled body of the prize Milo had won last night. Rae Ann dozed fitfully, her head lolling to the right, resting precariously on her bony shoulder. Her ponytails had been removed and now messy hair partially obscured her face, a clump sticking to her cheek, glued to her flesh by last night’s dried sweat and tears.

  Her sweater and short skirt—and her panties—remained undisturbed for the moment. Milo had every intention of relieving the girl of her clothing—eventually—but for now occupied himself by indulging in one of his favorite fantasies. He played with the handle of the long-nose pliers absently, snapping the jaws open and closed while he watched his guest sleep.

  Snap…Snap…Snap…

  Thick strips of silver duct tape secured Rae Ann’s forearms to the chair’s sturdy armrests, slapped down tightly by Milo to eliminate any possibility of escape. Her ankles were secured in a similar manner at the base of the front legs. Her torso he had left intentionally unencumbered. Years of perfecting his hobby had taught Milo that if tied up in this manner, his subject’s natural reaction to the pain he was inflicting would be to thrust her hips up and down over and over in an obscene parody of sex—fear and desperation driving her body in a vain attempt to escape the torture—while he played his games. This was what he lived for.

  Duct-taped to Rae Ann’s right hand as she dozed was a dingy white dishtowel. Milo had fastened a makeshift cotton mitten last night when he finished playing with her, placing the towel over her hand and then winding a long strip of the tape tightly around her wrist. A tinge of light-pink stain was just visible, indicating the blood had continued dribbling out of her missing fingernails, soaking into the terry cloth for quite some time.
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br />   It was no wonder she had thrashed around on her throne, moaning into her duct-tape gag, long after Milo went to bed on his air mattress. He had implored the girl to sleep while she had the chance but had been largely ignored. Eventually he had drifted off to a contented slumber, tuning out her pathetic noises, and slept soundly, as he always did after beginning a new adventure with a new girl.

  Now he stepped forward. He slid the pliers into the right rear pocket of his jeans and then cradled Rae Ann’s head in his hands. She groaned and blinked rapidly, her eyes dazed and sleepy. Then they snapped into focus, widening in terror as she awoke fully and the reality of her predicament struck like a sledgehammer.

  Milo smiled paternally. “Welcome back from dreamland, darling. Did you sleep well?”

  Rae Ann turned her head to the side, avoiding his probing eyes. She began begging into her duct-tape gag, the words indecipherable but their meaning clear.

  He shook his head. “We’re not done playing yet, so you may as well forget about being released. It’s not happening. Now, back to my question: Did you sleep well?”

  The girl ignored him and kept her eyes glued to the corner of the room, looking at nothing, refusing to give him the satisfaction of returning his gaze.

  Milo squeezed her head between his hands. “Answer me.”

  Still she refused to look. He sighed. He had chosen a strong-willed one this time, which in many ways represented an exciting challenge but in others was just plain frustrating. He removed his left hand from her head and flicked it out casually, smacking it against the bloody towel covering her right hand. The contact was minimal, barely more than a light tap, but his prisoner screamed into her gag, her head snapping back and forth as she tried desperately and unsuccessfully to move her injured hand out of harm’s way.