Finding Claire Fletcher (19 page)

After an eternity I stood at the side of the house, beneath a living room window. I did not move. My ears were tuned to any sound within. My body melted into the darkness of the night. The rhythm of my breathing fell into time with the steady, imperceptible motions and sounds of the night wilderness.

The last few days I had watched them, the ugly sensation in my stomach building inexplicably. Twice more they had argued on the porch of the wooden house. Twice more he had flown off in a spray of dirt and gravel, leaving Tiffany half-pouting, half-scowling after him. Still I could not hear what they were saying.

Earlier in the day he had been outside, circling his car. Then he began the meticulous cleansing ritual he had specially crafted for the inner sanctum of his vehicle. His obsessive-compulsive tendencies were in high-gear. I could not fathom what it might be, but between his recent behavior and Tiffany’s pouting, I knew something was going on in that house.

I didn’t know for sure that Tiffany had not witnessed me come and go the night I met Connor. I had to be certain. So I waited till after dark to creep across the road and spy, but after a half hour, I’d heard nothing.

Using my markers, I returned to the trailer in the same fashion I had left, periodically glancing behind me in case one of them woke and looked out the window. Once safely inside my trailer, I dropped to the floor and sighed. I thought about confronting Tiffany again but knew it would only make her more suspicious and more likely to rat me out—even if it was for something she made up.

For many years, Tiffany had been both a curse and a blessing.

During the third year of my captivity, Tiffany came to the wooden house like a new bride. He had been gone for several days, and when he returned, she followed him through the door, lapping at his heels, questioning my presence and shooting me looks of disdain.

From the streets of Portland, where she had lived since she left home at eleven, she came to rule his house like a queen. She was a tiny queen. Much smaller than me. In spite of starvation, beatings and malnutrition, I had grown taller and begun to fill out. The soft places on my body became harder, angles making themselves known. My breasts grew, full and round. Had I had the courage to look into the mirror he had put in my room, I would have seen that I had become a woman.

Perhaps that is why he went in search of her. She was his crowning achievement. A pet he did not have to chain, beat, starve, or drown. She was thin with the gangly movements of adolescence. Her body had not yet relinquished its awkwardness, though she feigned womanhood at every turn. Tiffany was not her real name. He had christened her with a new name as he had me.

She did not seem to mind. A new name for a new life.

He had not bothered to wash the dirt or grime from her, and it caked in every slim fold of her skin. Her hair was stringy and oily, a lackluster brown. She arrived wearing a small green shirt that exposed her pale stomach and cut off khaki pants that retained little of their original color, darkened by muck and filth. Her skin was sallow from lack of nutrition, and it stretched taut across her bones except for the two small buds where her breasts had begun to develop.

She stood over me, clutching a green canvas bag, her thin mouth coiled. She talked about me as if I were a deaf mute or a piece of furniture that was not to her liking.

“Who is this?” she said. For him, she reserved her most whiny tone.

He smiled. “This is Lynn,” he said.

“Who’s she?”

“She’s your sister.”

“I don’t have a sister.”

“You do now.”

“You said it would just be the two of us.”

He put his hands on her arms and smiled lovingly. “Oh darling, it is the two of us. Lynn won’t be any trouble at all. You’ll see. You’ll be sisters. We’re going to be a family.”

Her dark eyes looked down on me once more, beady in the baby-fat roundness that hugged her face even at her thinnest. “This isn’t what we talked about,” she said.

He bent down and kissed her, his tongue probing her small mouth, making loud, wet sounds that turned my stomach. When he pulled back, her face was flushed, and she smiled at him. He touched her cheek.

“Oh my Tiffany,” he said. “I am going to make you happy here. You’ll see. You just get settled in. This is your home now. I’m going to make you something to eat.”

She watched him leave the room.

“What’s your real name?” I asked.

“What’s it to you?”

I shrugged.

“So what are you—like his girlfriend?” Tiffany asked.

“Hardly.”

She thrust her chin out and crossed her arms. “Yeah, well, I’m his girlfriend now, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay out of my way.”

“Where are you from?”

“Portland, not that it’s any of your business.”

“You left your family for him?”

“No. I was living on the street. How bout you? You ever hook?”

“Hook?”

She rolled her eyes. “Are you dumb or something? You know, have sex for money.”

“You’re a hooker?”

“No, I only do it when I need something.”

“How old are you?”

“What’s it to you?”

“You seem really young.”

“I’m not that young. I mean I’m thirteen. I’m not a little kid, you know.”

But she had the face of a child. Dirt smudged and gaunt but still the face of a child. I stared at her. “Is he paying you?” I asked.

She smiled. “No. He asked me to come home with him.”

“Why?”

“He’s in love with me. He told me.”

“No. Why would you come home with him?”

She shrugged. “Why not? He treats me good. I get a whole house, and I don’t have to work. All I have to do is fuck him sometimes.”

I leaned forward and vomited on her sneakers.

She jumped back and shrieked. I was still retching when he flew into the room. She pointed at me. “That fucking bitch threw up all over me,” she cried.

Pulling me by my hair, he dragged me to my room and thrust me inside, locking the door. I fell to my knees, my body still heaving. When the nausea finally subsided, I got into bed and burrowed under the covers.

In the hollow place carved out of my insides, a germ of shame began to grow. It grew outward in concentric circles and multiplied. It was obvious to me that Tiffany would never be an ally. In her I would find no comfort, no solace, no escape, and no commiseration. But she did offer me something. Something that shamed me to my core, filling in the places he had pared down and whittled away to nothing. She diverted his lascivious attention away from me.

For the most part, the reign of Tiffany turned me into another kind of prisoner. I was now in solitary confinement. I lived in my little room with the fading flowery comforter and piles of books, which she liked to tear and burn in the grass outside of the house when she was most fitfully agitated by my presence. He earned my days in solitary confinement for me with a glance at me or a smile or any small gesture that Tiffany deemed inappropriate.

She had talons, long and sharp, and she dug them into the charred mass of his soul, seeking to possess him entirely. This was the salvation that shamed me. During the nights I heard them through the walls. She slept in his bed, a willing partner in his perversity, and sometimes I wept with relief that it was not me.

Noel Geary’s apartment building was in a less effulgent part of the city where the streets were unkempt and usually deserted during daylight hours. It filled up after night fell with club-hoppers and a melee of young people—college students and professionals looking to relieve the day’s tension and find someone to take home for the night. The building was a three-story brick structure which lacked décor. A single set of steps led into a cramped foyer with two walls of metal mailboxes.

There was no elevator so Connor and Mitch took the stairs to the second floor. Mitch knocked on the door to twenty-nine. A female voice yelled, “Just a minute.”

Almost five minutes later, Noel swung the door open and said without preamble, “Page. That was his last name. Rod Page.”

She looked from Mitch to Connor, her wide brown eyes taking him in from head to foot. “Who’s your friend?” she said, directing the question to Mitch.

Mitch too, looked at Connor. Connor smiled and raised a hand. “I’m Detective Parks,” he said. He pointed at Mitch. “This is my associate, Mitch Farrell.”

Noel did not take her eyes from Connor’s frame. “Well, I’m a lucky girl today,” she said. Then she spun on a bare heel and walked into the apartment, crooking a finger over her shoulder. “Come in,” she said.

In spite of themselves, both men watched the pointedly seductive sway of her rear, which was barely covered by a pair of cut-off denim shorts that showed off her long, tan legs. Connor pushed Mitch inside the apartment and closed the door behind him before Noel could turn around. Thick blonde hair cascaded down her back, and when she turned, her breasts bobbed under a tank top that left no doubt she wasn’t wearing a bra.

Noel was the kind of woman who could turn heads wearing a mumu, and she knew it. She smiled at the two men and gestured to a ratty, maroon couch propped up against the wall. “Sit,” she said.

The living room was tiny. Connor and Mitch took up most of it. They situated themselves side by side on the couch, which faced a long, oval coffee table and a television and VCR that used a small dresser for an entertainment center. Noel carried a green plastic lawn chair from one of the other rooms and placed it across from them. She sat in it as if it were a velvet-cushioned throne and crossed her bare legs, revealing a long, firm expanse of bronze-colored thigh.

“Sorry about the furniture,” she said. She waved a hand, indicating the rest of the apartment. “This place is a shithole. I’m trying to finish school, but I have to pay the bills too.”

Mitch cleared his throat. “What are you studying?” he asked.

“Communications,” she said. “I want to go into journalism.”

Connor looked at the strong lines of her face, high cheekbones, and pouty lips. He could instantly picture her as a news anchorwoman, her face pasted on city billboards advertising some channel’s hot nightly news team.

“Mind if I smoke?” she asked.

Connor shrugged. “It’s your place,” he said.

She smiled at him as if they’d just shared a private joke. Mitch shot Connor a sideways glance. When Noel went to the kitchen to retrieve her cigarettes, Connor looked at him and shrugged helplessly. Mitch simply shook his head.

She returned to her chair, and from under a pile of mail and magazines fished an ashtray from the coffee table. “So,” she said, lighting up and inhaling deeply without taking her eyes from Connor. “What do you want to know about Mr. Rod Page?”

Mitch pulled out a notepad and pen to take notes while Connor took the lead with questions. “We’d like to hear everything you can tell us about this guy,” Connor said. “Let’s start with the first time you met him.”

Noel nodded. “Well, he was my mom’s boyfriend. I never knew my dad. My mom had this habit of finding the most vile and abusive men within a fifty-mile radius and then letting them move in so that when they beat her one too many times or cheated on her, we’d have to move just to be rid of them.”

She took another drag on her cigarette and flicked ash into the ashtray, bending just enough to reveal her ample cleavage. “Those types aren’t easy to get rid of. They’re like roaches,” she said. “I was twelve when she met Rod. I don’t remember where they met or anything. I just remember he started coming around a lot. She thought he was the greatest thing she ever set eyes on. He would buy her flowers, come by and fix things around the house. All that shit none of those other assholes would even think of doing.

“Anyway, he was really creepy. I mean he looked normal enough, kind of nondescript—brown hair, brown eyes, about five nine. He was thin, just average if you know what I mean.”

Both men nodded and Mitch jotted the description down.

“Did he have any identifying features?” Connor asked. “Birthmarks, moles, tattoos, piercings? Anything like that?”

Noel shook her head. “No. He was just plain. Plain as the day is long.”

“What was it that made him creepy?” Mitch asked.

“I don’t know,” Noel said, grinding the butt of her cigarette into the ashtray before lighting another. “He was just weird. He was a little too quiet. He didn’t talk much, and when he did, he always talked in the same tone. A monotone, I guess. Like nothing upset him or got him riled up. I never even heard him raise his voice. Oh, and he never laughed. He would smile this tight-lipped, creepy little smile, but he would never laugh. I think the thing that creeped me out the most was that he was always looking at me.”

She crossed one arm under her breasts, jostling them upward against the thin fabric of her shirt. “Especially when my mom wasn’t really looking, or wasn’t in the room. He’d just stand there and stare at me.”

“You said he wasn’t a tenant,” Connor said. “But he lived with you?”