Harvestman Lodge (73 page)

“And you thought your old buddies the Ledfords were just the kind to want to watch a bunch of can-can dancers, huh?”

“No, no,” Melinda said. “What is interesting to me about it is my suspicion as to where the film was made.”

“And where’s that?”

“Keep watching … especially you, Eli, because in a few moments the dancers will be more off to one side and you can see the room they’re in.”

Eli saw no reason to abandon his fiance to any unnecessary awkwardness if he could help it. “Micah, this film was something Melinda found hidden in the cellar of my grandparents’ home. It’s empty now and we kind of sneaked in and explored the place recently. Grandpa had always been adamant with me, when I was little, that I not go into the cellar. So of course, Melinda and I went down there. Somehow she stumbled on an old Super 8 film cartridge and got it out of there without me realizing she’d found anything. Later on she made a transfer onto VHS, and here we are, watching it.”

“Where do you think this was made, Melinda?” Nancy asked.

“I think it was – there! Look!”

The phonograph music to which the dancers were bounding about skipped, then skipped again, over and over. The performance came to a stop for a few moments while someone not seen on film corrected the record player problem. During the time the performance was interrupted, most of the dancers moved randomly to one side, allowing the camera to take in the audience of men, a group who appeared mostly drunken.

Evidently the camera used to make the film had been stationary, either mounted on a tripod near the rear of the stage, or maybe on a surface such as a shelf or table. Maybe a secret camera recording, given that no one shown acted aware they were being filmed.

“I’ll be … I see my uncle in that audience!” Ledford said. “Uncle Hamilton! Shame on you, man!”

“Eli, did you see the room?” Melinda asked.

“Yeah. Definitely. This clip was filmed inside Harvestman Lodge. No doubt about it. I could see the part of the wall where – ” He quit talking abruptly, staring wide-eyed at the screen. “Melinda, I just saw – ”

The typically reticent Nancy Ledford finished Eli’s thought. “A famous face is on that piece of film.”

“Yes. I can’t believe it! Mr. Family Values Advocate himself, a lot younger than now, but Benton Sadler, without a doubt! Right there in Harvestman Lodge with a bunch of rowdy men and ribald dancing girls!”

“What do you know!” Melinda said. “I hadn’t even noticed him.”

NANCY LEDFORD’S NEXT WORDS GAVE another twist to the situation.

“I didn’t notice him, either,” Nancy said. “That’s not the famous face I was talking about. There’s one a lot more widely known than his that’s there.”

“Can we run it back and see that last part again, Melinda?” said Micah Ledford. “I did see Sadler, but I think maybe I saw that other face Nancy is talking about, too.”

Melinda ran the videotape back briefly and they all drew in closer, gazing intently at the screen, looking for the smallest of details. Fortunately the image quality at this section was less murky than at some others.

They all spotted Benton Sadler this time. He was at the rear of the room, showing no evident sign of being drunk like so many in the front part of the crowd. He had a serious, evaluative expression on his face, and was talking to a man beside him, who was nodding and replying and also looking concerned.

It took Eli a couple of moments to realize that the man beside Sadler was his grandfather, Will Keller. With his face a little more in shadow than that of Sadler, Eli hadn’t noticed him the first time through. He didn’t point him out now, either, not sure how to feel about the presence of his own grandfather in such a controversial location.

Nancy asked Melinda freeze the video for a moment and moved to the screen. She pointed at a particular part of the image, also in the rear but to the left of where Sadler and Keller were. “Keep your eye on this area,” she said. “That’s where you’ll see the face I’m talking about.”

Melinda punched the remote button again and the group fixed their eyes on the spot Nancy had indicated.

They saw it. But for Eli it was difficult to identify just whom he was seeing, despite the “famous face” talk. He had to admit, though, that there was something familiar in the face Nancy now pointed out.

“Who is she?” Eli asked.

“I know who she is, but I can show you easier than tell you,” Melinda answered. “Let me run out to the car and get something.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

ELI’S BREATH CAUGHT IN HIS THROAT as he looked at the image on the magazine advertisement Melinda brought in. Like almost everyone else in America, he’d often seen the face of the dark-haired child known simply as “Broken Flower.” The real name of the girl and where she had come from were unknown.

The image of her tear-stained, big-eyed countenance, the one that had become famous and ubiquitous, was actually a still from one of the horrific child sexual exploitation films in which the little girl had been forced by her captors to “star.” That film, and several other similar underground productions in which she’d been featured, were nothing more than filmed, violent child sexual abuse.

Once the heart-breaking image of the unidentified crying child began being used by law enforcement and government agencies as an icon illustrating and symbolizing the evils of child exploitation, the Broken Flower’s face had become famous across the North American continent and even beyond. The pleading and terror in her eyes were so palpable it was emotionally wrenching to see. The Broken Flower became the human face of child abduction and exploitation much as the face of a blonde little Boulder, Colorado girl would become the symbol of child murder in a decade yet to come. The Broken Flower’s tear-lined visage appeared on thousands of billboards, television screens, magazine and newspaper advertisements and stories, “over-the-shoulder” images displayed behind newscasters, and on posters in schools, hospitals, and police stations. Ironically, even as her face became familiar across America, the mystery of her actual name, origins, and whereabouts lingered, despite continued efforts by law enforcement agencies, social workers, and other investigators to learn who she was, and most of all, to rescue her.

All that was really known of her was that she had been trapped as a victim of an international child abduction and trafficking ring that chillingly called itself “the Flower Garden.” It was from that name that the “Broken Flower” appellation had been derived.

When she was found at last, that finding ironically became the saddest part of her heartbreaking story. Broken Flower’s badly misused, lifeless body was discovered in a trash-filled dumpster behind a convenience market just outside Los Angeles two days before the start of a new year.

Even after her passing, the little girl’s origins and identity, as well as the exact circumstances of how she had fallen into the Flower Garden’s hands, remained unknown. Broken Flower was a mystery that stubbornly refused to be solved.

The quest to identify the slain little girl dominated the news for a week after her body was discovered. The state of California, stinging under the shame of being home to the tragedy, made a very visible showing of arranging for the child to be buried in one of LA’s most high-end cemeteries, as if that somehow helped, with a lavish marker marked only with the words “AMERICA’S BROKEN FLOWER”. There was plenty of room left on the gleaming marble for the later addition of her real name, birth date, and so on, assuming those would someday be found.

The back-story of the little girl, though, continued to prove elusive.

That is, at least until the evening of July 2, 1985, in the family room of the Buckingham house in Tylerville, Tennessee. Because visible in the background of the video-transferred Super 8 film images playing on the television in that room was a clear view of that same famous-yet-anonymous little girl, being bodily picked up by a small-framed Asian man and carried deftly out a door, a Caucasian man with long hair following after. The faces of both men were caught for a moment by the camera.

THE SIGHT STUNNED BOTH ELI AND MELINDA.

The long-haired man’s face looked much like the one that had startled Melinda in that big election party photograph at the newspaper office. The other man, the one who actually carried the little girl out of the room, was Asian, probably Korean. His face appeared to be the same one Eli had seen when he looked out the window of Coleman Caldwell’s disused law office in the Arcade building. The same man, younger.

Nancy was softly crying. “You okay, honey?” Ledford asked her.

“Yes … I’m just … it’s just that I’ve always been troubled by what happened to that poor little girl … and I’ve always wondered where she came from. Dear God, Micah, she came from here!”

“It would seem so.” Ledford turned to Eli. “Are you certain these images are from Harvestman Lodge?”

“No question about it in my mind.”

“Eli,” Melinda said, “I hate to mention the shallower side of this, but do you realize we’ve stumbled on a major national news story here? One that nobody, absolutely nobody except us in this room, knows about? Think about it! Ever since that poor girl’s corpse was found in that dumpster, this entire nation has been trying to find who she was and where she came from. Now we know she came from here, and now it probably won’t be nearly as hard to determine who she was, and whose child she was.”

Eli shook his head. “Listen to me, Melinda: to hell with the news side of this, for now. And even forget about the Broken
Flower girl … she’s beyond either help or harm at this point. There’s only two things we have to concentrate on. The first is that Megan says she saw an Asian man watching your house, and with him a man who looked like a Parvin. I saw men of that same description in downtown Tylerville. And here is the really frightening part of it: the Asian man we just saw on that film clip my grandfather made appears to be the very same one I saw out that office window in the Arcade building. And we just now watched him carrying away a little girl who went on to become the very symbol of child abduction and abuse in this country.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” Melinda murmured, putting it together.

“They’re back, Melinda. And they may have their sights set on your sister. We have to make sure Meggy is safe, in case that’s true,” said Eli. “Before anything else, we need to protect your sister. And right now, she’s probably out in a flimsy tent in her friend’s backyard, clueless and unprotected.”

“We have to go get her and bring her home,” Melinda said. “Oh, God, God … please protect Meggy, God! Please!”

“Hey, folks, I’m the old man in this particular room, so let me say something,” Ledford said. “May I do that?”

“Go ahead,” said Eli.

“I can see something starting to happen here,” Ledford said. “There’s a feeling of panic setting in, and if you don’t mind me saying, it’s too early for that. We’ve jumped from seeing something that happened over a decade ago to all at once declaring Melinda’s little sister to be in danger. That’s too big a leap to be credible at this point.”

Eli said, “But we’ve seen the faces of the two men, both past and present.”

“We’ve seen them on that TV screen there. You are the only one who has seen them here in town in the present.”

“True. But I know what I saw.”

“Do you? You have to admit that it’s a little dicey, trying to say with any certainty that a face on an old film from years ago, and a face you saw through an office window and a car window, are the same man. There are a lot of Asian people in this country, and that could have been anybody, just passing through town.”

“He had a Parvin with him. And there’s a Parvin on that old film clip, with him.”

“But like I said, you can’t know for sure it’s the same ‘him.’ You really can’t even know that it’s a Parvin either in that film, or in the car you saw. It could be somebody in both cases who simply happens to bear a resemblance.”

Melinda spoke. “I wasn’t with Eli when he saw the man in the car with the Asian, but I can say without any real doubt, that the man in the film is absolutely a Parvin. I know that distinctive family look very, very well. And they’ve almost all got it.”

“You just strengthened my case, Melinda,” Ledford said. “The very fact that so many Parvin men bear such a strong resemblance to one another makes it impossible to be certain which one you’re seeing. And when you throw in the big gap of years between the film and the man Eli saw in town, things get even more shaky.”

Eli said, “Micah, you should have been a lawyer. Everything you’re saying makes good sense, and I can’t find a flaw in your logic. Even so, let me tell you that I remain absolutely sure that the men carrying out that little girl in that old film, and the men I saw in the car outside Coleman Caldwell’s old law office, are the same men. All I can ask is that you trust me on this.”

“And I’ll add this,” Melinda cut in. “I’d rather err on the side of over-protecting my little sister than in turning the benefit of the doubt in the other direction.”

“That makes sense to me,” Ledford said, his wife nodding agreement. “So exactly where is your sister now?”

“At a friend’s house. The Bill Lane family … their daughter Hannah is Megan’s age, and one of her best friends. I’m going to get her,” Melinda said, and rose.