Lost Girls (6 page)

Her rift with Muriel had long since separated Megan from the rest of her family. But this would be Lorraine’s first grandchild—and for the first time, Megan was living away from Muriel, receptive to Lorraine in a way she’d never been. When her due date approached, Megan contacted her caseworker and asked if she could leave St. Andre’s and stay with Lorraine. Lorraine jumped at the chance to take in Megan when Muriel would not.

For two weeks, Megan was able to experience her mother for the first time without Muriel filtering everything she saw. Lorraine was sober now, in her late thirties, with dark circles under her eyes that revealed her years of hard living. After a few years in Florida, she had moved back to West Portland. She was working at a Domino’s managed by her boyfriend, Bill, whom she credited with keeping her from falling off the wagon. Lorraine seized the chance to tell her daughter everything she’d wanted her to know. She railed against Muriel and the injustice she believed had been done to her—to them both, really, and to Greg, she said. She talked about how horrible a mother Muriel had been to her when she was younger, and how Lorraine and Megan had been separated for no good reason. Megan’s eyes widened as she listened. She seemed to sympathize. Lorraine held out hope that she did. Of course, Megan had a lifetime of longing to remind her who had stayed with her all those years and who hadn’t. Two weeks wasn’t nearly enough to persuade Megan that she had been brought up by the wrong person.

Megan delivered a healthy baby girl in the summer of 2006. She named her Liliana. By then she had left Lorraine’s; now she returned to Scarborough, taking the baby with her. Her choice stung Lorraine. In time, she would decide that Megan couldn’t handle the truth—that she had been poisoned against her mother. Still, a door had been opened; she and Megan would stay in touch, even if they felt like strangers. And something about meeting her mother and having the baby seemed to chasten Megan a little. When she finally came home to Crystal Springs, she seemed determined to do things differently. Megan could tell herself she had it all now—she’d never be lonely again—and that as long as she lived, nothing would come between her and Lili.

Motherhood became Megan. In the beginning, she was never anything other than ecstatic about the baby and gentle toward her. The same people who’d been cowed and intimidated by her were in awe of how happy she seemed with her daughter, how peaceful and free of anger. Gone were the histrionics, the temper, the volatility. “Megan loved her daughter,” Greg said. “Liliana was everything to her.”

But Megan began to feel some new pressures. The four hundred dollars a month she received from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services wasn’t enough to feed and clothe her and Lili, at least not the way Megan would have liked. The girl who once demanded the best of everything, who shoplifted makeup to compete with the rich kids of Scarborough, was looking at a life very much like her mother’s and Nana’s, living on government checks. Megan felt a need to deliver for her daughter and secure her future while also securing something more for herself—a life apart from the baby, one that promised success. No matter how much she loved Lili, that love did nothing to cure her of the elemental loneliness she’d always had.

AMBER

Kim and Amber were both tiny and skinny, with the same long nose that had a little bulb on the tip. The Overstreet sisters were born six years apart in Pennsylvania—Kim in 1977, Amber in 1983. Kim may have been the firstborn, but Amber was Margie’s baby: Everything about her was cute; anything she wanted, she’d get. Even Kim, who resented her sometimes, used to tell her that her legs looked like meaty drumsticks. When Amber grew up, she weighed a hundred pounds soakin’ wet, as her family put it, and stood four-eleven. Their dad, Al, liked to rib her that she was a half inch short of qualifying for disability payments as a little person. “Why don’t you take your shoes off ?” he told her. “You’d get a check every month for the rest of your life.”

Al had grown up in Wilmington, North Carolina, where his father had been a farmer. Bakery work sustained Al for years. He made rolls for Oroweat, and for the Federal Bake Shop, and then for Donut Town in Bristol, Pennsylvania, fifteen minutes outside of Philadelphia. That’s where he met Margaret Ann Sassy. She was a waitress at a seafood restaurant, four years younger than Al, and attractive, with dark hair, like Amber’s would be. Margie had a much more comfortable childhood than Al. Their daughters, looking at photos years later, would decide their mother’s side was just plain rich, and she’d gone and run off with a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks. To Amber and Kim, at least, it was a grand love story.

Shortly after Amber was born, the family moved from Pennsylvania back to North Carolina. Al reconnected with his father for the first time in years, and Kim remembers family dinners with a bunch of cousins she never knew she had. At first they lived several hours away from Wilmington in Gastonia, then a tough working-class town next to Charlotte, where Al had found work in the knitting mills nearby in Dolford.

Gastonia was where the first tragedy of Amber’s life took place. She was five years old. Through all that came afterward, Al and Margie stayed close to their daughters. If all four of them ended up suffering from the same affliction—addiction was, it seemed, the Overstreet family business—they each did so privately. Call it pride or denial, but to them, it was how they expressed their love.

The tragedy happened at home. Amber’s family was renting the garage apartment of another family’s house. According to Kim and Al, a twenty-six-year-old neighbor named James would take Kim and Amber and another girl to play tennis at the local park. Amber would retell the story in different ways to different friends over the years, but a few of the same details always came up: that James grabbed Amber and took her to the bushes . . . that Margie caught James and Amber in bed together nude . . . that Margie couldn’t pull him out of bed, since he weighed too much . . . that Margie called the police.

What came next was mixed up in everyone’s memory. Kim always thought that James went to jail and Al went to jail for shooting him. But Al said he bought a shotgun and threatened to blow James’s brains out and the police intervened before he could. No formal charges were filed. No arrest record for the incident appears to exist today, suggesting that everyone decided to walk away.

The Overstreets moved immediately. The entire family fell to pieces. Kim said that Amber went on to blame her mother, and Margie blamed herself, too. Margie was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown, and when she got out, she remained separated from Al, moving with Amber to Charlotte and later Wilmington, bunking in an aunt’s house. Kim stayed with Al, except when he served a jail sentence after racking up too many DUIs; then she stayed for a short while with a friend’s family. The rape scarred Amber physically as well as emotionally. Several friends and family members said that she told them she couldn’t have children because of what James had done to her. But the years eventually papered over what happened, and when Amber was in junior high school, they all settled together—first in Wilmington, then in Florida, then back in Wilmington.

The family lived for a year in Carolina Beach—the redneck Riviera of Wilmington—and then in a housing project called Nesbitt Courts. The 216-unit development was whites-only when it opened in 1940, and it held on to its reputation for being the only project in Wilmington that housed whites. Kim’s first baby, a girl named Marissa, was born when they lived at Nesbitt Courts. Amber and her friends would race home to play with her. Kim was almost twenty when Marissa was born. The father was a kid from the neighborhood named Mootnie. She’d have two more children with him, though another boyfriend would end up raising all three.

Life was about as stable for the Overstreets at Nesbitt Courts as it ever would be. Al worked at Krispy Kreme. Margie worked part-time managing properties and looked after Kim’s baby. By then Amber’s mother had become an almost ghostly presence around the house. Slender, with shoulder-length hair that had turned prematurely gray, she kept cases of Olde English in the pantry and would sip from the warm forty-ounce bottles bright and early in the morning. Amber earned A’s and B’s, smart enough that if she had to get a teacher’s note signed by a parent because she cut class, she’d trick her mom into signing it by setting up her little desk and pretending she was playing school: “Ah, yes, yes, Mrs. Overstreet, could you sign this?” Margie, watching TV, would sign anything.

Amber and Kim had just one fight that Al knew of—a knockdown, drag-out brawl that they wouldn’t let him break up. They told him that he had better get out of the way or he might get hurt. More often, they looked after each other. One time a member of the Crips gang came to the house looking for Amber; Kim, pregnant at the time, came out with a baseball bat. When the sisters clashed, it would be because Amber felt entitled to everything of Kim’s—her clothes, her perfume, anything sitting around her room. Kim would see her sister wearing something of hers and tell her she couldn’t, and Amber would act like Kim hadn’t said a thing. Their lives were symbiotic. What was Kim’s, Amber always thought, was rightfully hers.

Teresa didn’t look like a madam to Kim. She had red hair and green eyes and freckles—not exactly a knockout but pretty, with a boob job that brought her up to size D. Unlike Kim, Teresa had her life figured out. She had a husband who was in the military, based in another town, and rarely home. He was, if anything, a junior partner in the business. Teresa was the boss, and a successful one.

When they met, Kim was nineteen and a sophomore at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, studying sports medicine and paying tuition by waiting tables at two different restaurants—Bojangles’ and Freddie’s Italian-American Grill. Kim and Teresa were in a psychology class together; Teresa was a year ahead and a few years older. She didn’t keep her living a secret. Coed Confidential advertised in the local paper, promising “entertainment” for men: solo appointments, bachelor parties, massages. But Teresa didn’t talk about herself at first. Instead, she listened as Kim talked about how her own life was unraveling.

At the start of the school year, Al and Margie had been rocked by back-to-back health setbacks. First, Al had gone to get a hearing aid, and the MRI had revealed tumors on his acoustic nerve. After surgery, he was at home in bandages when Margie collapsed with a perforated ulcer. She, too, was rushed into surgery. Amber was just thirteen, so Kim became the nurse for both parents. What little sports-medicine training she had came in handy as she repacked her mother’s bandages and bathed her, and then turned around and rebandaged her dad, too, minding the staples in his head. Kim was holding on, but the financial pressure was mounting. Waiting tables wasn’t going to cover it.

Teresa kept listening as with each class, Kim became more despondent, losing heart. Then one day Kim said she’d seen an ad for amateur night at a strip club. She was thinking of trying to win the five-hundred-dollar prize.

Teresa shook her head violently. “You’re not gonna make shit there. You won’t make half of what we make.”

“I’m not gonna have sex,” Kim said.

“That’s not what it is,” said Teresa. “It’s about the show.” And then she proposed a half-measure. “Why don’t you come answer phones for me?”

The rate depended on location. Calls within reasonable driving distance of central Wilmington were $150 an hour, cash only. The dancer collected $100, and the rest went to the house. Calls from farther away charged more—Carolina Beach was maybe twenty minutes away, and that was $200 an hour per girl—but since they were the ones driving there, the girls kept the extra money. The girls were making $800 a night or more, just like that, while their friends were working eight or ten hours a day at places like Bojangles’ for ten dollars an hour.

When a guy called Coed Confidential, he would give his address and directions. During a normal appointment, the girl would come in, take the money, and go in the bathroom or bedroom to get changed. The client was supposed to give the girl adequate time to fit into her outfit—no pounding on the door, no shouts to hurry up. About thirty minutes later, Teresa would call to let the girl know how long she’d been there. The rule was no longer than an hour, unless the customer was paying more. The phone call from Teresa was a sort of safety valve: If she couldn’t get ahold of the girl, she’d know to be concerned. There were other security provisions: Girls couldn’t go alone to a party; more than one guy necessitated the hiring of more than one girl.

Kim had no trouble perfecting her delivery of the script:
A girl comes out, she models lingerie, she dances for you topless, she ends up nude. Some girls offer massages, but if she’s rubbing your back, she has to be dressed. Tipping is optional.
Sex, or “full service,” was never officially part of the deal. Inevitably, guys would ask, and the girl working the phones had a stock answer:
No, that’s against the law. They will be topless, and they give you a massage as long as they have bottoms on
. The girls were allowed to keep all tips, which was tacit encouragement to do more than dance, provided a client was willing to tip big. Teresa made a big show of not wanting to hear about any side deals. “Do what you want to do to earn the tips,” she said, “but just know that we don’t condone it.” She also covered herself. Each girl signed a form drawn up by Teresa’s lawyer, declaring that she worked as an independent contractor and that Teresa was not employing her to do anything illegal.

Those early years, it was all about fun, and in some ways it was innocent. They weren’t prostitutes, at least on paper, and at times they didn’t even feel like escorts. They were best friends. Shortly after Kim started, Teresa moved to a breathtaking plantation-style house: eleven hundred dollars a month in rent for four bedrooms, hardwood floors, a grand staircase, huge living rooms on the ground floor, an antique rug, and a big Jacuzzi in one of the bathrooms. All the girls who worked for her kept extra clothes there. It was like they were college kids, crashing together in the same stunning dorm.

Teresa made it easy to work for her. If you wanted to go on a call, you did. If you didn’t, you didn’t. When you made what you considered enough money, you had the rest of the day to do whatever you wanted. The big-money calls were at resorts like the Bald Head Island golf club off the coast of North Carolina. Those jobs were ideal: Guys on golf getaways, wives left at home. The girls would dance and spend the rest of the time doing a bunch of coke, playing poker, and negotiating side deals for sex. At the end of the weekend, they’d come home with a few thousand dollars each. For many of the girls, working for Teresa was about more than the parties—it vaulted them into a life of affluence, with all the trappings. Lending practices were so loose that the girls could pick up a car-loan application form at OfficeMax and have Teresa fill it out with whatever amount the girl wanted, and in no time, she would be approved.

Even answering phones, Kim was making enough to forget all about waiting tables. Teresa was kicking twenty-five dollars of her own commission over to Kim for every call, which translated into hundreds of dollars a night. Kim poured herself into the job, working nights and days, skipping classes. Before long, she sat in on interviews for new girls. One night, when a few of the girls were hired to perform during a bachelor party at the Beau Rivage, a golf club in Wilmington, Kim decided to go and observe. The guests were a bunch of doctors and lawyers from New York and New Jersey, about seventeen in all. Kim watched as the girls brought in suitcases with black lights and glow-in-the-dark body paint. One girl brought vibrators to play with while she stripped. Another brought Ping-Pong balls with which to perform the crudest, most notorious bachelor-party trick. They were all just stripping and dancing, no full service, and still Kim saw how the money—the tips—flew. One girl gave a hand job. Kim had never watched someone do that before, and she was a little stunned to be right there in the room while it happened. The takeaway for Kim was more than powerful. It was seismic. For just two hours of work, each girl made five hundred dollars plus tips. She figured they each came home with close to nine hundred dollars.