The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (10 page)

T
heir hotel wasn’t a hotel but rather a hostel, a small single story of shared and private rooms, a common kitchen, and a small living area, located south of the city center in the oldest neighborhood. The area was made up of colonial buildings and cobblestone streets, cafés, and
milongas
, all of it vibrant and alive with color, and here they would stay until Munroe had a better grasp of what the job entailed and the length of time required to pull it off.

Like Munroe, Logan was committed for the duration, but Gideon had only two weeks and Heidi three before they each had to return home. Without consulting Munroe, they’d developed their own set of expectations as to how quickly the project would progress, and as with everything else surrounding their involvement, Munroe ignored them, and ignored the expectations.

The little group had two rooms, side by side, and the boys’ master plan and the minimal operating budget called for Munroe to stay with Heidi. The walls, though thin, were a continuation of the same barrier that fourteen rows of seats had thankfully provided during the flight, and although this arrangement was better than being cooped up with either Gideon or Logan, sharing a room did not provide the solitude Munroe so desperately craved.

She needed sleep, needed it badly. She’d promised Bradford that
she’d at least try to go under without medicating, but none of this was possible while sharing a space with someone else.

Gideon had allotted a few hours to clean up, rest, and otherwise settle before reconvening in the late afternoon. Fighting the urge to drift off, Munroe lay down, waited until Heidi reached the rhythmic patterns of sleep, then slipped from her bed and headed out the door.

She was halfway along the corridor that led to the street when she heard the expected footsteps behind her. The predictability pleased her, and without turning she continued forward.

From behind, in a stage whisper that bordered on a hiss, Logan said, “Michael, please, wait for me.”

She slowed, and he continued toward her, keeping pace as she turned onto the narrow avenue that fronted the hostel. Logan said nothing as they walked but stayed so close that Munroe wanted to push him back.

It was nearing two in the afternoon, that time of day when the city stopped for lunch, and she searched for a café, some populated place nearby, where conversation would be buzzing and she could listen and absorb. She wanted submersion in the local dialects, needed tone, inflection, accent, and
lunfardo
, the local slang of the
porteños
, the port dwellers, as the residents of Buenos Aires were known.

Five minutes from the hostel on a busy pedestrian corner, Munroe found what she sought. The café was crowded enough that conversation abounded and small enough to facilitate eavesdropping.

She sat with a steaming cup in front of her and, with Logan across the table, immersed herself in the ambience that filled the room. Language washed over her, through her, and in snapshot glimpses she drew in the soul of the local culture. It was the same inexplicable absorption and understanding of language that had been with her since childhood, the poisonous gift that both created and destroyed, an ability that made it possible for her to blend and become anything to anyone.

Conversation with Logan was a slow, interspersed interaction that allowed for gaps and pauses until the room slowly emptied and she
turned to focus solely on him. “According to Heidi,” she said, “I’m missing a few things from the document folder.”

Logan paused and then chuffed—typical cover for a distasteful subject. “I’ve got some more stuff in my suitcase,” he said. “I’ll give it to you as soon as we get back to the room.”

“Why’d you hold it back?”

He shrugged. “Just wanted you to read everything else first.”

Munroe was silent a long while, irritation washing over her. The last thing she needed was evasion and truth bending from the one person she should be able to count on. She shifted forward, and tapping her finger against the table, Morse to thoughts, said, “What else are you holding back?”

He shook his head, a slow
nothing
to steady eye contact.

“You seem to have forgotten who I am,” she said, voice low and monotone. “Seem to have forgotten what it is that I do, seem to believe that I’ve become blind and dumb.”

She sat back, arms crossed, and stared at him, not with anger or malice, but with the neutral stare of analysis. “I agreed to do this job for you,” she said, “but that agreement was based on years of friendship, Logan. A friendship based on honesty and trust.” She paused, waited for effect, and then continued. “Without the honesty there is no trust, without the trust, no friendship. You’re holding out on me, and unless you’re willing to come clean, I will get up from this chair and walk out that door, and you know as well as I do that you will never find me unless I want you to.”

She paused again and said, “I want the truth, Logan.”

There was silence between them, a long and languid stillness that muted the last of the surrounding conversations into white noise.

Logan’s eyes were on the table. Munroe waited, willing him to speak.

She would not, could not, be the first to break: not for love, not for friendship, not for any bond; not in this scenario. The only way she could proceed was if trust and friendship mattered more than protecting whatever secret he harbored.

The silence drew into moments, and knowing that he had made his decision, she stood to leave. Logan reached for her before she had fully risen, an almost desperate grab across the table, his hand on hers.

“Please don’t go,” he said.

“You leave me no choice.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “Just give me a moment to collect my thoughts, okay?”

She sat again, and still silent, she waited.

When he finally spoke, his voice was a hoarse and broken whisper. “Hannah is my daughter,” he said.

For nearly the entirety of her adult years Munroe had known Logan—knew him in a way that even his childhood friends did not—and never in all this time had there been any hint or whisper to confirm what he’d just said.

Maybe it was the succession of boyfriends filtering in and out of Logan’s life that had blinded her to the possibility, or maybe it was because together he and she had shared everything else, and on trust alone she’d never expected such a secret, but either way, no matter how much she should have seen it coming, she hadn’t.

The meaning of his words, as detached from reality as they appeared to be, somehow made sense of everything else. Logan’s tenacity in finding Hannah, his connection to Charity, which went further than what he shared with the others, but most of all, his blind desperation for Munroe’s involvement in retrieving the girl.

A hundred thoughts raced around her mind, synapses connecting, details placed and then replaced in rapid reorder, so as to put new meaning to past events, but as to the one piece to which she had no fit, the only thing she said was, “Logan, you’re gay.”

“Gay men father children,” he said. “It happens all the time—men who stay in the closet, who marry and become fathers so that they appear straight to the world.” He opened his wallet and pulled out the picture that he carried always. “Michael, look at her. Just look.” He held the picture up next to his face, and the resemblance was so clear that Munroe wondered why she hadn’t seen it the first time in Tangier.

“It was a confusing time,” he said. “I was barely twenty. I’d gone from a homophobic cult to the homophobic armed forces, was still discovering who I was and what I wanted out of life. I’d just gotten back from a bloody tour …” He paused. “The shit I saw,” he said. “Death was in my face, and I wanted comfort, sanity. I was questioning everything, and I returned to what was familiar. My family had moved to Mexico, so I went to visit their Haven.

“I didn’t know if the Haven leaders would let me see them, didn’t know if because I had been assimilated into the Void they would lock me out, so I brought five months’ pay with me, a sacrifice, an offering of remorse. They let me stay for three days. Charity was there. We’d been very close friends throughout the years, and if ever I was physically attracted to a woman, it was her. I loved her. I knew that. And maybe I confused emotional love with physical love, I don’t know, but one thing led to another.

“She got pregnant. If anyone had found out it was me—an outsider—an evildoer—a doubter—she would have suffered horrible consequences. So no one knew, no one could know. Even I didn’t know until after Hannah was born. Charity couldn’t tell me because her letters were screened and her phone calls monitored, and it wasn’t until I’d returned for another visit that I learned.

“I visited as often as I could,” he said. “Almost every dollar I earned went to the Haven, and even though it was against their rules, I snuck some to Charity too, so she could try to get things for the baby and maybe eat a little bit better. I built a facade of being repentant, and since I was still in the military I had a good excuse for why I couldn’t return from the Void. I went through the motions of belief and gave them so much money that the Haven elders overlooked a lot of the rules.

“It wasn’t a far step moving from the cult to the army, you know. I could take orders, knew how to keep my mouth shut and how to become invisible. I could march to someone else’s drumbeat, and so I did a double march—in the military and in the Haven, juggling both worlds so that I could utilize the GI Bill and get the hell on with my life.

“When my contract ended, I had to stop visiting, and that’s when I started planning for Charity to get out. You were with me, so you already know that side of the story. Up until then we’d had to keep a secret of everything in order to protect Charity. Once she got to Dallas, because David was with her and Hannah looked to David as a father-type figure, we wanted to go slow in broaching the whole thing. Then David kidnapped her, and one minute to the next she was gone.”

Logan choked, struggled to regain composure and, with the words catching in his throat, said, “We knew he’d taken her back inside, and because I’d already done such a good job of buying my way in, it made the most sense that I would continue that way. While Charity has gone through the courts and the media and has done so well at keeping a spotlight on them that they hate her, I’ve done the opposite, keeping contacts and trying to get any piece of information I could from the inside. Nobody has any idea how connected Charity and I are, or how I truly feel.” Logan paused. “You see then why we could never let on? Why it’s been such a secret?

“For eight years those bastards have kept my daughter hidden and protected that fucking criminal ex-boyfriend. They’ve moved them from country to country to keep ahead of us, and now we finally know where she is.

“Please,” he said, eyes imploring. “Michael, I need you.”

Munroe nodded and squeezed his hand in a gesture of comfort and reassurance that only added to the burden she now carried. Failure had never been a viable option, but now it would come with the highest price. She understood Logan’s torment, why this silent and buried obsession had driven him through the years, and how, by proxy, the weight was now hers. The child was no longer a random picture of a girl; she was the beating of Logan’s heart.

Munroe slid her chair back and stood. “We need to go,” she said. “The others are probably up and waiting for us.”

Logan nodded and joined her. Hand in hand they returned to the hostel in silence.

Munroe stopped in front of her door, and Logan said, “Wait one
second.” She paused, and he went to his room, returning a moment later with another folder.

Eyes to the documents, holding them tightly, he said, “I held this back because, normally, once someone reads this, they ignore everything else.” He paused. “You were right—I
had
forgotten who you are. Not forgotten so much as got swept up in the desire to finally get Hannah—overwhelmed by the fear and disgust and frustration of nearly a decade.” He nodded to the folder. “I held it back because until now this hasn’t done anything except to turn our pain into a media-circus freak show. Nobody really cares,” he said. “The Chosen abused us, the media used us, law enforcement failed us, and justice is a farce. I was afraid,” he said, “that maybe you would be no different.” He looked up from the folder and met her eyes, and with tears welling in his, he handed it to her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Munroe reached for him, held him tight, and said, “I’ll bring her back, Logan. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll bring her back. You have my word.”

The information on Hannah’s whereabouts had come from Maggie, Charity’s sister, who was still a follower within The Chosen, her reticent confession a breaking of rank that had pinpointed the child’s location to the city without going so far as to betray the details that could bring them to the doorstep of the Haven in which Hannah was hidden.

Needle in a haystack, and there were four ways to find it: dumb luck, taking the stack apart piece by piece, using a magnet, or burning it to the ground. On this assignment, luck was out of the question, time was at a premium, and destruction was not an option.

Gideon and Heidi would be Munroe’s magnet.

They had each, at different periods, lived in Havens within or around Buenos Aires. But even if either one had a clear recollection of specifically where, even if they’d had an address, the information would have been worthless.

The Prophet believed that owning property tied The Chosen to the Void, and this meant that Havens were transient, relocating often, renting from landlords who had no idea that the couple who signed the lease agreement would the next day turn the property into a commune. When a stay had been worn-out, when neighbors had begun to complain, or the number of people attracted too much attention, the place would close down and The Chosen disperse.

Havens varied in size—some housed as few as thirty people and others upward of two hundred—but one constant was the necessity of clothing and feeding the many members. Havens needed cash to operate.