Читать книгу Good as Gone: A dark and gripping thriller with a shocking twist - Amy Gentry, Amy Gentry - Страница 8

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The first thing I see is her pale hair, all lit up in the rosy, polluted glow of the Houston sunset.

Then her face — ashen skin stretched thin over wide cheekbones flushed red across the top so that the dark circles stand out under her sunken eyes. The face looks both young and old. She wears worn-out jeans with holes at the knees, a T-shirt. She opens her mouth to speak, and I see that her feet are bare.

There’s something familiar about her, but it’s like my entire body has become fused with my surroundings, my brain rewired to resemble blind hands fumbling, the sensory data bumping uselessly around in search of something to latch onto: Hair. Eyes. Young. Bare.

Her eyes widen, and the color drains from her face.

My hands stretch out in front of me, palms out, fingers spread wide, ready to shield me from the nuclear sunset or as if I’m about to fall down, but it’s the girl on the porch who falls, her knees buckling so that she folds up neatly as she collapses onto the mat, blond hair catching lightly in the azalea bushes on her way down. I open my mouth and I think I must be yelling for Tom, although I can’t hear it because my brain is still blinded by the sunset glancing off her face. He comes running up behind me, stops, and then thunders through the doorway. When I look again, the girl has all but vanished into his arms, the loops and tangles of her hair crushed between his fingers as he hugs her to his chest, rocking back and forth. “Julie, Julie, Julie,” he is sobbing, like the chorus of the nightmares that I now know have never stopped but have been unreeling every night for eight years, and perhaps all day long as well, in a continuous stream I have simply chosen to deny.

The sight of Jane standing stock-still in the hallway flips the light switch back on in my head. “Call 911,” I manage to say. “Tell them we need an ambulance.” To Tom, who is making strange, animal sounds of grief I have also heard in my dreams, I say, “Bring her in.”

And just like that, the worst unhappens. Julie is home.

The first twenty-four hours after Julie’s reappearance are oddly similar to the first twenty-four hours after her disappearance, a mirror symmetry that lends extra significance to every detail. There’s the humidity of the long, hot summer’s beginning, the crape myrtles that were already dropping their flowers when she was taken in early fall just now starting to put out blossoms like crumpled scraps of tissue paper. There are the sirens blaring their way through the neighborhood up to our house, just like last time, but bringing EMS rather than the police and at sunset rather than sunrise, so the neighbors who open their front doors to see what’s happening are wearing work clothes rather than bathrobes, holding oven mitts rather than newspapers. Everything is backward, like a photo negative of tragedy.

Only one of us can ride in the ambulance with Julie, and Tom immediately steps forward, so Jane and I climb into the SUV and follow behind. When we pull up to the ED, they are unloading her gurney, now connected to a rolling IV, and she is wheeled inside and installed in a curtained-off room with that excruciating combination of slowness and urgency native to emergency departments.

The next thirty minutes pass like hours under the fluorescent lights. Julie wakes, mumbles, sleeps again. Tom sits by the bedside, holding Julie’s hand and murmuring something unintelligible; I pace; Jane leans; nurses come in at odd intervals, never telling us anything but instead asking for details about insurance or Julie’s medical history, questions that seem so useless and redundant that I become convinced some of these people just want to see the famous Whitaker girl in the flesh. One nurse comes in to draw blood, and Julie starts awake at the cold wet cotton swab on her inner forearm, keeps her eyes open just long enough to nod vaguely at the nurse’s bright questions, then fades as soon as the needle is in. The curtain that separates us from the hall flutters as people rush by and does nothing to block out the cacophony of squeaking wheels, indecipherable PA announcements, and hallway conferences punctuated with loud sighs and occasional laughter.

When the doctor finally comes, she sends everyone out of the room over Tom’s and my objections.

“I just need her for two seconds,” she says. “You — Mom, Dad — don’t go anywhere.”

Needless to say, we don’t, but Jane takes the opportunity to find a restroom. The doctor emerges from the curtained room after a hushed conversation I strain unsuccessfully to hear, and I glimpse Julie in the background, awake but flushed and disoriented, before she pulls the curtain shut behind her. Julie is dehydrated, the doctor tells us, suffering from exhaustion and exposure, and hasn’t eaten for a few days, but there don’t seem to be any injuries or illnesses, no substances in her bloodstream. “After the fluids take effect, most likely she’ll be right as rain,” she finishes, her use of the expression right as rain proving she cannot possibly have read the chart, or she has never watched the news, or she is so calloused by her job that she lacks the power to think past a stock phrase indelibly associated in her mind with the word fluids. “Just get her to the clinic for a follow-up after a few weeks. They’ll schedule her when she’s discharged.”

As we file back into Julie’s room, there’s a knock on the wall, and a police detective steps in after us. Fortyish, with dark hair, looking not unlike a police detective from a TV show but far less attractive, he leaves the curtain open a foot and stares at Julie from the improvised doorway.

“Julie Whitaker,” he says. “Unbelievable.”

Julie doesn’t take any notice of him, but on seeing Tom and me again, she collapses back onto the pillow, crying tearlessly. Tom rushes to enfold her in his arms. Noting my expression, the doctor says they’ll move Julie to a room with a door as soon as one opens up, and then she hustles out. The cop introduces himself as Detective Overbey and starts asking me questions about the circumstances of Julie’s arrival, which I answer as best I can considering that, for all I know, she could have come straight out of the glowing orange sunset or a god’s forehead or the side of a man opened up while he was sleeping. The question of how she was delivered to us seems that unimportant.

In the background, I hear Tom repeating the words “You’re safe now. It’s okay. The doctor says you’re going to be okay.” He is talking to himself as much as to her, and though the words aren’t meant for me, they’re so comforting that I let my attention drift toward them and away from Detective Overbey’s questions.

He notices. “I’d like to talk to Julie alone for just a few minutes.”

“No,” Julie says, clutching Tom’s arm but looking at me. “Don’t go.”

“This won’t take long.”

Tom stands directly in front of Julie’s bed. He’s a tall, broad man, imposing even with a gut. “Absolutely not. We left her alone once tonight, for the doctor. We’re not leaving her again.”

Tom and the detective begin to argue back and forth, and the tiny curtained room shrinks. The same words keep coming up, and at first I think Detective Overbey is questioning our mental health or Julie’s; he is talking about the sane, the safe. Finally, he addresses Julie directly, speaking right through Tom. “I know you’re not feeling well, ma’am, and I hate to bother you right now,” he says. “But I need to ask: Were you sexually assaulted?”

Julie just looks at the detective and nods. Tom sets his jaw, and I find a moment to be glad Jane is still not back from the restroom.

Detective Overbey explains about the forensic exam, and I realize SANE and SAFE are acronyms. “The sexual assault nurse examiner has already been dispatched,” he says. “She should be here soon to set up the exam room. The minute you’re off the IV, she can get started.”

Julie shakes her head no, and Tom steps forward, looking ready for a fistfight.

Detective Overbey, equally imposing, stands his ground. “If there’s any evidence of sexual assault, it’s best to collect it —”

“Listen,” Tom says, pointing his finger at the detective for emphasis. “We’ve done everything the police told us to since day one and never asked a single question we weren’t supposed to. Eight years later, after we’ve —” He chokes. “Years since we’ve heard any news, and our missing daughter shows up on our doorstep, no thanks to you. And now you want to keep her up all night asking her questions, treating her like a crime scene?” He snorts. “We’ll come in tomorrow.”

Detective Overbey starts to answer but a faint noise from Julie’s bed stops him.

“The last time was — a long time ago,” she says quietly. “At least six months.”

Detective Overbey sighs as if the news that our daughter hasn’t been raped in six months is disappointing but acceptable. “Okay, then. We still recommend you come back for the exam, but from a forensic perspective there’s no rush. Rest up, and we’ll get a full statement from you folks at the station tomorrow.”

Julie nods weakly. Tom slumps forward, hands on knees.

Jane comes in, a juice box in her hand. She must have gotten it from the nurses’ station. When she sees Julie awake, she smiles shyly and says, “Welcome back.”

Six hours later, in the middle of the night, Julie is discharged, fully hydrated and wearing hospital scrubs to replace the scruffy T-shirt and jeans the police took for evidence. She leans on Tom’s arm while I sweep everything into my purse: prophylactic antibiotics for chlamydia and gonorrhea, a prescription for Valium in case she has trouble sleeping, and a folder stuffed to bursting with pamphlets on sexual assault and Xeroxed phone lists for HPD Victim Services and various women’s shelters. It also holds Detective Overbey’s card, tucked into four slits in the front of the folder so it won’t get lost. I remove it and slip it into the back pocket of my jeans.

Tom drives us home, Julie sleeping in the back seat of the SUV on the disposable pillow they let her keep. Jane, who slept quite a bit in the hospital, now stares at Julie silently. Nobody talks — in part because we don’t want to wake Julie, but also because we ourselves do not want to wake up. Or maybe that’s just me.

It’s 3:00 a.m. when we open the back door and walk into the kitchen through the laundry room. It looks like some other family’s house preserved on a perfectly normal day, a museum of ordinariness: over the washing machine, a blouse drips dry; on the cutting board, a heap of glistening red chopped tomatoes lies next to a knife in a puddle of red juice. Through the doorway to the dining room, Jane’s elaborate homecoming meal sits forgotten on the dining-room table, the salad wilted, the breading on the fried shrimp gone soggy, the sauce jelled on the cold, gummy pasta. As the others pass through the kitchen into the living room, I head into the dining room and start picking up the dishes full of pasta. It takes only a moment for me to stack the evidence that we were surviving in the kitchen sink.

When I join them in the living room, Jane and Tom are standing awkwardly by the sofa with Julie, like people putting up a distant relative for the night. Tom is shaking his head, red-faced, and when I realize what they are discussing, my efforts in the dining room seem futile.

Tom moved his office into Julie’s room seven years ago. He did not discuss it with me first; nor did he let me know he was quitting his accounting job, the job we moved to the Energy Corridor for in the first place, to go into private practice as a tax consultant. One day I passed her room and saw it had been transformed from bedroom to carefully tended shrine, a desk and file cabinet where her bed used to be, posters replaced with framed pictures of Julie. I understood without being told that this new office was to be his command center for the search, that he was turning his longing for her into a full-time job. Only now, with Julie standing in front of us, does it look like an exorcism.

“I don’t mind the sofa,” Julie is saying.

“She can have my room,” Jane says, still hanging back, like she’s afraid to stand too close. Clutching her elbow awkwardly, she looks more like her ten-year-old self than I would have thought possible, though I notice with a pang that she’s taller than Julie by quite a few inches. Jane stares at Julie, not hungrily, like Tom, who looks as if he’ll never let her out of his sight again, but with a wary expression. “I don’t mind.”

“No, please,” Julie says. “I don’t want to take anyone’s room.”

I have a sudden longing to bed her down between Tom and me, like we did when she was a seven-year-old with a fever and couldn’t stop shivering. This, however, is not practical, and meanwhile, the living room yawns open like a mouth around us, the windows dark behind the curtains.

“Tom, the air mattress?” I offer. “She could be in her room until we can move your desk out.”

“A door that closes would be nice,” she says, and it’s decided. She has no toiletries or luggage, and no one wants to ask why, so Jane gives her a T-shirt and shorts to sleep in and I scrounge up a spare toothbrush still in its package. After the bustle is over, Julie disappears behind the door of Tom’s office like the sun behind a cloud. I wonder if she is comforted or disturbed by all the pictures of her in there.

By the time we have seen Jane to bed as well, with reassurances that she can decide if she wants to come to the station when she wakes up, it’s almost dawn. The bedroom door closes and my legs want to buckle under me, but I also feel more awake than I have for years. My mind is racing, or rather somersaulting, tumbling over itself as I go through my bathroom routine.

Tom says, “Anna?” in a way that suggests it is the second or third time. I come out of the bathroom and see him lying on his side of the bed, looking up expectantly.

Instead of finding out what he wants, I surprise myself by saying exactly what I’m thinking: “What are we going to do?”

“She’s back,” he says. “We don’t have to do anything anymore.”

I slide out of my jeans, keeping my T-shirt on to sleep in.

“She’s back,” he repeats, like a stubborn child.

“We don’t know what she’s been through.” I think of the detective’s card tucked into the pocket of my jeans as I hang them on the back of the closet door. “We have to be careful.”

“We should have been more careful then.” His voice breaks a little.

I emerge from the closet. “She may not be — the same.”

“None of us are,” Tom says. There’s a long pause. “You didn’t believe she would ever come home.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed. I can feel his eyes burrowing into the back of my head, and I close my own, tasting the accusation.

After a moment I turn to face him. “I didn’t believe we would find her,” I say, trusting him to know the difference.

He doesn’t answer. But as I lean over to turn off the light on my nightstand, I feel something shift, just a little piece of the night air between us moving aside, like a breeze wafting through a chink in a wall. He turns onto his side, facing away from me, but there’s something about this argument that reminds me of the marriage we used to have, the arguments that bubbled up only when we were in bed together. How gamely we entered every fight back then, knowing we’d still wake up next to each other in the morning.

Now, staring at Tom’s back, I think, Julie is home. Anything can happen.

I see her face again the way I saw it on the front porch, just barely familiar, the flesh melted away from her cheekbones and jaw, leaving a butterfly of bone.

“Good night,” I say.

I sleep until noon and wake to the noise of pans clattering downstairs, voices in the kitchen.

I know this dream. It’s the one where Julie shows up, and I say, “I’ve dreamed about you so many times, but this time you’re really home.” Now I get up and splash water on my face in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror, waiting for the features to distort, to drift. Everything stays put. This one is real.

A chill runs through me and a faint headache alights in my frontal lobe. I pull on my jeans from last night and head downstairs.

The kitchen table is bathed in light. My radiantly blond daughter sits on the side nearest the window, still wearing Jane’s T-shirt, which is too big on her. Tom beams at her from the head of the table as they talk — about nothing, it seems: orange juice, the weather, does anybody want more eggs. For a moment it looks almost normal. Then Jane comes in with a glass in her hand and sits across from Julie, and a shiver walks down my spine as I observe the odd regularity that has returned to our family: a girl for each side of the table, four sides for four people. The words fearful symmetry pop into my head.

“Good morning,” I say from the doorway.

“You slept forever,” Jane says, but Julie is already getting up and in three long strides she has embraced me. It takes me aback. How long has it been since a daughter of mine came rushing into my arms from across the room? Just as I am starting to notice the scent of her hair, she pulls back and looks at me, her hands sliding down my arms to grasp my hands. “Hi, Mom,” she says, a little awkwardly, and for a moment we are looking straight into each other’s eyes.

I have become accustomed to looking at Jane, who shares my distinctive features, my sharp nose and deep-set eyes. As I stare into Julie’s woman’s face, I realize there are no moles, no bumps or blemishes or wrinkles.

She’s perfect.

She breaks away, embarrassed, and I realize I have been staring.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I haven’t seen your face in so long.”

“I know,” Tom says.

“Sit down, I’m just getting some coffee,” I say. “Did you sleep okay?” There’s a big pan on the stove with some scrambled eggs left in it, and I put some on a plate, suddenly ravenous.

“I slept very well,” she says, like a polite guest. “The air mattress was comfortable.”

“She’s only been up for a few minutes,” Tom says. “I’ve been fielding phone calls from the police department all morning. Come in whenever you want apparently means ‘If you’re not here by nine you’ll be hearing from us.’ ” His face darkens. “I suppose it makes sense. They’re worried about the press. I’m sure that’ll be starting anytime now.”

Julie’s smile fades. “I guess we should probably go, now that Mom’s awake.”

Tom puts a hand over hers on the table. “You take as much time as you need.”

“The sooner we go, the sooner it’ll be over,” I say.

Tom’s eyes tear up, and I realize he doesn’t want to know what she went through. At the same time, it occurs to me that I do.

Julie is studying my face with an almost grateful expression. “Yes,” she says. “I want to get it over with.” I can tell by the way she’s looking at me that Julie needs me there, and no one else. I can’t keep Tom away from the police station, but I decide I’m going to persuade him to stay out in the hall, which means Jane will have to come too, to give him someone to look after.

“Come on, Julie,” I say. “I’ll find you something in my closet to wear.” A skirt, I think, looking at her dwindled frame. And I’ll need some safety pins.

“He said he would kill me if I struggled. Kill my family.”

“You believed him?” says Overbey.

We are sitting in the police station — me, Julie, Overbey, and a younger female detective, Detective Harris — in a private room with frosted-glass windows and a single table. Tom is outside waiting in the lobby with Jane, per Julie’s request. Overbey wanted to question Julie alone, but she looked from his face to my face and then back, and he sighed and invited me in. I’m holding but not drinking a cup of black coffee so weak you can see air bubbles clinging to the inside of the Styrofoam, read the imprint of the serial number on the bottom. It was brought to me by Detective Harris — Typical, I think — while Overbey asked the questions.

“Of course I believed him,” Julie says now. “He had a knife at my throat.”

“A kitchen knife,” Overbey says, consulting his notes, as if he doesn’t already know everything in the case file. “Taken from the household. Any other weapons?”

“She was thirteen,” I break in, but Overbey holds up his hand and nods for Julie to go on, and it’s true she doesn’t seem upset.

“Not that I saw. But I believed him. And if it was happening to me again now, knowing what I know about him, I would still believe him.” She takes a breath. “Once we were out of the house, we got on a bus just by the CVS, there on Memorial Drive, and went to the bus station downtown.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“The bus driver, maybe, but I was too scared to say anything. At the bus station he bought two tickets. We got off in El Paso.” She pauses, and her eyes go dead. “That’s where he raped me for the first time.”

“Do you remember where you were?”

“Some motel. I don’t remember which one.”

“Motel Six? Econo Lodge?”

She glares at him icily. “Sorry. We stayed there for only a couple days and then we were gone again. We moved all the time. He stole a car in El Paso” — Overbey makes a subtle gesture without looking at Harris, who writes something down — “and for a while we drove that, but he sold it somehow, I guess. He just came back without it one day.”

“He left you alone?”

“Yes. He left me tied up and gagged when he had to go out. We were in Mexico when he sold the car, I think, but I’m not sure because I was blindfolded, and then I was in the back of a van for a long time.” The duct-taped-in-a-van dream floats before my eyes. “It took me a while to find out he’d sold me.”

“He what?” Overbey looks up sharply.

“He sold me,” she says. “Five men, maybe six.”

Harris nods and returns to writing.

“Did those men —”

“Oh yes.” She gives a cold, brittle smile. “Yes, they did.”

My eyes close.

“Mrs. Whitaker, are you all right?” It’s Harris’s voice. I am sinking, eyes shut, into a cold black vapor that prickles at my extremities. I hear Overbey correct his partner — “Mrs. Davalos goes by her maiden name” — and snap my eyes back open, but the black dots take a moment to clear.

“I’m fine,” I whisper. I want to reach for Julie’s hand, but her arms are folded tightly across her chest.

“Could you identify any of the men?”

“I was blindfolded,” she repeats patiently.

“Any accents?”

She thinks. “Some of them spoke Spanish to each other, but none of them talked very much. Anyway, that was a couple of days — I think? I can’t remember it very well. Then they sold me again. To someone important this time.”

The detectives look meaningfully at each other. “Who?”

“I never knew his name. The other men called him El Jefe when they were talking about him, señor to his face.”

“Go on,” Overbey says calmly while Harris scribbles furiously. “How did you know he was important?”

“He had a giant house, like a compound, with bodyguards and a household staff and a lot of men with big guns coming to him for orders.” She stops and takes a breath. “Please don’t ask me where, I don’t know. I didn’t go outside.”

“For how long?”

“For eight years.”

Later, I tell Tom as little as I can get away with, enough to explain the pages of thumbnail photos Julie looked through at the station, pictures of Mexican men in their fifties with high foreheads and thick chins. I narrate the various stages of her captivity, but not the cigarette burns she got when she tried to escape; the years of rape, but not the way she spoke of them, as if describing the plot of a not particularly interesting television show. I tell him that her captor tired of her, but not that she was too old for him once out of her teens; I tell him that she was blindfolded and taken in a helicopter to a rooftop in Juárez, but not that the guard was most likely supposed to kill her rather than let her go. I tell him that she hid in the back of a truck to get across the border, but not that she was afraid of the U.S. Border Patrol because she wasn’t sure she could still speak English, or anything at all, after so long; that she jumped out of the truck at a stoplight and ran, but not that she dragged herself foot after foot along the I-10 feeder road for miles, invisible from the freeway, like the people you learn not to see stumbling through gas-station parking lots, clutching their possessions in plastic bags.

“My God,” he says under his breath. We are at the kitchen table and the girls are upstairs in bed, a peculiar throwback to the quiet discussions we used to have long ago, about topics so trivial I can’t imagine why we bothered hiding them. “So she was sold to a human-trafficking ring, then to some drug lord?”

It’s strange how hearing him say those phrases out loud makes it into a story more than the jumbled words in the interview room did. “That’s what it sounds like, yes.”

Tom is leaning forward on his elbows on the kitchen table, holding on to himself, every muscle tensed. “Well, is that what the detectives say?”

“They didn’t say much at all, really. They were just taking her statement, asking questions.”

“Right. They don’t want to say anything that might upset us, like, you know, human trafficking or forced prostitution. That might imply they know about it and can’t do anything to stop it!” Tom’s voice breaks on this last exclamation. He’s not bothering to lower his voice anymore.

“I think they may know something. Harris mentioned a task force —”

“Yes, there’s a statewide task force on human trafficking,” Tom surprises me by saying. I am reminded of how much work he has done, how many search organizations he’s joined, the support group for parents of missing children, the Facebook pages, and wonder what else he knows that I don’t. “They formed it a couple of years ago, after a big report came out. Obviously it came too late to help Julie. But I guess we should be thrilled that she can help them.” He sighs heavily. “How was she in there?”

“She seemed — fine,” I say. “All things considered. One of the detectives told me she’s in shock and needs to see a therapist.”

“Of course,” Tom says. “I’ll find someone. I’ll call tonight.”