Birthday Girl Read online

  “Just so we’re straight, I don’t believe for a second you’re with the cops. But if it gets me five more minutes of break time, I’ll take it. So, who are you really and what do you want?”

  Elliott looked back at her. It had been a long time since he’d talked to someone completely cold. Encounters on the streets—other homeless folks, a cop here and there, maybe a kind stranger—didn’t count. The conversations had been perfunctory and uncomplicated. Now that he had something on the line, he was, he found to his surprise, tongue-tied.

  Janine was about thirty-six, he guessed. A pack-a-day habit and holding down two or even three jobs kept her trim. And, he knew, whatever those things hadn’t done to hollow her out, grief had done the rest. This was a no-bullshit woman who’d already lived a life on the rocks and knew she was barely squeaking through the rest of it. If they wasted her time, she would take the cigarette and leave them with nothing. As if reading his mind, she quirked an eyebrow. The clock was ticking. He turned to Amy, mute.

  Amy offered the woman a shaky smile. “Janine, almost a year ago, I was living in a small studio apartment with my little girl, Lacey. Just me and her. She’d just turned ten. We didn’t have much, but we had each other and that was almost enough, as corny as that sounds.”

  Janine took another drag of her cigarette and stared back, her face stony.

  “One day, while she was on the way home from a friend’s house, someone grabbed her and took her away. I haven’t seen her since.” Amy paused. “We know something like that happened to your girl Tammy. Someone came and took her away from you.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “A mother, Janine. Just a mother. Elliott here is helping me. He’s had some experience working on cases like this.”

  “Cases?” She laughed and waved the cigarette in Elliott’s direction. “I told you, honey, I can tell you ain’t no cop.”

  “I’m in deep cover.”

  Janine looked back at Amy. “Why aren’t the police helping you? The real police.”

  “I think you know why,” Amy said, holding the other woman’s eyes. “They’ve given up. But a mother can’t give up.”

  Janine shrugged, scuffed at the ground.

  “We know that Tammy was kidnapped two years before . . . before she was discovered,” Elliott said. “We think there might be a connection between Tammy and other children who were kidnapped over the years. And, maybe, from them to Amy’s daughter, Lacey.”

  Janine paled. “What kind of connection?”

  “Tammy had just had a birthday when the police found her, hadn’t she?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Can you tell us about her? How she was kidnapped?”

  Janine’s lips pulled together, looking like sutures were drawing her mouth shut. “I don’t want to do this again.”

  Amy took a half-step forward. “Janine, I know you don’t. I really do. But there are six other kids out there who died a lot like Tammy did. And we’re afraid there might be more.”

  “And the cops don’t know any of this?”

  “They did as much as they could.” Amy gave her a bleak smile. “We’re taking it from here.”

  A shaking hand brought the cigarette up again. She took another drag, exhaled, and shook her head. “I can’t. I won’t. It’s too much.” She turned to go.

  “Wait.” Amy reached out, imploring her. “Please.”

  “I’m sorry. I—I have to get back to work.”

  “Janine.” Amy scrounged in a pocket. “Look at this before you go.”

  “What?” Janine turned, but her hand stayed on the door.

  Amy held a small photograph in her hand. “Just look at it. Look at her. This is my little girl. Lacey’s going to be eleven soon. Her birthday’s coming up, and I’m worried about her just like you worried about Tammy.”

  Janine reached out and took the photo, being careful to hold it by the rippled edge with both hands. She stared at it.

  “You took this at White Hills Mall,” she said finally, without looking up. “The photo booth by the pretzel shop.”

  Amy swallowed. “Yes.”

  “We took the same one.” A single tear slid down Janine’s face, ran down to her chin. “Just the two of us.”

  Janine’s upper body gave a jerk, like she’d been touched by a hot iron, followed by small tremors that shook her body. Another tear followed the first, and then more. Amy stepped forward and wrapped Janine in her arms, whispering to her. She caught Elliott’s eye and he shuffled to the end of the service alley, where he watched the traffic for a long time, naming the makes and models of cars, memorizing license plates, counting the number of stalls in the parking lot—anything to fight the feeling trying to pull him all the way down. The deep-fried stink of the Chinese restaurant set his stomach churning. He stood there for what seemed a long time.

  “Elliott?”

  He turned. Amy and Janine stood close to each other, no longer embracing, looking wan but composed. Janine stared at the ground. Amy tilted her head.

  He cleared his throat. “Janine, what happened the day Tammy went missing?”

  She hugged her arms to her body. “I don’t really know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “She wasn’t with me.”

  “Okay.” He glanced at Amy with a question, but she shrugged. “Can you tell us about that?”

  Janine picked a spot three feet up the brick wall, talked to it. “Randy, may he rot in hell, got tired of being a husband and a father, but didn’t have the decency—or the guts—to tell me he was through. Didn’t like to be pinned down, he told me, was meant to be free.” She fluttered her hands, and smoke trailed in lines that hung in the air. “I told him he should’ve thought of that before he knocked me up.”

  “He left you?” Amy asked.

  “Oh no. I couldn’t get so lucky.” Janine laughed, a harsh sound. She took another drag and glared at Elliott. “The story is boring. It bores me. It has to bore you.”

  “We’d still like to hear it.”

  She sighed. “He told me I was a bad wife, that I was lousy in bed, I never showed him enough affection. Once that stopped having an effect, then he told me I was a failure as a mother and Tammy would end up a loser like me, a slut, jumped-up trailer trash.” She finished the cigarette and dropped it to join the forest of butts on the ground. “And just when I got over that, I lost my job. He started in on me again, telling me I was too stupid and too ugly to get another. And who did I think was going to hire me at my age.”

  “He sounds like a real winner,” Amy said.

  Janine shook her head. “From all of his bitching, you’d think he’d want to get the hell away from me. But no, he said I was his cross to bear.”

  “Of course,” Elliott said. “He needed you to leave him so he could be the injured party.”

  Her eyebrows shot to her bangs. “You some kind of shrink?”

  He gave her a weak smile. “There was a breaking point, I guess?”

  “He slapped me around, but that wasn’t it. I can take a punch,” she said, running a finger along her nose. “But then he hit Tammy. Just once. I put a screwdriver under his chin and told the son of a bitch I’d kill him if he touched her again. He didn’t, but then he really started hitting me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Like I said, I can take a punch, but what would he do to Tammy if I was knocked out or couldn’t help? So, after the worst fight, I ran to the neighbor, just looking for a little help. She was a nosy old bitch, but I didn’t have a choice. Randy had emptied our checking account, and I still had to go to work if I was going to keep the two of us alive. The neighbor let us stay the night and I thought we were safe, so I left Tammy with her the next day.”

  “She called CPS,” Amy said.

  “Sure did.” She looked around, distracted. Elliott shook out another cigarette from the pack and offered it to her, then lit it. He stuffed his hands in his pockets as she continued talking. “Randy
got hauled off for beating on me, but spun some line that I was the one who’d abused Tam. I missed too much time at work going to hearings and lost the job. So, at the final hearing, the judge saw a single mother with no job and a history of a violent household. They put Tammy in foster care and told me I had six months to get my act together.”

  “And Randy?” Elliott asked.

  She waved a hand. “He skipped town after he did his ninety days in lockup. Guess he finally found his reason to leave. Good riddance. Although, if he’d been around so the judge could’ve seen two parents at home . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What happened then?”

  “The foster parents turned out to be complete space cakes and let her walk to school by herself through a truly shitty neighborhood.” Beside him, Amy flinched. “One day, on the way there, someone grabbed her. They didn’t report her missing for almost a week. By then, there was nothing to go on. They found her body last year in some gravel lot in DC.”

  Elliott paused, then asked, “Had she been . . . ?”

  “No. Or, at least, not when they found her.” Janine seemed unfazed by the question. Her emotions, perhaps, had been blunted by too many nights spent worrying—tears spent, one hand wringing the other—and now her tone was flat and matter-of-fact. “But after two years? Who knows what she went through.”

  Wet tires on pavement—rolling in, rolling away—was the only sound for a long time.

  “All I know,” Janine finally said, breaking the silence, “is that I didn’t get to see her that last day. I got to visit her in foster care once that week, a ten-minute talk. With a chaperone present, of course, in case I tried to steal her back. My own daughter.”

  The door popped open suddenly and the manager, a bald, moon-faced man, leaned out. He frowned, gave Janine a pointed look, then retreated inside.

  Janine rolled her eyes. “I have to go. Krauthammer gave me my job back but never lets me forget.” She dropped the second cigarette, half-gone, to join the other, then glanced at Amy. “I’m sorry. I really am. I hope you find your little girl.”

  Amy, lips pinched, nodded.

  Janine moved to the door, opened it, then stopped and looked back at them. “We didn’t have a good life, but we loved each other. She deserved better.”

  18

  Jeremy

  He awoke in darkness, which scared him almost more than anything, because he’d fallen asleep with the lamp on, which meant that someone had come in and shut the light off in the middle of the night without him knowing. He fumbled with the lamp and flicked the light on again, then got out of bed and pressed his ear to the door, but heard only distant thumps and whispered voices.

  Suddenly, the memories of the night before hit him and he sank to the floor, where he put his head in his hands.

  They’d ridden in silence for what seemed like hours.

  His head had felt stuffy and he had trouble keeping his balance, even though he knew he was sitting down. Slouched in his seat, he could only see the tops of bright highway lights as they flew by that became intermittent yellow streetlamps that, in turn, became less and less frequent until they stopped altogether.

  After a long time, the car had slowed and turned sharply onto a dirt road. The outside was just a smear of darkness interrupted only occasionally when the car’s headlights lit up a tree or a shrub. The car first dipped down, then up a steep rise, stopping only when they pulled onto a gravel drive. Jeremy had a momentary impression of a bulky, squat house illuminated by the headlights; then a blindfold came down over his eyes, knotted painfully tight.

  A car door slammed, his opened. The woman pulled him out of the car and to his feet, her hand wrapped around his arm above his elbow like a steel band. Wobbly and disoriented, he’d tottered across a gravel drive and up a set of steps, maybe the porch of the house. She’d fumbled with keys as she unlocked a door, then pulled him forward, where he immediately tripped over a threshold and stumbled into a smelly, mildewy room.

  The door had shut behind him with a bang, then a series of thick locks clacked into place, setting off a wave of panic inside him. He’d struggled, wanting to run back to the car and find a way home. But the woman had slapped him so hard that he sank to his knees.

  “Never disobey me,” she hissed, her lips close, touching his ear. “Never again. Do you understand?”

  He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  She’d led him to the second floor, where they’d walked down a hall with wood floors—their footsteps loud in the night—and into the closeness of another room. She sat him on a bed and, without a word, left the room and shut the door. A key turned in a lock, and then he was alone.

  He sat for long minutes with the blindfold still in place, terrified that she hadn’t actually left. His face where she’d slapped him tingled and began to sting. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he’d reached up and ripped the blindfold off.

  Whatever drug she’d given him had begun to wear off, and he was suddenly consumed with rage, rattling the knob and kicking the door, screaming that his mother would sue and the woman would be thrown in jail. There was no answer. He’d stopped when his voice went hoarse and his throat started to burn.

  Distraught, he’d explored the room, looking through the few pieces of clothing in the wardrobe and running a finger along the spines of the books on the nightstand: The Count of Monte Cristo, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They were bound in leather and the titles were in gold leaf like the books in his dad’s office, but they smelled bad and were spongy to the touch. Drained and terrified, he’d finally climbed onto the bed and cried, until the tears—with no one to answer them, no one to stop them—had dried up.

  Covered only by a thin blanket, he’d spent the night shivering and thrashing around on the narrow, musty-smelling bed before eventually falling asleep, comforted only by the weak light of a bedside lamp, a hokey old thing with a cowboy on a bucking bronco as the base. Until he’d woken with the light off and his reality shattered.

  A key suddenly rattled in the lock. He scurried back to the bed and sat down, not sure what else to do.

  The woman opened the door slowly, peeking her head in before entering and shutting it behind her. He was surprised to see she was dressed like a businesswoman this time—not as sharp as his mom, but less frumpy than what she’d worn last night. She held a large box in both hands.

  She nodded and smiled when she saw him sitting on the bed. “Very good.” She placed the box at her feet, then took out a stringy pair of jeans and a thin blue T-shirt. “Put these on and give me your clothes.”

  He was embarrassed to change in front of the woman, but the imprint of her hand still burned on his face. He turned so that she couldn’t see him in his underwear, at least not the front. The jeans fit around the waist, but the hem came halfway up his shins. “These are too small.”

  She pursed her lips. “They’ll do. Put the rest on.”

  He changed quickly and handed his clothes to her, which she dropped by the door. Reaching into the box again, she pulled out a piece of construction paper and a box of colored pencils, then lowered herself to the floor and sat cross-legged. She patted a spot on the floor. “Come. Sit.”

  He did so gingerly, afraid the jeans would rip. She handed him the paper and colored pencils.

  “Take this and write your name at the top. Then draw all the things you remember about your life.” The woman’s voice was low, gentle, and even. “Your mother, your father. Sisters and brothers. Your dog. Your house. Make sure they’re all in the picture.”

  “Right now?”

  She nodded. “Right now.”

  He shook the pencils out of the box and started to draw, feeling like a kindergartener. Will there be milk and cookies next? He doubted it. Soon, however, the room faded away as he warmed to the task.

  His family began as a collection of stick figures, four in all, but he went back and added details to his dad’s face and remembered things like Julia�
�s flower dress she’d worn the first time Dad had introduced her. Mom was a black dress with a head on it, and Graham was a scarecrow half again as tall as anyone else on the page. Home was a jumble of different buildings and cars. The house he’d grown up in that had to be sold. So it could be split fairly, they’d said. Apartments and mansions. Big cars and compacts.

  “No siblings?”

  Jeremy jumped. He’d forgotten the woman was even there. “No.”

  She raised an eyebrow, then gestured for him to finish, but his concentration had been broken and he wrapped up with a blocky facsimile of school with the flag flying overhead and a yellow school bus in front. It looked like a two-year-old had drawn it, he thought critically, but he’d never been good at art.

  He put the colored pencil down and looked up at the woman. She held her hand out and he passed the drawing across to her. She examined it closely, noting each of the figures. She pointed.

  “Who is this?”

  “My dad.”

  “And this?”

  “Julie. His girlfriend.”

  “They’re not married?”

  He shook his head. She pointed again.

  “My mom. And her husband Graham.”

  “Your parents are divorced?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you love them?”

  He nodded again, because this time he didn’t trust himself to speak. His throat was tight and his eyes itched. He blinked fast, trying to make it stop—he didn’t want to cry in front of her.

  “Why do you love them?” The woman’s gaze was relentless and hungry. “Why?”

  “Because . . .” Jeremy was stuck for an answer. “They’re my family.”

  Relief flooded through him when she nodded slowly. “That’s right. You should love your family.”

  She lowered the paper and smiled at him, although her eyes looked weird. Julie had made him cookies once, with a blue-icing smile and raisins for eyes. The woman’s eyes reminded him of those raisins.

  “How did your mother and father discipline you?”