Birthday Girl Read online

  Tina stopped as the wind blew hard against the house and a branch screeched against the side like a banshee.

  “One night, after he got really drunk, he picked me up, high in the air, and started swinging me around, faster and faster. He wouldn’t stop no matter how much I cried. The more I cried, the more he laughed. Finally, I was so scared and dizzy, I puked. I couldn’t help myself. He got angry and I thought he was going to hit me, but he just made me clean it up. Later, the other kids told me that I was really lucky, because when they did something bad, he would burn them with his lighter. The only reason he hadn’t done it to me was because the government was going to send someone to check on me. But after that, they said, he’d start burning me, just to teach me a lesson.”

  Charlotte’s heart flopped in her chest like a fish caught in a net. Next to her, Maggie was shivering.

  “The night Sister brought me here, I cried. I was scared because it was all new to me and Sister was mean at first. But she’s never hurt me, not really, not like he would’ve. And I haven’t cried since.” There was a long silence, then she grunted and moved in the bed, reaching under her and pulling something out. “What is this?”

  Charlotte reached out in the dark. “That’s mine.”

  “It’s wet,” Tina said, her voice rising with a little laugh. “Charlotte pees in bed!”

  “Give me that!” Charlotte felt for Tina’s arms as the other girl wriggled around. She caught one wrist and twisted. Tina yelped. Charlotte clapped a hand over her mouth and hissed in her ear, “Shut up and let go or I’ll break your arm.”

  Tina let go of the rag but slid out of the bed and, in a flash, had crossed the room and thrown the light on. She looked back at Charlotte and Maggie in bed, her face triumphant at first. Then the look turned to horror as she saw the bloody cloth Charlotte was holding, then down at the blood on her own hands.

  “Oh my god,” she whispered, and Charlotte felt a flush of embarrassment at the look on the girl’s face.

  Charlotte jumped out of bed, grabbing Tina by the ear while simultaneously flicking the light back off. “If you say a word of this to Sister, you’ll wish I’d broken your arm. Got it?” When the girl didn’t say anything, she shook her head by the ear and Tina gasped. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now wash up, go back to your room, and go to sleep. Remember what I said.”

  Without another word, Tina left the room, waiting for another gust of wind to cover the noise of the door opening, then was gone.

  Charlotte tucked the rag between her legs, holding it there with pressure, then shuffled back to bed. Maggie snuggled close, but didn’t say anything for several long minutes. Charlotte realized she was holding her breath. They were both waiting for the bang of Sister’s bedroom door or a sudden shout as she discovered Tina going back to her room. The wind sighed and pushed at the house for a long time.

  Finally, Maggie whispered, “Now Tina knows.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you get in trouble if she tells Sister?”

  Charlotte swallowed. “I don’t know. It’s not like I can help it.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said. Her words were muffled, and Charlotte knew she’d put a knuckle in her mouth, a habit she had when she got upset. “Because . . . because . . .”

  “Because Sister doesn’t like it when things change,” Charlotte said, and something about the simple statement was so right and so telling that a shiver went through her. “She hates it.”

  “Yes.” The word was small. Small jerking motions told her that Maggie was starting to cry. “I don’t want Sister to hurt you.”

  “She won’t, Maggie.” Charlotte put her arm around the little girl, even though she felt like crying herself. “I won’t let her.”

  “How?”

  She thought about the key, hidden now under a flap of carpet in the corner of the room, and the lonely path leading into the woods she’d spied through the peephole. Her next sentence amazed even herself. “I’m going to escape.”

  The jiggling motions stopped. “Escape? Like, to the outside?”

  She hadn’t actually admitted it, but saying the words out loud made it seem real and possible. “I’m going to try.”

  “You’re going to leave me behind? Like Charlie did?”

  Charlotte blinked in the dark. She hadn’t thought of it in those terms and she fumbled for an answer. “Only to get help, Mags. If I can get out of here, I might be able to reach my family, and they’ll bring the police to get us all out.”

  Maggie digested that. “I don’t like the police. They took me away from my mom.”

  “They’re not all bad. And the good ones will help take us away from Sister.”

  “Can’t you take me with you?”

  Charlotte hesitated a hair too long, and Maggie began to cry. To shush her, Charlotte held her tight and whispered urgently in her ear. “I can’t take you with me because you’ve got a really important job.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to help take care of Buddy,” Charlotte said, making it up on the spot. “You know Tina is always bullying him. She might even hurt him. He needs you. The two of you can stand up to her until I come back with help. Can you do that, Mags?”

  The girl was quiet for a moment, then squeaked, “I guess so.”

  Charlotte hugged her, then talked her into counting sheep until she slowly faded into a deep slumber. Charlotte lay there, listening to the little girl’s soft breathing, until the first tiny spoke of light seeped through the cracks in the plywood.

  27

  Elliott

  Modern TV sucked, Elliott thought, looking blearily at the screen in the corner. Every inch of available space was moving or squawking or blinking, all of it BREAKING NEWS whether it was about war ten thousand miles away or a celebrity death or the failure of a stock to perform as expected. Everything was important, which meant that nothing was.

  It was early morning, and sunlight filtered reluctantly through the stained windows. Teddy was back behind the bar, lifting and dumping a forty-pound plastic drum of ice into the cooler without apparent effort, hauling racks of steaming glasses from the kitchen in the back, swiping at the counter with a rag. The only sounds were the clatter Teddy made and the excitable drone of the TV newscasters.

  After his call the night before, Elliott had sat at the bar, feeling his world being swallowed and spat out. Teddy had left him alone, letting him sit in front of his untouched beer, unmoved by the laughter and shouts swirling around him. Last call had appeared suddenly, with Teddy throwing on the lights and unceremoniously grabbing glasses and dumping them in the sink to get the message across. Elliott had found it impossible to move, glued to the stool, as though years of weariness and disappointment had all come calling at once.

  When the bar had emptied, Elliott had raised his head to see Teddy looking at him, arms braced against the bar. Elliott mumbled an apology and reached into his pocket.

  “One buck,” Teddy said, his expression inscrutable behind the beard.

  A bitter taste filled Elliott’s mouth. “I don’t need a handout. I ordered the beer.”

  “Did I say it was free?” Elliott stared at him. Teddy shrugged. “We’re running a contest. Last man standing pays a buck a beer. Congratulations.”

  Elliott peeled a dollar out of his ball of cash and slid it across the bar.

  “No tip?”

  Elliott looked at him.

  “You seriously can’t take a joke.” Teddy swept the bill up and threw it in the cash register, slammed the drawer shut, and began tallying something on a tablet. Without looking up, he asked, “You got a place for the night?”

  Elliott stared at the empty glasses across the bar.

  “Hard to believe, I know, but I didn’t always own a dive bar on a back street named after somebody else.” Teddy finished writing whatever it was he was writing. “I’
ve been where you are. Maybe worse.”

  Elliott continued to stare.

  “If you don’t have an invitation to stay at the White House, there’s a storeroom in the back. I crash there when I can’t make it home. It’s got a blanket and wooden pallets and everything.” Teddy looked at him dead-on. “No joke.”

  A long minute passed, then Elliott slid off his stool and started putting chairs on tables. Teddy watched him for a moment, then grabbed a mop and a pail from a closet. The two of them worked in silence, cleaning and tidying and putting the bar back into rough shape. By three, they were done. Exhausted, Elliott retrieved his knapsack, then Teddy showed him where he could bunk down.

  “Just a couple things about your stay,” he’d said. “The main room is going to be locked, so if you feel like starting a fire, keep in mind I’ve got insurance and you don’t have a key. If you need to take a leak, bathroom’s at the end of the hall. Steal anything or shoot up or break stuff and I’ll kick your head in. I’ll be back at ten in the morning. Sleep tight.”

  After a tortured night, Elliott had been woken by a sharp rap on the door. He’d slumped out of the room to pitch in around the bar, setting up tables and lugging cases of beer from the storeroom until almost noon. Elliott dropped onto a stool, his shoulders rounded with fatigue.

  “You know,” Teddy said, leaning his elbows on the bar across from him. “That Unabomber look isn’t going to cut it with the ladies.”

  “There’s only so much you can do with fingers and a paper towel.”

  “Today’s your lucky day.” The bartender rummaged under the bar, then lifted a cardboard box and dropped it onto the counter. He pulled out a pair of scissors and a comb and handed them to Elliott. “Lost and found. It’s a mystery what people can manage to lose.”

  Elliott held them like relics. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d groomed himself. “Thanks, Teddy.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, running a hand over his own beard. “I could use a trim myself.”

  Elliott went to the bathroom, then washed and trimmed his beard and hair as best he could with the dull scissors. It took a concerted effort to get the comb through his shoulder-length hair and resulted in large tufts having to be pulled out, but thirty minutes later Elliott emerged looking better, if not feeling better.

  “That’s more like it,” Teddy said upon seeing him.

  “Do you think I could use your phone again? Last time, I promise.”

  Without a word, Teddy put the phone on the counter and went to unlock the front door. Elliott sat and stared at the phone, then finally picked up the receiver, made his call, then took his seat by the TV and waited.

  Amy showed up thirty minutes later, her hair pulled back in the headband, her face pale. She hugged her arms around her bag of binders, hesitating at the door of the bar. Teddy glanced over, then jerked his head at Elliott sitting in the corner. She approached cautiously, dipping her head down so Elliott could see her before she called his name. He glanced at a stool and she sat.

  “You said you listen for the connections in things,” Elliott said after a moment. “I do, too. I was trained to look for patterns and repetitions, the structure that holds a person’s mind together.”

  She said nothing.

  “When I studied a subject who exhibited violent behavior,” he continued, “I didn’t take the violence at face value. I asked, why is the person this way? What is the root cause of their behavior? What is it in this person’s psyche, stripped of its excuses and defenses, that makes them do what they do? Had I done that with you, instead of believing you, I might’ve saved both of us a lot of time.”

  Teddy banged open the front door with a hip, took one step, and heaved a bucket full of bleach water onto the walk outside the bar. It made a fat, splashing sound. On the TV, an enthusiastic white anchor with a crew cut and a block for a head began criticizing a recent decision by the mayor’s office.

  “Working together, we found that each of the kids on our list had a few things in common.” Elliott traced the wood grain of the bar with the tip of a finger. “They were kidnapped, went missing for a year or more, then were discovered dead on or near their birthday. I told you the only way we’d be able to find Lacey was if we took those known facts and built on them, find the patterns and strings that would tie everything together, constructing a blueprint that, if we were lucky, would lead us to your daughter.”

  Teddy walked to the back, glancing their way as he passed. On the television, the commercial break ended and returned to the local news segment.

  “I took for granted that every fact as we knew them—as you knew them—was on the table,” he said, his voice reasonable, measured. “To think otherwise made no sense. Why would any mother jeopardize her daughter’s life when what we knew and what had been shared was critical to finding her?”

  Amy said nothing, but her face tightened.

  “But all the cases we looked at, each family we spoke to, each child we investigated, had a second thing in common, didn’t they?”

  She tugged a lock of hair down and pulled it across her lip. “Elliott, I don’t know what you’re saying—”

  “I’m saying every child came from a broken home. Every kid was abused or neglected or thrown away.” He looked at her. “Including yours.”

  A tear slid down one cheek.

  “I wanted to give you a chance. I thought maybe I’d screwed up. So I called Dave Cargill last night. He told me the rest of the facts about your case.” His voice turned savage. “Lacey wasn’t at a friend’s house when she was kidnapped. She was in foster care.”

  “I was getting her back. I—”

  He cut her off. “The cops didn’t stop listening to you because of your flaky ideas. They stopped because you’re a goddamn addict.”

  “Was. Was an addict.”

  “Christ. As if that mattered.”

  Her face twisted and she pointed a finger at him. “I lost my daughter—”

  “You were too high to pick her up from school. Neighbors told him you blacked out on the way more than once,” he said, his lip curling. “You didn’t lose anything, Amy. Lacey was taken from you for her own good.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact that she was kidnapped. It has nothing to do with it.”

  “It has everything to do with it,” he shouted, turning on his stool to face her. His chest felt like it was cracking in half. “Don’t you understand? You’re culpable. You’re part of it. You made this happen. I helped you because I thought I might have an opportunity to take back a tiny bit of my own history and rewrite it, give someone I thought deserved it a second shot. But you tossed your chance away before I ever came on the scene.”

  The TV volume suddenly doubled—“The DMV reports new delays at all statewide offices”—nearly drowning them out. They glanced over to see Teddy aiming the remote at the TV. He looked at them pointedly. Amy moved closer to Elliott so she could be heard.

  “It must be wonderful to be on the righteous side of an argument all the time, to have never done anything wrong,” she said, her voice shaking. “To never have a moment’s feeling of guilt or doubt about how fit you are to be a mother and a parent.”

  “Irrelevant.”

  “So, you’ve never had to struggle with an addiction? Or failure? Or abuse? Oh, please, Elliott, tell me what it’s like to have absolutely no flaws, to be loved unconditionally, to never face a goddamned challenge in your life.”

  “Never face a challenge?” Elliott gaped at her, outraged. “You have no idea what I’ve been through. I didn’t deserve what happened to me—”

  “And I did? Who gets to measure that? Who gets to judge whether or not I get my daughter back? Or if she gets to live? Do we just take a kid away from every mom who doesn’t quite pass the test?”

  “Being a parent is more than biology. You have a responsibility to look after your child, and when you don’t, there are consequences.”

  “So Lacey got what was coming to her
?”

  “Of course not. Stop being melodramatic.”

  “But maybe I should suffer, is that it?”

  “Why not? I have. I still do.”

  “And I see you picked a bar to do it in.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She laughed. It was an ugly sound. “You think a junkie can’t spot a drunk? You should’ve seen your face when Neumann staggered to the door.”

  Elliott gritted his teeth. “I haven’t touched a drink in eight years.”

  “And I went straight after it mattered, too. But that doesn’t keep anyone from passing judgment, does it?” Amy’s lip quivered. “My god, you’ve been wallowing in your own pity for years, totally unwilling to forgive yourself for . . . for whatever it is you did or didn’t do, but the real problem is you would never forgive anyone for anything. Isn’t it enough—no matter what I’ve done, no matter what I’m guilty of—that I simply want my daughter back alive?”

  Elliott looked at her for a long moment, then lowered his head into his hands. His pulse beat painfully in his neck. Amy sat next to him, crying. Inane noises surrounded him, a soundtrack of meaninglessness—the downshifting of a passing truck outside, music coming from somewhere across the street, the babbling of the TV.

  “In local news, a Washington, DC, family is celebrating the return of their son after he went missing four years ago.”

  Elliott raised his head. A professionally perky woman—young and blonde, with chunky earrings and a bright smile—was delivering the news. After the lead, the screen cut from the anchor to footage of an ambulance pulling around the circular drive of a hospital.

  “The Public Affairs office of the Metropolitan Police,” the reporter continued, “announced today that Jay Kelly, son of Karl and Patricia Kelly of Washington, DC, has been found alive after being abducted as a young boy. The story made national news after the wealthy husband and wife experienced a messy public divorce followed soon after by the abduction of their son. The couple posted a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to the discovery of their son, ten at the time he went missing.”