Freedom's Child (17 page)

The scent of Lysol is enough to burn Mattley’s eyes. As he signs in, a man in the corner eats square, wooden Scrabble tiles. “He thinks the vowels have nutritional value,” says the nurse at the sign-in desk. Officer James Mattley can’t imagine any place being more depressing. He waits near a window and looks down to the courtyard where nurses suck nicotine through wrinkled lips and gnaw on their cell phones. None of them seem to mind the sleet and rain on this nasty morning, as long as they get their caffeine fixes for the day.

Mattley’s eyes water from a mix of the Lysol lingering thick in the back of his throat and too much yawning, his body sluggish from overexhaustion and barely any sleep last night. He pinches the palms of his hands for any kind of stimulation that can keep him awake right now. A parade of elderly patients in full diapers drag on into the common room, waking from sedated trances and hangovers of sleeping meds and antianxiety candy.
This is more like the fucking loony bin
. Mattley observes yet doesn’t stare. He watches them line up for an orderly, take a pill, and begin to assemble around
Wheel of Fortune
and chew their medicinal potpourri.

“She’s in room number twelve, right over here,” the nurse points. He’s on his toes, cautious around the woman’s room he walks into. “I’ll be right over here if you need me.”

“I know you,” Mimi exalts. “You’re my son!”

“No, no,” Mattley shushes her. “I’m Officer James Mattley. I met you the other night at the fire.” The room is painted a shocking yellow, an eyesore to visitors who don’t have the luxury of being medicated like these fine folks.

“Fire?” She looks around. “What fire?”

“The other night, remember? There was a fire that started in your home. We took you in an ambulance. Remember now?”

“The fire didn’t start in my house.” She stands from her bed and adjusts a pink fleece robe over her. “It started in Freedom’s house, from those men who were looking for her.”

“What men?” Mattley suddenly wakes up. “Who was looking for Freedom?”

“The crazy-eyed kind,” she says as she looks in a handheld mirror tacked to the wall as if she doesn’t recognize her own face. “Three of them. They hit me. They started the fire.”

“Why didn’t you tell this to the police?”

“I told Freedom in the ambulance. I figured she would.”

Mattley pulls out his phone and scrolls through his contacts until he reaches Newbie. He sends a text:

Get report from fire chief, should have been ready by now. What was cause of fire? Don’t tell Cap’n I’m asking
.

“What can you tell me about these guys?”

“What guys?” She forgets already. “Where’s Freedom? Where am I?” She begins to panic.

“Just take it easy, Mimi.” He tries to assure her and direct her back to her cot. “Freedom’s close by. You’re safe.”

“I don’t want to be here,” she screams. “I want to go home. I want to go home!” The scene is heartbreaking as she curls up at the head of her bed and sobs into her hands. A syringe-happy nurse runs in, with white leather loafers and a red curly Afro, like something cartoonish.

“Give me a minute,” Mattley shouts as he stops the nurse. He grabs Mimi’s arms and looks her in the eyes, stays quiet so the nurse can’t hear. “Mom,” he calls her. “Mom, it’s me.” And Mattley feels terrible at having to do this, having to resort to such cruelty.

“Son?”

“Yes, Mom, it’s me.”

Mimi smiles through the tears and falls into his arms. “It’s about time you came to see me.”

“I know, Mom, I’m sorry.” He nods at the nurse to leave. She sighs with disappointment. With Mimi’s head in his chest as he rocks her, he looks over to various pieces of mail scattered at the foot of the bed. One envelope is addressed to Nessa Delaney. Mattley softly pulls back from Mimi while she calms down and reaches for the envelope. “Nessa Delaney?” he asks her.

“I never heard the name.”

Mattley notices it’s addressed to Freedom’s apartment number. He opens it.

Dear Nessa, or should I call you Mom?

There is so much to say; there’s so much to take in. I’ve so much to tell you, but so little time, as I hide here in the shed of my church. I look back at my life. I wonder how’d I not see it, and looking here at your photo, I can see it, I can see it all.

For ages, I’ve been praying for a way out. Praying God takes me far from here. But in all this time, I’ve had nowhere to turn. There’s Mason, but I need to be farther. I have to get away from here, I can’t tell you why. Please, trust me. Trust in God. Because he sent your letter to me.

I will contact you in a few days when I reach Oregon.

Rebekah

Mattley reads the postmark and sees it’s from Goshen, Kentucky. He itches while he waits for Mimi to go with a nurse out to the lounge.

Five minutes later, the frozen sleet stings his cheeks, the biting wind sounds like the sharpening of steel. In Oregon, while early, autumn seems to have ended. He lets his truck warm up; the ice tings on the windshield when his phone vibrates from his back pocket.

He reads a text from Newbie:

Report came in yesterday. Came from Freedom’s apartment. Arson
.

With the weather report on AM low in the background, Mattley whispers out loud, “I shouldn’t be doing this.” He thinks about his son, still at his mother’s for the week, thinks about what good could possibly come of it. But who the hell else was there to look out for Freedom? Mattley shivers in his red flannel shirt. He rubs his hands together and sees his own breath. To his right on the passenger’s seat is a duffel bag full of his belongings. On top is his personal gun.

Mattley drives to the Amtrak station to save him a good fifteen hours of traveling. His destination: Kentucky.

After waiting forty-five minutes for a handicapped-accessible taxi to arrive, having sent two regular four-doors away, Peter finally checks into a Louisville motel. It takes him two hours to do his best with bathing himself and changing his clothes. He finds his muscle spasms are more severe today, as he attempts nearly half a dozen times to call Freedom. But the phone keeps jumping out of his hands. There’s no answer, anyway.

Peter sets up his laptop and connects to the motel’s Wi-Fi. What Peter lacks in motor skills he compensates for in technology, as it’s all that occupies him as he hides in his bedroom back at home. Playing stupid lets him get away with so much more than he should.

It takes longer than usual to maneuver the computer in spite of his hands, but he opens up several windows and starts his research. He starts with the Pauls.

A person can compile almost anything that’s left a digital trail if the person they’re looking into has an account on any social media outlet. And such is the case for Mason and Rebekah Paul. And it takes only a quick Google search to learn that Mason is some hot-shot defense attorney and that Rebekah has been missing for a good part of a week.

He continues with Virgil. It goes into his seminary training, his church’s website and podcast. Peter even watches a past sermon, one that would make his eyebrows raise, if he had such control over his facial expressions. And then he looks into Carol Paul, who once upon a time was named Carol Custis.

Carol Custis, unlike the rest of the Pauls, has a rich history. Peter learns of Carol’s twin sister, Clare, who made the news as a minister’s daughter who hung herself in her home one morning back in 2009.

“Clare Custis,” Peter says out loud as he searches the name on the Internet. And through that, he finds Adelaide Custis, the mother of Carol and Clare, who’s been missing the past four years. “No wonder this bitch turned to Jesus,” he says in regard to Carol and her messy family.

According to Mr. Gerald “Ger” Custis in all the local news programs’ archives, his wife left one afternoon to go to the local post office and was simply never seen again. Her car was found a week later in the Ohio River.

Peter clicks away, stores all this information on a USB drive that he keeps tucked away in one of the leather pockets on the inside of the wheelchair’s arm. Crumbs from his brother’s welcome-home cake fall on the keyboard. The neighbors in the next room are arguing about something. The daylight heats the room; it’s warmer in Kentucky than it is up in New York.

He tries to turn the television on with the remote, but his hands just don’t want to work. It takes him fifteen minutes to put it on. Of course, it’s the local news. Virgil and Carol Paul plead for any information regarding the whereabouts of their daughter. And when they show Rebekah’s picture on the screen, Peter is amazed at how much she looks like Nessa.

“I appreciate this,”
Peter tells a Good Samaritan who offers to help him grab a few things from a nearby Walmart.

“Not a bother,” says the morbidly obese woman in a ride-on electric cart. That’s always pissed Peter off. Fat fucks like his mother who get dibs on handicap parking spaces and ride-on carts because they’re lazy. Meanwhile, Peter’s the one with the real disability, a congenital condition he would do anything to get rid of. But these people? They did it to themselves, and whose tax dollars do you think pay for these lard buckets to sit at home and watch
Jerry Springer
instead of working because they’re eating deep-fried everything in a fucking trough?

“I feel your pain, I know what it’s like.” She uses a cane to hit the wheels on her ride-on.
Are you fucking kidding me?
“Got the diabetes and a bum foot.” The Samaritan uses a long-reach gripper to pull a bottle of Diet Coke from a shelf. Her muumuu exposes a ton of underarm fat that swings with her wheezing. He feels sick.
Oh, my fucking God
. But Peter plays nice, pretends not to notice.

After Peter pays for a large bottle of water, granola bars, apples, and a Salisbury steak TV dinner, he waits near the entrance next to the gumball machines and Halloween display table. From there, he can see her buy a carton of Pall Malls and pay for her junk food with food stamps. On days like this, Peter regrets being an American.

While waiting, he studies the wall: fliers for babysitters, car stereo installation, churches, firewood, you name it. And on the top is a row of black-and-white pictures of missing people.

He immediately recognizes Adelaide Custis, mother to Carol Paul and Clare Custis.

And to the right is one that he doesn’t recognize, but Peter studies it anyway. It’s of a fifteen-year-old female who went missing two months ago.

Her name is Michelle Campbell.