The Never List (25 page)

“Marked how?” Tracy sat up straight at that.

“They
brand
us.” She said it leaning forward, almost spitting out the words. And then she sat back smugly to watch our reactions.

Neither of us batted an eyelash. “Explain. Details,” Tracy ordered in a flat voice.

The girl pointed to her hip. “A brand. Right there. They say that everyone out there in the ‘network’—in the underworld, I guess you’d call it—knows their mark. Like cattle herders. And if we get caught by anyone out there, we’ll be returned to our rightful owners.”

“What does it look like?” I asked, terrified because I had an idea I knew the answer.

“Hard to say. I don’t like to look at it too much. They rarely heal just right, so on some girls it just looks like a little lump of twisted flesh. I guess those in the network have special skills at reading scar tissue. I suppose you could say it looks maybe like a bull’s head, except the horns kinda go straight out and then up.” She held her hands above her head, with index fingers pointed out, to demonstrate.

“Could it be … is it possible that it’s a headless man with his arms out? You know, with a body sort of like that Leonardo da Vinci drawing?”

She shrugged, whether at the concept of the headless man or the reference to Da Vinci I couldn’t tell. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

I half stood up, nearly hitting my head on the roof of the van, and shifted sideways a bit, unbuttoned my pants, and pulled my jeans down just past my hip. I pointed to my mark, my own little lump of twisted flesh.

“Does it look like this?” I almost shouted, choking out the words.

The girl put her fingers to her lips and whispered to me angrily, “Shut up! You don’t want them to have to stop the van to see what’s going on.”

She leaned closer, and I pushed my hip forward to move it more directly under the light. She studied it carefully, then shrugged again.

“Yeah, that could be it. Like I said, hard to say.” She gulped and suddenly looked afraid. “Wait a minute. Does this mean you were
in the network when you were young, and you escaped, and you’ve … you’ve been brought back? So they aren’t just bullshitting? And that’s why you’re, like, so old?”

I felt Tracy shudder beside me. Was she right? We were both thinking it. Had we been led back into the “network” after all this time, back to our
rightful owners
? Were the ten years in between the fantasy, and now we were back to reality?

“So,” she continued, leaning back and eyeing us, “so I don’t need to tell you what you’re in for? You know?”

Tracy leaned forward toward her. Their faces were almost touching there in the near dark, under the soft glow of the single light overhead.

“Listen, what we lived through was something much worse. I was held captive in a goddamn cellar by a goddamn psychopath for five years, chained to a wall, brought upstairs only for torture.” She leaned back, expecting the shock to register on the girl’s face. Instead she shrugged.

“Sounds a hell of a lot easier than this. Sounds to me like you just had one john. One john is easier than hundreds of johns. Simple math. With one john, I don’t care how psycho he is, you can figure him out a little bit. Understand how he works. Plan ahead. Manipulate. Not a lot. But enough to make it hurt a little less. When you’ve got new johns all the time, who the hell knows.”

Tracy said, “You have no idea what you’re talking about. At least you’re out in the world.”

“
Out in the world?
” the girl scoffed. “Is that what you think this is? Unless basements and padded rooms and purpose-built cells and—”

She suddenly shut up, bit her lower lip, and looked away.

When she turned back to us, her eyes were veiled and dark. Her tough-girl stance disappeared for a split second, and I saw only fear and hurt on her face.

I didn’t like the images that were suddenly flooding into my head. I didn’t want to know what could have caused the pain I saw in her expression.

“Why don’t we focus on what we’re going to do here? It doesn’t matter who has suffered more so far. Let’s focus on how to keep us all from suffering
going forward
.” I turned toward the dronelike faces beside me in the van. “Girls, there are more of us than them.”

The girl with the pixie cut turned back to me, this time anger glinting in her eyes. She whispered fiercely, her lips twitching.

“Shut
up
! If you try to incite a revolution, they will tell on you in six seconds flat. They are
dying
to inform. Then they get an entire day off. An
entire day
without anyone touching them at all. So shut the fuck up.”

I looked at the girl in disbelief, and then at Tracy, hoping she would take this point to heart. I had never done anything that bad. I wanted her to understand: this is what suffering can do to you. But Tracy’s face was as impassive as a statue’s.

The girl abruptly stopped talking.

In the silence, as the van rumbled through the night, I thought about what this girl had told us, and my calm started to evaporate. My heart was pounding so hard, I thought it would beat right out of my body.

After a few more hours, when the dawn was just breaking, the van made a sharp turn and bumped hard along what must have been a dirt road. The van swayed side to side, creaking noisily until it slowly pulled to a halt. Tracy and I jerked to attention, and Tracy poked the girl’s leg to wake her up. She slowly shook her head to pull herself out of her haze. She looked bewildered at first, but then, recognizing us, she nodded.

Tracy bent toward her, whispering, “By the way, what’s your name?”

“Huh?” the girl muttered, seeming confused. I wondered if she’d forgotten it in all this.

“What’s your name?” Tracy asked again.

“Oh, yeah, that.” She smiled at us, gaps and all. “No one’s asked me that for a while. My name is Jenny.”

Jenny. The name gave me a jolt of courage. I looked at Tracy and saw my own determination reflected back in her face. We braced ourselves for the moment the door would open.

     CHAPTER 30     

We sat for a long time as the van idled, our seats vibrating slightly beneath us. The engine went dead. The front doors opened and slammed shut. Then it was quiet. Too quiet. Five minutes went by. Ten.

Our arms taut, we gripped the cold vinyl beneath us, waiting. Someone lifted the exterior handle of the cargo doors once, but nothing happened. Then the driver’s-side door creaked open one maddening inch at a time. It was as if they were taunting us. We sat perfectly still, listening, and then it came. The sudden, dull click of the lock. They were coming for us.

Jenny whispered, “I don’t know who that is. I know all their tics and rhythms. Must be a new guy.”

“Good, right?” Tracy said optimistically, though her voice betrayed her fear. “He won’t know the routine. We can take him by surprise.”

Jenny stood up halfway and made her way over to the doors.
We followed, pushing our way past the knees and feet of the girls next to us, who were trying to sleep while they could.

Then the doors flew open. Instead of leaping forward, ready to push past whatever stood in my way, I froze, rooted to the spot, unable to believe my eyes. A split second later Tracy’s shaking voice came from behind me, “Christine?!?!”

I could not understand in that moment how it was possible, but there she stood. Christine, in all her Park Avenue glory, dressed in uniform New York City black, perfectly coiffed and shod for a day hike during peak leaf season. She held open the van doors, looking on in horror at the sight of the human cargo filling that van. Then she pulled herself into action.

“Everybody out! Let’s go,” she whispered loudly but assuredly, like a suburban mom unloading the junior varsity lacrosse team. All of us clambered out of the van, the girls behind us tearing themselves out of their sleep. Tracy grabbed the stragglers by the arms, throwing them into the breaking daylight. Some were dumbfounded and couldn’t process what was happening.
I
couldn’t process what was happening. What was Christine doing here?

But there was no time for questions.

Once we were out, Tracy jumped down and looked the girls over as they stood there, dazed. “Girls, don’t be idiots. RUN!!!”

I glanced around quickly. The van was parked behind a barn, half-collapsed into an overgrown rye field, across from an equally decrepit farmhouse, dark except for a single lit window. I wasted no more time following Christine’s lead but sprinted down the hill, away from the house into the woods. Running like hell.

It must have been a beautiful and ethereal sight in some ways. All those girls, barefoot in flowing white robes, running downhill at top speed between the trees of a wild rural paradise. Like nymphs. Like seraphim.

Time was unrolling in slow motion as if in some fluid, hypervivid
dream. The girls’ faces reflected their shock, their terror, their total disorientation. I could see flashes of white robes flitting in and out between the branches. Tracy, Christine, and I could easily spot one another as the group fanned out, the only black spots in the pure flow of white streaming down the hill.

All of a sudden I felt elated. I laughed out loud. Loud into the dawning sunlight glinting through the green of the trees. I looked over at Tracy and Christine. They heard me, and somehow my joy, my joy at being free, at having such a close call, of having Christine show up as a savior in the early morning, sent my spirits soaring, and I couldn’t stop laughing. They joined me, and soon we were running and stumbling and tripping over ourselves, laughing hysterically, maniacally, desperately, as we moved through those woods.

Eventually we came to a clearing. Christine slowed down to check her phone, then stopped, texting like mad. Several of the girls had stopped running from sheer exhaustion, many of them holding their sides to ease the cramps. We gathered in the clearing and tried to catch our breath, listening to hear whether anyone was chasing us. The woods were completely silent. No dogs, no men, no gunshots. It was eerily quiet.

Christine was smiling through tears. Just as I was about to ask her what we should do, I heard the sound of helicopters. There must have been four or five of them hovering overhead, the collective sound of their spinning blades combining into a single roar in my ears. Christine ran over to us, her arms wide, gesturing for us to get down. The girls in white stared up in awe as one helicopter lowered itself down into the clearing.

As the first one landed, a tall man in a black bulletproof vest and black flight suit jumped to the ground and started walking toward us as he spoke into the microphone pinned to his shoulder.

“Jim!” I said. I almost started to run toward him but slowed up as I realized Tracy and Christine were falling in line beside me.

Jim looked at us and shook his head. Then he smiled.

“Sarah, remember—all I asked you to do was testify at the hearing? And now look what you’ve gotten yourself into.” He almost reached out to hug me but pulled back at the last minute, remembering himself. Tracy fell into his arms instead, and then Christine. They were delirious, thanking him over and over again for coming.

Jim looked out at me from their arms. I could only smile weakly at him. He smiled back, holding my gaze with his eyes, which were filled with pity and a tenderness that caught me by surprise. He is pretty human, I thought to myself as I looked away, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Especially for an FBI agent.

Slowly they got us all boarded onto the helicopters, and an hour or so later we touched down in the parking lot of a local police station, which I would soon discover was in a small town just outside Portland. The squat brick building had been built in the fifties, and it didn’t look like anyone had done any maintenance on it since. Inside, the linoleum tiles on the floor had curled up at the corners, and the paint on the walls was chipped and faded, stained with the dull black sheen that inevitably develops from decade after decade of brushes with human flesh.

It seemed every law enforcement officer from the county had gathered in the building, and every journalist and camera crew in the state was camped outside. Three ambulances, sirens turning, awaited our arrival, and paramedics rushed toward us as we entered the building.

Moments later I sat on some officer’s desk, wrapped in a blanket, while he stood off to the side a few feet away, mostly gaping. Someone handed me a cup of coffee, and I took a sip. Christine and Tracy were sitting in wheeled office chairs on either side of me, Christine twisting hers slightly back and forth in a nervous rhythm.

The scene brought me back to a similar one ten years before.
Except now all around me were girls in floor-length robes, some being interviewed by police officers, some drinking their coffee and staring straight ahead, all trying to make sense of this new development. I knew how confused they must feel. To me, though, it was a sort of homecoming.

“Someday, someone is going to need to explain to me what just happened. But right now I’m perfectly content to be sitting on this desk in this funny little precinct, drinking this tar-paper coffee,” I said, almost feeling genuinely happy at that moment. Instead of retraumatized, I felt invigorated. This situation felt more like the normal condition of the world. This I could cope with. This was easier than waiting for what might happen.

“Well, it’s very simple, really,” said Christine. “When Tracy called yesterday morning to tell me about the list—”

“The list?” I said, my mind wiped clean from shock.

“Yes, you know, Jim’s list of girls who went missing during Jack Derber’s academic conferences.” I nodded, and she continued. “When she told me that, something in me snapped, and I knew, somehow, I had to help keep him from getting out. After all, as you pointed out, I do have daughters.

“But it was more than that. Ever since I saw you, I’ve been thinking about your search. All these years I’ve tried to forget our past. I was afraid if I went anywhere near that edge, I’d fall off the cliff. But if those other girls are out there … I had to.”