Circling Carousels (12 page)

Sienna helped Marcus carry her mother down the stairs. She sobbed great tears of something so lost, something that should never have happened, and the woman who had given her all
so that she and her sister might have a chance at a better life. Carefully, they placed her stiffened body into the backseat of the car and covered her with a blanket. From the house, they took all the back streets, which Marcus knew, into the main part of the city. In an alley, one distraught teenage daughter and one disturbed and saddened man took Candice’s body from the car and placed her ever so gently on the ground, so it looked as though she had simply died there. Marcus had brought some of the heroin with him and the tools to take it so it would seem she had overdosed there in the deserted alley among the rubbish and the grime.

Sienna was sick with the images of her once gorgeous mother now reduced to a junkie in an alley with the evidence of her habit there for anyone to see.
Where was the respect and the honour in this,
she wondered, but in reality she knew there was little choice. Candice would have no records, no past to follow up on, and the police would probably consider her a Jane Doe, a lady of the night in a desperately drug-addled mess.

It was so very hard to leave her there. Sienna was completely beside herself and unable to put the last picture she had of her mother out of her mind. She felt disgusted by the substances that destroyed her, angry at what she had become at the hands of these things, and caught in misery over a life cut so short and lived in such a sad way. Candice Carmody was only twenty-nine years old. There would never be a funeral for her daughters to go to, and there would never be any closure, just a whole lot of nothingness. That night, Marcus held Sienna until she finally slept and there were no more tears, only regret and miserable black emptiness.

In the morning, Sienna was met with the news from Marcus that he had made contact with Bonnie at the big house and that she would break the terrible news to Crystal of her mother’s death. Bonnie was struck with the awful irony of Candice’s short life, apparently, and was deeply saddened. In reality, Marcus had never called. That evening, after spending the day curled in a ball in bed, Sienna was told by Marcus that Crystal didn’t want to come home, that she wanted to stay with the aunties because she
hated Marcus for what he had let happen to her mother. Crystal would need to be alone, Marcus told her, for a while before she would want to see anyone, including Sienna.

Somewhere deep inside her, warning bells should have sounded. She should have realized this couldn’t be true. Crystal would want to be with her at this time. But she trusted Marcus and was fooled yet again by the mock sincerity she saw in his eyes. She wanted to believe him, so she did.

Dear Diary, my mum has died. I’m so sad, I can hardly write and there are big wet patches on the page from my tears dripping down. I so need Crystal right now! Marcus says she doesn’t want to see anyone, but I don’t understand why she wouldn’t want to see me! I want to tell her what happened. I want to explain to her why we had to leave her where we did in the alley. If she doesn’t understand, she might hate me for letting Marcus do it. I love him and I know he must have been right to leave her there, but it felt so awful. She looked so broken, and I want her back the way it used to be so much!

I don’t know why, but I felt like Marcus was pleased she was gone. I’m sure I saw him smile. I feel weird about him and I just want to die, too. Let me lay down with her and die and feel better, please.

But Marcus is so good to me. He holds me close when I cry, and I need him so much. Why is it that love is so good, but sometimes seems so bad, too?

Mummy, I miss you, I will always love you! I’m sorry if I hurt you! I hope you can forgive me, if I’m a bad daughter. Please, Mummy, I love you so much!

Chapter 18

A
long time had passed and Sienna, tired of not knowing what was going on, was rifling through her old papers, old books,
and old memories as she frantically searched for one small piece of paper. It had become extremely important to her to find the small scrap that had on it a solitary name and phone number. She felt that she loved Marcus and wanted to make him happy, but after two years of living together and being quite pleased with their relationship, she had become frightened because she had still not been able to see her twin sister.

It was wonderful to be with this man, but she didn’t entirely trust him. He worried her with his unwillingness to tell her about his life outside their home and his working life. She knew that whatever his business was that he was the owner, that he had quite a number of employees, and that it seemed like a covert kind of operation that did a lot of its business at night. The only organizations she could think of were the ugliest in society, and she wondered just what kind of man Marcus may be when he was away from her side. She had no complaints about their life with each other, but she had to admit some of the glow
was wearing off. Although he was still kind to her and appeared to give her love, he seemed more distant, more distracted, and even lacking in patience and tolerance with his young girlfriend. It was possible he was growing tired of her, she supposed.

She was so young and maybe he was beginning to crave more intelligent conversation and a woman closer to his age. Sienna would be heartbroken, of course, should he choose to find love elsewhere, but she had begun to scrutinize him more closely lately and wondered if she, too, was changing in her thoughts and heart towards him. She just didn’t completely believe in him anymore and the fact was it all boiled down to a few things: the way that her mother lived towards the end and then how she died and also the mysterious disappearance of her sister and continuing impossibility of contacting her. Every time any of these issues were raised, Marcus managed to wriggle his way out of the conversation and offer some new gift, a special weekend away, anything to grab Sienna’s short attention span and spin her in another direction.

Even two years later, the gaping hole left by her mother’s death and even longer since she had seen Crystal was eating Sienna from the inside out. It was time to get some answers, and Sienna knew just how to do it. All the news Marcus had offered about Crystal was second hand, passed on from Bonnie to his ears and then on to his girlfriend. All that she knew of her mother’s drug use was that it was what she needed and out of love he gave it to her. It didn’t quite ring true.

He had long since changed the number on her phone so that Bonnie could no longer contact her, so she really had no firsthand news. Sienna had a nagging feeling that Crystal was
not
safe. It was a twin thing, and she had a feeling that Marcus was supplying her mother with the drugs she wanted to keep her silent and malleable. Sienna was growing up. She was nearly sixteen now and had started to analyse rather than trust blindly. She was beginning to wonder if the absence of both Crystal and Candice was so that he could seduce her and have her all to himself. These were very negative thoughts for one previously
so blinded by her love, but she was starting to question a lot of things.

With these thoughts in her mind, she wanted to find a couple of imperative things: the phone number for the big house and some paperwork or emails or something to show her what it was that Marcus was up to. She hoped to find the latter in the locked office at the end of the hallway, and thankfully she had already noticed where Elsie kept the keys to all the doors in the house. At this exact moment, Elsie was at the market buying vegetables and meat for tonight’s dinner, and although Sienna knew she had little time, she wanted some answers. She had had enough of the unanswered questions and the wondering.

Grabbing the keys, she almost sprinted to the office door and tried three keys before the fourth one fit and unlocked the door. In this place, which she had never been in, were half a dozen filing cabinets and a laptop computer on the large modern desk in the middle of the room. She could hardly decide which to try, and then she thought of the probability of passwords on the computer and the difficulty in guessing what they might be. Just then, as she was trying to open the first filing cabinet drawer, a noise startled her. Looking up, she saw Elsie standing in the doorway with a confused mix of what looked like concern and pride on her face. She confirmed this by exclaiming in a soft but joyous voice, “Oh, Sienna, I’m so glad you worked it out! I’ve waited so long to find you looking through his things!”

“Well, then, could you help me, please?” Sienna said in exasperation.

Together they looked through the drawers for which Elsie knew were the whereabouts of the key to the cabinets, and as for the laptop Elsie, knew the password as she was surprisingly trusted to use it for downloading recipes on occasions. This was it, though, for Sienna; she now had the ability to find out what she needed to know about her boyfriend, and she was both pleased and frightened at the same time. Elsie made it easy for her, though, by doing most of the groundwork. She seemed to know exactly what to look for, and she opened up the emails
with only a few strokes on the keyboard. This was what Sienna wanted to see, and she was sure of it!

Elsie had clearly been in these emails before, and as she opened up the folder she knew would answer Sienna’s curiosity, she explained that for years now, she had wanted to share with her what she had accidentally stumbled upon on one evening when she was using the laptop. As she trawled the net for a recipe to make a chocolate cream pie, she was surprised to see an email alert appear on the screen. She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help herself. She clicked on it, read it, and a whole world of truth came rushing out at her.

Now as she showed Sienna this very email, she gave a small smile. It was time Sienna knew the truth. In one single thread were all the things the young girl needed to know. It was a conversation between Geoff, the friend who was supposed to have looked after her mother, and Marcus, the man she had believed in for so many years. They discussed back and forth the business, in general terms, which seemed to involve sales and deliveries of sensitive unmentionable things and the girls who worked hard, but not hard enough it would seem, to make money for Marcus’s company in the dead of night. Sienna looked at Elsie’s face, and she knew what it all meant: drugs and prostitution. It made sense.

Scrolling down, she realized that these emails seemed to be of an angry nature. She stopped suddenly when she saw her mother’s name.
You killed Candice, Marcus, not me!
Sienna scrolled down further. Geoff and her lover seemed to be arguing about how her mother died, and although Marcus was trying to blame Geoff, he knew that the blame lay with him. He talked about how he had supplied her with her needs and her hunger for more and more of the oblivion she desired and admitted he wished that she were indeed dead and gone from his life. Geoff replied that he had let her die for him so that he would be rid of her.

She stopped reading. Tears were streaming down her face, and she was unable to read more.

“Don’t stop now,” Elsie said. “You need to know the rest.”

Because Sienna was crying too much, Elsie read the next part for her. It was about Crystal. Marcus and Geoff were arguing back and forth about her, and the crux of it all was that Marcus had gotten rid of her, too. He hated her, he said, and wanted her gone. She was apparently too close to Sienna, and Marcus wanted her all for himself and not to have to share her with her nosy sister who had betrayed him to help her useless mother.

“Where is she, Elsie?” Sienna asked through her angrily gritted teeth.

“It’s only a little further down.”

They heard the opening of the front door. With the speed of a lightning bolt, Elsie shut down the email and the program and erased the browser history. Then calmly she opened up her favourite recipe site and started pointing out the required ingredients for a soufflé to Sienna and laughed out loud at the look on her face. “Yes, Sienna,” she said, “I’ve done this before.”

By the time the very concerned Marcus came and stood in the doorway, they were writing a list of what they would need and couldn’t have looked more innocent or immersed in the task.

“What are you two up to?” Marcus said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“We are making you a secret dessert for after tonight’s dinner, something really special,” Sienna said, flashing him her heart-melting smile.

“That will be lovely!” he replied. He offered to drive them to the market.