Forgive Me (23 page)

All this got Angie thinking about the attic where she’d found the picture in the jewelry box. She would let her father sleep in that chair a little longer, so she could return to the attic uninterrupted.

She began rummaging through boxes, plastic containers, and sundry bags, mostly filled with clothes. There was nothing of real interest, nothing until she found a container with her mother’s old check registers inside. There were boxes full of registers going back years—decades, actually. Not that this surprised Angie, who knew of her mother’s penchant for keeping papers because she was too busy to shred them, and never threw anything in the trash that could be used by identity thieves, even bank registers from accounts closed long ago.

It was fun and a little sad to review a lifetime of purchases. She found plenty of pedestrian entries—food, clothing, utility bills—but the more personal ones were what Angie found most touching, including all the lessons (dance, swim, horseback riding, tennis, soccer, art camps); all the home repairs; all the charitable giving, including one check for fifteen hundred dollars labeled a loan made out to Susie Banks, a close friend of Kathleen’s. Aunt Susie, to Angie. All the women close to her mother were aunts to Angie, except for her real aunts who Angie didn’t know.

As Angie looked at her mother’s handwriting, she thought of the words on the back of the photograph.
Forgive me
. “Forgive you for what, Mom?” she said aloud.

As she flipped through the check registers, years passing in seconds, a blur of purchases speeding before her eyes, one entry caught her eye. It was a two hundred dollar sum paid to MCEDC and recorded as “Microtia Gift.” The gift had been made five years ago, recorded as paid on March the fourth.

Microtia was the little girl’s ear deformity. Angie had looked up the condition online, but learned nothing revealing or helpful in her search for the girl’s identity. Using her phone, Angie typed MCEDC into Google and found the Microtia-Congenital Ear Deformity Center in Burbank, California. From what she could tell, it looked to be the world’s most prominent institute for research and surgical repair of microtia and a related condition called atresia.

Angie combed the check registers again with a different focus. The more recent check registers should be downstairs in her mother’s desk, but in these older registers she soon came upon another entry for a payment to MCEDC, that one also made on the fourth of March, also for two hundred dollars. She kept looking, register after register—thirty or so registers in total, stored in a dozen check boxes. Angie found the same entry made year after year. The checks were always written on the fourth of March and always for two hundred dollars, which told Angie it was significant, though she had no idea why.

The last entry Angie found dated back to 1984. It might have been the first entry recorded. She didn’t know if other, older registers were anywhere else in the house.

Downstairs, she rifled through her mother’s desk and found her more recent checkbook registers. She flipped through pages, but did not have to go back very far. A little over a month before her death, Kathleen DeRose wrote a two hundred dollar check to the MCEDC on March the fourth.

Angie sat in her mother’s office chair, spun it a few times, thinking what it could mean, knowing she would end up calling Bao.

Angie’s phone rang. She was sure it was Bao calling her. “Were your ears ringing?”

It wasn’t Bao. It was Mike. “Ange, I got a joke for you. Three pimps walk into a bar.”

Angie gasped. “They’re there?”

“Mr. Fedora, Casper the Friendly Killer, and some tall, thin, good-looking guy I hate on account of those very attributes. A couple girls are with them and they don’t look like they subscribe to
Good Housekeeping
, if you get my drift. I’m going to strike up a little conversation. See what happens.”

“You be careful as can be.”

“Hey, I’m Captain Careful, the world’s dullest superhero.”

“Listen, if you can’t get inside, see if one of the girls can get Nadine the burner phone and my business card. The message is we want to help. Don’t play the hero, Mike. Got it?”

Mike hummed a few bars from Superman’s theme song in response.

CHAPTER 29

E
xhibit D: Excerpts from the journal of Nadine Jessup, pages 44-50

I am here in the basement on my bed (my bed, ha that’s a good one, like I want to claim it for my own . . . mine, mine, mine). Anyway, here I am on a bed in my, oh let’s call it “designated area,” my cube (like where my dad’s employees work) down in this bogus maze of makeshift rooms. I’m staring up at a ceiling carpeted with so much mold I want to gag, waiting for something to happen, something I don’t want to have happen. I don’t want another job, another man, but someone will show up because someone always shows up. To pass the time, I’m sneaking in a little journaling, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. I still feel sick and dirty and disgusting. Whatever was me, the old me, I think has rotted away and now whatever I am is all that’s left.

At least I have something inside me to numb the pain, something Tasha gave me, something small and blue that makes the mold on the ceiling ripple like waves and my body feel weightless and my soul feel free. I can do anything in this state of mind. Even let them use my body as an ATM for “Stinger” Markovich, Ricardo, and the others. I understand that I’m here, trapped in this situation because of me and nobody else. I could have said no to the pictures. I could have somehow not fallen for Ricardo, not trusted him, escaped from that first apartment when he gave me the chance. I could have said no to the work, no to using my body, but I didn’t fight them because I was afraid—afraid of them—and now I’m a part of this. You can’t separate a part from the whole without suffering, Ivan said to me. He told me you can’t cut off an arm and not have it bleed.

I could try and leave this place, sure, but I know it’s going to hurt if I do. Somehow it’s going to hurt badly, so I’m stuck here and probably I’ll stay here until I disappear like Jade, the older girl they starved until she wouldn’t eat. I’ll stay here until the day another girl takes my place and lies on this very bed (my bed/her bed), staring up at the same mold-covered ceiling.

I saw Ricardo for the first time in a while. He kissed me on the lips, but I played possum, acted like I was dead, didn’t kiss back at all, and he didn’t like it so he didn’t stick around for anything more. He said he’s with a new girl now and he’s not going to bring her here because he loves her too much. Strange. For all the horrible things Ricardo has done to me, horrible horrible things, I thought he couldn’t possibly hurt me anymore than he already had.

I was wrong.

The craziest thing just happened. I mean crazy! I’m still freaking out. My heart is racing like mad and Tasha gave me something to calm me down, but I don’t think it’s working. I don’t know what to do. I’m so happy I want to burst into tears, but I’m so scared I want to cry, as well, so I’ll be back in a minute because I’m going to the bathroom to cry my eyes out and probably puke.

Miss me? Ha-ha. No, really I did leave and I really did cry, but I didn’t puke. Whatever, I feel so much better, but I’m still not sure what to do or what to make of what just happened. Here’s the skinny. I’m downstairs in the room (yes, that room) just chillaxin, high as a raindrop spit from a cloud (my friend Brianna used to say that) so that was good. I’m numb to this now, so I can be (as my mom would say) flippant about what it is I do to survive, though the pills help, the pills make it a whole lot easier to get the job over with. And this job was some middle-aged guy with a middle-aged belly and it was gross what he came here to do so I hated him right away. But I played with him because that’s what’s expected of me and the alternative is the hole.

Tasha was awake when I got back upstairs. She was making tea, something she did a lot. She had on gray sweats and a blue T-shirt and looked super relaxed which was so weird to me. This was just Tasha’s life. This was her normal and I guess it was my normal, too. It was hard to get my head around that one. When we weren’t downstairs being fantasy gals or release valves for these sicko Johns we wore sweats and drank tea and watched television and did Sudoku and read books and cried. Just because we are prostitutes doesn’t mean we stopped having feelings.

Tasha had a funny look on her face and I asked her what was wrong. She told me she went out with Ricardo, Casper, and Buggy for drinks with a couple of the girls. I knew which ones without her having to say. Getting out of here had everything to do with how long a girl had been on the job. Like I wrote, I go out rarely, and I’m always accompanied. For the most part I’m kept indoors like a house cat. Tasha has more freedom because with more years comes more trust.

Tasha told me she was hanging out at Club 324 and some guy came up to her and started talking. Casper got all territorial (her word), but she told him to go away. It could be business, right? Then this guy starts asking questions about me. He describes me anyway, calls me Nadine (Tasha didn’t know my real name) and he showed her a picture of me on his phone. He told her my mom was looking for me and she had hired him to find me. Tasha told me she didn’t say yes or no, but the guy is persistent. He says he followed Ivan to the apartment building. And they think I might be with him. He thinks he knows what this place really is. So Tasha on the sly told this guy that I’m fine and healthy and all that, and then she gave him the cold shoulder, but not before the guy gave her a phone and a card of some woman named Angie.

After this big news I’m all kind of freaked out. Tasha poured us both a cup of tea and we sat on the futon aka my other bed. She placed the phone and business card on the coffee table and told me the choice was mine. My body went hot and cold at the same time and it had nothing to do with being high (which I was BTW). It was the weirdest feeling ever, I mean so surreal I can’t even begin to explain it. Tasha knew exactly what that phone call might mean. Police. A raid. A rescue. But what about her? This was her life now. She had no family. No money. No relatives. She had nothing but Casper, Buggy, Ricardo, and Ivan. And horrible as it was, it was better than the unknown and that’s where she’d be headed, into the unknown. No money for food, no place to live, and nobody to supply her with pills. Believe me, the pills were an important part of the equation. But she said she knows what this life is, and what it will do to me. It’ll turn me into her and she doesn’t want that for me, so she gave me the phone and said the choice is mine. But what will happen to Tasha if I make that call? What would happen to me?

And that’s when I started to panic. Could I just leave? Should I? What was I going to tell my mom and dad once I got home? What would they think of me when they found out what I had done? I don’t belong there anymore. I belong here, right where I am.

Tasha called me her little sister. She said she’d understand if I made the call and I shouldn’t worry about her. I told her how scared I was, how I was afraid of going home, afraid if I left they would find me and kill me or kill my mom and dad. If I left, they would put everyone who stayed behind down in the hole, including Tasha. I wanted Tasha to reassure me that I was overreacting. I wanted her to tell me I had nothing to worry about, that nothing would happen to me, or to her, or to my parents. That’s what I wanted her to say. Instead, she told me she understood and that she’d feel the exact same way.

CHAPTER 30

A
ngie left her father’s house at 4:30 in the morning. She woke her dad to tell him she was going, and without delay got in her car and drove out of town. She would talk to him about the check registers later, when he was more awake and his memory could be trusted. She drove north instead of east, a long detour on her way to DC because some news had to be delivered in person.

Carolyn Jessup came to her front door dressed in a checkered bathrobe, looking half asleep. Angie had awoken her with a phone call made from Carolyn’s front porch. She made the call so Carolyn wouldn’t have to wait long to find out what Angie had come to share. Carolyn’s hair was tangled, and her eyes, ringed with dark circles, showed the strain of her daughter’s absence.

“We think we’ve found her,” Angie said. “We believe your daughter is alive and in good health.”

Carolyn’s legs buckled as her eyes misted over. Angie grabbed Carolyn’s arm to hold her steady.

Carolyn placed a hand to her chest, her ragged breathing made it difficult to speak. “Where—where is she?”

“Baltimore,” Angie said.

Carolyn let out a sob. “Why? Who is she with?”

“Invite me in. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

Soon they were seated at a kitchen table. Carolyn didn’t offer Angie any tea, not even a glass of water. She only had time to get the facts.

Angie explained to Carolyn how they had followed Nadine’s trail from Union Station to an apartment building in Baltimore. She told her about Mike’s encounter at a bar with a woman he believed knew Nadine.

“Who does she know in Baltimore?” Carolyn asked.

Angie pulled her lips tight. Breaking news usually involved breaking hearts. “You need to brace yourself. We think Nadine is being trafficked for sex.”

Carolyn made an expression Angie had seen on people who had just been shot—horror, shock, sadness, and confusion blended into one.

“She’s just a girl,” Carolyn said, her lower lip trembling. “She’s my baby girl.” Tears. “I need a drink. Excuse me a moment.”