Leather Maiden (21 page)

33

It didn't take much research to find Mrs. Soledad's phone number. Next morning, I called her and told her I wanted to talk to her about Ronnie, asked if she knew where Ronnie was these days.

“No,” she said. “But I don't talk about things like that over the telephone.”

I gave her my background, told her I was running down a story about missing women, meaning Ronnie and Caroline, and from some letters I had come across, I knew she knew them well.

Mrs. Soledad was silent for a moment.

“Letters?” she asked.

I explained.

“Those were private,” she said.

“Came across them by accident, and we're doing an investigation.”

“We?”

“My assistant and I.”

“I don't know I like you going through letters I've written.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Soledad. We just sort of came across them.”

“Did you have permission? Isn't there a law about that?”

“They had been confiscated by the landlord for back rent. He gave us permission to look through what was left.”

No word from the other end.

“You know that Caroline went missing?” I said.

“Of course. Ronnie told me. We exchanged letters and phone calls. Mostly letters. I don't do that new thing everyone does.”

“New thing?”

“Mailing off the computer.”

“Oh. E-mail.”

“That's right. We did it the old-fashioned way. Envelopes and stamps. But, yes, I knew Caroline. I knew her well.”

“Can you tell me about her and Ronnie?”

“You come see me. I see you face-to-face, then maybe I'll want to talk.”

“All right,” I said.

“You get here, I'll be the one with a .357 in my lap.”

“Oh.”

“No. I mean it. Come on, but you better have good intentions.”

“I use my powers only for good.”

“Yeah, well, you better.”

She gave me the directions I already had from the Internet. Belinda and I drove over to Cleveland in my junker. When we left, a dark cloud came in from the west and brought thunder and lightning with it. The noonday sky was dark as midnight. We drove with the headlights on. We saw a strand of lightning hit the ground out in a pasture, and when it hit, the world lit up brighter than a floor show in Las Vegas, made my vision go white for an instant. When we were a half hour out from Cleveland, the bottom of the cloud collapsed and down came rain. We had to turn the windshield wipers on high. One of my wiper blades was a wounded soldier. Part of it came loose, slapped frantically at the windshield.

It was still raining when we got into Cleveland. Mrs. Soledad lived in a little white house just off the highway with a covered porch with a swing on it and a couple of cloth foldout chairs. As we drove up in the yard, the wind picked up the chairs and slapped them across the porch and hung them up in the swing.

Belinda and I sat in the car for a moment. The driveway ended some twenty feet from the porch steps, in front of a closed-up garage. I said, “I'm thinking about the .357 she mentioned.”

“She shoots you,” Belinda said, “I'll go for help.”

“Comforting.”

About that time, a woman, who I surmised was Mrs. Soledad, came out on the porch. I didn't see the .357 in her hand. She waved us in.

“Here we go,” I said, and I opened my door and slid out, and Belinda slid out behind me. We fought our way through the rain, and the moment we stepped up on the porch steps, the wind picked up again, jerked one of the cloth chairs out of its tangle against the swing, carried it away in a swirl, just missing us. I watched it fly off the porch, hit the yard twice, like a skipping rock, then go sailing into a stand of trees where it got hung up.

I gave a hand to Belinda and helped her onto the porch. I turned and looked at Mrs. Soledad. She was about five feet tall with black hair streaked with gray, and she had a little body and a pleasant face. She looked elderly, but spry, like an android version of a grandma. In spite of this, I kept the .357 she had mentioned in mind.

“Sorry about your chair,” I said. “Rain slacks, I'll get it for you.”

“Don't worry about the chairs,” she said. She pushed the screen door wider. “Come on in. It's gotten chilly out here. Not to mention wet.”

The other chair gave way then, came up and over the swing, banged against one of the chains that supported the swing, then darted off the open end of the porch and sailed out to join its cousin.

Inside it was a little cool, but nothing like outside. The place was dark and smelled of Lysol. After a moment my eyes adjusted, and I could see the place looked like the classic grandma home, with knickknacks here and there, and a big comfy couch with a Chihuahua lying on it like something stuffed. There was a small blackened fireplace and some really thick, comfy chairs nearby. Out a back window I could see a big fenced-in yard being rained on.

We stood there as she went away, and came back with towels.

“Dry off,” she said, and we did. She took the towels, folded them up and placed them on an arm of the couch.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Soledad said. “I'll make us some tea.”

“Thanks,” Belinda said. She and I chose the comfy chairs by the dead fireplace. Mrs. Soledad disappeared into the kitchen. A light came on in there and some of it fled into the room where we sat. I could hear pans clanging around in there.

About five minutes passed, Belinda and I not saying anything, just glancing at each other from time to time. Occasionally checking out the Chihuahua, who had almost raised its head once, but had decided on a shrug and a soft sigh.

I looked around for the .357, but didn't see it.

Mrs. Soledad came out of the kitchen, came over and stood between us in our chairs. “Take about fifteen minutes for the water to be ready,” she said. “I'll start us up a fire. Can you believe this?” she said, stopping to snap up some wood in a little metal bucket, and put it in the fireplace. “This time of year it ought to be hot. I had to turn off the air conditioner.”

“Weird times,” I said.

“Global warming,” she said. “It makes the seasons all screwed up.”

She built a fire in the fireplace, and I stood up and got some larger wood out of a bin on the other side of the mantel and gave it to her and she put it in the way she wanted. Pretty soon the fire was jumping and crackling and throwing shadows over the room.

Outside the rain came down hard on the roof. Mrs. Soledad sat on the couch beside the motionless Chihuahua.

“They usually yap, Chihuahuas,” I said.

“He's too old for that,” Ms. Soledad said. “He barks too hard, he might throw up a lung. He's twenty-one years old. I kid you not.”

“Wow,” Belinda said.

“About Ronnie,” she said. “Do you know where she is?”

“We were hoping you might,” I said. “She knew Caroline, and Caroline is also missing…possibly murdered, and it ties in with another investigation our paper is doing.”

Ms. Soledad shook her head. “No. I was hoping you knew where she is. I've tried shaking every tree you can imagine. I reported her missing, but nothing really came of it. They said she checked out of the university and left, just no one knows where.”

“Wouldn't she just go home?” Belinda asked.

“This is home,” Ms. Soledad said. “Home of a sorts. The one she knew best. I did home care. A foster parent.”

“Ronnie was one of your foster kids?” I asked.

Ms. Soledad nodded. “And so was Caroline, for a while.”

“Can you tell us about it?” I asked.

“Caroline and Ronnie came to me when they were preteens. They had been with an adoption agency, but no one adopted them. Ronnie would have been adopted, I suppose, but when she came to stay with me, she just never left. I pretty much became her mother, and she my daughter. I love her dearly, and I'm very concerned about her.”

“Why didn't the police follow up?” I asked.

“I think they did. But there was nothing to follow. She checked out of school, left her apartment and just went away. There was no evidence of foul play, they said.”

“Except she left everything she had in the apartment…” I said. “Oh, I didn't mean to worry you, Mrs. Soledad. It's just that I'm not that impressed with our police force in Camp Rapture, previous or present.”

“Nor I,” she said. “Fact is, I'm quite sure something has happened to Ronnie. She wouldn't have quit writing. She would have called me on Mother's Day. She always did, you know. I was worried because she was so close to Caroline, and that was like having a rattlesnake for a friend. In the end, it just doesn't work out.”

“Can you tell us about Ronnie and Caroline?” Belinda asked. “Maybe we can help find them, if we knew more about them.”

“Truth is, I hated Caroline,” she said. “Isn't that an absolutely awful thing to say? I raised her to some degree, but, as they say in East Texas, that girl just wasn't right.”

Belinda looked at me out of the corner of her eye, then back at Mrs. Soledad. “When she was a kid did you hate her?” Belinda asked.

Ms. Soledad nodded. “I never said such a thing to her. I tried in every way to like her and to get along with her, but she was…wrong. Don't misunderstand me. I don't think she was born wrong. Having helped raise many foster kids, I'm convinced that we humans make our own monsters. But sometimes, the monster gets made very early, and there's no rescue. The deed is done.”

The teapot whistled and Mrs. Soledad walked into the kitchen and came back with a tray and three cups of tea. She gave one to Belinda, one to me. She sat down on the floor and fixed her tea, then got up without effort and went to the couch.

“Notice how I get around,” she said, and it was easy to see she was proud of her agility.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yoga. I swear by it.”

I nodded. “I may have to take it up.”

“Good for the back.”

“I'm sure it is. You were saying about Caroline.”

Mrs. Soledad sipped her tea. “Yes. She was a pathetic thing. Her parents, they had done a number on her. Her mother was thirteen when she had Caroline. Can you believe that, thirteen? I didn't even know about sex until I was fifteen or sixteen. Christ, are hormones really working at that age? I guess so, but it seems so amazing.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“Anyway, her mother had her at thirteen, and the old boy who was the father ran off and didn't come back, and when Caroline was two or so, her mother…what was her name…Jennifer something…Well, Jennifer took up with an older man. Some fellow twenty-five, worked as a pulpwood driver. This guy drank when he worked and drank when he was home, and he took to beating Jennifer like she was a dusty rug, and he didn't have a lot of patience with a baby either. I don't know what went on there exactly, but it wasn't good. I'm sure little Caroline took a few whippings herself. If not worse.

“Well, things looked like they were turning for the better when the old boy had a pile of pulpwood snap its chain and cover him up and kill him good…But Jennifer, therein lay another problem. She wasn't any smarter at sixteen than she was at thirteen, and the next thing you know she's pregnant again, some black fellow from over around Houston. Now, I know how some people feel. I don't give a damn about skin color. What I think's wrong here is that Jennifer was little more than a baby and this fellow was nearly thirty, and he wasn't any better than the husband she had before. Except he didn't drive a pulpwood truck. He kicked Jennifer one night while she was pregnant, and the baby died from the kick. The kicker, her old man, disappeared into the woodwork.

“Caroline was soon the stepdaughter or stepniece or pal to whoever came along and was shacking up with her mama, and that's all Caroline knew. She didn't know that these men weren't supposed to touch their daughters, or stepdaughters, and they sure weren't supposed to have sex with them. She started being molested early on, I figure, but certainly by the time she was eleven she was being taken full advantage of by her mother's boyfriends, or husbands, whatever Jennifer called them. And as Caroline got older, she turned into a real looker, and that brought all manner of boys around.”

“How did you learn about all this?” I asked.

“Her social workers, people who knew her. Things she told me. Believe me, I did my research. I wanted to do whatever I could to help her. I had had abused children before, but this poor girl, she was the most worked over and manipulated I had ever seen. Her mother used her. It was a way for her to attract men to help take care of her and Caroline. She put her out there like bait on a line. And she didn't care if Caroline was servicing them like a show heifer. Long as it kept food on the table and she didn't have to bother with work or raising a kid. By this time my guess is the mother had pretty much worn out on sex, and she was just then old enough to really start having it.

“Sex isn't just an act. It's an emotional investment, though kids these days try to tell you different. They call it hooking up. At least they're making the choice to hook up. Caroline, she wasn't making the choice. Least not at first. But by the time she was fourteen she knew something about manipulation herself. Two men came to live with Caroline and her mother, and they both were there for Caroline. And somehow, Caroline worked them. Or that's my guess. And one of them killed the other, and the survivor ended up in jail. Caroline, she never went to see him or had anything else to do with him. She had played them. She was a hollow shell. All of her goodness, or any potential for goodness, had been sucked out and blown away dry. She took to hurting animals and setting fires, and finally she was taken away from her mother.”

“And that's how you ended up with her?” Belinda said.

“That's right, sugar. That's how I ended up with her. Her mother swore she was going to clean up her act, but what she did was put a needle in her arm that was full of something that killed her. Caroline, when I told her about it, she said, ‘Huh.' Just like that. Nothing else. She didn't go to the funeral. She didn't have any real connection to anyone, except maybe me a little, and Ronnie.