Authors: Cameron Judd
AFTER SITTING AWAKE IN A CAR ALL night, Melinda had hoped for an easy work day, especially with her sister present in the office.
She got her wish. Her only real assignment for the day was to do some fact-gathering from the Kincheloe County tax assessor’s office, a favor for a momentarily overburdened friend and fellow reporter at the station. The task was easily accomplished by phone, and Melinda received the added compensation of her grateful friend ordering pizza for her lunch and having it delivered to Melinda’s office for her lunch. At Melinda’s request, enough was ordered to feed Megan, Eli, and Flora as well.
The pizza arrived about the same time that, unknown to all, Cale Parvin was putting a pistol to his temple and taking his last blurred look at the bedroom that was his world.
Flora ate two modest slices of pepperoni pizza before departing for the Parvin house. Driving away from Hodgepodge, she automatically looked for Jimbo’s truck, then wept as she realized one more time that it would never be parked there again.
ELI AND MELINDA CHANCED TO WALK OUT of their offices at the same time in late afternoon, and both spotted the just-returned Flora Hamilton at the same moment. Flora was at the door of the “suicide room” where had died the young woman Eli was sure was the daughter of Don New. The one Don New, at graveside, had said took her own life in the former Winona Court in despair over something that had in some manner caused her to “lose” her child.
Melinda was nearer to Flora and reached her first.
“Flora, why are you going in there, of all places?”
Flora’s face was lined and tear-stained. “I’m compelled to, Lindy. I don’t know why, exactly. He took his life. His own life.”
“If you’re talking about Jimbo, you’re wrong. It was his heart that killed him. You know that!”
Eli reached them just as Flora said, “It’s Cale Parvin I’m speaking of. Mr. Cale, he shot himself today. Right in his own room, sitting in his chair.”
“Oh!” Melinda said. “Oh no!”
“Are you the one who found him, Flora?” Eli asked.
“Somebody called in the police before I ever got there. They think it might have been his son, Rawls. He was there during the morning, if I understood the policemen right.”
“Poor Rawls, losing his father,” Melinda said softly. “Although I don’t think they had much of a relationship.”
“You’re a remarkable person, Melinda,” Eli said. “Sympathy toward someone who once tried to hurt you is an unusual quality.”
Melinda merely shrugged.
Flora turned the key and opened the door. A musty, closed-up smell wafted out, and Eli and Melinda had the odd experience of looking into a room whose origins as a mid-20th century motel had not been stripped away. Even the bed frames remained, bolted to floor and wall, though the mattresses were gone. Also remaining were the gaudy wall paintings of big flower blossoms that were the only decoration in the room, as well as reading lights on hinged arms attached to the walls above the bed frames. Two dusty chairs covered with decaying, splitting vinyl were in one corner, stuffing hanging out and much-harvested by rodents.
Flora walked listlessly to the nearest bed frame. “It was here I found her,” she said. “Lying out with her face still damp from her tears and her hand still holding to the bottle of pills she’d taken into herself. Her wordly sorrow was ended by the time I found her. She’d left a “note to everybody,” which is what she’d wrote out on the motel notepad from the bedside table. She wrote down that she’d been living a life of sin and had failed to keep watch on her little daughter, and 'evil hands' had took her away.”
Melinda put her arm around the trembling Flora’s thin shoulders. “Flora, you’ve already been through seeing the aftermath of one suicide today. Why come back here to where you had to go through the same thing once before? What are you looking for?”
Flora turned and looked into Melinda’s face earnestly. Eli, feeling somehow like an intruder, stood to the side, watching.
“I’m not looking for nothing, Lindy. I don’t know what draws me in here sometimes. I’d just like to figure a way to clean the death from this room. Jimbo felt the same … he told me. Maybe someday when I come in, I won’t feel the same sorrow lingering here.”
Melinda said nothing, merely embraced the old woman, who began to cry shakily and leaned into Melinda, letting the younger woman help hold her up. It had been a very stressful, saddening day.
Chapter Fifty
LUKEY PARVIN BARELY FELT THE PRICK OF Jang’s needle into his arm. Jang was skilled in administering the shots that kept Lukey in a semi-conscious state, flopped in the passenger seat of Jang’s car, unmoving, seeing but not comprehending the world around him. He was helpless, fully at Jang’s mercy and thus in constant danger. One of the side effects of whatever drug concoction Jang used, though, was that it took away his ability to care.
Years of experience in use of the drug concoction, created by pharmaceutical chemists under the hire of the Flower Garden as a tool for procurers such as Jang, had given Jang expertise in its administration. Jang carried pre-loaded hypodermics filled with assorted doses of the highly stable drug cocktail, and could tell with no more than a glance at his intended victim the size of dose needed to render that victim listless, unconscious, or dead. He kept his hypodermics in a small case that was never out of reach, and was deft in stealthily administering a fast injection after putting himself within reach of his victim. The drug’s effect was so fast that even the sting of the needle was almost instantly erased. One quick, barely-felt jab, and Jang had control.
In the time since he’d tracked down Lukey Parvin, a once-promising procurer for the Flower Garden who had been foolish enough to betray the Gardeners and think he could get away with it, Jang had kept Lukey perpetually under the influence of the drug. Lukey’s state had varied from relatively mild torpor to full unconsciousness. Any time now Jang would draw a hypodermic from the side of his case where he kept the lethal doses, and Lukey would never waken again. Jang hated to do it to a man who had once been a partner and friend, but he had his orders. He’d even called in news that he’d found Lukey, hoping to learn he could be allowed to spare the man’s life. No such mercy was extended. Lukey had to be disposed of.
So there was no reason now to keep Lukey alive. He was a cumbersome burden, and the stupid man had made the mistake of showing Jang where the little girl, Megan Buckingham, lived. So now Jang had no need of Lukey’s help in finding the child destined to be the Flower Garden’s next prize blossom. He would harvest her very soon – it would take only moments, when the right opportunity came. He would put her sufficiently under the influence of his drug to keep her sedate and compliant, and whisk her away from this hick town and off to a new life she would never have anticipated. A life in
Slovenská republika,
a world far away from the one she’d known. Oh, the things this little girl would see, would learn! And she would have to thank for it Jang Bo-kyung. It was enough to make him smile, though smile he seldom did.
Jang was ready to divest himself of Lukey Parvin. There was always one particular difficulty in such messy matters, though: when life left a body, the body remained, and had to be disposed of.
Fortunately for Jang, Lukey himself had provided a possible solution to that problem a decade or so earlier, when Jang had made his first visit to Tylerville, Tennessee. On that occasion, Jang recalled, their prize flower had been harvested at a big lodge hall near a Kincheloe County community with the strange name of Flea Plank. Jang had to admit that Lukey deserved the main credit for that particular procurement. He’d been the first to see the little girl, whose name Jang had by now long forgotten, and had sniffed out an opportunity for them to conveniently get their hands on her.
The little girl’s unmarried young mother had been a dancer in a group of low-level and largely untalented high-kickers who billed themselves under the name “The Bawdy Girls.” The Bawdy Girls were little in demand because their shows were actually not very bawdy at all, and the redneck audience they sought to entertain could find much randier entertainment in a dozen remote backwoods “gentleman’s clubs” (with names like “The Wildcat Lounge” and “Hell’s Belles”) that were merely beer joints presenting unrefined young women willing to go onstage and do whatever the drunks hollered at them as long as they were paid enough to keep themselves in alcohol and drugs. The Bawdy Girls were decidedly lackluster in comparison to that wilder breed of hillbilly showgirl.
But the Bawdies had found one repeated venue in a particular local lodge hall, something unaffiliated with major organizations such as the Masons. There they were paid for doing little more than skipping about the stage in old-style petticoats and frocks, and kicking up their legs every now and then for the entertainment of the lodge members.
The Bawdy Girl who was mother of the child Jang and Lukey had taken was, like so many, unmarried and usually broke. During performances at the lodge building, she usually left the little girl to roam freely, unsupervised, and in that lay the opportunity Jang and Parvin had needed. It had been easy to simply sweep the child up and out a rear door of the big building while the dancing girls were distracted by their performance, and the men watching them distracted by the same.
The young girl gained at that rural lodge hall had proven an initial boon and later bane to the Flower Garden. They had made use of her as the featured underage star in one of their most vile underground film productions, and that film had proven unusually lucrative for the Flower Garden. It gained the distinction of being the piece of “kiddy” smut most frequently found by police when they busted the enterprises that marketed in such sad material.
When some FBI public relations hack had the idea of using an image of the girl’s tear-stained face, an image taken directly from the film that exploited her, as an icon representing the child abduction and exploitation issue, trouble had begun for the Flower Garden. Intense investigation unveiled the existence of the secret child-trafficking network. A shocked public demanded that Broken Flower (as reporters dubbed her) be found and rescued. Investigating officers ranging from the highest levels of the FBI and their counterpart state-level bureaus and on down to small-town street cops vowed to be the one who would claim the distinction of finding and save Broken Flower.
The girl’s image became ubiquitous as awareness of the reality of child-napping and related abuse grew across the country. She became a story in her own right. Evening news broadcasts gave frequently updated reports of new hopes by investigators across the country that the anonymous little girl was about to be identified because of some fresh clue, but never did the hopes reach fruition. Even after her corpse was found in a California trash dumpster, her true name remained unknown.
Broken Flower’s pathetic image had begun to fade somewhat from public awareness by 1984, when a presidential sign-off on congressional legislation brought into being the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a private non-profit entity. That event rejuvenated the memory and image of Broken Flower. The quest to learn her origins and identity revived with a new fervor, in spite of the added bitter twist of her now being beyond rescue.
Lukey Parvin’s successful involvement in the procuring of Broken Flower initially had brought him favor within the structure of the Flower Garden. When her image was taken over by the forces mustering against the evils done by the Flower Garden and their ilk, Lukey’s standing within the organization changed. Broken Flower, his greatest contribution to the Flower Garden, had become a rallying point in a nation that at one time had been oblivious to the problem she symbolized. Growing public awareness was nothing the Flower Garden network wanted. Their kind of “gardens” thrived in darkness, not in light.
When two of the leaders of the network (or “Gardeners”) were arrested, one in the United States and the other in Canada, the network scurried into hiding like cockroaches fleeing a kitchen light. The Center for Missing and Exploited Children was quick to assert that the problem embodied by the Flower Garden was far from over, despite the momentary blow inflicted upon the network. It would be back, the authorities warned. And other networks like it were out there as well.
With the heat on, the Gardeners began to look askance at Lukey Parvin. The man knew too much and did not seem stable. When he and a woman he married managed to get their hands on some Flower Garden funds, he became a problem needing resolution. Lukey fled, and his old partner, Jang Bo-kyung, was assigned to track him down and put a permanent end to the Parvin problem.
Now, as he drove down Kincheloe County backroads with a senseless-but-reviving Lukey in his passenger seat, Jang decided there was no better moment than the present one to deal with the situation.
Lukey stirred slightly and moaned, and Jang turned his car onto a highway Lukey himself had shown him those years back, when they had first taken the little girl into their clutches at Harvestman Lodge.
LUKEY HADN’T SAID AN AUTHENTIC WORD for over a day, being under the influence of the sedating injections Jang gave him repeatedly. He’d felt no wish to speak, anyway, because the truth was that he was content in the warm, cottony, silent embrace of the drugs. He could happily feel this way forever.