Hope House (3 page)

Sometimes now, Martine lay on her spring mattress on the cool white cloth sheets, her spongy black dreadlocks spla
yed on her feather pillow. She would look at her rainbows, while a ceiling fan dried sweat off her glossy black skin, and think how lucky she was to be here. She had three meals a day, electricity, television, and good medical care.

So different from when she lived with Maman and Papa in the shac
k in La Saline, Port Au Prince, fighting her siblings for food, and Maman always having more and more hungry babies. Maman sold her to Madame LaBrie when Martine was seven years old because she could not afford to feed her anymore.

At Madame LaBrie’s,
life consisted of chore after chore and not a minute to rest. But now, so many nice things around her. So much she
should
be thankful for.

Maison D’Espoir, the gate above the compound read in French in strong gold letters.
House of Hope
. But French was not her language. She spoke Creole.

And the sign was not
true. It should say,
Key San Espwa
, Creole for House
without
Hope, because once you stepped across the gates of Maison D’Espoir you became a cursed thing. A monster that spat white babies from your belly even though you were a virgin.

Yes, she had luxuries now, but what she had to do for those luxuries was hard. Very painful both to her body and to her soul. It made her feel like nothing
more than a breeding bitch. That is what Mr. Puglisi called her and the other girls: His breeding bitches.

She gritted her teeth.

“Martine?” She looked up.

“Are you all right?
Ou Byen
?”  Dr. Tad asked, his kind eyes meeting hers. He put his light hand on her dark shoulder and she felt love. He pressed her to speak English so she would learn faster, but he spoke to her in Creole when she was upset. 

“Mr. Puglisi is a
sansmaman.”

“Shush.” He looked around the corner. “He is coming to give a tour to the new girls this afternoon. He could arrive early. Please be careful what you say when he’s nearby.” Dr. Tad scribbled on her chart.  His eyes met hers. “I don’t want to hear any
more talk about getting sent off. That will never happen. If you ever want to leave, I’ll give you plenty of money to start a new life. I’ve told you that before. You don’t have to go through the birth process over and over again.”

She patted her stomach. “I have the babies
for Mr. Puglisi because I do not want to leave you. I just wish we could both run away.”

“Me too, Martine. Me too.”

Anyone who did not follow Mr. Puglisi’s orders was sent off. If you had a sick baby or got a problem with your body and could not have more babies, you were sent off, never to be allowed back in. The money to your family stopped. Your Maman and Papa and brothers and sisters starved and they all blamed you; and
they
would
banish you too.

Everyone believed if y
ou had your own children, they would be born without souls, because evil created the babies you sold to the
blan
—to the white man.

To be sent off was a slow and for-certain death.

“If I leave,” Dr. Tad said, “a new doctor would be worse.”

She gasped at the thought.  In a little over five years, Martine had given birth to four babies. L
ast year Mr. Puglisi said they would make more money if the girls carried two at once and this was Martine’s first set of twins. So hard.

“A new doctor would make the girls pregnant sooner,” began Dr. Tad, “and would not give them so much time off in between. I have to stay here to watch over everyone, make sure they’re taken care of. I know you care about me too but you should leave
here and start a better life. The other girls may not have a chance outside Maison D’Espoir, but you do.”

Every birth nearly killed Martine. Killed her heart. Carrying the babies for so long and then never seeing them again. Wor
rying their new parents would not love them.

But she feared life outside the gates without Dr. Tad. He had taught her to be a nurse, and he needed her. They had never even kissed but this was the man she loved: A skinny blan from America who chewed his nails and spoke in a funny accent. He had been to doctor school and yet treated her special. Special, hah! Martine from a shantytown in La Saline.

How could she have a better life if he was not in it? If she left Maison D’Espoir? 

“I do
not want to leave. I just do not want to have more babies to give to Mr. Puglisi.” Tears welled up in her eyes. She loved the twins growing in her and wanted to keep them. The thought of having them taken away once they were born was too much to bear.

“You know the rules, Martine. To live here, you have to keep producing. I pleaded with Mick to let you stop after Luke . . . ”

She bowed her head and said a silent prayer for her murdered son.

3.

Office of Kurt Malone, Miami, late morning

Before he met
with his client, Kurt Malone checked himself out in the small bathroom mirror in his modest office. He was forty-two-years old, clean-shaven, with dirty blond hair and a bump on his nose from an old fistfight. His brown eyes were perpetually bloodshot. Kurt never slept soundly. He couldn’t relax enough to give into the demands of his body. He always looked over his shoulder when he was awake, kept an ear open as he slept. His shabby one-bedroom apartment on Meridian Avenue would be all too easy to break into if someone wanted him badly enough. 

A female client was on her way in for his services. He flexed his arm and chest muscles. He was a tall, solid guy who could hold his own in a brawl. He smiled at his reflection.
You’ve still got it.

Kurt walked back to his desk and waited for
No-last-name
Carla. His torn black cloth swivel chair creaked when he sat. It went against his better judgment opening this office in Miami as a private investigator and skip tracer. He knew better than anyone the risk of reverting to hobbies and occupations you had in your old life. 

He ran his fingers through his thick hair, cursing himself for taking chances like this. But hell,
it had been years and seemingly no one was looking for him. Years of performing odd jobs under the table: Cleaning swimming pools, painting houses, installing drywall. He’d relocated from Rhode Island to Miami and changed his name and appearance, all of which seemed to have done the trick.  He was safe from his past. This low profile office on Biscayne blended right in with all the other businesses no one thought twice about. No worries.

Right. That’s why before each new client walked in, what few there were, his hands shook, and he clenched his teeth until his jaw ached. 

At one on the dot, Kurt heard footsteps in the hallway. He took a deep breath.
It’s just a client. No one knows who you are; don’t worry.
The doorknob turned, and in walked a very heavy woman. Oh hell, say it, a fat chick. Three hundred pounds if she was an ounce and dressed in dark-brown stretch pants and a tight brown top that she had no business wearing. Long blond hair, done up in a ponytail, a human Hershey’s Kiss. He struggled not to snicker. She’d come because she felt threatened and was running from someone who tried to kill her. Nothing funny about that.

When he looked in her eyes, he saw fear and beauty. Wow, what a gorgeous face. He hadn’t expected that based on her body. Her eyes were dark green, her skin olive. Italian maybe
? Maybe Greek? Bleached hair.

“Mr. Malone, I’m Carla.”

“Nice to meet you. “ Malone had politely stood and with a half-hearted flourish of the hand, indicated a seat. The only one other than his.

Even in the act of sitting, she looked back and forth between the one small-paned window and the door. “I watched behind me,” she confessed. “Don’t think I was followed.”

Kurt locked the door. “That oughta give you a little more security.”

He dropped back into his seat and took out a notepad. “On the phone you said you wanted to
disappear. Without a trace, right?”

“Can you do that?”

He sighed, cracked his knuckles, then spoke. “A long time ago my bread and butter was finding people who had disappeared—people who wanted to vanish. I really learned a lot about shaking people out of their hiding places. Learned their secrets. Got in their heads to figure out how they stayed lost as long as they did. It’s called skip tracing and back then I mostly worked with people who had jumped bail.”

“But I thought—”

He nodded. “Like I said, that life was a long time ago. Now, well, I’m kind of a reverse skip tracer.”

“So can you help me?”

“It’s not so easy to run away from everyone and everything you know, and it’s an enormous step. Usually involves desperation.”

She remained adamant, her quivering jaw set. “I want to disappear, Mr. Malone and you do help people disappear, right?”

“Well, more like helping people get lost. I should put that on my business card. ‘Kurt Malone, Guide to Nowhere’ ”

She nodded, not amused. “Well, I need to disappear for a while but I hope someday to go back home. I’ll find out who tried to kill me and why, but I need time. And so long as they think I’m alive, I won’t be safe.”

“What about the police?”

“They failed to protect me before and I fear some of them are involved.”

He winked and nodded knowingly. “No one is above corruption, Carla. If you remember that, you’ll survive with your new persona.”

She relaxed a little. “I don’t have much money but someone told me that you might help me. Once I can prove what happened to me and can regain my identity, I can pay you everything I owe, whatever expenses come up.”

Kurt had only recently started this business and didn’t have a lot of financial flexibility, but he could never refuse a damsel in distress. He didn’t want to be the one to rain on her parade, inform her that the likelihood of returning to her old life was nil. He had a talent for hiding people from their pasts. A grand successful coward who helped others to cower from their pursuers. Sometimes though, running from the bad guy proved one’s best choice.

The option for him personally, if he decided to emerge from his own deep cover to face the music? A long jail sentence, which he’d most likely never serve because someone from the Family would kill him first.

“I’ll help you. But you have to agree to my rules—and never question my loyalty to you.”

She smiled at him, tears of gratitude
in those gorgeous eyes. Even with all her extra weight, her radiance caught his breath in his throat.

“Thank you, Mr. Malone. Thank you so much. I didn’t know where else to turn.”

Those were the words that got to him every time. Profit or not, hopeless case or not, he could never say no to a pretty face or a real sob story, and Carla had both. The details of her story would rush in as they went. For now, all he said was, “Hey, it’s what I do.”

As they talked more about her past and future, and he saw the hope he instilled in her, he realized resuming his unique
reverse skip tracing vocation wasn’t a foolish choice but rather an obligation.

4.

Maison D’Espoir, Haiti, late afternoon

Mick Puglisi, tall, skinny, wavy black hair, late thirties, gave a welcoming speech to twenty-two new Haitian girls who would be r
esiding at the Maison D’Espoir. He guessed the oldest girl was twenty. Hard to say precisely how old any of the girls were because the parents of the Maison hopefuls were usually illiterate to the point of being unable to fill out a birth certificate. The ages were estimates and most likely lies. One of the girl’s records showed her at sixteen, the minimum age for residence, but Mick could see she was barely thirteen. Still, she’d be better off in here than out there beyond the safety of the gates. Maison posed as a non-profit entity, a free live-in nursing school for eligible young girls; but everyone knew its true purpose. And they didn’t care.

All Mick had to do was wave fifty dollars under the nose of some lazy good-for-nothing father, and the girl
would be out the door without so much as a hug goodbye.
Yeah,
I profit from the girls but I do ‘em a service as well.

They were safe, clean, and well fed. No chores besides keeping their rooms clean. No beatings and absolutely no molestation. Their bodies were their incubators, a means to an end, and to be kept pristine.

Mick smiled as the girls lined up inside Maison D’Espoir, the tall protective wooden gates shutting behind them, creating an impenetrable barrier to their old lives. Their eyes glowed, and they gasped in astonishment when they saw the mystery compound they’d only heard about. Fifteen brightly painted cottages complete with shutters and screens. Most likely these girls didn’t know what a screen was for, but they’d learn to appreciate them—awakening without mosquito welts or malaria. In the good sections of Port Au Prince, some of the people didn’t have it so bad, but he didn’t choose from that pool. He sought out the girls who would be so desperate for shelter and food that they’d willingly come here, happily sever ties with everyone back in their villages, and say, “Thank you very much, Mr. Puglisi,” in the bargain.