Authors: Jaden Terrell
I said, “Maybe we should start fresh in the morning. Where are you staying?”
She pulled her duffel a little closer to her chest. After a pause, she said, “I come plane, go straight you office.”
“Do you have a reservation anywhere?”
“I think I stay you office, maybe.”
“It’s not set up for guests. I could take you to a hotel.”
“You no trust?”
“It’s not about trust.”
I remembered how she’d gotten here, how her mother’s medicine had taken most of what she’d earned from selling the sap of the wind tree. The plane ticket had probably taken the rest. I said, “Exactly how much money do you have?”
Mr. Tactful.
She flicked her tongue across her lower lip and said, “One hundred American dollar.”
“You’ll run through that like it’s water.”
“I have what I have.”
My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “I guess you’re staying at my place.”
She looked away, and I guessed she was no happier to accept my charity than I was to give it. “Vietnam, family take care family,” she said, finally, “but I pay you back. Send money I get home.”
“Let’s worry about that when the time comes. For now, let’s just find Tuyet.”
Khanh stared out the passenger window, watched the landscape flash past until we pulled into the open area at the top of the driveway.
“This is it,” I said.
She scanned the two-story farmhouse, the barn with its stalls open to the pasture, the horses stretching their heads over the fence to scarf up the grass on the other side. She said, “You have lovely home.”
“It belongs to a friend. I just rent the upstairs.” I pulled in between Jay’s Lexus and the pasture fence. Eric’s red Beamer sat to the right.
She glanced again at the horses, and I said, “You ride?”
“No horse my village, only ox.”
The Papillon pup met us at the door. I tucked him into the crook of my arm and glanced at the foyer table. Nothing but an L.L.Bean Catalog and a couple of ads for magazine subscriptions. From the living room, Jay was laughing at a
Big Bang Theory
DVD while the smells of fresh-baked bread and apple crumble emanated from the kitchen. I stuck my head into the living room, where Jay and Eric sat on the couch, Eric’s arm around Jay’s shoulders. Jay looked up, pointed the remote at the TV, and clicked
Pause
.
He grinned. “It’s the one with the robot contest. Classic. Dinner’ll be ready in about twenty minutes. And this . . .?”
“Is Khanh. She’ll be staying in the spare room for a while.”
Jay slid out from under Eric’s arm and stood, extending his right hand. Noticed Khan’s stump and switched hands as smoothly as if that had been his intent all along. His gaze flicked briefly across her scars.
“I hope you like squash casserole,” he said to Khanh.
She forced a smile. “Never have squash casserole.”
“You’ll love it,” Jay said. “I’ll show you your room. Jared, seriously, you let her carry her own bag?”
“I carry.” Khanh swung the duffel up.
“She’s the independent type,” I said. “Plus, she thinks I’m going to steal her bag.”
She grimaced at me.
Jay flashed her a smile. “You don’t need to worry about him. He hasn’t been arrested in days.”
He came back down a few minutes later, and not long after, Khanh followed, dressed in black yoga pants and a clean white blouse. Her hair was damp, and as she passed, I caught the scent of sandalwood. My shampoo.
The casserole was hot and cheesy, the bread warm and crusty, the apple crumble sweet with a touch of cinnamon. Khanh picked at her food while the rest of us made stilted conversation. Thoughts of death hovered like another presence at the table. We might as well have set out another coffee cup.
It was a relief when we finally pushed our plates away and retired to the living room to watch the news.
Khanh said, “If Tuyet you daughter . . . you sit home, watch TV?”
I picked up the Papillon and set him on my lap. “I want to see if there’s anything about your daughter or the dead girl on the news.”
“Oh.” She tilted back in the lounger and curled her knees toward her chest, arms wrapped around her shins. The fingers of her good hand clasped her stump. “You do big favor, I too big hurry. I know.”
Jay pointed toward the screen. “Look.”
Ashleigh Arneau sat behind the anchors’ desk, a strained smile on her face. Beside her, looking young and fresh and chipper was the blonde woman I’d seen at the crime scene.
“What does that look like to you?” I asked.
Jay chuckled. “Poetic justice.”
Neither Ashleigh nor her apparent understudy mentioned the murder. Old news now, especially with no breaks in the case. The new, hot news was another explosion, this one in East Nashville. Five dead, two injured. The photos of the victims showed glazed eyes and prison tats. This time, the message read:
For Justice. No mercy
.
“My God,” Eric said. “He’s going to be a fucking folk hero.”
“For a while.” I pushed out of the lounger and handed Jay the remote. “Until he kills someone who matters.”
Khanh scowled at the screen. “Many police there.”
I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking it too. All the man-hours that would be going into finding the bomber.
Hours that would not be spent finding Tuyet.
Tuyet
I
n the corner of the shed, Tuyet scratched a line into the metal. There were five lines now, one for each day Dung had been gone. They looked like white hairs against the paint. Tuyet imagined her grandfather’s face when Dung handed him the photo, pink skin turning ashen, gray eyes widening in surprise. What is this? he would ask, and somehow Dung would make him understand.
The doorknob rattled, and Tuyet dropped her hands to her sides and sidled back to her mattress. The other women in the room looked at each other, their faces sallow in the sooty light.
The door opened, and the boss man strode in, Mat Troi and the tattooed man a step behind. The boss man’s jaw was taut, his lips thin and white. Tuyet’s throat tightened until her breath was a thread.
Mat glanced in her direction, and she forced a smile, as if she still thought there was something special between them, as if she still found him beautiful. He didn’t smile back, but there was hunger in his eyes.
The boss man said, “Dung is dead.” He reached into the jacket of his expensive suit and pulled out a photograph. A shiver started in Tuyet’s stomach, spread to her arms and legs. She wrapped her arms around herself to keep the men from noticing. “She betrayed us, and you helped her. One of you, some of you . . . maybe all of you. And by helping her, you made this happen.”
He thrust the photo toward Hong’s face, then Weasel’s, then Beetle’s. Hong sucked in a sharp breath and curled her hands into fists. Weasel flicked a nervous tongue across her lips. Beetle stared at the picture with dull, flat eyes. He passed down the aisle between the mattresses, flashing the photo at each of the women, and stopped in front of Tuyet. Held the picture up to show the broken doll that had once been Dung, curled into a nest of plastic garbage bags. In bright red letters, someone had stamped: Police file—confidential.
Tuyet’s eyes stung. She had not even known Dung’s name.
“Look at the date,” the boss man said. “Five days ago. She didn’t have time to talk to anyone. She didn’t ask for help. So if you were thinking some white knight would come bursting in here to save your pretty little yellow asses, you’re wrong. No one is coming.”
Tuyet willed the tears from her eyes. She would not give him the gift of her tears.
He tucked the photo back into his jacket pocket. “Do you know why I waited this long to tell you?” He cupped her chin and tilted her head up, his thumb and fingers digging painfully into the sides of her jaw. “Answer me.”
“Hope,” whispered Tuyet. “You want us hope.”
“That’s right. Five long, glorious days of hope. And now you see there is no hope, and never will be.”
He gestured toward the man with the tattoo. “You all know this man. You know what he can do. Now you have a choice. Tell me who helped Dung escape, and only the guilty party—or parties—will be punished. Protect the guilty, and . . .” He paused, smiled. “Let’s just say the manticore will have a very busy night.”
No one spoke. Tuyet’s heart pounded, the pulse of blood in her ears like the sound of the ocean in a seashell.
Then, as pointedly as if they had shoved her into a spotlight, the other eight women looked in her direction and slowly turned their heads away.
For an interminable moment, the boss man studied her face. Then his fingers closed around her arm, dug painfully into her flesh.
“Wait.” Mat wrapped his hand around Tuyet’s other wrist. “This one is mine.”
11
A
fter the news, while Jay took his meds and Eric made a missing-person flyer, I called a woman I knew at the DMV. It was after nine, but she’d be up for hours yet, working Sudoku puzzles and watching nature documentaries on TV.
Beatrice Sandowski had started with the Department of Motor Vehicles the year I was born. She had five daughters, one a lesbian, two divorced, one a career bachelorette, and one married to a guy who’d been unemployed for the past three years and spent his days smoking pot and playing online war games. Beatrice had a soft spot for me, which probably had something to do with her none-too-secret hope that I might one day make a more suitable son-in-law.
Her voice warmed when I said hello.
“Hello, handsome. You still single?”
“Seeing someone.”
“Dang.”
“Got a favor to ask. A partial plate.”
“It’ll cost you.”
“Cost me what?”
“Meatloaf on Sunday. You can even bring your girlfriend, if you want to break my heart.”
“She’s out of town.” I glanced at Khanh. “But I might bring someone anyway.”
She tsk-tsked. “When the cat’s away?”
“Nothing like that. It’s . . . she . . . might be my sister. Half-sister.”
“Might be?”
I looked at Khanh again. She sat stiffly in the recliner, pointedly not watching me. “It’s still up in the air. This partial plate I need you to run. It’s connected to a missing girl, this woman’s daughter.”
Her voice softened. “Oh, honey. Look, you give me the numbers and I’ll see what I can do. I’ll take a rain check on the meatloaf.”
I thanked her and flipped the phone closed. Slipped it into my jacket pocket.
“Might be?” Khanh said. “Still in air?”
“Don’t push it,” I said. “It’s not like there’s a paternity test.”
“We find Tuyet,” she said. “Then we go away, you close eyes, no more sister.”
“Promises, promises.” I told her where the extra blankets were and went outside to feed and water the horses. The night air chilled as I picked out their hooves, combed their manes and tails, and brushed them until they gleamed. Through the stable doors, I could see the flicker of the television behind the blinds. Then the lights went out and there was nothing but the moon. It was past time for bed, but I lingered in the comforting presence of the horses.
I was feeding Tex molasses treats from my palm when the front door opened and Khanh came out. She wore one of Jay’s sweaters, and my mother’s afghan hung loosely around her shoulders. I tried not to let that bother me.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I said.
She pulled the afghan tight around herself. In the moonlight, the scars on her face seemed softer, like the shimmer of heat.
After a moment, she said, “You think Tuyet okay?”
“I don’t know.” I moved to the next stall, and Crockett nudged my hand. I asked him to target my other palm, and when he did, I gave him a treat. “We have to work it as if she is. And we have to assume she hasn’t been shipped off somewhere. We have to assume she’s someplace we can find her.”
She rubbed at her upper arms. “My country, many ghost. People die from war, die from mine. No body, no ritual. No one pray over.” Crockett put his head over the stall door, and she gave his nose a tentative stroke. “No rest. Become
con ma—
hungry ghost, cause
bi ben tah
—mean ghost sickness. If Tuyet die, we need find, make good ritual. Make sure she no hungry ghost.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Believe, not believe. Not believe not make not true.” She pulled Jay’s sweater tighter, drifted to the open door of the barn, and stared out at the house. It stood in shadow, an isolated square of light in the upstairs window.
I rubbed the flat space between Tex’s eyes and said, “There are no ghosts here.”
“You wrong,” she said, clasping the edges of the afghan just beneath her chin. “This place, many ghost.”
12
I
f there were ghosts, they kept to themselves. I slept unmolested and woke to the smell of buckwheat pancakes. Outside, leaves rattled in the wind, and the trees waved their branches against an angry sky. While Jay and Eric armed themselves with umbrellas and left to plaster have-you-seen-this-woman flyers in coffee shops and grocery stores across the city, I loaded Tuyet’s photo and Eric’s drawing of the suspect onto my phone and laptop.
Khanh, fumbling with the buttons of a sweater Jay had given her, looked over my shoulder as I printed out hard copies and Googled the address for Hands of Mercy, the rescue organization that had featured so prominently in the news articles I’d read.
“Why we go there?” she asked, as I tapped the address into my phone. “You think they rescue Tuyet?”
“No. If she’d been rescued, she would have called. But if someone’s buying and selling Asian women, these folks might have them on the radar.” I handed her the folder with the copies in it. “Hang on to these for me, would you?”
We stepped out into a brisk wind, too cold for the season. I flipped the collar of my jacket up. Khanh held the folder against her chest and pulled Jay’s sweater tight around her.
I waited until we were on the interstate to dial Frank’s number. Got his voice mail and hung up without leaving a message, punched in Malone’s instead. She answered on the fourth ring.