Dietland (40 page)

“How much money did you bring?”

“Twenty thousand,” I said, gazing at the door, longing to open it and flee.

“What did you tell Verena?” Julia was stuffing files from her desk into her bag.

“I didn't tell Verena anything. This is my money.”

Julia opened her mouth as if to speak, then reconsidered. Her lips, in Muted Rose, turned into a half-smile, and she nodded. “I'm sorry I've lied to you, but I didn't want to involve you unless it was absolutely necessary. When she came to me, I had to help her. You understand, don't you?”

“I'm here, aren't I?”

Julia attempted to tame her wild hair, smoothing it with her hands, but it made no difference; each flattened curl sprang back up. She was serious and fearful. She didn't even flirt with me. Crushed cakes of purple and blue eye shadow bruised the white floor around her. “Come with me,” she said.

I followed her down the Lips aisle, left at Mascara, right at Concealer, to the end of the Blush corridor. Julia wasn't wearing her heels, just simple brown flats, and I had never seen her move so quickly. I struggled to keep up.

At the end of the corridor was a pile of boxes sitting in front of a blank space of white wall. Julia pushed the boxes aside, grunting and puffing. Once the boxes were cleared away, I saw a cutout line in the drywall. Julia wrenched it open with a crowbar, revealing a hidden space.

The space was glowing with yellow light coming from two lamps balanced on a steel beam; beyond the lamps it was black. Julia bent over and stepped inside. She motioned for me to follow, but my limbs were heavy. I couldn't move.

“You wanted the truth,” she said. “It's in here.”

I entered the space. A figure was sitting atop a sleeping bag in a dim corner to my right. As I moved closer I saw she was wearing a gray tracksuit, her arms and legs pulled tight around her, headphones dangling around her neck. Her dark hair was nearly shaved off. She squinted up at me, a tiny, startled creature.

“Leeta?”

Julia moved one of the lamps so I could see her better. Her face was scrubbed and pale. Without the long hair and eye makeup, without the colorful tights and boots, she was pared down, almost naked.

“It's Plum.”

“I know who you are, Louise B.” Her voice was raspy, unused. She scooted out from the corner where she was sitting, moving into the light. She wasn't the looming figure I'd seen on the screen in Times Square, but I was finally beginning to recognize her face, that face that had haunted me for so long.

“It's really you.”

Behind me, Julia was sweeping up the concrete floor, trying to remove all possible traces of Leeta from the hiding space. “Go on,” she said over the broom handle. “She won't bite.”

I unbuttoned my jacket and wriggled out of it, leaving the paper bag under my waistband, and maneuvered myself onto the hard floor to face Leeta. “Your hair is so short,” I said.

She turned away, fidgeting, reaching for the locks that were no longer there. “I'm not what you expected. I'm being hunted like an animal, so I've become one.” She backed into her corner again, pulling the gray hood up over her head. The face that peeked out at me from beneath the heavy fabric, now darkened by shadow, had been spotted all over the country, all over the world, but Leeta had been hiding beneath fifty-two stories of Stanley Austen's media empire the whole time. I thought of the barricades outside the building and had to smile. The enemy was inside.

“Did you bring money?” she asked.

I kept staring at her, only semi-aware that she had asked me a question. She asked again. “Money. Did you bring it?”

I reached under my shirt and removed the paper bag, but I didn't hand it to her. Julia wheeled a large brown crate into the hiding space. “Five minutes,” she said.

Leeta bounced her legs up and down, slipping her hand beneath the hood to reach for her hair again, then moving her hand to her mouth and nibbling one of her fingers. She eyed the crate. “I want to see the sun. Even if they capture me or shoot me, at least I'll have a taste of freedom one last time. Nothing feels as good as freedom.”

The playful girl from the café was gone. Leeta, stuck in a dark cave for months, hunted by the police with their guns and dogs and helicopters—she was the reality of everything that had been happening. I worried about what they would do if they found her. She seemed so alone down here, as if she'd been abandoned.

“What happened to Soledad?” I felt an almost electric charge saying the name to someone who knew Soledad, the woman whose grief and rage for her daughter burned as brightly as a star.

“All the women have scattered. I don't know where.”

“How did you meet Soledad?” I knew what I'd heard on the news, but the details had been vague.

Leeta was silent, as if she'd closed up in her dark corner, but then she began to recount the story. In college, she was required to sign up for a community service project. She volunteered at a women's clinic; Soledad worked there and trained Leeta to become a rape crisis counselor. The clinic offered abortions and birth control in addition to rape counseling. “Working there was intense,” Leeta said. “Bulletproof windows and an armed guard outside. Women had to pass by a guy with a gun just to get rape counseling, which is fucked up. Working there, it was easy to feel that it was us against the world—and the world didn't care. Sometimes me and Soledad would go for drinks after our shift, to cope with hearing so many awful stories and seeing so many women cry.” Soledad was used to it, but Leeta said she struggled with the job.

Soledad's house in Santa Mariana was an hour away, but Leeta went there for barbecues and movie nights sometimes, which is when she spent time with Luz. “When I got homesick, Soledad mothered me. How embarrassing to need a mother at my age, right?” Leeta's eyes, which had been wide and alert, softened. She blinked slowly. “Do you want to know what I did for Luz and Soledad, Louise B.? I think you need to know.”

“Tell her,” Julia said as she continued cleaning. I was still holding the paper bag and set it down on the floor next to me, wiping my palms on my knees, conscious of my colorful tights and boots, wondering if Leeta thought me a fool.

She explained that after Luz's funeral, Soledad insisted that her relatives return to Texas right away. Alone at home in Santa Mariana, she invited Leeta over and told her that her friend Missy was going to kidnap Wilson and Martinez. They couldn't get to the other rapists, who were locked up, so the two ringleaders would pay for all their sins. “I asked Soledad why she wanted to kidnap the men—I was stunned at what she was suggesting—but she just said they were going to get what they deserved. This wasn't the Soledad I knew.” Leeta tried to talk her out of it for Soledad's own sake, so she wouldn't risk going to prison, but she'd made up her mind.

Soledad couldn't be directly involved in the kidnapping because she would have been an obvious suspect, so she asked Leeta to go to the bar where Wilson and Martinez hung out and lure them to a vacant lot, where Missy would be waiting for them. “I would be the bait in a short dress and blond wig,” Leeta said. “I wasn't in my right mind then. What'd happened to Luz was the worst thing that'd happened to anybody I'd ever known. I just kept thinking of her and all those crying women at the clinic and how this was never going to end. Despite my shock at Soledad's plan, I began to wonder if she was right. Maybe we needed to go to the source of the problem.”

It wasn't difficult to lure the men from the bar. They followed Leeta to the car, eager and excited at the thought of sex, and she drove them the ten miles to where Missy was waiting. “Being in the car with them made me sick. Those two scumbags killed Luz, each of them and the other men taking a piece of her, and I wanted to pull the car over and run into a field and scream, but I couldn't do that, so I drove and screamed in my head. The men were talking to me in the car but all I could hear was my screaming.”

When they arrived at the darkened lot north of town, Missy was waiting with a black van. “They suspected something was wrong. They were scumbags but they weren't stupid.” Leeta said they were reluctant to get out of the car. When they finally did, Missy Tasered them and tied them up. Leeta helped Missy load them into the back of the van and then Missy told her to drive away and keep going, out of Santa Mariana and as far away as she could get.

I had no idea how to reply. Leeta stared from beneath her hood into the darkness that surrounded us. I could only imagine the scenes that played in her mind, that would always play. In my head I saw the Dirty Dozen dropped into the desert, the Harbor Freeway interchange, and all of the other attacks linked to Jennifer. “Did you know this was the beginning of something
bigger?
”

Leeta said she didn't. Days after the abduction, she called Soledad from the desert motel where she'd taken refuge and asked again what she was going to do with the men. “She said she'd let them linger for a while, that they weren't going to be first. I didn't know what she meant by
first.
I didn't ask. That's the last time I talked to her.” After the Jennifer attacks began to unfold, the first publicized attack with its link to the military, Leeta wondered if they were connected to Soledad and Missy. She tried to contact Soledad again, but it was Missy who replied. She and Leeta talked on the phone and through email, but Missy never admitted to anything. After Wilson and Martinez were killed with the rest of the Dirty Dozen, she knew for certain. “Missy was worried that I'd go to the police, so she wanted to keep tabs on me. I didn't go to the police, but I told my roommate I knew who Jennifer was. I just couldn't keep it inside anymore.” Leeta knew she'd made a mistake by telling her roommate. That's when she went underground.

“How have you coped with hiding down here?” I asked, tugging on my collar. Finally, I was getting the answers to my questions, but what I really wanted to do was leave the suffocating hiding space. Leeta and I had both been underground—she in the Beauty Closet, me in Verena's basement. New York was full of these dark places.

“During the day I know Julia is on the other side of the wall, but at night . . . sometimes there's that screaming in my head again.”

“Why don't you turn yourself in? Your sentence might not even be that long.” I was out of my depth, but this seemed like the sensible thing to suggest. Prison couldn't be worse than this hiding space.

“The police wouldn't believe anything I'd tell them. They're out for blood. They'd want me to turn against Soledad, and I'm not going to do that. The truth is, I'm scared.”

Whether she ran or turned herself in, she was headed for a life of confinement. I wanted to reach out to her, to say it would be all right, but that would be a lie.

“Almost ready?” Julia said. Leeta struggled to stand up and so did I.

“I understand if you don't want to give me the money, Louise B.”

“You
need
the money,” Julia said.

“It's her choice. I don't want her to do anything she's uncomfortable with. She could get into trouble.”

I knew I could get into trouble, but I wanted Leeta to see the sun. “This money was given to me for a reason, but that reason no longer exists. You helped me,” I said. I wanted to say,
You saved me.
“Now it's my turn to help you.”

She took the paper bag and stuffed it under her jacket. “I was right about you. You're not like them.” She nodded upward toward the fifty-two stories on top of us.

“No, not like them.”

She pushed back the hood so I could see her face more clearly. She grabbed my hands, grasping them hard. “That time I spent spying on you was the last happy time in my life,” she said. “I've thought of you often while I've been down here. Julia has given me updates on how your life has changed, and that's offered some rare moments of joy. Wherever I end up, just know that I'm on your side.”

She looked at me for several seconds more and then she walked away, inserting the earbuds and pulling the hood back up. Music blasted, muffled to me but deafening for her. I stared at the back of her, at the outline of her body against the hole in the wall and the light from the Beauty Closet. I'd imagined her for so long. In reality, I didn't know her, but we lived in each other's memories, each of us what the other needed us to be.

Julia removed the lamps from the hiding space, so the only light was coming from the other side of the hole in the wall. We helped Leeta into the crate. Once inside, she stepped into her sleeping bag and pulled it up so it rested under her arms like a strapless dress. She lowered herself into the crate and lay on the bottom in the fetal position, her face positioned near one of the air holes. Julia and I dropped eyebrow pencils on top of her and she didn't flinch. We filled the crate with pencils, all the way to the top, until there was no sign of a person underneath. Julia attached the lid.

After we wheeled the crate out of the hiding space, Julia sealed the hole shut, pushing the boxes back in front of it. We moved down the Blush corridor toward the exit.

“Am I allowed to ask where you're taking her?”

“New Mexico,” Julia said. “I'll hand her off to someone there. She has to keep moving.”

We took the service elevator to the parking level and pushed the brown crate to the back of a small white delivery van that Julia had rented. I looked over my shoulders, exposed and scared. “Act normal,” Julia whispered. “There might be cameras.”

There were no windows on the sides of the van or in the back doors. With great effort, we lifted the crate and wrestled it into the hold. Once it was secure, Julia locked the doors. I wanted to say
Be careful
or
Good luck,
but nothing I could say would have been adequate.

“Write the book,” Julia said, and I told her I would. When she was in the driver's seat with the door closed, I placed my palm against the glass and Julia did the same on her side. That's how we said goodbye.