My Sister's Keeper (16 page)

At 2:00 a.m., the outside lights went off again. Ten minutes later I prowled from my hiding space and inched up the stairs to the first level.

The porch held a dozen white rockers set in ghostly motion by the steady ocean breeze. There were a few shrubs and ornamental trees in stone planters. Gazing over the top step, I could see little more than the moon reflecting back at me off the sliding glass doors. I squeezed in behind a recently manicured square bush and crawled up to the house under cover of a budding Ficus tree. The moon passed behind a cloud and darkness closed in.

I shielded my eyes against the salt-glazed glass and stared into a dark room. The moon reappeared and I could make out a giant-sized TV screen, walls lined with videocassettes, DVDs, and speaker grills, along with plush couches and chairs neatly arranged to face the screen. It was a private movie theater.

As the moonlight again faded, a sliding glass door rumbled open at the other end of the porch. Hidden behind the tree, I watched as a young woman stepped out onto the deck and gently closed the door behind her. She strode barefooted to the stairs and down a few steps where she pulled her thin robe tightly around her and sat less than a dozen feet from me facing the ocean. She lifted a cell phone from a pocket, flipped it open, turned it on, and pressed the lighted number pad. I could hear the various tones as she touched each one. It sounded like
Mary Had a Little Lamb
with a note too high at the end. She held the phone to her ear, covered her mouth with her hand, and waited. Finally, she whispered something I couldn’t hear then raised her voice a little.

“
Bobby, it’s me, Angie.” She turned her head and looked back at the dark house. The moon reappeared and lit the porch like a floodlight. I remained motionless watching her through the budding tree.

“
No, I’m still here,” she whispered, turning away and tucking her head down. “I don’t know

tomorrow maybe. Something’s happened to one of the girls. Everything has been crazy.”

A light came on in the room behind me and Angie hopped down a couple of steps, bent lower, and twisted around surveying the activity inside with frightened eyes. I dared not move. I would now be a silhouette against the bright room to Angie and easily visible through the glass from the inside.
I was trapped.

I could hear my heart pounding and resisted the instinctive urge to leap over Angie and flee for my life.

“
I’ve got to go,” Angie whispered. “I love you, too. I’ll call you later.” She turned the phone off, dropped it back into her robe pocket, and hunkered lower on the steps. Her reddish hair was pinned up behind her ears and her face was covered with freckles. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen and looked closer to fifteen. She slid backward another step and clasped the neck of her robe closed. She suddenly gasped and flailed backward nearly losing her balance as her bright blue eyes discovered me.

21

S
TANDING MOTIONLESS in front of the window, I held my breath and waited to see what Angie was going to do. Her eyes pleaded with mine and mine with hers. The two of us stayed fixed on each other until the lights in the room went off whereupon she bolted across the porch back toward the door from where she’d come.

“
Wait,” I whispered, spanning the deck behind her.

“
Please don’t tell,” she pleaded as I got closer. “I’ll do anything you want.” She let her gown fall open and as the wind whipped it out like a sail, I saw that she wore nothing underneath. “Please?”

I stopped a few feet from her. “I don’t work here. I’m just trying to find out what happened to a girl that’s disappeared.”

She pulled her robe closed clasping it at the neck and waist. “I

I don’t know anything about the others. I just started last week.”

“
What do they do here?”

She looked inside her room then back to me and whispered, “Who are you looking for?”

“
Ashleigh Matthews.”

As the chilly wind pressed her thin robe against her naked body, she struggled to keep it closed. “I’ve never heard that name.”

“
What do you do here?” I asked again.

A sliding door rolled open one level above us and hard leather shoes scuffed the porch above our heads. The door closed with a bump and as the shoes crossed the deck and started down the stairs, Angie pulled me into her darkened room closing the door behind us. Through the misty glass I could make out the shape of a heavy man in his 50s or 60s as he continued down the stairs and disappeared.

“
That’s creepy Fat Albert. He walks around all night, but the girls say you can get anything you want from him if you do him favors. Don’t let him see you.”

I took her arm and swiveled her to face me. “Tell me the truth, Angie. What goes on here?”

She ripped her arm out of my grip and stepped back into the darkness. “How did you know my name?”

“
I just heard you say it on the phone.”

“
Please. Leave now before you get me in trouble.”

I whispered gently, “Listen to me. This girl could be in a lot worse trouble and I need to find her.”

Her voice grew fainter, “I told you I’ve never heard of her.”

I shuffled blindly toward her voice and spoke softly. “A blond man from here was in her house earlier tonight looking for something. When he left I followed him here. He drove a black Corvette and had a mole on his face. Who is he?”

I could hear her breathing through her mouth. “That’s Greg. He works here, too.”

“
Doing what?”

“
Whatever they want.”

“
On the phone you said things were crazy around here. What did you mean?”

Her breathing became more rapid. “Someone took some money and they’re trying to find it. They questioned us and searched our bags.”

I bumped against something with my left leg and moved more to the right. “When?” I asked.

Her breathing became more rapid. “Don’t come any closer. I mean it.”

I stopped moving. “When did the money disappear?”

“
Sunday or Monday,” she sounded panicked. “Now will you please go?”

“
I will if you’ll tell me what they do here, Angie.” I could hear her breathing and lowered my voice to a whisper. “Please tell me what they do here.”

Her voice was so low I almost missed her answer. “It’s an adult website.”

Moonlight suddenly illuminated the room and I could see Angie a few feet in front of me

a cornered animal clutching a lamp like a baseball bat, ready to strike. I took a step back. “Was Ashleigh Matthews involved in this?”

“
I don’t know. I’ve only met a few of the girls, but there’s lots of tapes with different names on them.”

“
They might have called her Ash?” I added.

“
Sometimes they use fake names here, but everyone has tapes in the screening room just down the hall.”

I backed away. “Thank you, Angie. I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

“
Just don’t tell them I helped you.”

She was definitely afraid of something. “I won’t. I promise.” I cracked the door to the hall, but could see nothing more than the outline of the doorway to the screening room.

The stirrings of the house were masked by the distant rumbling of the surf, the snapping of the flags, and tinkling of their metal clamps. Easing through the door, I stole across the carpeting into the dim light of the screening room and scanned the wall of video cases, but there was too little light to read the hand-written labels. I tugged one off the shelf, opened the cassette, and read the label inside.
Lindsey 11.

I replaced the cassette, moved farther along the wall, removed another, and read that one.
Madison 15. They’re in alphabetical order.
I stepped to the beginning of the row and opened a case. It read
Ashleigh 1
. I removed the cassette and was about to return the empty holder to its place on the shelf when the glass sliding door behind me rolled open.

As the roar of the ocean filled the room, I ducked behind a padded chair fumbling the empty black case out onto the sand-colored carpet just as Fat Albert stepped into the room gliding the door shut behind him. Scrunching as low as possible behind the chair, I forced my lungs not to breathe. They revolted in spastic jolts and my arms and legs went numb.

As Fat Albert crossed the room, I crept backward around the chair. Passing right over the cassette, he continued into the next room and pulled open a refrigerator door spilling light into the room and over the cassette case lying between us. Withdrawing a carton of milk and leaving the door open wide, he stepped back toward me, opened an overhead cabinet, pilfered a glass, and filled it.

The black cassette case lay on the floor six feet in front of him. As he cocked his head back and drank, I thrust an arm out and snatched the case. He drained the glass, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, poured another glassful, turned, and set the carton back in the refrigerator. When the door closed, the house returned to total darkness. I listened as he shuffled across the kitchen, then heard nothing but the muffled sound of the wind and surf. I didn’t know if he’d left the kitchen or not. I slid the empty case back into its rightful place on the shelf, tucked the videotape into the back of my trousers, and covered it with my shirttail. With sweat dripping off my chin, I nudged the sliding glass door open and the sound of the surf again thundered in. Squeezing through the crack, I eased it shut behind me and vaulted down the stairs.

My damp clothes turned icy stiff as I scooted down the driveway toward the road.

A voice from the front porch called out. “You there!”

Although my body jumped, I pretended I hadn’t heard it and continued down the drive acting a little drunk.

“
Hey,” the voice shouted. “This is private property! You come through here again and I’ll have you arrested. Or worse!”

I staggered around to face the man on the porch and executed my best drunken-Englishman accent, “Truly sorry. Won’t happen again.” It was Fat Albert. I bowed clumsily and stumbled on down the drive, my knees so weak I feared they’d give out on the next step.

“
I won’t be so sociable next time,” he called behind me.

“
Right-o. Sorry, ol’ Chap,” I shouted back over my shoulder staggering forward. As I reached the edge of the highway, I heard a car engine crank, looked back, and saw a man running down the drive toward me. As the car’s lights popped on and it squealed from under the house, my heart leapt into my throat. I bolted across the road and up the opposite drive, tossed the cassette in the saddlebag, hopped on the bike, and cranked it to life. The car picked up the man running, then sped across the highway and was right behind me as I spun out the backside of the property, crossed another sandy lot, and fled out a different road. I pushed the bike to speeds of over 70 M.P.H. with my helmet flapping off the side and the sedan swerving back and forth across the road just a few car lengths behind me.

Managing to get my helmet on, I cut through another sandy lot back to the beach road hoping for more cars, but summer was still officially two months away and traffic was light. I passed one slow moving vehicle, but the sedan also cruised by it and got even closer. As I neared the next car, it made an abrupt left turn causing me to skid on the sandy pavement and bounce off a blue and white 50s-era Chevy parked on the shoulder of the road. I smacked the pavement and got hung up under the bike as it made a 360-degree spin on the roadway and skidded into the deep sand of a beach access ramp.

Pain flared through my left leg as I wriggled out from under the bike and strained to lift it. The sedan slowed, its tires squalling, then swerved and headed straight for me.

Throwing my leg over the bike, I rammed the throttle and—with the back tire spinning in the loose sand—wobbled up the slippery wooden ramp and clunked onto the beach. As the bike hit the sand, it lurched forward just as the sedan came crashing into the sand behind me and stopped dead. I heard their engine racing and their tires spinning freely in the sand as I sped off down the beach.

22

B
ACK AT THE HOUSE, I discovered the cassette had been crushed in the collision. Finding an unopened blank videocassette in the entertainment center, I transferred the tape from the smashed cassette to the new casing and, after a frustrating scuffle, managed to get the cassette closed and screwed back together.

Inserting it into the VCR, I pressed “play” and stood back. The tape squealed and the video fluttered as the machine dragged the crumpled magnetic ribbon over the tape heads. Through the static and distortion, the silhouette of a woman quivered on the screen. Wobbly music with a heavy beat began to play and the woman seemed at first confused and embarrassed, but then began dancing and posing for the camera in what appeared to be some sort of amateur audition.

I pressed “fast forward” and the jerky images scrolled by as the camera panned slightly to the right and zoomed in past the woman to a man hiding in the shadows. I stopped the tape and ran it forward slowly—a frame at a time—to see if I could get a better look at his face, but could not. When I resumed normal play, the sound and picture struggled as the camera pulled back to again show the girl prancing about teasing the camera. She wore a red sequined dress, long black gloves, and black high heels.