River of Glass (15 page)

She dozed against the passenger door on the way home, stirring only briefly when I went in to fill the prescriptions. Twice, my eyes snapped open as the tires of the Silverado juddered on the shoulder, and I gave a little prayer of thanks when we finally pulled into the driveway. I shook Khanh gently awake, ran through the checklist the doctor had given me to make sure her brain hadn’t ruptured, and steered her upstairs to the guest room. A sliver of light streamed from under Jay’s door. Burning the candle at both ends.

I was supposed to wake Khanh up every two hours and run the checklist. I was supposed to take a pain pill for my throbbing arm. Instead, I lay down on top of the covers and let my eyes close. A stream of images passed in front of my eyes, things I should be doing, people I wanted to see, questions I wanted to ask.

Then there was nothing until the buzzing of my cell phone woke me. Lying on my stomach, I reached to turn it off with my left hand and hissed in a breath as a knife of pain cut through my forearm. I rolled over and fumbled for it with my other hand. Flipped it open and mumbled, “Yeah?”

Frank said, “You’re not going to like this.”

Before I could form a coherent sentence, he gave me the punch line. “We picked up Helix for questioning early this morning.”

“Is that the part I’m not going to like?”

“No, that’s the good part. The bad part is, we can’t hold him.”

“One of his ladies alibi him?”

He gave a humorless laugh. “How’d you guess? Not to mention, as his attorney kindly pointed out, there are plenty of people who know about that double helix symbol. Any one of them could have killed the girl and marked her with the spiral.”

“He have any ideas who might have done a thing like that?”

“Says there’s plenty of people want a shot at his action. But I was thinking, if he had a partner . . .”

“Or partners. They might be shifting the blame to him. But why do that, knowing he might give them up?”

“Maybe he can’t. It’s the Internet age. Maybe they do it all online.”

“Or maybe one of the people I talked to this week decided he’d make a terrific red herring. I put his name out there.”

“You didn’t have to do much to get it there. He didn’t exactly keep a low profile.”

We spent a few minutes chatting about the case. Then, from the front of the house, Patrice called his name. “Gotta go,” he said, and after weighing the virtues of sleep versus breakfast, I slid out of bed and reached for a pair of jeans.

“Thank God,” Jay said, when I finally stumbled downstairs. It was almost noon, but he stood at the stove, stirring a pot of steel-cut oats. The butter, brown sugar, and cream were already on the table, a bowl of sliced bananas on the side. Khanh sat at the table, looking bleary-eyed. A bruise darkened one cheek, and one eye was ringed with purple. More bruises pocked her arms. A gauze patch covered the scrape on her forearm. Presumably, there was another beneath the knee of her black pants.

Jay ladled a scoop into a bowl and set it in front of Khanh, who gave it a dubious look. “Look like . . .” She cast about for an appropriate comparison, came up empty. “Nothing good.”

I shook my head. “This from a woman who eats duck fetuses.”

Jay ladled out another dollop of oats, looked back over his shoulder. “I’m not fixing duck fetuses.”

“Too bad.” Khanh forced a smile. “You learn make very good food, come Vietnam.”

Jay set another bowl in front of me. “What happened this time?”

I held up the cast. “Bone meets pipe. Pipe wins.”

Khanh said, “What we do now?”

“Now you stay home and rest while I go have a talk with our good friend Helix.” At her baffled frown, I said, “That part about being good friends, that was sarcasm.”

“Why I not go?”

“Somebody already tried to kill us. No point tempting fate.”

She stared down at her bowl, pushing the oatmeal around with her spoon until the sugar made brown swirls in the cereal. After a few moments, she lifted her gaze and waved her stump toward the scars on her face. “You know what happen me?”

“Not my business,” I said.

Jay took the pot off the stove and set it in the sink to soak, then slipped out of the room.

Khanh said, “I ten year old. My sister, Trinh, only eight.”

As she spoke, she toyed with the spoon. She didn’t look at me, and I didn’t look at her, but as she wove the story, it unspooled behind my eyes like a movie.

T
HEY
’
D GROWN
up in a small village not far from the Red River. Before the Communist takeover, her mother’s family had owned a small plot of land where they grew rice and other vegetables, and where her grandmother made a meager living as a soothsayer. Then they found themselves on the wrong side of the government.

A lot of women in their mother’s position had abandoned their Amerasian children, but Khanh and Trinh were lucky. They were embraced by their mother and her parents. While they spent much of their early childhoods in education camps, scrabbling for handfuls of rice and scouring the riverbank for mussels and snails, their family treated them with kindness. One neighbor, Min, made toys from the river clay, and they earned a few coins gathering clay for him in chipped pots. They learned English from their mother, who insisted they would need to know it when their father returned for them. He was trying to get them out, she said, but it was too hard. There were too many obstacles.

When Khanh was ten, her grandfather died, and the family moved to a nearby village to live with a cousin and her husband. Their first day there, their cousin pointed to an overgrown field on the south end of the village and then to an old man sitting on a reed mat, the legs of his trousers knotted beneath the stumps of his thighs.
That is a dangerous place
, their cousin said.
A field of ghosts.

Two days later, while their mother went to the river for mussels, Khanh and her sister went out to gather bamboo to make baskets.
Take care of your sister
, Phen said to Khanh.
Keep her safe
.

The girls wandered toward a stand of bamboo at the south end of the village, Trinh’s damp hand clasped in Khanh’s.
Stay close
, Khanh said, and at Trinh’s nod, turned to the bamboo stalks.

The sun streamed through the canopy of the trees. The air was damp and steaming, smelling of muddy water. The older girl, engrossed in her task, looked up, realized the child was no longer at her side. She scanned the landscape, saw her sister, hand stretched toward a brilliant yellow flower in the middle of the minefield.

The bamboo clattered to the ground, forgotten. Khanh ran toward the field, hand flung up in warning. “Don’t move!”

The smaller child froze. Turned her head and opened her mouth to protest, then saw something in her sister’s face and took a tentative step in her direction.

“No!” Khanh said. “Stay there. I’ll come for you.”

While Trinh stood frozen, ten-year-old Khanh picked her way through the field. The earth was soft from the recent rains, and she could see Trinh’s small footprints in the grass. She stepped carefully into the impressions left by Trinh’s feet. She reached the smaller child, took Trinh’s hands, and placed them on her own waist. “You walk where I walk,” she said, and turned to retrace her careful steps.

If a mine exploded, she thought, she would be torn to pieces, but her body would shield her sister’s. Maybe, just maybe, Trinh would be all right. Khanh felt a sudden chill, though sweat stung her eyes and trickled down her neck.
I should have been watching her
.
She was mine to watch
.

One step. Two. The vegetation crunched beneath her feet. Trinh, realizing where she was, began to cry. Her small hands dug into Khanh’s sides.

Halfway there.

Khanh tried not to think of the old man with no legs or of the others she’d seen, women, children, some missing limbs, some missing eyes, some crippled, some ripped apart, their startled spirits doomed to haunt the countryside as hungry ghosts. So many ghosts.

Almost there.

She felt it a heartbeat too late, a lessening of pressure as Trinh’s hands slipped from her waist. Sensing safety, the little girl bolted around her sister and rushed forward.

No!

Khanh lunged, planted a hand on each of her sister’s hips and lifted and shoved with all her might. Trinh flew up and forward as Khanh fell, hands flung wide.

There must have been a noise, a flash of white, a rush of red across her face, but those moments were lost now, perhaps blessedly lost. There was no memory of pain. But there was pain later, when she awakened, and for many months after. Pain when the bandages were changed and her wounds abraded and cleaned, pain in her stump, pain in the arm that was no longer there. The ghost of an arm. The ghost of pain.

And pain in her heart when she learned that she had not saved her sister after all, had not even been able to help their mother wash and wrap the remains or prepare the incense and offerings to keep the girl’s spirit from rising as
ma doi
—a hungry ghost.

You were lucky, everyone told her. Lucky to be alive
.

She wondered about that, especially when fire spilled from her pores and the weeks and months ahead seemed like nothing but endless, relentless pain, or when visitors glanced at her face and averted their eyes. Was it luck that had taken her sister and left her with a scarred face and half an arm?

She expected ridicule from the village children, who for years had taunted Khanh and her sister for their lighter skin and the trace of Western Europe in their features. She expected them to throw stones, to call her names and tease her about her scars. Instead, they kept their distance, eyeing her with a mixture of awe and apprehension.

What she had done was so huge they couldn’t find a way to turn it against her. Her scars, which might have made her an object of ridicule, had become a symbol of self-sacrifice.

K
HANH FELL
silent, head lowered. The air in the kitchen seemed thick, a few motes of dust swirling slowly in the light that streamed through the window. After a moment, I said, “And you were never sorry you’d done it?”

She lifted her head and gave me a level look, then turned her face to the window. “Sometimes . . . I see people look my scars . . .” She shrugged. “I imperfect human.”

20

I
wanted to protect Khanh, to keep her in the shadows while I followed threads and searched for her daughter, but I understood now that, even if she’d had reason to trust me, she needed to play a part in bringing Tuyet home. She’d walked into a minefield to save Trinh, but she had failed. That failure made her doubt herself. It made her doubt me. It made her doubt the possibility that Tuyet—that anyone—could be saved.

I went back to Helix’s website,
Pimp It Up
, and showed Khanh the forum, books, and webinars dedicated to advising other upstanding young businessmen on the finer points of targeting, grooming, and turning out vulnerable girls. A prominent donate button on each page reminded visitors that their dollars subsidized the valuable free content.

Khanh, perched beside me on the couch, shook her head. “You think he kill Bridget?”

I clicked the
Log Off
button. “I think the manticore killed Bridget. Whether Helix is involved or not . . . Let’s go see.”

It was another gray day. The rain held off, but the air was thick and wet. It felt like breathing slush.

After a quick stop at the bank I stashed my ID, credit cards, the receipt, and all but three hundred in cash in a lock box behind the front seat. I tossed a space blanket across it. Then we crossed the Cumberland River and passed from downtown to East Nashville, a crime-infested patchwork of low-income housing, crack houses, and meth labs pocketed with funky artist hangouts, Victorian cottages, and the occasional jazz club.

We rolled past the bombed-out skeleton of a meth house we’d seen on the news, then passed a group of kids with skateboards. One boy jumped off a homemade ramp, one hand free for balance, the other holding up a pair of oversized pants. I pulled up and rolled down the window. “You know a guy named Helix?”