Stolen Grace (20 page)

“I think you
have,
young lady. I think you’ve been listening to my private conversations! And you know what happens to naughty, spying, eavesdropping girls, don’t you?”

“The Bogeymen?” Grace whispered.

“That’s
right
!” Mama Ruth cried, washing her hands with soap for the third time. “The Bogeymen come and take little girls like that away in the night when it’s dark. Snatch them from their beds when they’re fast asleep. And they take them and throw them on big, stinking piles of garbage onto the streets of Rio where there’s no food. No nothing!”

“But then you can come and find me? Can’t you? If the Bogeymen take me to Rio and you’re going to Rio too, you can come and look for me.”

Ruth suddenly changed from Dragon Face to Cheshire Cat Face. “You know what, baby? You are funny. So
so
cute! You are so
adorable
I could eat you. Now wipe your tush, then wash your hands—”

“Are you going to wash my hands for me?” Grace remembered how good it felt when her Real Mom washed her hands.

“No, you’re big enough to wash your own hands. Hurry up now and we’ll go downstairs for dinner. Guess what, baby?”

“What?”

“Tonight you can eat as much ice cream as you like.”

THEY WERE SITTING at the table, eating dinner on the beach. The floor was a bed of sand. There were candles and it was now dark. The sand wasn’t hot beneath Grace’s feet the way it had been earlier that day. It was cool. Lucho was with them. He was wolfing down a tamale saying, “
Está bonissimo.
Bonissimo
!”

Grace knew that the wee-wee puddle had made Ruth forget about what was hidden under the towel. The cocktails she had guzzled had also made her forget—Ruth was a bit woozy, her eyes glazed. But Grace was aware that she might remember any moment. She needed to go back upstairs and hide the secret pen in a new place, before it was too late. But if she left the table, Ruth would get suspicious and the Dragon could return.

Grace watched Lucho eating. He was as hungry as a lion. Ruth would, as usual, pay for his dinner. She always paid for everything. Grace had never seen him with money. He wore red swim shorts that came above his knees, and he surfed all the time. How could he carry money when it would get lost in the waves? His chest was always bare, bald. Not like her dad’s that had a few soft hairs like a cuddly bear. No, Lucho was smooth. Smooth as a boiled sweet. The hair on his head, though, was shaggy and black, and he had big brown eyes. Like Bambi’s. He had long, long eyelashes but when he came out of the water, all wet, he looked like a black Portuguese water dog. He shook like one too. She’d seen those dogs on YouTube. Droplets of water like lots of glittering diamonds and goldy-black sand like golden nuggets, would fly from Lucho’s body. Her Real Mom had told her that when dogs shook themselves they moved hundreds of miles an hour. So maybe Lucho was more doggy after all. Not like a deer, except for his eyes. He laughed a lot and Grace liked it when he was around because it meant that SHE was in a good mood. He was twenty-four. Grace knew because she asked him. Her Real Mom told her it was rude to ask women their age or older men, but it was okay to ask boys how old they were. Grace figured that Lucho was still a boy because he played video games with her and giggled a lot. So she’d asked him his age.

One day, she thought, she would marry Lucho.

But that was her secret.

She didn’t want to tell HER because she might get jealous.

Grace was also eating a tamale because if Lucho liked them, then she knew they must be good. She decided that she would always order whatever he ordered.

Mama Ruth was eating a hamburger. She had her mouth full and said in Spanish, “Adela wet herself again. She’s like a leaking hot water bottle. I don’t know what to do.”

Lucho winked at Grace and said, “What’s that pretty blouse you’re wearing? You look like a little princess tonight.”

Ruth looked at him and knotted her brow. “Did you hear what I said?”

“What you said, Rocío, has no place at the dinner table,” he replied smoothly. “I was admiring Adela’s lovely blouse. As I was saying, Adela, you look like such a pretty princess tonight.”

Grace blushed and jiggled about in her chair.

Ruth glared at her. “Stop swinging your legs, baby.”

“Bathroom Mommy,” Grace said in Spanish. She couldn’t say the whole sentence yet. She knew she wasn’t allowed to say one single word of English in front of Lucho. She wasn’t even allowed to speak Spanglish. She didn’t dare. Just in case. Just in case her Real Mom was sent to Hell to live with The Devil.

Ruth rolled her eyes. “Go, GO! Hurry to the bathroom, I don’t want to be cleaning up any more stinky mess.”

Grace jumped off her chair. She ran from the beach into the guesthouse and up to her room. She now had a bedroom of her own because Ruth shared a room with Lucho.

Grace dashed into the bathroom and took the secret pen from under the towel.

She ran to the bed and pulled apart the Velcro on Carrot’s back, took out the nighty and quickly rolled it around the pen. She pushed it all neatly back inside, pressed his back together again and, just to be sure, popped him under the bedclothes.

Sylvia

S
ylvia lay stretched out on the wall-to-wall carpet of the living room floor, giving her back a break from the soft mattress of the guest room. She was staring at the ceiling, transfixed by a fly meshed in a spider’s web. The spider was busy with her legs, spinning and rotating the helpless fly in a threaded whirl. On a normal day, Sylvia would have been glad to see one less fly buzzing around the house, but now she felt sorry for the creature. Only a spider, she thought, can make a fly helpless.

She hadn’t heard from Tommy for three days. He’d been gone for nine. She knew she shouldn’t be worried; he’d warned her that he could be out of reach at times but she, like the fly, felt helpless. On two occasions, she’d been a click away from booking herself onto a flight to join him, but she wasn’t even sure where he was, which country he was in. Was he still in Guatemala? Had he crossed the border to El Salvador or Belize? Besides, she was still waiting for her new passport to come through. She’d paid for the expedited service and was expecting it any day now. And Agent Russo had pulled some strings to hurry things up.

The FBI had sent alerts out to all the border crossings for Ruth and Grace but Sylvia had been online—getting a fake passport would be easy for Ruth. Right there on the Internet were websites offering false documents. For less than a thousand dollars you could have a brand new passport and pay by Western Union, Moneygram or a bank transfer. The passport could be ready in less than a week, sent to you, courtesy of UPS or Fedex. Simple! Sylvia was amazed such companies existed. There they were, blatantly online, breaking the law. If businesses could disappear into thin air (surely the police must be trying to stop them?) then a woman and child traveling incognito was, by comparison, a piece of cake.

South America was notoriously corrupt. If Ruth and Grace were moving about on chicken buses or taking private cars, they’d just blend in with the locals who had simple IDs, easy to forge.
Who knows
, thought Sylvia,
Ruth could have been smart and just double-backed into Mexico.
Sylvia recalled Ruth’s Mexican socialite friend with the influential father—the one she talked about in one of her e-mails—who would be able to organize papers for her. Ruth could have cooked up any sob story lie to get what she wanted.

Ruth was a confidence-trickster, what they called a “grifter.” She could be anywhere. Latin America was vast. It was like when people talked about “going to Europe” as if it were a postage stamp they could add to their collection. Central and South America were huge landmasses, replete with mountains, inhospitable terrain, rainforests, and the Amazon which was the biggest river in the world. Ruth had backpacked in Asia; she wouldn’t be intimidated by such a place, especially being fluent in the languages there. She was intrepid and could have gone in any direction. She might be hidden in a tree house in the jungle somewhere, or equally as likely, sipping cocktails in someone’s grand apartment in Mexico City, hooking up with high-ranking politicians and luring them with her “man-magnet” charms. Grace could be
anywhere
. If Sylvia hopped on a plane now, where would she even begin? Especially, when she wasn’t even sure where Tommy was at this point.

Up until a few days ago, Sylvia had been following his every move, online and by phone, suggesting ideas, gleaning any clue she could from Ruth’s e-mails which she read over and over. His first stop trailing Ruth had been the IVF clinic in Mexico. He’d hoped he could find someone who’d been close to her, had a photo of her or something. Nothing. The doctors hardly even remembered what she looked like, they told him. Tommy reminded Sylvia that he had never even caught a glimpse of Ruth, not even when she and Sylvia Skyped on all those occasions. Neither had they crossed paths at the airport. Sylvia had described her a hundred times to him.

The more Sylvia thought about it, the more she realized she needed to get out there too. The funeral was over, what was she still doing in Saginaw? She kept looking at the phone and checking her e-mails for Tommy’s update. The last time they spoke, he was still in Guatemala. She assumed he must be in a jungle somewhere by now, or he would have called.

Sylvia wondered what the IVF clinic was like. The whole baby factory idea made her feel queasy. There were enough children seeking “forever families.” Why battle to create more children on purpose when all the odds were against you? The lesbian couple that Ruth had mentioned in one of her e-mails, for instance. Why didn’t they want to adopt instead? People’s egos? she asked herself. Or their biological need to reproduce? Tommy had tracked the couple down via the clinic. He managed to wheedle a phone number out of the secretary at the front desk. Apparently, one of the women was a barrister (an attorney) in Leeds, England. But when Tommy called, the woman said she hadn’t heard from Ruth for months. The only contact she had was the same old e-mail, the same defunct New York phone number. “What about the Mexican socialite?” he’d asked. The woman didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. And when Tommy grilled the clinic about her, they laughed. “This is Mexico, we have hundreds of Mexican socialites passing through our doors,” they told him.

Sylvia had so many secret fears. Grace’s adoption papers stolen by Ruth—she could have those forged and put into her own name—whatever her latest fake name was. Sylvia and Tommy had no proof that Grace was even their child. A DNA test? What good would that do when neither of them were her biological parents? What if they didn’t find her for ten years? By which time, Grace could have forgotten them.

Agent Russo had kept in touch, but there had been no leads.

Nothing of any significance from any of the website forums had come up, just hundreds of messages of “condolences” and good wishes. Almost, it seemed to Sylvia, as if people had already given up because there was no hope for Grace at all.

Tommy’s next stop had been the bank in Guatemala. He even took the same flight Ruth and Grace had been on, in hopes that one of the airline staff would have remembered a five-year-old girl with a woman wearing a straw cowboy hat. But nobody could help. The bank in Guatemala remembered Ruth very well, though. They let Tommy see all the CCT footage, but the police had been right. He relayed to Sylvia that Ruth’s face was always in shadow, her head tilted down. She was aware of the cameras, it seemed. All you could make out was a blond sweep of hair and her flowery dress. Sylvia remembered that dress. It was the dress she wore on one of her first dates with Tommy. They’d had a picnic together in Central Park. She now felt violated. Knowing Ruth was flouncing about in her special memory. But that was nothing compared to how her stomach turned when she imagined Ruth with her own child. The words that came to her were: Disgusted. Abused. Desecrated.

She thought back to the conversations they’d had over the last few years. To think she had given this woman little pieces of her heart so freely, her intimate thoughts and feelings. It made her feel like she’d been raped.

For the past few days, her fury toward Ruth, the Perpetrator, had become more jagged, and the guilt toward herself had softened. How could she have known that psychopaths like Ruth existed? She was aware that it was an illness, but imagined that only murderers, serial killers, drug barons—people who had stridently broken the law many times over—could be that way. She knew that there were axe murderers out there, she knew that, and she had explained to Grace how she mustn’t speak to strangers, never get tempted by someone to see a puppy or a kitten, or get into an unfamiliar car. But how could she have been prepared for Ruth?

Sylvia sat on the sofa-that-saved-her-life with her laptop beside her and looked up “psychopath” on Wikipedia. It said:
Psychopathy is a mental disorder
characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness.

Ruth. To a terrifying T. Cold as a blade. A steel blade.

Ruth Steel. How fitting.

What was it that made Ruth different from other human beings? We, Sylvia thought, can feel sympathy, empathy, sadness, or fear because we can step into other people’s shoes and imagine how it would be for them. We can
feel
in an abstract way. We can see seconds ahead of ourselves into the future and avoid hurting others, simply by basing our emotions on our own experiences from our past. We have been hurt so we are personally involved, and we learn not to repeat others’ mistakes, or our own. We can predict how others could react because we are able to see ourselves in them. We can identify, Sylvia concluded. We can identify with others.

Something Ruth was incapable of doing.
That
was what made her a psychopath.

A psychopath without a sense of humor—Ruth couldn’t even appreciate
Bridget Jones
.