Tarnished (18 page)

“Is it from the kennel?” I whispered.

She shook her head, pointing to the side where the remnants of an eagle’s head were spray painted in red.

“Like the one from the train?” I asked.

Slowly, Missy stepped closer to the van, her arm outstretched as if she wanted to touch it.

“We have to go,” I said. “Penn’s waiting.”

Missy took another step. “Just let me—”

She stopped and covered her mouth with both hands.

“Missy?” I crouched beside her. “What is it?”

She fell to her knees, and a low moan escaped from her lips.

“What?” I asked again, looking up at the van.

And then I saw. Peeking through the crack in the back doors was a hand, the small white palm pointing skyward.

“We have to go,” I said, tugging Missy to her feet.

We stumbled back into the trees. Missy held onto me, and I pulled her against my side, moving for the two of us.

“I can’t do this,” Missy cried. She slipped from my grasp and crumpled onto the ground. “This is too much. Getting you back here was one thing, but all of these dead girls? I can’t
do
this, Ella.”

I grabbed her beneath the arms and hoisted her to her feet. “I know. But you can. You’re the strongest person I know. It’s just a little bit further. Come on.”

I helped Missy up and supported her slumping frame as we slipped back into the trees. The foliage grew denser. Thick patches of holly caught the fabric of our thin jumpers and clawed at our calves and thighs. I wanted to stop, too. Wanted to lower myself down in the underbrush and close my eyes, but I couldn’t. I’d meant what I said to Missy, but it was time for me to be the strong one.

“Who told you to look for that shape the first time?”

“It must have been a mistake,” Missy said. “We must have seen it wrong. We
had
to have.”

I didn’t need to ask again. I saw the answer streaked across her cheeks.

Seth. It was Seth.

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said, wanting to believe it as much as she did, but we both knew it was a lie. It
did
matter. We wanted so badly to believe that there were good guys, but we’d been wrong.

W
e walked on. Ten minutes turned into twenty and then suddenly it was there, the yellow glow of the gate’s small lamp. We stumbled into the small clearing in front of the kennel’s long driveway. Somehow, by some generous stroke of luck, we’d found it.

“He’s not here,” Missy said, her hands on her hips, as if she’d expected Penn to be sitting behind the wheel of the car with the engine revved and his hand resting on the gearshift, ready to pull out at a moment’s notice.

“Stop it,” I whispered. “He said he’d be here.”

“What if he’s not, Ella? What if they got to him already?”

I readjusted the bag over my shoulder, ignoring her.

We were standing in front of the kennel’s gate, out in the open. Of course Penn wouldn’t wait there. “He said he’d hide the car,” I reminded her. “Come on.”

The gate’s wrought iron bars sat open wide, attached on either side to two wide columns, about six feet at its tallest. From there, it sloped down on either side, curving a bit toward the road. It was only about a dozen feet long, but there was probably enough room to hide a car back there.

I tromped down the small incline behind the brick wall. The foliage was thick with bramble and bushes but it was clear that there were no cars hiding here.

“Maybe he’s on the other side?” Missy whispered hopefully near my ear.

We pushed through the tangle of branches and paused at the edge of the road. The kennel wasn’t visible from here, but the bright beams of the searchlights were. They looped in circles through the dark sky, illuminating the grounds in bursts of light.

We were too far away to be spotted by the beams, but still we held our breath, waiting for just the right moment to dash across the empty road. The smooth pavement soothed my aching feet, but I didn’t stop to savor it. A second later we crashed through the underbrush on the other side.

My eyes darted over the scene and the bag slipped from my hand.

There it was. The car.

Chapter Eighteen

I
could barely make out the car’s shape behind the mound of long evergreen branches that Penn must have draped across the hood and along the roof, but it was there.

I had no idea what time of night it was or how long Penn had been waiting, but he must have been awake, because the door flung open and a second later he was in front of me.

All the fear that I’d been carrying like this heavy bag across my back dropped away as I collapsed into his arms.

“Thank God you’re here.” He pulled me into his chest, squeezing me so hard that it felt like I might burst. “I had the windows cracked, listening for you, and I swear I heard an alarm go off.” He sounded hoarse, like his voice might break at any moment. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if I should stay here or come looking for you.”

His warm hands closed around my shoulders and he pulled back, staring down at me. It was dark, but a bit of light reflected off the tears that had welled in his eyes.

“You did the right thing.” I lingered in his embrace a moment longer before I snatched up the bag of files and began pulling evergreen boughs from off the car. “We need to go,” I said. “Now.”

Penn stared at me a moment longer. The need to flee pounded against my back, pushing me forward, but I understood the hesitation in his eyes, the need to remind himself that we’d found each other. Again and again. We found our way back.

The passenger side was still covered in boughs, so the three of us piled in through Penn’s door and he cranked the key. The engine revved, the sound of it growing in the night, spreading out like a beacon, echoing across the kennel grounds before the car sputtered and died.

Penn hit the steering wheel. “Damn it, start!”

“Try again,” I begged, leaning forward in my seat as if the crazy whirring that rushed through my veins could feed the engine.

He twisted the key again and it sputtered. Chugged. Once more and the engine caught. The car shook beneath us and Penn threw it into drive. The wheels spun, digging into the damp dirt before finally finding traction. Branches whacked the windshield as we shot forward, bouncing up onto the blacktop.

Missy’s head flopped forward against the back of my seat and her hand snaked up over the backrest, settling on my shoulder. I reached up and held it as beneath us the tires purred against the asphalt. Dark trees whipped past our windows and still I held tight to her hand. We’d done it. I don’t know how, but we’d done it.

The bag full of files slumped beside Missy in the backseat. They were only papers, bits of wood pulp and ink, but it felt like they were alive. It felt like we’d managed to rescue something more than just some scribbled notes and documents. More than proof. Those files breathed and something like a pulse moved through them.

M
issy ripped off the kennel’s white jumper as soon as the car hit the freeway. I couldn’t get out of mine fast enough either. The smudge of ashes cut across the middle of it like a dark wound. I balled the fabric into a tight ball and shoved it beneath the seat.

I wiggled back into my old jeans and T-shirt. Already I felt better just being in my own clothes. The fact that they were dirty didn’t bother me a bit.

Dawn was beginning to break as we pulled into Hartford. In the backseat, Missy was sprawled out with her feet propped up against the window. Her mouth had fallen open in sleep and she snored softly. Nothing about her looked refined or sophisticated and my heart swelled for her. It felt weird, this love. It reminded me a bit of the way I felt about Ruby, but it surprised me to feel this way for her. Maybe it was because I’d been taught my whole life to distance myself from the other girls at the kennel. Pets weren’t meant to be friends; at least, that’s what I’d been told.

We drew nearer to the city and Penn pulled into the nearly empty parking lot of a grocery store. He put the car in park and laid his head against the steering wheel, his face still blank, unreadable. During the drive I’d whispered the things we’d seen inside the kennel, letting the words spill from my mouth like a sickness that I needed to expel from my body. His hands had clamped tighter and tighter around the wheel as I spoke, his eyes dark and stony, locked on the road.

“You look tired,” I said, reaching out to lay my hand on the back of his neck.

His eyes were red and his short hair poked out at a funny angle, stuck this way from all the time he had spent running his hands through it.

“Why don’t we find a place to rest?” I suggested. “It doesn’t have to be for long. Only an hour or two.”

Penn shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “No. I don’t want to have this stuff any longer than I have to.” He glanced uncomfortably back at the bag of files, which had slipped down onto the floor of the backseat. “If they find us with them… It’s bad enough that I committed fraud by selling you two. This is proof.”

“Good,” I said. “Proof is exactly what we need.”

“You’re right.” Penn nodded. “I guess we need to look through them first and then we can find someone to take them to.”

“Who? The police?”

“No.” He shook his head. “My dad and NuPet have the police wrapped around their little fingers. You said so yourself. Besides, they wouldn’t care unless a crime had been committed and as far as I can tell, we’re the ones who committed the crime.”

“You don’t think it’s a crime? What they’re doing to those girls?” My voice shook. “They’re killing them. We saw the bodies!”

He reached out for me, cupping my face in his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m not saying it isn’t horrible. It is! I know that. Anyone with even an ounce of decency would know that.”

I covered my face with my hands, pressing my palms into my eyes. “I don’t want to see it anymore,” I said, shaking my head. “They sent their bodies down a garbage shoot. That’s all they were. Garbage. I can’t—” I choked on the words.

“Shh. It’s okay,” Penn said.

I concentrated on the warmth of his hand as it stroked the back of my neck. I didn’t want to think about what was happening inside the kennel. I wanted to shut it out of my mind and never think about it again, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t forget those girls. It wouldn’t be fair.

“So who can we tell that will care?” I asked, sitting up.

Penn sighed, reaching back for the bag of folders. “You really think they’re killing those babies because they aren’t perfect? What if that woman you talked to has it wrong? What if they were stillbirths? What if they’re dying for other reasons? Health reasons. Maybe that’s what the doctors knew when the babies were born.”

“We saw them.”

“You saw the
cabinets
,” Penn said. He pulled a file out of the bag and laid the stack of papers in his lap. “The only bodies you saw were of older girls.”

I gaped at him. “Are you saying I’m lying?”

“No, not at all. I just want to be sure. That’s all.”

“So look at the papers, then,” I snapped.

He sighed and looked back down at the paper in front of him, running his finger along a line of print. He was quiet for a moment, reading, and his brow crinkled as he studied the words.

“I don’t get what a lot of this is,” he said after a while. “There’s a bunch of scientific terms…stuff about performance, but I don’t know. What if we can’t find anything to use against them?”

“But that’s just one file,” I said, straining to reach into the back for another one. “And it’s one of the first ones we found.” I shuffled through the bag until I came to one of the folders that came from the locked drawer. I handed him the file. “Try this. Some of them have something different on the outside like this one.” I pointed to the red word stamped across the manila file.

Penn sat up a little straighter. “Terminated?”

A chill spread up my arms.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean they killed them,” he said. “It could mean something else. It could…” His voice trailed off as he thumbed through the file, stopping every once in a while to read, and I flipped back and forth between watching his face and watching the way his finger traced the shape of the sentences.

“This is messed up,” he muttered.

“What? What does it say?”

He licked his lips. “I don’t even know what it all means,” he said. “There’s a lot of these legal papers in here. I can’t understand all the jargon, but I think it’s saying that they’ll pay these women forty thousand dollars for the use of their uterus and an extra ten thousand for a live birth. And then on top of that it says they get five thousand dollars each year just for keeping quiet about it. And then there’s lots of doctors’ notes and I think this is a psychiatric exam.” He picked up one of the papers and shook it. “And this! God, Ella, look at this!”

“What is it?”

“Right here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the paper. “It says subject unviable.” He ran a hand over his face. “It says this woman had a live birth, but that the subject was found to be defective. Look at this. They list a bunch of numbers and stuff: length, weight, facial girth—whatever that means. And then it says ‘sub-par: terminated.’”

In the backseat Missy sat up. “See? They killed it. It didn’t die on its own.”

Penn shook his head. “No, it didn’t. The woman at the kennel told you the truth,” he said. “All of it. The surrogates. The payments. The dead babies. All of it.”

Missy leaned over the seat. “Of course she told us the truth,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “So now what do we do?”

“We need to take this to someone.” He held up the folder.

“Who?” Missy asked.

“There’s the newspaper, but nobody reads that anymore. We need people to hear this. We can’t risk all this and just end up with some little story that’s going to end up at the bottom of someone’s birdcage.”

“Television?” I asked.

Penn nodded. “Yeah. I think it’s our best bet. But…” He rubbed his eyes again.

“But what?”

He couldn’t hide the worry in his eyes when he looked up at me. “What if they want to interview you and Missy? That’s fine if it’s in the newspaper, but what if someone recognizes you on TV? We can’t risk that. If my dad finds out that we—” He stopped short and swallowed.

“Then I’ll be the one they interview,” Missy said. “If they need someone on camera, it can be me. I couldn’t care less who finds out.” Her cheeks were rosy, maybe from sleep, or maybe from the fire she must have slowly been rekindling since the kennel.

“Fine.” Penn nodded. “We’ll go. I just hope we can find someone that’s willing to listen.”

P
enn held the crumpled-up page from the telephone book in his hand as he clutched the wheel and pulled into the parking lot of the Eyewitness News broadcast studio.

“I can’t believe we found it,” he sighed, tossing the paper down by his feet. “I just assumed it would be closer to downtown.”

The news studio was actually located in a big office building just off the highway a few minutes south of the city. The building didn’t look like the kennel. It was taller, with wide windows that shone like mirrors reflecting the peachy sky, but still, there was something about the size of it, the overbearing way it loomed over us, that made my palms sweat and my mouth go dry.

Across the parking lot a woman got out of her car and Penn sat up straighter in his seat.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That’s Diane Westly. I recognize her from TV,” he said, already grabbing the file sitting on the seat next to him.

Missy and I scrambled out after him as he jogged across the parking lot to catch up with the woman who had just started to climb the wide cement stairs that led up to the building’s front door.

“Excuse me, Ms. Westly,” Penn said.

He reached out to grab the starched edge of her blazer and she pulled her arm back, startled.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, backing up a bit. “But we have a story that we think you might be interested in.”

She turned around to study the three of us and I finally got a good look at her face. From behind, I’d thought that she was younger. Her hair was very blonde and styled in a stiff bob that looked like it wouldn’t move even in a gust of wind. Up this close, her makeup was caked on so thickly that it cracked as she frowned at us. Her thin lips, which were painted a bright shade of pink, tightened into a line and her nose wrinkled a bit in distaste.

“Well thank you for thinking of me,” she said, plastering on a fake smile. “But I really don’t have time to talk this morning.”

She turned around and trotted up the rest of the steps.

Penn ran after her. “It’s a big story,” he said, grabbing her arm more forcefully this time.

“If you’ll kindly get your hands off of me,” she said, shaking him off. “May I suggest that you don’t grab people like that, young man? Some might consider it assault.”

Penn’s face reddened.

“Please,” I said, hoping she’d listen to me. “If you’ll just give us five minutes.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m sorry, but I can’t give five minutes away to every person with a ‘story.’” She rolled her eyes at the word. “My time is valuable. I know you kids want to believe that since you’ve seen me on TV we have some sort of connection, but I’m sorry to inform you that we don’t. I don’t owe you anything.”

She turned, swinging open the wide door. We chased after her. The door swung shut behind us and she glanced over her shoulder, obviously irritated that we’d followed her inside.

Missy grabbed the file out of Penn’s hands and thrust it at her. “Will you just look at the goddamn papers? Maybe if you stopped judging us by what you
think
you see and actually look at the evidence you’ll surprise yourself. We’ve got documents that could uncover a scandal with the—”

“Bob!” Ms. Westly hollered, slapping Missy away and waving her arms at the big man in a security suit who sat behind a desk in the corner. “Will you please escort these people from the premises? I’ve been assaulted twice in the space of thirty seconds.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The man nodded. He scooted back from his chair and glared at us.