Read Year of the Monsoon Online
Authors: Caren J. Werlinger
Year of the Monsoon
Year of the Monsoon
By Caren J. Werlinger
Published by Corgyn Publishing, LLC.
Copyright © 2010, 2014 by Caren J. Werlinger.
All rights reserved.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9886501-8-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-9886501-9-0
Cover design by Patty G. Henderson
www.boulevardphotografica.yolasite.com
Book design by Maureen Cutajar
E-mail:
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Books By Caren J. Werlinger
Currently Available:
Looking Through Windows
Miserere
In This Small Spot
Neither Present Time
Year of the Monsoon
Coming Soon:
She Sings of Old, Unhappy, Far-off Things
Hear the Last Unicorn
Dedication
To my parents, Nancy and Ray
Acknowledgments
There are many people to thank for their assistance in getting this manuscript at last into readers’ hands. A sincere thank-you to Marty, Marge and Terry for reading early versions of this story and offering feedback and proofreading. To Beth Mitchum, for her editing skills. To Julie French of the Live Baltimore Home Center, for her assistance in researching Baltimore neighborhoods, and to Patricia Morill of the Art Gallery of Fells Point, for her generous time and assistance with my research of the Fells Point area.
And to my partner, Beth, for always being my first and gentlest critic.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
LEISA YEATS COUGHED A
little as her first few breaths of cold night air hit her lungs. She pulled her scarf more snugly around her neck as she descended the brick steps of her front porch. From the sidewalk, she glanced back up at the dark window of the bedroom where she had so recently been sleeping in a warm, cozy bed next to her partner, Nan, with their corgi, Bronwyn, snuggled between them.
Shivering, she looked toward the Mini Cooper, thinking longingly of the heated seats. She sighed and unlocked her ten-year-old Nissan Sentra, tossing her backpack onto the passenger seat, and turned the ignition. She switched the heat on high and pulled away from the curb, her tires spinning a little on the compacted snow near the curb. A few of the neighbors in their Baltimore community of Arcadia still had Christmas lights up, but most of the houses on this mid-January night were dark and still.
The only good thing about being roused from bed at three a.m.,
she thought,
is that there’s no traffic.
By the time she pulled into the police station, the car was just getting warm. Her shoes crunched on the snow as she walked through the parking lot. She hurried through the sliding glass doors into the brightly lit lobby.
“Hey, Matt,” she said to the young officer behind the desk as she retrieved her ID from one of the pockets of her backpack and clipped it to her jacket.
“Hi, Leisa,” he answered, looking up from his computer screen. “You’re on call tonight, huh?”
“Yup. The glamorous part of social work,” she said, stifling a yawn. “What do we have?”
“Little girl.” He swiveled the monitor so she could see the report. “Neighbors reported seeing her going through the garbage looking for food. Our guys said when they got there, she ran and hid in a closet. Found a female corpse in another room. Probably her mother. The M.E. thinks it was most likely an overdose, one, maybe two weeks ago. Won’t know for sure until he does the autopsy.”
Leisa grimaced. “Was it nasty?”
Matt shook his head. “No heat in the apartment. It’s been so cold, the body was fine.”
“How old’s the girl?”
“Don’t know,” Matt shrugged. “She hasn’t said a word. Looks like she might be five or six.”
“Where is she?” Leisa asked, glancing around the empty lobby.
He jerked his head to the left. “Room 3.”
“Alone?” she asked, displeased.
“There’s a two-way mirror,” he explained, pointing to a closed-circuit monitor next to his computer. “I’ve been watching her. It was the only way we could get her to eat anything. She wouldn’t touch the food while we were in there with her.”
Leisa leaned over the counter so she could see the image on the monitor. “So we don’t have a name, either?” She watched the little girl get up from the corner where she was sitting on the floor, come get a drink of milk from a cup on the table and go back to her corner, leaving a half-eaten sandwich on the table.
“Nothing.”
Leisa sighed. “Well, let’s see what we can find out.”
She went down the corridor to Room 3, knocked and opened the door. Without looking directly at the girl, Leisa could see her hug her knees more tightly against her chest, trying to make herself even smaller. Leisa took off her coat and scarf, draping them over the back of a chair and sat on the carpeted floor also, still not looking at the girl. Opening her backpack, she found a chocolate bar. Tearing the outer wrapper open, she broke off a chunk of chocolate and placed it on the wrapper on the carpet next to her. She pushed it toward the girl a few feet and left it. Ignoring the girl, she broke off another piece of chocolate and put it in her mouth. She set the remainder of the chocolate bar on top of her backpack and waited.
For nearly half an hour she waited, trying not to doze off. At last, the girl stirred from her corner and scooted closer until she could snatch the chocolate Leisa had left. She took it back to her corner and ate it, shoving the whole piece in her mouth.
“I really like chocolate,” Leisa said as she took another bite. She placed another chunk of chocolate on the wrapper, not quite so far away this time.
It only took a few minutes for the girl to come and get the chocolate this time. Before she could scuttle away, Leisa held the rest of the chocolate bar in her open palm.
“My name is Leisa.”
She looked at the girl for the first time. “What’s your name?”
The little girl’s greasy black hair was tangled. Her face and hands were filthy, her clothing stained and torn. She surveyed Leisa with dark brown eyes that were large and wary.
“What’s your name?” Leisa repeated, holding the chocolate a few inches closer to the girl.
“Mariela,” the girl murmured in such a quiet voice that Leisa almost couldn’t hear her.
“Hello, Mariela.” Leisa smiled, offering the candy bar to her. Mariela took the chocolate and this time stayed next to Leisa while she ate. Leisa glanced at her watch and saw that it was nearly four-thirty. “Tired?”
Mariela nodded.
Leisa spoke to the mirror. “Officer Wellby, could we have some blankets, please?”
Within a couple of minutes, Matt came in with three folded blankets. He winked at Leisa as he handed them to her and left.
Leisa spread one blanket on the floor beside her and placed a folded one next to her leg, patting it invitingly. Mariela laid her head down and Leisa covered her with the last blanket.
Mariela looked up at Leisa uncertainly, not sure whether this was a safe thing to do. Leisa smiled down at her. “Go to sleep. I won’t leave you.”
Was that night the trigger, the catalyst for everything that happened later? Leisa would wonder when she thought back. No
,
she realized. There had been no one cataclysmic event that had set things in motion. It had been so many little things, meaningless, or at least harmless at the time, chipping away at the foundation of their relationship, that by the time it was hit by something big – “our monsoon,” Nan would have said – there was nothing left to hold it up.
“Hey.” Maddie’s round face, framed by a halo of frizzy hair, appeared over the partition around Leisa’s cubicle.
“You do know,” Leisa said, glancing up from the report she was filling out, “that using the door to my cubicle, like normal people, would be the polite thing to do. Just because you’re seven feet tall –”
“Six two,” Maddie cut in, ignoring the rest of Leisa’s jibe. “How’s Mariela doing?”
Leisa shrugged. “I’m not sure. I haven’t had a chance to check on her today, but the residential staff said yesterday that she still hadn’t said a word to anyone.”