Lies We Bury(20)

“Well, I can see I may have delivered some surprising news. I’m Shia, by the way. Shia Tua.” He extends a hand, but I don’t take it. “So if you’re free tomorrow, I’ll be waiting at that address.”

I watch the gray backpack he wears bounce up the road, then over the hill toward the brewery. Shadows from the building across the street reach my chest as the wind picks up.

While I don’t know what Chet hopes to do on parole, I know he wants to see me. He said so in the few letters he wrote over the years and that my lawyer forwarded. He’s also been hell-bent on rehabbing his image, granting interviews and recording his “side of the story” during the first several years of his incarceration. If he succeeds in locating me, he’ll bring the cameras, and everything I tried to leave behind—Chet’s basement, the pain of adolescence, persistent strangers and the danger they pose—will catch up to me in an instant. No one will let me near their high school senior for a photo shoot during grad season. Chet will have taken everything from me all over again.

A drop of rain slides down my ear, and I jolt from my trance, breaking into a sprint toward my car. The wind whips against my face as I jam my key into the driver’s door, flinging it open. I slide inside, breathless, then hit the “Lock” button with a shaking hand.

When I uncurl my fist, the ink from Shia’s card marks my palm. His handwriting—messy, pointed—is smudged but legible, and I’m able to read the address of tomorrow’s meeting.





Ten

The last time I saw Chet was when we escaped. Rosemary was asked to testify against him in court, and she did, but all the adults involved, to their credit, agreed to spare us children further trauma. The prospect of seeing Chet out in the open for the first time left me wide-awake until around three in the morning. My need for coffee is real.

Of the café’s patio tables, only one seat remains vacant during this Tuesday midmorning, opposite a lone man. Shia Tua peers at me, and he hasn’t stopped staring since I turned the corner from where I parked. The last time someone approached me out of the blue, I had just turned eighteen. A tabloid magazine suggested I pose topless, and despite the pitiful sum, I considered it.

“Ms. Lou,” he says, standing and extending a hand. I take it, and his skin is warm, moist in the cool temperature. “Or should I say, Missy Mo?”

He offers a flirtatious smile, speaking the alliterative name the press loved to use as I ventured past puberty, then into adulthood. Missy Mo Learning to Drive! Missy Mo All Grown Up! Missy Mo Models New Swimwear! The final headline was a complete lie. Some idiot blogger took a photo of me on their phone while I was floating downriver in my hometown.

“Claire.” I take a seat and clutch my cross-body bag in my lap. The man doesn’t appear to have any weapons handy. Nothing to knock me out with, although how he’d do it in plain sight with ten witnesses beside us, I don’t know.

“Of course. Thank you for meeting me. Coffee? This place is kind of Portland’s answer to Starbucks.” He leans forward, fidgeting with the sleeve of a too-small jean jacket and placing a cup with a lid in front of me. “The brew here is amazing.”

“Thanks.” I wrap my hands around it but don’t drink.

Shia’s probably in his early thirties, was around twelve or thirteen when our story broke. The local papers were horrified that something like our captivity could have occurred within their polite, sleepy city. A place where the running joke is that if four Portland drivers arrive at a four-way stop at the same time, they’re still there, insisting the person to their left goes first.

Shia tucks thick black curls behind an ear. Olive skin glows beneath the overcast sky.

“You left me a note,” I say. “A threat.”

The pair of women beside us pauses their conversation to eavesdrop. Shia shifts forward and angles his body away from our neighbors—not the kind of self-assured comportment I would expect from a stalker or killer after brazenly suggesting we meet in public. He grips his paper coffee cup.

“I’m confused. I only wrote you one note, on the business card I handed you. Did someone threaten you?”

When I don’t reply, he inhales through his nose.

“Actually, I’ve been following your story since I was in high school. Along with the rest of the country. Since college, I’ve focused on writing nonfiction, some editorial, but mostly true events that I believe were pivotal to the American consciousness.”

He pauses as if waiting for me to challenge him. The women beside us resume discussing the latest tsunami, which struck Indonesia last week. “What does that have to do with me?”

He leans forward onto the wooden slats of the table. “The thing is, I’ve been offered a major advance to write a book. On your family. Your . . . whole family.”

A chill sweeps down my chest. Of course he has. This is the writer who spoke to Jenessa. Maybe he is the author of my note, the way she suspected, or maybe he’s not. Either way, he’s still trying to manipulate me for his own gain. Vultures. All of them.

“You don’t know us,” I say. “How can you write a book on us?”

“That’s exactly the point. We know very little. Just the facts. Yet your experience stuck with everyone for years. People want to know what happened from a firsthand perspective.”