Lies We Bury(28)

“By your ‘mothers,’ do you mean Rosemary, Nora, and Bethel?”

“No, Bethel wasn’t there yet. This was before her.”

“Got it.” Shia makes another scribble. He looks up, dark-brown irises contrasting the blue of his pen. “It seems like you recall a pretty normal, easy time growing up—at least initially. Is that right? Would you say that the experience of being born in captivity, underground, was more or less damaging than any other childhood?”

I stare at him like he just suggested organ harvesting as a viable business model. “No, it was damaging. It was fucked up.” The adjacent table’s conversation pauses, the anger in my voice filling the space. I lean closer. “The first few years, I was naive and a child. My mother sheltered us from the knowledge that she and the others were assaulted and sometimes beaten a few times a week by a man fifteen years older than them in a two-room space with no windows. It was when I became older that I began to notice Rosemary’s haggard fatigue, her restlessness, and my own.”

“Did you help plan the escape?”

“No, I was seven. I couldn’t plan anything, but I recognized the same tension in myself that my mother had been exhibiting for years. I knew Jenessa felt it, too, when we were big enough that we started knocking into each other, then hitting each other. There was no more space. Either more people had to die or we had to get out.”

I take a moment to gulp back the rest of my latte while Shia writes something else. He looks up and watches me; I see it from the corner of my eye while I examine the tables around us. A couple leans back in their chairs, each typing something on her phone while their feet touch underneath; a woman in a long, wraparound scarf reads a book; and a male student hovers over an open textbook displaying an anatomical depiction of the human body. Through the window of the coffee shop, I see people lining up to place their orders, the queue stretching back to the front door.

“How do you think being born into that situation affected you as an adult?” Shia asks.

I sigh, recalling the feeling of being belowground, in the two different storage spaces this week. “I don’t know. Badly?”

“More specifically. Can you recall when you decided that being belowground was negative? How did your mother react to it? Your sisters?”

“What do you mean?”

“As in, how did Rosemary manage being kidnapped as a twenty-year-old, being thrown in with another woman, Nora, then eventually watching the third woman, Bethel, die in childbirth? How did she deal with it, and how did you and your sisters deal with that trauma in such close proximity?”

An image from my childhood returns, of Rosemary crying in a corner after trying to do something, I don’t know what. “I . . . I can’t remember.” Flashes of running from one end of the compound to the next, of racing Jenessa, then Lily, back and forth, rise in my head, then disappear as quickly as they came. A frame, as if from a movie, snaps forward, of Chet looking at me, no more than a foot away. He reaches for me with something like hunger in his gaze, and Rosemary flies at him, clawing him across the face. He beat her then.

Their fights weren’t only about him playing with Lily.

I stand up, pushing my chair backward. “I . . . I can’t handle this. It’s too much.”

Shia stands, too. “Let’s take a break. Five minutes?”

“No, I can’t right now. I’m at my max. I’m sorry.” I grab my shoulder bag, withdraw my keys, and begin walking. It takes me another two blocks before I realize I started off in the wrong direction and have now completely turned myself around. My knees buckle, and I sit down on a nearby bench advertising a real estate company.

Sitting with Shia for twenty minutes and answering his simple questions is more time than I’ve spent thinking about my childhood in years.

Recalling his bombshell about Jameson—did Rosemary know someone else was aware of our existence? I do the math. Jameson would have been about sixty when I was born. Is he still alive today?

The spidery fear that crawled across my skin upon seeing the bracelet on the body in the cooler returns. Could Jameson be the one leaving these details behind at crime scenes? If he sent me the original stuffed Petey, desiring a relationship with us, he could be sending a signal that he desires one now. The person leaving me messages and clues is responsible for two murders. Chet had it in him—the violence, the disregard for human life. Maybe Jameson does, too.

My phone vibrates in my pocket. Pauline is calling me.

“Claire? I have more good—I mean bad—news. What’s the soonest you can get to The Stakehouse in North Portland?”

Thunder rumbles overhead, drowning out the rest of her words. Without waiting for the address, I hoist my bag onto my shoulder and walk in the direction of my car.





Thirteen

Shouts rise from the interior of the strip club, and all heads outside the building turn toward the sound.

Oz and I exchange a look.

“Think it’s another body?” he asks. A crime reporter’s dream. Bright-green eyes squint together, and full lips turn up at the corners. Naturally dusky skin gives him the appearance of an omnipresent tan.

I don’t answer. Instead, I stare down at bullet points about my family, which I scribbled on a notepad not unlike the one Oz was using outside Four Alarm. Knowing I couldn’t arrive too quickly and reveal I’d already been to The Stakehouse, I sat in my car two streets over, researching local news stories from the last twenty years on my phone. Tried to ignore my camera and the horrifying images it now contained.