Concealed in Death (In Death #38)(67)

She stopped to swallow, to breathe out. “She’d cut my hair—shorter than Dallas’s—especially when I started to bud some. She’d whack it off, so it wouldn’t tempt men. If she caught me at anything she didn’t like, she’d take a belt to me, beat out the devil kind of thing. And I’d have to fast, no food for however long she figured.”

Saying nothing, Leonardo shifted her just a little closer. And that, Eve thought, said everything.

“Then she’d start using again, and it was better. Until it wasn’t. Round and round, you never knew who she was going to be on any given day. Am I taking too long? It’s a messy memory lane deal.”

“You’re not.” Roarke topped off her wine, brushed his fingers down her cheek, then sat again.

“It’s just—I was afraid, for a long time, it was like passed down. Like the whole gene thing. I was never going to get totally about a guy or have kids.”

Her voice broke, and while she struggled to control it, Leonardo pulled a blue hankie with silver snowflakes out of his pocket, dabbed at her eyes himself.

“As if I could help it,” she added, “once I found you. But it wasn’t the gene pool thing. She’d messed herself up, fried her brain, f**ked it up good. So one night, she woke me up. Middle of the night, middle of the winter. She was using again, but it was different this time. It was like the worst of both ways she could be. Hellfire and beat the devil, and that dead look in her eyes. She . . . Dallas.”

“They were living in a flop,” Eve continued. “Junkie flop. She had a couple of guys hold Mavis down while she cut her hair off again, and sold Mavis’s clothes for junk. The others used her like a slave, and some of the men wanted to use her for something else. The mother didn’t give a shit, and when she got offered some Zeus one of the f**kers claimed to have coming for Mavis, the mother made the deal, said it would be Mavis’s initiation.”

“That’s when I was scared, the most,” Mavis murmured. “That’s when I knew I had to get away, all the way.”

“Mavis was supposed to fast, purge, clean up—all this weird ritual prep. Instead she ran, grabbed whatever she could carry and she ran, all the way to New York.”

“I was always going to run—I mean once things got really bad, and the flop was really bad. I was hiding some money, stealing it mostly. I was just waiting for better weather, but the idea of her selling me to that guy? Time to book it complete. I was going to go south, follow the sun, you know? But there were a couple of cops at the transpo station, and it spooked me. I got on the wrong bus, ended up here.”

“Perhaps it was the right bus after all,” Roarke said quietly, and made her smile.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it was. I did some sidewalk sleeping, changed my name. I did that legally—sort of—when I could, but I already had the name picked out. We had a neighbor once, Mrs. Mavis. She was nice to me. She’d say how she made too much food, and would I do her a favor and eat it, that kind of thing. And I just liked the way Freestone sounded, so I was Mavis Freestone.”

“It’s exactly who you are,” Roarke said and made her smile again.

“It’s who I wanted to be. I was scared for a while, and freaking cold, hungry. But I knew how to get by, and anything was better. I was doing some panhandling and pickpocketing in Times Square when I met a couple of girls. Not the ones upstairs, not then. They took me to The Club. I never told you much about that,” she said to Eve. “I wasn’t there that long really. Maybe off and on for a year, a year and a half.”

“Where was it?”

“We moved around. A basement, a condemned building, an empty apartment. Nomads, Sebastian called us.”

“Sebastian who?”

“I don’t know. Just Sebastian, and I never told you about him because, well, because. He ran The Club. It was like the street academy, a school, a club, a place to hang. He’d teach us the ropes—pocket picking, handoffs, drops, simple cons, most short cons. Crying Baby, Lost Girl, Duck and Goose, like that. He made sure we ate, were outfitted—and pooled the take, of which he took a cut.”

“Your Fagan.”

Eve frowned at Roarke. “Her what?”

“Fagan. A character from Oliver Twist. Dickens, darling, only Fagan ran a gang of boys in London.”

“Sebastian figured girls got less of the cop eyeball, and pulled off the cons better than boys. That’s where I met Shelby and Mikki and LaRue. They didn’t stay—Sebastian called them day-trippers. But they ran with us, and Shelby made noises about starting her own club. Somebody was always making noises about starting something, going somewhere, being somebody.”

“This Sebastian, did he ever hurt any of you, go at any of you?”

“No. No!” Mavis waved a hand in the air. “He looked out for us—not your way, Dallas, but it worked. He never laid a hand on any of us, not any way. And if any of us got in the stew outside, he fixed it.”

“Forged documents?”

“He was pretty good at it, I guess you could say it was one of his specialties.”

“I’ll need you to work with an artist. I need his face.”

“Dallas.” Mavis just looked at her, waited a beat. “If you think he did that to those girls, you’re out of orbit. He’d never hurt any of them. Nonviolence all the way. No weapons—ever. “Wit and speed,” that’s what he’d say. “Use your brains and your feet.” Even after I went out on my own, I’d do jobs with him now and then.”