Hope House (22 page)

She would rather have believed, if she had been allowed, that Luke lived in a mansion full of toys, with parents who read to him every night and told him how special he was.

Closure was not good. Martine tossed down the scalpel and clamps and  ran after Dr. Tad to tell him that he needed to lie to Stefanie. Let her think the twins were fine. Let her live her life thinking they went off to a rich couple in the United States. It was a small lie but to tell the truth sometimes was the surest way to break a heart. 
 

5.

Key West, late morning-Gloria

“This is the address but I don’t see a sign that says Hope House, do you?” Gloria asked as Kurt and she pulled up in front of the large gray Victorian seaside home on Windy Key.

“No. Maybe they moved? What was most recent birth record in the stack?”

“Four years, I think,” Gloria replied.

Kurt stopped the truck in the front and shut the car off. Gloria jumped at the loud ratcheting of the emergency brake as he pulled it up. “Sorry. Not used to standards?”

“No. That’s all right. A little jumpy. Life’s been a roller coaster lately.”

Kurt grinned proudly. “Part of the ride’s been fun though?”

She took his hand and squeezed. “Part of it yes, but this morning, what you told me, not so fun.” She was still stung by his news this morning despite the incredible after- sex that followed.
Deep breath, Gloria. Good sex isn’t everything. Correction, great sex.
 

“I really am sorry. You have to believe me.”

“I know, but it still hurt.”

It’ll take awhile to trust you again. But I’ll need to set it aside for now.
“I’m glad my phone ran out of battery before I told Tommy we were coming here,” she said as they both studied the house from the road. Pink shutters and a pretty white picket fence. Charming.

“So am I. We’ll have to start feeding him false information. He has faith in both of us, oddly enough, so whatever we share with him can be made to work to our advantage.”

“Yes, and we dare not trust anything my ex tells us.”

“
And we can bank on the fact that whatever you divulge to him, will be relayed to Mick Puglisi immediately, truth or not,” Kurt said.

“I got it. Should we go in?”

“Sure. If this isn’t the place, whoever owns the house now maybe knows where the new birthing center is,” Kurt said as he opened his door and stepped out.

They walked toward the house together. Kurt took her hand in his.
“We’re in this together, okay? Nothing’s changed.”

That was good in some ways but to her a lot had changed. ‘
In this together’
took on new meaning.

Kurt knocked.  The shadow of a figure came close to the door and opened it the inch or so the slide chain lock allowed.

“Mickey is that you?” A woman called to them, her voice brimming with joy.

Kurt looked at Gloria and mouthed,
Bingo
before saying, “No Ma’am, but we’re friends of Mickey’s. He sent us here to talk to you about Hope House.”

The door shut and then opened again, this time without the lock.

A pretty woman, about sixty, faced them. She had the bottled red hair of brunettes past their prime who refused to give into gray. Bright lipstick and eye makeup plus a fitted suit in expensive fabric told Gloria that this woman still cared a great deal about her appearance.

A deep scar across her check and another that disfigured her bottom lip told Gloria it was an uphill battle. The woman’s right eye sagged. It wasn’t a stroke. Some kind of accident.

“Hi, I’m Gloria.” She extended her hand.

The woman took it. Fresh manicure, red nails, warm soft fingers adorned with diamond and gemstone rings. Lots of them.  Good moisturizers and precious stones could stall time.

“I’m Kurt. Mickey wanted us to stop by. He said you could give us some information about Hope House.”

“Oh yes. Code words, I get it. Come in.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know your first name,” Gloria ventured. Of course she didn’t know her last name either.

“Maria. Maria P—Parker. How well do you know my Mickey?”

“Pretty well, we just didn’t want to sound so formal,” Kurt said.

“Meaning you weren’t sure which name I was using?”

Gloria looked to Kurt, not sure what that meant.

“Well, come in and sit down, why don’t you? I can get you some iced tea. I just made some.” Her lips moved when she talked but out of synch with her words. The bottom lip
was a syllable or two behind.

“That would be great,” Gloria replied. 

Kurt still held Gloria’s hand. This woman, Gloria guessed, must be Mick Puglisi’s mother. My Mickey, she had said. And she had hesitated when giving her surname. Gloria again wondered what had happened to her face.

Had Mick’s father done this to her?

“It’s silly really, Mickey naming this place. He said it’s for tax purposes.”

“So this is just your residence? Not a birthing center?” Kurt asked, letting go of Gloria’s hand and stepping closer to Maria Parker.

“No. None of them are born here, silly.” She turned around quickly and faced Kurt’s strong body opposing hers. “I—well, you said you were friends with Mickey. So I—” Suddenly she dabbed at her face with her petite, pretty fingers, lightly tracing the scars. “I thought you were dropping off or picking up—oh, dear. I shouldn’t have said anything.” The painted fingers shook violently now, like frightened Vaudeville girls in a raid.

“Picking up what?” Kurt asked. He seemed to have grown six inches since they stepped in the front door
, and his menacing look frightened Gloria. She was damn glad she wasn’t his target. 

“The b—nothing. Nothing.” Still she ran her hands over her face.

Gloria took a shot in the dark by asking, “How did you get hurt, Mrs. Puglisi?”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not allowed to be called that. Mrs. Puglisi is dead. Dead. Cheated on her husband. Now she’s dead. That’s what happens. I’m just Marie. Marie Parker.” She ran from the room, looking over her shoulder and batting the air. Fleeing from someone who wasn’t there. Not anymore.

“Just go,” she called out from the behind the swinging kitchen door. “Just go. You never saw me. I didn’t tell you anything!”

Then her voice rose in pitch and in fear. “I didn’t say anything to them, I swear I didn’t.”

“She’s talking to herself,” Kurt said.

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure but she’ll call someone eventually. We don’t have much time.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go upstairs and look around. No one else is here or she would have yelled out to them. Here’s my phone. Take a quick look around for anything that might help us and get pictures. I’ll watch her.”

Gloria bolted up the large wide glossy steps, a tasteful Oriental runner and brass rods cushioning her steps. The second floor was a long, wallpapered hallway with a series of doors. All hard wood, all with glass door knobs. Behind one, music played. Classical.

Carefully and quietly Gloria turned the knob. “Oh my God,” she whispered. Rows of cribs filled the large pale pink room enhanced with yellow wall paper border. Ten cribs. Damn big room. She stepped inside. All empty. She took out her phone and took a picture anyway. It might be evidence she’d need in future.

Another door in the room off to her left caught her attention. Closet? No, the double doors on the right most likely opened to that. Maybe a bathroom. She opened it and found another room, just as big. This one was light blue. The same music played. Must be a central system that piped music
throughout the floor.  

Ten more cribs. But this room felt different. Smelled different. She peered into one of the cribs and saw twin babies swaddled separately but lying side by side. They were asleep and calm. She took their picture. From the smell, they needed a diaper change but she wasn’t here for that. She quickly looked into a couple of the other cribs and saw a few more babies. Five in all. She peered to the other side of the room to see if there were more children but then she heard Kurt yell, “Gloria.” 

She turned and ran, taking one more picture of the room before heading down.

“We have to go. Now!
”

“You won’t believe—” Gloria started to tell Kurt about the babies and all the empty cribs until she saw the reason for Kurt’s urgency to leave.

Maria Puglisi aimed a small handgun at them. Her hands trembled violently and her eye makeup ran down her face, carried by tears. Black rivers rolled over her scarred cheeks and across the twisted lip.  

“I don’t want to kill you, really I don’t. I know how it feels to be afraid and I’m sorry I have to scare you. But please leave and don’t come back. Please. You didn’t see anything right?”

“Nothing,” Kurt promised. “We were looking for Hope House but clearly this isn’t the place.”

The woman’s arms relaxed a bit and the gun lowered.

“No?” she asked, obviously wanting to believe she’d fooled them.

“No, we came in and asked you about Hope House and you said it wasn’t the place, remember?” Gloria offered.

She smiled. Gloria guessed the woman’s brains had been scrambled along with her face if she could so easily block out the last few minutes.

“Right. That’s right. I didn’t say anything, did I?” She wiped her makeup with her hand.

“We’re obviously at the wrong house, Mrs. Parker. So sorry to disturb you,” Gloria said as she backed away toward the door, now holding Kurt’s hand for dear life.

“Parker, yes. That’s my name. Maria Parker.”

Kurt and Gloria walked out the front door and Gloria heard the chain lock slide behind them.

“They don’t know!” the woman yelled to the air from inside. “See, I didn’t tell them anything.” After that Gloria didn’t hear her because she jumped in Kurt’s truck and they drove away.

“So Mick’s mother is hidden away on this island, allowed to live in the big house so long as she doesn’t tell anyone who she is. Her scars are her punishment for adultery.”

“And being banished from her family,” Gloria added. 

Kurt nodded. “Apart from learning a Puglisi dark family secret this was kind of a wasted trip.”

“It wasn’t a waste. You don’t know what I saw.”

“What did you see?” He gripped her arm to emphasize his interest in this news.

Gloria queued up his
phone and displayed the pictures. He glanced from the road to look.

“Cribs?”

“Rooms full of cribs. You heard what she started to say. That the babies aren’t born here. I believe it. I didn’t see any evidence of the biological mothers being here. No pregnant women milling about. Just the babies. Maria thought we were here to pick up or drop off,” Gloria reminded him.

“Okay, so Puglisi uses this place as a holding and distribution center. He brings the babies here before carting them to Miami to his agency when it’s time for them to go to the new families.”

“Right,” Gloria said. “But where does he drop them off? And why do all the records show the infants being born here?”

“She said something about tax purposes. Calling it Hope House for tax purposes, she said.” Kurt chewed his lip. “We need to go to the adoptive parents.”

“We can’t go back to the Ganders. I’ve put them through enough.”

“No not them. Let’s pick some from the files I grabbed. Maybe they can shed some light on this, tell us something that will help figure out why he’d say the births happened here, as opposed to the truth.”

Gloria reached under the seat and grabbed the files, surprised her hands were steady. She was nonplussed by her their most recent brush with death—an obviously disturbed woman brandishing a gun in their faces.  How quickly people could get used to  running for their lives. The first time someone had tried to kill her and failed, Gloria had accepted the existence of her guardian angel.

She looked over at Kurt, his big strong hands handling the wheel as they had handled her body only a few hours earlier. If she did have an angel protecting her from death, his name was Kurt Malone, and he was one hell of lover.

She smiled and flipped open the first manila folder. “Portland, Maine.”

6.

Key West, same time-Kurt

“Portland, Maine is good. Where else you got?”

He watched Gloria as she checked file after file and called out the addresses where the adoptive parents lived. He was amazed at her serenity.  Only a few minutes earlier a woman whose face resembled a broken and poorly mended vase had held a gun to them. The lady was fractured mentally as well and Kurt had been scared shitless. People like that didn’t think twice about killing, didn’t care about consequences or repercussions. Someone always came  along to clean up the mess. Kurt had been eyeing the doorway while feeling in his pocket for something to use as a weapon. But it hadn’t come to that. 

Maria Puglisi had let them go.