Vicious (19 page)

Grant was at my side in a minute, and we rang the doorbell. A portly woman of about thirty-six in a knee-length flower-print dress answered the door with a wide smile and inviting eyes.

“Well, hi there,” she greeted cheerfully in a thick east Texas accent. “You must be Grant and Brook from the college. Howard has so been lookin’ forward to your visit. He doesn’t get a lot of visitors way out here. Oh, and where are my manners? I’m sorry. I’m Betty Sarsguard, Howard’s home nurse.”

She stuck a chubby hand out toward me with a friendly smile, and I took it and squeezed with the same amount of strength that she gave me. I knew Southern women preferred a nice firm handshake but never one much stronger than theirs. She did the same to Grant, and I could tell she was a sweet, strong woman used to lifting heavy burdens on a day-to-day basis with a big smile on her face. I liked her instantly, and some part of me was happy with the thought she was here to care for my father, if he was in fact my father.

“You two can follow me right through here. Oh honey, I think you can take your sunglasses off now. I’ve already drawn the curtains for the evening.”

I looked around at the little old home. The furniture was out of date, and the curtains she spoke of were ancient white things with blue flowers printed on them. It smelled of biscuits and faintly stale air, like the room was not used often, but the place was spotlessly clean. The little bit of orange glow left of the day was very faint in the house through the flowery curtains, so I removed my sunglasses as instructed. Betty’s smile faltered a little when I took them off, and for a moment, I was worried that she recognized me from the same photo Grant had shown me. But then I realized she was looking at my eyes. No small-town woman would have ever seen eyes like these before, so I grinned back at her awed expression.

“They’re colored contacts. I think they make me look exotic,” I said brightly.

She nodded and her body seemed to relax as if that was a perfectly good explanation, and she continued to lead us through the living room and into the hallway to a back bedroom. The door was closed, and she bade us wait while she checked to see if Howard was ready for company yet.

I looked at Grant, and he looked at me.

“Good cover with the contacts,” he said in whisper.

“Where did you get Brook?”

“It’s my sister’s name. That’s all I could come up with on the fly.”

We looked around the hallway and took in every little picture. Like most family homes, the walls were littered with family portraits and various other pictures. I spotted the same little blond-headed child in almost every photograph. She peaked at me at age five from atop a pony at the fair, and then I saw her again at age eight posing in a light-blue dress and some white roller skates. Her blue eyes burned into mine as I tried to wrap my mind around the idea that this little girl had been me. I looked over at Grant and saw he was studying the pictures as well.

The door suddenly opened, and Betty was there beckoning us inside the bedroom. We entered slowly to find an old man, who looked to be about eighty-five years old, lying in a large bed at the opposite end of the room. He had graying eyes and a thinning mop of white hair. He greeted us with a warm smile.

“Howard, this is Grant and Brook. They are the students who wanted to ask you some questions about Anna.”

She spoke to him slowly and enunciated every word carefully in an effort to make herself clear, but I could tell he understood her perfectly fine without the extra effort. He nodded and beckoned with his hand for us to come closer and sit on two folding chairs placed by the side of his bed. We did as he instructed and took the seats quietly.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Mitchell, and thank you again for agreeing to speak with us,” said Grant in a very professional tone.

He sounded like a journalist.

“Yes, thank you, sir,” I added quietly as he turned and looked at me. His graying eyes widened in shock as he gazed at me closely for the first time, and he sat upright in his bed to get a closer look. He opened his mouth to speak, but Betty interrupted him.

“They are colored contacts Howard. That’s why her eyes look like that,” she said in a pleasant way.

He closed his mouth but did not stop staring at me. I stared right back at this man, this old withered man who was supposed to be my long-lost father. I didn’t know how to feel, and I could tell by looking at him he was grappling with more than the oddity of my eyes. This man was funnier than his simple nurse gave him credit for, and he recognized me as his daughter, Anna. He opened his mouth again, but this time I was the one who interrupted him.

“I know, sir. I look just like your daughter Anna did. I noticed the resemblance when we chose your case to work from, and I saw her picture.”

“The spitting image,” he whispered, still staring at my face. “I started to think I was losing it when you sat down young lady. You look just like my Anna, aside from the eyes. I’ll admit you are a little more mature-looking version of her, but still, the resemblance is uncanny. Of course, I know you can’t be her. I’m not senile yet. Anna disappeared thirty-two years ago, and you can’t be more than twenty or twenty-one?”

“Twenty-two actually,” I lied. I smiled warmly at him, and he smiled back.

“Twenty-two then, but still much too young to be my Anna. She disappeared when she was nineteen. Not much younger than you kids.”

“Could you tell us about your daughter, if you don’t mind, Mr. Mitchell?” asked Grant in his best reporter voice.

He sounded both interested and distant in his professional demeanor. I wondered if this was how I seemed to some humans when I was detached and acted interested or engaged.

“I don’t mind at all. She was the light of my life. Such a sweet child. A tow head from day one, with these pretty blue eyes that would make anyone melt if they saw her cry. She loved to cook with her mother, even as a little child. She made pies all the time. Before she was old enough to start using the oven, she made mud pies out back, and when her mother started showing her how to really cook, she started making pies and cookies almost every day. I tell you what, I gained a good thirty pounds one summer because I could just not refuse her cooking. She was so proud.”

I smiled at this little memory. I had once baked? Not just baked, but I lived to bake with my mother in a real kitchen? The thought was so alien to me, and I tried to reach back into the dark recesses of my brain to remember what he was describing. I thought about the smell of baked goods and hugging a woman’s apron caked with flour, but no memory came to light. There was just blackness there. It was like hearing about a stranger’s childhood.

“She also loved that swing,” he said partly to himself as he reminisced.

“The swing in the front yard?”

The words almost leaped from my throat, and he looked at me fondly.

“Oh, you noticed that? Yes, that was her swing. Her mother and I made it together for her birthday one year. I did the manual labor of it and Beth painted the thing and wove all these fresh flowers into the rope. I told her those flowers would just die and wither away in a few days, which they did, but she did it anyway. It soon became a tradition with the girls. Every spring when the wildflowers bloomed, they would pick a bunch and weave fresh flowers into the rope of the swing. Anna kept up the tradition through her teenage years. She loved that old swing.”

“Mr. Mitchell, do you mind if we ask you about when Anna disappeared?”

Again, Grant had his professional reporter tone to his voice. The old man’s reminiscent smile faded, and I instantly felt guilty about asking him to relive all of this.

“Of course. It is why you are here, after all. I don’t mind talking about it now. It’s been so long the pain isn’t so much, but if I begin to get tired, I would appreciate it if you would excuse me.”

“Of course, sir,” I said understandingly.

“Do you need to turn on a recorder or take notes or anything?”

“No, Mr. Mitchell. I have a really good memory,” said Grant quickly and without a moment of hesitation.

“Anna was going to go to New Orleans with her friend. The two girls were going to celebrate their first spring break in college by going to have some fun together in the Big Easy.”

He paused a moment, and I thought of how simple and normal this all sounded. It hardly seemed real and believable that I could have once been so normal and so human as to plan a girl’s trip to New Orleans on spring break with a friend. He took a deep breath and continued the story.

“Her friend came over here to pick up Anna, and I still remember helping her out to her car with the bags. I hugged her, asked her to please be cautious about pickpockets, and I watched them drive away. I never knew it would be the last time I would see my daughter. If I had known that, I think I would have tied both girls to the fence posts to keep them from going if I had to. As it was, they never even made it to the hotel. We didn’t know she was missing until about two days later. You just don’t expect a teenager to call you right away when they get in, but after another day of hearing nothing from her, we began calling her hotel. When the hotel said they never arrived, we called the other girl’s parents. They hadn’t heard from the girls either. That’s when we called the police.”

I shuddered a little since I knew the rest of the story that he did not, even if I didn’t remember it. I knew I had been taken, and they had done things to me to make me brutish and inhuman. While this man and his wife were out searching with police patrol cars and dogs in the woods for their dear sweet Anna, what was left of their daughter was violently mutilating some poor prisoner in a hell hole of a cell.

“The police never found the girls. Anna was our only child and our whole world. My wife collapsed. She had always been such a creative, carefree woman, but losing Anna was like losing her will to live. She drank heavily and stopped taking care of herself. The stroke was more of a mercy than anything else. I’ve lived here alone ever since, but now Betty comes to visit and take care of me.”

He smiled up at the kindly nurse, and I could tell he truly enjoyed her company. How long had he taken care of my mother while she destroyed herself in front of him? I was sure the feeling of being cared for by another person was a nice relief for him after all of that. However, I could tell this kind man would never admit that to a soul, including himself.

“Did the police ever turn up any leads in the case?” asked Grant.

“Not any real good ones. We kept pushing them to follow up on anonymous tips, and we hung new flyers all the time, even years after the girls had gone missing, but nothing ever came of any of it. They never even found the car.”

A thought snapped into my brain after he had finished talking, and I could not believe that I had not thought of it before.

“You said that both girls went missing, Mr. Mitchell? Who was the other girl? What was her name?”

“Oh yes, that was her best friend since childhood. Lea Everton was her name. Some small-minded families around here didn’t cotton to the idea that we let Anna spend so much time with a black girl. I really always hated that way of thinking. My wife and I never were tolerant of racists. Besides, you only had to talk to her for five minutes to see what a sweet and endearing child she was. The poor Evertons suffered just like we did after her disappearance. They moved from here shortly before Beth’s stroke. It was the daily reminders here that got to them, but I hang on to those reminders and my memories. It’s all I have left of her really.”

My heart sank into my stomach. Lea? Why hadn’t I thought of this before when he said I had gone missing with another girl? Lea and I were turned at the same time. They must have taken us at the same time. I had always thought she had come from the women’s prison down the road because she’d been dressed in the awful orange jumper that all of the prisoners wore. Did he actually say she used to be sweet?

I glanced over at Grant with a sudden anger. Had he known this detail? Surely he had found this out during his research. How could he have let me come into this whole thing blind? That seemed too cruel for Grant, and sure enough, when I looked into his eyes, he shot me a panicked look of shock that matched my own thoughts. Obviously, he hadn’t known this little detail about Lea and was just as surprised as I was.

When I looked back to the old man, he appeared to be tired and weary of the world. I stared intently at his face, searching for some trace or hint that might jog my memory and send a young lifetime full of happy childhood memories back to me. Nothing came. No sudden flashbacks of baking in the kitchen or sweet thoughts of warm, fatherly hugs came crashing through my mind. I just saw a tired old man who vaguely resembled me, and who was still mourning for the loss of his family. More than ever before, I wished I could remember him.

“If you nice kids will excuse me, I am getting tired. Men as old as me can’t visit like we used to. It’s been wonderful having you though. Thank you for the visit. I hope I’ve helped your project in some way.”

We stood politely and shook his hand. I took an extra-long time to say goodbye to him as I held his hand ever so gently in my own. This frail man on this bed was my father. I may not remember him, but I felt that this was true as he pressed his hand in mine. He smiled lazily at me, and I could tell he did not want to let me go either.

“You just look so much like her,” he said, still grinning at me. “It’s crazy how much you look like her. This has been like having her back for a little while. Thank you so much, dear.”