A faded sign marked my arrival. HUNTER’S GLEN TRAILER PARK. Rows of metallic and off-white trailers suffocated among the debris around them. Plots that were little more than dirt and a few stray weeds were marked by white, jagged rocks. If this was a glen, then I was a debutante, but I could believe people hunted in the swamps around the lake.
I hadn’t known Chicago had anything like this, so country. But then, it was barely there at all. As my car jostled over the gravel path, I noticed several trailers had their windows smashed in to darkened rooms. Only a man slumped against the side of one told me that this place hadn’t been entirely abandoned. His eyes were yellow. And his teeth, when he bared them to me. In a smile or a threat, I wasn’t sure.
At the end of the path there was a smaller sign staked into the ground. EUROPEAN FORTUNE TELLING $10.
Though a few of them seemed like they might be lived in, I was hesitant to go knocking on doors. Neither did I want to check back with the man I’d seen on the way. The fortune-teller seemed like the safest bet.
I got out of the car and wove through the path of junk. The furniture and car parts made me think the plot was used as storage. The pink metal flamingos and numerous gnomes made the area seem more deliberate, more decorous, like a poor person’s sculpture garden.
I knocked and was rewarded with a raspy, “Come in.”
When I opened the door, I was met with a beaded curtain. Not wooden beads or jewel tones like I might have expected, but hot pink plastic beads, like the kind that go on Mardi Gras necklaces. I parted the strings to walk into the smokiest room I’d ever smelled. Piles of newspapers and dishes crowded in on me.
“You want your fortune told, missy?” came from the corner, in a voice that grated like the gravel I’d just come from.
I blinked through the mist of smoke and dust, trying to see. “No, I was looking for…well, I wasn’t exactly sure, but—”
“If you don’t know what you’re looking for, sounds like you do need your fortune told, eh?” She cackled. I was pretty sure it was a she.
“I found out this place was owned by someone. Someone I know—”
“You know Colin?” she interrupted.
“Yes, he’s—”
“What you want with the boy?”
He hadn’t been a boy in some time, but the fact that she seemed to know him and thought of him that way said a lot. “Well, he’s my boyfriend. Or he was. And I guess I—”
“Girl, you’s barking up the wrong tree with that one.”
I didn’t know who this lady was, but that really wasn’t the message I wanted to hear. Thank goodness I didn’t believe in psychics, especially not her.
“I wonder if you could just tell me how you know him,” I said quickly to ward off another interruption.
She huffed. “I know everything about him. I practically raised the boy.”
Holy shit. I thought back to the papers I’d found in Philip’s study. He’d been orphaned, they’d said, so she couldn’t be his mother. Maybe a foster parent? If they’d been placing kids in this dump, they must have been in a bad way.
She leaned forward from the shadows. Her face was a map of neglect with its many wrinkled tributaries and sunken eyes. “I’m his aunt.”
I looked around the tiny trailer. I saw two doors leading off, though one might have led to a bathroom. There definitely didn’t seem to be enough room for the three siblings.
“Where did all of you stay?” I asked.
“All of us?” she barked. “I only had that one. Oh, they tried pushing the other two brats on me, but I told them, them two’s too messed up in the head after what they’d been through. Ain’t gonna spend my time on that, have them stealing from me. Colin, though, he was young enough, and they didn’t much touch him. So I took him in, like family does.”
I just stared at her, trying to find some hint of recognition, that she knew how heinous what she’d just said was, but found nothing. She’d taken Colin in, like family does, but had rejected the other two because they’d been abused? With family like that, who needed enemies?
And then I applied that story to Colin, and even Philip and Rose, and my heart broke. I couldn’t even think of Philip and Rose, whatever they had been through with their parents, and then having their aunt turn them away. And Colin, trapped here in this pit of a home, without his siblings. How lonely he must have been. How miserable.
I could understand better now why a bachelor like him had such an airy, open house even when he hadn’t needed it. And maybe I also understood what Bailey and I had offered him. Something he hadn’t really had before—a family.
“You say you were with him, huh? What, did he leave you pregnant or something?”
“No,” I ground out. “Colin’s not like that.”
She laughed. “I guess not. He wouldn’t leave you high and dry, not my boy. He’d just pay you off probably.”