Not quite a year ago, one morning when her dad was upstairs getting dressed and her mom was packing her lunch for school, she had been using the computer in the family room to visit the Girl Scouts website because she had a question about a Brownie badge. She had typed in one of the words incorrectly and wound up on a site so disturbing that she had yelled for her parents reflexively. Even before they had dropped what they were doing and rushed into the family room, she had closed the screen. What she had seen (or, now, what she thought she had seen), was monstrous and grotesque. She felt…ashamed. Her parents had found the site in the computer’s history and deleted it, and told her that she had done nothing wrong. They said she had done exactly the right thing telling them about it. Then they had lectured her (yet again) about the need to be careful on the Internet, and reiterated the house rules, which they admitted she had indeed been obeying when she had inadvertently strayed onto that site.
Now, while her mom was making dinner and her dad was out, she decided to move beyond the site with the funky tights for girls. She took a deep breath and typed in her father’s name in the search bar. Her mom had said he would be home for dinner, and Melissa honestly wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Her anger toward him had been smoldering for a couple of days. She was irritated with him for making Mom sad—for causing such tension in the house—and she was embarrassed by the attention she was receiving. Even her dance teacher had given her a huge, wholly unexpected hug that afternoon. Moreover, was it possible that her father had done the sorts of gross things at the party that she had seen on the website she had accidentally stumbled upon almost a year ago now?
She read stories about her father on four different sites before she had had enough. She had never heard the expression “sex slave” before, but she had an idea what it meant. She looked up the word orgy and was appalled. Again, there were pictures. But she scrutinized as well the sections of the news stories that focused on the dead Russians, because the reporters always quoted detectives who stressed that there were many more men like that pair out there—and that their Russians friends were probably furious and dangerous.
“Sweetheart?”
At the sound of her mother’s voice she instantly minimized the screen.
“What?”
“What are you doing?”
“I was trying to find something for school.”
“About?”
“Turtles,” she lied.
“Okay. Would you like mashed potatoes or baked potatoes?”
“Mashed.”
Her mother nodded and retreated. Before the bachelor party, Melissa knew, her mother would have asked her why in the world she was looking up turtles. She would have come to the computer and sat down beside her to see what she had found. She would have asked why her teacher—a woman her mother called by her first name because, of course, they were peers on the faculty—was having them study turtles. Was it a unit on reptiles? Was someone bringing a turtle to school? Were they going to get turtles for the classroom? Now, however, her mother was so distracted that she didn’t ask a single question. Not a one.
After Melissa clicked again on the story about the violence in her home, she deleted it. She deleted all the sites she had visited from the computer’s history. Then she googled turtles. For the life of her, she had no idea why the first thing she had thought of was a turtle.
…
Richard’s day ended where it began: on a futon on the floor. Another news van trolling the neighborhood and pausing at the end of his driveway.
He stared up at the ceiling at the dim light from the moon and listened to Cassandra snore ever so slightly in her sleep. He took comfort that at least the cat had not deserted him. Usually she slept upstairs. Tonight she was downstairs with him. His mind, as it had all day, ping-ponged between the unfairness of Franklin McCoy still refusing to allow him to return to work, the sword that Spencer Doherty was dangling over his head, and the hurt he had inflicted upon his family. He was angry at the world, but he was also awash in self-loathing. And somewhere in the maelstrom behind his eyes that was keeping him awake was that poor girl he had brought upstairs in this very house. Sometimes he was haunted by her eyes as she sat on the guest bedroom bed. Sometimes he heard her voice in his head. He thought of her sadness when she spoke about Yerevan. He thought of her playfulness when she described a sculpture of a cat.
Manhunt. Now she was the object of a manhunt. Everyone wanted to find her. The Russians probably wanted to kill her. He was, he realized, terrified for her. It made him loathe her parents, whoever they were and wherever they were.
He sat up on the futon, his head in his hands. He thought of his wife and daughter, upstairs in the master bedroom. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake not coming home with a gun.
Alexandra
Sonja was sobbing when we ran from the party for the bachelor. We were both crazed, we were both all adrenaline. We climbed into Pavel’s car, because she said that was how we were going to get away, and she got into the driver’s seat. She slammed shut the big Escalade door and right away banged into the side of one of the other cars in the driveway when she was backing out. She didn’t know how to drive. Neither of us did. She didn’t even know how to turn on the windshield wipers at first, and it was pouring rain. But she had planned this thing in her mind and didn’t plan to drive very far. We were just going to the train station, she said, which we had seen when we were driving around Bronxville before the party. We had gotten there so early, Pavel had gone to the village to find a liquor store for his vodka. Sonja figured even she could drive the mile or two to the train station.
“What the fuck were you thinking!” I asked. “Why did you do that?”
“Because they killed Crystal, why else?”