He let out a breath. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just pissed off. I’m going to get fined; they rounded up a load of kids and brought them to the Sheriff’s Office, so they’re going to be really bummed about that and tell everyone. I mean, it’s not like it’s going to stay quiet for long. But still …’
‘Oh dear.’
‘I’m sorry. I thought you knew.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I can understand how you might think I know everything …’
He smiled.
The door to the ladies room burst open and Jo da Ho staggered out.
‘Damn you, you son-of-a-bitch,’ she shouted, as she fell briefly on her hands, then pushed her weight back up again. The man ran around her and out through the door of the bar.
Billy ran to her. Ren ran too.
‘Did he hurt you?’ said Billy. ‘I will –’
‘No,’ said Jo. ‘But damn him, he broke my damn necklace in two.’
‘Oh, your pretty necklace,’ said Ren, bending down to pick it off a floor she realized too late was very wet.
‘Exactly,’ said Jo. ‘Thank you.’ She held out her hand.
But Ren didn’t hand it to her. ‘Where did you get this, Jo?’
Jo looked at Ren, then Billy, then down to the necklace.
‘Jo?’ said Ren. ‘This is not a big deal. It’s just out of curiosity.’
‘I found it in the bathroom,’ said Jo. ‘A woman dropped it. She’d been in here before and I knew she’d be back, so I kept it for her. But it was pretty, so I wore it. Otherwise I would have just sold it, wouldn’t I? My plan all along was to give it back to its rightful owner.’
Good point. ‘I know that,’ said Ren. She closed her grip on the necklace and put it into her pocket before Billy or Jo could see what she really had in her hand. She took out a photo of Jean Transom that she kept in her wallet. ‘Is this the lady who lost it?’
‘Exactly,’ said Jo. ‘Exactly.’
Billy and Ren looked at each other.
‘Did you see any pictures of this woman on the news or on the posters around Breckenridge?’ said Ren.
‘I don’t have a television set,’ said Jo. ‘But I did see a picture something like that, now you mention it. But that woman in the pictures was an FBI agent, it said. The woman who dropped the necklace didn’t look like an FBI agent. An FBI agent just wouldn’t come into the Filly. So I thought they kind of looked like each other, but it couldn’t be the same person.’
Maybe if you had read the poster and seen that the last sighting was here …
‘That is true,’ said Billy.
‘Well, Jean was a friend of mine,’ said Ren, ‘so, if you don’t mind, I’m going to hang on to this necklace for her family.’
Jo nodded. ‘OK, sure. You do that. I knew I’d only have it for a little while. And I’m sorry I broke it.’
‘You didn’t break it,’ said Ren.
It was designed to come apart. Otherwise you couldn’t plug it into a USB port.
Ren turned to Billy. ‘I’m just going out to the Jeep for a little while. I’ll be back.’
‘Sure, no problem. Is everything OK?’
‘Absolutely.’ She turned to Jo. ‘Thank you.’
‘A pleasure,’ said Jo, sitting down on her corner stool, looking down at her vast, bare cleavage.
Ren grabbed her laptop from the trunk of the Jeep and sat in the front seat. She turned on the heating in the car. She dropped the bottom half of the damp pendant – the cap of the USB flash drive – into the driver’s door and held the part with the USB drive against the vents.
What files have you saved on to this?
Ren’s fingers started to burn in the hot air. She shook the drive. Please dry. After a little while she checked it. There was no way of telling. She plugged it in and a little white disk icon appeared on her screen. Ren clicked on it. There were three files. The first was a Word document called ‘listassaults’. The second was a jpg, numbered. The third was just called ‘letterforpsych’. The list of names was no surprise to Ren – the young girls, the abuse.
The jpg stalled when she tried to open it. When it did open, it was a small, blurred image taken with a cellphone camera. It looked pixilated – a mess of shapes and colors – but it wasn’t. Ren stared at it closely. She had seen it before: in a drawing on the little girls’ file in her office, signed Ruth XX. Here in a tiny, badly lit photo. And also at exactly the location the photo had been taken in. Her heart pounded.
I know what this is.
Suddenly, a face appeared at the driver’s window.
‘Jesus Christ!’ She rolled down the window. ‘Are you fucking insane?’
‘What are you doing out here?’ said Billy. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m working,’ said Ren, pulling down the laptop screen.
‘I was worried, that’s all.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘OK. Jesus. You just ran out –’
‘See you inside.’
She opened the last file, ‘letterforpsych’. The heading was ‘Jennifer Mayer’:
Jennifer Mayer sat in the last pew of the condemned church, her eleven-year-old body starved and bruised and torn. Her hazel eyes were vacant, but held more than she ever wanted to know. She slid to the edge, gripped the rail and walked slowly up the aisle, her steps off, her toes pointed; a tiny, broken ballerina. She wore nothing but a flower girl’s tight smile as she strew blood-stained petals from a basket that hung on her forearm.
On the altar, in a wreath of fresh lilies, was her last school photograph. She took the three long steps up the soft red carpet to the altar. On a marble plinth in front of her stood a baptismal font with a drying pool of holy water. She reached in and splashed it on to her face, wiping away dirt, revealing wounds she couldn’t feel.
In God’s safe house, a strange parody of disordered sacraments: baptism, marriage and death, communion with evil and confirmation that she would never be the same again.
She looked into the eyes of all the statues around the church. In an alcove was a portrait of the French saint, St Jean-Marie Vianney. She had learned about him at school. He had found strength in going without food or sleep. He could heal the sick, especially children. Jean. She turned her head to face the huge cross that hung behind the altar. Transom: the horizontal beam on a cross … or gallows.
So … I can come back to life. Or I can die.
Ren closed the file. It was therapy. A letter to a psychiatrist, written in the third person, to help her get through it. Jean Transom was Jennifer Mayer, the pretty little girl who had been abducted with her friend, Ruth Sleight, and held for three weeks in a place where they should have been discovered.
She called Paul Louderback. Then she re-read the last line of the letter: “So … I can come back to life. Or I can die.”
And Jean Marie Transom did both.