I told Ellie I can’t just sit around in the middle of the night twiddling my thumbs and waiting to get sleepy, and that’s why she gave me this book for my birthday. She bought it from the stationery department at the company store. She says when it’s late at night and I don’t have anyone to talk to, I can talk to the book. And that’s what I’m doing right now—talking to the book—and it’s just as well, because what’s going through my head isn’t something I can talk about with anyone else, most especially her.
Because it’s always the middle of the night when the house is quiet that it gets to me—when I sit around wondering where is he? What happened to our little boy, our baby? Is he in a good family? Are his adoptive parents taking proper care of him? Do they love him? He’s five now and probably in kindergarten. Does he like school? Is he smart? Is he learning to read?
Most of all, does he know he’s adopted? If he does, what do the people raising him tell him about us—that we didn’t want him? That wasn’t the case for either one of us, but Ellie’s mother was and is a bitch on wheels! If Ellie didn’t agree to give up the baby, her mother was going to go to the cops, have me arrested, and brought up on charges of statutory rape. So Ellie caved. She gave up the baby—and she did it for me. And the whole first year we were married, she cried herself to sleep every single night.
By the time the baby was born, Ellie’s father had been transferred to Fort Benning, Georgia. She went there long enough to get her high-school diploma, but on the day she turned eighteen, she ran away from home, caught a Greyhound bus, and came straight back to Bisbee. She was waiting for me on the sidewalk one day when I came off shift at the Campbell shaft. “What are you doing here?” I asked her when she got into my truck.
“My parents can go to hell,” she told me. “I came back to marry you, and nobody’s going to stop me. I’m eighteen now, and I’ve got my birth certificate along to prove it.”
We drove over to Lordsburg that very weekend and got married in front of the justice of the peace. It was the best day of my life.
Chapter 3
THE BOSS OFTEN WENT AWAY FOR DAYS AT A TIME, LEAVING HIS prisoners chained but otherwise unguarded. The girls had discussed his absences among themselves—first just the three of them, and later, once Amelia joined them, all four of them together—theorizing about where he went and what he did while he was gone. This time, however, he had made his intentions clear. He was off hunting—but where? Latisha had no idea. Soon some other poor girl would be cast into this hellish nightmare with her, and eventually one or the other of them would die.
But for now Latisha was alone. Sandy had disappeared first. Maybe she’d gotten away, or maybe the Boss had let her go. That’s what Latisha hoped. One day Sandy went upstairs and never returned. Sadie was the next to leave. Now Amelia was gone, too, with no question whatsoever about what had happened to her. Amelia hadn’t escaped. There was no one left in the basement for Latisha to talk to—no stories to tell, no histories to share, only endless stretches of time where one day bled into the next, or maybe not. She sometimes awakened from sleep thinking that a whole day had passed, or a night, and maybe that wasn’t true. All she had to do—all she could do—was think about how much she missed the others—Sandra Ruth Locke, Sadie Kaitlyn Jennings, and Amelia Diaz Salazar. She repeated their names aloud each time she thought of them, almost like a sacred chant. She didn’t want to forget them, because someday, if she ever got away and lived to tell the story, Latisha wanted to let the world know about her friends and what had happened to them.
In many ways all their histories were unsurprisingly similar—fractured families and lives complicated by poverty, drug use, and other criminal activity. To begin with, and more than anything else, they talked about food. Given their stark circumstances, that was hardly surprising.
Sandy had been thirteen when her mom, Margo—a divorced, single mother—had gone to prison for writing bad checks. Sandy’s father had never been “in the picture,” and with Margo incarcerated, he didn’t step forward then, either. Instead Sandy had gone “into the system” and had ended up in foster care. Thanks to a series of unfortunate circumstances, she’d gone through a series of foster homes.
Sandy’s first placement, with Ben and Andrea Thompson, had been a revelation. Ben and Andrea were a married couple in their early forties. Ben worked long hours selling medical equipment, but he made good money. Andrea was an architect who worked out of their home, a sweet little bungalow in Van Nuys, California. Unable to have children of their own, they had signed up for foster care with the ultimate intention of adoption.
Throughout Sandy’s young life, Margo hadn’t come close to being Mother of the Year. She had worked sporadically, but working or not, she was seldom at home when school let out. From a very early age, Sandy was a latchkey kid with very little adult supervision. She came home from school, ate whatever was available, and then spent the evenings watching cartoons rather than doing homework. By the time she landed in foster care, she was a freshman in high school and reading at a fifth-grade level.
Once Sandy moved in with the Thompsons, Andrea set out to change all that. When Sandy came home from school, Andrea was there, more often than not with a batch of freshly baked cookies—chocolate chip or peanut butter—cooling on the kitchen counter. Then she would sit Sandy down at the kitchen table and help her with homework until Ben came home for dinner.
The idea of eating the evening meal as a family was also strange. Margo’s idea of a balanced diet had been a Big Mac and a Diet Coke. For her a home-cooked meal was a Papa Murphy’s bake-at-home pizza. Andrea actually cooked food for dinner each night—grilling pork chops or steaks, serving them with salads and fresh vegetables—combinations Sandy had encountered before only in school cafeterias.
“That musta been weird,” Sadie had observed.
“It was,” Sandy agreed. “I didn’t know that things like broccoli and cauliflower could actually taste good. And I didn’t know that real people ate like that, either, sitting down in an actual dining room so they could all eat together. I thought that was a thing that only happened on TV. It made me feel sort of like Cinderella. My grades started getting better. I thought I was going to be okay.”
In the dark of the basement, her voice faded into silence.
“So what happened?” Latisha wanted to know.
“One day when I came home, Andrea wasn’t there, and there weren’t any cookies.”
“How come?”
“There’d been a wreck on the 405—a multi-car wreck. Ben’s car was rear-ended by a semi. He ended up with a broken neck—a quadriplegic. It’s bad of me, but sometimes I found myself wishing that he’d died. Maybe that way I could have stayed with Andrea, but she told me she couldn’t take care of him and me, too, so I ended up back in the system.”
“And then what?”
“The next place wasn’t a foster family so much as it was a foster farm. As far as the Millers were concerned, taking in foster kids was strictly a moneymaking proposition. It turns out Mr. Miller was especially fond of little girls. I was almost fifteen, so I was too old for him, but someone finally blew the whistle on him, and they ended up shutting the place down.”