In the open kitchen, volunteers were busy cooking: giant vats of what smelled like beans and vast industrial sheets of cornbread coming out of the oven. At a table nearby stood self-serve jugs of water with paper cups. On the wall was a blackboard menu: Rice, beans, and cornbread, pay what you can. Or work for your meal.
“I bet you get a lot of dishwashers,” Naomi said, stepping close to the counter. She pulled her investigator’s license out, expecting the suspicion. “I’m not a cop,” she said. “I’m looking for someone. My sister, actually.”
The tired eyes met hers. There was a permanent wimple crease in the woman’s forehead. “We don’t talk about our customers.”
“That’s nice, that you say ‘customers.’” Naomi smiled. “Usually I hear ‘client,’ like they are here on sufferance, or a boulder around our necks.”
This nun apparently was not ready to be charmed. Naomi could feel the body across the counter, under the cloth: the exhaustion, the heavy-boned fight against injustice. “Look. I don’t want to make trouble,” Naomi said. “Do you have a community bulletin board where I could leave a message?”
There was a terse nod. Then the nun looked over Naomi’s shoulder, and now she was genuinely smiling, because it was time. One by one the families and winos and street people filed in, and the nun’s voice met each of them with a personal greeting, a name, or a question that sounded like love.
The bulletin board was in the annex of the soup kitchen, where Naomi also found a row of mailboxes so the homeless could get mail, as well as a message board plastered with notes. Tony, brother, please call me, read one. Looking for my birth mom, with details. Notices for AA meetings. Help for veterans. PTSD support groups.
And the posters for the missing street girls. Naomi read these with a chill in her heart. Most of the missing girls didn’t even have real names—they went by street names like Mercedes and Diamond. Rich objects, dream worlds a life away. With relief, Naomi saw a name she trusted on the older posters: Please call Det. Winfield, state police. But underneath them were the crime stopper flyers for those found murdered, and these listed the number for the local FBI. Naomi frowned.
Naomi took a flyer from her messenger bag, the text circled in bright yellow so it would get attention. She pinned it in the center of the board.
I am looking for my sister. She is about twenty-five, the flyer said. Naomi had added the few details she could remember: the Oregon farm valley where they had been held captive, the bunker underground where a man had kept them, the year of her escape. She didn’t know her own sister’s name, so she couldn’t add that. And then: If you know her, tell her I am sorry and I miss her.
Naomi stepped back.
An old man, querulous with alcohol or other shakes, had come up behind her, as silent as a whisper. Naomi could smell his gummy breath. He blinked, reading her flyer. “There’s a lot of girls in this world,” he said, grinning at her with horsey teeth.
“I know,” Naomi said, huskily.
“What does she look like?” the old man asked, friendly.
“I don’t know,” Naomi had to admit.
“You ain’t got a picture?”
“No.”
“What kind of sister are you, to not even have a picture?”
Outside now the line was gone, the sidewalk empty. Behind her, through the dusty window, the tables were all full, the customers eating piles of the delicious-looking beans and the cornbread, cut in slabs and drizzled with honey at the table. A little girl with lank blond hair looked up at her. The mother touched her head, and the child’s eyes returned to her plate.
Naomi felt tinny with despair. Night had fallen and she wanted to fall with it. She moved down the street, approaching every makeshift shelter and human sleeping in a doorway. “I’m looking for my sister,” she began, each time, but at the end of the block she stopped, suddenly flooded with hopelessness.
This wasn’t like her other cases. The fact those other missing children were not her family had allowed her to face the possibility they were never going to be found. Naomi understood now the panic of the parents, how they told her they couldn’t breathe as long as their child was missing. Even in her sleep she was searching. If there was any chance her sister was connected to the missing street girls, she would find out. She knew from experience that those on the streets watched out for each other. They might help her.
She passed RVs crowned with tarps, a drunk retching on the curb. Tent camps that appeared overnight in parking lots, the wet sounds of sex in an alley. The lights of bars were ahead of her, the smell of exhaust, the sound of car doors opening and shutting. The red-light district. Naomi could see shapes of what looked like children, begging in the half dark. Begging and maybe something worse.
She moved towards them.
Chapter 5
Celia was standing on the corner, the car lights white eyes in the dark. She hated the men in the cars, hated them and their reaching hands, their spongy needs, even as sometimes she, too, got in.
It was better than dying.
That was when she saw the woman coming down the street. The woman was medium-sized, not skinny and not fat. She looked strong. She had long silky brown hair that fell over her shoulders, and she pushed it back, impatient. Celia caught the wink of a ring on her hand. Her skin glowed in the night.
The woman clearly did not belong here, not in these days of sea creatures washed up onshore. What happened in the night was meant to stay secret—like what had happened with her stepdad, Teddy. Celia had made the mistake of telling. She had found out that the people of the day don’t want to know what happened in the night.
This woman was a day person. Celia could see it at a glance, and her lip curled.
“Check her out,” Celia said to Rich. The big boy looked down at his little friend, eager to see what sparked such scorn. Usually Celia was soft. Not now.
“Probably one of those church types,” Rich said.
Celia’s eyes were hard and green. “She should go home, then,” she said.
The two watched the woman make her way down the sidewalk, talking with the other street kids. The cross-dressers were gone, blown away to the bars like so many drifting feathers from their boas. As the night got later, the people got smaller and harder, until the night whittled them away to nothing. Then it was time to run.
The woman walked into the street to talk to a kid. He was in the middle of what you might call a transaction, hanging in an open car window. The kid turned towards her, shocked at the intrusion, and behind the wheel Celia could see the astonished O of the john’s mouth.
“What the fuck is she doing?” Celia asked.
“Maybe she’s trying to find her good friend Jesus. He needs his nails redone,” Rich cracked, and then looked disappointed that the sick joke had gone right over Celia’s head.
Celia felt hot jealousy. She hated the woman instantly. To be so beautifully bold in the night—to walk and ask questions with her shoulders thrown back like she had the right. To act like she mattered.
Behind them their friend Stoner emerged from a car, all arms and legs, uncoiling until you could see his skinny height. His long limbs reminded Celia of how butterflies had six jointed legs so they could escape predators. It wasn’t working for Stoner. He wiped his mouth, and no one said anything about where he had been, what he had done. He would feel the stain enough on his own.