two guys on the team with Jason who are married to girls from Portland and their families still live there,” said Andy.
Kiley was beginning to spring hopeful.
“I’m going to read all this. Why don’t you stay the night here, and in the morning, I’ll try to put in a call to Kyle and Jason. No promises. But maybe we can plan something out.”
“I want to go back to my own bed, Andy. And my computer and other things are there. I shouldn’t have left them alone.”
Andy stood up. “That settles it. I’m walking you back to your place then. From what you’ve told us, we can’t be too cautious.”
Chapter 13
The picture in the newspaper didn’t at all resemble the woman they brought into Natalia’s shelter yesterday. Battered about the head with one eye swollen shut and a cut lip, this woman was nearly unconscious, which might have been a blessing. Natalia requested she be seen at an emergency room, but was flatly overruled. Dr. Nash was going to stop by this afternoon sometime, and he was late.
Natalia helped the woman out of her bloody clothes and into her own personal shower because she had installed grab bars. She was no problem to help, since she was very slight, tiny, like a child, almost like all the other ones she’d tended to before. Except this woman, unlike the others, had an education and a job at the same newspaper that published her smiling face. And she wasn’t young. It concerned her that there might be a husband or family missing her. Natalia didn’t like changes in the routine, because that made her have to think too much.
She laid a clean nightie and a pair of fuzzy socks on the closed toilet lid, with a dark green towel. She knew the drill. Everything the woman touched, even the sheets she slept on, would be burned in the incinerator at the back of the building after she was gone.
She was well paid to not take chances, to clean up the messes and ask no questions. It was the price of what little freedom and autonomy she had. It allowed her to save money, buy things for herself, go to the store to purchase food and pretty clothes, and have the big bedroom with the view of the river. But caring for these orphan women was getting old and Natalia was growing weary of it. Especially with this one so badly beaten up. Natalia wondered if this signaled a change in where they got the girls.
But something else was different about this woman. She spoke English. None of the others she’d tended to had. They came from all over the world, walking into her shelter frightened preteens and walking out into their new lives—lives they’d never dreamed of before—happy. At least, that’s what she told herself.
As she checked on the sleeping form of the reporter, she feared the woman’s fate might be dangling in Natalia’s hands. This woman had been beaten, unlike the others. And that also made her think. She didn’t like thinking.
She’d gone to church in Ukraine with her grandmother when she was little. Her babushka taught her how to cross herself, which she now did, reciting the prayer she’d learned. It was one of the only things she remembered about her religion, about her family, about the country she would never see again after she was taken.
From the living room, Natalia heard her two yellow canaries singing in the morning sun. They’d both had a bath and had fresh paper and food in their cages. She sat at the kitchen table, drinking her now-cold tea, and looked down at the newspaper with the smiling picture of the woman whose name was Carmen.
She began to remember her grandmother’s house.
Her grandmother’s friends told her he was a savior and would take Natalia out of the poverty and hell that was their home. But when she recalled the washed and starched white lace curtains and little yellow birds her grandmother raised and then sold in exchange for extra food or socks for her or some soap or milk, Natalia hadn’t thought of that home as living in poverty at all. Sometimes the house was cold and there would be little food, but she didn’t starve, and blankets always would warm her.
Her grandmother’s loving arms were what she missed most the day the man took her away. Her grandmother was inconsolable, but her friends smiled and told Natalia that it was all for the best.
She