Find Him, page 11
Gently, the door closes and a lock clicks into place.
Lily turns around and looks at Allan.
As big as he is, he looks small. “Sorry,” he says. “We tried.”
For a moment, Lily stands still. Allan lifts a hand to her, as if to help her off the steps. She ignores the gesture and steps down on her own. As they walk back to the truck, her stomach feels heavy, like it’s dragging her to the ground.
Lily glances back. She doesn’t know why. But when she does, she sees the curtains jerk shut.
She spins around and stalks back toward the house with Allan following and grabbing at her arm.
“Peter Cutchin,” she calls out. “Are you in there? Come out here and talk to me. Right now.”
A moment passes, but then the door of the house opens, and a woman steps out. She is young and small, dark-skinned like her brother.
She’s also pregnant.
With her hand on her belly, she says, “I guess you’re Lily.”
Lily is sitting on a couch. She’s lightheaded, her vision slightly blurred. She doesn’t quite remember how she got here.
But Allan is sitting beside her, huge and heavy, sweating. His solid presence is reassuring, and she leans against him like a wall to get her balance. A television is on somewhere else in the house. A game show. People are clapping and cheering and laughing.
Jarell is slouching in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, hands in his pockets.
Ciara is sitting across from her. She’s Lily’s height, but she’s a few years older. Further along in her pregnancy, she’s wearing gray stretch pants with a hunter green hoodie unzipped to reveal a white scoop neck t-shirt stretched taut against her belly. She sits forward, hands clasped in front of her, her face somber.
“Peter isn’t here,” she tells them.
Allan asks, “Was he here?”
Ciara shakes her head. “He never stayed here, if that’s what you mean.” Like Allan’s, her voice retains the off-duty echo of calm professionalism; they both have the voice of someone who answers the phone for a living.
“So you haven’t heard from him.”
“Not in a couple of weeks, no.”
Ciara turns back to Lily. The younger woman is staring at her. Ciara says, “Do you want to ask me something?”
Lily swallows hard. She nods at Ciara’s belly and says, “Is it his?”
“Yes,” Ciara says.
Lily feels so uneven she has to close her eyes, like she’s been hit in the head. When she feels steady enough, she opens them again. “It’s Peter’s baby.”
“Yes,” Ciara says.
“I knew,” Lily says, shaking her head. “I knew when I saw you.”
Ciara says nothing to that. Everyone waits. Allan sweats.
Lily says, “I don’t understand.”
Ciara starts to say something to that but catches herself.
“Did you…?” Lily shakes her head again and puts her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. I need a second.”
Allan asks Ciara, “How far along are you?”
“Thirty-nine weeks,” she says.
Lily says, “I’m twenty-five weeks.”
“Yes,” Ciara says. “He and I…it happened before y’all got together.” She pats her large round belly. “Obviously.”
Lily asks her, “That’s why you quit the hotel?”
“No, but it was at the end of me working there.”
“Do you love him?” Lily asks.
“No,” Ciara replies.
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Did he love you?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Just happened,” Ciara says. “My car broke down. Sometimes people from work would give me a ride home. Allan did once. And Peter did a couple of times. The second time I invited him in, and one thing led to another. And that’s it. That’s all there was to it. It just happened. One time, and I got pregnant.”
“It ‘just happened’?” Lily says.
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Which part?”
“Having sex with someone just happens?”
Ciara tilts her head slightly, “How’d you get pregnant, Lily?”
That stops her for a moment. Finally, she says, “I was in love him.”
Ciara nods. “Well, I hope you can hear this, but that doesn’t have a thing to do with me. You love him, I don’t. After Peter and I hooked up that one time, that was it. I didn’t want a regular thing with him. I was kinda interested in somebody else at the time. And Peter didn’t want a regular thing with me. Right after that, he started dating you. So it really was just a one-time thing.”
“He didn’t tell me about you,” Lily says.
Ciara glances at her brother. “Yeah, we kind of figured that.”
Jarell nods.
Lily rubs her eyes. She looks at Ciara. She asks, “Does he know you’re pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked me what I wanted to do.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Have the baby.”
“Why?”
Jarell shakes his head. “That’s a fucked-up question,” he says.
Ciara asks Lily, “You trying to talk me into an abortion?”
“Of course not,” Lily says. “Of course not. I just don’t know why you’d want Peter’s baby if you don’t care about Peter.”
“It’s my baby. Besides, I thought you were Pentecostal.”
“I am,” Lily says, feeling dizzy again. This is too much. She clutches the arm of the couch and closes her eyes to regain her sense of balance.
Ciara tells her brother, “Got a Holy Ghost woman sitting on my couch trying to talk me into an abortion. That’s a new one.”
“Signs and wonders,” Jarell says.
Keeping her eyes closed while her head spins, Lily says, “I’m not trying to talk you into getting an abortion.”
Ciara tells Lily, “It’s my baby growing in my belly. You’re not the only one who can feel the life inside you.”
But Lily can’t feel the life inside her right now. She just feels a heaviness pulling her down.
Ciara turns to Allan and asks, “So where did Peter run off to?”
“We don’t know,” Allan says. “That’s why we’re here.”
“You thought I had Peter hiding in the closet or something?”
Allan spreads his hands. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
Jarell says, “How about nothing? Nothing’s usually pretty good.”
Allan glances at Lily, who is still sitting with her eyes closed, trying to regain her equilibrium.
He tells Jarell, “You have to understand, she thought he was missing. She even went to the police.” He tells Ciara, “She even came up to the Corinthian and started asking questions…”
Ciara opens her mouth, then shuts it again. She turns to the girl.
“Lily.”
Lily opens her eyes.
Ciara says, “I haven’t heard from Peter in a couple of weeks. Until you showed up on my doorstep, I thought he was still up in Conway.”
“No one knows where he went,” Lily says. “His mother, the people at my church, nobody.”
Jarell says, “Sounds like he just run off.”
“Sounds like it,” Ciara agrees. After she says it, her gaze drifts to the bare coffee table. “I guess he’s gone.”
Lily asks her, “You think this is why he left? He got us both pregnant. You think that’s why?”
As if she’s just been asked the stupidest question she’s ever heard, Ciara looks up and says, “What do you think?”
Shame comes down on Lily like a movement of the Holy Ghost. Everything she thought about Peter was wrong. Momma, Daddy, Adam, Fiona, the Drinkwaters, the police—everyone has been right. He’s no good. He got another girl pregnant. Lily’s just some girl he had sex with. A silly, stupid girl.
But she doesn’t cry, doesn’t scream, doesn’t collapse. She sits up straighter.
“Okay,” she says.
Ciara and Jarell watch her.
Allan asks her, “Maybe we should go?”
“Yes,” Lily says.
As they’re about to get up, however, she remembers something.
“Wait,” she says, “what’s Eli Buck got to do with all of this?”
At the mention of the name, Ciara turns to Allan.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“I didn’t tell her shit,” he says.
“That’s true,” Lily says. “He didn’t tell me anything. But now somebody should.”
“Eli’s just a guy,” Ciara says.
“He’s not ‘just a guy,’” Lily replies. “He’s looking for Peter. He broke into Peter’s house while I was there alone, and he assaulted me.”
“What do you mean he assaulted you?”
Lily tells her what happened, and Ciara quietly takes in the information. Her brother watches her, waiting for her to give him a sign. Should he throw these people out? Allan glances back and forth between Lily and Ciara.
Lily leans forward and stares at the other woman.
“Please help me,” she says. “I just need to know what’s going on.”
Ciara rubs her mouth. “Eli is looking for Peter…”
“Yes.”
She nods and sucks in her lips. Jarell is still and silent. Allan rubs his earlobe and looks back and forth between Ciara and Lily.
“What did Peter tell you about the Corinthian?” Ciara asks.
“Not much. He didn’t like to talk about work. I’d ask him about it, and he’d just say it was boring, or he’d complain about some guest. I don’t think he liked the boss, Mr. Baker, but he didn’t say a whole lot about him.”
Ciara looks over at Allan.
“We got to tell her,” Ciara says. “Better to tell her than to have her traipsing all over hell and Arkansas asking questions.”
For a moment, Allan says nothing and makes no move. Then he sighs and lets go of his earlobe. “Look,” he tells Lily, “what we’re about to tell you is some serious shit, okay? We shouldn’t tell you. We should all keep our mouths shut.” He wipes his sweaty face. “But here we are, and I guess we’re at the point where it will just make it worse if we don’t tell you.” He nods, takes a deep breath, and says, “Mr. Baker, has this…arrangement with Eli.”
“What kind of arrangement?”
“Women.” He looks at Ciara. “Well, girls.”
“Pretty young, most of them,” she agrees. “Eli brings them up from Little Rock. Originally, the girls are from Louisiana or Texas? Louisiana, I think. But now they live in Little Rock.”
“Prostitutes,” Lily says.
Allan exchanges a look with Ciara. As much to her as to Lily, Allan says, “At first, honestly, I just figured they were regular sex workers. I mean, you work in the hospitality industry long enough, you get used to that sort of thing.”
Ciara nods.
“There are a lot of underground economies going on in a hotel,” Allan continues. “Private escorts and that kind of thing aren’t unusual. Men and women with personal agency doing a job for money. I don’t judge that kind of thing.”
“People got to make a living,” Ciara says.
Allan nods. “That’s right. But…”
“But what?” Lily says.
“But…I’m not sure that’s what we’re talking about in this case.”
“Then what are we talking about?”
Again, looking to Ciara for conformation, Allan says, “I don’t know, but I think we might be talking about sex trafficking.”
Ciara nods. “That’s what I figure.” She looks at her brother.
“From everything you told me, it sounds like he’s running a ring,” Jarell agrees.
Lily absorbs this information soberly.
She asks Ciara and Allan, “What did y’all have to do with it?”
“Peter and I didn’t even know about it at first,” Allan says. “It happened gradually. Every so often, on nights when we weren’t working, the girls were brought up for ‘private accommodations’ in the back wing. The annex, we call it. That part of the inn is weird. It’s an addition, an extra building that was built years after the rest, during a period when somebody was flush with cash and thought they were going to really expand the place. You have to go down a long hallway past all the other rooms, past the exercise room, past the boiler room, then you have to go outside under the back portico, and there’s the annex. Eight rooms, four on bottom, four on top. It has its own little parking lot back there, and it looks out on a field and some trees.”
“It almost feels like a separate inn,” Ciara says.
“That’s right,” Allan says. “Mr. Baker books all the private accommodations himself. Then Eli brings some girls up in the back of an old moving truck.” He asks Ciara, “You and Dillard were working the first night, right?”
“Yeah,” Ciara says. “We got an extra twenty dollars each. Just for being there. It was like a gratuity. We just went about our jobs like usual and stayed out of the annex ’til morning. Didn’t see nothing, didn’t hear nothing.”
Allan says, “A week later the same thing happened, but this time it was me and Peter working the desk. Mr. Baker called us into his office and said that there were going to be private accommodations in the annex that night. And that was it. Peter and I both got an extra twenty bucks just for being there. We didn’t see anyone, didn’t talk to anyone. We were just up front doing our regular jobs. The private accommodations were all off the books and out of sight.”
“But y’all knew what was going on?” Lily asks.
Ciara shrugs. “We ain’t stupid.”
“We put it together,” Allan says. “Every week or so, Mr. Baker would tell us it was a private accommodation night. That meant he’d rented out the annex as a block, like you’d reserve rooms for a wedding or something. Maybe these guys, the clients, knew each other, or maybe Mr. Baker bundled them together like that to contain it. I don’t know. But these weren’t guys off the street. The whole thing was done in a low-key kind of professional way. And like I said, for a long time, I just assumed we were talking about professional sex workers. No big deal.”
“But then what happened?” Lily asks.
“But then one night, one of the girls came up to the front desk. Eli and Chance always hung out under the back portico after they parked the truck, but I guess she must have slipped out of the room without them seeing her somehow. She was an average-looking girl, kind of pale. But younger than I expected, about your age. Maybe younger. She wasn’t dressed like a prostitute in a movie, you know, with the high heels and halter top or whatever. She was wearing a t-shirt and a short jean skirt and some flats. Looked like any other girl walking down the sidewalk. She came up to the front desk and asked me and Peter to use the phone. I guess she didn’t want to use the phone in the room, and she didn’t have one herself. She wasn’t running or crying or anything, just walked in from the annex like she was any other guest of the inn. I wasn’t even sure she was with the group in the back until Eli came stomping down the hall. Rough-looking guy. Well, you’ve seen him, so you know. When she saw him, she just put down the phone. Just like that. No big scene. They didn’t say a word to each other. She followed him back to the annex like she’d been caught doing something wrong. It was weird. After a while—once he’d left her with Chance, I guess—Eli came back up to the desk to talk to me and Peter.”
“What’d he say?”
“He told us it was nothing, a misunderstanding. Told us if we had any problems, we should talk to Mr. Baker.”
“What’d you do?”
“What could we do? We didn’t do anything.”
“You could have called the police.”
Ciara raises her eyebrows. Jarell shakes his head.
Allan says, “You think the cops would do anything?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know about that,” Allan says.
“You think they’re in on it? The chief?”
“I don’t know, Lily. I really don’t. But I’ll put it this way. The cops usually swing by the hotels at night. Just quick drive bys, part of the loop around the all-night places just off the interstate. The hotels and motels, the gas stations, the MacDonald’s. But on the nights when we have the private accommodations, the cops never come by. So…I don’t know.”
“They have to know,” Ciara says. “They never come around when the private accommodations are going on.”
For the first time, Lily sits back on the couch. Her back hurts, so she arches it against the cushions. She places her hands on her knees. Her hands have no nail polish. They’re just hands, young hands, strong hands. She squeezes them into fists.
“You said these girls…they’re in Little Rock?”
“I…think so?” Allan says, looking at Ciara.
She nods. “Eli stashes the girls in a house over on Baseline behind the Soap-N-Suds. Eli ain’t there much. His girlfriend Harper runs the girls.”
“You’ve been there?” Lily asks.
“Fuck no, I ain’t been there.”
“Then how do you know so much about it?”
Ciara glances at Jarell.
He waves his hand. “Never been there myself,” he says, “but I know a couple guys who have. Leave it at that.”
Lily turns back to Ciara. “Eli is looking for Peter, which means it must have something to do with this business at the Corinthian. Why else would he care if Peter left town?”
Ciara says, “Yeah, but Peter didn’t really have anything to do with the business. You know what I mean? He was just a guy who worked at the hotel. He didn’t know any more than the rest of us. Eli’s got no reason to care if he skips town.”
Lily thinks about that. Then she grimaces, remembering a thought she had on the drive down here: Peter wouldn’t run off by himself.
“Maybe Eli isn’t looking for Peter at all,” she says.
Ciara’s eyes widen. “Maybe Peter ran off with some of Eli’s…property.”
Lily leans over and presses her palm against her eyes. She’s not crying, just taking a moment. Slowly, she rubs her temples, then her eyes.
