“I told her if she worked at the bank she could buy some decent clothes for a change and stop dressing like a hippie. She laughed at me. That’s when I called her a bitch.”
“Any other arguments? Sore spots?”
“No. None.” Holly knows she’s lying, and not just to the private detective she’s just hired.
Holly types one more note, then gets up and puts on her mask.
“What will you do first?”
“Call Izzy Jaynes. I think she’ll talk to me. She and I go back quite a few years.”
And even before Brown, the pickup truck man, she wants to talk to Lakeisha Stone. Because if Lakeisha and Bonnie were besties—even closies—Lakeisha will have a better fix on how the mother and daughter got along. Door-slamming argument or not, Holly doesn’t want to start this by equating her own mother and Bonnie’s too closely.
You are not the case, Bill told her once. Never make the mistake of thinking you are. It never helps and usually makes things worse.
November 22–25, 2018
Em doesn’t like this one.
Not that she liked Cary Dressler, and she loathed Castro, the spic maricon. This girl, though, this Ellen Craslow, is different from either of them. Because she’s female? Em doesn’t believe it.
She descends the stairs to the basement, carrying the tray in front of her. On it is a pound and a half of liver, uncooked and swimming in its own juices. Price at Kroger: $3.22. Meat is so expensive now, and the last piece was wasted. She came down and found it crawling with maggots and flies. How they got into this sealed room, and so quickly, is beyond her. Even the crack at the foot of the door leading to the kitchen has been sealed.
The girl is standing at the bars of the cell. She’s tall, with skin the color of cocoa. Her hair is neat and short and dark. From the foot of the stairs Em could almost believe it’s a bathing cap. When she comes closer, she can see that Ellen’s lips are cracked and sore-looking in places. But she doesn’t cry or beg. She’s done neither. So far, at least.
Em takes the plate of liver from the tray and places it on the concrete. She drops to one knee to do this rather than bending. Her sciatica is bad, but bad she can take. When it screams though, when it makes every step agony… that is a different matter. She takes the broom and pushes the plate toward the cell. The red liquid sloshes. And as she has done before, Ellen Craslow blocks the pass-through with the side of her foot.
“I’ve told you, I’m a vegan. You don’t seem to listen.”
Em feels an urge to poke her with the broom handle and quells it. Not just because the girl might catch hold of it, either. She must not show emotion. Like Castro and Dressler, this is a caged animal. Livestock. Poking livestock is childish. Being angry with it is childish. What you do with an animal is train it.
Ellen refused the protein shake, too. She drank both of the small bottles of water that were in the cage when she woke up, the first all at once. She made the second one last, but both are gone now. From the pocket of her apron, Em takes another. “When you eat your meat, Ellen, you can have this. Your body doesn’t care that you’re a vegan. It needs to eat.” She holds the bottle out, displaying it. “And it needs to drink.”
Ellen says nothing, only stands looking at Em with her hands loosely gripping the bars and her foot blocking the pass-through. That gaze is unnerving. Em doesn’t want to feel unnerved, but tells herself that she’d feel the same way if she were at the zoo and locked eyes with a tiger.
“I’ll leave the food, shall I? When I come back and the plate is clean—juice, too—you can have the water.”
No reply, and animal or no animal, Professor Emily Harris (emerita) realizes she’s angry after all. No, furious. Castro ate; Dressler ate; eventually Ellen will eat, too. She won’t be able to help herself. Em turns away and starts for the stairs.
The girl says, “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”
Em turns back, startled.
“When people won’t do what you want. It’s horrible, isn’t it? For you, I mean.” And the girl actually smiles!
Bitch, Emily thinks, and then what she would never in a billion years allow herself to say except in her diary: Stubborn black bitch!
Em says (gently), “It’s Thanksgiving, Ellen. Give thanks and eat.”
“Bring me a salad,” Ellen says. “No dressing. That I will eat.”
The nerve! Em thinks. As if I were a serving girl! As if I were her ladies’ maid!
She does something then she will later regret, because it gives away too much of herself. She takes the bottle of water from her apron pocket, raises it to her lips, and drinks. Then she pours the rest out over the railing.
The girl says nothing.
A day later.
Professor Rodney Harris (Life Sciences, emeritus) stands in front of the cell, cogitating. Ellen Craslow looks back at him, calm. Or so she seems. There are a couple of blisters on her lips now, there are pimples on her forehead, and the smooth cocoa loveliness of her skin has turned ashy. But her eyes—a startling green—are brilliant in their deepening sockets.
Roddy is a respected biologist and nutritionist. Before his retirement he was a teacher sometimes revered and more often feared by his students. A bibliography of his published work would fill a dozen pages, and he still keeps up a lively correspondence in various journals with his peers. That he considers himself first among those peers doesn’t strike him as conceited. As someone wise once said, It ain’t bragging if it’s true.
He’s not angry at this girl the way Em is (she says she isn’t, but they have been married for over fifty years and he knows her better than she knows herself), but Ellen certainly perplexes him. She must have been disoriented when she woke up, the way the others were, they use a powerful drug to knock their subjects out, but she didn’t seem disoriented. If she was hungover—and she must have been that, too—she didn’t complain of it. She didn’t scream for help, as Cary Dressler did almost at once (must have made his headache that much worse, Roddy thinks) and as Jorge Castro had eventually. And of course she has refused to eat, although it’s been almost three days now, and over two since she finished off the last of the water she’s been allowed.
The liver Em brought down yesterday has darkened and begun to smell. It’s still edible but won’t be for much longer. Another few hours and she’d probably vomit it back up, which would make the whole thing pointless. Meanwhile, time is flicking past.
“If you don’t eat, my dear, you’ll starve,” he says in a mild voice his students of yore wouldn’t recognize; as a lecturer, Roddy had a tendency to be rapid, excitable, sometimes even shrill. When talking about the wonders of the stomach—serosa, pylorus, duodenum—his voice sometimes rose to a near scream.
Ellen says nothing.
“Your body has already begun to digest itself. It’s visible on your face, your arms, the way you stand, slightly slumped…”
Nothing. Her eyes on his. She hasn’t asked what they want, which is also perplexing and (admit the truth) rather disturbing. She knows who they are, she knows that if they let her go they will be arrested for kidnapping (only the first charge of many), ergo they can’t let her go, but there has been no bargaining and no begging. Just this hunger strike. She told Em she would gladly eat a salad, but that is out of the question. Salads, whether dressed or undressed, are not sacrament. Meat is sacrament. Liver is sacrament.