Chapter 10: The Orphan

 

An orphaned boy searches for a lost girl.

A woman abandons her new-born at a motel in the back of beyond. Adin grows up unloved, bullied, and no one remembers him. He doesn’t exist.

Until he sees a poster for a missing girl on a lamppost. There is an instant connection to little Sunflower, kidnapped for ransom, only to disappear after the money is paid. He exists because he must find her. Alone, he searches, a journey that takes him into the wild places, meeting along the way some interesting characters.

In dreams he speaks to her, for she is the one who will remember him.

Chapter 10

Your face is also your fingerprint.

 

SUNFLOWER

 

SHE SAW FRED’S face.

When it happened, she realised he would never let her go. He would soon kill her. He needed her alive for the photos he took of her with the day’s newspaper, but once her father paid, he would kill her.

She had seen his face.

Fred surprised her. In fact, he freaked her out completely. There was nothing normal about him, just as there was nothing normal about her. His type of strange came from a different planet, though. He did not act or react as a child expected. She doubted adults could deal with him either.

Late one evening – she knew it was evening when a bar of light appeared under the door, for he switched the lights on for the night – he unlocked her prison and beckoned her out.

The action was familiar to her. Either it meant he needed another photo, or he was allowing her to go to the toilet. He allowed the latter only once a day, and sometimes it was morning and sometimes it was night. Sometimes she had to hold for untold hours between, but never did she surrender and wee on the stinking floor.

He looked odd this night. Not quite the Fred who now no longer wore the balaclava over his face in her presence. Unfortunately, she finished in the toilet one time before he was ready, despite having stolen time to splash water on her face and wash her hands, and exited the cubicle to see the balaclava rolled up, revealing his features. She had thought him old, like her father, but he was more like her friend Tara’s older brother, when she attended his twenty-first birthday party. Fred was too young to have a daughter, and she had believed him that day in the park. How naïve she really was, of the real world.

Tonight, his brown eyes seemed like living orbs. As if two worlds moved there in his face. Usually he showed no emotion; he just beckoned her to duty with dead eyes. His kind of strange was all about no expression. His hair was a funny reddish-brown, worn slicked back, which she thought might be because he always wore the balaclava rolled up as a cap, ever ready to pull it down when his face needed hiding. Tonight, his hair stood on end. In fact, as he waved a hand at her to come, the other messed his hair even more. Obviously, he’d been running hands through his hair.

It was strange behaviour.

Fred was excited about something.

Had her father paid the ransom?

Her heart became a lump of ice in her tightening chest. Fred was about to kill her. That was the reason for his excitement.

He preceded her down the short dark passage, knowing she would follow. Sunflower once went the other way, seeking escape, and discovered only a blank wall. Besides her cell-room, there was nowhere to go. Her heart started beating again, loud thumps she was certain would soon jerk her up and down in the violence of its movement.

Where this was, she had no idea. Her room had no window, the passage was lightless, and this space, where he forced her to pose with a newspaper, was boarded up. There were two windows, but dirty slats had been nailed over them, tight, allowing no light or sight through. A naked bulb overhead highlighted the nastiness. The narrow toilet cubicle to the left did possess a small window and that one allowed light in – when she visited it in the day – but was constructed of glass that allowed no view. It was rusted in place; she had attempted to pry it open, if not for escape, then at least for knowledge of her whereabouts. Well, escape had been first on her mind, but the sight of a tree or a building might help, too.

No sounds other than Fred’s grunts, footsteps and occasional words now formed part of her life. She had not yet heard the whisper of a bird in song, or a tyre crunching over gravel or swishing in rubbery silence on tar. Whether she was in the country or hidden somewhere in the city, she could not know. Not knowing meant she was as lost inside as she was to the outside.

The only other sounds she experienced emphasised the state of her existence. The slap of a tin plate on the floor – deposited once in the morning and once in the evening, and she knew it as morning and evening by the food on it – and the scrape of it being collected again. The click of the camera on Fred’s phone. The rustle of the newspaper. Her ablution noises, and the flush of the toilet.

And her sobs, but those were silent. He was not to know of her pain, although it was true that her hopelessness sounded loud in her own mind.

In her dreams, when she managed to sleep, blue eyes watched over her. Once she watched a documentary with her father about New Zealand, and said how lovely the blue rivers were, and her father said the melting snow caused that kind of blue.

Snow-melt eyes.

Because he saw her, she lived. And while he looked, she could endure. It was a boy, she just knew it, but also wondered if even her sleeping mind played tricks on her. Maybe she needed a protector so much, she made him up.

Fred motioned her to the plastic chair she usually sat in, and then dragged another closer. This, too, was unusual behaviour. She had seen the other chair between the two boarded windows, but he had never bothered to use it before today.

He sat in it, facing her. Staring at her. With dancing, gleeful eyes.

Sunflower swallowed. “My father paid,” she whispered.

A massive grin split his face. He laughed then, and slapped his thighs. “He paid!”

“What now?”

He lifted a finger into the dank air. “Now it is time for decisions.”

“Yours?’ she dared.

“Yours!” He chortled and slapped his thighs again.

She did not dare ask what that meant, but he told her without her having to prompt him. His excitement could not long contain his ability to create suspense for her. He wanted to share, because she was the only one he could share it with.

“I now have enough money to disappear, little flower, and you will need to deep disappear also. The permanent kind, because you had to look, didn’t you? But you have a choice. You have made me rich, so I’m giving you a choice.”

She did not trust that, but anything was better than a knife across her throat. He wouldn’t use a bullet, no; too loud. And she had a suspicion he’d prefer the thrill of her blood over his hands, rather than a clinical kill.

“Choice?” she whispered.

“See that door there?”

Fred pointed at a door to the right, one she thought led either to a kitchen or maybe a hallway that led to outside. It was locked. She’d seen him lock and unlock it with a bunch of keys he kept in his pocket.

She nodded, staring at him, her heart alternately beating hot and cold, sending heat and then ice to shiver over her skin.

“There’s a hole beyond it, real deep. Either I throw you into it and walk away, for none will find your body for months, maybe years, or …” He stopped there, leering at her.

“Or?” she shuddered.

“You come with me, and we disappear together.”

Would he beat her if she went with him? Or have sex with her? Would he throw her into another cell somewhere? Maybe he’d kill her in another place. Maybe he liked the idea of her scared, putting off her murder until she could barely talk for fear.

But maybe she’d escape from somewhere new. Even if he beat her. Even if he raped her.

“You have ten seconds to make your mind up, little flower.”

“I’ll go with you,” she stated.

THE ORPHAN