Sisters of the Road Read online

  “Old enough to get whipped for it—but Melanie wouldn’t let me touch her. Not even when we found out she was messing around. That’s when this all started.”

  “You know she’s been a… a…”

  “Whore? The whole damned neighborhood knew it. Picked up one night down in Seattle—she was still living here then and we were the ones responsible for her. We had to go down to the detention center and get her. I wanted to smack it out of her good and hard, but Melanie was just crying and crying. I told Patti, this happens again and you’re on your own. Two weeks later they got her again. They said she had V.D. I told Melanie, we’re not going to go get her and if she ever sets foot in this house again, I’m leaving.”

  Rob had worked himself up to a righteous anger. His face and ears were red enough to light a fire.

  “You have a son as well, don’t you?” I asked, as dispassionately as I could.

  “If Melanie was here she’d tell you he had something to do with Patti going bad, but that’s a goddamned lie. Patti’s a whore and she’s always been a whore and no goddamned social worker is going to put her back in this house—not when there’s an innocent little baby on the way.”

  I was so angry that the words didn’t quite sink in. “Trish is pregnant?”

  “Melanie is—seven months.” He was still fuming about his son though. “I don’t pretend to think the boy’s perfect. His mom and me was divorced when he was just a baby and she’s raised him all screwed up—taking him to Mexico with her and her artsy friends, putting him in private schools and all. And then trying to dump him on me when she got married again. No wonder Wayne don’t know how to hold a job. But he’s a good kid all the same. I won’t hear nothing said against him. He only tried to help Patti—but she wouldn’t listen to him either.”

  “Well, thank you,” I said and got up. I suddenly couldn’t bear to listen to any more, even though I was sure Rob would be able to regale me for hours with details of Trish’s troublemaking. He certainly seemed to hate her—and I suddenly wondered if Rob could have been obsessed with Trish in another way? Obsessed enough with her as a whore to follow her, to kill her friend, to kill her?

  “What’d you say the name of your institute was? So I can tell Melanie. Something about juvenile delinquents, am I right?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “And you’ve been very helpful. No, I can find my own way out. Thanks so much.”

  I heard the television roar alive as I left. “Betty, I’m telling you that it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll always love you, always and forever.”

  14

  I MADE A FEW PHONE CALLS to various personnel departments and discovered that Melanie Hemmings worked at the Bon Marché in the nearby Northgate shopping mall. Hosiery.

  I found her straightening striped and patterned kneesocks on tiny hangers. I went over and fingered a couple on sale. Maybe this was all happening in order that I could enlarge my wardrobe. I never went into department stores if I could help it.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, with a timid but friendly smile. Like Trish she had a triangular face and widely spaced eyes. She was petite and dark-haired; under a burgundy smock her pregnancy was very apparent.

  “I’m Nancy Todd, with the National Institute for Research on Delinquent Youth…” I realized my voice sounded tentative and added firmly, “I’ve just talked to your husband and wanted to ask you a few questions about your daughter.”

  Melanie shook her head. Her dark brown hair was thick and cut in a bob with bangs. “I haven’t seen her for months, almost a year,” she said distantly. “My husband… well… he… we just don’t want to see her, that’s all.”

  I nodded and kept my voice neutral. “When did the trouble begin?”

  Her hand went to her abdomen and she looked around for escape. If we’d been at her house she would have politely shown me the door.

  “She was such a good girl,” Melanie finally said, helplessly. “But something changed a few years ago. I didn’t recognize her anymore.”

  “Do you think it had something to do with your marriage?”

  She defended him immediately. “Oh no. Rob wanted to be a father to her… He just believes in discipline.”

  “Did he—punish her?”

  Some memory seemed to hurt Melanie; it showed in her eyes. “I told him I thought it wasn’t the right way. I never hit her when she was growing up. And she was such a wonderful little girl, it was just her and me for six years, we always got along. But she put up such a fight when I married Rob. He’s a good man, he didn’t know much about kids, that was all…” Her hand went anxiously to her belly again. “They just got off on the wrong foot. He has a quick temper sometimes, that’s all. He doesn’t like being talked back to.”

  “But the real trouble started when your stepson came to stay with you, didn’t it? How old was Trish then?” I was unconsciously shifting from researcher to interrogator.

  Melanie’s face sharpened, just as Trish’s did when she was angry. “He said he was only going to stay a couple of weeks, just until he got a place of his own, and he was at our house nearly six months, sleeping on the couch and taking over the garage with his loud music and his art stuff. I told Rob it wasn’t right, to let a thirteen-year-old girl hang around with a nineteen-year-old boy and his friends, but Rob couldn’t understand it. I think he felt bad that he’d missed seeing Wayne grow up—he wanted to pretend that he could have this father-son relationship he’d always wanted. He’d sit Wayne down with a beer in front of the television with him so they could watch football and everything—he couldn’t see that Wayne was laughing at him, manipulating him. It was Wayne who turned Patti against us, made her laugh at us, at the way we live, the way we are.”

  It was a hard question to ask. “Did Wayne turn Trish—Patti—into a prostitute?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know anything about it. My little girl! She’s a stranger to me,” Melanie burst out and then controlled herself. She went over to a skinny little customer lost among the Queen-sized stockings.

  I picked out three pairs of kneesocks and decided to buy them. I also wrote out my name and phone number on a slip of paper. When Melanie was finished ringing up her customer I went over to the cash register.

  “I’m sorry for upsetting you,” I said. “And for lying. I’m not with any institute. My name is Pam Nilsen and I’m a friend of your daughter’s. I think she’s in trouble and I’m looking for her.”

  Beneath the fluorescent lights of the store her pointed face went a little pale.

  “I shouldn’t have told you anything,” she said and turned away.

  “Please listen. A friend of Trish’s died a few days ago and now Trish has disappeared. She could be in danger. If you have any idea where she might be… if you could tell me where to find Wayne…”

  It didn’t seem to sink in. Melanie was the kind of woman who, threatened by authority, might tell things to a researcher, but not to a friendly stranger.

  I put my hand on her arm. “Please don’t give up on her,” I said. “Someday she’s going to need your support very much. Here’s my phone number. If you hear anything from her or see her, please give me a call.”

  Melanie’s lower lip trembled. “You didn’t say anything about this to my husband, did you? That you were looking for her?”

  I shook my head. “As far as he knows, I’m just filling out forms.”

  “Cause he would kill me, if I got involved with Patti again….”

  I waited while she struggled with herself. “If you want to get in touch with Wayne,” she finally said. “I know where he is. He’s living at the Redmond Apartments, on First Ave, downtown.”

  “Thanks. Thanks very much.”

  “I hope she’s all right, I hope… but I just don’t want to get involved again. I just can’t.”

  15

  IT WAS DARK WHEN I went back out into the parking lot, almost six. But there was no hurry—June had generously offered to let me keep the car unti
l tomorrow and had even more generously offered to help me wash out the blood in the Volvo’s back seat Saturday morning. On impulse I decided to drive by Carole’s house, since I was practically in the neighborhood. I felt a need, after talking with Rob and Melanie, for a reality check, even though I wasn’t quite sure Carole could provide it.

  Carole’s house was just like her, full of projects enthusiastically begun, abandoned and then absent-mindedly displayed. A wall hanging unraveled halfway through its sunset-over-the-mountains’ theme; a clay head stood unfired and with its ears missing on a low table. And there was a mysterious collection of telephones sitting in a silent but somehow expectant row along the mantelpiece.

  She was cooking dinner when I got there—or rather, whipping up something in her blender with spinach and protein powder. It looked healthy, but disgusting.

  It’s a new diet,” she explained. “I made it up myself. I’m doing a purge. That’s what I like about life,” she added. “You can always start over.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was referring to women with handcuffs or her digestive system, but didn’t want to ask.

  “You should have some. June said you went home sick.”

  “I’m not sick,” I said. “But I do have a problem. You know that girl Trish who was at the shop the day before yesterday?”

  I told her about Rosalie and the night at the strip, about Trish vanishing and my search for her.

  “I don’t know the slightest bit about the world she lives in, that’s the trouble,” I ended. “Not only am I not a teenager, but I don’t know anything about prostitution.”

  Carole finished her drink, leaving a moustache of pale green above her lips. She licked it off thoughtfully. “I used to have fantasies about being a prostitute,” she said. “I even turned a trick once.”

  “You?” I said, not sure if I’d heard her right. Carole was a little kooky, but it was hard to believe she’d gone to bed with a man for money.

  She fixed me with her beatific, slightly vacant blue eyes. “Oh, it was no big deal—kind of strange, but not really upsetting. Funny, actually… See, I was taking an art class, well, really modeling for the art class in exchange for lessons. I was kind of into being naked—I mean, I was twenty or something and I had a good body and knew it. I really got into sitting up there, turning all different directions and stuff. I let myself fantasize, just in this general way. I wasn’t a lesbian then, I guess I was bisexual, sort of pansexual, you know. I’d think about the women looking at me and at the men looking and it just felt good, it felt erotic.”

  She smiled warmly and almost playfully at me, and I realized I was trying to imagine what Carole looked like naked. She did have a nice body, especially wearing sweat clothes: lithe and energetic with just the right amount of curve at her thighs and breasts. If I were to admit it, at the moment she looked a little like one of those women in Playboy—guileless, a good sport, no hang-ups. I shook the image out of my head; it was too easy.

  “So one day I’m leaving class and this guy comes up and asks if I want to go out afterwards and have a cup of coffee or something. He was just an ordinary guy, I can’t even remember what he looked like. A little older than some of the rest maybe. ‘Sure, why not,’ I said, and we went to a coffee shop. Turned out he was married and had a couple of young kids. It wasn’t like he was some sex fiend or anything. He didn’t come on to me like that, just friendly and polite and asking me what I want to do for a living and how do I like the class and stuff. Then afterwards, when we’re leaving the coffee shop, he all of a sudden asks, ‘Your place or a motel?’

  “I don’t think so,’ I say, ‘I mean, like you’re married and everything,’ I say, not to hurt his feelings. ‘I mean, I like you and all, but…’

  “You don’t understand,’ he says. ‘I want to pay you. It’s just business. I’ll pay you’—he says fifty dollars or something. It seemed like a fortune.”

  Carole seemed bemused at the memory. “Nowadays I’d tell him to get lost, nowadays something like that wouldn’t even happen. But then… well, of course I needed the money, so some of it was that. But mainly I remember thinking, Wow, he thinks I’m a prostitute. Model equals prostitute, right? That was so—erotic! It gave me this great feeling, I don’t know, like of being in control. Yeah, that’s it,” Carole repeated, twirling the blond lock of hair that fell out of her short hair like a question mark. “I felt powerful. And sexy, and sort of low and nasty.”

  I was speechless for a moment. “You liked that?”

  “Umm-hmm,” said Carole, smiling. “I did. It was sort of an extension of sitting up there on the platform, with my legs spread a little and thinking about being a sex goddess or something. They couldn’t touch me, they were just sketching away, but I thought some of them would really like to. I could see it in their eyes.”

  I hastily lowered my own and asked, “So you went with him? How was it?”

  “Oh, like most things,” Carole said matter-of-factly. “Better in fantasy than in reality. We went to this creepy little motel and I took off my clothes and he took off his clothes and he did it, it only took about five minutes, and I didn’t have much interest at all, I sure didn’t get off or anything like that, and then we were both sort of embarrassed and didn’t know what to say and he drove me home.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Umm-hmm. I think it was mostly a fantasy thing for him too. He never really met my eyes or talked to me in class again.”

  She trailed off. We were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table and I was uncomfortably aware that I was doing a certain amount of fantasizing myself.

  “I think a lot of women have ideas about being whores or strippers, don’t you?” Carole said after a minute. “Wearing some depraved kind of costume, being powerful and in control, letting all that pent-up sexuality out. I mean, haven’t you ever thought about it?” She regarded me innocently.

  I searched my mind for pictures of me wearing a Frederick’s of Hollywood black garter belt and push-up bra, but didn’t find any.

  “No, really,” Carole pushed me. “What do you think of when I say the word ‘whore.’ ‘Pam is a whore’?”

  “I remember this time,” I said slowly. “In junior high, ninth grade. Penny had just gotten a boyfriend, her first, and everything was different. Suddenly there was this pressure on me. I hadn’t thought much about boys. I had this friend, Martha, and I was happy just spending time with her. But when Penny got a boyfriend, it was like I was supposed to have one too. That’s the way it was with us. So I started going to parties, boy and girl parties. Finally I met someone’s brother, a guy named Steve. He was two years older, sixteen, a junior in high school. I let him feel me up at the party. It was a little bit exciting, but mainly I was thinking, okay, now I have a boyfriend, now I’m going to be like Penny, now I’m going to be like everyone else.

  “But Steve didn’t call me after the party or ever again, and one night, very late, just as I was going to sleep, a carload of boys drove past the house. ‘Pam is a whore!’ somebody shouted. I looked out and it was Steve’s car. I saw him.

  “I was terrified, I was terribly humiliated, I didn’t know what my parents would think.”

  “What did they think?” Carole asked.

  “Oh god. My mother took me aside the next day for a little heart-to-heart talk. I tried to explain that I hadn’t really done anything, and I think she believed me, but she went on and on about how boys could get the wrong impression, you had to be really careful how you acted. And so on. I felt like crawling under the bed and never coming out afterwards.”

  Carole took my hand and squeezed it sympathetically. Her touch was warm and lively and for a wild moment I thought of getting her undressed right then and there. Common sense held me back. Things didn’t work that way. I should know that after this winter. If I slept with Carole I’d end up getting involved in her life, and that was the last thing I needed at this point.

  Fantasy was better than reality
, she’d said, and she was right. At least in this case.

  I stood up. “I’ve got to get going. I’m on my way downtown to see if I can find Wayne.”

  She nodded, and I wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or just feeling the effects of the spinach-protein drink. She looked a little sad. “I hope I didn’t put you off. I mean, I’m a very sexual person, but I understand why you’re upset about this girl being a prostitute and everything. It would be really strange to take your clothes off all the time and do it with hundreds of men.”

  “I don’t think Trish feels it’s very erotic,” I agreed. “I’m not sure what she feels, but I don’t think it has much to do with sex at all.”

  I drove away from Carole’s feeling a mixture of relief that I hadn’t done anything rash, and regret that caution had won out. It didn’t suit me to be celibate and alone; I longed for the connection to my body that sex promised and often delivered. Why did the complications that being involved with real people who had pasts and expectations have to intrude? Why couldn’t I—I stared at the garish signs of Lake City Way all around me and for the first time felt the persuasive logic of it all—just go out and find a prostitute?

  16

  WHEN I WAS A KID, Belltown was more often called the Denny Regrade, and that was what developers still called it. It was a strip along the bluff that had been bulldozed flat, between the city center and the foot of Queen Anne Hill, the traditional home of sailors and transients. Belltown was the old name, after William Bell, one of the city’s first settlers, and that was still what the oldtimers and artists called it. It was one of those areas you never imagine becoming fashionable, but that do anyway. Martin Selig, Seattle’s proverbial man with a million, who’d done more to change the city’s skyline in five years than anyone else had managed to do in fifty, had put up large office buildings and condominiums along Third and Fourth. The streets next to the bluff, First and Second, were still hanging on, but soon the beat-up sailors’ taverns, the hotels and odd little shops would be lost to the wrecking balls. In between the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific and the Catholic Seaman’s dub were whole blocks of two-story buildings boarded up and unoccupied, scheduled for demolition. The gentrification of the Market was creeping up First Ave. like a pretty disease, remodeling and refurbishing anything and everything into punk boutiques and European delicatessens.