The Guest Room

  “Again, we think.”

  “Yes. I guess,” Kerri-Ann admitted. “You think…”

  Kristin took a sip of her coffee, cold now, and then sighed. When she looked back at Kerri-Ann, the other teacher was already smiling and waving at yet another group of boys.

  …

  Nicole considered all of the ways she could inform Philip that she was breaking off the wedding. They ranged from going to his apartment in Brooklyn Heights and telling him face-to-face, to sending him a text. A text would manage to be both cowardly and cruel, and it would invariably prove epic: it would, knowing Philip, almost certainly go viral. And why shouldn’t it? She imagined the words on the screen of her phone:

  After what you did on Friday, I just can’t marry you. I’m sorry.

  Or it could be a long text that crossed some t’s and dotted some i’s.

  After what you did on Friday, I just can’t marry you. I’m sorry. I don’t trust you and I don’t see a future where I can trust you. I’ve called the caterer and the church and the people who were bringing the tents to my parents’ house. I’ll send you a check for what you paid toward the deposit. I’ll give you back the ring. I don’t want it. Please don’t call me. I’ll call you when I’m ready.

  But even a text that long still conveyed only a tiny fraction of what she wanted to say—which suggested the need for an e-mail. Besides, he would call her, even if she asked him not to. Of course, he would call her after an e-mail, as well. He would call her if she mailed him a handwritten letter, enclosing the ring in the envelope. Philip was nothing if not persistent. It was, perhaps, why she had first fallen in love with him. He was funny; he was playful; he was—at least at the beginning—attentive.

  All of which suggested she would have to see him in person, because he was going to have to try for the last word. But she feared that if she went to his apartment, that last word might lead to her backing down. Alone in his living room or bedroom, he would convince her to change her mind. And she did not want to change her mind. It wasn’t only that she didn’t trust him; she no longer believed that she loved him.

  So instead she wrote him a text that said she wanted to have breakfast with him Thursday morning at a place on Montague Street they both liked, and tweaked it over and over on her phone. If she did see him on Thursday morning, it would be the first time in a week—since before he had had sex with that prostitute.

  Can you have breakfast with me tomorrow at 7:30 at Evergreen? We need to talk. Please don’t call me. But text me if you can and I will be there.

  After reading her final draft a third time, she pressed “send.” She realized that she felt horrible for the girls who had been brought to the party and she felt terrible for the families of the dead men; but, yes, she also felt something very close to despair about the way she had fallen out of love with Philip. She couldn’t build a life together with him that began on the bodies of two dead men and the fact he had fucked a prostitute. She just…couldn’t.

  She took the engagement ring he had given her off her finger, but then put it back on. She decided that she wanted to take it off in front of him in the restaurant. The ring was a symbol: maybe—just maybe—it would hurt him as much as he had hurt her if she removed the ring from her finger before his very eyes.

  …

  Melissa was not exactly scared of the Internet, but she knew that there was a world beyond the sites she visited often—sites for school, sites for music and movies, sites about Brownie badges and fashion and hair—that was not meant for a nine-year-old girl. In some cases, it was just a keystroke away. One letter off. An accidental dash.

  Not quite a year ago, one morning when her dad was upstairs getting dressed and her mom was packing her lunch for school, she had been using the computer in the family room to visit the Girl Scouts website because she had a question about a Brownie badge. She had typed in one of the words incorrectly and wound up on a site so disturbing that she had yelled for her parents reflexively. Even before they had dropped what they were doing and rushed into the family room, she had closed the screen. What she had seen (or, now, what she thought she had seen), was monstrous and grotesque. She felt…ashamed. Her parents had found the site in the computer’s history and deleted it, and told her that she had done nothing wrong. They said she had done exactly the right thing telling them about it. Then they had lectured her (yet again) about the need to be careful on the Internet, and reiterated the house rules, which they admitted she had indeed been obeying when she had inadvertently strayed onto that site.

  Now, while her mom was making dinner and her dad was out, she decided to move beyond the site with the funky tights for girls. She took a deep breath and typed in her father’s name in the search bar. Her mom had said he would be home for dinner, and Melissa honestly wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Her anger toward him had been smoldering for a couple of days. She was irritated with him for making Mom sad—for causing such tension in the house—and she was embarrassed by the attention she was receiving. Even her dance teacher had given her a huge, wholly unexpected hug that afternoon. Moreover, was it possible that her father had done the sorts of gross things at the party that she had seen on the website she had accidentally stumbled upon almost a year ago now?

  She read stories about her father on four different sites before she had had enough. She had never heard the expression “sex slave” before, but she had an idea what it meant. She looked up the word orgy and was appalled. Again, there were pictures. But she scrutinized as well the sections of the news stories that focused on the dead Russians, because the reporters always quoted detectives who stressed that there were many more men like that pair out there—and that their Russians friends were probably furious and dangerous.

  “Sweetheart?”

  At the sound of her mother’s voice she instantly minimized the screen.

  “What?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I was trying to find something for school.”

  “About?”

  “Turtles,” she lied.

  “Okay. Would you like mashed potatoes or baked potatoes?”

  “Mashed.”

  Her mother nodded and retreated. Before the bachelor party, Melissa knew, her mother would have asked her why in the world she was looking up turtles. She would have come to the computer and sat down beside her to see what she had found. She would have asked why her teacher—a woman her mother called by her first name because, of course, they were peers on the faculty—was having them study turtles. Was it a unit on reptiles? Was someone bringing a turtle to school? Were they going to get turtles for the classroom? Now, however, her mother was so distracted that she didn’t ask a single question. Not a one.

  After Melissa clicked again on the story about the violence in her home, she deleted it. She deleted all the sites she had visited from the computer’s history. Then she googled turtles. For the life of her, she had no idea why the first thing she had thought of was a turtle.

  …

  Richard’s day ended where it began: on a futon on the floor. Another news van trolling the neighborhood and pausing at the end of his driveway.

  He stared up at the ceiling at the dim light from the moon and listened to Cassandra snore ever so slightly in her sleep. He took comfort that at least the cat had not deserted him. Usually she slept upstairs. Tonight she was downstairs with him. His mind, as it had all day, ping-ponged between the unfairness of Franklin McCoy still refusing to allow him to return to work, the sword that Spencer Doherty was dangling over his head, and the hurt he had inflicted upon his family. He was angry at the world, but he was also awash in self-loathing. And somewhere in the maelstrom behind his eyes that was keeping him awake was that poor girl he had brought upstairs in this very house. Sometimes he was haunted by her eyes as she sat on the guest bedroom bed. Sometimes he heard her voice in his head. He thought of her sadness when she spoke about Yerevan. He thought of her playfulness when she described a sculpture of a cat
.

  Manhunt. Now she was the object of a manhunt. Everyone wanted to find her. The Russians probably wanted to kill her. He was, he realized, terrified for her. It made him loathe her parents, whoever they were and wherever they were.

  He sat up on the futon, his head in his hands. He thought of his wife and daughter, upstairs in the master bedroom. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake not coming home with a gun.

  Alexandra

  Sonja was sobbing when we ran from the party for the bachelor. We were both crazed, we were both all adrenaline. We climbed into Pavel’s car, because she said that was how we were going to get away, and she got into the driver’s seat. She slammed shut the big Escalade door and right away banged into the side of one of the other cars in the driveway when she was backing out. She didn’t know how to drive. Neither of us did. She didn’t even know how to turn on the windshield wipers at first, and it was pouring rain. But she had planned this thing in her mind and didn’t plan to drive very far. We were just going to the train station, she said, which we had seen when we were driving around Bronxville before the party. We had gotten there so early, Pavel had gone to the village to find a liquor store for his vodka. Sonja figured even she could drive the mile or two to the train station.

  “What the fuck were you thinking!” I asked. “Why did you do that?”

  “Because they killed Crystal, why else?”

  “I know, I get it! But why? Why now?”

  “Because I think they were going to kill me tonight—on the way back to the city. They probably would have killed you, too.”

  “What the fuck? Why?”

  “We’ll get on the first train that goes to the Grand Central,” she said instead of answering my question, and she screeched to a halt in front of a red light by a beautiful brick library and a beautiful stone church. I bumped into the dashboard. I hadn’t put on a seat belt. “We’ll disappear on the subways. New York City is so big, maybe they’ll never find us,” she said, and then she banged her fists twice on the steering wheel.

  We had ridden the subways before, but I had no idea where we could go. And while Sonja had started thinking about what she wanted to do the minute they told us that Crystal was dead, I was a little nervous about her maybe. Maybe they’ll never find us? Seriously, that was her plan?

  We had a lot of cash, because Pavel and Kirill always carried big rolls of money in their pockets. But I guessed we had also made another four thousand dollars in tips. Richard had given me nearly a thousand when we were upstairs. I almost didn’t take it because he hadn’t let me finish him, but in the end I did. I knew if I didn’t, Pavel would have thought I was hiding money from him. He never would have believed that some dude had just decided not to finish. And after they’d killed Crystal, there was no way I was going to risk getting him mad at me. Besides, I had held up my end of deal. I had earned the money. Still, I had felt a little guilty when we were upstairs in the bedroom and he gave me all that cash. But now in the car, when Sonja and I were running who knew where, I was very glad I had it. I was very glad I had all those extra fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “Where are we going on the subway?” I asked her when we got to the train station maybe two minutes later.

  She didn’t answer. “You have the money?” she asked me instead.

  “I do.”

  “And the gun?”

  “Yes.” I knew she had one, too. They were both Makarovs. She had eight rounds in hers—full magazine. I had six left in mine.

  When we were on the platform, she pointed at a train schedule under glass. “See?” she said. “See? There will be train in seven minutes.”

  “Seven minutes,” I repeated.

  “That will fucking teach them,” she said, and she wiped some of the mascara off her cheek. I knew it was running because she was crying, but we had also gotten soaked when we had raced to the car and then a second time when we had climbed the steps to the train platform. Her eyes were red and her makeup was a mess. I was relieved the platform had a roof. “God, I’m glad they’re dead. I am so fucking glad they’re dead,” she said.

  “Tell me: Where are we going?” I was going a little crazy myself not knowing.

  She looked at me, but her face was blank behind all that messy makeup. Still, I could tell she had heard me. It was just that she was so lost in her own thoughts that she couldn’t answer me that second. And the seven minutes until that train came felt like forever. I kept looking for police cars or one of the cars that we’d seen in Richard’s driveway—but I thought a police car was more likely. Those guys from the party were too scared to follow us. They weren’t coming. God, one of them was crying when I was getting into my jacket. Another begged me not to shoot him when I put on my skirt. At one point Sonja and I heard a siren when we were waiting on the platform, but to this day I don’t know if it was an ambulance or police car. I don’t even know if it was going to the party for the bachelor. In the end, no one came after us that night. No one tried to find us. No one came to stop us. In my mind, I saw the men from the party back at the house, and they were staring at Pavel’s and Kirill’s bodies, and wondering what they were going to do. I saw Richard. Poor sad, sweet Richard.

  When Sonja and I had our seats on the train, we made a list of what we had. We had just under eight thousand dollars in cash, which we knew would not last as long as you might think, and we had the credit cards in Pavel’s and Kirill’s wallets, which we did not believe we could ever use because that would tell people where we were, and we had the two guns and the fourteen bullets inside them. We had that big kitchen knife, but Sonja said she had only brought it because it was evidence. She said she would throw it into a garbage can in the city. (And later she did.)

  She turned to me. “Fuck. I left something at the house.”

  “We left lots of somethings at the house.”

  “No. Something important. A phone number. I hid it inside a condom wrapper.”

  “Whose number?”

  She put her finger on my lips to shush me. “It will be fine. I can remember enough of the numbers. Trust me. It’ll be fine.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to look calm. We were the only people in that train car. We knew that later the conductor would tell the police about us, but there was no one else who saw two pretty girls whose makeup was a meltdown disaster.

  …

  Sonja, it would turn out, was full of surprises. When we got off the train in New York City, we took the shuttle to the Times Square. There she bought us blue and red knit caps for a New York football team to cover our hair, and sunglasses at a late-night souvenir shop. She bought knapsacks for this football team, handing me one.

  Then we went to a twenty-four-hour store and bought two cell phones that were called “prepaid.” She said they were “burners.” We hadn’t had cell phones since we had been abducted, but sometimes we’d used Catherine’s or Inga’s or even one of the men’s. So we knew how much they had changed. But I was still impressed that Sonja knew that “burners” were the kind we wanted, because no one would know who we were or where we were. There was no contract, she said. We would use them and throw them away. Then we would buy more. She didn’t let me come into the store with her, because she didn’t want the man behind the counter to remember seeing two women together. She wore the knit cap but not the sunglasses, since sunglasses after midnight would look suspicious.

  “We’re going to get hotel rooms—but in two different hotels,” she said. “People will be looking for us together.” She said the knapsacks were so it would look like we were tourists when we checked in, not courtesans hiding from our bosses or police guys.

  “We look like schoolgirls,” I said. “Not tourists.”

  She thought about this for a second and then said, “We do. Sort of. We look like we’re runaway stripper girls, maybe. That’s good. If we don’t like the hotels, maybe there’s a place we can find for runaway girls.”

  She was right about how we looked. Schoolgirls do
n’t wear black thigh boots and miniskirts. We hadn’t put our stockings and garter belts back on when we left. She was wearing a thong, but neither one of us was wearing a shirt or a blouse under our leather jackets.

  “Let’s just get off the street,” I said. “Any hotel is good hotel.” I knew they wouldn’t be nice places because we weren’t going to use Pavel’s and Kirill’s credit cards. We needed the sort of hotel that would take our cash and wouldn’t care who we were. “Okay? I’m really scared.”

  “I know, Alexandra dear,” she said. “I am, too.”

  “But tell me what you know. I have to know.”

  “About Crystal…”

  “Yes. About Crystal. Why did they kill her? Why were they going to kill us?”

  She looked at one of the huge, blinking video billboards, alive even at this hour of the night. They were crazy hypnotic. Then she turned back to me. “Crystal had dude five days ago who turned out to be police guy.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “I know.”

  “But he didn’t arrest her?”

  She shook her head. “She had him again two days ago. He didn’t want sex. He wanted her to help him trap Yulian. Inga. You know, all bosses.”

  “They’re too smart. Never happen.”

  “He promised her she’d be okay. We’d be okay.”

  “He was lying. We’d go to jail for sure, too.”

  “She believed him.”

  “She was crazy then. Crazier than you even.”

  “I know. But think of how unhappy she was. Think of how much she wanted out. How she dreamed of being rescued.”

  I nodded. I remembered.

  “And Yulian had hunch about Crystal. He had Pavel follow police guy second time he came to the town house—after he left. When Pavel told Yulian he had guessed right and dude was police guy, that was it for Crystal.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “And Crystal had told me all about this! Asked me for my advice. I told her to tell police guy nothing, but she was into him. Believed him. So into him, she offered to wear a wire. Only reason she didn’t was because he wouldn’t let her. Said that was way too dangerous and she was way too young.”