The Secret Sister by M. DeLuca (leveled readers txt) 📗

a glassy-eyed glue sniffer staggering towards you begging for a quarter. I stopped outside the apartment building where I’d seen Dane. It was a three-story block of red brick with zero architectural merit. No doubt doomed to come under the wreckers’ ball and make way for yet another swanky riverside condo block. I scanned the windows for the wallpaper room. In the sunlight, the panes appeared dirt-smudged, with broken blinds hanging askew.

Then I saw it again. A faded square of orangey yellow flowers. The sickly expanse that always appeared in the image of Birdie, climbing upwards, hair sprayed out in a static fuzz. Me looking on, my eye throbbing, swollen and painful when I touched it. Then the laughter. A smoker’s hoarse laughter. More than one person. Men and women. A chemical smell, like burning plastic and dried piss.

I closed my eyes, pressed my face on the steering wheel and tried to think of Vegas though I had no frame of reference, no picture to conjure up the place in my mind. I tried not to think of Birdie climbing or Dane getting into the stranger’s SUV or Carla being lured by some creep in the mall parking lot.

When I finally got my breathing under control and dared to look upwards, a parking meter guy was pulling out a pen ready to ticket me. I revved up the engine just before he could plant the ticket on my windshield and screeched away in a cloud of burning rubber. Two hundred bucks could buy me a nice pair of sandals and besides, I’d taken down the number of the apartment block. I had to get to Linda Martin’s office and tell her I’d remembered something. Maybe it could help us find out what happened to Birdie.

13

Linda Martin had been my social worker when I was placed with the Levines. I hadn’t seen her since then. Hadn’t needed to. Or maybe hadn’t wanted to.

Her office was plastered with posters. One was a superhero decal with a big purple SW and the words Super Social Worker emblazoned across. Above her desk a bright green poster declared, There can’t be a crisis today, my schedule is already full. But the best one featured a trim fifties lady and read, As a social worker, doing a good job is like wetting your pants in a dark suit. You get a warm feeling but nobody else notices. I was chuckling at that when Linda’s trilling voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Anna – I had to do a double take when I saw you there. I barely recognized you.”

I blinked my eyes twice and looked at her. She was wearing a turquoise jacket I’d seen last year in the clearance section at the Gap and she’d cut her hair in a short, choppy style that emphasized her sagging jowls. Her attempt at pleasantries left a sour, flat feeling in my gut.

I tilted my head away and concentrated on the fifties lady in the poster. She was stylish in a neat Audrey Hepburn suit and Gucci pillbox hat.

“Did you pull my file?”

“Well it’s been a while, so I had to dig deep to access it.”

I turned to watch her shuffling through a green folder. “Did you read my email?”

Red blobs flared across her cheeks as she lowered her eyes away from me. “I did.”

“And?”

She glanced over some papers she’d taken from the file. “You mention an address.”

“And I told you about Birdie climbing up the wall? The laughter? My swollen eye?”

She sighed and picked up a printout. “I’ll read your statement: I remember seeing Birdie climb up a wall with flowered wallpaper. There was a stink of burning plastic in the air. It felt like my eye was injured,” she recited, her eyes flickering over the paper. She looked up at me, her eyebrows lifting. “Shall I go on?”

Yellow light buzzed around her head. I blinked my eyes. There were penciled-in gaps on her sparse eyebrows. I shook my head. “And what do the records say about that placement?”

She sighed, her face settling into a martyr’s smile. Rainbow letters above her head spelled out the words, I’m a social worker. I do my own stunts. What was with this hero fixation?

“The records show, Anna, that Birdie wasn’t with you at that particular placement. Before the Levines.” She pursed her mouth so tight, her lips disappeared. She stared at me, tapping the desk, waiting for me to talk.

I didn’t.

I knew silence was poison for people like Linda, so she kept on babbling as she pulled out a dog-eared paper and waved it in the air. “This report shows there’s nothing to connect that particular place with her disappearance.”

I brushed aside the desk magnet with all the little pins sticking to it. “I happen to know she was there. I keep remembering her there. And I remember other placements. Rosa Flores-Rivera. The cop station. The donuts. After that the group home, then some other useless placement, then the place with the wallpaper.”

She sat back, her eyes crinkling with the semblance of pity. “I don’t mind going over this with you, Anna. The system didn’t give you what you needed at that time and yet you’ve done so well for yourself. Overcome chronic instability, neglect as well as unbelievable trauma. Some kids never recover from the horrors you’ve been through, but you’ve triumphed. Look at the way you’re dressed. Gorgeous,” she said, her watery eyes devouring my camel coat.

“Anna, I understand how trauma and chronic grief can change the way you remember events in your life, so I’ll clarify it all for you. You were taken from the Rivera place after the double stabbing.”

“What stabbing? We left before anyone was hurt.”

She shook her head. “Mr. Vincent Cavallo, an ex-marine suffering from PTSD, fatally stabbed Rosa and her husband Perez. You and Birdie witnessed the whole thing. Luckily, Mr. Cavallo spared the two of you and took you out onto the street just as the police arrived.”

I vowed I’d never cry again but the tears