Page 3 of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

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The little town of Smithfield, Virginia, yes the very same town known for ham, smells of bacon and sits near the Chesapeake Bay.

Small town Americana in every way a girl from the Windy City would think of Americana.

Sweet.

Charming.

Quaint.

Storefronts for artisan galleries, shoppes and cafés. A tourist’s dream. From stories of my mother’s childhood, I know this place swarms with them in the summer months.

I’ll get to look around more after settling in. Right now, with no sleep, crashing is imminent.

Following the handwritten directions my mother had given me years ago. I’d handwritten them from memory. My mother, when halfway lucid, told me about her home. When the mood hit, she’d tell me bedtime stories as she tucked me in at night. Right before she’d go off to get high and let men she didn’t care about use her body however they felt fit because it was the only way she could sometimes get the attention of the man, the only man, she ever loved. Leaving me alone in our crappy, cramped apartment for hours.

Once I figured out she left, I couldn’t sleep until she came home. Sometimes she got there on her own, but most times dumped in our living room by some man who’d gotten what he wanted and had no more use for her.

How a young, beautiful virgin from Smithfield, Virginia could end up a cracked-out biker whore in Chicago?

My dear old dad.

The man only meant to roll through town. He met her at her grandfather’s gas station.

He stayed a few days more.

He took her virginity.

He convinced her to run away with him. To the big life in the big city.

What he’d neglected to tell my beautiful, innocent mother was that he had an old lady back home. Not just an old lady, a wife. A wife and a one-year-old son. My brother. Raif.

My brother doesn’t know about this place. Gage doesn’t know about this place. Anyone, aside from me, connecting the Lords to this place died years ago.

Freedom.

From Raif.

From Gage.

From Houdini.

Maybe here, the nightmares will stop and I can finally get some sleep.

Out the other side of town, closer to the Chesapeake, I turn the truck down a dirt lane off the main road. Barbed wire fencing lines the trees leading up to the dirt lane, all with NO TRESSPASSING signs in bright orange lettering tacked to each tree.

I’m not trespassing. This land belongs to me. Inherited after my mother’s grandfather passed away. I’d paid the hefty inheritance tax and keep up property taxes every year. The gas station had been sold to afford assisted living for the old man before he passed. Too bad. I could use a readymade place to work. Since the kidnapping, I haven’t been able to get myself back into the phone sex, my main source of income while I worked on my finance degree from DePaul. It paid well, and I could set my own hours. A great job until the moment he took me. Now I’m a skittish woman always convinced the douche calling is Houdini threatening to finish what he started. I know I’ll have to find a job. Just one more thing to check off my list.

The long lane ends at the mouth of an inlet off the bay. So maybe the house has seen better days—it’s mine. Everything else can be fixed.

Without a second thought, I park the truck, jumping out to the brackish smell of ocean mixed with vegetation and walk to the overgrown flowerbed under the front window. Flowers have long since been choked out by grass and weeds. Mostly weeds. I head to the fake cement rock, which looks surprisingly like a real rock, the one my mother used to wax on nostalgically about before she’d get too high for coherent speech.

Not because of it being a fake cement rock, the nostalgic waxing, but because it sat directly under a tiny hula dancer in the window sill. So despite the overgrown vegetation, I know exactly where to find the rock.

The hula girl still sits in the window. One of those meant for a car dashboard. Mom’s grandpops brought it back from Hawaii after WWII. He’d been a navy man. Saw combat. He’d been career. It was how he’d ended up in Virginia. The plastic, that old 1950s hard plastic, the kind that breaks just as easily as glass, has been sun bleached and hair-line cracked over the years from a lifetime stuck in her sentry spot.

Her deep Hawaiian skin now looks as pale as mine. What was once, I’m sure, a vibrant red on her lei and headdress now appears a shade lighter than pastel pink. Her green-grass skirt, a pastel green. Though, despite her age, she looks poised to hula with the best of them.

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