Page 9 of Claimed
“He’s my boyfriend.”
“Are you in hiding, Kat?” I asked again.
“Then we’re definitely being followed,” Jasper announced,but he directed his words toward his earpods.
My heart was twisting itself into knots. Jasper kept looking straight ahead. Everything occurring in that moment was competing for my attention. On top of that, my cell phone rang in my purse.
“Are you, Kat?” I asked more loudly. “In hiding?”
“Yes,” she snapped.
Jasper and I glanced at each other through the rearview mirror.The sound of a message being left on my phone filled the silence.
Jasper had takenthe circuitousroute. We drove down streets in the different parts of Long Island. Kat confessed that Nel had no idea her daughter, Alexia, was still in touch with her. All of her life, Kat had been held prisoner in the small house in Chattanooga.
“Did you know your mother?” I asked.
“I think so. I don’t know…” She went silent for a few beats. “I think Beth was my mom. She was older, but she hardlyspoke to me or anyone else. For the longest time, I thought she was mute, but she was just so fucked up that she didn’t like to talk—although, whenever slimy guys came to the house, she pointed forcefully at a crawl space under the floor, telling me to get in there. I think she and I were the only two people who knew it existed.”
She went on to explain how the secret space led to the woodsbehind the house. “It was creepy serial-killer shit.”
Kat would crawl in the dirt with the spiders, mice, and other insects and arrive at a five-by-five dusty space, where she would climb a set of fragile wooden steps to a hatch that opened in the woods.
I recalled my visit to Chattanooga and remembered the trees behind her old house. Kat said she would roam the woods, contemplatingrunning away forever. However, she didn’t know where to go. She had no education, no money, and—according to Bam, the man who ran the house—no common sense. He tried to convince her that she was nothing more than a stupid girl whose only value was what was between her legs.
“But I never believed a damn thing he said, especially that,” she said.
Once she started talking, it was difficultto get her to stop, which was a good thing as far as journalism was concerned. She was providing answers to questions I hadn’t even asked.
“It was snowing on the day I met Alexia,” she said. “Beth had just gotten her teeth knocked out by a john, and she was in so much pain…” Kat took a deep breath through her nose. “Anyway, I was sitting against a tree, wearing nothing but a gown. It feltlike my blood was frozen. All I wanted to do was die.”
Then she explained how Alexia had found her in the woods and snuck her back inside of Nel’s house to warm her up and feed her.
“She asked me a lot of questions I couldn’t answer, like what my name was, how old I was, and where my parents were. I couldn’t even tell her where I lived because I was afraid she’d tell Bam that I’dsnuck out of the house. But after my nightgown had dried, she gave me a coat and some shoes, and we promised to stay friends.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“I was fifteen.”
“And you didn’t know your name?”
She shook her head. “But I asked Beth if she knew, and she wrote something on a piece of paper, handed it to me, and whispered that I should never let anyone findit. Whenever she talked, she whispered.” Kat said that last part as though it were an afterthought.
“Humph,” I said. Bryn also whispered a lot—a trait of hers that drove me crazy.
“Written on the paper was my first name and age,” she whispered, sounding exactly like Bryn.
I had lots of questions, but one was more pressing than the others. “Were the women and girls who livedin your house prostitutes?”
She paused, and then her face dropped. “Yeah, they were.” Her voice was barely audible.
I wanted to ask if she, too, had been a prostitute, but I thought better of it. That was the sort of question a woman asked another woman in private. “Do you know what happened to Beth?” I asked instead.
Kat shook her head.
“Do you remember what she lookedlike?”
Again, there was a long moment of silence. “I don’t.” She sighed. “Well, sort of. It took me a long time to figure out how old Beth might have been when she gave birth to me, that’s if she’s my mother. The face of hers that I can’t forget is that of a teenager.”
