The Taken

It took Hazel a moment to realize Cameron was talking to her. “I’m in the hallway beside the kitchen.”

“Go into the living room.”

Her heart jolted and she pushed herself up the doorframe. “Why?”

“I want you to see it as it was. I want you to be there with her.”

She walked cautiously into the living room, but it was still empty. She strode to the apartment door and locked it, then stood with her forehead against it.

“There was a couch with its back to the window,” Cameron said, “and a round, low coffee table in front of it. In the corner, beside the opening to the dining room, a comfortable chair with a lamp beside it.”

“How do you know this?”

“She described it to me.”

She turned around to look at the room. “There’s nothing here, Joa

“All of this happened here, in this place. You don’t see it yet, but you will if you let yourself.” Hazel wondered if Cameron was repeating lines Dana Goodman had once said to her, when he’d turned her grief to his own purposes. “Put me on speaker-phone.” There was a button on the side of the device and Hazel pushed it, then leaned down and stood the phone upright in the middle of the floor. Joa

“It doesn’t mean he killed her, Joa

“No, of course it doesn’t.” Hazel heard a car drive past outside the house and for a moment her attention wandered, but she brought it back. “Brenda fell in love,” the voice from the floor said. “And that was an inconvenience to him, you know, but he dealt with it. He used it, when he wanted her; he shot Cupid’s arrows at her, full of promises. But he tired of her. He was too busy to see her this time or that time, but he still told her he loved her. She couldn’t read between the lines.”

“She told you all this?” she asked.

“She never hid anything from me,” said Joa

“It must be hard feeling it wasn’t enough,” said Hazel.

“People like Brenda… they’re beautiful in so many ways. They believe in others, but they can be taken in. Their love goes out into the world and finds its kind, even if it’s really only a shadow or a show. They’re blind to things like that. I told her all the stuff you tell someone when they’re on a bad drug. That it’s going to let you down. That the world doesn’t look that way when you get the juice out of your system. But she was an addictive personality. She started turning up at his place, una

“She must have been crushed.”

Cameron ignored her. “It got bad enough that he broke up with her, finally. I guess even Colin Eldwin had his standards.”

Hazel had picked up the radiophone and moved into the dining room. She imagined candles on a table set for two. “Get to the night in question,” she said. “How do you know she was here?”

“He broke up with her in July, but she wouldn’t stay away. She had other troubles and they were clouding her judgment.”

“Drugs?”

“She’d been clean since the previous fall, but she started back on crack and she was unravelling. She showed up at my place a few times talking about how they were going to get back together, how she had a plan. He just needed her to show him the way back, she said. The night of August second, she was with me before she went to him.”

“And?”

“She said she was pregnant.”

Unbidden, the dead girl with the knifed fetus swam into Hazel’s mind. But she knew Brenda Cameron had not been pregnant.

“Said it was the sign she was waiting for. She was going over to tell him the good news.”

“She wasn’t pregnant, Joa

“I know she wasn’t pregnant.”

“The members of your family stop at nothing to get what they want, do they?”

“She’s at the door,” she said quietly. “It’s about ten o’clock at night on August second. She knocks, calls his name.”

Hazel’s heart was thrashing now. She heard nothing, but when she turned to look back into the living room, she saw them in her mind’s eye, Brenda Cameron walking into the apartment, Eldwin standing there, his arms crossed. She asks him if he’s alone. He tells her she has to stop this, it’s over, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her. She puts a hand on his arm, slides it down to his wrist, and puts his palm against her belly.

“We can’t know any of this,” Hazel said. “There were no witnesses to what they said to each other. To what happened here, if anything happened here. Just because you saw her and she told you she was coming to this house, it doesn’t mean she did. She might have gone straight to the ferry docks.”

“But she didn’t. She came here.”

“Fine. And then she killed herself. Whatever happened here that night drove her to it.”

“He drugged her. He knocked her out and dragged her across the floor. He took her out to his car -”

“No, Joa

“I know what I’ve done.”

“I want to know where Colin Eld -” She stopped mid-sentence. She realized the last thing she’d heard had not come from the device she held in her hand. She looked down at it and saw the call had been disco

From behind her, Cameron said, “There was a witness.”

26

Hazel dropped the phone and, in one motion, freed her gun from its holster and spun, weapon extended. Joa

Cameron ignored her and reached into the bag. Hazel decided if she brought out Eldwin’s head she was going to shoot her on the spot. But she removed an official evidence bag and Hazel knew right away what was in it and who had given it to her.

“She was wearing this the night she was killed,” Cameron said, holding out the bag with the black sweater in it. “There are bits of wood in it, and varnish. It was all in the lab report, but they ignored it.”

“I told you to back away.”

“Why would they ignore evidence?”

“There was no lab report on the sweater, Joa

Cameron was smiling sadly. “There’s a lab report. It was done afterwards. But they wouldn’t reopen the case.”

Hazel hesitated a moment and then lowered the gun and put it back in the holster. She took a step toward Cameron and gently slipped out a necklace tucked into her shirt. It was a lamb dangling from a leather cord. “He couldn’t save Brenda with this,” Hazel said, looking at the talisman with a heavy heart. “What makes you think it can save you?”