The signal had flickered back on where it had vanished. Two minutes later, it moved fluidly back to Queesik Bay, and she and Forbes held their breath as it stopped and then resumed its movement at a slower pace, back behind the Eagle. The blue dot on the computer screen reversed, then made a little turn, and then headed back out to the Queesik Bay Road. The phone rang. Hazel picked it up and heard his voice saying her name.

“I know who Kitty is,” he said.

] 25 [

Mr. Sugar had been the first client to have her delivered. Terry Brennan was the second. But Mr. Sugar had been the worse of the two, and only serious deviants needed girls delivered. There in the privacy of their own homes, they could do whatever they wanted. She’d been told to call him Mr. Sugar – he was the owner of a profitable energy drink company – but she avoided speaking to him at all. He liked three things: Eating, gambling, and torturing girls. It got him off.

Anything could be an excuse for punishment. She was given cans and cans of caffeine-fortified power drinks but nothing to eat. They made her feel like an electrified wire had been run through her. He obviously drank quite a few himself: he was more than three hundred pounds. The first few times she’d seen him, in the underground bedroom, he’d been more or less gentle with her, although every inch of him disgusted her. He was a man of indeterminate age, somewhere between forty and sixty, but so ruined it was impossible to tell. Clearly an alcoholic, a smoker, and definitely a bad man. She’d been brought to him and Earl introduced him as their “favourite bachelor.” There was no mystery to that. Some people took no care of themselves, but they had money and so they could do as they wished. Mr. Sugar was rich and he was a nine-year-old in the body of a debauched middle-aged man, greedily playing with his toys.

He’d come at the end of that first awful week in the rooms.

After six days in the motel, Earl had appeared and led her to the car he’d brought her from the airport in. She knew from talking carefully to Tania during their lessons that her destination was a place that was called “the rooms” and that she would stay there a long time. No effort now was made to hide her in the car or prevent her from seeing where she was going. Clearly, they never intended her to reappear in the world again.

She hadn’t seen the outside world since she’d arrived in Canada a week before. Then Earl pushed her head down and put her back into the car. As he was pulling away, she saw the name of the motel. Forty Winks. Forty lashes was more like it. She hoped she’d never lay eyes on it again. Forty minutes south of the motel, he changed to narrower, rural roads and eventually into farmland. He continued on to a house at the end of a long straight road. It was an older house, a nice brick country farmhouse set back from the road and surrounded by fields and other farmhouses. He brought her out, holding her wrists behind her, and unlocked a set of doors. There were two men inside, guards, she quickly realized, men she heard called Gene and Bobby. Bobby took her from Earl and led her downstairs. A door at the bottom of a set of steep steps opened onto the basement. There were rooms here, some with closed doors. There was a living room with two couches and a television attached to one of the walls. Two girls, one of whom was the girl called Timmy, were sitting on one of the couches. Evidently, Timmy’s English, and perhaps her obedience, had permitted her re-entry into the general population. She looked beautiful now, and she had a new dress.

Bobby snapped his fingers and both girls rose. He made Timmy sit back down and passed Larysa to the other. “Show her to her room,” he said, and the girl took Larysa gently by the arm.

“Come,” she said.

“I am Cherry,” she said.

“Kitty,” she replied, knowing doing anything but playing strictly by the rules at this point would be suicide.

“Your English is good.”

“I learn to speak in high school, and I take … I was take courses in English. French also.”

“I wish I can speak like you.” She led Larysa to a door that went into a hallway off the living room.

“How long have you been here?”

Cherry laughed softly. “My life. How it feels. But half-year now.” She led Larysa down another set of steep stairs. The air became cold and musty.

“Here we are.” Cherry opened a door and showed Larysa into a room made of dirt. There was nothing here but a row of doors standing in a wall that went from the floor to the ceiling of the earthen space. Someone had dug this room out. In the wall to their right, there was a concrete frame in which a heavy steel door had been mounted. “This was Gina’s room,” Cherry said, showing Larysa to a door. “Now is yours.”

“Gina got out?”

Cherry just looked at her, and Larysa finally realized what happened to the girls here. Perhaps some of them, like Tania/Timmy, were pulled back from the brink by good luck, but now she didn’t want to know what had happened to Gina. What happened to her was something Cherry knew, but it wasn’t time to tell the new girl that. She would have a long time to live with the truth. Her heart sank farther as Cherry let her into the room. There was a filthy mattress on the floor, a steel rod that had some other girl’s clothes still hanging on it, and a small side table with two drawers in it up against the wall. Here, the walls were made of earth, too.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“Wait. Wait until someone wants you.”

“When?”

“Any time,” said Cherry. Then, safe in the clay-walled room, she switched to Russian: “If you cooperate, you eat. If you don’t, you starve. This place is for men who do whatever they want to a woman. Hard or soft, gentle or vicious, you will meet them all. Outside, they are other people. In here, they do whatever they want. They come from all over. One day, there were Germans here. If someone likes you, they will deliver you to them. Hotels, warehouses, homes. Wherever they want you, you go. No one knows you are here. You may choose not to live, many girls have chosen not to live. But if you want to live, you must do your best and avoid pain and suffering.”

“How do they get away with it?”

“Nothing like this would ever happen in Canada …”

She gave Larysa some threadbare sheets. “Try to keep a part of yourself safe, Kitty. One day, they may find us, and it would be better to be alive then.”

“My name is Larysa,” she said in English, holding her hand out in thanks, but her gesture was cut short by a slap.

“My name Cherry. Your name Kitty. You never say name again. Your Larysa is dead.” She turned smartly and walked back to the door. “I wish you luck,” she said in their mother tongue, “and if you do not have luck, I wish you a speedy release.”

She left and closed the door. Larysa heard her walking slowly back down the hallway. When the hallway was silent, she remained standing in the middle of the dirt room where a girl, or any number of girls before her, had once lived.

In the second week, she was visited on almost a daily basis by Mr. Sugar. He had her in one of the rooms on the floor above. Then, in the third week, he had paid enough to have her brought to him. Sugar did not let her out of the house, not that week, nor the next, nor the week after that: for almost a whole month he lay on top of her, tortured her, doing whatever came to his blackened imagination. Every inch of him imparted some awful scent or flavour, and it was all she could do not to vomit on him.

But she had decided she wanted to live. So she did what she was told to do. And she acted as if she liked it because that was the price of avoiding the rest of her fate.

After these three weeks, she was suddenly brought back to the rooms and told that Sugar had been outbid. Outbid? She was baffled by this idea. But with this, the whole depraved order of the place was laid bare to her. They weren’t mere whores here, no. They were prize lots, given to the highest bidder, for a week at a time. Sugar had become complacent and missed out; Terry Brennan had stepped ardently into the fray and claimed her. But he would not have her at the house. For his two weeks, before Mr. Sugar won her back, Brennan came to the rooms, only once asking for Larysa to come to the house, a day, Larysa now understood, that his wife had been out of town. If not for that visit, she would never have found where Brennan lived.