Dead Hunt

But Alain had good looks and money, and that was all that mattered to my sister. Of course, she was beautiful too, all blond curls and Scarlett O’Hara waist. She married him in a big wedding—long gown, doves. Lavish does not begin to describe it. I thought it was embarrassing.’’

‘‘Do you have pictures?’’ asked Carley.

‘‘I have nothing to remind me of her,’’ said her grandmother. ‘‘She is dead to me.’’

Carley looked wide-eyed at her grandmother. ‘‘What happened?’’ she whispered.

‘‘If you’ll be patient, I’ll tell you,’’ said her grandmother.

Diane wanted her to hurry and get it out, but she could see Kingsley leaning forward, hanging on every word.

‘‘Alain was in the shipping business, as was his father before him and his father before him. They have been around these parts forever and most people think they are some of the most respectable people on the Outer Banks. Little do they know what they have living among them.

‘‘My husband lost his job one time—he was an accountant before he retired—and Alain offered him a position in his office doing bookkeeping. My sister never let me forget their largesse, as she called it. I can hear her now, the way she pronounced it, always more accented than the rest of the words in the sentence, as if she were stuck on one sheet of her worda-day calendar.’’

Gramma took a sip of tea and grabbed a chocolate chip cookie. She ate all of it before she resumed her story.

‘‘My sister got pregnant. It wasn’t easy for her. She had triplets.’’ Sarah smiled. ‘‘Cutest little things you have ever seen and just as identical as you could imagine. She had to keep colored ribbons tied to their wrists to tell them apart. I helped her with them. That was about the only time we got along was taking care of those babies. Alain was indifferent to them. He would pat their heads, smile when someone complimented them, but I didn’t see any real love. Not like your daddies loved you two.’’

‘‘Were their names Iris, Lily, and Rose?’’ asked Diane.

Sarah nodded. ‘‘Yes, they were. Iris, Rose, and Lily Delaflote.’’

The sun went behind a cloud and it got a little cool. Diane noticed that a few mosquitoes were flying about.

‘‘One day by accident my husband saw one of the transactions and found out what kind of cargo Alain Delaflote dealt in,’’ said Sarah. ‘‘That knowledge changed our lives.’’

Chapter 47

Sarah eyed her granddaughter for several seconds. Finally Gramma reached out a hand and touched Carley’s smooth, tanned arm and rubbed it.

‘‘That’s why I was trying to protect you,’’ she said. ‘‘I didn’t want you to ever be kidnapped and sold into slavery.’’

Carley clearly wasn’t expecting that. Her laugh was almost a musical giggle. ‘‘Oh, Gramma, they don’t have slavery anymore. This is the twenty-first century,’’ she said.

Sarah Wallace’s gaze lingered on her granddaughter a moment longer. She frowned. ‘‘You ask those two if there’s still such a thing as slaves,’’ she said.

Carley looked over at Diane and Kingsley with an indulgent smile. The kind arrogance of youth, thought Diane as she took a breath.

‘‘Twelve point three million people are enslaved around the world in forced labor, forced military service, or forced sexual servitude. The largest category is sexual enslavement,’’ said Diane.

She paused as Carley and her mother, Ellen, stared at her. The grandmother quietly sipped her tea.

‘‘I used to be a human rights investigator,’’ Diane added.

Diane watched Carley’s face change from a smile to that openmouthed, round-eyed expression she often saw when she gave those statistics to people who were unaware of some of the very bad things in the world. Diane hated that she was taking away a little piece of Carley’s innocent idealism.

‘‘Is that true?’’ Carley whispered. ‘‘Really, there are slaves in the world? Not in the United States, though?’’

Here goes another piece of idealism, thought Diane.

‘‘There are about ten thousand people enslaved today in the United States. About forty-nine percent are in sexual servitude; the rest are in some form of forced labor.’’

‘‘That’s what Alain dealt in,’’ said Gramma, setting her iced tea down with a clunk on the glass-topped table. ‘‘The community around the Outer Banks thought he was a public-spirited man. They gave him awards for his community service.’’ She snorted.

‘‘Public service. What the man did was sell teenage girls. He would have these extravagant parties for girls from orphanages and homes for delinquent girls. He would always have teenagers, nothing else, strictly teenagers. His official line was that they were harder to place than younger children and needed the extra help. Sometimes these parties would host parents looking for children to adopt. But you see, these prospective parents were really people shopping for slaves. They would pick out what they wanted, place the order with him, and he would fill it—with the help of some corrupt officials, of course. Sometimes the places he got the girls didn’t have the kind of girl somebody wanted, and local girls would disappear after some of these parties. Not right away—he knew that would attract attention—but in a few weeks or a few months. Sometimes it was a young tourist who would go missing. Officially, the parents were told their daughters drowned in the ocean or ran away. I know now that just about every one that went missing was kidnapped by my brother-in-law.

‘‘Like an idiot, when my husband told me what he discovered, I told my sister what Alain was doing. I told her she had to take her children and leave. She just laughed at me and said, ‘He wouldn’t sell his own children, silly.’ I just stared at her. I couldn’t believe she knew about it. I thought she misunderstood what I said. I said, ‘Jerusha, he’s selling the kids he’s supposed to be helping.’ She got that look she got when she disagreed with me. She would put her head down and glare at me. Then she told me if God had blessed these children, He wouldn’t have taken their parents. I couldn’t believe she said it. I didn’t know how to respond.

‘‘The next day, Alain came to my house. I remember it like yesterday. Ellen was fifteen. It was summer— 1975. Ellen and her friend Laney had just got back from seeing Jaws. They were wearing shorts and sun tops, sitting in the grass talking and giggling. I was on the porch reading a magazine. Alain came up on the porch all friendly. He didn’t threaten or anything like that; he just looked over at the two of them and said how nubile Ellen and Laney were, how they were almost ready for plucking.