Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013) Read Free Page A

a pyramid scheme. Plus, who the hell’s going to buy an emu from you?”
    “One egg feeds a family of five.”
    “Where you going to find a family that eats emu eggs?”
    “Internet, maybe? Beats me.”
    She crunched some ice from her drink. “I’ve been wanting to get into stocks my whole life. Something safe, but something with a good payback. My bank CDs are getting like, well I’m not sure, but those stocks I hear are going up 20 percent and all.”
    “Well, some of mem are, Caryn. The thing to remember is a lot of those stocks weren’t up at all last year. Stocks should be long term. If you want to play them short for a big return, well, that’s where you get burned. Still beat emus, though.”
    She seemed somehow burdened by this idea. “The little guys, like Chet and me, we ought to have some way of getting profits like the big boys. He works hard. I work hard. Get to the end of the year and what do you have? Same as you started the year off with. Lauren’s chippin’ about college already. I don’t even know if she’s smart enough. But it costs real bread.”
    “There’s a couple of education trusts that are—”
    “—Want to see her?”
    “Uh … yeah.”
    Caryn led me back into the living room and down a short hallway. We stood outside the door on our right. Caryn raised her fist and knocked as she pushed open the door. “Sweetie? Lauren? This here’s Art, one of our new friends?”
    Chet had said she was ten, and he wasn’t lying. Pedophiles usually round the age down. Lauren was cute in a plain, wholesome way, slender and rather tall. She stood there beside the bed at loose attention, her hands folded behind her back and her feet turned in, looking not quite at me and not quite away. She had her mother’s dark eyes and nice skin. Dad’s dark hair. Caryn had dressed her in a simple blue smock dress, white socks turned down and red canvas tennies with cartoon characters on them. Her hair was parted in the middle and tied off in two opposing pigtails that fell to her shoulders. The pigtails are a well-known deviant’s delight, and I was instantly furious at Lauren being turned out by this woman next to me, her mother. Lauren was the picture of innocence, and I wanted to run out of the house with her and take her someplace where her childhood could be removed like a bad part and replaced with a new, better one. One of my faults is that I feel children are precious. There was a TV going in the corner—music videos—and an open textbook on the bed. Dangling from the closet door were a couple of clothes hangers with a skirt and blouse on them, still packaged in clear plastic from the cleaners. In another corner stood a full-length mirror framed by those makeup lights you see backstage.
    “Oh. Hi.”
    Chet had told me he “started her” when she was two, taking pictures of her naked, getting her “used to things.” He gradually escalated the touching to include himself. He turned her to friends for profit when she was six—more pictures, more touching. She really took to it. Anything you wanted. Chet had ruined an entire life. In that moment, if he had been there with us, I would have had to restrain myself from pushing him into the hallway out of his daughter’s sight and killing him bare-handed. I knew there was no way that Lauren would ever have her childhood replaced with a better one. It would be her foundation forever, a nightmare from which she could never quite awaken, a painful haze through which she sleepwalked the daily thing called her life. Lauren had the resigned eyes and the aura of passive invincibility found in nearly all children who have escaped to the last place they can go—to the private, silent cave of their own selves.
    She looked at me very briefly, and I looked very briefly back, trying to tell her with my eyes that I was not what she thought I was. But I could tell by the way she looked away that she already knew who I was, and why I was here. There are few