The Altar Girl: A Prequel Read online

  ALSO BY OREST STELMACH

  The Boy from Reactor 4

  The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

  The Boy Who Glowed in the Dark

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Orest Stelmach

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477827970

  ISBN-10: 1477827978

  Cover design by David Drummond

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014953211

  For my parents, Eudokia and Bohdan Stelmach. Child refugees, proud Americans, devoted parents.

  Мамі і Татові--Вічная Пам’ять!

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  HE SNATCHED ME a block away from my apartment.

  I’d just driven back to New York after attending my godfather’s funeral in Hartford. A drive to Connecticut usually unwinds me. I crack open the moonroof and the wind sucks out my stress like God’s vacuum cleaner. Beauty surrounds me, along country roads, on rolling hills, and in the sound of silence. Once I reenter New York, however, the parkway twists and turns my insides. Gridlock awaits, at the toll bridge, on the sidewalks, and on the rungs of the corporate ladder. At least that’s how it always was for me.

  Until tonight.

  I’d sped toward the border of New York as though the Red Army were pursuing me in a fleet of Audis. I couldn’t wait to get out of Connecticut and leave my suspicions behind me. I didn’t really think anyone was following me, but I feared my godfather’s death might not have been an accident. That deduction didn’t bother me when I was among people, at the wake and the reception. Once I’d climbed into my car, however, the silence was too loud, the hills too desolate. I wondered if I’d asked too many questions and who’d heard me. Suddenly, I’d longed for the familiarity of the gridlock.

  After leaving my car at the garage at midnight, I walked along 1st Avenue savoring the smells of my neighborhood. The smell of pups from the doggie day care center, the aroma of rising crust from the pizzeria. I spied my apartment building up ahead. A hot shower awaited, the pizza was next door, and if I could have uncorked the Chianti telepathically, I would have. I was safe at home. No one would touch me here.

  I stopped at the corner of 82nd Street to let a car go by.

  A glove covered my mouth. A second set of hands lifted me off the pavement.

  A shiny black van screeched to a halt. The back doors opened.

  They hurled me inside.

  I landed on my elbow and hip. Pain ripped through me.

  The doors slammed shut. Darkness enveloped me.

  “Don’t scream,” a man said. “And don’t move.”

  I froze.

  It all happened so fast I had no time to fight, no time to resist, no time to even think. One minute I was a random carbohydrate addict dreaming of medicating with food and wine, and the next minute I was some stranger’s prisoner.

  “We go way back, Nadia. Be good. Don’t make me hurt you even more than I got to.”

  Except he wasn’t a stranger. I recognized the voice as soon as I heard it, but I couldn’t place it. It boasted a mellifluous tone that contrasted with coarse enunciation and gutter grammar. He knew me. We knew each other. According to him, we went way back. But I didn’t frequent the gutter, so who was he? I could see him sitting in a chair at the far end of the van, but I couldn’t make out his face or any of the objects around him. My eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness.

  The van started moving.

  A sense of helplessness gripped me. First, I’d lost my freedom. Now I was being taken somewhere against my will. I was an average woman. I wasn’t trained in self-defense. I wasn’t a cop, spy, or martial artist. I was a financial analyst. I was good with numbers, but math skills weren’t going to get me out of this situation.

  These men could do anything they wanted to me, and I would be helpless to stop them.

  The thump of my heartbeat echoed in my ears.

  He lit a match. Long, elegant fingers cupped the flame to a face. Dirt clung to the skin beneath one of his nails. The flame illuminated a pair of lush lips, the kind that could suck a grapefruit dry from across the room. I caught a glimpse of his face. It belonged to a man who’d grown up with me in the Ukrainian-American community in Hartford. I hadn’t seen him since graduating high school, but I’d heard stories about him. Everyone in the community had heard the stories.

  The bad seed. The most handsome first-generation Ukrainian-American boy, the one mothers and their daughters had dreamed about until he revealed himself to be a true sociopath. This one didn’t hide his tendencies. There’d been arrests for a string of burglaries, illegal weapons possession, even rumors he was the lead suspect in two drug-related murders in Hartford. People spoke in whispers about him at church, that he’d gotten involved with the wrong crowd, lived on the edge of society. Outwardly, the community distanced itself from him. Secretly, however, many of the seniors enjoyed some Schadenfreude at the expense of his parents, for he created the illusion that their own dysfunctional first-generation kids were normal.

  Dim lights came to life in the ceiling. Recessed lights. Bright, brighter, full power.

  Donnie Angel sat facing me in one of two captain’s chairs.

  In full light, he still resembled the boy I’d grown up with, but time had been unkind to him. His lush cheeks had turned hollow. His jacket hung loosely on his formerly broad shoulders while a slight paunch pressed against his belt. As his midsection had thickened, his hair had thinned. Gone was most of the rock-star mane so many girls had dreamed of running their hands through.

  Someone once told me that spouses begin to look like each other over time. I’d never believed it but now I wasn’t so sure. Donnie Angel was evidence the theory might be true, if a man was married to his job and his job was crime.

  He wore a blue blazer with gold buttons, natty gray slacks, and black track shoes with white stripes. His eyes lit up when he saw that I recognized him. His lips stretched wide. It was a smile as spontaneous and genuine as the pile of s
hit I’d stepped in was deep. His teeth were still white and perfect. He could still smile. My God could he smile.

  “You look great, Nadia,” he said. “Just great. Someone told me they seen you at the funeral. Said you lost weight. Not that it didn’t look good on you. You always had a cute face, for a smart girl. You know what I mean. So how you been?”

  I could tell he was serious. He meant what he said—that I looked good, for a smart girl—and what he didn’t say. That in some sick way he was happy to see me even though he’d kidnapped me and made it perfectly clear that he was going to hurt me. That he was compelled to hurt me, presumably for something I’d done. I wasn’t particularly happy to see him, which meant I had to lie. I had to pretend to be cool even if I was petrified on the inside.

  “I’ve been good, Donnie. Real good.” My voice sounded unsteady. I prayed he couldn’t tell. I nodded at his blazer, its gold buttons to be specific. “Nice jacket. You look like you just got off the yacht in Newport. Free enterprise agrees with you.” I gave him a once-over and forced a smile of my own. “How’ve you been?”

  “Oh, I think you’re looking at it.” He gestured toward an assortment of decanters partially filled with liquor. “How about a drink?”

  “A drink?”

  “I got some Champagne in the fridge. French stuff in a bottle with flowers on it. Got a case of it from a guy who got it from a guy. Been saving this bottle for a special occasion.”

  I couldn’t believe he was acting as though we’d stumbled into each other at the Ukrainian National Home’s bar. There had been a time when the thought of Donnie Angel pulling out a bottle of champagne for me would have been the highlight of my life. Now, given the circumstances, it terrified me.

  “Donnie,” I said. “Why am I here?”

  He stood up and walked over to a small refrigerator in the corner of the van. Beside it, a side table was covered with a white sheet. A glint at his feet caught my eye. I glanced at the floor and realized his athletic shoes had metal spikes attached to the bottom, the kind worn by golfers, and track and field athletes. I tried to conjure various reasons why a sane man would wear spikes but couldn’t think of one. Then I tried to think of some reasons why an insane one would wear them during an interrogation and could think of only one.

  Bile rose up my throat.

  He twisted his body to reach into the corner and opened the fridge. He didn’t raise his voice or bother to look at me. He spoke matter-of-factly. “You know why you’re here.”

  “No I don’t. There must be some misunderstanding—”

  “Don’t do that.” He stood up from the fridge, Perrier Jouët in hand, his knuckles white. “Don’t patronage me. My mother used to patronage me. My mother’s dead now.”

  “Donnie, I’m not patronizing you.”

  “You were asking questions you shouldn’t have been asking. At the panakhyda and the reception after the funeral.” The panakhyda was a Ukrainian Catholic memorial service held the night before the funeral. “You know better. We’re gonna have to . . . we’re gonna have to talk about that.”

  “Talk about it?” I glanced at his cleats again.

  He looked me over and licked his lips. It was the look of an addict delaying gratification for a few minutes, or kidding himself that this time it would be different. This time he wouldn’t smoke, drink, or do whatever it was he meant when he said he had to hurt me. He smiled quickly as though that would erase the gesture from my memory.

  It didn’t.

  “Let’s don’t worry about that now. Let’s have a drink and catch up. You work in New York, right? Investments or some shit, isn’t it? I bet all the Ukes are really proud of you. They should be. You were a classy girl. I always thought the world of you.” He glanced at the Champagne, turned back to me and raised his eyebrows. Tilted the bottle in my direction so I could see the label. “Money, right?”

  I vaguely heard myself answering him because I was too busy searching for a means of escape. But there was none. A wall prevented access to the front of the van. The windows were blacked out and covered with shades. The only exit was through the rear door, and Donnie would have had his hands on me before I could raise the latch. The problem was that I was certain he was going to put his hands on me even if I didn’t try to escape. And he wasn’t going to use them to give me a warm embrace.

  Despite the adrenaline, the all-consuming nature of my body’s fight-or-flight response, I was still lucid enough to reason. I understood that there was a decent probability he might do serious bodily harm to me, or even kill me. It was this ability to reason that gave me hope.

  A crinkling sound snapped me from my stupor. Donnie peeled aluminum foil from around the cork.

  “This is just like a date,” he said, cheerily. “Did you ever think you’d go on another date with me?”

  “No, Donnie.” The operative word in his question was “another.” I’d done my best to forget the first one, and was hoping that after all his probable substance abuse, he might have forgotten about it, too.

  Instead, he popped the cork. Champagne burst out of the bottle and poured down its sides, covering his hand and the carpet. He licked two fingers and gave me a rakish grin.

  “You do remember our first date?” he said.

  I looked away from him. Tried not to blush, urged the blood out of my face so as not to give him any satisfaction. It did the opposite of what I requested, of course, and flooded my cheeks so badly my entire face stung.

  “Yeah, Donnie,” I said. “Of course I remember.”

  Although I wished I could forget my date with Donnie, there were other childhood memories I’d worked even harder to forget.

  CHAPTER 2

  AFTER STUDYING HIS compass and map carefully, Nadia’s father hacked off a dead limb from one of the trees. The morning sun poured through the gaps between the branches and made a circle of light atop a bed of pine needles. He told Nadia to sit down precisely in that spot, and she obeyed. Nadia’s brother, Marko, stood off to the side sipping water from his canteen.

  Beads of sweat covered her arms as though her skin was a pancake in the making. Her body pulsated from the two-mile hike. She was warmed up. Ready for the survival test. The details were a closely guarded secret, but she figured she’d have to build a camp and survive a night alone.

  Nadia took three deep breaths. She could do it. Whatever it took, she could do it. She wouldn’t let her father and her brother down. Heck, the forest wasn’t the worst place in the world. Not even close. In a month, she’d turn twelve and school would start again. Sixth grade. The day before summer vacation, Rachel Backus and her friends had promised to flush her “disgusting Russian head down the toilet” in September. She’d told them her parents were Ukrainian, not Russian, and that there was a big difference. They’d disagreed, and promised her head was going down the toilet no matter where it came from.

  Nadia looked around. Recognized the dip in the path ahead that lead down to the river. Diamondback Pass, they called it, because you could hear the rattlers hiss if you stepped in the wrong place. She spent her summers twenty miles away on a five-hundred-acre lot of land in northwestern Connecticut that Ukrainian immigrants had bought on the cheap in the 1950s. They used it as the setting for their PLAST scout camps. Plastun was the historical Ukrainian name for a Cossack scout or sentry. Sometimes the counselors bussed the plastuny and plastunky north to the Appalachian Trail to hike for the day. Nadia remembered the spot by its pine groves.

  Her father walked up to her. He reminded her of an old lion, with sandy hair combed straight back and blown thick by the wind.

  “Nadia, you live in America,” he said in Ukrainian. “The greatest country in the world. This makes you a lucky girl. You understand that, don’t you, my kitten?”

  “Yes, father.”

  “And you’re sitting at the exact point,” he said, tapping his right index finger
on the map in his left hand, “where Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York meet. This makes you an even luckier girl. How many girls can say they’ve been in three states at the same time?”

  Nadia glanced at the ground beside her. “Really?” A smile spread on her already-chapped lips. “That is so cool.”

  “And now you’re going to become the youngest girl ever to pass the PLAST survival test. Are you ready?”

  “Yes, father.”

  “Good.

  “Here is your knapsack. Inside you’ll find a compass and map, food and water for one day, three matches, a knife, a poncho, a plastic bag, some twine, a flashlight, and a mess kit. Attached to the bottom of the knapsack is your sleeping bag. You must survive three nights on your own with just these things. Do you understand?”

  What? Three nights? Nadia nodded her head mechanically and managed a “Yes, father.” He couldn’t possibly mean it. He and Marko would probably be close by. Yeah, that was it. They’d be close by.

  “Your brother and I will be far away,” he said. He glared at Marko the way he did when he was ready to ream one of them out, which was pretty much all the time. “Neither of us will be holding your hand.”

  Marko gave their father a blank stare in return, but Nadia knew Marko was probably fantasizing about drop-kicking him from here to Niagara Falls.

  Her father knelt before her so they were face-to-face. Nadia bit her tongue to try to look strong.

  “Your parents are immigrants,” he said. “You have a strange name. You speak a strange language. And you are not a Barbie doll. That is the cruel truth. You aren’t going to get by in this world with your looks alone.

  “To succeed in this country, you’re going to have to compete with men. Men are selfish, petty, and cruel. The world where this behavior is rewarded is called business. To beat men in business you will have to be smarter and tougher than them. We know you’re smart. We know you’re very, very smart. But are you tough?”