The Record Keeper (Murphy Shepherd, #3)

by Charles Martin

When I could muster the courage to pick up a pen, I found my hope bucket empty and the page wordless. I, as much as anyone, knew that hope is what feeds us. It’s the currency of mankind. The fuel of the soul. Without it, we wither and die.

Every girl in our care had walked into Freetown wearing some form and expression of shame. Across the board. It was true of all of them. It had been put there by someone else and wrapped around them like a blanket. Not only had it clothed them, but it had become their identity. But by nature and by design, life at Freetown swapped out that blanket for something new. Something that fit. Something they wanted to wear. Something that said, “I am beautiful. I am one in a billion. And I am priceless.”

When each of us arrived at Freetown, our hearts and souls were held together by twine and tape and glue. Little more than a patchwork of pieces. Like a sweater with one loose thread, a simple pull threatened to unravel the whole. Each of us walked in with a singular need: to be known. I used to think the need ended there. Repair the tear and fix the person. Wrong. What I saw happening across the streets of Freetown, from fashion to dance to photography, convinced me there is one need deeper. To be accepted in the knowing. Maybe that’s rescue.

Mom was trying to pay the bills and got us in the process, proving there’s a blurry line between prostitution and trafficking.

When he continued, his voice had softened and he spoke as much to himself as to me. “If you don’t know something is wrong, and don’t know what to call it, and if it’s all you’ve ever known, then it’s difficult to know for certain that it shouldn’t be happening to you. I once explained abuse like growing up in a world without hot water. If cold was all you ever knew, then a cold shower was normal. All you ever took. You had no choice. That doesn’t mean you liked it, but you didn’t complain. You could imagine something else, but what good would it do? The dial you were given read On-Off, not Warm-Cold.”

We didn’t know who we were, and more importantly, we didn’t know whose we were—forever proving that identity precedes purpose. You can’t know who you are until you’ve settled whose you are.

Whoever flew us across the pond knew that if we had no record, then we didn’t exist. And if we didn’t exist, then they could do what they wanted to us because no one would care enough to come looking. Which allowed actions without consequences. Before you’re rescued, you first have to be lost, and to be lost you have to be someone. Otherwise, what’s lost? It’s an age-old tactic. Hitler did the same with the Jews. We had become ‘unborn.’

“I liked farm life. It agreed with me. The old man was a sheep herder. Sold the wool. Flock of a couple hundred. On two occasions I saw him leave in the middle of the night only to return in the morning with a wolf draped over his shoulder. More times than I could count, I saw him leave the safety of the flock to go find the one dumb sheep that got itself lost. And when he found it, he’d feed it, care for its wounds, and return it to the flock—teaching me more about life in three months than any human before or since.

There are more people enslaved today—women, children, girls and boys—than in the history of the world. And there will always be demand.” I nodded. “The intent of man’s heart.”

When she did speak, you could hear a pin drop. And she was looking at me. “I was lying on the floor of a shower. Some house in South Florida. Have no memory of how I got there. In the week prior I’d”—Casey held up her fingers like quotation marks—“‘serviced’ more than a hundred clients. Which in English means I’d been raped for profit fifteen times a day. One after another.

I’m told I was profitable. But that ‘profit’”—more quotation marks—“I never saw a dime. Selling flesh is different than selling drugs. Drugs you sell once. Flesh you sell a thousand times over. To help me forget, to transport my mind out of the hell in which my body lived, I did a lot of drugs.

Truth was, they’d had complaints. Said I was no longer desirable. Which makes me wonder, what had they done to me that even the worst of the perverted and whacked human beings on the planet couldn’t satisfy themselves with what was left of me?”

Since I woke up from my Rumpelstiltskin nap, Casey had continued to improve physically. Thanks to Gunner, she’d even quit taking sleeping medication. But emotionally she was not healthy. Having grown stronger, she began fighting the memories she couldn’t shake. Memories in which she constantly found herself helpless. And muted. She told us, “It’s like drowning every day only to find that someone lets you up long enough to suck in a breath of air just before they shove you down again.”

Her tone changed. “I watched a TED Talk last week where a computer hacker attended a conference—of the media. Many of you were there. He used your Bluetooth connection to hack your phones. What he found was consistent with the rest of the male population—over half of you have a daily porn addiction. Yet you argue you’re not hurting anybody. No big deal. Just a little peeky-boo. Nobody’s the wiser. But in economics you are creating what is called ‘demand.’ And throughout the history of the world, wherever demand exists,

someone meets it with what is called ‘supply.’” Casey pointed to herself. “I.e., me.” She paused to let that sink in. “I am supply. But it doesn’t end there. What starts as a porn addiction becomes pay-to-see. Then pay-to-experience. But that, too, gets old, and the pay-to-experience that used to satisfy no longer does. So now you pay-to-experience someone younger. Someone fresher. Soon the age drops. From eighteen to sixteen. Then fourteen. Twelve. Ten.” Casey studied the room. Most everyone had grown uncomfortable. “A wise man once told me that a man with a theory can never argue against a man with experience. I have seen with my two eyes ‘normal’ men like you satisfy themselves with five- and six-year-old boys and girls. If that’s not enough, they then posted the videos on the dark web and sold them so other miscreants could gorge on their carnage.”

Clay sat back down and Gunner returned to Ellie’s side. “That said, the soul is like Velcro, and when you brush up against someone else, especially when there are no clothes to separate you, part of you clings to them and part of them clings to you. Soon you find yourself carrying pieces of souls that you don’t want and don’t want you. But you can’t help it. It’s like being handcuffed to a stranger on the subway and your stop never comes.” She pointed to her book. “In your hands you hold the story of who I was. Casey Girl. Now I’m trying to figure out who I am. And yet, when I close my eyes, the faces return. The countless men. Twenty-four-seven, they play like a slideshow across my eyelids. I want to be me, whoever that is, but I’m left carrying them. I spend my days trapped inside memories I don’t want with people I don’t want and who don’t want me.” She shook her head.

the more my memory returns, and the more clearly I see. You should know that I’m approaching twenty-twenty. My question is this: What do I do with all those who gave so little and stole so much? What do I do with these men who live rent-free in my mind? Am I not of value? Do you not see me?” The room was silent. “A few weeks ago, we were talking. Me and the one who rescued me. He heard this bitter tone that you now hear in me, and he told me again, ‘Write it down. Tell the truth. Let it out.’ When I asked why, he pointed at my chest. ‘This thing you’re holding on to—this rage—is the poison we drink thinking it’ll kill someone else.’ So . . . once again, I am. Reminding me that those men stole pieces of my soul, and I want my pieces back.” Casey paused. Making eye contact with many in the room. “Why? Because in the blurred edges of my mind, I remember . . . I’m a daughter. A friend. One day I’d like to be a wife and—if my body can—a mom.” Casey was whispering now. “It’s my love letter to the me I used to be. And to all those like me.”

Love shows up.

He wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. “When you were laid up, body fighting infection, I spent a lot of time with Mister Bones. He’s a good man. Maybe the best of men. He told me a story. We were talking about him being White and me being Black, and he said that when Jesus was carrying his cross up that hill, he stumbled ’cause they’d beat him so bad. When he did, the soldiers grabbed a man out of the crowd and said, ‘Carry that.’ So this man named Simon shouldered that crossbar and, although the Book don’t say it, Bones think he lifted Jesus. And the two of them walked up that hill. One man carrying a crossbar and maybe helping Jesus when he stumble and Jesus carrying, well . . . everything else. “Bones told me that man was from Cyrene.” Clay looked at me. “That’s North Africa.” He paused. Wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “That means, according to Bones, the last man to touch Jesus in kindness was a Black man from North Africa.

I marveled at him. How much had been stolen? And yet six decades behind bars had not hardened him.

During my training at the Academy, he’d sometimes pull me out of class, hand me an eighty-pound pack, and point to the mountain. Rain, snow, sun, the end of the age, or the zombie apocalypse mattered not. If he pointed, we were headed up. This addition to my training produced a few things in me. It forced me never to get comfortable because at any second Bones might appear and cause me great discomfort. I was always just thirty seconds away from extreme physical and mental hardship. It also forged in me an ability to push myself past

my mental limits, because Bones accepted no argument. No excuse. I could have been at death’s door, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. He did. It’s just that he cared more about something else. He wanted to see if that trait did or could exist in me. Did I care about something more than me? Because if I didn’t, he was wasting his time.

did so from both memory and experience. “People who steal people, and then line up a train of miscreants and perverts deserving only of a single bullet, don’t think like you and me. Their business model is rape for profit. Twenty times a day. They open the door. ‘Please, come in.’ Then they sit at the table and count the dollars or smoke a Marlboro as some little girl or little boy’s spirit slowly exits their body beneath a blanket or another’s sweat. The only way you and I ever catch those people, the only way they ever pay for their sin, is when we learn to think more like them and less like us.” He held up a finger. “Notice I didn’t say ‘become like.’ I said ‘think like.’ There’s a difference. And one way we force ourselves to do that is to override what our body is telling us. Pain is a signal. That’s all. The body’s response to discomfort. We are here learning to mute it. Because if we don’t . .

A name. It was the only thing I could give me. Because I had nothing else.” He raised a finger. “In the years since, I’ve come to understand, no . . . to know . . . through the hundreds of people I’ve rescued, that nothing matters more than a name. It’s why it’s always been the first thing I’ve asked them. Because no matter what hell they’ve endured, a name can call them back out. A name establishes a record. Drives a stake in the ground. Shouts across the stratosphere, ‘I’m here! I matter! I’m not invisible!’

“When you’re in hell, slavery, nothing matters more than a name. Because with it, someone can walk up to the bars that shackle you, point at you among the many, and call you out—by name. A name is the singular thing that separates us from the ninety-nine. A name makes us the one.” The look in Bones’s eyes was one of longing. Of remembrance. And of pain. “Without a name . . . there is no record.”

The look on her face. A look that both carried and defended. It was one of the things I loved most about her. Maybe the most. How she loved. She never halved her love. She multiplied it. Exponentially. As a result, she never ran out of room. Which was why she was on the plane.

One of the things I loved about my island, before Frank blew up my boat and set everything on fire, was waking to the quiet in the mornings. Before daylight, after the crickets and the frogs quit, there was a momentary pause. Often several minutes. When all the world stood in silence and you wondered if your ears worked at all. It was as if all of creation just stopped and stared in wonder at what was about to happen. That the sun was about to rise. That light would once again pierce the darkness, and the darkness would roll back like a scroll.

Whose you are matters more to the soul than who you are or what you are.

I’d found my place in this world because of Bones. Why? One simple reason: I’d mattered more to Bones than Bones mattered to Bones.

The reasons for this fear might have been valid. Granted, he grew up in horrible situations, but so had Bones—and Bones was Frank’s antithesis. He didn’t live in fear and never had. Ever. He lived in freedom. Something Frank couldn’t buy no matter how much money he made or people he enslaved. My gut told me that Frank hated Bones because Bones didn’t end up like Frank. Frank had no power over his fear, and Bones not only had conquered his fear but had none. At

People in darkness don’t know they’re in darkness because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s their world. They navigate primarily by bumping off things that are stronger. Immovable. They don’t know darkness is darkness until someone turns on a light. Only then does the darkness roll back like a scroll. It has to. Darkness can’t stand light. And it hasn’t. Not since God spoke it into existence. The problem comes when you turn on a light and find those in darkness who, having seen light, prefer the dark.

Sometimes, given their depth, we become little more than the sum of our wounds, and it takes someone else to see what we can be instead of what we are.