Seven hours later, somewhere in Kentucky, they ran into road work. Ilka had left the freeway to find a rest stop. They’d already paused once for Lydia to stretch her legs and go to the bathroom. She’d insisted on keeping out of sight while they drove. Ilka felt it was unnecessary, that they were far enough away from Racine, but Lydia had just looked at her blankly before crawling back in and getting settled.
They were behind a long line of cars at a temporary stoplight, waiting to cross a river bridge with one lane closed for repairs. The line of cars zipping past them from the other side was endless. Ilka felt sure many more of them were allowed to cross than from their line; whenever it was their turn, they advanced only a few short spurts before stopping. She noticed woods on the other side of the river they’d have to drive through to get back to the freeway.
Ilka rolled her window down and swore. They were wasting so much time. Her phone rang, and she checked the display. Her mother. She thought about answering but put the phone on mute and waited for the silent ringing to end. It still boggled her mind that her father was alive, and she couldn’t imagine how her mother would react to the news. Telling her would have to wait until she’d found him.
She was still holding the phone when the line began moving again, and she straightened up in her seat, expecting to cross the bridge this time. But again, the line stopped, and she yelled out the window.
She googled Lydia Rogers and stared in astonishment at the number of articles that popped up. Had she spelled the name correctly? She checked; yes, she had. After enlarging the photos on her phone’s screen, she saw it was the sister, with longer hair that fell gently onto her shoulders. In other photos her hair had been styled up, and her face was of course younger, but it wasn’t difficult to recognize her. Ilka clicked on the first article and gaped at the headlines.
“The Baby-Butcher of San Antonio.” Shocked, she scrolled down through the first row of headlines. “Baby-Butcher Wipes Out Own Family,” “Rogers Behind Stolen Bodies of Babies,” “Fleeing from the Police,” “Drug Smuggling.”
Ilka enlarged the text to find out what these gruesome acts had to do with the photos of Lydia. A moment later the drivers behind her began honking—cars in front of her were already crossing the bridge. She tossed her phone aside, and when she floored it the hearse lurched forward.
She stared in the rearview mirror at the shiny lid of the coffin. Her knuckles were white from gripping the wheel, she noticed. She badly needed cigarette smoke deep in her lungs; she craved the dizziness that would dull her growing nausea as her brain processed the short headlines.
The cars behind them had long since passed her when Ilka spied a rest stop ahead in the woods. She turned in and sat motionless for a long time, staring again in the mirror at the coffin while considering whether to call the police or get in the back and lock the coffin. Instead she reached in her bag and grabbed her pack of cigarettes, then pushed in the cigarette lighter—one of the advantages of driving an old car. She opened her window a crack, closed her eyes, and leaned back against the headrest, waiting for the tobacco to reach her nerves. A wave of dizziness finally rolled over her, and she savored the moment. After stubbing the cigarette out, she reached for her phone.
The events described by the headlines had taken place in Texas in 2005, and there was no doubt they referred to Lydia. Among other things, she had been accused of killing infants and stealing baby corpses from the morgue and out of graves, after which she filled them with drugs and smuggled them over the border from Mexico.
One of the photos was of a ten-month-old baby, Gina, one of Lydia Rogers’s many victims. The baby was obviously dead in the picture, but she was dressed in red pajamas with small bears. She’d been taken from a morgue and was found by the police when a younger woman (not Rogers, the article stated) attempted to cross the border into Texas with the baby “asleep” in its baby buggy.
“Stuffed Babies” was how the journalist described them. Ilka was dumbfounded. There was also a photo of the house where Lydia was said to have lived before fleeing. Two gutted baby corpses had been found in her backyard. Two pouches for drugs.
Another headline, “The Brutal Baby-Butcher Strikes Again,” was followed by a long article about how Lydia Rogers had shot her brother and his wife and their two daughters. She’d also shot several men who had tried to rescue the family. A manhunt was formed, which led the authorities to the two baby corpses. The article named Lydia as the head of the dead-baby smuggling ring that had been operating for several years.
Ilka was so absorbed in reading the articles that she didn’t hear the car pulling into the rest stop. Nor did she hear the footsteps approaching. She was startled when a man flung her door open and dragged her out onto the ground, her phone flying through the air. Before she could react, he’d bound her hands behind her back with plastic cable ties that cut into her wrists.
A bandanna covered the lower half of the man’s face. As he was about to slide into the hearse, she kicked him and screamed, “What the hell are you doing!”
In a second he was all over her again. He opened her mouth with hands that stank of motor oil, ripped off his bandanna, and stuffed it into her mouth. She gasped for breath and tried to kick him again, but he grabbed her ankles and bound them with another thick cable tie. He began going through her coat pockets, and when he came up empty, he rolled her onto her back and pressed against her, hard.
“You have a wallet?” he hissed. He sounded younger than he looked.
Ilka shook her head.
He was wearing a denim jacket and torn jeans. He worked his hand into her pant pocket, which reminded her of the twenty thousand dollars in her bag, money she had taken from Raymond Fletcher’s office the day before. The old man had originally given her the money to help her—a welcome-to-the-family gift, as he put it—but when she found out what an asshole he really was, she threw the money back into his face. After he was killed, though, she had entered his office and grabbed it out of his desk drawer. No one knew she’d returned the money to him, so no one would ever know she’d reclaimed it. The bills were in an envelope in her bag.
Was this guy somehow reading her mind? He jumped in the front seat of the hearse and started rummaging through her bag. He smiled in satisfaction as he pulled out the envelope, then he leaned across the seat and went through the glove compartment and side pockets of the doors, checked underneath the seats. Finally, he turned his attention to the coffin in back.
“Nnnnnn! Nnnnnn! Nnnnnn!” Ilka struggled to yell through the handkerchief in her mouth, but by then he’d already opened the rear door. From the ground she watched as he prepared to pull the coffin out. Suddenly the lid opened, and Lydia sat up with her gun pointed at him. He stepped back in shock, and a second later she shot him first in one knee, then the other. He fell to the ground screaming in pain.
Ilka stared in disbelief as Lydia crawled out of the back, still holding the gun. The man looked up at her, silent now, his mouth contorted, his eyes wide with terror.
Lydia walked over and pulled the bandanna out of Ilka’s mouth. The guy started screaming again.
“Shut up,” she snarled, pointing the gun at his chest.
Ilka could barely breathe, but she managed to say, “He took my money.” She explained about the twenty thousand dollars.
The man clamped his mouth shut as Lydia approached him. She found the bulging envelope in his denim jacket, then went through his pockets and fished out a black wallet, cell phone, and Ilka’s cigarettes.
She pulled out a knife and cut Ilka free, then helped her to her feet. “Did he steal anything else?”
Ilka shook her head and took the money, all the while watching Lydia out of the corner of her eye. Nothing about this woman resembled the nun she’d known from the funeral home, and Ilka was still so shocked by what she’d read that she couldn’t look her in the eye. Lydia made no attempt to hide the gun; on the contrary, she wielded it as if she might start shooting again at any moment.
Ilka rubbed her wrists as Lydia looked around inside the hearse.
“Where’s my bag?”
The guy was beginning to moan again, loudly, as he crawled toward his car. He left a trail of blood behind him.
Ilka didn’t understand. “What bag?”
“The one I packed, my travel bag.”
“I didn’t load any bag,” Ilka said. She thought a moment, then she remembered the dark-blue bag with the leather handle. “It must still be in the garage.”
“You can’t be serious.” For a moment Lydia looked like herself again. “You didn’t bring it along?”
Ilka shook her head. “No—it must be in the garage,” she repeated.
“Take me back to the funeral home.” Now Lydia was sneering at Ilka. Her eyes were black, and she pushed the barrel of the gun against Ilka, who staggered back against the hearse. “Now!”
Lydia’s face was contorted with rage. The gunshots from a few minutes earlier were still ringing in Ilka’s ears, and she knew she should follow the woman’s orders, but she shook her head.
“No.” She kept shaking her head. “I won’t. If you want to go back to Racine, you’re on your own.”
The image of Lydia from the newspaper articles was frozen in Ilka’s mind. She wanted nothing more than to tuck her tail between her legs and run.
“Give me the keys.” Lydia held out her hand and stepped close to her, so close that they were touching.
Ilka’s head began spinning; Lydia was short, but her fury made her seem ten feet tall. She glared up at Ilka with a look on her face she’d never shown as a nun.
Ilka caught herself breathing in short spurts, and she straightened up. She wasn’t about to let Lydia see how frightened she was. “No,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Go ahead, shoot me. I just want to go down and find my father, I don’t want to get mixed up in this.”
They stood for a moment, staring at each other.
“I hope for your sake I never see you again,” Lydia spat.
She’s going to shoot me after all, Ilka thought. But Lydia turned on her heel and walked over to the man at the car. Ilka slumped against the hearse, shaken but alive. She didn’t hear what Lydia said when she bent over the man. He shook his head and said something as he started to hand her his car keys, but the woman stood up and walked away. Back in the direction they’d come from.
Ilka slowly got to her feet when Lydia disappeared behind the trees. Her legs were shaking, which annoyed her. She clasped her hands tightly in front of her.
“Who the hell was that?” The man was leaning against the rear tire of his car now, crying. All of his tough-guy act was gone, and he looked like a boy. A big one, but still just a boy.
“She’s a nun.” She looked at his bleeding knees. The shots had been bull’s-eyes, both of them. She walked over to the open coffin, took out the lining, and tossed it over to him along with his wallet and phone.
“She was going to steal my car,” he said, whining now. “She just about shot me, again. But I got a flat. That’s why I pulled in. If I wouldn’t have gotten that flat, I’d never have run into you.” He made it sound as if it were all Ilka’s fault.
She had no pity for him. “You shouldn’t have robbed me.”
That angered him. “I needed the money. For a new tire. I can’t get to work without my car, and they’ll fire me!”
“Call nine-one-one, and get something wrapped around your knees.”
She pushed the coffin back into place. She felt his eyes on her back as she walked around the hearse and got in, but he kept his mouth shut. She glanced in the rearview mirror; he was wrapping strips of material around one of his knees.
She closed her eyes a moment and leaned her head back. Her phone beeped: a text from her mother. Ilka felt like calling her, she needed a shoulder to cry on, but she knew the moment she heard her mother’s voice, it would all come out. And that wouldn’t be good for either of them.
How’s the weather in Racine? Is it cold? her mother wrote.
No, the weather’s been great, and it’s lighter than it is back home right now. She sent a sun and a kiss, then she started the car and checked the side mirror, in the direction Lydia had disappeared.
The man with the bleeding knees was still sitting on the ground when she pulled out. Darkness was falling, and Key West still lay far away.