Chapter 2 - Blood on the Lake
The words hung in the conditioned air of the car like toxic gas.
Alana bled to death.
Disappeared into the lake.
“Sophie...” I felt the blood drain from my head so quickly my vision narrowed to a gray tunnel. “Start from the beginning. Every single detail. Right now.”
Sophie swallowed hard, her hand gently stroking Maya’s downy dark hair. The baby gave a tiny, contented sigh in her sleep, completely oblivious to the horror surrounding her arrival into this world.
“Alana came here on a temporary hospitality work visa from a small town outside Bucharest,” Sophie whispered, her voice tight and hurried. “She was sweet, quiet, and terrified of everything. When we were assigned as roommates in June, she was already six months pregnant. She wore oversized men’s flannel shirts and tied ace bandages around her ribs during her shifts so the management wouldn't notice.”
“Why didn't she go to a clinic?” I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Duluth has three regional hospitals!”
“Because of Marcus Sterling,” Sophie said, shuddering at the name.
Marcus Sterling was the general manager of Whispering Pines. His family owned half the commercial logging acreage in northern Minnesota, and his brother was the presiding district judge for the county. When I had dropped Sophie off in June, Sterling had stood on the resort porch in his pressed linen shirt, giving me that practiced, country-club smile, assuring me that the staff quarters were monitored by round-the-clock security and that our daughters were in the safest hands in the state.
“Sterling took her passport, Mom,” Sophie continued, her tears flowing freely now. “He took her visa papers, her social security card, everything. He told her she owed twelve thousand dollars for her international transit and room fees. He told all the foreign girls that if they went off the property or sought medical care in town, he would report them to immigration enforcement as undocumented fugitives and have them deported to federal holding pens.”
“My God,” I breathed, horror settling over me like a suffocating shroud. “It’s human trafficking.”
“Alana went into labor on a Tuesday night,” Sophie said, her voice cracking with the memory. “It was raining so hard the lake had flooded the lower dock. She was screaming in the bathtub. I ran to Sterling’s office at midnight, begging him to call an ambulance. He grabbed me by the throat, Mom. He shoved me into the wall and said that an ambulance meant county health inspectors, and health inspectors meant an audit of his seasonal payroll.”
Sophie pulled her collar aside. Faint, yellowish bruises in the distinct shape of four fingers were still visible against her pale skin.
“He brought his private handyman, an old man named Vance who lived in the maintenance cabin,” Sophie sobbed. “They delivered Maya on the bathroom rug using sewing shears and boiled water. Alana was hemorrhaging. She lost so much blood her lips turned gray before dawn. I begged them to take her to the emergency room, but Sterling locked the dorm door from the outside. He said... he said women give birth in the woods every day and that her body would adjust.”
“And she died?”
“She died holding my hand at four in the morning on Monday,” Sophie wept, burying her face against the car seat’s plastic frame. “Her last words were in broken English. She looked at Maya, then at me, and said, ‘Keep her away from the water. Don’t let him sell my baby.’ When Sterling came back with Vance at sunrise, they wrapped Alana in a plastic boat tarp. They put her in the back of a maintenance truck. Sterling looked at me holding Maya, and he smiled. A sick, dead smile.”
Sophie gripped my arm from the back seat, her fingers digging through my sleeve with desperate strength.
“He said: ‘Well, Anderson, looks like your roommate skipped out on her contract and left her luggage behind. You’re going to nurse this kid for three more weeks until my private placement broker from Minneapolis arrives. If you open your mouth to anyone, your mother will get an unexpected visit at her house in St. Paul.’”
The realization hit me like a physical blow. The cheerful phone calls over the last month. The sudden cheerfulness that felt slightly too loud, too bright. Sophie hadn't been growing happier; she had been reading from a script with a gun to her head, protecting me while she quietly bought a car seat, formula, and waited for the one day she knew I would drive up that gravel road to take her home.
Before I could speak, a sharp metallic rap sounded against my driver's side window.
I jumped in my seat, gasping.
Standing outside my door was Marcus Sterling.
May you like
He was dressed in a tailored navy polo shirt, his silver hair neatly combed, holding a clipboard against his chest. Behind him, parked across the gravel lane, was a heavy black Ford pickup truck—the maintenance vehicle—with an older man in grease-stained coveralls sitting behind the wheel with the engine idling.
Sterling tapped his heavy gold signet ring against my glass again, motioning with two fingers for me to roll down the window.
