The Art of Deception

Of Mice and Spiders

Daphne Matthews negotiated the aisle between cots occupied by, among others, a spaced-out seventeen-year-old methadone addict, a girl shaking from the DTs, and a street-worn fifteen-year-old seriously pregnant. With the continuing spring rains and cool weather, like mice and spiders, the young women migrated inside as conditions required.

The basement space held an incongruous odor: of mildew and medicine, spaghetti and meatballs. Bare bulbs, strung up like lights at a Christmas tree sale, flickered and dimmed over twenty-some teens, two resident RNs, and two volunteers, including Matthews. This was the Shelter’s third home in three years, a cavernlike basement space accessed via the Second Presbyterian Church, one of the five oldest structures still standing in Seattle. A thirty-block fire in 1889 had taken all the rest, just as the streets would take these girls if the Shelter ceased to exist.

For the past five months Matthews had doubled her volunteer time at the Shelter, less out of a sense of civic duty than the result of a combination of guilt and grief over the loss of a despondent teenage girl-a regular at the Shelter-who had taken her life. The girl, also pregnant, had jumped to her death from the I-5 bridge.

Matthews knew the young woman on the cot before her only as Margaret-no surnames were used at the Shelter. She asked if she could join her, and the girl acquiesced, less than enthu-siastically. Matthews sat down beside her onto the wool blanket, leaning her back against the cool brick wall.

Sitting this close, Matthews could see a curving yellow moon of an old bruise that lingered on the girl’s left cheekbone, an archipelago of knitted scars curving around that same eye. No doubt Margaret told people they were sports injuries or the result of a fall. She was fifteen going on forty.

“We spoke the other night,” Matthews said, reminding the girl. The methamphetamine, booze, and pot wreaked havoc on the short-term memories of these kids. Not that they listened to the counselors anyway. They tolerated such intrusions only to serve the greater purpose of a warm meal, a shower, free feminine products, and a chance to wash their clothes.

“You’re the cop. The shrink. I remember.”

“Right, but here, I’m a counselor, and that’s all. You were going to think about calling your grandparents.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it. You were.”

“After five days you have to leave the Shelter for at least one night.”

“Believe me, I know the rules.”

“I don’t like to think of you up there in the weather.”

“That’s your problem. I live up there.” Defiant. An attitude.

But behind the eyes, fear.

Matthews rarely lost her temper, though she could pretend to when needed. She debated her next move in what to her was a chess game that could make or break lives. “You can call for free. It doesn’t have to be collect.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting out of here so much,” the girl conceded.

Matthews saw an opening and seized it. To hell with the regulations. She pulled a Sharpie-an indelible marker-from her purse, grabbed hold of Margaret’s forearm, and wrote out her cell phone number in letters the size of the top row of an eye test. Clothes came and went with these girls. Notes in pockets came and went. Forearms were a little more permanent.

“Day or night,” Matthews said. “No questions asked. No police. You call me and it’s woman to woman, friend to friend.”

Margaret eyed her forearm, angry. “A tattoo would have lasted longer.”

“Day or night,” Matthews repeated and pulled herself off the cot with reluctance.

“Can I ask you something?” the girl asked.

Matthews nodded.

“You think this place is haunted?”

Matthews bit back a smile. “Old, yes. Creepy, maybe. But not haunted.”

“Haven’t you felt it?”

It wasn’t the first time Matthews had heard this. “Maybe a little,” she confessed.

“Like somebody watching.”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she said, aware she was sounding like a schoolmarm. “The imagination is powerful. We don’t want to mislabel it.”

“But you’ve felt it, too,” Margaret said.

Matthews nodded, stretching the truth. It took a long time to establish anything close to trust with one of these kids.

“I heard this place used to be a storeroom or something.

Pirates, or smugglers, or something. Like a hundred years ago.”

“I’ve heard it called lots of things: a slaughterhouse, a jail, a house of ill repute.” She delivered this comically, and won the first signs of light in that face. “Smugglers? Why not?” Matthews hesitated, unsure if she should leave it here-the first tendrils of rapport connecting them-or drive home her point once more. “If you do call your grandmother, we have funding for transportation. No one’s kicking you out, you understand.

But I want you safe, Margaret. The baby, safe.”

The girl glanced around the room, uncomfortable. “Yeah,”

she said. “We’ll see.”

As Matthews reached the surface and her car, her police radio crackled, and the dispatcher announced a 342-a harbor water emergency-a body had been spotted. The location was the Aurora Bridge. Matthews ran four red lights on the way there.