The Girl and the Deadly End (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery Book 7), стр. 15
Summer was always my favorite. With burning summer sunlight turning the tips of our shoulders gold, my father and I splash in the pool and race down slides. We run across the yard and jump through the sprinkler as it waves back and forth. Overhead, clouds gather in the sky, threatening a storm. Mama calls out to us, beckoning us inside, but Dad tells her to come out to join us instead.
“We’re in the sprinkler. Why come in from the rain? Come play!”
The raindrops swell in the clouds as he beckons her. They begin to fall, and I join in. She’s refusing to come out, but there’s a smile on her face, teasing us. Dad shoots across the yard, running for her, where she stands just outside the door still under the overhang of the patio. She tries to dive inside, but he is too fast for her. She squeals when he grabs her around the waist. I laugh as he carries her out into the spray of the sprinkler. It hits them, and the sky decides to join in, splitting open to empty all the looming raindrops in a cascade.
My mother lets out another playful scream and kicks as Dad, still holding her from behind, lifts her up and swings her through the water from the sprinkler and the rain spilling down. She cries out, slipping into her native Russian. I feel something when I hear them. In my dream, I know what the words mean, but it’s just out of grasp. She laughs, shouting again, and I snap awake, gasping in a sharp, hard breath.
“What’s wrong?” Sam mumbles as I scramble out of bed. “What’s going on?”
“Spice Enya,” I say, running for the living room and flipping on the light.
The door to the spare bedroom opens, and a bleary-eyed Dean steps into the hallway.
“What’s happening?” he asks.
“I don’t know. She just got out of bed and ran out here,” Sam tells him.
They come into the room as I open my laptop and pull up a search.
“What are you looking at?” Dean asks.
“I remembered something. When I was little, my mother would sometimes slip into Russian when she was talking, especially if she was really excited or happy or angry. Any big emotions would blur the language lines. When we were playing, my Dad liked to pick her up and run around with her. She would always yell out this one phrase. She never tried to teach me Russian. I’m not sure why. But she would tell me what she was saying if I asked. This was one of those phrases I picked up on, but I must have shoved it deep into the back of my mind when she died because I didn’t think about it until now. I had a dream about us playing and my father picking her up and holding her in the rain. This is what she was calling out. Tell me what it sounds like to you.”
I click the little microphone button to have the translator pronounce the words I translated.
“Spasi menya,” the voice says.
The men look at each other and step closer.
“Play that again,” Dean says.
“Spasi menya.”
“And this one,” I say, pulling up another word.
“Spaseniye,” the voice says, and they both draw in breaths.
“Spice Enya,” Sam says. I nod. “What does it mean?”
“Save me.”
Chapter Nine
“What?” Sam asks, his eyes wide and his voice thin.
He comes to sit beside me, and I point to the screen.
“This is what I used to hear my mother say. She was always joking and playing with my father. He would be holding her or running around with her in his arms and she would say this. ‘Spasi menya, spasi menya.’ Save me. It’s related to the word spaseniye. Rescue.”
“But what does that mean? Rescue who?” Sam asks.
“Women,” Dean says.
“Women?” I ask.
“Yes,” he nods. “Think about it. Houses owned by this entity no one knows anything about. Nobody knows if it’s a company or a person. It’s right out there in the open, listed on deeds and medical records, listed as insurance providers. Spice Enya isn’t an individual or a corporation. It’s an organization.”
“An underground group that rescues women in danger,” I muse. “They have to stay as anonymous as possible to avoid being detected and revealing people they helped.”
“Like my mother,” Dean says. “She was in a really bad place before I was born. She didn’t want to tell me, but I found a marriage license when I was looking for some papers for school when I was a kid. I didn’t even know she’d been married. That’s when she told me about her husband. They got married when she was really young. Too young. But he convinced her he was the only person in the world who loved her and could take care of her. Of course, the second they were married, he started treating her like trash. He beat the hell out of her all the time and controlled every second of her existence. She came from Russia, and he made sure she had no one. No friends. No job. No hobbies. Nothing to take her attention away from him. If she so much as spent ten minutes longer at the grocery store than he thought she should have, he would punish her. He kept her locked in the house with no phone. She was completely reliant on him, and he made every day of her life hell.”
“Why didn’t she leave?” I asked.
He looks at me, a cold, painful look in his eyes.
“She did,” he says. “The first chance she got.”
“But that sounds nothing like my mother. She defected from Russia, but she didn’t experience anything like that. By the time she came to this country, she was already in love