For the second year in a row, I decided to participate in the NYC Midnight Short Story Competition. This year though on the week when I received my prompt and had 8 days to write my story I ended up really busy and distracted. So on my last day of time to write the story, I decided to write it… I didn’t expect much from this, it isn’t perfect grammatically, there are themes that deserve further exploration, and in fact, it is a story I feel could be much bigger than the 2500 words I was bound by.
But, by some miracle, my story I wrote in one day between high tea and Lunar New Year celebrations, made it into the next round. So I am sharing it here. The next round starts Thursday night, I will have three days to write a 2000 word story based on the prompts I receive.
The prompts for this were:
Genre: Mystery
Must include: A runner, a delivery
The Istina Project
In front of me, the path diverges three ways. Frost would tell me to take the one less traveled, but he only had two to choose from. My heart beats faster, the closer I get.
I think back to last night, I had just hit publish on a new post about the lack of moral character in the amplified voices of our city. Specifically, I have written a series on Jack Brent, who made a fortune in the oil and gas sector, then spent a few seasons on a popular business pitch show only to come out as a bigoted blowhard. His voice is loud, and his money gives him power as a thought-leader, but his words show his distaste for the most vulnerable. He lacks sympathy for the circumstances that keep some people back. I tried to tell myself that the reason I went after Jack Brent was because of his lack of moral character based on the power he wielded. At the heart of it, was my distaste for a man who had once been my father’s business partner. They had a falling out, resulting in the dissolution of their relationship. A few months later, my father died in a boating accident. I always blamed Jack for this.
I had named my investigative blog the Istina Project as it means truth in Croatian, a language I was fluent in, thanks to my grandmother, who helped raise me. After I hit publish, I sat back with my cup of tea and watched as the views started to come in, and then the comments. There was rarely a middle ground in the comments. My phone pinged with an encrypted email notification.
The message was from a username I didn’t recognize, Trgovina. While I had never seen the username before, I knew the meaning instantly, Trgovina was the Croatian word for trafficking. The message was a simple picture of three paths diverging, the trails were all surrounded by tall trees and foliage; however, the one on the right had small yellow blossoms on the lower bushes. I knew the place immediately. It was my morning running trail, I always took the one in the middle. There was a simple sentence under the picture, “For Istina take the one to the right in the morning.”
Recently I had received a few tips regarding a rumored human trafficking ring. I had been doing some quiet digging, and aside from a few sources, no one knew I was working on this story. In fact, there wasn’t a story there, I couldn’t find any information to indicate any trafficking was happening. This person obviously knew I was working a trafficking angle, and also knew my morning routine. A chill ran down my back, I made a mental note to change up my route going forward.
If I met this source, I could be putting myself in danger, I had received many threats since starting The Istina Project. This person understood I would know the meaning of their username. Was this a friend or an enemy? I asked as much in a return message, but there was no response. And now I stand in front of the diverging paths, my breath coming in bursts.
“Don’t be stupid, Nora,” Milo had yelled at me last night from across the Atlantic. He was in London on assignment for his newspaper, covering the latest Brexit controversy. “You can’t go there, at least not alone.”
“You’re a journalist Milo, you have to understand why I need to go,” I reasoned. After a long argument, he agreed to me turning on my phone tracking and messaging him as I entered the path, and as soon as I was clear. He didn’t like it, but he understood my drive.
This morning I put on my running shoes and headed out the door. My earbuds pumping out music that I wasn’t hearing, my thoughts louder than any song. The pavement disappeared under my feet, and I found myself at this place, in front of the three paths. Muscle memory has me leaning down the center path, but I take out my phone and send a text to Milo, “heading in, I love you.” The message instantly shows read, but I don’t wait for a response.
I turn on the location tracking on my phone and hit the audio record button before starting a slow jog down the path to the right. The small yellow blossoms continue down the trail, which winds toward the river. A few hundred feet ahead, I can see a bench with a woman sitting on it, her hands clasped on her lap, her black hair is cut in a blunt bob, and she is wearing a long dark coat. I slow, feeling a light breeze coming through the trees from the river.
I pull the earbuds out and pocket them. As I approach the woman looks at me, she has dark circles around her steel-blue eyes, and there is a scar that runs down her left cheek. The most startling thing about this woman isn’t her scar, it is that I recognize her. My mind flashes to photos of a twisted car, a glass of champagne, and a perfectly manicured hand. Ten years ago, when he was at the height of his television career, Brent could be seen at most social engagements with this beautiful, dark-haired woman on his arm, Celia Lorens. Celia wasn’t just Jack’s paramour, she was a powerful businesswoman in her own right. She ran a successful public relations and crisis management firm that had done a lot of work after one of Jack’s assets had been compromised by eco-terrorists in Northern British Columbia.
I met Celia at an event I was covering for the business beat for the local paper ten years ago. I recall her arguing with Jack at the event, a glass of champagne falling from her hand as he grabbed her arm to pull her aside. These were notes I had taken that night, and never reported on. Celia had been killed, or so the world thought, that evening in a car crash.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Celia says quietly. I look down at her hands and notice the nails have been chewed down to the quick. This woman who had once been known as powerful, who could make things happen, who could make problems disappear, looks haggard and tired. The circles under the eyes and the fingernails aren’t the only signs of some hard-lived years, her once shiny black hair is frizzy and streaked with grey. Her face is lined with more than the scar, and her coat, upon closer inspection, is worn and dirty.
“I wasn’t either,” I responded. “You’re supposed to be dead,” I start to think about the investigations I’ve done into Jack Brent. Celia has clearly read my work; otherwise, she wouldn’t have reached out to me. I never spent a lot of time looking into Celia and her past before starting her company.
“I had to disappear for a while,” she says.
“Are you looking for a comeback?”
She looks down and shakes her head, “It’s best if I stay away.”
“So, why are we here?”
“Because a reckoning is at hand, and you seem to be brave enough to see it through. Besides, I had a Croatian grandmother too,” she grins, passing me a thick manila envelope.
“What is it?” I take the envelope and start to pull back the flap.
“Not here,” she says, placing her hand over mine. “I can’t go into details, but my only hope at staying alive is for you to figure out what all of this means, and put it out into the world. He found out I’m alive, and he will kill for this to stay hidden,” she stands to walk away.
“Wait, who is he, and how do I reach you if I have questions?”
“You can’t reach a ghost, Nora, you have to do this one yourself. I risked my life to deliver this to you, don’t let me down.” With that, she leaves me sitting on the bench.
I make my way back home, texting Milo on the way to let him know I’m fine. He wants details, but I don’t even know what just happened.
When I get home, I immediately walk to my desk and pull the contents of the envelope out. There have to be over a hundred pages here. At the bottom is a thumb drive. I’m skeptical about plugging it into my computer and put it to the side.
The first few pages look like a transaction ledger. Beside a row of dates on the left is a row of random numbers, and in the right two columns appear to be dollar amounts coming in and out. Everything is handwritten, and these are photocopies. The numbers are significant. They seem to be transactions worth tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A part of me hopes this will take down Jack Brent. But there is nothing in these first few pages to point in his direction, and there is nothing that looks outwardly illegal or immoral. I may dislike the man for his loud mouth, and the issues between him and my father, but he has never done anything illegal to my knowledge.
I continue to skim through the pages. After the first few pages of ledgers, the other documents appear to be shipping manifests that date back as far as forty years. The receiving company is North Star Incorporated, but it is the sender that makes my breath catch in my throat, Novak Izvoz.
I glance at the picture of my grandmother, taken on her 75th birthday, she beams as candles burn on the cake in front of her. My grandmother Ines had moved to Canada at the age of fifteen with her parents and married my grandfather Goran Novak when she was eighteen. Their only son, Miros Novak, was my father, and it is his signature that is on the manifests indicating receipt of the cargo. But I have never heard of North Star Incorporated.
Novak is a common Croatian name, Novak Izvoz, which stands for Novak Exports was a company my grandfather founded with his cousin Igor back in Croatia. Why is my grandfather’s company the sender, and why did his son sign for receipt, and what the hell is the cargo?
A quick search on North Star Incorporated takes me through a wormhole of shell corporations all incorporated in 1979. Information wasn’t as easily accessible then as it is now, and my search brings me to the two owners, Jack Brent and Miros Novak.
I continue to flip through the pages, there are copies of pictures of my father and Jack Brent together, I’ve seen most of these before, but there are some new images. Jack Brent and my father at a loading dock in what appears to be the middle of the night.
Jack Brent at a worksite, a crew of men using equipment to prepare the land for what was likely an oil rig. There are headshots of at least a hundred men and women of various ethnicities. There is nothing obviously wrong with any of these images, but the knot in the pit of my stomach tells me there is more.
I look at the thumb drive on the side of my desk. I don’t dare open it on my computer; however, I have an old laptop that is not connected to the internet and has been wiped of files. I pull it out from the top shelf in my closet and power it up. I impatiently wait for it to load and turn the kettle on for a cup of tea. As the laptop comes to life, I insert the thumb drive and run a quick diagnostic, no known viruses are found on my extremely outdated software. Taking a deep breath, I double click on the one file titled North Star. I double click the folder, and thousands of pictures are listed. I click on the first one and notice it is listed by numbers instead of a name. But the numbering is odd and familiar.
The ledger.
The numbers on the left side of the ledger aren’t bank accounts or transaction numbers; they are people. The numbers list the earnings of each person. I start to cross-reference the pictures with the ledger and find there are more ledger entries than there are pictures. It isn’t clear at first how the people and the dollar figures compute, but then I notice another folder at the bottom of the list of pictures.
I double click the folder; additional files are revealed. I click on the first one, titled Cambodia, my blood runs cold, my hands are shaking, and I can hear the kettle whistling at me as if ready to explode. As the file loads, I turn off the stove, forgetting the tea as I return to the computer. The document provides the shipping details for a shipment from Cambodia to Vancouver in 1979. My father would have been twenty-one at the time that his signature landed on the invoice, he had yet to meet my mother, I was not even a thought in his mind.
Multiple numbers are listed on the invoice. It doesn’t take me long to cross-reference the ledger to note that this shipment included twenty Cambodian nationals. I could tell myself that my father was saving these people from being hunted by the Khmer Rouge, but I am brought back to the picture of Jack Brent standing among a group of workers. I realize that the ledger isn’t a list of these peoples’ earnings, but rather a listing of what they have earned for North Star. For Jack Brent and my father.
I sit back and stare at the piles of evidence around me and start to sob. I’ve spent my life fighting for the moral high ground, and it turns out the ground I was living on was made of lies and the bodies of innocent people. I weigh my options. I could publish everything, turn the cache over to the police and let the whole thing implode. But the image of my sick grandmother in a nursing home haunts me. To take down Jack Brent is to take down my own family.
I could do nothing, pretend that I never saw this. But if I did that, I would be risking not only Celia’s life but that of the people who have been destroyed by this.
I could try to scrub my family name from this, but where would I even start, not to mention that moral compass I hold so dear.
In front of me, the path diverges three ways. Frost would tell me to take the one less traveled, but he only had two to choose from.