He leaned forward a little. “How much do you remember?”
She stared at him for a long moment, then licked her lips. “I remember what happened, what they did to us. I remember getting away, but not much more.” Her eye widened as a fragment of memory returned, though she wasn’t sure how reliable it might be. “There was a guy, about my age, maybe a little younger, a black kid. His name was…” She struggled to pluck the memory from the swamp her mind had become. “Pete. That was it. I was in the truck with him.”
Marshall nodded. “Pete, that’s right. Pete Lowell.”
“Is he here?”
“’Fraid not. He took off soon’s he brought you in and saw you were in good hands. We sent a patrol car out to bring him back, but turned up nothin’. We found his house burned up though, and his daddy…” He waved a hand. “We can talk about all that some other time.”
Claire planted her hands on the mattress and started to ease herself into a sitting position. Immediately her body became a combat zone, the pain exploding in various parts of her, a stern reminder that she was not yet fit enough to be attempting such hasty and ambitious movements. She squinted against the discomfort and when next she looked, Marshall was at her side, strong hands beneath her armpits, pulling her up as she dug her heels into the bed and pushed to assist him. “Easy. Hold on now,” he said, and arranged the pillows so that she could lay back. She did, out of breath, her body humming with the exertion. Her joints were stiff and stubborn, her skin taut like dried leather. She was perspiring and when she raised her left hand to wipe her brow, she saw the source of at least some of the pain. It was missing two fingers—the pinky and the ring finger, and where they’d been nothing remained but twin half-inch nubs of smooth flesh. Staring in a kind of grim disassociated fashion, she withdrew her right hand from beneath the covers, and released a breath, relieved to see that aside from some angry looking pink scars, possibly self-inflicted during her escape, it was not mutilated. She raised her watery gaze to the Sheriff, who wore the expression of a man suddenly very much aware of the limitations of his job.
“You’re gonna be fine. All kinds of surgery nowadays can fix you right up good as new,” he said softly, but it was a weak effort at consolation and they both knew it. It wouldn’t matter if they found her fingers, or her eye lying in a ditch somewhere, remarkably preserved, and sewed them back. It wouldn’t matter if between now and her time of discharge they discovered a cure for rape, a way to give a sexually abused woman back her dignity, and in Claire’s case, her virginity, the fact was that the violence had been done, its impact irreversible, and some vital part of her had been destroyed in the process, a part of her she hadn’t known existed until it was stolen. Her friends were dead and gone, brutally tugged from life. Nothing they could do for Claire would repair that horrifying reality, or fill that dark gaping rent in her world and the worlds of their families.
Dark spots speckled her vision and she had to take a moment to steady herself, to anchor her consciousness. When at last her vision settled, she said to the Sheriff, “You said ‘the man who did this is dead’. Who were you talking about?”
“Garrett Wellman.”
Claire shook her head and frowned. “Doctor Wellman?”
“He was the town doctor, yes, or as near as they had to one. Some of the folks in Elkwood said he always seemed real nice, but started keepin’ to himself after his wife passed on. Cancer. She didn’t go quietly they say, and after her funeral, Wellman all but shut himself up in his house just outside of town. Took to drinkin’ hard. No one knew what he got up to out there all by himself. Looks like it weren’t anythin’ good.”
“Sheriff—”
“When we got there, he’d burned the place down around himself.”
“Sheriff, listen to me. More than one man attacked us. There were at least three, and they were young, the oldest about eighteen, maybe, and the youngest not more than eleven or twelve. You’ve got this all wrong. Wellman helped me.”
He smiled uncertainly. “We found remains, Claire. Your friends. In Wellman’s basement. And he had access to all kind of—”
Claire stopped listening. She felt that old familiar panic rising in her chest. If there had been some kind of mistake, if the authorities were pinning this on the wrong man as it seemed they had, it meant the real murderers were still out there and the police weren’t even looking for them.
But maybe they’ll be looking for me.
Suddenly, the room began to tilt, the dark spots returning, bigger now, like black holes in her vision. Shadows pooled in the corners of the room and began to reach toward the ceiling, dimming the light. Nausea whirled through her. “Oh God…”
“Claire?” Marshall put out a hand to her.
Imagination gave it a knife.
“Oh G—” She turned away from him and vomited over the side of the bed.
-14-
“Goddamn it, Ty. Keep your hands to yourself.”
The three workmen in the booth grinned at the fourth, an overweight black man in a padded check shirt and worn navy baseball cap with an M embroidered in the middle. Beneath it, Ty Rogers’s broad face settled into one of apology though his large yellow teeth were bared in a grin as he raised his sap-stained hands in a gesture of placation.
“Not my fault, Louise. You keep shaking that fine ass in our faces every time you walk away.”
Louise tucked the pencil she’d used to jot down the men’s orders into the breast pocket of her pink and white striped shirt and folded her arms.
“Wouldn’t mind being that pencil,” another of the men muttered and his coworkers sniggered.
Louise, more tired than offended, glared at each of them in turn, until only Ty was looking at her directly.
“Maybe I should give your wife a call,” she said, and at his nonchalant shrug, addressed the rest of them. “All of your wives. I’m sure they’d be real interested to hear what you boys get up to on your lunch break.”
Ty pouted. It made her want to slap him.
“Aw c’mon now, girl. We were just playing witcha. You should be flattered. I mean, look at the rest of the girls in here.” He nodded pointedly toward the counter where the other waitresses, Yvonne and Marcia, hugely overweight and looking forever unhappy about it, scowled over steaming plates of homemade fries, hash, eggs and sausage. In the warming light above the stainless steel counter, they looked like operatic villains.
“Flattered? I should punch you in your fat head,” Louise told him and the men erupted into laughter. But Ty’s smile faded, just a little. It was enough for Louise to see that she’d gotten to him, hit him where he didn’t like to be hit, especially not in front of his friends. Though she’d seen him in here almost every day over the past month, had weathered his innuendo, crude passes, and vulgarity and thought him a pig, she hadn’t been afforded this intimate glimpse of the man he most likely was at home. Dirty, abusive. Worse than a pig, she thought. A pig with a violent streak. She was more than familiar with the type.
“Talk like that,” he said, “I should put you over my knee.”
“With knees like yours, you could put me and everyone else in here on ’em and there’d still be room for a grand piano.”
Ty’s smile didn’t drop any further, but it was frozen in place, as if the muscles responsible for relaxing it had gone into arrest.