“Me?”
“How you promised to make her a star, then you got her hooked on drugs and then you got her pregnant. And you wanted nothing more to do with her. Denied I was your baby.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Her name is Jolene, not mine. I’m Carrie, actually. Remember that Jolene you knew? The one who was the good singer? Oh, I’ve been learning all about you. And I made it my mission to find you. I’ve followed you this far. And I don’t think you want to rape your daughter, do you, Daddy?”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” he said, but he sounded unsure.
“Why do you think I was sitting beside your car, waiting for you tonight? I wanted to see for myself if you were the rat my mother said you were. And you are.”
“Now listen you little...” He was trying to get to his feet when she picked up a rock and brought it crashing down onto the back of his head. He gave a grunt and pitched forward. She stared at him, feeling horror mixed with triumph. Then she turned him over. He wasn’t breathing. For a moment she had a wild fantasy about driving off in his car, leaving him for the vultures and coyotes. But decided against it. That would be stupid. They’d track her down and accuse her of murder. Instead she retrieved her jeans and put them on again, finding it hard with her hands shaking from cold and emotion. Then she turned her attention to him and carefully removed his trousers.
She took out her cellphone and was pleasantly surprised to find a signal.
“There’s been a horrible accident,” she gasped when the 911 operator answered. “A man gave me a ride in his car. He stopped and tried to rape me. I pushed him away. He tripped over a rock and fell and hit his head. I think he’s dead.”
The operator was kind and soothing. Carrie sat in the car until state troopers arrived half an hour later. They, too, were kind and understanding. They took in the sprawled body, his trousers lying neatly on the driver’s seat. “Come on, honey. Let’s get you home,” one of them said.
She drove off in the squad car without looking back.
Easy Peasey
John Lescroart
Carrie McKay’s cellphone alarm went off at midnight and after taking a moment trying to figure out where she was and what she’d set the darn thing for, she rolled over and killed the noise, which sounded far louder than it had ever sounded before in the daytime.
She lay back down, holding the now blessedly silent phone and listening for any other sounds it might have roused in the house. Her mom and dad were just across the hall in their bedroom, hopefully still deep in slumber. Her brother Kyle’s room was adjacent to hers, with just the one wall separating them. But she knew that he usually slept like a rock and probably wouldn’t have heard the alarm. Probably.
Still, she waited, listening, making sure.
After a minute that seemed like a half hour, she finally decided that the alarm hadn’t awakened anyone. She threw back her covers, turned and sat up. Her stomach growled as though she was hungry; she put her hand flat on her belly and tried to breathe out the tension. But she knew that it wasn’t lack of food roiling her insides.
It was nerves.
She was starting to realize, because she really wasn’t cut out for it, that she never should have told Dawn and Emily that she’d be part of the raid to TP Jason Trent’s house tonight. After all, he was Dawn’s boyfriend. Carrie didn’t think she’d ever even said hi to him. But you didn’t say no to Dawn if she wanted you to do something with her. She was definitely the leader of the cool kids at school, and Carrie had been aching to be one of them herself, always just not quite making it.
She was afraid that she wasn’t really a natural for something like this, actually sneaking out in the middle of the night. It had been bad enough when she went into Target two days ago to buy the Super-Size pack of twenty-four rolls of Charmin’, waiting in the checkout line, hoping and praying that she wouldn’t run into somebody she knew, especially one of her friend’s mothers. But no big deal, she’d told herself. Everybody had to buy toilet paper. She could always say she was just running some errands for her mother. Nothing sinister going on. She was one of the good kids, after all, and nobody would think anything about it.
And in the end, nobody had seen her.
Hiding the actual package of rolls was another issue altogether. Carrie had to keep them out of sight somewhere for two days. Why had she gone down and bought it so early? What if her mother checked the car’s trunk in the next two days and wanted to know what this cache of toilet paper was all about? There would be no guarantee that her mother wouldn’t open the trunk, and no fooling her if she did. So Carrie couldn’t put them there where her mom could find them.
Or, really, anywhere in her own house.
In a panic she’d called Emily from the Target parking lot, which she hated to do because she knew from TV that it would leave a telephonic record of when they’d talked. If anybody, like the police for example, did some kind of real investigation for this crime of trespass — or was it vandalism? Or both? ...Whatever, they’d be able to put it together that she and Emily were planning something.
But what else could she do?
She had not planned on this degree of subterfuge holding onto the TP. She hadn’t even thought of it as an issue. Before Emily picked up her own phone, Carrie actually considered throwing the evidence away in one of the dumpsters behind the Target. But if she couldn’t even score and hold onto a few rolls of TP, that would surely betray her pathetic personality flaw.
Gutless and fearful, that’s what they’d say about her.
There was a really thin line between being one of the good kids and one of the cool kids, and so far Carrie had managed to fool most everybody as fitting into both camps.
But Emily, like Dawn, was all the way cool. She actually thought that Carrie’s worries about where to hide the toilet paper were legitimate. And Carrie’s suggestion that they stow the TP in Emily’s Tuff Shed in her backyard (which Emily’s dad almost never used anymore) was actually a great hiding place and a pretty brilliant idea.
Sucking in a breath, pushing with the flat of her hand on the continual churning of her belly, Carrie stood up. She was still mostly dressed. She’d left her socks on and worn her jeans and her black high school logo sweatshirt to bed. It wasn’t like her mom and dad came in every night to tuck her into bed anymore. The unspoken personal space barrier for the past year or so was her door: if closed, everything was fine and there was no need to come in and check on her. So tonight she had left it closed. Her parents trusted her and she was, here at home at least, definitely one of the good kids.
Using the flashlight from her phone, she found her tennis shoes and put them on. Then, with the flashlight still on, she crossed the room to the windows that faced out at the front of the house. Pulling open the plantation shutters, she unlocked and then raised the right-hand window, and stepped out into the night.
If the quiet in her room had been comforting, the quiet outside was all but terrifying. Standing on the dewy grass, she listened to nothing.
Then suddenly she realized that she still held the lit-up phone and that the window was open. She tip-toed back to the house, closed the window and turned off her light. Now it was pure dark. None of their neighbors even seemed to be watching television. There was no moon. She checked her phone; it was 12:08. She was seven minutes early. Squatting behind one of the low bushes that grew in the front of her house, she settled down to wait.
Seven minutes... yikes!
At last, at long last, car lights up at the corner turned onto her street. She checked her phone, exactly 12:15. Standing up from where she was hiding behind the bushes, she ran across the lawn and out to where Dawn’s car was pulling over to the curb.