A Tangled Web

by A. Claire Everward

  She had closed her eyes and now she stopped speaking, and he saw the struggle for control. Then she opened her eyes again and saw his hand on the bed, clenched into a fist. She didn’t have to look up to see the anger, the rage, it flowed from him in waves. She reached out and touched his fist tentatively, then drew her hand back again. Suddenly he knew what she was thinking. A fist, his, not there to hurt her. There to protect her. Still, he didn’t want her to even remotely equate him with what she was remembering, and so he willed himself to relax his hand.

  Even though he really wanted to kill someone right then. Two people, in fact.

  “Maddy would come to me, after. When it was clear that he was finished with me for the time being. She would hug me hard and then go back quickly, just in case. After a while I did the same. The rapes, the beatings, the starving to try to make me obey, the . . . everything, it continued for an endless year. And no one from child protection services ever came to check up on me. Maddy said no one would, she’d been there much longer and no one ever came for her. He filed the required reports regularly, and had his boss sign them. No one had any reason to suspect. And no one cared. I was nothing. We were both nothing. We were two of countless kids in an understaffed, overworked system. Whatever. No excuses. They didn’t care.

  “I thought about trying to get out, to run, or at least to find someone, get some help. But I didn’t manage to. Until once, just that once I thought I might succeed. We were always locked in our rooms, and our windows were locked, too. But there was a lower roof under my window, so I worked on it gradually, over time, and one night I managed to pry it open, and I climbed down. Maddy said she was scared, so I promised I would come back for her, I figured maybe I could get to another house, or to the police. To someone, anyone.

  “I made it to the ground, just that. He was waiting for me, he’d known all along what I was doing. He punched me, pulled me by my hair to the middle of the back yard, and raped me right there. Just to show me he could do whatever he wanted and no one would know, no one would stop him.”

  She fell into pained silence. After a while, she spoke again. “You know, that one time, when I lay there, after, just before he dragged me back inside, I thought about it. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment. This wasn’t a completely faraway place, people have gone by there. How could it be that no one ever heard me? That night and all those months and months of nights and days and hell, how could it be that no one ever heard me scream?”

  Ian’s heart broke.

  “And then Maddy fell ill. It was the dead of winter, and cold, starvation, torture, they did their thing. She died a week later. I don’t know what was wrong with her, but I know she didn’t mind dying. She told me so.” She raised her eyes to his again. “She was the last person I ever hugged, you know? Who hugged me. I haven’t willingly touched anyone since, let alone hug.”

  Ian couldn’t bear this. In his mind he could see it, see her as a young girl, huddled in the corner, cold, starving, alone. Knowing she will be hurt again. Knowing there was no one to help her.

  With all his money, all his power, he couldn’t go back in time and save her.

  “They buried her in the back yard, near Justine. When they came back into the house, they were arguing. They forgot to lock Maddy’s door after they took her out, and the door between her room and mine was always unlocked, so I went outside to the corridor and eavesdropped. There was nothing they could to me that they hadn’t done already, so I risked it. And I heard them say that I was trouble. A year on and I was still fighting. I wasn’t broken, docile like they wanted me to be. He wanted another girl. Another victim. But bringing another, that’s not good when there’s such a troublemaker in the house, his wife said. And I was older, it was difficult to control me. That’s why they killed Justine. And anyway, he wanted a younger girl, one he could keep longer. Maybe one no one would know about, this time.”

  She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, trying to escape. To hide. When Ian moved, she jumped, but all he did was reach out and wrap the blanket around her, tuck it close so she wouldn’t be cold. She hadn’t realized she was shivering badly in the comfortably warm room. The gesture made emotion erupt and she struggled, fought to keep the tears back.

  “I thought that was it, that I was dead. But they made two mistakes. The first one was not killing me that night. She wanted to, but he refused. He needed someone to . . . use until he found a new girl. The second I learned about a few weeks later. You see, when we moved to Montaville, my parents had my school transcripts sent to the high school I was transferring to—something he didn’t know about. But I never showed up. I don’t know what happened the year before, maybe because I was supposed to arrive after winter break, the middle of the year, they forgot about me, or maybe they were told what happened and thought I was taken away by family or something. I have no idea. What I do know, what I heard there, in that house, what he told her after he returned one day, was that when winter break approached again my name came up with that of another new student who was transferring there just then, and the school realized that my school records were still there, that no one had called for them, no other school or anyone else. The school district then checked and discovered that I was in foster care, still in Montaville, and asked the monster who had taken me what happened, why I hadn’t attended school.

  “He said he told them that I was being home-schooled, that it was best after the trauma I’d been through. And he thought they believed him, he told her that they’d just raised the concern that they hadn’t gotten any information about my schooling and that he’d promised to provide it to them immediately. He intended to forge some records, school works, exams, things he had from other kids, he was a social worker after all. He hadn’t had the same problem with Justine. And with Maddy, well, no one asked about her. It was that specific school I was supposed to be in, they were the ones that raised the issue, and they just happened to approach the one school official who decided to make an issue out of it. But after all, I was just an unwanted kid, they won’t care enough to follow up, that’s what she kept saying, and he said that she must be right, that they must have believed him.

  “I mean, finally, after all that time, someone actually remembered that I existed, and here he had managed to deflect them again. I had no idea what that meant for me, if they would decide to get rid of me after all and make up some story to explain it, because they couldn’t risk anyone finding me. I do, though, remember what it meant for me that night. They were both angry, both worried, and I was right there for them to take it out on.” She shook her head wearily.

  “But as it turned out, his story wasn’t that believable. And he didn’t expect that, or that the reaction would come so soon. The very next day, just before noon, he got a call telling him that a school district supervisor was coming by for a visit. To see me. In a panic, he left his wife to meet the guy by herself and took me out of the house. On the way he got a call to report to an emergency social workers’ meeting because some kid committed suicide in the next town and the media was all over them. He needed to do something with me, so he threatened to kill me if I didn’t do as he said, and he made me put on his coat, and I was wearing an old hoodie underneath so he made me put its hood on and behave as if I had a cold and just wanted to wrap myself up, so no one would see how bad I looked. It was January, so it was a plausible excuse. Not that it mattered, because he managed to get me into his office unseen.”

  She raised her eyes to Ian’s and there was something else in them now, whatever it was that had awakened in her back then. “My luck that day was that he thought he had no choice but to leave me there, and that he thought my being alone with him after Maddy’s death had finally broken me and he had no idea I knew I was the next to die. And then there was the duration of his absence. He got held up long enough, you see. Just long enough. And what you need to know is, I learned a whole lot from my parents, I grew up around work discussions and if I ever came near one of th
eir computers at home, they would let me sit with them and they would answer every question I asked with all the patience in the world.”

  This time, a tear escaped. And then another.

  She cleared her throat, breathed. “And whatever happened to me since they died, some things you never forget, especially when your life depends on it. You see, for the first time in more than a year I found myself in front of a computer. Social services there still worked mainly with paper, and he didn’t have a workstation. But he did have his own laptop, one of those heavier ones of back then, which he always had with him when he left the house, and that he left right there beside me, thinking I had no idea what to do with it. Except I did.

  “I knew what the laptop was for. That when he was at work, he wanted to be able to see us, his toys, as he called us, in our prison cells whenever he wanted to. I knew because he told us, because he would give orders sometimes, or have that monster of a wife of his punish us when there was something he didn’t like. So I looked for the way he did it, and found them, his webcams, the way he was streaming their feed. I figured a sick man like him, he would like images, videos, whatever, and I found them, too, I found where he’d hidden them, the remote file storage he used.

  “I opened an account in a free file storage service, and I copied everything he had on his laptop and in his remote stash. What he had about us, the links he used to see us at the house, more links and videos I found that showed he liked to browse online for the . . . the things he’d later do to us. What was on his laptop, I copied as much of it as I could. The rest, in the remote storage, would take too long, but it was online, account to account, so I set it up to continue to back up to my choice location even when I’m not there to watch it. I simply copied his storage to mine, making sure as best as I could in the little time I had that what I did couldn’t be traced.” Her eyes were closed as she remembered, retraced her steps.

  “Apparently the risk of someone looking in his laptop, or the risk of being hacked, hadn’t occurred to him. Or maybe he just got used to not getting caught. Either way, it made what I did easier, and I managed to get most of what I wanted. Most, but not all, I didn’t dare stay too long. As soon as I was done, I got out of there. I picked the lock on the door, I knew how to do that from all the times I tried to unlock the door of my room at the house. His laptop I left there, exactly where he’d put it, I didn’t want him to even suspect what I’d done.

  “No one saw me, they were talking somewhere not far away, arguing about something, I remember the voices, someone was shouting. No one was there to stop me when I left. I have no idea when he got back or what happened, I just walked out of the building and kept walking. I did take the money he had in his wallet, but I didn’t dare go on a bus, I needed not to be seen. I’d left his coat, I was scared someone would recognize it as his and remember seeing me with it, so I just left it there, but I had my hoodie on, and I covered my head. I stayed away from people, walked through alleys until I got to some woods, that entire area is heavily forested so I could move through it basically unseen, and I did, I just walked, and then I ran, and then I walked some more, I didn’t dare stop. I tried to stay low, and I just continued in what I thought was the opposite direction to that house, as far as I could away from it. And then it was night, but I didn’t stop. I figured he wouldn’t call the police, but he could look for me himself and so could she and I had no intention of dying that day.”

  Ian flinched, and she surprised him by putting her hand on his. He held it, needing to hold it, but then she pulled it away, with some hesitation, he noticed, and he wondered if maybe she had wanted to keep the touch.

  She kept her eyes down, not looking at him, and continued to speak. She wanted him to know it all, to judge for himself. “When I got to the next town I chose a house—it was night, everyone was asleep—and I stole some vegetables from their garden because I was so hungry. It was raining, and I was soaking wet, freezing, so I also stole some clothes. A teenager’s clothes, a boy. And a backpack that sat on the porch, because I thought it would look less odd if I walked around with it.” She raised her eyes and met his. “I had the money I stole from him, I could have bought something, some food, at a gas station down the road. But there was a man minding that station and I knew what men do.”

  His gaze didn’t waver and something in hers did, and for a moment there she thought those stubborn tears would finally come.

  They didn’t. And she was determined to finish her story. “I continued that way for a long time, hiding during the days and walking at night, when it was dark and there was no one around. It wasn’t just them I was scared of, I was afraid of meeting anyone. Anyone who might ask questions. Any man who might figure out I was a girl walking alone. My hair was chopped short, it’s easier to maintain it that way when you’re keeping a girl prisoner. And I was thin, underdeveloped, starving. So with the clothes I was wearing, and it being winter, and with my head down, I could easily pass for a boy. But there was no way I wasn’t going to be as careful as I could.

  “I ate what I found in some greenhouses and in storage sheds on the way, took a little with me for when I would walk where no one lived, and I walked on. It took me a while, I wasn’t strong. But I survived, I survived all that way, in the winter. Until today I’ve no idea why, what made me fight that way, to live. But I did. Once, in a city along the way, I went into an internet café at night and checked my storage account. Everything had downloaded to it, it was all there. As far as I could see no one had tried to touch the account, but then they never would have thought I would have done anything like that. Didn’t know I could. I transferred everything to another storage account and closed the original one I’d used, to cover my tracks, and then I left. I kept moving this way for a while longer, but the fact was that no one was coming after me, as far as I could see I wasn’t on the news, nothing.”

  She paused. “Finally, I understood I couldn’t continue that way forever. I had to risk it. And so, at some point, with every step I took further away, I made a small change, to look more normal. I got some clothes at a thrift store. I had my hair cut properly in some town, so it wouldn’t look so strange—I still wore that hoodie, I’d kept it, I still wanted to be seen as a boy on the road, but I knew that at some point that would have to change. The hairdresser asked questions, and I gave her a name, made up a story. It worked, she believed it. So I figured I could do that again, tell whatever story I chose to.

  “Those weeks when no one had caught up with me, the fear turned into thinking. I knew I had to disappear forever. To become someone else. I was in Denver when I decided that, and that’s where I made my mind to stay.”

  “You walked all the way from Southeast Texas to Denver, Colorado?” Ian gaped.

  “For about . . . a month. Four weeks. At some point I couldn’t, I barely had any strength left and I wasn’t making enough of a headway. So far I’d pushed forward on adrenaline, all I wanted was to get away, get as far away from them, from him, as I could. But it wasn’t enough, I just couldn’t feel that I was far enough from him. So eventually I sneaked into the back of a pickup truck. The driver was a woman, I was passing by a gas station and I heard her say she needs to make it to Denver by morning. I didn’t want to talk to her, I was afraid she’ll tell someone or even just remember that she saw me, if anyone asked later, so I sneaked in and got off as soon as she slowed down at a traffic light when she entered the city. That’s why I got to Denver in the first place, it wasn’t as if I was planning to get there. I had no idea what direction I was going in.”

  “God, Tess.” He couldn’t imagine it, her making all that way alone, in the winter, in the condition she was in. Afraid to meet anyone, not knowing who she could turn to for help.

  “I had no money left, but I managed to check into a tiny motel managed by an old woman, a nice one. You kind of learn, you know, to tell the good ones from the bad. Anyway, I gave her some story, and she let me stay there and pay after a few days. I’m not sure
she actually thought I would pay, but she let me stay. She even gave me some change for the vending machine. I didn’t ask for it, she just gave it to me. Anyway, I spent the first couple of days there creating a story, a new background for myself, and when I was ready, I went to look for a job. I needed money, and I needed to start my new life somewhere.

  “I didn’t know Denver, and I got lost. And then I chanced upon a small company, a startup that was just setting up shop in a building of its own. They had actually stuck a handwritten note on the wall near the entrance, saying that they were looking for a couple of people without any experience, just to help set up, move stuff around, clean, you know. They were just moving there that day, there were boxes all over.

  I thought maybe I could get some work there and went inside, but then I got scared, there were too many people around there for me, mostly men, and I tried to get out and took a wrong turn and ended up in the basement. And there was this guy there, this big guy, older—mid-forties looked old to me then—and I remember he was muttering to himself, he was trying to set up a computer, a desktop tower, under a desk, and I wanted to go, I thought I could leave unnoticed. But then he tried to get off the floor, and he bumped his head on the table and cursed, and then he saw me. And stared. And then he just called me over, in a kind of distracted way, asked me to help him set up the computer. And I did. To this day I don’t know why. Why I went to him instead of running. Maybe because of the way he looked. Even then.” She shrugged. “Later he told me I looked lost and neglected and hurt and he had a feeling he shouldn’t just let me disappear.”