What Lies Beneath

by Archer, David

  “No, they wouldn’t,” Brenda argued. “There’s William, from our building. Ask him, he likes to flirt with you.”

  Cassie looked at where William was sitting at the bar and he happened to glance her way. She hooked a finger at him suggestively, and the grin on his face seemed to freeze. He got up and walked over to the table and looked down at her. “Hey, Cass,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I was just wondering,” Cassie said, “since you tend to hit on me a lot, what would you do if I reached out and grabbed the front of your shirt and planted a big kiss on you?”

  William’s eyes were wide, and now they took on a glaze. “I, I, I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because I bet Brenda that if I flirt back with any of you guys, you’d probably all run away. Am I right?”

  William swallowed hard. “I, um, I…”

  Cassie giggled. “Relax, William,” she said. “I’m only teasing. Guys never yearn for a girl who’s been burned.”

  Brenda slapped her on the shoulder. “Cassie! That’s terrible!”

  “Who cares, it’s true. I went to a burn victim support group, and most of the women talked about how guys won’t even bother to ask them out anymore. I figure that’s not that big a deal, since I pretty much hate men, anyway.”

  Brenda’s eyes went wide. “You do? It never seems like that when you’re talking to them.”

  “That’s because,” Cassie said, winking her one good eye, “I’m like a pit bull. I wag my tail and act submissive until I get close, and then I’m going to go for the throat.”

  “You seriously hate men? All men?”

  “Yep,” Cassie said. “I just don’t usually talk about it unless I’ve been drinking.”

  Still wide-eyed and staring, Brenda leaned close. “Oh my gosh, are you a lesbian?”

  Cassie looked into her eyes. “Why? Want to try?”

  Brenda almost fell backward. “No! I just thought if you hated men, then…”

  “You can relax, too,” Cassie said. “I’m definitely not into girls, I just don’t think I’ll ever trust a man again. I mean, look at it this way. They’re usually bigger than us, they’re usually stronger than us and there’s usually only one thing they really want from us. Right?”

  Brenda nodded. “Okay, yeah,” she said.

  “If I told you there was a bear over there in the corner, would you run out the door?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “Why? The bear is also bigger than you, stronger than you and only wants one thing from you. If you can handle it out of men, shouldn’t you be able to handle it out of a bear?”

  Brenda’s eyes went big. “But that’s crazy,” she said. “A bear would eat me alive!”

  Cassie leaned close and looked at her through a bloodshot eye. “And what, pray tell, do you think an abusive man would do with you?”

  Brenda decided wisely not to argue the point any further, and they finally made it back to their dorm room a little before midnight. Nobody bothered them, and the one time someone had seemed to be following them on their way back from a night of drinking, Cassie had simply turned around and looked at him. The guy froze, then suddenly decided he wanted to go in a different direction in a hurry.

  Slowly, the school year slid past. Brenda was from somewhere in Minnesota, so she decided not to go home over the Christmas holidays and Cassie ended up dragging her to the farm at Centralia. She seemed to fit right in with the McGraws, and enjoyed herself. She had planned ahead, and had brought gifts for Cassie and her parents, but they weren’t to be outdone. When the two girls came down from Cassie’s room on Christmas morning, even Cassie was surprised at the number of presents under the tree.

  Jack and Annie were so happy to see Cassie with a new friend that they had gone just a little bit overboard. Brenda went back to school with a lot of new clothes and a brand-new laptop.

  Shortly after Christmas, Cassie got a phone call while they were lying around the room.

  “Hello?” she answered, and then she listened closely for more than a minute before her eye grew wide and round. “Holy crap,” she yelled into the phone, “are you freaking serious?”

  She listened again for another minute, then promised to show up at a certain time and place. When she put the phone down, she looked at Brenda with her mouth hanging open.

  “That was my lawyer,” she said. “My mom and dad filed a lawsuit against the city of St. Louis over what happened to me, because my ex was a cop, you know? Well, it turns out that a detective is willing to testify that there were other cops who knew what Mike and his friend had been up to, but they never came forward. That means the city is considered negligent and liable, so they just offered a huge settlement. My lawyer says I should take it, so I’m going to.”

  “A settlement?” Brenda asked. “Like, money?”

  “Yeah. They just offered me and the parents of my friend who died a settlement of more than four million dollars each.”

  Brenda’s eyes and mouth flew wide open. “Are you serious?” she demanded. “Holy cow, Cassie, that’s awesome! That means you’ll never have to work a day in your life!”

  Cassie looked at her askance. “Never have to work? I grew up on a farm, remember? That may sound like a lot of money, but it goes pretty fast once you start spending it...”

  “Right,” Brenda said, “which is why you don’t spend it! You put that money into some good moderate yield CD accounts and just draw the interest. Four million dollars would give you about, oh, three hundred thousand a year, and after taxes, you’d be looking at roughly two hundred thousand.”

  Cassie blinked. “Really?”

  “Yes, really,” Brenda said. “That’s what I do, remember? Accounting?”

  Cassie grinned. “Good. You can help me get all that set up. But I’ll still be working, I’ve got to do something. And it’s the only way I’ll ever be able to live with what’s happened to me.”

  Chapter 14

  Two years later

  Cassie pulled into the parking lot behind the building and tucked her car into the space with her name on it. She stepped out and made her way to the back door as another car pulled in beside hers.

  “Hey, Cassie,” Julie said. “How are you feeling today?”

  “About the same as always,” Cassie replied. Julie was always nice, but Cassie was fully aware that the girl was careful not to look closely at her. She didn’t take offense; she could barely stand to look at herself in the mirror each morning, so she understood.

  “You think we’ll be busy today?”

  “I think we’ve got a couple of new clients coming in this morning,” Cassie replied as Julie held the door open for her. “Marsha said something about it last night, just before we left. I get to put on my horror show for them, so maybe they’ll listen before it’s too late.”

  Julie followed her through the door and shook her head. “You know, I think you’re a hero for what you do. I don’t know if I could turn a tragedy like yours into something positive, but you managed to do it.”

  Cassie allowed herself a chuckle. “Well, the alternative was sitting in my bedroom at my folks’ house and refusing to even come out. When you look like this, you can either hide or use it to try to accomplish something good. I chose the latter.”

  Julie led the way into the lobby, where she moved the little magnetic marker to say she was “in,” and Cassie did the same once Julie had gone toward her office. Angie, the receptionist, mumbled a hello while managing to keep her eyes focused on her desk.

  “Hey, Angie,” Cassie said. She turned away quickly so the girl wouldn’t have to look at her and went into her own office. She had arranged it so that her back was closest to the door, making it necessary for anyone who entered to walk around her on her right, and she had placed her client chairs slightly to the right of the desk. With her computer sitting on the left side of the desk, she could keep the burned and mangled side of her face hidden most of the time.

  It was probabl
y the last bit of kindness she would show to most of her clients at the Saint Mary’s Outreach for Battered Women and Children. Most of them were not truly aware of her burns when they first came into the office, and Cassie had learned that the shock they experienced when she let them see for the first time was often enough to make them realize just how dangerous an abusive partner could really be.

  They invariably wanted to hear the story, and Cassie was always willing to oblige. She told them about meeting Mike and being swept off her feet, about how wonderful he seemed to be while they were dating and even after they were engaged. It wasn’t until she mentioned the times he hit her that she saw some of them cringe, and knew that they had also met a dark side of their own Prince Charming.

  Then she would tell them about how she’d learned that Mike had been doing even worse things, including murdering other young women who, even if they were prostitutes, did not deserve to die. She would tell them about how she was stupid enough to confront him about what she had learned, and how he was so determined to silence her that he was willing to sit by and watch her and her friend be murdered.

  That was the point at which they always said, “But my John, he never murdered anyone. All he does is hit me when he gets mad/is drinking/gets depressed…” There were always several reasons for the abuse, and they could almost fill in the blank.

  Cassie would look them in the eye, turning her face directly toward them so they got the full impact of the ruined left side of her face. The patch that covered the empty eye socket, the barely visible stub of what used to be an ear, the skin graft scars below the patchy spots where the hair transplants had not quite taken, and the twisted little snarl that was always present at the left corner of her mouth would make them stare, or look away, or swallow hard and try to pretend they weren’t seeing what was right in front of their eyes. She would make sure she had their full attention, and then she would respond.

  “If he’s capable of violence against you or your children,” she would say, “then he’s capable of murder. It’ll be when he’s mad, or when he’s drinking, or when he’s depressed, or when he’s got some other excuse that you enable him to use by refusing to put an end to the abuse. It will come when he’s got you all alone and there’s no one who can help you. For whatever reason, he will fly into a rage and maybe if you’re really, really lucky, he’ll come to his senses before he actually kills one of you. The thing you have to ask yourself, though, is can you really take that risk? I did, and look what it got me.”

  Marsha, the Outreach director, told everyone she knew that Cassie had been a godsend. Before Cassie came on board as a volunteer counselor, the Outreach saw an average of forty women each week who were in abusive situations, but only three or four of them would actually take a step toward escaping. Now, though, because Cassie was willing to make sure every client they had got to see her and hear her story, they were averaging fifteen new placements each week. That would be fifteen women, often with children who were suffering abuse, who were being placed in shelters where they were protected.

  Cassie half turned her head as the first new client of the day came into the office, keeping her right profile visible. One of the many children who had come into her office over the past few months had referred to it once as her “pretty side,” and Cassie couldn’t help a small smile whenever she thought of that.

  “Hi,” she said, keeping her face pointed toward her computer monitor. “I’m Cassie.”

  The heavyset woman took one of the chairs and pulled one of her two children onto her lap while the other one, a boy of about seven, sat in the second chair. “Hey,” she said. “I’m Mary Kowalski. The lady up front told me to come in here.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Cassie said. “So, what brings you to us?”

  Mary adjusted the child on her lap, keeping her attention focused downward as she spoke. “Well, it’s my husband, Jim,” she said. “Jim’s not a bad guy, but sometimes his temper gets the best of him, you know? And—well, once in a while when he gets mad, like when I didn’t get the dishes done or something, he gets…”

  “He gets physical?” Cassie prompted.

  “Well, yeah,” Mary went on. She was still keeping her eyes on the child she was holding, unwilling to look up and meet Cassie’s gaze. “He, um, he’s hit me a few times…”

  Cassie turned and looked directly at Mary, which automatically made the woman look up. Her first reaction was the one Cassie expected, a gasp of surprise and an expression of horror. “You’re wearing an awful lot of makeup,” Cassie said. “Especially on your left cheek and around your eye. I used to do that, too. We try to cover up the bruises so that even we can’t see them, but guess what? It doesn’t work. When you’ve got more makeup on one side of your face than the other, it just draws attention to the fact that you’re trying to hide something, and just about everyone figures it’s a bruise, a black eye.”

  Mary just stared at her for a moment, unable to speak, but then she lowered her eyes again and nodded. “Yeah, sometimes,” she mumbled. “Sometimes I get, you know, marks.”

  “Mary, it’s more than just sometimes. It’s happening often enough that you’re starting to worry. Tell me, has he started hitting the children yet?”

  The little girl on Mary’s lap pushed a finger up her nose, and Mary pulled her hand down. The little boy, sitting quietly in the chair by himself, suddenly said, “My daddy whips me real hard.”

  Mary nodded. “He whips Kevin,” she said, “with the belt, sometimes way too much. I count, and sometimes it’s like twenty or twenty-five times with the belt.”

  “And you know that isn’t right. Don’t you, Mary? Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  Mary nodded again, still keeping her eyes down. Cassie turned her face back to the computer and saw, from the corner of her eye, that Mary glanced up at her again.

  “I was engaged,” Cassie said. “I thought my fiancé was the greatest guy in the world; he was always so sweet and loving and gentle. But then one day, he started getting overstressed at work and things changed, and that led to me having to use a lot of makeup on my face.” She turned suddenly to face Mary again, but this time the woman didn’t look down. “I was lucky,” she went on. “I found some things in our house that told me just how violent he could be, but then I got stupid. I tried to talk to him about it, but I had gone a little too far. I had stumbled across proof that he not only had beaten and raped women, but he’d actually killed some of them. He decided he couldn’t risk letting me talk about it, so he and a friend of his were going to kill me and my friend, Abby, who was trying to help me get away from him. His friend poured gasoline on us and set us on fire. If it hadn’t been for some very heroic deputies and paramedics who dragged us out of a burning cabin, we would both be dead. As it was, I lived through it, but my friend Abby didn’t.”

  Mary swallowed, her eyes wide. “But—my Jim, he’s not like that,” she said. “He ain’t ever killed anybody.”

  Cassie smiled, and the twisted edge of her mouth turned it into a grimace. “Not yet, anyway,” she said. “But if he’s capable of beating you and Kevin, then he’s capable of anything. There isn’t a limit on a man’s violence; there is no shutoff switch. It won’t reach a certain point and then automatically stop. Sooner or later, whatever triggers the violence is going to push him further and further, until at least one of you is either very badly injured or dead. Do you want to see the statistics? I can show you. I can show you that this type of situation never goes away on its own. It will only escalate, it will only get worse, and the only thing you can do to protect yourself and your children is to get as far away from him as you possibly can.” She laid her fingers on the keyboard but kept her eye on Mary. “Now, we’re here to help you accomplish that. Don’t you think we should get started on it?”

  Mary stared at her for a moment, then looked at her son, Kevin. The little boy, with a courage and wisdom far beyond his years, looked at his mother and nodded. “We gotta,”
he said.

  Over the next thirty minutes, Cassie took down all of Mary Kowalski’s information. It was all entered into the forms that printed out when she was finished, forms that would help Mary to get an order of protection against her husband, to keep him away from her and the children. She learned Jim’s work schedule and arranged for immediate placement for Mary, Kevin, and little Tina in one of the shelters on the other side of the county. When everything was complete, she picked up the phone on her desk and pushed a button that called a retired policeman who would escort Mary and the children to their home to gather clothes and necessities so that they could be in the shelter before Jim got off work.

  When Mary was gone, Cassie sat back and took a deep breath. There was a small wipe-off board on the wall beside her desk, and she picked up a marker and put another check on it. There were twenty-seven check marks, and each one represented a woman or family that Cassie had helped to escape from abuse.

  “That’s another one, Abby,” she whispered to the photograph on her desk. “We saved another one.”

  The deputies who had arrested Lex Stuart that night had run right into the burning cabin after cutting him and shoving him into the back of a car. They were joined seconds later by a pair of paramedics, and between the four of them they managed to drag both the women out, chairs and all. The fire had been melting the zip strips, but it had also been searing their flesh onto the wood, so it was necessary to carry them out in the chairs. They were still on fire when they got out of the cabin, but another deputy had arrived and had a fire extinguisher in his hands. He put out the fire so the paramedics could start doing anything they could to save their lives.

  Stuart had done a better job of dousing Abby, and she died six hours later as they were trying to stabilize her. Cassie had terrible burns over most of the left side of her body, including her neck and head, but she clung to life with a determination that amazed all of her doctors. Over the next few weeks, she endured numerous surgeries to remove damaged skin and graft on new tissue, but most of that was on her neck and the side of her face. Her left side, arm, and leg were too badly burned for anything but synthetic skin grafts, and they had been forced to cut off her engagement ring. Her ring finger and pinky on her left hand had become fused when the doctors decided it was the only way to avoid amputation.