by T. L. Haddix
“I know. And there’s no way to protect her.”
“Sometimes the best way to get a wound to heal is to rip the bandage off. You know that.”
“Yeah, I do. I still don’t have to like it, though.”
Wyatt clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s go in. The pizza should be ready, and they’ll be wondering what happened to us.”
When they walked in the back door, Stacy was pulling the pizza out of the oven. She was dressed in leggings and a long T-shirt and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked worlds better than she had earlier in the day, and some of Gordon’s tension evaporated.
“There you two are. We were starting to think we’d have these pizzas to ourselves.”
“No such luck.” Gordon moved past her to the cabinet where the plates were, giving her ponytail a brief tug as he went. “We’ll eat in the dining room, if there are no objections.”
“None here,” Maria said as she stood. “But I do need the restroom, if someone would be so kind as to point me there.”
“Down the hall, past the stairs, on your right.” Once he’d gathered the dining accoutrements, Gordon headed into the dining room with them. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Chloe trailing after him and Murphy following, keeping about ten feet between them. He sat the plates down and turned to watch the cats.
“No more nine-one-one calls from Murphy, I take it?” Wyatt asked, also watching the cats.
“Not since I locked the phones away. I’m just happy they haven’t tried to kill each other.”
Stacy came in with the pizza and laughed. “I think Murphy’s in love. He’s following her everywhere and looks at her like he’s never seen another cat before.”
“And what does she think of the attention?” Maria asked as she came back in.
“She’s playing hard to get.” They all laughed when Murphy slinked closer to Chloe with a chirruping meow and lay down before he reached her. Chloe, tail swishing back and forth, glanced at him and then jumped up to sit in one of the dining room chairs. Gordon could have sworn she had a satisfied look on her face.
“What’s the word going around at the courthouse?” Stacy asked as they all sat.
“That you hurt your wrist again and had to go in to get that checked out.” Maria served the pizza, fighting the stringy cheese that didn’t want to break. “Now that’s good cheese. Thanks for letting me bring pizza. I’m craving pepperoni like you wouldn’t believe.”
“That and pickles, from what I hear,” Gordon teased.
She grinned back at him. “Those, too. Wyatt had an idea about tomorrow. About how to throw our perpetrator off.”
Gordon and Stacy both turned to him, and he nodded. “Yeah. I think you should come in tomorrow like nothing happened. Wear your brace. Just stop by for a visit. We’ll make something up. Laugh today off.”
The merit of the idea was easy to see. Stacy voiced Gordon’s thoughts before he could swallow his pizza, though.
“You think that will make whoever’s doing this escalate, push them into revealing their hand.”
“That’s what I’m hoping. We show him or her that what they did to you had no effect. Your house is empty. They don’t know that we know about them. With any luck, they’ll think you aren’t there tonight because you’re with Gordon romantically. We can set up surveillance of the house from the garage, see what happens.”
“Cameras or personnel?” Gordon asked.
“I’m thinking cameras. As much as I’d like to put people in the garage, we’re a little slammed right now. The state troopers have offered some help, but a stomach bug is making the rounds up there, and they’re short staffed, too.”
Stacy winced. “Ouch. That’s always fun. Do you want me to cancel my vacation, come back in?”
“No.” Wyatt was adamant. “You need some time off, especially after what happened last night. Don’t even try to come back early.”
She seemed to relax at the reprieve. “Tell me if you change your mind.”
The conversation moved into more general discussion and stayed light until the end of the meal, when Wyatt changed the subject.
“Stacy, I need to talk to you about something. Can we walk outside?”
A subtle shift moved over her, and after studying Wyatt for a moment, she nodded. “Sure.”
“We’ll clear the table,” Maria assured her. “You all go talk.”
“Let’s go out to the front porch, shall we?” Wyatt asked. “We can sit out there.”
As the door shut behind them, Gordon was surprised to hear Maria blow out a tense breath. “Everything all right?”
“Yeah. I just know what he’s going to discuss with her, and I hate it.”
Gordon loaded the dishwasher. As much as he wanted to ask what Stacy and Wyatt would be talking about, he held his tongue. He did question Maria about how to handle things going forward with Stacy.
“I asked her out, finally,” he admitted. “But I don’t know what to do next. Especially if she’s—if what I think happened did. I don’t want to hurt her more than she’s already been hurt.”
Maria finished washing her hands, obviously considering his words as she dried off. “Let Stacy tell you how to proceed. Push her gently, but not too much. You’ll know. You’re very intuitive where she’s concerned. Make her feel safe with you, and I think she’ll open up. She wants to. She’s just afraid to.”
He crossed his arms and leaned back against the counter. “I know. Andre really did a number on her, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did.” She straightened the items on the counter around the sink. “And I didn’t realize just how much until recently. Oh, I knew it bothered her when they stopped seeing each other, but I didn’t know how much. It wasn’t that she had deep feelings for him, either,” she hurried to assure him. “She didn’t. But he represented something to her, and when it didn’t work out…”
“She blamed herself.”
She smiled up at him with sadness-tinged approval. “Exactly. You care for her, don’t you?”
He looked down at his feet. “Yeah, I do. But she doesn’t get that. Not yet.”
“I think she just needs time to get used to the idea.” Maria patted his arm. “If you’re patient with her, I think you’ll get a huge payoff. But please, please, don’t hurt her. If you’re not serious, back off now. Stacy isn’t the kind of woman who does casual relationships.”
“No. I know that. I’m not into casual, either. I’ve been happily married, and going back to happily single is not something I’m interested in.”
The front door opened, and he moved away from the counter, then hurried after Maria into the living room. As soon as he saw Stacy’s face, he saw that the shields were back, possibly even stronger than before. The haunted look in her eyes pierced his soul, and if they’d been alone, he would have tried to hold her.
“We need to head out.” Wyatt held out his hand to Maria, who clasped it. “We’ve all got some rough days ahead.”
“Yes, we do.” Stacy managed a smile for Maria. “You need to get home and rest. Take care of my niece or nephew.”
“I will do just that. You’ll call if you need me?”
She nodded. “You know I will. Drive safely going home.”
Gordon walked them to the door and watched until they’d pulled out of the driveway. Only then did he lock the front door and turn to face Stacy. She was standing in front of the windows, absently petting Chloe, who had climbed into the window seat.
“You think it’s okay to close the shades? It’s getting dark, and people can see in.”
Gordon went to the nearest window and started lowering the shade. “Yes. I’ve never understood people who aren’t bothered by being in a house with the windows wide open at night.”
She still didn’t look away from the window. When he drew alongside her, she released a hitching breath, and he realized she was crying.
“Stacy…”
“No, I’m okay. I just don’t react w
ell to certain drugs, and I guess whatever they gave me is one of those.”
He grabbed a couple of tissues out of a box on the bookshelf and handed them to her. “Is it whatever you and Wyatt talked about?”
“Mostly. And I know you and I are going to have to discuss it, and I would rather be shot than have to do that.”
To his surprise, she closed the distance between them and slid her arms around his waist. She clung to him tightly, and Gordon returned the embrace. Because she was so tiny, he had to bend his head to rest it against hers. The top of her head barely came up to his chin.
“I just want to stay right here,” she said softly. “You have no idea how good this feels, and I don’t mean that sexually.”
“I beg to differ. I know exactly how good it feels. And you can come here any time you want, no questions asked. You know that, yes?”
She didn’t answer, and he drew back so that he could see her face. Her cheeks were damp, and he gently wiped them away. “Hey, I meant what I said. Please tell me that you don’t expect me to turn away because of whatever this secret is.”
“I don’t know what to expect. I’ve been afraid to even think about it.” She pulled back and sat on the window seat with her back braced against the bookcase that formed its end. “I’m just going to blurt this out, because that’s the easiest way to get it over with. When I was seventeen, my mother drugged me. After I passed out, she sold me to two of her friends for five hundred dollars, and they raped me.”
Even though he was expecting it, her words hit him like a freight train. He sat down heavily on the seat beside her, horrified. “Your mother?”
Stacy didn’t look at him. “Yes.”
Gordon didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure which part of the revelation disturbed him more—that she’d been raped or that her mother had been the impetus of the attack. As he tried to get his head around the awful knowledge, he watched Stacy. She looked prepared for a blow, and he guessed that he probably wasn’t the first man she’d told about the violation.
More than anything, he wanted to pull her into his arms and protect her, hold her, assure her she was safe, but if her posture was any gauge, the overture would not be welcome. He decided to try a small step and held out his hand to her, leaving the choice of whether to take it up to her. She didn’t move right away, but she did eventually take it.
He clasped her fingers tightly. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“It isn’t pretty.”
“I didn’t expect it would be.”
Chloe came over to the window and jumped up, settling in on Stacy’s lap. She petted the cat with the hand Gordon wasn’t holding. He could feel her trembling, and he was ready to tell her that she didn’t have to say a damned word when she started talking.
“My mother and I lived in a trailer park near Fort Knox. That’s where I grew up. And we didn’t have the best relationship in the world, as you might have guessed by now. By the time I was a teenager, we pretty much had separate lives. I avoided her as much as I could and vice versa.” She let go of his hand, reaching up to pull the ponytail holder out of her hair. She kept her hand to herself, but stretched her legs out behind him on the window seat, letting them rest against him.
“You have to understand, I saw what she was from a very early age, and I didn’t want to be like her. I got lost one year at the county fair when I was eleven. I was half-sick with a cold, and I shouldn’t have been out there to begin with, but she had a new boyfriend who wanted to go… So we went. As soon as we got there, she gave me a few dollars and told me to make myself scarce. I did. And before long, I was lost.”
Gordon moved so that his back was against the other bookcase flanking the window seat and rested his hand on her ankles. He stretched out one leg, and Murphy, who had been lurking under the coffee table, saw the opportunity to get in his lap. When the orange cat jumped up and settled in much as Chloe had, Stacy actually smiled at the sight, if only briefly.
“So what happened?”
“I wandered around, sniffling and crying, and all of a sudden, there was this tall man in front of me. God, he seemed like he was a giant,” she remembered. “He bent down and asked me if I needed help, and all I could do was nod. He was the sheriff, and he took me to the department’s booth. I stayed there for a couple of hours while they tracked down Pam. The two women working the booth were so nice to me. I watched everything they did and saw how they helped people. I decided that night that I wanted to be like them when I grew up.”
“So your experience made an impression.”
“A deep impression. I saw that there were people in the world whose purpose was helping others. I’d never met anyone whose first priority wasn’t themselves. It changed everything.” She shifted and rested her hand on Gordon’s ankle, matching his hand on hers.
“How’d you find your mother?”
“The sheriff did. He dropped me off at the booth, and he took two hours to track her down. I think she’d probably left the fair and come back, but I don’t know. It hardly matters now. What matters is that she was furious. I guess he read her the riot act and turned CPS onto us. She blamed me, of course, and for the next six months, she had to mind her ps and qs. She’d been abrasive before, but after that, her attitude had an extra bite. I found out when I got older that she had some activities she would rather not have looked at too closely. A daughter who was enamored of law enforcement and following the rules? Rather inconvenient.” She cleared her throat.
“Things just got more contentious as I got older. By the time I was sixteen, I was living more with one of her friends than I was at home. Maggie grew up with my mother, and her husband was in the Army with my dad. The arrangement seemed to work for everyone concerned, and that was that. Well, the summer when I was seventeen, I got a job working at the diner just down the road from where we lived. Maggie’s husband died, and she bought a house in Elizabethtown. I had to go back to the trailer park. I couldn’t afford the gas money to drive back and forth from Etown every day.”
Gordon knew where she was going, and he realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out silently as she continued.
“I’d been home about a week, and Pam and I were actually getting along better than we had in probably forever. Stupid me, I thought she’d changed,” she said with a sad smile.
“She hadn’t?”
“No. She’d just learned to hide her activities better. My mother is a brilliant con artist.” She blew out a long breath. “I remember going in from work that night, tired. I’d pulled a double shift since it was summer, and I’d made some good tips. You know those days when you work your butt off and you’re bone-tired, but you feel good because you’ve worked hard?”
Gordon nodded. “I do.”
Her smile was bittersweet. “That was one of those days. I’d even gotten a chance to talk to the sheriff that day. By that point in time, he knew me well, and we’d developed a friendship of sorts. He knew I wanted to be a cop, and he was helping me figure out how to go about doing that.”
“A mentor.”
“Exactly. So I went home that night, and she had cooked dinner. One of the ironic things about Pam, she could cook like nobody’s business. I was surprised when I went in, and she knew it. She convinced me that we’d turned a corner, and after I got cleaned up, I sat down to eat. I was starving. The last thing I remember was thinking that the lemonade was a little too sweet. Do you know, to this day, I hate lemonade?”
Chloe got down, and Stacy drew her legs up to her chest. “The next thing I knew, it was early morning, and I was in her bedroom. There was a man in the bed beside me, smoking crack, and there was another man on top of me. The guy smoking was telling him that he needed to flip me over and try the other side, because it was even better. They didn’t realize I was awake until he tried to flip me over, and I screamed bloody murder.”
Gordon had to swallow, and he struggled with the urge to scream with rage. He gripped the cushion next to
her legs tightly. He heard a seam rip, but Stacy, lost in remembering, didn’t notice. If she can stand to tell you about it, you can stand to hear it, he told himself.
“What did they do?”
“They freaked out. The one who had been taking his turn hit me, but I didn’t stop screaming and struggling. I guess they were too high to notice that I was coming out of having been drugged. They’d been using steadily all night, and they were pretty out of it by then. I got off the bed. I’m still not sure how, and I grabbed a knife from the dresser. They’d used it to cut me earlier that night, and they’d just left it there. When they came after me, I fought back. I couldn’t stand up, and I aimed for where I knew I’d do the most damage. I castrated that son of a bitch before he could get the knife.”
Gordon’s wince was instinctive, but he had never been so glad to hear the word ‘castrated’ in his life. “Good girl.”
Her eyes were fierce. “It was mostly luck, but, by God, it stopped him. He screamed like nothing I’ve ever heard before or since. I managed to get out of the bedroom, and the second guy decided he wasn’t going to stick around and get caught. By then, the neighbors had all heard the screaming, and they came over. They called the cops, and that was that.”
“Where was your mother?”
“Gone. Long gone. She knew she was done, and she had a couple of warrants. She needed to get out of town fast, and selling me was the easiest way for her to make a good chunk of money to run on.”
Gordon was devastated. He slowly shook his head in disbelief. “Five hundred dollars. Your mother needs to be horsewhipped. Stacy, I’m so sorry. Please tell me that she at least got what was coming to her, and the men?”
“The men did. They both went to prison, and the one who ran got killed while he was in there. The one I castrated served his time, got out, and within a month, he stole a car and wrapped it around a tree. He died instantly.” She ran a finger around the cuff of her leggings. “I don’t say their names. I don’t like giving them that much recognition.”