“Couple of things. First, I think Annalee has found us what we need. I’d like you to ride over there with me and look at it, see what you think. Second, I need to know, and I’m sorry if you think it’s none of my business, but do you still have feelings for Annalee?”
“Hell, Boss, you know I do,” I said, forgetting to call him Russ. “Why?”
“Charity’s told me some disturbing things about Jason Clark. I’m going to check them out, and I wondered if you want to be involved,” he said.
“You bet your ass I want to be involved! What kind of disturbin’ things?” I asked.
“He’s been treating her badly, nothing anyone would be able to see, but she’s scared. He doesn’t seem as concerned as he should be with the children’s safety, and he’s made some remarks that didn’t sit right with her about his parents’ death.” Russ hesitated then, like there was more but he wasn’t sure he should share it with me.
“What about his parents?” I asked.
“Word in town was it was a strange accident, a few years back. He inherited their business when he wasn’t any older than you.”
“Accident?”
“Logging truck hit them. Funny thing was, it was a clear day, no ice on the road, and that truck came from a side road without stopping. Driver claimed his brakes wouldn’t work, he couldn’t stop, so the logging company got fined for having faulty equipment, but the driver wasn’t charged.”
“That sounds legit to me, Russ.”
“I thought so too, until I had my investigator try to locate the driver. He’s dropped off the face of the earth. I’d like to know why.”
“What can I do?”
“Keep an eye on Annalee, kid. Hang out in town, make up to her sisters, be there if she needs you. I’m not sure I should tell you this, but…”
“What?”
“Charity says there’s been some sex stuff that Annalee doesn’t like. She puts up with it because she thinks she needs to marry the bastard. But I don’t think any woman should have to do anything she doesn’t want to.”
I didn’t know whether to holler or just go kill Jason Clark. My head felt hot, and my ears was buzzin’, just thinkin’ about him touchin’ my girl at all, much less doin’ stuff she didn’t like. I narrowed my eyes and snarled, “I’m gonna kill him.”
Russ got a worried look on his face and put his hand on my arm. “Don’t go off half-cocked, son. We’ll straighten him out, don’t worry. But I would like you to keep an eye on Annalee.”
“Russ, she won’t like it.” I was torn. I wanted, no needed to make sure she was safe, but what if she never forgave me for it? No, that was selfish thinkin’. By the time Russ answered, I knew he was right.
“Doesn’t matter. She needs to be safe.”
Chapter 14
I knew I shouldn’t have told Charity about the way Jason was treating me sexually. After all, he wasn’t hurting me, just humiliating me. I got it. He was punishing me for hesitating to have a baby with him. I thought it would get better after we were married. In the meanwhile, I could endure it. I’d endured a two-year marriage with Jed, after all. A couple of weeks was nothing compared to that.
Still, I dreaded going with Jason every night. My reluctance soon became noticeable to Celeste and Ciara. Ciara was younger and sympathized with me, but Celeste took it as a big joke.
“What’s the matter, isn’t his dick big enough? Or is it too big? I swear, Annalee, you act like he’s takin’ you out to kill you instead of just having sex. If you hate it this much, what’s it going to be like when you get married?” She’d hit too close to home with the ‘kill you’ remark. He didn’t hurt me, didn’t even threaten me, but somehow I knew he was capable of killing me if he got angry enough. And for some reason, he wasn’t getting less angry, he was getting more so.
After the carnival incident, I kept the kids out of his way. But he kept on coming every night to take me to his house and put me through his humiliating routine, after taking me to dinner and showing me off like a prize horse, of course. No one would have believed the change in him. Witty, soft-spoken, charming Jason wined and dined me, pulled out my chair for me, opened doors for me and gave every evidence of cherishing me in public.
In private, his sexual desires kept getting more and more bizarre. In only a couple of weeks, he’d gone from wanting to make love to me to wanting to punish me in any way he could that wouldn’t leave evidence. I wondered if it would stop escalating before it finally did leave evidence. That very night after showing Russ and Charity the property, he escalated again. He stripped me as usual, and loosened my hair from the braid he’d insisted I wear it in instead of my bun, then he used cords to bind my ankles to a bar that kept my feet and legs spread far apart. That surprised me, but it wasn’t all that uncomfortable, until he also cuffed my hands behind my back again.
I couldn’t see what he was doing, but I could feel him threading something like a clothesline through the cuffs. Then sharp pain seized my shoulders as he drew it tight, raising my cuffed hands behind me. I was forced to bend forward to keep the excruciating pain from making me cry out. When he had me pulled as tight as I could stand it, I was facing the floor with my hair trailing down around my feet, tears dripping from my eyes from the pain and fear.
It wasn’t long before the fear was justified. A sudden agony seized my left nipple as he clamped it with something rigid and tight, followed shortly by the same agony being visited on the right. I couldn’t suppress the scream this time, and Jason quickly covered my mouth with his hand.
“Don’t scream,” he whispered. “It won’t go well for you if you scream.”
I whimpered with the pain and the effort not to scream, but forced my eyes open to see if I could tell what was happening to my nipples. Two plain wooden clothespins dangled from my breasts, shaking slightly from my tremors as I fought the pain.
“Jason, please, take those off, I can’t stand it,” I whined, but softly.
“Sure you can,” he said cheerfully. “They’ll go numb in a minute. I’ve got a treat for you today.”
My mind came near to shattering when I realized he was oblivious to my pain. The contrast between his menacing whisper of only a moment ago, and his cheerful declaration that he had a treat for me settled it in my mind…he was insane. I began to pray, for surely he wouldn’t let me go after this. The only thing that comforted me was knowing that Charity or one of my sisters would take the kids when I was dead, and they’d keep them together. I really hoped it would be Russ and Charity. Only they could comfortably deal with that hospital bill.
My thoughts made me cry harder, but I didn’t dare make a sound. Jason had gone somewhere I couldn’t see him, and I would have been glad, except that I felt my nipples were going to be pinched right off if he didn’t get those clothespins off of me.
Jason was coming back, I could feel his deliberate tread through the floorboards.
“Jason, please, please. This hurts so bad,” I said. By now my hands and arms were tingling, the blood unable to travel uphill from the shoulders where he had me tied up.
“You’re okay. Here’s your treat,” he said from somewhere behind me. With no further warning, he shoved something big and rigid into me from behind. It was such a shock, and so painful since I wasn’t lubricated, that I tried to stand. Immediately my arms were jerked upwards with an electric shock that sent me quickly back to my forward-bending position. I managed to close my mouth against the scream that bubbled up, but the violent movement agitated the clothespins, which shook all the more as I gasped and twitched, mindlessly trying to get away from the pain.
With indifference to all of it, Jason pulled the object out and rammed it back in, several times, before he grew tired of the sport. I was sobbing uncontrollably now, unable to summon words to beg him to stop. When he finally withdrew it for the last time and showed me what he’d used, I saw a grotesquely large flesh-colored replica of a penis, with streaks of blood on it.
“Look at that
,” he said. “Are you on your period?”
“I don’t think so,” I rasped out, still crying.
“Well, you got my dildo dirty. You’ll have to clean it.” With that, he seized my jaws and squeezed, forcing my teeth open before ramming the nasty thing into my mouth far enough to gag me. “Suck,” he commanded. I drew my lips back and clamped down on it with my teeth, trying to keep him from ramming it into the back of my throat again.
“Suck, or you’ll get your wish.”
That made no sense, and I thought I was hearing things wrong. I was still puzzling about it when he yanked one clothespin off without opening it. That ripped a scream out of me that I was helpless to control. It was the last straw for Jason. With a snarl of rage, he yanked the other clothespin off. I truly didn’t know whether my nipples were still attached to my body, but the excruciating firing of the nerve endings pierced me either way. I screamed again. That’s when he lost it.
I was helpless to fight back or even dodge, as Jason first slapped me with a ringing blow to my ear, and then began to whale on me with the dildo, which was surprisingly painful for all that it wasn’t really hard. I stopped screaming, hoping that would make him stop beating me, but he just kept on hitting, now with his fists. Though I twisted and turned my head, he rained blows on my face, shoulders, back and torso, while kicking at my legs with his fortunately unshod feet.
The torture ended for me when one of his kicks knocked my legs out from under me, and I screamed one last time before losing consciousness when my right shoulder gave way.
Chapter 15
“I’m takin’ the pickup,” I threw at Russ as I realized it was gettin’ on for dark. Before anything else happened, I needed to get to Rawlins fast. Russ hadn’t shared details, and I didn’t even know if he knew ‘em. But, I could imagine, and each mental picture made me want to punch something, anything, but preferably that asshole Jason. I tore out down the ranch road burnin’ rubber, makin’ the highway in record time and riskin’ a ticket after that by pushin’ that pickup to near a hundred.
When I reached the city limits I only slowed down so I could make the corners without rollin’ the truck. I barely took the time to turn the ignition off and put the pickup in Park before I threw myself out of the cab and ran up on the porch. In a state of desperation and rage that I’d worked myself into on the drive, I pounded on the door until Celeste yanked it open and stared at me.
“Cody Wayne, what the fuck has gotten into you?” she demanded.
“Nice language. Pick that up at the truck stop? I’m here to see Annalee.” I snapped.
“She isn’t here, shithead. My language is none of your business, and neither is Annalee.” Celeste stood there with one hand on the door and the other in a fist resting at her waist. She looked like a spoiled brat, but I had no time to straighten her out.
“Where is she?” I asked urgently.
“If you must know, she went to dinner with her fiancé. I don’t know where. Now get off my porch before I call the police. You scared the shit out of the kids pounding on the door like that.”
In despair, I turned from the door, wondering if I could search every eatin’ place in town. I turned back to ask when they left, but Celeste had already slammed the door. I didn’t think she’d open it again, no matter how hard I pounded. Shit, I was just gonna have to go lookin’.
There was thirty or forty places to eat in Rawlins, to my knowledge, but I could probably skip the fast food joints, ice cream and frozen yogurt parlors, and coffee houses. Most of the coffee places wouldn’t be open this time of night anyway. It was time to use my noggin for somethin’ besides landin’ on in the rodeo ring. Where would he take her?
I started with the steak houses, thinkin’ he’d want to take her somewhere she’d feel comfortable. From her background, I didn’t think Asian restaurants would fill that bill, and maybe not the sports bar/grill combinations because she didn’t drink. Everybody knew everybody in a town the size of Rawlins, under ten thousand people. All I had to do was ask the hostess or the first waitress I saw if they’d seen Jason Clark, and I’d have my answer. Since most of the places I was lookin’ was within a four-block area, I parked the pickup and walked from restaurant to restaurant, only movin’ the pickup when the group I was workin’ was more than a couple of blocks from the next one.
I hit paydirt at Rose’s Lariat way up on the east end of Cedar. It was the last good restaurant before Cedar hit US Highway 286 and petered out. It was a long shot, because I knew Rose’s was only open ‘til seven, and it was gettin’ close to that by the time I got there, but I had to check anyway. Rose’s son Bob ran the place now, and I think it was one of his daughters that was a year or two ahead of me back in high school who told me Jason had been there with a girl she didn’t know.
“Blonde, blue eyes? Slender, with her hair all put up in a bun and pushed up in front?” I asked, though I knew if Jason was with a woman, it had to be Annalee.
“That’s pretty much right, except she had her hair braided down the back instead of in a bun. Man, that hair must go most of the way to the floor, long as that braid was,” she answered.
“That’s her. Thanks, Rita,” I said. She waved me off, turning to the next person that was waitin’ for a seat and told him it’d have to be take-out ‘cause they was closin’. For a little diner in the middle of nowhere, that place sure did some business! I still thought it was a funny place to take a date to show off. But that didn’t concern me now as much as where they could’ve got to. Middle of the week in Rawlins wasn’t exactly rockin’ entertainment. There was a few bars, but nothin’ goin’ on there, and somehow a movie didn’t sound right. They had to have gone to his house. And I didn’t know where that was.
Back I went to Annalee’s house, but this time I managed to knock politely. Ciara opened the door this time, and said, “Cody! I’m surprised you’re back here.”
“Ciara, can I talk to you? About Annalee? Russ says she may be in trouble.” My chest was tight, and I was sweatin’ even though it was a cool evenin’, but I had to get someone’s help and Ciara was someone else that loved Annalee. “Please,” I added.
“Sure, Cody. Just a second.” Ciara closed the door, leavin’ me on the porch while she fetched a sweater. She was back in a minute, pullin’ on the sweater as she came through the door.
“What kind of trouble, Cody?” she said, as if the minute’s interruption hadn’t happened.
“You tell me. Russ said she told Charity some stuff about sex with him that she didn’t like. I wanta know what he’s forcin’ her to do.” My lips felt twisted, as the word sex crawled out of my mouth like a dirty snake.
Ciara’s eyes widened, and her hand went to her mouth as she said, “So that’s what…”
“What what?” I demanded, unable to wait for her to finish the sentence. Ciara’s lips firmed.
“She hasn’t wanted to go with him the last couple of days. Ever since he almost got the kids hurt at the carnival, she’s been funny about it. But when we tell her she doesn’t have to go, she just hangs her head down and says she does, too. And then she goes, and comes back lookin’ like she’s been drug through a knothole backwards hours later.”
The more she said, the madder I got, ‘til I coulda spit nails. “Where does he live?” I demanded.
“Oh, lord, Cody, I don’t know the address. I could take you there.”
“Jump in the truck, we’ve gotta go right now. They was at Rose’s and they left at least an hour ago.”
“Let me just tell Celeste. Can we be back here by eight-forty-five? She needs to go to work, and I have to be here for the kids.” Poor Ciara was torn right in half, not knowing where her duty was. I told her we’d be back as soon as we could. She went in the house to tell Celeste she was goin’, and in a minute both of ‘em was back.
“Cody Wayne, I wish you’d mind your own business,” Celeste said to me. I told her Russ had made it my business when he told me to keep an eye on her.
“We ain’t gonna go bustin in and break up anything, Celeste. I just need to see if she’s all right. Then I’ll bring Ciara back here so’s you can get to work.”
“I’ll hold you to that. I can’t afford to lose any hours, since Ciara’s not working yet and Annalee’s moving out at the end of the month.”
~~~
Ciara climbed up into the truck and I closed the door behind her before trottin’ around to the driver’s side.
“Buckle up,” I reminded her. “Now, which way do I go?”
“Let me think,” she said. “I’ve only been there once, but it’s north and west of here. I think on one of the numbered streets off Walnut.”
I turned right at their corner to get to Walnut, and we started cruisin’ so she could look down each side street and say, “No, that’s not it.” The houses was gettin’ bigger and newer, when we got almost to the end, where Walnut curves around and becomes Mountain View.
“Where is it, Ciara?” I asked
“I don’t know! I was sure we came out Walnut. I think we went around a big curve, and turned left.”
Then I knew. He must live on Park Drive, the most exclusive subdivision in town. Figured. I wondered just how much money the bastard had. “Ok, I think I know the area. Will you recognize the house?”
“I think so.”
I sped up a bit as we rounded the curve, but not much because that left turn was comin’ up and the street lighting out here wasn’t good. There, just ahead, was the turn onto Park Drive, which went straight for a ways, jogged a bit to the left and then went straight for about twice the length of the first part. Then it curved back in a big circle, to join the straight part again right at the jog. Ciara couldn’t remember whether they turned left again or not, so I took the straight part, figurin’ we’d come up on it sooner or later. Just as we got to the part where it curved to the left, Ciara hollered, “That’s it!” She was pointin’ to a house on the right that was set facin’ right down the road where we was comin’ from.
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