He downed the whiskey in one gulp without flinching, and said, “I want you to tell me about them. The men who you…” Elegant gesture. Wanted me to kill. “What did they do to you, Holly? Why did they follow you here?”
She felt panic welling at the idea of telling him. But she felt something else, too: a relief, so profound she could cry, lingering at the horizon. He wasn’t giving up on her after all. He’d come back around to the idea. He wanted to know. And if she told him, it might ease this awful ache of knowing her own past. Living with what had happened was exhausting. She would never want to burden someone with her story, but Michael wasn’t someone. He was the sergeant at arms for the Lean Dogs MC, and he’d seen his share of horrors, no doubt. She held such hope that this outlaw might understand her outsider soul.
She leaned toward him. She wanted to touch him, but refrained. “Not here. Can you wait till I get off tonight?”
He nodded. “I’ll follow you home.”
The earnest attention in his hazel eyes was too much. She did touch him, reaching forward to briefly close her hand over the back of his. Then she left, before he could retract his interest.
There were a handful of lights on at the Victorian mansion, including the lamps Holly had left blazing in her attic loft, the tiny Christmas tree twinkling behind the fogged glass.
Inside, there were the faint sounds of music, and the smell of sweets baking.
“Mrs. Chalmers has insomnia and does night baking,” Holly explained. “And Eric never sleeps, I don’t think.”
He followed her up both shadowed stairwells, the old house creaking under their feet. Muffled human noises from the other tenants: a cough, a murmur of a voice, a door closing, water running, TV rumbling. Did no one go to sleep in this place? It was almost four.
Oh well. This way, nobody would be disturbed by them moving around in the attic.
The loft was almost too warm, and Michael peeled off his jacket, hung it up on one of the pegs inside the door.
Holly took off her jacket too, and kicked off her uniform sneakers, but she didn’t go change clothes, as he expected. She was drawn tight as a bowstring tonight, nervous and furtive, and exhausted because of it. She walked to the kitchenette, pulled a bottle from an upper shelf, and took a long slug from it as she walked back toward him.
It was Crown Royal, he saw the label as she reached him, and she was drinking it straight down like water.
“That’s some nasty shit,” he informed her. He felt clumsy and awkward, here in her personal, feminine space, with her in such a fragile state.
She shrugged. “All of it’s nasty. It gets the job done.” She sat down on her peach sofa, curled her bare legs up under her, tugging at the hem of her silk shorts. She clutched the bottle into her middle. “Sit,” she said, and he did, settling beside her, an arm’s length between them.
Holly let her head fall to the side, against the back of the sofa. It was wearing her out already, thinking about what she’d say to him. The lamplight caught the shadows beneath her eyes. She looked small and pretty, like he could pick her up in one hand.
“Your father, your uncle, your husband,” Michael said, recalling what she’d said before.
She nodded, silken hair rustling against the sofa. “Some of their friends were involved sometimes, but I never knew their names. It was usually too dark to see their faces.”
Michael felt the slow, even pounding of his heart against his ribs. He didn’t want to hear the story she was about to tell him. The dread was already building in him, swirling like bile at the base of his throat. But he needed to know how bad it had been. He needed to have this justification for what he was fast realizing he had to do.
“What did they do to you, honey?” he asked, quietly, his shoulders stiff with anticipation.
She closed her eyes a moment, pain lining her face. “Promise me something first.”
He waited until her eyes were open, and nodded.
“Try – at least try, please – not to hate me, after I tell you.”
“I won’t.”
Her smile was small and wry. She took a deep breath. “My mother fell in love with a monster…”
Holly had a handful of precious, closely-guarded memories of her mother. Lila Jessup had been slight, almost boyish, with lush tangles of dark hair that were always catching in the wind. She was soft-spoken, always-gentle. Trapped in the old farmhouse out in the woods, with no one but her husband and daughter for company, she had been far from depressed. She loved nature; she knew the name of every songbird, every tree and tiny sprouting flower.
She took Holly by the hand, and together they walked the wooded trails, passing in and out of golden shafts of sunlight, freezing at the sight of a doe and fawn passing through the trees, staying so silent the mother deer never noticed them, and they could marvel at the fawn’s perfect blanket of white spots.
They clipped flowers and carried them back to the house to arrange in old jelly jars and sweet tea glasses, set up in the window above the sink, so the sun shone through the water and translucent petals. Lila knew which berries were safe to eat, and she baked them into pies and tarts. She stood behind tiny Holly, helping her roll out the dough with the floured pin, holding her little hands steady on the knife as they cut the lattice strips for the pie tops.
Holly’s father, Abraham, was a handyman, on the road all day every day looking for work among the local farms. Fixing a fence here, installing a new bathroom sink there, mowing grass in summer and shoveling snow in winter.
On Sundays, he held a bible study group in their living room, somber men in pressed plaid shirts talking about the King James version for hours, smoking cigarette after cigarette until the entire house was swimming with the exhalations. Those were the days when Lila took Holly down to the pond, where they hunted for frogs and minnows. And inevitably, Abraham would come looking for them, and he’d grab Lila by the arm, squeezing until Lila’s skin was red, and take her back to the house.
Abraham’s brother, Holly’s Uncle Jacob, stayed with them often. He didn’t work, and spent his afternoons on the sofa, watching soaps and calling for Lila to bring him another beer, to rub his feet, to treat him “like a good sister should.”
A horrible memory, one Holly couldn’t shake: She came bolting into the house, pigtails flying behind her, clutching a bundle of wildflowers for her mother. Down the long cool hallway from the front door, Holly stepped into the kitchen, and tried to make sense of what she saw.
Her mother stood at the kitchen sink, hands braced on the porcelain edge, eyes fixed on the window, face blank and lifeless. Her legs were spread wide, and her dress was hiked up to her waist in back, so her pale legs were bared up to her round white bottom. Jacob stood behind her, right up against her. His jeans were unbuttoned. His hips thrust forward, again, again, a fierce gyration, almost like he was dancing. He panted, and grunted, his face pressed into Lila’s hair. His hands clutched at Lila’s thighs, leaving dark bruises. And Lila rocked forward with each movement, swaying in time to Jacob’s hips.
Neither of them noticed small, silent Holly standing there.
“Say you like it,” Jacob growled. “You say you like it, bitch!”
“I like it,” Lila said in a high, breathless voice, as devoid of emotion as her face.
Holly fled, running out of the house, across the yard, into the forest until she thought her lungs would burst. She sank down onto the dirt path, and sobbed into her hands, the flowers scattered at her feet, the songbirds trilling in the trees above.
Lila found her just before nightfall, her smile its usual warm reassurance. “Come on, darling. It’s dinner time.” She took Holly’s hand and pulled her up, and Holly didn’t dare mention what she’d seen, though Lila’s eyes were sad, like she knew anyway.
It grew worse after that. Lila’s dress torn open in the front, her lip split, Abraham zipping up his jeans in the middle of the living room on a Saturday afternoon, Holly unseen in the doorway.
; At night, when she should have been sleeping, Holly saw Jacob go into the bedroom with both her parents. Heard the door lock. Heard the incomprehensible sounds from within. Saw her mother’s bruised wrists the next morning.
A Saturday. Cold kitchen. No sign of Lila. Abraham and Jacob sat at the table, smoking, foreheads heavy with creases.
“What’re we gonna do?” Jacob asked. “Dig a hole?”
Abraham glared at his brother. “We wouldn’t have to do anything if you hadn’t covered her damn mouth.”
“You did it too!”
“But I didn’t suffocate her!”
Abraham tapped the ash off his cigarette onto a teacup saucer and sighed. “We can’t just leave her up there.”
Holly crept up the stairs on her tiptoes. To her parents’ bedroom. Door ajar. Narrow ribbon of light slithering across the hall floor.
The door swung inward with the lightest touch. Sun pouring through the bare windows, framing the wooden bedstead. Ropes at all four posts. Lila, pale and limp, lashed to the bed, naked, her skin tinged with blue. Eyes open, glassy. Mouth agape. Like she was screaming. But her skin was cold, cold when Holly touched her.
“Mommy?”
But there was no response.
An unmarked grave in the forest, a place where the dirt was fresh and wet on top. No explanation from anyone.
Jacob moved into the house permanently.
Holly scattered wildflowers over the place where her mother was buried. She sat in the woods for long hours, watching the deer come and go, watching the fawn grow into a young buck with tiny buds for antlers.
Her mother was dead, and she belonged to the monsters.
Michael didn’t want her to continue; from this point, he could guess what she’d say. But her eyes were dry and there was a certain fierceness in her now. She wanted, needed, to keep going. It was strengthening her resolve, bringing it all back to the surface, replacing her fear with fury.
“I was fifteen when these came,” she said, closing her hands over her full breasts, straining against her tank top. Her smile was bitter. “That was when they replaced Mom with me.”
She’d inherited her mother’s knack for cooking, and she’d made a big breakfast of bacon, eggs and hash. She’d fished all the shell from the eggs with her fingertips, because the last time Abraham had bitten down on a piece, he’d slapped her so hard she’d lost consciousness for a moment. She wouldn’t let that happen again.
She stood at the kitchen sink, washing the skillet by hand, enjoying the sight of the little brown wrens hopping around on the windowsill outside.
Then she heard the footsteps behind her, the heavy breathing. A hand landed on her waist. Jacob’s voice in her ear, his hot breath fanning her skin: “When you stand there, in the sun like that, I can see right through your shirt.”
She shuddered, gooseflesh breaking out all down her arms and legs. “I–”
The words were snatched out of her as she was spun around. Her hair whipped across her face and the room revolved as she struggled against the sudden loss of balance.
When she tossed her hair back, Jacob’s hands were at the buttons of her cheap cotton blouse, and he was opening them with rough, excited movements, threads snapping and popping in his haste.
“Uncle Jacob–”
He slapped her mouth, jerking her head around on her neck, pain radiating up her throat to the back of her skull, merging with the stinging in her lips.
“Keep your trap shut,” he ordered.
And then her shirt was open, and the new feminine curves of her breasts were in his rough hands. He squeezed them hard, his tan fingers dark against her pale flesh.
Face smarting, shaking all over, Holly stood rooted while he played with her a moment, his eyes glazed-over, his mouth hanging open in an absent smile as he molded her breasts and dug his fingertips deep into the soft round weights.
Then he spun her again, pressed her stomach up against the edge of the sink, and he reached around her and tore at the fastenings of her cutoffs. Yanked them down to her ankles. He ripped her panties.
“Now you just be a good girl, and you’ll like it.”
She thought of her mother, lying cold and dead, tied to the bedposts upstairs, as she felt his hand go between her legs.
She was fifteen, and it was no longer some abstract spectacle, as it had been when she’d witnessed him raping her mother. She knew what was happening, now, as he forced himself inside her.
The pain painted the inside of her head white for a moment. White, consuming, blistering pain, too awful to put a name to, too intense and intimate to be believed.
And as Jacob grunted and heaved against her, she realized she could see her dim reflection in the sun-glazed window. Her shirt open, her breasts swaying as she was rocked forward and back, forward and back. Wet tears tracked silently down her face, glinting like crystal.
I’m pretty now, she thought. Look at me, I turned out pretty. Just like my mama.
A Sunday, before bible study. The upstairs rooms were stuffy and humid, because the AC needed repairing, and Abraham had, as he’d said, other things on his mind besides that.
Holly could hear the men gathering downstairs, the shuffle of feet and the low tumble of masculine voices. Someone laughed loudly, and it sounded like a pig snorting. She could already smell the sharp tang of all the cigarette smoke.
Her father’s bed had been stripped down to a single white sheet, and he stood beside it, beckoning her forward with one hand, a length of rope held in the other.
Holly stared at her bare toes a long moment. If she refused, there would be more slapping. She didn’t know how many more times she could be struck without suffering brain damage. There was no chance of escaping, not while the downstairs was so packed with Abraham’s friends.
If she relented willingly, maybe it would be easier for her, she reasoned, and stepped toward her father.
He tore her clothes from her, and he forced her down onto the bed. He tied the ropes tight to both her wrists, until her hands grew numb.
She stared up at him, vision blurred by the bright sheen of the sun shining off her white naked skin. She could see the raised mounds of her breasts, lifting as she breathed, the knobs of her knees.
Abraham stripped off his belt. And then unbuttoned his jeans.
“It isn’t your fault that you’re full of sin, Holly,” he told her. “You’re a woman now, and your body was designed by Lucifer to draw the evil out of men.”
And then he climbed over her.
He left her tied, after, when he redressed and went to greet his bible study group.
Holly grew exhausted and hungry, waiting, as the shadows lengthened across the ceiling. Her hands had lost all feeling hours ago. Her arms quivered and crawled with awful sensations, the nerves clamping against this constant strain. She dozed. Or maybe she blacked out.
But then there were footsteps coming up the stairs, many sets of them. And Abraham came into the room followed by the men from the bible study. They all crowded inside, bunched in the corners, all of them staring down at her nakedness.
One after the other they climbed up to settle between her thighs.
She closed her eyes and thought of the woods, of the birds, of the deer, of the flowers scattered across her mother’s unmarked grave.
“Holly. Oh, Holly, Holly, Holly!”
Dewey Jessup was her third or fourth cousin. The nephew of some step-something-or-other, a chain of relation Abraham had explained to her while she was drawn deep inside herself, and not listening. He was skinny, and he had clammy, pale skin, and his head was too big for his narrow neck, and his ears should have been pinned back when he was a boy.
He was a virgin the first time he came to join the bible study group, and he’d fumbled and blushed the first time Abraham had urged him up on the bed and given him instructions. Ever since, he’d been fascinated, obsessed, almost rabid in his need, awkward and clumsy still.
“Oh, Holly,” he groaned, fi
ngers digging into her hips as he gave one last thrust and spilled himself inside her. The orgasm stiffened him all over, locked his hands on her hipbones, drove him against her and held him there, still, quivering as the pulses overtook him.
Then he relaxed, his shoulders slumping, so his sunken chest seemed to cave in even farther. He passed his clammy hands up the soft skin of her belly.
“Thank you, Holly.” He lay down on top of her, most of his weight on the bed, his head cushioned on her breasts. “What you give me…it’s so special. Thank you, thank you.”
Holly stared at the ceiling, silent.
“Holly,” Dewey said. He petted her belly, her breasts.
“Hurry up, boy,” one of the others said, impatient. The room was mostly dark, save for the lamp burning on the nightstand. The men were all the same, a blur to her. Only Abraham, Jacob, and Dewey were more than cocks and hands.
“I want to be with you all the time,” Dewey continued, oblivious. “Holly…will you…will you marry me?”
“You’re lucky, just damn lucky is all,” Abraham told her, “that some sweet boy wants to marry you. Wants to give you his name.”
But it’s the same as my name, she thought to herself.
And as her head was forced to the side, and her father leaned over her, she was forced to watch what happened to her in the dressing table mirror.
“It wasn’t a real wedding,” Holly explained, taking another long gulp of Crown and dabbing the amber droplets off her lips with the back of her hand. “Obviously. There wasn’t a preacher for miles in those fucking backwoods.”
It was the first time Michael had heard her cuss. The alcohol was loosening her up, allowing the emotion to shine through, glimmering in her eyes like fever.
Her smile was more of a sneer, lips drawn back hard with pain. “My father presided. In the kitchen. Pronounced us man and wife.”
Price of Angels (Dartmoor Book 2) Page 13