by Mira Gibson
“Nah, I don’t think you would.”
He was too old to be Charlie. Factoring his weathered face and white hair, she pegged him for sixty-five, maybe sixty years old. If he was related to Charlie at all, and she had no question he was, he had to be his father.
“People round here are probably a bit riled up, you poking around a family in mourning and all.”
This was his excuse for why a truck purposefully rear-ended her?
“I’m thinking you’ll do the right thing. Maybe take a little more time for yourself. Lord knows you’re probably scaring off them children you work with, your head busted up like that.” He clenched his jaw then worked his cracked lips into a brittle smile. “Why don’t we chalk this up to a warning?” She knew when she was being threatened, though it rarely happened. “For the speeding, that is. I know you’ll do the right thing otherwise.”
The way he was staring at her, she had to assume he expected confirmation. When she didn’t give it, he snorted a laugh and started back towards his cruiser, whistling a death tune as he went.
What were the King’s after, she wondered? What was so vital about keeping both Roberta and the firearms in the house? And why didn’t any of them seem grief-stricken that Maude had taken her own life?
As Gertrude signaled onto the highway, accelerating hard and shifting fast, ironclad determination to uncover their secrets formed around her like a shield.
Yet her instincts told her that when it came to the Kings and their eerie grip on this town, she was facing an uphill battle, plain and simple.
Trust no one, she thought, and she might have a prayer of staying alive.
Chapter Nine
“I wish you’d given me notice.” Zhana was flitting about the porch, tidying up her gardening tools and making the place look slightly better as if for Gertrude’s benefit. “I would’ve made sure Charlie was home.”
Barely acknowledging Gertrude, Roberta appeared bored from where she perched on the railing, her bare feet on the keg, toes exploring the edge of the barrel as she watched her mother.
“Roberta,” said Zhana.
The girl’s eyes were glazed over, but she said, “Hmm?”
“Why don’t you pull those lawn chairs out of the basement?”
She slid off the railing, red dress snagging, but she jerked at it and the material snapped off the splintered wood. Zhana eyed her as she padded down the steps and circled towards the back of the house, disappearing.
A silken handkerchief with purple and mauve swirls—a 60’s pattern—wrapped Zhana's head, but she pulled it off and picked its knot open then shook it like a flag. Her hair wasn’t styled as precisely. It flowed when she ran her fingers through. A few strands fluttered down and she wiggled others over the side of the porch.
Observing her, but feeling odd—there was something awkward about watching her finger-comb dead hair off her scalp—Gertrude asked, “So where is Charlie?”
“I apologize. I really can’t tell you. He’s off somewhere.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“Sorry.” She shrugged with a little wave of her hand, looking out through the dusky yard.
There had been no delays or pitfalls with the 10-1C application. Apparently Harry had received confirmation from the Laconia Police that they were planning to move forward with the court order and were scheduled to arrive shortly. Gertrude thought it would’ve taken longer than a day to process and considering her bizarre encounter with Peter King on the highway, she'd actually assumed the order had been shredded and shoved in a recycling bin at the precinct.
It was probably for the best Charlie wasn’t here. This actually might go smoothly.
Roberta returned, dragging a folded lawn chair across the grass then up the steps, but Zhana snatched it, grumbling about her daughter’s carelessness.
When she unfolded the chair, placing the rickety thing near the railing, Gertrude realized its legs weren’t three inches off the ground.
“There you are,” said Zhana, indicating she could have a seat. “Would anyone like a drink?”
“Thank you, no.” Gertrude was hesitant to sit so she made an excuse of glancing at Roberta, who seemed to be debating what she’d like, but she also declined, returning to the railing.
After Zhana went inside the screen door slapped shut, bouncing a few times in the frame.
“You’re here a lot,” she commented. “I thought you guys were supposed to come once a month.”
“Considering everything that’s happened, we feel checking in on you frequently is necessary,” she explained, as she sat down in the low chair.
As soon as she did, she regretted it. She felt like a dog looking up at its master.
“What’s really going on?”
“I just want to make sure you’re safe,” she said quietly. Through the screen door she could hear Zhana faintly clunking around in the kitchen.
“Is this about the article?” She didn’t wait for a response. She was shaking her head, glaring off through the screen door. “I doubt she gets it.”
“Have you had any counseling since...” trailing off, she wasn’t sure how to phrase it delicately then said, “since the attacks, by those men?”
“It’s not what you think,” she said, implying there was no need for therapy.
Gertrude struggled to divide her attention between Roberta and listening for Zhana in the house. In terms of making a drink, she was taking awhile, and Gertrude grew nervous she might make a phone call, warn Charlie, or worse, tip off her father-in-law, who Gertrude hoped to never see again.
“What should I think?”
She took her time and seemed to reject a few replies that formed in her mouth. Then, finally, she stated, “The way things are here, you’re not going to be able to change them.”
“Why do you think that?”
Turning sullen, her gaze fell and she frowned, started swinging her leg.
Zhana returned and a graceful balancing act ensued, flipping on the porch light with her elbow and using her foot to kick open the screen door since her hands were full with two martini’s—both for her, Gertrude assumed, though part of her was curious to see whether or not Zhana handed one to her daughter.
Though the light was soft, it caused the darkening dusk around the house to look like a black abyss. The driveway hinted shapes and shadows, the road behind it a mere tracing. Gertrude could see the lake, the moon's glow across the water, but only if she turned her head.
“So,” said Zhana, bending at the waist and setting one of the drinks at Gertrude’s feet, “what would you like to talk about this time?”
Roberta cut in with a biting tone. “Why don’t we talk about that article?”
“You want to talk about it?” Zhana snapped. “You think I’m happy?”
“You’re the one who gave them that magazine photo. What’d you expect?”
Looking up at them as they hissed like two rattlesnakes lashing out, Gertrude got the impression they’d forgotten she was there and their overlapping jeers—I had every right to use that photo! and Roberta trumping her mother’s intensity, You’re the joke of the town, and Zhana shouting, That’s the pot calling the kettle black, then You’d like to find me with a bullet in my head, and simultaneously Just wait until Charlie gets home—culminated into a crescendo when Zhana exploded, screaming: “Take off my dress!”
In a tone so resigned Gertrude almost didn’t hear her, Roberta said, “Fine,” pulling the straps over her shoulders and letting the dress fall to her feet, which left her standing with nothing on but a simple black bra and plain underwear.
Accusingly, Zhana said, “You’re the reason my hair’s falling out.” She gulped her martini to compose herself then snapped, “People can see you-”
“There’s no one out here.”
“I’ll not have you conducting yourself without dignity. Go inside. Put some clothes on.”
“I don’t have any clothes.”
“Yes, yo
u do.”
“They’ve been sitting in the hamper. I’m not going to wear dirty clothes.”
“Ah,” Zhana groaned, as if agreeing then mumbled distractedly, “I have to get that washer fixed.”
Gertrude, who’d been watching the exchange with unblinking eyes, noticed a set of scars over Roberta’s right thigh—fine lines, as close-set as wood grains—wrapping from her inner thigh to her outer hipbone.
“Can I wear something of yours?”
Having given up, Zhana sighed in defeat. “Pick out something sensible and nothing too expensive.” Then she glanced down at Gertrude, giving her a vexed smile as if to say, See what I have to put up with?
But Roberta didn’t pad into the house. She simply pulled her mother’s dress up and slid the straps over her shoulders, having finally been clever enough to get Zhana's permission to wear the dress.
“I can’t,” Zhana muttered, pacing away. “I just can’t with this.”
Startling her, Gertrude’s cell vibrated in the front pocket of her jeans. When she stretched her leg out to fit her hand in her pocket, she accidentally kicked over the martini glass. “Damn.” She reached for it, but it was rolling away, spewing vodka across the porch and arching towards the steps.
Roberta grabbed it and used her foot to spread the puddle so it would drip between the wooden slats, as Gertrude checked her cell.
Swiping the screen, she saw a text message from Harold McNeil, which read: More BS. Cops aren’t coming.
“Excuse me,” she said, getting to her feet and moving absentmindedly down the porch steps, as she composed a reply. After she sent it—Argh okay—she turned and found Zhana staring at her. “I might have to take off.”
“Very well,” said Zhana, brows rising. She shot a warning glare at Roberta then pulled open the screen door. “Goodnight.”
Gertrude watched the door thwack shut then gave Roberta a parting smirk and started off down the driveway for her car, but Roberta padded after her, catching up.
“Don’t you want your ID back?”
She stopped, saying, “Yes, I would.”
As if negotiating, Roberta asked, “Why are you really here?” Gertrude’s hesitation seemed to provoke her. “Look, you’re obviously trying to accomplish something. The other woman almost never came and when she did it was barely five minutes. And the woman before her came once a week and it was usually scheduled and she only talked to my mom then made sure I was breathing. So what are you doing?”
“We have your best interest in mind,” she recited. It was right out of the manual.
“But you were waiting for someone, weren’t you?” Then urgently, she asked, “You’re trying to get me out of here?”
Roberta looked miserable and the optimistic glint in her eyes was gut wrenching, but she wasn’t sure giving the girl hope would be responsible. “It’s a long process,” she began. “And it’s complicated. Your dad was ordered to remove his firearms from the house and he didn’t, so I was expecting the police. In terms of removing you, it might work in our favor that we can’t seem to get the guns out. It proves the environment isn’t safe. My boss is filing an application with the court, but it’ll take time to get the order. Is that something you want?”
“Does it matter what I want?” she asked as though she was genuinely interested.
“At this point it might not,” she admitted.
“Where would I go?”
“A foster home.” When Roberta’s expression turned fearful, she added, “It would be a family around here. You’d go to the same high school. It’d be a big change, but you’d retain a lot of your usual life and you’d see your parents under supervision.”
Her brow furrowed as if bearing all that in mind was worrisome, but managed a doubtful smile, which soon dropped, her face going long.
“He’ll stop you,” she said.
“Your dad?”
Scraping her teeth over her lip, she nodded. “The police are never going to help you.”
“Yeah, I’m realizing that.”
She twisted her big toe into the gravel and when she glanced up again, backlit by the dim porch light yards behind her, she looked ghostly, her black eyes staring up.
“People keep telling me it’ll all be over soon, you know, because I’ll be eighteen. They think I’ll be able to leave, but I won’t. He’s not going to let me. Sometimes I think about running away. He’d find me, though.” She fell silent, searching Gertrude’s eyes. “He wants me to do it to Jake.”
It took a moment to place precisely what she was referring to then the five arrested men sprang to mind.
“He had you do that to those men?” Gertrude felt like the earth was tipping off its axis, realizing the entire criminal justice system was corrupt. “Why?”
“I don’t know the particulars. I just know what happens if I don’t do what he says.” She swallowed grimly as if choking a memory down. “They got in his way somehow, doing something, I don’t know.”
“So they never actually assaulted you?”
“Assaulted? No. But I slept with them. Well, some of them. All you really need is semen so technically you don’t have to fuck them.”
Horrified, Gertrude almost couldn’t believe what she was hearing, and Roberta’s easy nature, her casual tone, was alarming. She nearly insisted they go to the police station right now to give a statement—if Charlie was coercing his daughter into sexual acts to entrap men, Gertrude could take Roberta out of the house right this instant—but the police weren’t an option and wrapping her head around that hard fact made her wince in frustration.
Working it through out loud, she asked, “Your dad told you to seduce Jake Livingston?”
Ashamed, she went back to twisting her toe in the dirt. “Yeah.”
“Because of the article?”
“No, I mean, he probably didn’t like what Jake wrote, but the article came out this morning,” she said as though Gertrude was a bit dense when it came to the timeline. “I don’t think my dad wants anyone living within five miles of our house.”
“Charlie is sending men to prison because they live too close to his house?” she gaped, astonished. “What the hell is going on inside your house?”
“All kinds of shit,” she stated, intentionally stirring up intrigue, or at least that was how Gertrude read her.
“Tell me.”
“Why? You won’t be able to do anything about it.”
“I’ll find a way,” she asserted, but Roberta smiled and began swaying coyly, which gave Gertrude the strange feeling this was a game to her. “Are you messing with me?”
“There’s something wrong with your brain, isn’t there? Something happened to you.”
Straightening her back, she countered with, “What makes you think that?”
“You’re better today,” she observed, evasively. “You didn’t ramble at all.” She was stepping in close and studying Gertrude's face. “Did someone hurt you?”
“No, it was a car accident.”
“Were you driving?” Her eyes widened, catching the moon’s reflection.
With night falling, the air was cooling off. A thin veil of fog crept towards them from the lake.
“I was.”
Reaching her hand up, she nearly touched the bruised side of Gertrude’s face. “You slammed against the window there. Doctor’s had to shave you head?”
“It’s growing back,” she pointed out, taking a step back. “I don’t remember anything, so there’s no sense in asking me.”
Roberta held her gaze, folding her arms against the eerie chill that was sweeping through.
“I had a sister,” she went on. “She died. Wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, I’m told. She was your age, maybe you knew her, Doris Inman?”
“I don’t have that many friends at school.”
Gertrude got the feeling she was being polite, that perhaps Roberta didn’t care for Doris, but she couldn’t be certain that was the meaning behind Roberta’s narrowing eyes.
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br /> “My brain is fine. Using the wrong word here and there is just superficial damage,” she said, which wasn’t true, but Roberta didn’t need to know that. “And I’m a rambler so, no change there.”
“I’m sorry you lost your sister.”
“I’m sorry you lost yours.”
Holding each other’s gazes, Gertrude felt an immense urge to embrace her. She wanted to grab hold of her, pull her in, feel the realness of her body, maybe even feel Roberta’s heart beating against her own chest, feel her warmth, smell her hair, and scream and cry. But knowing it would be impossible to reach through a living girl to touch a dead one, she simply closed her eyes for a long moment.
When she opened them, she asked, “Can I get my ID now?”
“You can get it any time you like.” Registering Gertrude's confusion, Roberta quirked her mouth into a smile. “It’s in the dirt.”
Then she turned on her heel and started for the lake like a skeleton gliding through mist. Gertrude watched her until she vanished, fog billowing up around her so thickly it swallowed the red of her dress.
As Gertrude set off for her car, she sensed more than saw someone walking on the road. Training her gaze and squinting her eyes into adjusting to the darkness, she realized it was a kid, a boy rather, fourteen or perhaps fifteen, though if he was fifteen he was short for his age.
His thin, long limbs and sloping shoulders, which should’ve made him seem taller, actually made him look frail, like he’d snap if you squeezed him too hard. He appeared to be carrying a Tupperware container in his petite hands. Dressed in a basic pair of jeans, a tee shirt, and Converse sneakers, there was nothing distinct or remarkable about him. He looked like every kid she’d ever seen, but his features, she realized as they passed one another, were delicate and mousey, unusual—dainty dark eyebrows, a tight narrow mouth, a slightly oversized nose.
When she felt it wouldn’t be obvious, she turned, watching him stalk up the King’s driveway. He slowed, behaving somewhat cautiously as he came to the porch steps. He didn’t ascend them, didn’t cross the porch or knock on the door.
For some reason he peaked her curiosity. Maybe it was because the overall feel of him was so incongruent to Roberta’s that she couldn’t imagine them being friends. In fact, Roberta was so peculiar she couldn’t imagine her being friends with anyone. She knew if Doris was alive, she’d tell Gertrude the real deal about Roberta.