And none of it would bring her friends back.
“How are you feelin’?” Marshall asked.
“Tired. Sore.”
“Doctor Newell says you might be able to check out by the weekend. I’ll bet you’re anxious to be home with your family again.”
“Yes,” she replied, but wasn’t entirely sure that was true. She dreaded the thought of what awaited her outside of this place—the reserves of energy she would be required to draw upon to satisfy the concern and curiosity of her well-wishers, the ill-concealed looks of resentment and accusation she expected to see in the eyes of the her friends’ parents, the ones who had no child to welcome home. She was safe from the men now, for however long, their power over her limited to dreams and the occasional waking nightmare, but little could protect her from the maelstrom of emotions that would come crashing down upon her as soon as she stepped foot outside this place. The mere thought of it exhausted her, made her want to cry.
“Well,” the Sheriff said. “Your Mom and sister are eager to see you. They’ve been stayin’ in a motel close by, checkin’ in on you often as they can.”
Claire exhaled. She recalled their visits, how relieved she had been to see her mother and Kara, the agony reflected in their faces, the uncertainty of not knowing for sure how much she had suffered, and unprepared to accept any of it. But she was alive, and in their eyes had glimmered the joy of that simple undeniable truth. She was alive, back with them, when so many others had perished.
“Is there anythin’ you need?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay. I just wanted to have a little talk with you today, check on your progress, make sure you ain’t wantin’ for nothin’.”
She nodded slightly, her bandages chafing against the pillow. “Thank you.”
“And I wanted to let you know that the man who did this to you and your friends is dead. Not how we’d have wished for it to go, but I’m guessin’ he’s facin’ justice of another kind now.”
She started to respond, then stopped. Surely she’d misheard. The man who did this…
“What did you say?” she asked, and finally looked directly at him. She saw she’d been right; he was old, his hat resting on his lap, held there by thin wrinkled fingers. He had a generous head of gray hair, which the hat had all but tempered flat against his skull, and kind brown eyes, which seemed designed for sympathy. His face was lean, and deep wrinkles ran from the corners of his mouth down past his chin.
He leaned forward a little. “How much do you remember?”
She stared at him for a long moment, then licked her lips. “I remember what happened, what they did to us. I remember getting away, but not much more.” Her eye widened as a fragment of memory returned, though she wasn’t sure how reliable it might be. “There was a guy, about my age, maybe a little younger, a black kid. His name was…” She struggled to pluck the memory from the swamp her mind had become. “Pete. That was it. I was in the truck with him.”
Marshall nodded. “Pete, that’s right. Pete Lowell.”
“Is he here?”
“’Fraid not. He took off soon’s he brought you in and saw you were in good hands. We sent a patrol car out to bring him back, but turned up nothin’. We found his house burned up though, and his daddy…” He waved a hand. “We can talk about all that some other time.”
Claire planted her hands on the mattress and started to ease herself into a sitting position. Immediately her body became a combat zone, the pain exploding in various parts of her, a stern reminder that she was not yet fit enough to be attempting such hasty and ambitious movements. She squinted against the discomfort and when next she looked, Marshall was at her side, strong hands beneath her armpits, pulling her up as she dug her heels into the bed and pushed to assist him. “Easy. Hold on now,” he said, and arranged the pillows so that she could lay back. She did, out of breath, her body humming with the exertion. Her joints were stiff and stubborn, her skin taut like dried leather. She was perspiring and when she raised her left hand to wipe her brow, she saw the source of at least some of the pain. It was missing two fingers—the pinky and the ring finger, and where they’d been nothing remained but twin half-inch nubs of smooth flesh. Staring in a kind of grim disassociated fashion, she withdrew her right hand from beneath the covers, and released a breath, relieved to see that aside from some angry looking pink scars, possibly self-inflicted during her escape, it was not mutilated. She raised her watery gaze to the Sheriff, who wore the expression of a man suddenly very much aware of the limitations of his job.
“You’re gonna be fine. All kinds of surgery nowadays can fix you right up good as new,” he said softly, but it was a weak effort at consolation and they both knew it. It wouldn’t matter if they found her fingers, or her eye lying in a ditch somewhere, remarkably preserved, and sewed them back. It wouldn’t matter if between now and her time of discharge they discovered a cure for rape, a way to give a sexually abused woman back her dignity, and in Claire’s case, her virginity, the fact was that the violence had been done, its impact irreversible, and some vital part of her had been destroyed in the process, a part of her she hadn’t known existed until it was stolen. Her friends were dead and gone, brutally tugged from life. Nothing they could do for Claire would repair that horrifying reality, or fill that dark gaping rent in her world and the worlds of their families.
Dark spots speckled her vision and she had to take a moment to steady herself, to anchor her consciousness. When at last her vision settled, she said to the Sheriff, “You said ‘the man who did this is dead’. Who were you talking about?”
“Garrett Wellman.”
Claire shook her head and frowned. “Doctor Wellman?”
“He was the town doctor, yes, or as near as they had to one. Some of the folks in Elkwood said he always seemed real nice, but started keepin’ to himself after his wife passed on. Cancer. She didn’t go quietly they say, and after her funeral, Wellman all but shut himself up in his house just outside of town. Took to drinkin’ hard. No one knew what he got up to out there all by himself. Looks like it weren’t anythin’ good.”
“Sheriff—”
“When we got there, he’d burned the place down around himself.”
“Sheriff, listen to me. More than one man attacked us. There were at least three, and they were young, the oldest about eighteen, maybe, and the youngest not more than eleven or twelve. You’ve got this all wrong. Wellman helped me.”
He smiled uncertainly. “We found remains, Claire. Your friends. In Wellman’s basement. And he had access to all kind of—”
Claire stopped listening. She felt that old familiar panic rising in her chest. If there had been some kind of mistake, if the authorities were pinning this on the wrong man as it seemed they had, it meant the real murderers were still out there and the police weren’t even looking for them.
But maybe they’ll be looking for me.
Suddenly, the room began to tilt, the dark spots returning, bigger now, like black holes in her vision. Shadows pooled in the corners of the room and began to reach toward the ceiling, dimming the light. Nausea whirled through her. “Oh God…”
“Claire?” Marshall put out a hand to her.
Imagination gave it a knife.
“Oh G—” She turned away from him and vomited over the side of the bed.
-14-
“Goddamn it, Ty. Keep your hands to yourself.”
The three workmen in the booth grinned at the fourth, an overweight black man in a padded check shirt and worn navy baseball cap with an M embroidered in the middle. Beneath it, Ty Rogers’s broad face settled into one of apology though his large yellow teeth were bared in a grin as he raised his sap-stained hands in a gesture of placation.
“Not my fault, Louise. You keep shaking that fine ass in our faces every time you walk away.”
Louise tucked the pencil she’d used to jot down the men’s orders into the breast pocket of her pink and white striped shirt and folded he
r arms.
“Wouldn’t mind being that pencil,” another of the men muttered and his coworkers sniggered.
Louise, more tired than offended, glared at each of them in turn, until only Ty was looking at her directly.
“Maybe I should give your wife a call,” she said, and at his nonchalant shrug, addressed the rest of them. “All of your wives. I’m sure they’d be real interested to hear what you boys get up to on your lunch break.”
Ty pouted. It made her want to slap him.
“Aw c’mon now, girl. We were just playing witcha. You should be flattered. I mean, look at the rest of the girls in here.” He nodded pointedly toward the counter where the other waitresses, Yvonne and Marcia, hugely overweight and looking forever unhappy about it, scowled over steaming plates of homemade fries, hash, eggs and sausage. In the warming light above the stainless steel counter, they looked like operatic villains.
“Flattered? I should punch you in your fat head,” Louise told him and the men erupted into laughter. But Ty’s smile faded, just a little. It was enough for Louise to see that she’d gotten to him, hit him where he didn’t like to be hit, especially not in front of his friends. Though she’d seen him in here almost every day over the past month, had weathered his innuendo, crude passes, and vulgarity and thought him a pig, she hadn’t been afforded this intimate glimpse of the man he most likely was at home. Dirty, abusive. Worse than a pig, she thought. A pig with a violent streak. She was more than familiar with the type.
“Talk like that,” he said, “I should put you over my knee.”
“With knees like yours, you could put me and everyone else in here on ’em and there’d still be room for a grand piano.”
Ty’s smile didn’t drop any further, but it was frozen in place, as if the muscles responsible for relaxing it had gone into arrest.
“Got an awful smart mouth on you,” he said coldly.
“And you got awfully twitchy hands. Keep ’em to yourself from now on you won’t have to listen to my smart mouth or any other.” She gave him a final withering look, then went to put in their order. Behind her she sensed the man’s icy stare, but it wasn’t hard to ignore. He could glare and grumble all he wanted and it would never bother her. She had bigger problems, and as The Overrail Diner was her sole solace from a life gone bad, not to mention her only source of income, she was more than willing to deal with whatever took place within its plate glass walls and acoustic-tile ceilings.
She reached the counter, ripped the order free and slid it across to Marcia, who snatched it up and deposited it behind her in the little square hole in the wall separating the business area from the kitchen.
“He giving you trouble?” Marcia asked, though Louise knew she’d seen and heard it all from behind the counter.
“It’s no big deal. Pinched my ass, is all. Isn’t the first time; won’t be the last. I dealt with it.”
Marcia glanced over her shoulder. “Way he’s looking at you, you might want to watch your back.”
Louise leaned against the counter and sighed. “Don’t worry about it. Guy got his feelings hurt. He’ll get over it.”
“Probably,” Marcia said, in a tone that said she wasn’t convinced. “But be careful is all I’m saying. That’s a big bull to have on your tail. And he isn’t used to having the girls in here do anything but flirt with him, or at least take it a little better than you did.”
Louise found the thought of that nauseating. She was about to say as much when Chet, the cook, appeared at the hatch and cried out in his irritating nasally voice, “Order up!”
Marcia waggled her eyebrows in an “I’m just saying” gesture before she turned and grabbed the two plates Chet had set there. A pair of mushroom omelets threaded steam as the waitress beamed her way down to the booth by the front door.
Outside, the snow had robbed the streets of color, reducing them to a monochrome depiction of quiet streets and tall silent buildings framed by a lead-colored sky. Dirty slush had gathered by the curbs, and what little life moved through that drab watercolor did so wrapped up tight in warm clothing, heads bowed to watch booted feet traversing treacherous ice-limned sidewalks.
This is not my world, Louise thought, but felt a pang of frustration when it came to her that though she’d had that same thought innumerable times over the years, she had yet to find a place that was. She was adrift and always had been, in a sea of other people’s unhappiness, seemingly incapable of finding that single tributary that would lead her away to the place she sought and couldn’t name, or even imagine to any encouraging degree. Elsewhere, she decided. Anywhere but here. But how often had she thought that too? And every single time, she’d picked up her life and moved, buoyed by the promise of light at the end of the tunnel, gold at the end of the rainbow, only to find herself in the same situation again and again and again. Stuck, miserable, and as good as alone, with a view of the future that never extended beyond the next paycheck.
Tomorrow, she decided, repeating the mantra that kept her from losing her mind. Tomorrow it’ll be better.
Chet hailed her and she moved around the counter to pick up the order. There were four plates, each loaded with enough cholesterol to kill a horse, and that was before the men doctored their fries with catsup, salt and vinegar, and whatever else they could find to smother the taste. The smell of the food made her stomach turn. She stuffed some knives and forks in napkins, then expertly balanced the plates in both hands and headed for Ty’s table.
“Damn that smells good,” one of the men said, and rubbed his hands briskly together. “I’m starving here.” And while the other men nodded their thanks, or smiled at her in appreciation, hunger bringing back the manners their Mommas had taught them, Ty, his face close to hers as she set the plates down, continued to stare. If he was indeed as pissed as Marcia had seemed to think he was, there was nothing to stop him making it known now through violence. She was all but presenting herself to him, and he could do plenty of damage by the time anyone realized what was happening.
“Somethin’ you want to say to me, Ty?” she asked quietly, as she set down the napkin swaddled knives and forks.
“Just looking at that bruise around your eye,” he said, his voice equally calm. His tone threw her a little. It was almost one of concern, as if he was preparing to make a conciliatory speech on behalf of his fellow swine.
“What about it?” she asked, and felt her cheeks redden, suddenly self-conscious.
“How’d you get it?”
“That ain’t none of your business.”
“Well,” he said, leaning closer. She could smell cigarettes on his breath. “You should tell your man that his fists aren’t doing the trick. You still haven’t got no respect.”
She felt her face grow hot, and the eyes of the men on her, waiting for a reaction. They said not a word, forks held close to their mouths, still loaded with food as they absorbed what had just occurred. A line had been crossed they would never have crossed themselves it seemed, but perhaps out of fear, they weren’t about to point that out to their boss, who showed not the slightest sign that he regretted what he’d said. Louise straightened slowly and brushed absently at some imaginary wrinkles in her skirt. She looked from Ty, and the satisfied smile on his thick rubbery lips, to the cutlery she’d just set down before him, the tips of the knife and fork catching the fluorescent light, and she knew she was going to kill him. The awareness came without fear, or anxiety, or concern for the future she would be denying herself by plunging that knife into his throat. There was no future to squander. There was only now.
“Now get me some A1 sauce for my meat, okay?” Ty said sweetly around his victorious sneer.
She saw herself doing it. Though the fantasy seemed to last forever, she knew the moment itself would not. It would be quick. Pick up the knife, drive it forward into his throat, step back to avoid the worst of the blood.
“You hear me?”
Then sit down with a cup of coffee and wait for the cops to come
write your future for you, takin’ the choice out of your hands for good.
There had been many men in Louise’s life. Too many, she sometimes thought, and yet still not enough to balance out the investment she had put into them. From Louisiana to Alabama to West Virginia and now Michigan, the path to her present could be found by following the trail of shattered dreams, empty promises, buckled pride and heartache. She’d been the sole burlesque performer in a theater filled with dead-eyed men.
And though she had never unlocked her most secret desires for the hulk sitting before her now, his eyes were just as lifeless, reflecting only inward, studying the desires and dreams of the self, incapable of recognizing those of others.
Her hand found the knife. Ty glanced down.
“What do you think you’re going to do with that?”
“Is there a problem here?” a voice said, and Louise jerked, her hand splaying, releasing the knife. She felt her muscles relax, even as some other part of her tensed in disappointment. The invisible strings that had been tugging at her heart, her mind, and her arms, encouraging her to cut loose from them in the same swoop that would see the knifepoint piercing the sagging black flesh beneath Ty’s double chin, released her. She had to struggle not to collapse from the recession of that furious impulse.
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