Coming Home Again (A Coming Home Again Novel Book 1) (23 page)

“Aren’t you going to let me get
dressed?” He sniffled pathetically.

“Absolutely not,” Julia answered as she
focused back on the needle in his arm. “Now, let’s let you relax a bit.”

“No,” Evan began squirming. “I need to
be able to think straight when the cops get here.”

“We aren’t going to make it that easy
on you.” Julia said as she drained the needle into his arm. “Stay in here,
Savannah. I’ll be right back.” Julia rushed out of the room. I uncomfortably
obeyed and stood there watching as a weird, foggy look came over Evan. The
drugs seemed to take an immediate effect. The sour stench, his vile body naked
before me, and the drug marks on his skin made me sick to my stomach. I was so
ready to be out of this nightmare. This thing before me…he stole so much. All I
could do was shake my head at the unfair fact. He had no right, but was allowed
to anyway.

My sister should have known better than
to leave me alone with him, because the next thing I knew I had punched him
again. This time the blow produced a trickle of blood from his nose. He hardly
responded to my attack and it caused me to pause. He was just a sick pathetic
excuse for a human being and I realized he didn’t deserve this much of my
effort. Beating on him only reduced me to his wicked level and I wanted to be
nothing like him. So I stowed myself near the door and waited.

Julia returned a few minutes later with
no makeup on, exposing the nasty bruise on her cheek, and her face flushed. Her
hair was disheveled, and she looked so frail in that moment. I was scared my
sister had maybe just had a nervous breakdown or something. “Are you okay?” I
asked.

“No,” she whimpered. “I’m a rape
victim.” Then in a perfectly normal voice she explained, “I let a little soap
get in my eyes for affect.” I was floored by her transformation. “We’ve got to
get him to the living room and then you have to hide. I don’t want to involve
you in the police report and stuff. I’ll have to go with them to give my
statement and then get a rape kit done on me.” I started to get scared by her
words. “Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “I’ll be fine. You won’t be alone for
too long.” She pulled me in for a long, unexpected embrace. When Julia let go I
followed her gaze as she glanced over at Evan and took in the thin line of
blood oozing from his nose. She cut her eyes back to me. “Savannah!”

“Sorry!” I shrugged. “I couldn’t help
it!”

We unlocked the handcuffs and hid them
in the top of her closet. Then we pulled Evan to his feet and had to
practically drag him to the door. He slumped up against the wall just as the
knocking began. Julia turned to me in that moment.

“Go hide in my big closet,” she
whispered. I hesitated briefly. I didn’t want to be separated from her. “It’s
going to be okay. Please go,” she quietly begged. I finally did as she said as
the knocking began again, with a gruff voice announcing they were the police.

Once inside the room, I listened from
the door as the police entered the apartment. A deep voice began to question
Julia.

“Ma’am, are you Julia Thorton?”

“Yes,” she whimpered between sobs.

“Is this Evan Grey?” the policeman
asked.

Again, she whimpered. “Yes.”

“Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

“He’s been shooting up with these,” she
answered as she obviously showed him the syringes.

“Are you on anything?” he continued
questioning.

“Nothing,” Julia said.

“Are you hurt?”

“I don’t know…” She sounded confused. I
swear to you the girl was nailing this rape victim character she was
portraying. I had to keep reminding myself that she was only acting and that
she was really okay. Well, as okay as she could be considering she had actually
been a victim. I guess she had plenty of character study of this all those
years ago.

“My partner and I are going to attempt
to get some clothes on him, and then I’m going to have to ask you to come with
us. Do you understand?” he asked.

“Yes.”

I heard some bumping and shuffling and
so I assumed they were trying to dress Evan. Within ten minutes, they had read
Evan his rights and exited with my sister in tow. I sat in the room for at
least ten more minutes before heading back to the deserted living area. I
quickly gathered my wits and got to work in cleaning up Julia’s room. I slid
the glass door completely open in hopes of ridding the air of rancid odor. I then
worked on scrubbing up any smeared vomit and put her bed linens in the wash.
Luckily, she had her luxurious bedspread folded towards the end of the bed, so
only the sheets and pillows were the victims of the vile mess. While the wash
cycle did its job, I set out on gathering all of the syringes to throw away. I
decided the handcuffs needed to be tossed too, so I fished them back out of the
closet and they joined the syringes.

After I started the linens for a second
wash cycle, I found some disinfectant cleaner and meticulously wiped down every
surface in her room. I sprayed more air freshener and lit a few candles. No
matter how hard I cleaned, I just didn’t seem to be able to rid the space of
the odor. I began to think that the stench was probably trapped in my sinuses
and pores.

I did all I could do, so I left her
room to air out. As I pulled her door shut, the realization hit me that the
sick devil had probably been all over the apartment before I had I arrived, so
I set out to wiping the entire place down.

Once the linens were dried and I had
her bed remade, I decided it was my turn to scrub the sin of the night off my
body. I threw my soiled outfit in the washer with a substantial amount of full
bleach for a heavily soiled cycle, but then thought better of saving the outfit
and tossed it in the trash as well. I just didn’t think I could ever get the
sin of that night out of the material.

Once I felt clean enough, I found my
way to the kitchen for a bottle of water and a couple of Tylenols. I sat at the
marble counter on a stool and anxiously waited for my sister to return.

As the sun was beginning to rise, Julia
finally arrived back home. She took a stool beside me and put her head down on
the cool counter.

“How’d it go?” I whispered.

“It went,” she murmured. “I have to go
wash,” she said as she slowly peeled herself off the stool and headed
sluggishly to her room.

“I cleaned it all up and washed your
bedding twice,” I said to her. I felt like it was the least I could do for all
she had endured that night and probably countless other nights as well.
Thinking of what she went through for us made my insides cringe in repulsion.

“You did?” My sister seemed surprised.
“Thank you,” she said over her shoulder before she stiffly continued towards
her room.

Once she washed, we both climbed into
my bed without another word and slept well into the evening. I slept without a
glimpse of a dream, and it was heavenly. It was like I had died for a spell,
which was fine by me.

After we awoke, Julia finally felt up
to telling me what had happened after they left. We laid wrapped in the covers
as she quietly explained that she had to give her statement, and then they took
her to the hospital for a rape test.

“Julia, I just wish you would have let
me help you come up with a better idea than letting him touch you, again,” I
said in disgust.

She rolled to her side to get a better
look at me and dabbed tears away from her blue eyes. “It was the only way. I
wanted this to be the end of it,” she firmly said. “Now it’s over with, and you
and I need to work on moving forward.”

We grew quiet for a while and then I
remembered my sister’s wicked performance for the cops. “You need to get into
the acting biz.”

“What?” Her perfectly plucked eyebrows
were raised skeptically.

“Julia, you should have received an
Oscar for that performance last night.”

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind when I
have to retire from my modeling career.” She chuckled weakly. Neither one of us
seemed to want to abandon the comforts of the guest bed, so we stayed hunkered
down for quite some time.

We eventually headed to the kitchen for
something to drink. Just as I began unscrewing the cap off my water, my stomach
let out a violent growl.

“Whoa…that sounded pretty mean.” Julia
smirked.

“Well, you haven’t fed me since I’ve
been here. You know, you are such a terrible hostess. Trying to make me an
accessory to kidnapping and murder on top of starvation.
Tsk-tsk
.” I smiled as I shook my head.

“Alright, Miss Smarty, give me thirty
minutes to fix this.” Julia laughed, as she got busy on her phone. Within her
time limit, a young guy with a long mop of black hair showed up at her door,
carrying a fancy warmer bag.

“Hey Julia. Here’s your supper,” the
young guy spoke as he eyed me.

“Thanks, Caleb. This is my little sis,
Savannah.” She reached for her wallet.

“Nice to meet you,” he said towards me,
then turned his attention back to Julia. “Dave said no charge. Just come see
him sometime this week.”

“Tell him I’ll visit him by the
weekend. This is for your trouble,” she said as she handed him a fifty.

“Thank you, Julia,” he said as he
headed to the door. He spotted the bag of garbage I had placed by it. “You want
me to take care of that for you?”

“Would you?” she asked. “I would really
appreciate it,” she cooed as she fluttered her prissy eyelashes at the young
guy. He nodded his head and grabbed the bag before closing the door behind him.

As she placed the food before us on the
bar, all I could do was chuckle at her. “You have to take up acting. You’re
such a natural,” I said. All the girl had to do was change her mannerism and
tone, and she seemed to be able to beckon forth whatever desired effect she
wanted—and she could do it effortlessly.

The plates contained petite steaks and
a medley of steamed vegetables. My mouth instantly watered with the aroma. I
devoured every morsel while I watched my sister take only one small bite of
steak and two small bites of veggies. She then placed the rest in the fridge
and retrieved one of the fancy bottles of champagne.

“You’re not going to eat any more than
that?” I asked, disappointed.

“I’m ready to celebrate our victory.”
She almost sang this as she popped the cork and poured us each a fluted glass
of champagne. We celebrated and climbed back into the bed around two Saturday
morning. We slept well into Sunday afternoon.

I awoke, astonished at how long we had
slept, and then felt sad at the thought that it was time to head back to South
Carolina already. After showering and dressing, I repacked my bag and placed it
by the door.

“Come here,” Julia shouted from her
boutique closet.

I found her filling a suitcase with all
types of goodies, many of which still had price tags. “We have to be able to
show what we did all weekend,” she said in response to my unspoken question. I
joined her by the suitcase and threw in a few pairs of shoes I had spotted the
other night.

I smirked as I helped myself to a Gucci
wallet. I’m not very girly, but HELLO. It was Gucci! “Yeah. I guess we can’t
tell them that you drugged up the devil himself and tied him to your bed.”

“Yeah. And I guess we can’t tell anyone
that you brutally beat that devil’s penis within an inch of its life.” She
laughed. “You know they had to call a doctor to go to him. They think something
had ruptured and were talking about having to remove one of his testicles.”

We broke out into a fit of laughter at
that. We sat there laughing until it turned into seriousness. We wrapped our
arms around each other for a long while. We grieved for the nightmare of our
childhood and for what we had seen and done in the last few days. I like to
think in that visit, we were able to pull a few thorns out and mend a bit.

After pulling ourselves back together,
we reluctantly gathered my new and old belongings and headed for the airport. I
talked Julia into a quick detour to that bakery I had visited last time.

“I want to send Miss May a cheesecake,”
I said as we walked up to the counter.

“You know, that’s a great idea.”

Before I could place the order, the guy
behind the counter spoke up. “You’re the supermodel, Julia Rose,” he said in
shock, recognizing her easily even with her oversized sunglasses on. She was
sporting these wild black leather pants and an art deco shirt that flowed over
her frame. She exuded supermodel. I wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt and
felt desperately plain in comparison.

“That would be me, and now why don’t
you tell me who you are,” she flirted.

“I’m Greg, the owner of this place,” he
answered coolly.

“Well, you are just the man I need. You
see, I have a very special lady that lives in South Carolina, and I want to set
up a special order service for her,” she said as she leaned on the counter
towards him. “She is a huge fan of your famous cheesecakes, and I would like to
start surprising her with one on her birthday, May eighth, one at Christmas,
and one on Valentine’s Day on a yearly basis. Can you handle that, sweetheart?”
she said in her syrupy, girly voice.