The Dark Light of Day (24 page)

In that moment, it wasn’t red that I saw. It was blue. Radiant
blue, like the color of his eyes. I don’t remember the look on his face. I just remember the beautiful color blue clouding my vision.

Before I could say anything, he jumped in. “You were my
only
reason to come back here.”

“Well, ain’t nothing holding you here now.”

I turned and started to run. I had no destination in mind. I just needed to get away from the hurt. But, it traveled with me.

I ran faster.

There were no sound of boots on the gravel behind me, no smell of leather or of sweaty man. No beautiful blue eyes to make it all stop. It was just me, left alone again with all the pain I just couldn’t seem to get rid of.

It would have hurt less if he’d just shot me instead.

OUR TOWN MAY HAVE LOOKED
like the Mayberry of tourist
destinations, but if you were to come inside and stay a while, it
wouldn't take you long to learn that filth, decay and darkness were the glue holding it all together.

It was time for me to get the fuck out. Every reason I’d ever had to stay put in that town had left.

I shoved the few things I owned into my backpack. I needed to
get out of there, and I needed to do it as soon as possible. Even
though I
had nowhere to go, I was still in a rush to leave. It’s not like Jake
would be barging through the door at any moment—I knew that much. I’d heard his thunderous bike fading into the distance over the bridge minutes before.

I knew it would be the last time that comforting sound ever
touched my ears.

I left my keys on the rack and swung the door open to leave. I wanted to turn around, to take one last look at the rooms where we’d shared so much happiness in so short a time, but I couldn’t let
myself bring that to the surface. The air in the apartment was sticking to me, suffocating me.

I had to get out.

I grabbed my hoodie and stuffed it into my bag before gunning for the door.

I was in such a hurry to leave I ran right into the doughy chest of Sheriff Fletcher. He was standing on the porch, his fist raised in the
air, about to knock. He didn’t react to me slamming into him or ask me what was wrong when he saw my tear-stained face. In his
suspicious, coal-colored eyes, I saw a flash of knowledge, of recognition, and I knew that he knew everything.

Owen. Jake. Everything. He knew what his monster of a nephew
had done.

The sheriff handed me a thick yellow envelope and walked
away without uttering a word.

I closed the door and sat back down on the couch, losing my will to flee. I dropped my backpack onto the floor beside my feet and examined the envelope in my hands. It was too thick and heavy to be
a letter. My name was written in feminine handwriting, in large
black marker across the top flap. I opened the seal and poured the contents out onto the coffee table.

What little there was left of my heart nearly stopped.

It was money—stacks that had bands around them, labeling how much was in each. I had never seen so much money in my entire life.
I prodded around inside the envelope. There was no note—just a business card. It read
Bethany Annabelle Fletcher, ESQ, Attorney at
Law.
Owen’s mother. And on the other side, in the same handwriting as my name on the envelope it read:

To ease your troubles…

The Fletchers were trying to clean up Owen’s little mess. This
made them as sick and twisted as Owen. At least I knew then where he got it from. The money— ten-thousand dollars from what I estimated—was hush money, meant to keep me quiet. The Fletchers obviously
didn’t want people to know that their golden boy was really a
sadistic rapist. The thought made me gag.

I wondered how many times he’d done this before, how many times this worked for them in the past.

It sure as shit wasn’t going to work with me.

Bethany Fletcher was trying to give me money
to
ease my troubles
.
Like money would undo the damage Owen had done to me, over and over again. There truly was only one thing that could
ease my
troubles
completely. Since Jake was gone now, it was no longer an option.

But if Jake were here
…

He wasn’t, though, and he would never be again. I would never experience his reassuring touch. I would never again see his stone face turn soft when he looked at me. This kind of pain, coming from a heart that I thought I had successfully closed off to the outside
world years ago, was worse than any physical pain anyone could
cause me. It was worse than what I’d experienced the morning after Owen attacked me.

I would go through what Owen put me through a thousand
times over to have Jake be the person I thought he was.

Jake would put Owen to ground if he knew, and I would want him to. Frankly, I didn’t care if that thought made me a bad person.
Bad, good. Right, wrong. The lines were so blurry lately. I was in
love with a killer, and I wanted Owen dead.

When I thought of it as simply as that, maybe it wasn’t so blurry after all.

The money on the coffee table mocked me, and I could feel all the pent up anger that had been distorted by the sadness from losing Jake rise to the surface. No matter what they tried to pay me, I wasn’t going to say anything to anyone except Jake, anyway. Did they think I’d be seeking justice from a failed system? That I’d tell people what their precious son did to me? Little did they know Jake leaving had just bought Owen a reprieve from his almost guaranteed
death sentence. Something clicked inside me. I wasn’t sad over
losing Jake, or upset that Bethany Fletcher thought I was poor, stupid white trash who could be bought.

I was fucking enraged.

I couldn’t remember a time in my life when I’d been so angry.
The heat from below the surface of my skin felt as if it had been dropped in oil. I wanted to jump out of my skin and harm someone, throw something. To destroy for the sake of destroying.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My heart rate went from normal to borderline cardiac arrest in a matter of seconds.

Fuck. This. Shit.

This bitch thought she could buy my silence? Well, she was dead
fucking wrong. All the Fletchers were. And, I was about to show
them how dead fucking wrong they really were.

The argument Jake and I had in the kitchen over me paying him
back for the camera he’d bought me played in my head.
“I’ll just
burn the money,”
he’d said, when I insisted on paying him back.

I stuffed the bills back in the envelope before grabbing Jakes truck keys from the rack. My move to nowhere would have to wait a
little while. I grabbed a half empty bottle of lighter fluid from the shelf over the barbecue and a pack of matches from the drawer
below it.

I got into his truck and drove. I tried to ignore the part of me that was thinking about how much the truck smelled like him, how his
old black baseball cap was still sitting on the dashboard, and how
much all I wanted to do was curl up in the back seat and sleep surrounded in his smell.

The misery wasn’t going anywhere, either.

I became more and more heated as I drove. I saw red again. The anger poisoned my blood, and I was drunk on it. High on my hatred. My heart pounded in my ears the closer I got to my destination. I
didn’t follow a single traffic law. The gas pedal was squeezed
between my foot and the floor board the entire way.

What was it about me that made people think I was for sale?

My mother thought I could be used as payment for her fucking
habits. Owen and his family seemed to think that ten-thousand
dollars could buy him a night of rape and attempted murder at my expense. Owen may have seen the shy Abby in the past—the one whose skin
was always covered, who kept to herself out of self-protection. He
had no fucking clue who he was dealing with now. I wasn’t going to curl
into a corner. I was done feeling sorry for myself. This shit wasn’t
my fault. It wasn’t something I’d asked for.

I was no fucking victim, and I refused to be bought.

Fuck. This. Shit!

I peeled down the shell road that led to the Fletchers’ compound. The Sheriff’s squad car was already parked in the driveway by the main house. Owen’s blue Chevy was on the side of the house by his private entrance.

A chill ran down my spine at the thought of them witnessing me
making it clear that I wouldn’t be purchased, by them or anyone
else. Ten-thousand dollars may have bought the Fletchers a lot of things,
but it couldn’t buy me. I knew one thing for sure at that point: Owen was determined to treat me like the whore he thought I was by
taking
what he thought he was entitled to and then making sure he paid for it.

I didn’t take my foot off the gas when I tore into the Fletchers front yard. I started with a few 360s, making sure I used every bit of the thick heavy truck tires to destroy Bethany Fletcher’s award-winning roses, plant beds, retaining walls, and manicured lawn. I hit a few sprinkler heads and mini-geysers of water shot out of the ground and into the sky, raining a thick muddy fountain down onto the windshield. I turned on the windshield wipers, spreading the mud over the windows before clearing enough of it to see through the blurred coating of brown sludge.

I kept going even after there was no grass left. Each turn of my wheel kicked up more mud, caking it onto the sheriff’s car and the
pristine white siding of the house. By the time I pulled back onto the road, the front yard looked like a good ol’-fashioned redneck muddin’ hole.

I threw the truck in park and grabbed the envelope, the matches
and the bottle of lighter fluid from the passenger seat. The envelope felt hot, as if its evil intentions were burning a hole in my hand. I laughed.

It was about to get a whole lot fucking hotter.

My heart beat with a speed I’ve never known, like I’d taken a shot of pure adrenaline. I didn’t care if they came outside and saw me. In fact, I hoped to fucking God they did. I wanted them to know it was me who was telling them to go to hell.

I grabbed a freshly-rolled joint from my back pocket and held it in my mouth.

I picked up a rock from what had been the garden and dropped it into the envelope with the bills. I doused it inside and out with the lighter fluid, tossing the bottle to the floor when it was empty. I folded over the flap of the matches and lit the entire pack in one strike. Then I lit my joint, and I set the envelope on fire.

I let it burn, and when I couldn’t hold onto it any longer, I
cocked my arm and launched their blood money through the front window of the Fletcher family home.

Fuck you, motherfuckers.

The window shattered. Bits of glass dangled from the broken aluminum window frame. I stood back and watched as the living room curtains caught fire, framing the window in flames and black smoke. This picture perfect house, the home of all the power in the
town, was now going up in flames. Flames that I caused. Flames
those
bastards would eventually see again if they believed in any sort of
hell.

I blew out my long-held drag, and then I heard the first high-
pitched scream. It brought me a satisfaction that ten-thousand
dollars certainly couldn’t. I didn’t run this time, and I didn’t look back. That would have suggested that I cared what happened next, and really, I didn’t care if their propane tank exploded and they were all blown to Kingdom Fucking Come.

These were the thoughts of someone with nothing left to lose.

Sheriff Fletcher was already standing next to the driver’s side
door of Jake’s truck waiting for me. He stepped forward as I
approached. I didn't see his right hook coming straight for my cheek. The fat fuck made contact with the side of my face, then managed to grab me by my shirt and shove me up against the hood so he could cuff my hands roughly behind my back. He snuffed out my joint. I didn’t see where it went, but it was a pretty safe bet he’d pocketed it.

He used his portly body weight, pressing himself up against my back to subdue me. He grunted. “You got some balls, Abby. I’ll give
you that. What you don’t understand is that money was your final
offer. From here on out, there will be no more money. No more
chances. No
more nothin’.” Then he started mumbling to himself. "If I had the
chance again—between taking you home or digging a hole—let's just say I would have done things a little differently."

I knew Owen had help moving me. Even as small as I was, my dead weight must have been difficult to lift and maneuver. It didn’t surprise me that it had been the sheriff. It surprised me more that he hadn’t just let me die. It would have been less work on his part.

There was nothing the sheriff could say to me—not even the
confession of his decision to keep me alive rather than let me die—
that could have killed my adrenaline rush, my high. The Fletchers had brought my madness upon themselves. They shouldn’t have covered for Owen. They shouldn’t have protected him when it was me who
needed the protecting. They certainly shouldn’t have thought that
ten-
thousand dollars would have bought my silence or in any way,
would have made me whole again.

They didn’t know they were dealing with someone who’d never been whole to begin with.

The sheriff was right. He should have dug the hole and fucking
buried me deep. No good could come of who I was becoming. Jake
had
once told me that the most dangerous people are the ones with
nothing to lose.