Wreckage (19 page)

A little tickle on my cheek brings me back to reality. I’m well over the freak-out reflex all girls are born with when faced with close encounters of the creepy kind, but this time it’s different. Sensation pads up my face, making my fingers itch to push whatever is climbing on me away.

Swatting at the phantom creature, I crunch my eyes closed tighter, hoping it’ll eventually go away. I must’ve done something right because even after I relax my arms and settle into the cracks in the rock that seem to fit my body the best, the tickling is gone.

Then a hand clamps over my mouth.

My eyes fly open. Kent is standing over me, hand pushing hard against my mouth so I can’t breathe, crushing my skull against the rock. I grab his arm, trying to rip it off my mouth. His flesh tears beneath my fingernails but he doesn’t flinch. His forearm’s as immovable as a tree trunk. My front teeth cut into the inside of my lips like they’re razorblades and my mouth begins to fill with blood. The dirty metallic taste gags me as it slips down my throat. Kicking, my legs flail from side to side, missing his body entirely.

My lungs are burning, and darkness starts to fill me like water overflowing the brim of a cup. It happens fast; my body stills and my lungs stop trying to suck in breath. There’s no room for pain or remorse as I sink below the surface of consciousness. In the inky darkness of my mind, there’s a nothingness that’s both terrifying and refreshing. It tells me I don’t have to care anymore, that it’s okay to let go and drift away in its billowing velvety current. The temptation to give in is overwhelming, like gravity pulling me down irresistibly. Then, as I start slipping over that dark precipice one finger at a time, the hand is gone and I can breathe again.

Light develops through painful pinpricks, making me want to go back to that safe black place. Before I can think, or put together the fractured memories that develop like film, the blood in my mouth drips down my throat and I have to sit up to avoid choking. I sputter, and blood-thickened spittle dribbles down my chin. I wipe it away with the back of my hand. Someone’s after me.
Kent
is after me.

I squint and everything is fuzzy. I search the pool and surrounding jungle but he’s gone. I climb backward to the edge of the rock and tumble the three feet down to the muddy ground. The impact makes my stomach retch. Rolling onto my hands and knees, I vomit a lumpy mixture of blood and fruit, stomach acid burning my throat. My head hurts and I still can’t see straight.

A twig breaks in the trees behind me, and I clutch at the ground with mud-caked fingers, trying to crawl away before Kent can come and get me. The mud is like quicksand and the more I fight to get to its edge, the deeper I sink. Breathing heavily, I pull my hands out with a loud sucking sound and plop them down a few inches away. Instead of going forward I’m being drawn down, buried alive. My pounding heart sends blood, warm and disgusting, pouring out of the cuts in my mouth.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Kent’s voice growls behind me in a mix of amusement and annoyance. His feet slosh through the mud casually, like a parent after a wayward toddler. He’s coming closer. I open my mouth to scream but all that comes out is a pathetic gurgle.

He chuckles. I don’t look back.

Get to the trees and then run.
The thick safety of the jungle is only a few feet away but it might as well be a mile. The harder I try to get away the slower I move.

He’s next to me, his bare feet immersed in the muddy silt. Brown slashes crawl up his legs, drying quickly, tangled in the thick coating of hair on his calves. “Why are you running away, sweetheart? You don’t have to be afraid of little old me,” he mocks. “Come on, hon, get up, we need to get you washed off.”

I try to find his face but his fingers tangle in my mud-caked hair. Tugging, he urges me up onto my knees. I don’t want to follow his orders but I have no choice. My legs flop uselessly beneath me.

Stand
, I scream to them in my mind.
Please, let me stand!
He yanks my head back till I can hear the follicles popping as he rips out a chunk of hair, the light blue glass of his eyes sharp as needles.

“You’d better behave yourself, missy. I don’t see this turning out any way but bad if you try to be cute.”

“Kent, what . . . what do you want?” I stutter, still half-submerged in the mud.

“What do I want?” he laughs deep in his chest. “I want you to get on your feet right this second, that’s what I want.”

He tosses a chunk of my hair into the mud and grabs another section, much larger this time and forces me to my feet.

“You know what else I want?” He pulls me up to his face, his breath sour on my cheek, and I have to resist vomiting on him. “I want Theresa back. I want her to be the one sleeping in that disgusting shack. But I can’t have that, can I? Why not,
Lily
? Huh?” He pauses like he expects me to answer. “Because of you, that’s why not. Because you were too busy flirting with the PR guy to get back to your seat. Now, you traipse around here, half-naked, playing house with that dummy, Dave, and you’ve got the nerve to act all high and mighty and too good for
me
?” His voice builds till a clutch of birds fly away in fear, and spit dribbles from the corner of his mouth. Then, with one punctuating tug, he smiles. “I don’t think so. I’m done with your games. Now get in the water or I’ll put you in the water.”

The next sequence is a blur. I’m not sure how I get from the shore to being waist-deep in the pool but suddenly I’m there, and he’s still beside me, his hand in my hair, guiding me like a puppeteer.

“Here, wash with this.”

He shoves a small, smooth bottle in my hand. Shampoo from Margaret’s bag. White freesia blossoms bloom across the label. With trembling fingers I unscrew the cap. It slips out of my hand and into the water with a plop. Reaching for it, only my hand moves as he holds me up by my scalp.

“Let it go,” he growls. “Wash. NOW.”

As I rub my muddy, bloody hands together the soap seeps through my fingers like pudding. I wash. Face, arms, body, legs. He snatches the bottle from my hand and pours the remaining liquid into my hair—roughly rubbing it into a bubble-less froth stinging the raw parts of my scalp. Then he pushes me down toward the water.

“Please don’t, please, please,” I beg, pushing feebly against the water, sure that he’s about to drown me.

“What? You afraid of a little water? You seem to like it enough when you play in it every week—flitting around naked when you tell us you are out here working. Now you don’t want to take a little dip? Can’t make up your mind about anything, can you? Well, that’s over now. I’ll decide for you. Go
in
the water.” He pushes me down further, my face just above the surface. “Go on—rinse off.”

He shoves me into the dark water. It stings, flooding my nose and mouth. Choking, I try to get to the surface. Wild bubbles of precious air shoot out of me as my first and possibly last scream falls dead in the water.
No air. NO AIR!

Using every ounce of strength I have left, I plant my feet in the gooey mud below and lift up against his iron hand. My head breaks through the skin of the water. Air floods into my lungs. Coughing spastically, I spray gigantic streams of pond water out of my mouth. Kent stands there, arms crossed over his bare chest, waiting. When my body finally stops convulsing, he holds me away from him like he’s inspecting a pair of dirty socks.

“That’s a little better,” he mumbles, and begins to guide me toward shallow water.

“Now there’s a good girl,” he croons. A few feet from the outcropping, he shoves me away from him. My toes ram up against sharp stones skirting the base of the rough, gray boulders. “Get out of the water and take everything off. Now.”

I know why he wants me naked and I know what’ll happen once I am, but the pounding in my face and head reminds me he’s capable of even worse. Shaking, I climb the boulder, forcing myself to breathe slowly and push down the returning nausea as my mouth fills with blood again. I’m sure he can see my hands tremble every time I lift them to find another handhold on the rock. It kills me that he knows how terrified I am but I can’t make them stop. Reaching the top of the rock, I pull myself up, the sharp corners of the stone cutting into my palms.

“Stand up,” he spits. A nasty smile of expectation creeps across his mud-splattered face.

Knees wobbly, I rise to full height. He’s watching my body, scanning every inch as though I were already naked. I feel dirtier now than when I was covered in mud.

“The top first,” he orders, and the tremor in my hands returns as I twist my arm around to grasp the latch on my bra. Looping my pointer finger under the strap and my thumb over, I pinch the two sides together, ready for the hook and eye to release, just like I’ve done every day since I was a preteen. It doesn’t budge.

“Is there a problem?” Kent asks, tapping the knife against his thigh. He isn’t expecting a response, just action. Twisting harder I wait for the tiny pop that’ll take that fierce glint out of his gaze, the one that says he wants to hurt me.

“I can’t . . . I can’t get it off.” I feel like a little lost child, alone and scared and wanting her mommy.

“Once again, I have to do everything myself. Get over here,” he growls, reaching the rock’s edge. Listening will keep him from beating me further but it won’t save me. Scanning over his head, I start to calculate how far it is to the deeper part of the pool, where I could dive down and disappear. When Kent’s right hand shoots out to grab my ankle, I curl up on my toes, tensing my calves, and I jump. But, instead of landing ten yards away in water that’s six or seven feet deep, I belly flop into the three feet of water directly to the left of Kent and sink immediately to the bottom. Thick sandy dirt pushes my hair away from my face and traces paths along my bare skin. Submerged, kicking off the pliable ground with my feet, I race for my life toward the blackest depths of the pool.

The first stroke is swift and sure. I move effortlessly through the water, like I’m flying instead of swimming. Exhilaration fills my chest and I start to believe I can do it. I can escape!

Then his hand is on my ankle. He pulls me through the water while I wave my arms in the dark, hoping to find anything to hold on to, anything that’ll stop my backward progress toward land and pain and horrible things I can’t even imagine. But there’s nothing.

He pulls me out of the water, tossing me on the shore. I throw up water again until it feels like my stomach’s turned inside out. As I writhe on the ground, Kent watches, gratified.

“Enough with the games.” He flings one leg over my body, straddling me as I lay prone on the ground. His thick, callused fingers grab my hands and yank them behind my back. A satiny ribbon of material tightens around my wrists till my shoulders burn.

“That’s better,” he mutters, then drops me face-first into the mud, the grit oozing into my mouth and grinding between my teeth. Fingering the golden chain around my neck, he seems to count the rings: Margaret’s ring and Charlie’s and more recently—mine. After losing so much weight I put it on there to keep it safe. Nothing is safe right now. “You won’t be needing these anymore, will you? What’ll your husband think when he finds out what a little slut you are?”

He yanks hard, and the gold cuts into my throat a second before snapping like fishing wire. The rings plop into the mud next to my face and I watch them, those last emblems of my former life, quickly engulfed by brown sludge.

It’s easier to watch their loss than to think about what he’s going to do, what’s coming next. I want to watch him so I’d at least know when he was about to cross that line that’d change everything forever. I make another wish, a better wish, that I’d listened to David and kept the knife close, that it was lying heavy in my hand right now, but it’s twenty feet away in the back pocket of my jean shorts, laid out on the rocks to dry with all our other laundry.

In the distance, a bird cries out. It sounds afraid like me. At least I’m not alone. The bird’s voice reminds me of the last verse of a song my mom used to sing to me as a little girl when I’d have a nightmare. She learned it as a child living with her missionary parents in Australia. I still sing it to my boys. The words run through my mind and I can’t keep them inside. Instead, I sing.

“Kookaburra sits on a rusty nail.” The old words trip out of my mouth, not making much of a tune. When I sing I can’t feel the cold knife on my skin as he cuts through my bra straps. “Gets a boo-boo in . . . his . . . tail.” I can’t hear his cruel chuckle as he shoves it off into the mud. “Cry . . . Kookaburra . . . cry . . . Kookaburra . . .” Or feel his hands trace the curve of my back. “Oh, how life . . . can . . . be.”

It’s almost time, I sense it. I want to sing again so part of me will be free but I can’t even perform that one act of rebellion.

Then, as he slips his blade under the fabric on my hip, something breaks through the tree line, screaming.

“KENT!” a furious voice yells.

My heart leaps with hope and fear—it’s David.

CHAPTER 19

DAVE

Present

“Let’s be candid here, Dave, you and Kent weren’t exactly best friends?”

“What makes you say that?” It was hard for him to pretend he didn’t hate that man with every ounce of his body.

“Well, call me crazy but there always seems to be this sarcastic undertone to your stories about ‘Scout,’ if that’s what you really called him. It sounds like he single-handedly kept you alive those first few months and there’s not a whole lot of appreciation for those services,” she said, raising her eyebrows accusingly. Was he that transparent?

“He wasn’t exactly the easiest guy to be around. He knew a lot, don’t get me wrong, but he wasn’t what I’d call warm and fluffy either.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard,” Genevieve pushed. “His family says he had a love for life and he was a fun guy to be around because of his positive outlook. They also say he and Theresa were very much in love and they were on the verge of getting engaged.”