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.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
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.
I’d already lost it all.
***
“Miss Ford, protocol requires for me to ask you if you would like an attorney.”
Bethany Fletcher stood and tapped a long red fingernail on the scratched wooden table. We were sitting in a small room with no windows and bare green walls, stained with god only know what. My hands were cuffed to the chair behind me.
“Protocol?” I asked. “That’s funny. I’ll have to remember that one.” The woman had some nerve. She furrowed her brow in warning.
Owen had the same look.
With their green eyes and dark hair, they could almost be mistaken for siblings instead of mother and son. Bethany looked sharper though, like a knife with a new blade. She wore a fitted black power suit. Her heels were four inches of pointy, red patent leather.
“Abby, you are being charged with a class A felony of arson, as well as driving without a license, destruction of property over twenty-thousand dollars, and possession of marijuana. You have priors for breaking and entering, petty theft, possession of marijuana paraphernalia, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and battery. You should really take your situation more seriously, sweetheart, because you’re looking at ten years without sunlight in a nice, cozy cell all to yourself.” Bethany was taunting me. The way the word sweetheart melted from her lips, it could have been mistaken for an endearment. Southern women used it when they couldn’t come right out and call you a cunt.
“So what, then? Rape and attempted murder are just misdemeanors? ‘Cause I got a feeling that kind of thing goes unpunished around here.” I looked her right in her eyes.
She parted her shiny red lips and chuckled.
Bethany circled around the desk, unbuttoning the jacket of her suit, and knelt down next to me. “I’m glad you decided to have your little episode today, because now you need my help, and I am the only one who can make all these unfortunate charges go away. I felt bad for you, Abby. I really did. That’s why I sent you the money. Too bad you fucked up a good thing. Now, we play it my way.” Bethany flashed me a fake smile.
“Now, you’re blackmailing me?” I asked. Bethany stood and took a seat opposite me, propping her briefcase up on the table.
“Not blackmail sugar. An agreement.” She pulled papers from her briefcase and set them in front of me. “This is your account of what happened that night: you were mugged. You don’t know who did it. You didn’t get a good look at your attacker. The police report will make it seem as if they searched heaven and hell for the assailant but have ultimately come up empty-handed, and the case will be shelved.”
“You’re out of your goddamned mind.”
“Now, sugar, don’t go using the good Lord’s name in vain. It’s not the Christian thing to do. This is a business transaction—your account of what happened in exchange for me dropping the charges for torching my house. You’re the one who ruined this, Abby. You could have taken your money and gotten out of town, but instead you chose to go all avenging angel on me.”
“Fuck you.” I’ll go to jail, I thought. After what I’ve been through, jail would be like summer camp.
Bring it bitch.
“Doesn’t matter to me, darlin’. It’s not like you can prove anything, not like Owen will ever be charged, what with his father being county judge and all. It’s a simple decision really.” She leaned over the table and propped her chin up on her elbows. “Jail, or your signature. You make the call.”
She was right, but I didn’t care. This wasn’t about making sure Owen was prosecuted for what he’d done to me. This was about not letting these people own me.
I wasn’t a piece of land or livestock.
They could take their power and shove it up their asses.
Bethany had a victory smile already plastered on her overly botoxed face. It was time to rip it the fuck off.
“I don’t think you quite understand something, Mrs. Fletcher.” I mimicked her posture, leaning and pressing myself as close to her as my cuffed hands would let me. “The last thing you want to do is fuck with someone who has nothing to lose. I want your entire family to leave me alone, and I want Owen to stay at least one hundred yards away from me at all times. I mean it. If he sees me on one side of the street, he needs to cross to the other.”
“This isn’t a negotiation. I’ve laid out your options so you pick. Jail or signature. End of story.” She placed the papers back into her briefcase and clicked the locks shut. She stood. “What will it be, Miss Ford?”
“Fuck you.”
She shrugged and turned to leave, but before she could twist