And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(68)

“I can come with you.”

“No, go home. I’ll text you if I get anything meaningful from her. We’ll touch base in the morning.”

“I hope she doesn’t clam up.”

“She won’t. She’s gonna talk. I’ll make sure of it.”





Chapter Twenty-Two


Jenny was sitting up in the bed and wouldn’t look at Emmett when he came in with her dinner: a baked sweet potato with a glob of plain yogurt and an oxycodone pill on the side. It had been the same when he’d come down earlier with the insulin and a new syringe. She was angry about being kept prisoner in this room, about Carl smashing her hand, but she hadn’t been able to hide her relief at the sight of what he was carrying. Didn’t mean she had to talk to him, and she didn’t. Not even a thank-you. He’d smoked in the doorway and watched as she read the tiny print instructions that came in the white box. After a few minutes her only words were to ask him for a pencil so she could do the math to figure out the right dosage. He found a flat carpenter’s pencil in a drawer under the workbench and used his knife to expose the graphite.

She looked almost as relieved by the sight of real food as she had at the box of insulin. She swallowed the pill with some water, then picked at the still-hot potato with her good hand while he slowly unpacked a grocery bag filled with the other things he’d brought down for her: a cleanish towel, a new toothbrush, the girly shampoo. He saved the book for last. He’d taken the MISSING flyer out and thrown it away. She wouldn’t reach for the book when he held it out to her.

“You don’t want it now?”

She kept staring at her food.

“I’ll take it back,” he said.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I went to a lot of trouble to get this stuff. The insulin, too. You could at least say thank you.”

She refused.

Emmett dropped the book. He didn’t know if he should stay or go. He picked up the shampoo bottle and smelled it. “Do you want to eat first or shower?” he asked.

She gave him a look like she was trying to figure out whether this was a trick or not. “Shower,” she said.

He put the leg restraints on her, then undid the manacles that kept her chained to the ring in the wall. She took off the Sandy Lake Labor Day T-shirt and he put the regular handcuffs on her. She was naked and he couldn’t help but look again as she walked stiff-legged to the shower. She carried the new shampoo in her good hand, and the thin towel over her shoulder. She had a dark mole on her right hip and a birthmark on her back the color of an old tan.

He watched her clutch the shampoo bottle under one arm and pop open the top with her good hand. She tried to keep her back to him but there was no missing her small, pointed breasts and the fawn-colored hair between her legs. The girl squeezed a blob of shampoo on top of her head, then set the bottle on the floor and scrubbed her hair with her good hand. The basement filled with the smell of the tropics.

He let her take as long as she wanted under the warm water. The wounds on her hip were still bruised and red, but she seemed to flinch less from the water this time. She spit her retainer onto the back of her bandaged hand and balanced it there while she brushed her teeth and spit on the floor. He went back for her bucket and dumped it in the toilet. Something electric passed through him as she stepped aside so he could rinse the bucket under the shower hose. It used to be a fantasy of his to stand close to a naked woman wet from the shower. Not while holding a stinking toilet bucket and her with a foamy toothbrush sticking out of her mouth, but close. He stared at her, waiting for the feeling to come back until she turned away from him and hunched her shoulders, protectively.

When she was clean, they went back to the room and he undid one side of the handcuffs so she could put on a different T-shirt, red and full of little holes, probably from welding sparks. She still wasn’t speaking to him. He dragged the rocker into the room and sat across from her and unwrapped the soggy bandages on her hand. The sight was still gruesome. Red and tattered flesh. Her wrists were raw and abraded from long hours in the heavy manacles he kept on her. He prodded gently with his stiff fingers for any bits of shot that might have worked their way to the surface. He found one on the back of her hand that popped out with just the slightest bit of pressure, followed by a slurry of pink pus. The girl’s face was damp with sweat.

“Can you move it?” he asked.

She could make somewhat of a grip with her thumb and first two fingers. The ring and pinkie wouldn’t move at all.

“Needs more peroxide,” he said.

She nodded and braced herself for the pain as he poured right from the bottle over the back of her hand and on to the floor. “Show me the palm. We need to hit it all.”

Again with the peroxide. Tears ran down her cheeks but she kept from crying out. He held the clean bandage in place and helped her wrap the new tape. Next to hers, his thick fingers, stained with tobacco and knobbed with arthritis, looked like those of a rock creature. Between the two of them they had about one and a half good hands.

When her hand was rewrapped he sat back and smoked a cigarette and watched as she ate. She had the blanket pulled up over her legs with the sweet potato in her lap.

He didn’t appreciate the silent treatment. The least she could do after he got her everything she asked for was talk to him. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “How come you don’t ever ask about the boy?”