And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(69)

She flinched like she’d been hit by something wet. She kept eating. “What would I ask? I saw what you did to him.”

“You don’t want to know about the body?”

She looked like she was thinking. “What did you do with it?”

“Put it in the trunk of the car you all came in.”

“Where’s the car?”

“In my garage.”

“What are you going to do with the car?”

“Carl has a tow truck. He’s going to haul it away and get rid of it.”

She picked up a piece of the potato skin and used her teeth to peel away the orange flesh stuck to it. “Why does Carl help you? What does he get?” She looked at him sideways while she waited for the answer he didn’t want to admit. He ignored her question and studied the end of his cigarette instead.

“It’s me, isn’t it? He said he was coming back for me when he smashed my hand against the wall. He expects you to let him have me for helping you.”

“That’s what he expects.”

“Are you going to let him do whatever he wants? Rape me? Kill me?”

“I’m not keeping you locked in here for Carl’s benefit,” Emmett said.

“Then why are you?”

“Maybe I’m going to rape you. Maybe I’m going to kill you.”

She gave him a flat, cold stare that seemed like a dare. “What are you waiting for?”

Emmett leaned forward in his chair. “You don’t want to challenge me. What do you think happened here before? Why do you think I built this room?”

Her boldness wilted. She turned back to her food. “Carl said you killed three women and buried them in the woods.”

“That’s not true. There are three women buried in the woods. Carl killed one of them. One of them killed herself.”

Wanda, the girl from the gas station. Three months after he grabbed her. He thought time would make her grow to like him, but all it did was make her realize he wasn’t going to let her go. The end of the chain that went through the ring on the wall was padlocked around the handle of a one-hundred-pound dumbbell underneath the cot. Emmett could barely move it so he had assumed it would be too heavy for a woman. He hadn’t counted on a woman who used to stack plywood for eight hours a day before getting a job at a gas station.

Wanda got the weight up on the cot, wrapped the slack chain around her neck, then rolled the weight over the edge. He found her on her back, head hanging off the side of the bed. Her face was dark blue. Her tongue stuck straight out of her mouth like a stamen.

“Carl said you shot one.”

“I put that one out of her misery. The news said she had quit taking her schizo pills after her husband left her. She thought she could control her craziness with exercise and jogging. Between that and the things Carl did to her, she went nuts. She clawed the walls until her fingers bled. She smeared shit all over everything, including herself.”

They both looked around the pink room with the low ceiling. The girl looked like she was trying to imagine what had happened. Emmett didn’t have to.

The girl said, “I don’t understand. You keep women locked in this room and then Carl does what he wants to them?”

That’s how things had more or less turned out with the pink room. The space he’d built for himself and Wanda had become Carl’s playground. After Wanda, the whole terrible history of it belonged to him. Now history was about to repeat itself. Carl was practically pacing outside, waiting to pounce.

“Don’t worry about Carl.”

“How can I not? Can you explain it to me? I don’t want to die in here, and that means you have to bring me insulin, and now I realize it also means you have to protect me from Carl. If he killed those other women, he’ll kill me. Why bring me insulin if Carl can just do what he wants?”

Emmett didn’t say anything. He stared at his enormous belly and watched it go up and down with his breath.

“Are you going to protect me?” she asked. “I need your help, Emmett. You have to have a plan to stop him.”

The sound of his name coming from her mouth made the hair on his arms stand up. Had she said it before now? He didn’t think so.

Emmett grunted. “I’ll bring your medicine and protect you from Carl, but there’s going to come a day when I want something in return.”

“Like what?” she said.

“I’m still deciding. Might be what a man usually wants from a woman, might be something else. When I decide, I don’t expect a fight. You’ll owe me. The price for fighting me is the light goes out, I lock the door, and I don’t come back.”

The girl’s face was a mask. “I understand,” she said. Silence filled the room like so much cigarette smoke. Emmett scratched the back of his neck and looked out the door like something out there had caught his attention. Neither one of them knew what to say next.

The girl set her plate aside and reached for the book. “Do you want me to read to you? I can start at the beginning if you want.”

“Do what you like.”

She laid the book in her lap and used her good hand to get it open and turned to the first page. She read aloud, her voice growing more sure with every sentence:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.