Mercy (Atlee Pine #4)(12)

And Cain? That just came from reading the Good Book. Desiree Atkins had said the scriptures were all she needed to know in the way of learning. That she had to repent her whole life for all the awful things she’d done and all the awful things she’d wanted to do. Well, she had certainly wanted to do awful things to Desiree, all right. But whatever she was willing to do paled in comparison to what the woman actually had done to Cain.

After escaping, Cain had basically lived at some of the best public libraries in the country for years. And it wasn’t necessarily about reading and learning, at least not at first. She had found, as a rule, that the more books you read, the longer they let you stay. And when it was freezing cold or mercilessly hot out, that was important. And if you read a lot of books, and even helped out, she had found that kindly librarians had often become informal teachers, helping her to read better and to write—and on top of that, they fed her, too. Because without something in the belly the mind didn’t work too good. Those years had constituted her formal instruction, for better or worse.

She really had no clear memory of anything prior to going to live with the Atkinses. Except for one thing.

But it was a big thing. A really big thing.

She dropped her duffel next to the mattress on the floor. A box next to the mattress represented her closet. She could have flicked on a light, but she preferred the dark. Counterintuitively, for her, things somehow seemed to have greater clarity in total darkness. The stark distractions of life were filtered out by it, allowing one to fully focus as though one’s life depended on it, which it often had for Cain.

She took a loose board out of the floor and opened the lid of the tin box she kept there. The money went in and the board went back. Also on the floor were stacks of books. All had been taken from libraries, some with permission, most without. But she had read them all, multiple times, so there was that. Books were meant to be read, not displayed on a shelf for decoration.

She sat on the mattress and rolled a joint. She lit it, sucked on it, drank in the smoke’s fumes, as the night deepened and the weed siphoned off some of her pain from the fight. Over the years she’d torn through all of the hard stuff: coke, crack, meth, heroin, synthetics, exotic street mixes. Then she’d almost died from an OxyContin pill laced with fentanyl. It had taken three pops of naloxone spray from an EMT to bring her back, or so she was told. After that, she’d walked away from it. It was a bitch to kick, but she’d kicked harder than that. The bottom line was nothing was going to control her ever again.

She focused on the memory from long ago.

They don’t want you anymore, the man had said that night to the little girl she used to be with the name and history she no longer remembered. As they sat in his car he had said, They sent me here to take one of you. Your mother and father told me to kill you. But I’m not going to do that. I’m taking you to another family that wants you. You’ll be safe there.

She remembered the older couple, Len and Wanda Atkins. That was who the man had taken her to. Then she had been quickly passed on to Joe and Desiree Atkins. What they had done to her—well, Desiree mostly—she had tried her best to forget. But she never really could.

Slave. That was what she was. Slave, prisoner, piece of property, human meat; she had read about that stuff in books. Blacks used to be slaves in this country, she had read. Whatever the term, it was all she was back then.

How many trees had she chopped down for firewood? How many logs carried, how much brush cleared? Floors and windows scrubbed, dishes washed, carpet vacuumed, grass cut, garden tended, bushes trimmed, vines and crap cleared, walls painted, clothes laundered, toilets and sinks cleaned, beds made, meals prepared that were never for her? How much shit hauled from one spot to another, or “Do this, do that, NOW!” orders just because they could make her?

She had read the fairy tale about Cinderella.

I was her, only I never found a prince. And my feet are way too big for a glass slipper.

Human beings were funny, in a very unfunny way.

She grew tall, very tall. Her parents must have been tall; she couldn’t remember. And her life had made her strong: She could lift a truck, and she possessed stamina out the roof, able to work her ass off for days and not feel it. And not an ounce of fat was on her frame, because they fed her just enough to keep her hungry. And her pain tolerance? What she had endured tonight? It was painful, for sure, but really nothing compared to what she had endured in the past.

Desiree had really liked to burn shit. Dogs, cats . . . but mostly El.

And mentally she was stronger than she otherwise ever would have been. Every day the same. First the locked room in the house. Then her final destination was the little prison in the woods. Another fairy tale with a monster attached. The chain. The smell of rotting clay. She’d stayed focused in her mind to survive it. Played the mental games required not to lose her sanity. She obsessed over mundane stuff so she could bury the total absurdity of her current existence in the black hole of her mind while she doted over minutiae: the counting of seconds, the drip of water, the arrangement of her rag clothes on her grimy shelves, the cleaning of dishes, the fixation on just where to place the first cut on a tree limb. Or the sighting of a fawn that drove her to tears, or the spying of a hawk enjoying the lift of air currents along with the best view in the county.

A bird with more freedom than she had.

Each day she was alive to see the sun rise and then fall was an enormous victory. It truly was the little things, particularly when all the big things had been denied you. The long days and nights of labor, the knock-knock on the door for her two daily meals. Her with the food, him eventually with the gun. Because she had grown far bigger than both of them. They were afraid of her; she could see that in their wide eyes and how Joe clutched the weapon, how the vein at his temple bulged while that door, that damn door, stayed open. Never seeing another living soul except the scaredycat Joe and the bug-eyed and vicious Desiree, and occasionally Len and Wanda, who would come with sad eyes and leave with sadder ones. Cain had passed from terrified kid to cool-eyed adult. She was a prisoner even though she’d never been tried and convicted of anything.