Gun Shy(67)

He shuts off the water and leaves me there, on the tiles, shivering, my arms wrapped around my knees. I hear water running and realize he’s filling the old claw-foot bath that sits beside the shower. A moment later, he’s pulling me out of the shower, picking me up like I’m a feather and lowering me down into the bath.

I find my voice when my bare ass hits hot water. I scream. After the cold of the shower, it’s as if he’s dropped me into a vat full of acid. Maybe he has. Maybe this is how he kills me. Damon claps a hand over my mouth. I hold the sides of the tub as if it’s a lifeboat and I’m being tossed around in the middle of the ocean, instead of being boiled alive in my own bathroom. Onetwothreefourfive, and the burning sensation recedes ever-so-slightly.

Damon takes his hand away from my mouth, handing me a bar of soap and a washcloth. “Clean yourself up,” he says, his jaw set. He takes a step back and watches intently as I shake and scrub the blood from my skin. I should be crying, shouldn’t I? Crying or having a breakdown or something. Instead, I’m thinking about Ray. About Jennifer. About Karen.

“Are you going to bury Ray with Jennifer?” I ask suddenly.

Damon glares at me. He’s starting to look a little worse for the wear, my philandering stepdaddy. His clothes are covered in blood, his eyes are bloodshot to hell, and the black circles under his eyes weren’t there when I met him. It must be hard to keep your youth when you’re busy stealing it from everyone else.

“What kind of question is that?” he snaps. “Of course not.” And then, “Sometimes I worry about you, Cassie.”

There’s a dead man missing half his skull downstairs, a teenage girl and her stillborn fetus buried in the yard below this window, and this is what makes him worry about me? The ridiculousness of his thought process makes me laugh in my head at first, and then a whole body convulsion that brings tears to my eyes and a cramp to my stomach. Laughter is so close to crying, that pretty soon my cackle is a full-blown sob, strips torn off my soul, my eyes bleeding salty tears that burn my eyes.

I bring my knees up to my chest and hug my arms around them, just a small ball of a girl, naked and waiting to die.

I break.

I cry and cry, cracked open, falling apart, or just plain falling.

This is not a fairytale and there is no happy ending, no prince to ride in on his horse and save me.

It’s just me and my monster, just us in our house built out of bones and lies.

“Cassie,” Damon says, his tone softer this time. Almost like he’s pleading. For what, I don’t know. There’s a longing in his tone, a need. He puts his hand on mine, squeezing gently. I would recoil, but there’s nowhere to retreat to.

“I went to Lone Pine today,” I whisper.

His entire demeanor changes. He squeezes my hand harder, and when he speaks, there is fear in his voice, incredulity. “What?”

Now he knows that I know. Now he knows that I have his secrets. Maybe this will be my end. Maybe he’ll thread his hands through my hair and hold my head under water until I suck in a watery last breath.

Maybe that would be the very best thing for him to do.

“I went to your grave,” I say sadly, crying again. I don’t know why I’m crying for him, because he’s never caused me anything but darkness. But as I look at Damon King, a person who doesn’t exist, a boy from a milk carton, I cry. His grip on my hand is so tight now he’s crushing my bones. “That’s where I went. I found your milk cartons in the attic. I needed to know. I needed to know.”

When his words come out, he sounds like a little boy. “Did you tell anyone?”

I shake my head. “There’s nobody left to tell.”

He lets go of me, sagging to the floor. He starts to cry, too. All these years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him cry.





CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT





CASSIE





One bath, two shots of bourbon, three extra blankets. I can’t get warm. I can’t stop shaking. My teeth chatter along to the beat of my heart, a hummingbird trapped in my ribcage desperately hitting against my bones in an effort to break free. There are water stains on my ceiling, dark brown patches with irregular edges. They remind me of blood. If they hadn’t been there for so long I could mistake them for Jennifer’s blood seeping through the attic floor, through the ceiling, dripping onto my face as I slept.

All these thoughts of blood, of course, because I still itch from it, from Ray. He’s still downstairs, what’s left of him, and Damon is dressed in a blue plastic crime scene suit, ready to battle the carnage and make everything disappear.

“Open,” he says to me from his spot on the edge of the bed. I open my mouth obediently. Usually he would be sliding something else in at this point, but tonight it’s a little white pill on the end of his finger. He presses it deep enough that I almost gag, forcing the pill down dry. This isn’t the first time he’s drugged me, but usually it’s crushed up in a glass of milk, like he thinks he’s tricking me. Tonight he’s dropped the pretense.

You’ll be out in a few minutes,” he says, like I don’t already know. We’ve danced this dance a thousand times. More than a thousand. How many days since I turned eighteen? That’s how many nights, give or take. That’s how many pills. He gets up to leave just as the pill is threading its way through my limbs, down my chest, deep into my core.