Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas #1)(88)

Dallie hated seeing that helpless look in her eyes, and he slammed another carton into the wall because he was only seventeen himself and he wasn't exactly sure how to make that look go away. But he found that the destruction didn't help, so he yelled at her. “Don't you ever be such a fool again, you hear me, Holly Grace? He's not going to send your mama away. He's not going to do a goddamn thing, because if he does, I'm going to kill him with my bare hands.”

She stopped looking so much like a whipped puppy, but he could see that Billy T had bullied her for too long and that she still didn't believe him. He made his way through the rubble and grabbed the shoulders of Billy T's white pharmacist's jacket. Billy T whimpered and threw up his hands to protect his head. Dallie shook him. “You aren't ever going to touch her again, are you, Billy T?”

“No!” he blubbered. “No, I won't touch her! Let me go. Make him let me go, Holly Grace!”

“You know if you ever touch her again, I'll come and get you, don't you?”

“Yes... I—”

“You know I'll kill you if you ever touch her again.”

“I know! Please—”

Dallie did what he'd been wanting to do since he'd first looked into the storage room. He drew back his fist and slammed it into Billy T's fat pig face. Then he hit him half a dozen more times until he saw enough blood to make himself feel better. He stopped before Billy T passed out, and got real close to his face. “You go ahead and call the police on me, Billy T. You go ahead and have me arrested, because while I'm sitting in that jail cell over at the sheriffs office, I'm going to be telling everybody I know about the dirty little games you've been playing in here. I'm going to tell every cop I see, every do-good lawyer. I'm going to tell the people who sweep out my cell and the juvenile officer who investigates my case. It won't take long for the word to spread. People'll pretend not to believe it, but they'll be thinking about it every time they look at you and wondering if it's true.”

Billy T didn't say anything. He just lay there whimpering and trying to hold his bleeding face together in the palms of his pudgy hands.

“Come on, Holly Grace. You and me have somebody we got to talk to.” Dallie scooped up her shoes and her tights and, taking her gently by the arm, led her from the storage room.

If he had expected gratitude from her, she quickly let him know exactly how wrong he was. When she heard what he intended to do, she started to yell at him. “You promised, you liar! You promised you wouldn't tell anybody!”

He didn't say anything, didn't try to explain, because he could see the fear in her eyes and he figured if he were in her place, he'd be scared, too.

Winona Cohagan. twisted her hands in the ruffle of her frilly pink apron as she sat in the living room of Billy T's house listening to Dallie talk. Holly Grace stood by the stairs, her mouth white and pinched as if she wanted to die of shame. For the first time Dallie realized that she hadn't cried once. From the moment he had burst into the storage room, she had remained dry-eyed and stricken.

Winona didn't spend any time cross-examining either of them, so Dallie got the idea that someplace deep in her heart she might have suspected Billy T was a pervert. But the quiet misery in her eyes told him that she had no idea her daughter had been his victim. He also saw right away that Winona lòved Holly Grace and that she wasn't going to let anyone hurt her daughter, no matter what it might cost her. When he finally walked toward the front door to leave the house, he figured Winona, for all her flightiness, would do what was right.

Holly Grace didn't look at him as he left, and she didn't say thank you.

For the next few days she was absent from school. He, Skeet, and Miss Sybil paid an after-hours visit to Purity Drugs. They let Miss Sybil do most of the talking, and by the time she was done, Billy T had gotten the idea that he couldn't stay in Wynette any longer.

When Holly Grace finally came back to school, she stared right through Dallie as if he didn't exist. He didn't want her to know how much he was hurt by her stuck-up attitude, so he flirted with her best friend and made sure there were good-looking girls around him whenever he thought he might run into her. It didn't work as well as he'd hoped, because every time he ran into her, she had a rich college-prep boy at her side. Still, sometimes he thought he caught a flicker of something sad and old in her eyes, so he finally swallowed his pride and went up to her and asked her if she wanted to go to the homecoming dance with him. He asked her like he didn't much care whether she went with him or not, like he was doing her a big fat favor by even thinking about taking her. He wanted to make sure that when she turned him down, she would understand he didn't really give a damn and that he'd only asked her because he didn't have anything better to do.

She said she'd go.





Chapter

18



Holly Grace looked up at the anniversary clock on the mantel and swore under her breath. Dallie was late as usual. He knew she was leaving for New York City in two days and that they wouldn't see each other for a while. Couldn't he be on time just once? She wondered if he had set out after that British girl. It would be just like him to go off without saying a word.

She had dressed for the evening in a silky peach-colored turtleneck, which she'd tucked into a pair of brand-new stretch jeans. The jeans had tight cigarette legs whose length she had accented with a pair of three-inch heels. She never wore jewelry because putting earrings and necklaces near her great mane of blond hair was, she felt, a clear case of gilding the lily.