Chapter 32 #2
Later, she’d remember the next couple of hours only in snatches.
Ellie shivering, maybe from shock or maybe blood loss, despite the heat of summer evening.
Vera producing a comically giant first aid kit from the car like some kind of army medic and pressing a stack of cotton gauze to the gash on the side of Ellie’s head all while keeping her head up, on high alert, gun in her lap.
An argument erupting between them about whether Ellie could be moved until Ellie decided it herself, shakily crawling to her feet only to throw up, then slump lightheaded between them, until they quickly got her lying on the backseat of the car.
Estella kneeling on the floor of the car as Vera drove them in through the gate and up to the house.
Pressing her face into Ellie’s throat, the iron scent of her blood.
Who did this to you? Ellie’s absolute lack of response, no matter how hard she begged.
And finally, in crystal clarity, Cheryl Grant, standing over them all, bleach blonde, upscale sneakers, hands on ample sixty-eight-year-old hips.
“Well. What the fuck do we have here then?”
There wasn’t much her mother-in-law hadn’t seen in her life.
First as a nurse, then as a mother of three boys, then as the wife of a mob boss.
Cheryl knew where all the bodies were buried, yet somehow she’d proven bulletproof.
She’d lost her husband and all three of her sons to the violence in which she’d thrived and here she stood amongst the rubble.
Perfectly free and out of jail, despite decades of suspicion and countless arrests.
She’d poked and prodded and bullied poor broken Ellie in the back of the car, then pronounced her fit to walk into the house.
Between the three of them, they’d gotten her into the living room and onto Estella’s couch, while Cheryl had cleaned and sutured the wound on the side of Ellie’s head like she was a goddamned plastic surgeon.
She clucked and tutted, and clicked her tongue, made Ellie follow her eyes with a tiny torch.
She had Vera write down a set of meticulous instructions about rest and observation and Vera obeyed her like a well-heeled puppy, the combination adding up to perhaps one of the scariest moments of Estella’s life.
Estella held herself excruciatingly taut and upright.
She knew what Cheryl could do if she showed a shred of weakness and so she sat aside, unmoved, like Ellie was nothing to her than another of her lackeys.
There wasn’t a trace of softness or empathy in Cheryl’s touch or her tone, so Estella was taken aback when Ellie was left limp, her bleeding finally staunched, and Cheryl had looked down at her on the couch and said matter-of-factly, “Poor little mite. Don’t worry love, we’ll get the monsters,” and gotten to her feet.
Estella followed her to the door. “Friend of yours?” Cheryl said, her voice like broken glass.
She was apparently psychic now as well as psychopathic, or perhaps Estella’s new fragility had shown in her eyes despite all her effort.
“Message received, huh?” Cheryl jerked her head towards the violence played out on Ellie’s body.
Bruises bloomed everywhere, but Cheryl was right: Ellie was alive for a reason.
Estella couldn’t let the thought land, couldn’t even begin to face it right now, so all she did was nod, sharply.
“Better get her out of town,” was all Cheryl said. “Fast.”
“Cheryl,” Estella managed, her voice brittle.
She’d finally had enough, no more hints or wheedling, no more veiled threats or begging.
Everything she needed hinged on this ferocious husk of a woman and yet she’d finally run straight out of time.
Ellie’s body made that quite clear. “You’ll think about it. What I asked?”
She’d first met her future mother-in-law at nineteen.
Cheryl had hidden soft-shell crab in the pasta sauce, because she’d heard Estella was allergic to shellfish.
As Estella had stabbed herself in the thigh with her EpiPen, her throat starting to close up while the ambulance siren wailed closer, Cheryl had only shrugged, blandly.
Sorry love, I thought you were lying to me.
Estella had signed herself up for a desensitisation trial, shuttling herself back and forth from the immunologist for an entire year, because she knew full well that Cheryl would happily try again to kill her and make it look like an accident.
“Ezzie,” Cheryl said now — because Estella hated when she called her that — “I’m fucking tired.”
That, Estella knew, as she closed the door behind her, was the only kind of yes she’d ever get from this woman.
There was no time to waste on second-guessing.
Estella packed a quick bag and flung it in the front footwell of her car.
It triggered the memory of the last time she’d fled her home with an overnight bag and she too, felt fucking tired.
When would this end? The bloodshed, the danger, the schemes, the violence.
God, to just sit in a sunbeam, just for ten whole minutes, without thinking of fighting or running.
Ellie lay slumped in the back seat of the car again, her head on Estella’s lap.
Vera had found a way to wrap the seat belt around her hips despite the position, muttering only, it’s the law, when Ellie had protested.
Estella felt a hysterical laugh bubble up her throat, which she swallowed, because she knew Vera’s resume, and very little of it involved the right side of the law.
Ellie was too weak to sit up, and Estella wanted the excuse to watch her as closely as possible, to ensure she was breathing — conscious, alive — so she’d ignored the door to the front passenger seat when Vera had opened it for her.
They couldn’t take Ellie back home, or to her family, and Estella wasn’t convinced any of her safe-houses were safe right now.
Not when Ellie couldn’t — or wouldn’t — tell her who’d attacked her.
It had been Ellie who’d finally given her a name of someone she trusted.
Hugo. When Estella had picked up Ellie’s phone and called the number under his name, giving the man who answered only a terse report, he’d grasped the situation with startling brevity.
And when he gave her the address she couldn’t fault the karma of it all.
As Vera started the car and rolled it towards the gate, Estella looked ahead at the darkened city beyond.
“Take us to Gold Hill,” she said.