21. Kinleigh
TWENTY-ONE
KINLEIGH
EIGHT YEARS AGO.
With thick mud still caking the bottom of my boots and hem of my jeans, I walk into the road. I’ve been trudging in one general direction for the last hour.
The shipping container is gone.
The coordinates are no good.
It took me nearly a year to figure out it was a shipping container that they were using as a holding tank as it is. I kept seeing invoices from a company called Haulaway and it only took me several months to realize… we don’t get anything hauled away. I looked it up one day when my dad was in town with Uncle Garrison and realized it’s a shipping container company. My mind went back to a few of the stray photos on the computer, a beaten woman at the forefront, the background dark. She was in a container, and it was then I realized that the holding point between two spots was clearly that trucking bin.
Even now, I still don’t know much. Is it the same container brought back and forth? Does the whole container get shipped with people inside? I don’t know. All I know is that when I came across a set of coordinates etched along a book spine, hidden in plain sight, I had to find those numbers. I had to go wherever it was going to take me.
I knew it meant something.
I was right, but I was also too late. Now, I’m trying a new tactic.
Calmly leaving the property and going to law enforcement. After all, if he can hide the coordinates in plain sight, maybe I can leave the same way?
I keep my eyes on my boots as I walk down the unmarked country road, knowing at this pace I won’t be in town for another hour. But it gives me time to get my facts straight.
What can I actually report?
My father holds women and girls underground. That much I know. And though no one holds human lives in a metal box beneath the earth for any good reasons, I don’t have proof with me of actual sales or transactions.
They’ll have to believe me enough to follow me back to the house. It’s my only shot.
Somehow, as I kick a loose pebble and lift my eyes to the early morning sunshine, I realize the severity in that truth: this is my only chance to save them, and to save myself, too. Ever since the forced surgery last month, I am no longer hoping that Forrest will rehumanize, that he’ll let me go, that he’ll do anything but enslave people, rape and kill.
Knowing there isn’t anything left to fear but death is freeing. If he kills me for this, what’s the difference? I exist to help him, to be used by him, to be his personal trash can and fuck hole. What’s left for me?
I’m lucky enough to have experienced many years of true, unending, go-to-the-edge-of-Earth-for-you love. And Forrest killed that, too. I know now Colton was a threat to my father—without Colton in the picture, I was his to use.
And use me he has.
The town comes into view as I continue walking, the sky warming as morning matures to early afternoon. When I finally make it to the sheriff’s office, I enter the lobby and wipe sweat from my brow, fidgeting with my long, messy braid as I wait for the woman at the front desk to pay me attention.
When she looks up, she smiles. I look like every other hard-working person in Wyoming, with dirty jeans and boots, unkempt hair and sweat glistening on my skin. She can’t see the bruises beneath my flannel, the broken ribs that never healed correctly that currently make me wheeze a little when I breathe, the marks on my hips where I was stolen from irrevocably.
I tap my lips and shake my head, the way I tell people in town that I don’t talk. It’s much easier than standing there blinking, because then they just start talking louder.
She passes me a paper and pen, and on it I scrawl “Forrest Conway at Conway Farms out on Tarpan Way is holding kidnapped women and girls underground.” I push the flannel up, exposing a thin strip of my wrist where I’d written the old coordinates. I scribble them onto the paper, along with the words, “Here’s where he kept them before. I don’t know where they are now. Please come to my house. Please investigate him.”
I watch the middle-aged woman as her blue eyes skirt over the words, and when she’s done, she lifts the phone receiver and taps a button. The smile she gives me makes my stomach tighten in a nervous reaction.
“Forrest Conway’s daughter is here,” she says quietly, eyes still boring into mine, her voice real secretive and low.
Why isn’t she running into the sheriff’s office and waving her arms when I’ve brought her big news? A sex trafficking bust would be a big deal for a rural sheriff’s office in the middle of nowhere Wyoming.
A moment passes where I begin sweating uncontrollably, and then the undersheriff strolls out wearing a crooked smile that sets off an itchy discomfort beneath my skin.
He peers around me through the long windows, out into the vast parking lot. “Didn’t ride here?”
I shake my head, his eyes sliding to my muddy boots. “I’ll give you a ride home.”
I look at the woman one more time but she refuses to look at me. She does nothing when I groan and moan, jerking away from the deputy as he forcibly loops his arm through mine. He drags me out into the dirt and easily tosses me into the back seat.
I am here reporting crime and now I’m in the back seat of the sheriff’s cruiser.
I stare at my muddled reflection in the window as he paces the front of the car, getting behind the steering wheel on the driver’s side. He says nothing as he drives me back home, and it’s then that I know: Buffalo Trails isn’t safe.
I have to free those girls and myself on my own.
I don’t know how to do it, but I’m mortified when the cruiser pulls through the gravel drive at my house and I see my father has returned home. He walks out, shiny red boots making me nauseous. I’ve stared at those boots while trying to be invisible before. They remind me of pain and shame, and the man I hate.
The sheriff speaks to my father with his back to me, and my father peers around him to glare at me through the windshield.
In the privacy of the back seat, a singular gasp slips free. A gasp at how much effort I put into the mission this morning–on an empty stomach, no less–all to have it end here. Back at home with the Devil.
The sheriff opens the door a moment later, and my father yanks me out, dragging me inside as I force my body to go limp. I know what’s coming, and I won’t make it easy. Not today.
Today, as his fist connects with my eye and his steel-toed boot sears my stomach, when he unbuckles himself and forces his way into my body, I cry. I cry loud and hard, and the more I cry, the angrier he gets, the more brutal his strikes and strokes become.
I don’t care.
I cry for those women. I cry for myself.
I cry for the life I thought I’d have.