Chapter Nine
Before
Marshall knelt beside her, cleaning up the wrappers from the fast food he’d brought.
He seemed quieter than usual that night.
Different. He’d fed her, given her water, cleaned her wound, changed out her waste bucket—which was a particular indignity on top of all the other indignities she suffered—and now he looked to be packing up to leave. Her heart beat hollowly in her chest.
“What are they saying about me?” she asked.
Her voice sounded rusty from lack of use.
The only time she spoke was when Marshall came to feed her and do…
other things. His visits were becoming shorter and shorter.
She’d wondered often how her friends and family were reacting to her disappearance, what the police were doing to find her, but hadn’t asked Marshall about it.
Maybe some part of her was afraid to know.
She was surprised when he leaned back against the wall next to her, his masked head hitting the cement behind them.
“That r-roommate of yours is raising holy h-hell. She calls the police every day. She has a command central going on from your apartment. Other students roaming in and out.” He made a strange chuffing sound.
“Printing off f-flyers, making calls until all hours of the m-morning.” He paused.
“I volunteer there.” He turned his head as if gauging her reaction to that bit of news and then turned away.
“Your aunt Mavis is there all the time t-too.”
Mavis. Her father’s sister who lived in Oxford.
Josie closed her eyes, feeling tears burning behind her lids.
She lived in a picturesque old farmhouse in the country.
It was a shining beacon of light in her mind.
She pictured herself standing in the field that overlooked the house, where her aunt had brought her to pick wildflowers, and the longing to be there, wide-open sky stretched out around her, hit her so hard it was like a punch to her gut.
Josie had loved it there as a kid when her dad took her.
But once her dad left for good, her mom didn’t take her anymore.
She said Mavis was weird and kooky and a bad influence.
Which was laughable coming from her mother.
The woman who was biologically a mother anyway, though Josie thought of her with no fondness.
No, she’d been her first abuser. The person she should have felt safest with… but hadn’t.
“And my mother?” Josie whispered, turning her eyes away. She didn’t care. She told herself she didn’t care.
When she looked back at Marshall though, his eyes were narrowed as he studied her. “Your mother hasn’t come by.”
“So you…spend a lot of time there? Volunteering?” she asked.
She somehow knew he did, thought he probably got off on it.
Walking from his apartment to the second floor where she and Reagan lived, acting all concerned, making calls, maybe, his stutter growing worse as he spoke to strangers, passing out flyers…
leaving to feed her, rape her, returning with her still on his skin to comfort the people who actually cared for her.
“As much as I c-can. I have to w-work too, you know.”
“Where do you work?”
He barked out a laugh. “Oh right, you c-care about me now, d-do you?”
She ignored his sarcasm, and he sighed. “I’m the n-night manager at a store.”
“What do they think happened to me?” she whispered.
“That some s-stranger nabbed you.” He made a small sound that might have been a humorless laugh. “It’s n-never the stranger, though, is it? It’s always s-someone you know, s-someone you should trust who h-hurts you the worst. Isn’t that t-true, Josie?”
There was something strange in his voice that made a chill go down her spine. Was he talking about her? How her rejection had hurt him? It was all she could think of. The only reason that could explain this. “That’s what the statistics say,” she said softly. “It’s usually someone the victim knows.”
He laughed, a real one, though she heard meanness in it. “Is that what you are? A v-victim?” He reached over and used his fist to pound on the wound on her thigh. She cried out in pain, drawing her leg up.
“Both,” she said on a strangled breath. “I’m both. Aren’t we all?” Tears streaked down her cheeks, though she tried to hold them back. “Sometimes the victim, sometimes the perpetrator? None of us are one or the other. We’re all both to different degrees.”
She bent her head and used her knee to wipe her nose, her tears drying.
She’d been thinking about that a lot lately, considering her life, her choices, the reasons behind them.
Thinking about her past and how it affected her present.
Maybe any self-reflection was pointless considering she’d most likely die in that warehouse room, but what else did she have to do?
She was constantly terrified, alone, all her raw emotions right at the surface.
She wasn’t sure she could stop her mind from spinning if she tried.
She’d had no choice but to look at her feelings, and all the time in the world to examine each and every one.
“T-tell me, Josie, tell me about the b-bad things you’ve done,” he said after a minute.
She turned her head, swallowed, unsure what he wanted to hear. He’d told her he knew everything about her… He didn’t return her gaze, his masked face pointed forward, staring at the wall in front of them.
Her shoulders drooped as she looked away. “I had an affair with a married man.”
“I already knew that. You’re a whore. It’s w-what whores do.”
Was she a whore? Obviously not using the classic definition, but that’s not what Marshall meant anyway.
He meant that she was promiscuous. She flaunted herself.
She made men want her, and then she rejected them or used them for her own selfish purposes.
She knew that’s what he thought of her, and those thoughts were exacerbated by whatever madness ruled his mind.
Because he had to be mentally ill. No sane human chained another person to a cement wall and raped them repeatedly.
No one sane carved words into another person’s flesh.
No one sane killed another person or left them to die, and somehow Josie knew that’s where this was all heading for her.
“I’m not a whore,” she said calmly. “I loved him.” I thought I still did, only I haven’t thought of him much since I’ve been down here, and that’s probably very telling.
Marshall laughed. “You loved him? He wasn’t yours to love. Other people must have loved him too. They probably waited for him to come home, but he didn’t. Because he was busy fucking you.” He spoke quickly, fluidly, anger lacing his tone and making his voice deeper.
“I know,” she said, and her voice was small.
But not as small as she felt. “I know, because I’ve been the one waiting too.
My father cheated on my mother repeatedly.
They fought, he’d leave, and then she’d take out her rage and helplessness on me.
I know about that part too.” She wondered why she was telling him this and why he was listening.
Would it make any difference if he knew something about her?
The times she’d hurt like maybe he had hurt?
Would it make her human in his eyes? Make him decide to spare her life?
She didn’t know, and she didn’t dare hope, but even so, the things she was saying needed to be said.
Not for him as much as for her. She needed to voice these truths, express her contrition, because if she was going to die, she wanted to do it with a partially cleansed soul.
It was the only thing she had left for which she was in control.
“So you did it to someone else to g-get back at your father? Your mother?” He sounded genuinely interested.
“No,” she said, turning her head toward him.
“No.” She stared forward again, considering.
She’d met Vaughn Merrick—Professor Vaughn Merrick—in her English class.
She’d fallen for his striking looks and his boyish smile, the way he held his class spellbound with his passion as he quoted Shakespeare and Hemingway, Austen and Dickens.
She’d been leaving in the rain after class one day when he’d offered her a ride.
There was an old-school song by The Police with lyrics about that, wasn’t there?
God, she was such a cliché. He’d driven her home, turned his usual flirtation up a notch, and she’d invited him in.
He’d made love to her all afternoon as the rain pounded outside her windows.
Later, they’d lain in bed together, their legs entwined as he’d quoted poetry to her.
It was the most romantic and sensual thing she’d ever experienced.
A month later, she found out he was married as she stood frozen in an art gallery, watching him with his wife, hands clasped, the wedding ring he didn’t wear to class glinting on his finger.
There were two preteen girls next to them, giggling softly at whatever he’d bent to whisper in their ears. The perfect family.
All those old feelings of intense rejection had slammed into Josie. She was an outsider. Again. It felt horribly, heartbreakingly familiar. An insidious association between pain and love that she didn’t know how to untwist.
Josie had confronted him later. He and his wife were on the rocks, he’d said, but didn’t they all?
When she’d pointed out that it didn’t look that way at the gallery, he said it was where she worked, and they had to pretend for her co-workers.
His wife wasn’t ready or willing to deal with the gossip that surrounded a separation.
And they hadn’t yet told their daughters.
He’d said that the only time he felt like he was truly himself was when he was with Josie.
She had given him hope that true love—the kind the poets wrote about—was possible.
If his story had been a novel, the reviews would say it had plot holes ten feet deep, but she’d chosen not to explore them, not to listen to her gut.
She’d chosen to suspend disbelief and learned the hard way that suspended disbelief has no place in real life.
Suspended disbelief in real life is called willing stupidity.
She’d kept seeing him for another six months before she’d been unable to lie to herself any longer.
Regardless, even after it’d ended, she still thought of him, still missed him, her heart still flipped and that old familiar neediness filled her chest when she saw him across campus, walking with some other pretty student.
She still longed for the way he’d made her feel.
She thought of what Marshall had asked her a moment before.
Did she keep seeing Vaughn after she knew he was married—with two daughters nonetheless—because she was trying to get back at her father?
“I wasn’t trying to get back at anyone. It’s like…
I recreated the situation with my father unconsciously.
The feelings were the same. Are the same.
I craved the rejection as much as the acceptance. I wanted to hurt myself.”
“Why?” he barked. He seemed upset in some way she couldn’t discern, and she wondered if she was going too far here.
Wondered if she’d accidentally say something that, instead of cultivating empathy, would create anger, cause him to revile her more than he did.
But it was all she had. The truth of her life as she was finally beginning to see it.
She felt a sudden kinship with her captor—that Stockholm syndrome rising up.
It was a familiarity that went beyond words or understanding.
She tried to move closer to him, but her chains pulled her tight, trapping her where she was.
“I didn’t set out to hurt myself intentionally, but seeing it now, yeah.
Yeah, I did. Somewhere deep down.” She took in a pull of air.
“Maybe we’re all just going through the motions, trying to rework the stories that ended so badly in our early years.
Trying so desperately to play a different role in the tragedies of our lives, yet using the same flawed script.
Do you ever think that, Mar—” She realized her mistake and cleared her throat.
He didn’t appear to notice. He didn’t react at all. “Do you ever think that?”
“What about the other p-players? What about them?”
“You can’t change them.”
“No,” he murmured. He turned his head, his hazel eyes catching the light for a moment.
She saw that he had a ring of dark brown surrounding the lighter hazel.
She’d never seen eyes like his before. “But you c-can make them suffer.” He smiled then; she could tell by the movement of his mask.
A deep chill went down her spine as he stood and left.