She walks away.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Aworn path in the grass from the back of the pale brick house to the outbuilding. Emma sees it by moonlight, feels it under the rubber soles of her shoes.
The outbuilding is a large steel shed, like a garage or a barn. Almost as tall as the house. It’ll have a mezzanine level inside, Emma’s sure – she’s seen a lot of sheds in Apple Creek, and she recognizes the style. There’s a front door, beside a roller door large enough to admit a big Chevy or a truck. A short concrete ramp lips up to the roller door, but it doesn’t look well used, and there are no tire ruts outside.
The front door is the most terrifying part. Walking up to it, Emma feels electric. She keeps moving her head, scanning for scurrying figures. Has to keep reminding herself to hold her gun properly, trigger finger on the frame, left hand in support. Her palms are sweaty. She loosens her left hand to grab the doorknob. In the moonlight, her skin glows almost blue. She listens, hears nothing. Turns the knob and opens the door, inches inside.
She closes the door. It’s very dark. But there’s a glow somewhere farther back, up high. The space inside feels big. Echoey.Some faint noise coming from somewhere, maybe the same place as the glow.
Travis.Stupid to call for him, but that’s her first instinct. She has to suppress it.
She picks her way through the debris. An old car, a pile of bricks, an abandoned sink. She can smell bagged concrete and dust. Furniture and mothballs. Up ahead, a pile of canvas, and to the right, an old upright piano, a pile of rebar. A set of stairs to the mezzanine.
Noises on the mezzanine level. Her heartbeat drowned them out when she came in, but now that she’s closer, she can hear them. They sound tinny, like a TV show soundtrack. Something about them is familiar, and her skin prickles.
She takes the stairs slowly, keeping her back against the rail near the right-hand wall, scanning up, down, every direction. Her eyes move all over, and she tries to settle. Stay in control. She doesn’t want to jump at nothing, shoot and give herself away by accident, shoot Travis by accident.
From the second-top stair, she sights with her gun over the mezzanine level. Like she thought, there’s a TV: it’s set up on a rug, in front of an armchair and a standing lamp. The unsettling noises are loud now. She’s been trying to block them out. Dread rises in her, like damp fog. There’s no one here. She steps onto the mezzanine, edges closer.
It’s as if someone has arranged a diorama of a living room, here on the mezzanine. The rug is circular and plush, some kind of ginger shag pile. An armchair is facing her – brown leather, solid, with wide arms. Beside the armchair, an adjustable dress form on an old-fashioned wooden stand – the tall lamp nearby casts it in a dullorange glow. Emma feels her heart stutter: the dress form has a veil draped over it, a headband with a fall of white tulle.
She catches her breath. Looks at the furniture. Everything is at least a decade old. Emma immediately thinks of Vivian Kirke, and where you’d put household items from a deceased estate. The final piece in the diorama is a big console TV set. Emma can see illumination radiating from the TV, which has its back to her.
She hears a tinny cry from the television. There’s a silver JVC videotape player on top of the TV.
Now she understands.
Sweat on her skin. Her mind quails, but she has to know for sure. She takes a shaky breath, walks onto the rug, and skirts the console TV until she’s facing it.
On the big screen, in the grimy gray light of a cinder-block basement, a man in overalls shakes a girl by her long dark hair. The girl clamps her lips together to stop herself from crying out. The man bangs the girl’s head against a wall – once, twice. The third time, the girl finally makes a cry.
Emma puts a hand to her mouth, makes a small, desperate noise in shock and sympathy. Spots in her vision, resolving wet. Gun down, forgotten at her side, she watches through tears.
It’sher. The girl is her.
This is the videotape.
Emma drops her hand, lets out a sob. Can’t help it. This is a horror show. This is her life. For a moment, she is wholly back in that basement. Back in those moments she has tried so hard to forget.
Her ribs squeeze together, her chest is compressed. She knows what comes next on the screen. She watches as the girl is dragged byher hair. As the man slaps her. As the girl’s arms rise and flail so the zip ties on her wrists are clearly shown. As the man tears the front of her white dress –
Emma bites down on her lip, tastes blood. Consciousness returns. Her heart is pounding. She raises her gun, aims it, shaking, at the TV.
Shoot it, shoot it dead.
She is going to blow this memory apart, and the feelings that come with it. Destroy these bones of her past. She’s going to put it all to the sword.
Her arm trembles. Finger on the trigger. Hard to aim, her vision blurry.
On-screen, the girl on the videotape turns her head. Stares in the direction of the camera she doesn’t know is there. Her lips are sealed, her eyes full of mute appeal.
Emma gasps again. Loses breath. Her arm wobbles, dips. She watches the girl. This girl who endured so much. Emma has tried to run from her, in the last three years. Has tried to bury her. To be rid of her.
But doesn’t this girl deserve more?
She did nothing wrong. She fought, and escaped, and tried to save. It was not her fault. It was awful, but she survived. She doesn’t deserve to be forsaken. She deserves compassion, and respect, and gentleness, and care.
