Gotha terror, p.14
Die Behind the Wheel, page 14
“Josie,” I tried again. “What’s going on? Do you know that guy? Who is he?”
“He’s no one,” she spat. “He’s nothing.”
The guy turned toward us, cupping his hands around his Zippo’s flame to light his cigarette. He raised his eyes and I saw the moment they locked onto Josie. A disturbing smile spread across his lips.
Then he started to laugh.
“Get us out of here,” my sister hissed. “Just get me away from here.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, Josie.”
I cranked the ignition and was pulling away from the curb just as the man started toward the car. As crazy as the whole exchange had been, I almost lost the wheel when I saw Josie steel herself against his approach, her right arm and leg braced against the window and door as if to keep him out, her eyes wild and wide, like prey who’s spotted a predator.
“What the hell, Josie? You’re scaring me.”
“Shut up for a second, will you?!” she screamed. “Just shut UP!” She was shaking now, her red lipstick smearing as she wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and started to cry.
I turned my eyes back to the road, just kept driving in long, slow loops around town in silence until her sobs stopped. I finally pulled the car over in front the elementary school and shut the engine off. Eventually, she sighed and turned to face me.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Pattie. I’m sorry, but I just can’t. Besides, there are things you’re just better off not knowing. Trust me.”
I stared at her, partially mad, mostly worried.
“Can you just take me to St. Sebastian’s instead? It’ll make Mom happy. And it’s what you wanted anyway.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It is what I wanted. And we’ll go. But this conversation isn’t over.”
I drove us to church as Josie fixed her makeup in the mirror. By the time we arrived, she was glowing and pristine, a supernova in human form.
We entered the sanctuary just behind a large group of stragglers. We weren’t necessarily late for Midnight Mass, but being one of the few days that all of Woodside became suddenly devout, Christmas Eve services were always packed to the rafters. I searched the room, dazzling in the light of a thousand candles, and found our parents up front, next to the deacon and his wife. I saw my mother craning her head around, eyes frantic and searching.
I waved and she saw me, a look of relief—then another of irritation—crossing her features. I pointed to the pew in the back row and watch my father nod, then shoved Josie into it and sat beside her as my father corralled my mother and turned her attention back to the cross. Josie was quiet, stiff, her gaze foggy and distant. But to her credit, she repeated all the usual phrases dutifully and completely, standing and sitting and kneeling as directed, a non-believer giving a commanding performance of piety and devotion.
As we all knelt for the final devotions, my heart seized at the sight of my older sister bowing her head in supplication, her hands folded together so tightly her knuckles went white in protest. I reached out a hand and placed it on her back. We stayed like that, melded together, even while the priest wished us all the merriest of Christmases and sent the congregation on its way. Even as our parents stumbled past, my mother reaching for us both, my father pulling her away and through the open doors.
It was silent in the church, all the parishioners gone, before Josie lifted her head and unclasped her hands. Her eyes were ablaze, fiery red with the sting of unshed tears. The delicate blue that normally shined so bright seemed lost in the chaos.
“Josie,” I whispered.
“Patricia Ann, I want you to promise me something, and I want you to mean it. Okay?” She all but choked out the words.
“Tell me what’s going on, Josephine Mary, and maybe I will.”
She almost smiled then, the corner of her mouth quirking northward just a fraction before returning to a hard, straight line.
“I just…I want you to be safe, to be smarter than I was….” When she stopped there, her words fading like the incense, I lost it.
“What in the holy hell are you talking about?”
Even my sister’s eyebrows arched at my blasphemy, and in God’s own house, no less. On the holiest of days.
We broke into hysterical laughter, clutching onto one another to keep from falling to the floor. The moment didn’t last long, but it was enough: cathartic, cleansing. Years of doubt and distrust seemed to evaporate, and suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to be as close as we had been. I took Josie’s hands in my own and squeezed.
“Just say you’ll be careful, with yourself, with who you are,” she said. “Don’t give that to anyone, you hear me? You keep that just for you, Pattie. Promise me.”
“I—I promise, Josie,” I stammered. She fell into my arms and wrapped her own around me, squeezing tight. I returned the hug with everything I had, hoping she’d feel what I meant, what my words had failed to say.
The next few days passed in a blur. Christmas, in all its tinseled glory, came and went, and we spent the week that followed in relative peace and quiet. Josie remained pensive and subdued, giving in to Mom’s requests without so much as an eye roll. Our mother was thrilled. I was terrified.
It wasn’t until Friday, the 30th, that I saw even a spark of the Josie who’d snuck out of her window, night after night. The Josie who was a human embodiment of a living, eternal flame, ready and prepared to set fire to anything and everything around her.
We were in the supermarket, walking each aisle as we collected the things on Mom’s list. Turning a corner, we collided with a trio of boys, their own cart a myriad of beers and cheap snacks. One of them was a guy from school, a tall, lanky kid named Liam who’d lived the street over since we’d been in kindergarten.
“Hey, Pattie,” he said, his smile shy and charming. “Enjoying break?”
“As much as I can, stuck in Woodside.” I glanced at my sister and saw her staring hard at one of the other boys. Liam’s older brother, Michael. He’d been in her class and was a larger, broader copy of his sibling. Gorgeous, actually.
“Hey, Michael,” she nearly giggled. “It’s been a while.”
Michael shrugged his shoulders and gave my sister a coy smile. “Yeah…it has. Lookin’ good, Josie.”
“You too, stud.”
The third kid, the one I didn’t know, stood there looking at Josie with the strangest expression. Like he recognized her, but didn’t know how.
“You guys coming tomorrow night for New Year’s?” Liam asked. “Party starts up at Rockaway, around ten.”
I hadn’t taken my eyes off that third kid, still peering at my sister. As I began to answer Liam, a massive grin spread across the guy’s face and he clapped his hands together in glee, like a toddler at a birthday party.
“Holy shit, it’s you!” he said to Josie. “I’ve seen your pictures! Niiiice, girl.” He began to laugh.
I was instantly reminded of a braying donkey.
Josie had gone the color of ash—pale and silvery and so, so fragile. Michael launched out a fist and caught the donkey on the arm, hard. It shut the stupid animal up, but the damage had been done.
Gripping the back of my arm, Josie hauled me away from our cart and down the aisle as fast as her legs would go. We were out the front door and halfway through the parking lot before I could stop her.
“JOSIE,” I hollered. “The cart! Mom’s groceries—”
“I don’t give a fuck about Mom’s FUCKING GROCERIES!” she screamed. Tears streamed through her mascara and down her cheeks in sooty, ragged paths. “I can’t go back in there, Pattie, I can’t!”
She was trembling, shaking, her eyes wide and terrified. The same way she’d been outside of Donovan’s on Christmas Eve. When she’d seen that guy.
“Where the fuck is the car?” she yelled, turning in rapid, manic circles.
I grabbed her arms and held them tightly at her sides.
She struggled, then stopped and stared at me.
“Josie…”
She seemed to crumble at the way I said her name. “Can we just find the car?” It was almost a plea.
I turned her loose and scanned the parking lot. Dad’s Riviera was only an aisle and a few spaces away. I unlocked the door and let Josie in. She sank into the cracked upholstery like a hot bath, her body nearly prone in the seat, like she was trying to disappear.
“I screwed up, okay? I screwed up so bad.” She burst into fresh sobs and hid her face in her hands.
“How?” I asked. “How could anything be this bad?”
“It just is,” she said. “And you’re not going to that fucking party.”
I lost it.
“I’ll go if I fucking want to, Josie. I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve got my own life, my own friends. And if I want to go to a goddamned New Year’s Eve party, I’m damn well going to!”
“You’ll lose yourself if you do,” my sister whispered. “Lose a part of yourself you can’t get back.”
“How?” I was sick of her double-speak. “Don’t you think it’s time for the truth?”
She stared at me hard, then took a ragged breath.
“Last year, on New Year’s…a guy took pictures of me, you know—” she made a vague gesture with her hand, “—doing things.”
“What guy? And what things?”
“The guy we saw at Donovan’s. And bad things. Things that would kill Mom and Dad if they knew. Things I can’t ever take back. Sex stuff.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She cringed as if I’d smacked her. “I don’t know how it happened. I mean, it wasn’t like it was my first time drinking. Or even being with a guy. But I got so smashed at the party, and then…suddenly I wasn’t on the beach anymore. I was on a boat, and it was out on the water, and I was on this mattress on the floor, naked. And there was this guy…on top of me. And Paul, he was in the corner, taking picture after picture with that fucking Polaroid. I wanted it to stop, but I couldn’t scream, couldn’t move my arms to push the guy off me.”
She looked up at me, her eyes wide, staring. “I was so scared. Just kept telling myself that it would be over soon, that I just had to get through it. And then we were back at the dock and Paul was helping me out of the boat like he gave a shit and it all felt so…unreal. Like it hadn’t really happened. A few days later, Paul saw me in the park and told me I’d better do everything he said or he’d mail the photos to Dad at the garage. I can’t even begin to explain what he put me through. I couldn’t wait to get out of Woodside and away from him. I wouldn’t have even come home for Christmas but Susan Richards told me he’d gotten a job down in Philly so I thought it was safe. Fucking Susan!”
Yeah. Like it was Susan’s fault.
I’d never seen my sister like this. Frantic, wild—damn-near unhinged. And the story she’d told me. It sounded like she’d been slipped something, and I told her so.
“Doesn’t matter,” she moaned. “He’s still got those fucking pictures and me, naked with my legs spread, is all anyone is ever going to see.” She threw an arm across her eyes and howled. “I wish I was dead. Or, just…gone. Just fucking disappear and be someone else.”
I cranked the ignition hard then peeled out of the parking lot and into the street. Josie sat up in her seat. “Jesus Christ, Pattie. What the hell?”
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to get those fucking pictures back and teach that asshole a lesson.”
She scrambled to put on her seat belt as I took a corner wide, the tires squealing on the pavement. “Now you’re scaring me.”
“Good,” I growled. “It’s about fuckin’ time.”
Josie wasn’t happy with the plan we’d worked out by the next morning, but even she could see it was our best—and maybe only—shot. She was sure Paul still had the pictures, and that they were most likely on the boat. He actually lived on the wreck, dealt drugs out of it, too. He’d never leave it unprotected. I’d just laid it out for her: how our only option was to get on the boat somehow and find them. Or better yet, get him to give us the pictures himself.
We got everything we wanted, but making it happen cost us. By the time we got back to Mom and Dad’s that afternoon we were a pair of zombies, silent and vacant-eyed.
We’d found Paul easily enough—sitting on a barstool at Donovan’s. She’d done all the talking—I had stayed by the door, trying hard to look bored and irritated. At one point, his attention turned toward me, and I had to suppress a shudder at the smile he gave me. The guy really was a grade-A creep.
Paul agreed to the transaction readily enough. Oh, he’d scoffed at first, told Josie to go to hell. But the idea of defiling Josie’s little sister at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve—it was just too good an offer to resist. She told me later it took everything she had to keep from punching him in the throat.
“We don’t have to do this,” Josie said. “You don’t.”
“Like hell I don’t.”
“We can figure out another way.”
I snorted.
“What if he won’t hand over the photos?” she said. “What if—”
“There are a thousand ‘what ifs.’ We can’t think that way. We show up at the boat, he’ll give you the photos and we get out of there. And if he doesn’t, then I’ll find them like we talked about and take them. It’ll be fine.”
“So what…you get on the boat, and then what? What if he tries to hurt you?”
“I’ll hit him in the head with one of Daddy’s crowbars.”
She blinked at me, speechless.
“Look, I can handle it. He’ll underestimate me and you. That’s how we win.”
Mom and Dad would be spending the evening at their friends’ house, celebrating with Dick Clark on the TV and cheap champagne in plastic glasses, so we were free to do what we wanted.
We headed toward Rockaway just after eleven. We could see the bonfires on the beach from the footpath that ran along the shoreline, heard the sound of drums and a few guitars drifting up from the sand. Even from where we were, we could see the coolers of alcohol and the kegs of beer, bodies swaying with the music and the flames. Michael and Liam were down there, with the others. I wanted so badly to join them, to dance around the bonfire, light and easy and free of the weight that sat heavy on my shoulders. But there would be other parties. Tonight was about saving Josie.
We found the dock, and Paul’s boat, just before midnight. Josie squeezed my hand, then started down the creaking wood. I followed her faithfully, though every hair on my head was standing on end. I’d been the one trying to convince Josie it would all be okay, but now—I wasn’t sure of anything. Just as Josie reached the end of the dock, the door of the boat opened and a shaft of yellow light poured out. Paul appeared, a self-satisfied grin ruining his otherwise-good looks.
“Finally. Thought you two got lost. Cutting it a bit close, aren’t we?”
“Knock it off, Paul. We’re here, as agreed. Now hand over the photos.”
“You think I’m stupid, Kelly? Un-uh. Your sister comes aboard, spends some time. When I’m done with her, I’ll give her the photos.”
“No. No way,” Josie shook her head. “Photos now or we’re out of here, Paul.”
“Your call. But I’ve been looking forward to this all day, so if you reneg now…. Maybe I’ll just mail ’em to Daddy. Not like they’re much good to me now, anyway.”
Josie’s hands balled into fists at her sides.
“It’s fine,” I caught her eye as I stepped around her. “It’ll be fine.”
“Well, lookee here. The younger Kelly sister, all grown up.”
I swallowed hard. No point in covering it. I wanted him to think I was scared.
“Come aboard, darlin’,” he said. “I won’t bite. Unless you ask me to.”
I forced a smile onto my lips and looked back at Paul. “I just might.”
“Hear that, Josie?” He laughed. “Little sister is going to be just fine. You can leave.”
Desperate to look back, I trained my eyes on Paul and took his outstretched hand instead, climbing over the railing and into the boat, the dip and sway of the ancient vessel mimicking the swell in my stomach. I had to duck my head as I entered the cabin. One lamp illuminated the cramped space so well, it had me blinking like mad to adjust my eyes.
There wasn’t much to the place—a filthy, uncovered mattress in one corner, a small propane stove and metal basin in another. No cabinets or dressers—nothing suggesting a hiding place.
Fuck.
“You look like you could use a drink,” he offered, shutting the door behind him.
I gave my best shy smile and shook my head no. “Josie gave me plenty on the way here.”
“Bullshit. You’re freezing and a little something will fix you right up.”
He poured a healthy dose of some kind of brown liquid into a stained water glass and handed it to me. I thought about what he’d done to Josie and wondered whether he was arrogant enough to try the same shit with me. It didn’t matter really. Disgusted as I was—scared as I was—I knew I was going to have to drink if Paul was going buy my act.
I tipped the glass back and started to take a small sip to appease him, but it wasn’t enough. He raised a hand and tilted the glass back until the alcohol sloshed down my throat. Whiskey. I’d never be able to smell it on my father’s breath again without remembering this moment.
“Thatta girl,” he purred. “Get nice and warm, darlin’.”
He leaned toward me and I tensed.
“Re-laaax. I’m a nice guy.”
I swallowed hard, willing the bile back down into my stomach. I didn’t need to look behind me—there was nowhere to go but the dirty mattress and I would’ve rather died than sit on it. I pasted a smile on my face and looked up at him.
He looked annoyed. “Why are you here? You want some of this, don’t ya? Your sister certainly dug it.”
He closed the distance between us in a breath, leaving me no time to do anything but put my hands up. He batted them away like he was swatting at a fly, then grabbed me with both hands, jerking me toward him. I had just started to scream when the door to the boat swung open and my sister charged through, arms raised above her head, a crowbar in her hands, her eyes ablaze. Two quick steps and she’d brought the tool down, hard, across the back of Paul’s head. The blow knocked him flat to the floor.
