Page 47 of Price of Angels

“Who are you?” Abraham had asked, as he held the belt. “Who do you think you are that you can go running off like that?”

Dewey had knelt on the floor beside her, crying. “Holly, why’d you do it? Why’d you disobey when we love you so much?”

Now she was alone, and the house was quiet around her, and she thought it had been a blessing, truly, that Lila hadn’t survived this.

“I knew, after that,” Holly said, “that I had to get away, but I’d have to be more careful, and clever. They kept the gate locked down. I had no sway over anyone but Dewey, and so I used it. I got him to teach me how to drive. Just the old truck, back and forth across the yard, when Abraham and Jacob were out. The Chevelle was in the barn, under an old tarp. It took almost six weeks once I started looking, but I finally found the keys.”

She been the best she’d ever been, for three months. Perfect meals cooked at the perfect time, not a breath out of turn, not one frown or grimace. Pliant in their hands. Just a few tears for Dewey, to show her contrition.

And all the while she planned, and she’d never been more terrified.

Then the perfect chance came.

Abraham and Jacob had picked up work loading fresh-cut hay bales onto a truck. A backbreaking, all-day affair. They left just after dawn, leaving her alone with Dewey.

In the kitchen, she washed the skillet at the sink and watched her father and uncle drive off through the window. When they were gone from sight, she counted to fifty, time enough for them to get through the gate and out onto the road.

Dewey was at the table, eating the last of his eggs, his back to her. Holly lifted the dripping skillet from the suds, spun, and cracked it across the back of her husband’s head with all the force she could muster. There was an awful sound of the cast iron hitting his skull, and the skillet rang like a gong afterward. Dewey crumpled forward onto the table, boneless, maybe even dead.

Holly didn’t have time to check. She had to move.

There was a makeshift sack composed of an old knotted bedsheet in a closet upstairs, already packed with all the clothes she had worth taking, a toothbrush, paste, and what money she’d been able to squirrel out of the men’s pockets and store away in the old sewing machine for the past three months. She raced upstairs, stepped into her old sneakers, collected the sack, and from inside it, fished the precious keys of the Chevelle.

All the way across the yard, she waited for the truck to come back into view. What if they’d forgotten something? What if they came back? She wouldn’t survive the beating; she knew she wouldn’t.

But then she was sliding back the barn doors, and there was the tarp-covered glorious beast of a machine, waiting for her. It started on the fourth turn of the key, the giant engine roaring as it turned over. There was a shovel in the backseat that she’d stowed there earlier in the week. She used it to break open the lock on the gate, terrified with every strike that the sound would rouse Dewey, and he’d come for her.

But the chain had given way, and then she’d been behind the wheel again, ill-prepared for the power in the old muscle car, pushing it hard anyway.

Driving, driving, driving…

And she was gone.

Michael had the Crown again, drinking it like it was water. Holly played with the purple screw-off cap and told him how she’d stopped in Nashville for a while, without money for gas or food. She’d roomed with an aspiring country singer who was trying to make it big with cliché songs about girls in bikini tops, who’d made use of her a few times, in exchange for a roof over her head. She’d found work as a waitress. And when she could afford it, moved east, to another town, and another diner.

In Chattanooga, she learned about the Lean Dogs, about the violence and law-breaking associated with them, and she’d come to Knoxville out of curiosity and desperation. She’d taken a job at Bell Bar. And there she’d met him.

“That’s it,” she said, finally, sitting back with a deep sigh. “That’s how I got here. That’s why I approached you.”

Then she was done with her tale, deflated against the back of the couch, watching him, waiting for the scorn, the disgust, the censure.

“I was looking for a killer,” she added, softly. “And I took one look at you, and I knew you were The One.”

Michael set the Crown bottle on the coffee table with great care. The sun was coming up, bronzing the windows, dancing in the tiny droplets of condensation on the glass. The birds were waking in the trees outside the house with a rising tide of chatter. Below, tenants were getting ready for work, the mansion alive with the thumping and creaking of water pipes, the low buzz of wakefulness.

For hours he’d sat here listening to the long, awful story of her life, and he was very drunk at this point. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d overindulged like this; couldn’t remember a time when his head had been this fuzzy, and his thoughts so clear despite it.

“My life’s been nothing but one long rape,”she’d told him, and she hadn’t been exaggerating.

He took several long moments, staring at the soft glow emanating from the windows, collecting the violent anger cycling through him into something expressible and manageable. He had to say something, he had to find some kind of focus, or he’d reach a point of such fury that he’d be forced to act on it.

“You told all of this to the cops?” he asked, hearing the awful tightness in his voice.

“Not in detail, no. But they said they’d need evidence – physical evidence – to bring charges, and by that point, I didn’t have anything that could tie them to the old scars.”

“Typical,” he growled. He understood how the law had its hands tied, but it infuriated him anyway.

He took a deep breath, and then another, and then looked at her.

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