“Because of what he did. I thought he was there, not to rape me, but to kill me.”
When she said those words, Edmund looked alarmed. “Why would you think that?”
“When I first saw him, I thought he was the guard in the booth. I thought he might have gone in those woods to relieve himself or something like that.”
But Edmund was shaking his head. “Guard duty isn’t twenty-four hours a day. It’s from five a.m. to nine p.m. The guard would have been gone by the time you made it back up front.”
“I didn’t know that. That’s why I assumed he was the guard. But then a feeling came over me that told me real quick that something was off about him. I was even backing up and was about to run away, but he was too fast and too strong. He grabbed me and forced me into those woods. Then he knocked me down so hard it took my breath away, and then he held me down with his big body on top of me.”
Edmund’s anxiousness was getting the best of him. “And then?”
“And then he started choking me. And I mean so hard that I just knew I was seconds away from . . .”
Edmund’s jaw tightened. That bastard could havekilledher? He assumed it was a rape and run. Though that never happened in his neighborhood that he knew of, there had been a couple of incidences in that area of town before. But he wanted tokillher? He closed his door on her and sent her away to bekilled? He sat in his guilt. It was just that heavy on him.
“Then the light from a car that had driven up shined on my face and my attacker saw my face I guess more clearly. And it was like he had a sudden change of plans and while he held one of his hands over my mouth, he removed the other one from my neck and was trying to take off my jeans. But he couldn’t do it. He needed both of his hands to even unbutton those jeans. That’s when he briefly removed his hand from my mouth. And that’s when I screamed as hard as I could. I was gonna make the earth hear my scream. I didn’t know it was my Uber driver’s lights that had shined in those woods. I didn’t know my Uber driver had driven up until he heard my scream and yelled if somebody was back there. Then I saw his light. They said it was a flashlight. But I passed out after I saw that light. But the police said that my attacker ran away before he could strangle me or rape me or do anything to me. Thank God.”
Maude could see a strained look on Edmund’s face as if her story had struck him to his core. “Did you tell any of this to the Police?” he asked her.
“I told all of it to them.”
“And?”
“And they still put it down as an attempted rape. They weren’t trying to hear what I had to say.”
That upset Edmund too. “They’ll hear what I have to say,” he said as he stood up and felt the side of her neck again with two of his fingers. The mistreatment she had to endure angered him. All because those professional fools could only see a powerless black woman with nobody in her corner. But as of this moment she had somebody in her corner. She had him. And he was definitely somebody.
Then he placed his hand on her shoulder as he looked down at her with that pensive look again. “Was that true?”
“Was what true? What I just told you? Of course it’s true!”
“What you told that nurse about your next of kin.”
Did he mean the fact that she didn’t have a next of kin? “It’s true,” she said.
“What about your parents?”
“Dead.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes.”
“Siblings?”
“I had a sister, but she died too.”
Edmund needed to know. “How?”
Maude hadn’t spoken of it in years because nobody cared to know. But since he wanted to know, she told him. “We were arguing, my sister and I, and my father reached back and slapped me.”
“He slapped you?”
“That’s how he was. My sister was his favorite. My mom’s favorite too. And so they never blamed her for our arguments. But while he was so angry that he slapped me, he had forgotten that he was driving a car. So he lost control and we flipped and crashed and everybody in the car died.”
“Except for you?”
Maude nodded. “Except for me.”
