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She eyes me hard. “You look all prim and proper but you got balls.”
“Thank you.” Then I wait, quietly, patiently.
“It makes no difference to me what happens to the kid,” she says after less than a minute of contemplative silence and nail biting. “If you think I’m a bitch, I don’t give a shit. But you’re right about one thing, taking the kid wasn’t about money. I didn’t fucking want him, not ever. They would have paid me to leave him, that’s for damn sure. Maybe I should have played it different, got my money and split. But I hated them too much for that.”
“You must have had a good reason.” I fold my hands together on the table.
“Yeah, I had good reason.” Her tone drips with contempt. “If you didn’t already know, ole Charlie inherited Franklin Farms from his daddy when he died. It had been in the family since his great granddaddy built it from the ground up. That business, that legacy meant everything to him.
“Finding the right woman to marry was part of it. My mother didn’t exactly fit. She was what we called in the South, white trash. But she was pretty, smart, and had potential. She started working as a secretary at Franklin Farms. My father noticed her. Liked what he saw and classed her up to look and talk fancy. Then he moved her into a hostess position or some shit, greeting important clients and attending to his personal stuff.
“She was no fool. She recognized a good score and made herself indispensable. Within a year, Joan Ellis from the trailer park became Joan Franklin, Lady of the Manor. Only there was one big problem. The Lady wasn’t so good at popping out babies. Just me. No boys to carry on the fine line of horsemen. I was Daddy’s little princess. Finishing school. Cotillions. He dressed me up to look the part. But I still could never be what he really wanted.”
A son. I got the picture. “Sounds like a difficult environment to have grown up in.”
“I hated it. All the fake appearances of being a perfect family. It was so fucked up. But I had my horse. Starlight.” For the first time since I arrived, her eyes soften with sadness, maybe longing. “I didn’t care all that much about competing, that was my daddy’s thing. I just loved to ride.”
“You stopped after Starlight died.”
“Killed,” she corrects, her eyes going so hard again that if they were made of glass they’d break under the pressure of her anger.
“Who killed him?”
“Wyatt Alden,” she spits out his name. “My fucking stepuncle.”
My mind’s eye goes back to the file I’ve read at least a dozen times. Alden, as I recall, was Joan’s much younger stepbrother. Now deceased. An accident of some kind. He’d worked at Franklin Farms prior. Nothing particularly suspicious stands out. “Why would he kill your horse?”
She glares at me as if I’m clueless. “My mother didn’t have much to do with her parents after she left. They didn’t suit the Joan Franklin image. When her mama died, her daddy remarried. This woman had a son from a previous relationship. Wyatt. He came sniffing around Franklin Farms. My mother didn’t want him there. She wanted no part of her old life. But he talked his way in. Fucking Charlie gave him a chance. Liked to think he was this do-gooder.Pfft. Put him to work as a ranch hand. Wyatt acted grateful but you could tell he resented being the hired help while my mother was sitting like a Queen Bee in the mansion.”
“Why kill your horse?” I ask again, not drawing the connection.
“I’ll get to that.” She chews another nail. “He seemed nice enough, got along with the other staff; he was friendly, popular. Paid attention to me. I had a stupid girl’s crush on him. I was too dumb to know that he was earning trust. He had access to the farm, to the horses, and to me.” Her breathing accelerates and I know what’s coming.
“One evening, I had just gotten back from riding Starlight. I was brushing him down when Wyatt came into the stall. He’d done that many times before. But this time, he didn’t look friendly. He grabbed my arm and shoved me into the corner.” She closes her eyes tight. “He covered my scream with his hard hand. I could taste the dirt from the day on it. He whispered in my ear that he was going to fuck the little princess and see how royal cunt felt.”
I inhale a sharp breath. Expecting it, I realize, doesn’t stop the shock of hearing the rancid words. “Did you tell anyone? Your mother? Your father?”
“No.” She opens her eyes. They’re vague and distant as if she’s still back there on the farm. “I wanted to. But when he killed Starlight and said he’d do the same to me if I ever told, I just shut up and put up.”
It explains why the light in her went dark. Why she changed so dramatically and quit riding. Wyatt Alden had stolen her childhood and murdered her beloved horse.
“I’m so sorry, Joyce.” This hard-edged woman had made horrible choices, not the least of which was beating her son. But my sympathies are with the girl she had once been. “Your parents didn’t suspect something was very wrong?”
“Pfft. Grief, sure. But when I whacked off my hair and started acting out, ditching school, smoking…putting a smear on the family name, they weren’t so understanding.”
“Did they try to get you counseling?”
“Lady, get real. My daddy wouldn’t send me to some pencil-neck shrink to air out dirty laundry.”
“How long did the abuse continue?”
“Five months of fucking hell.”
I can’t even imagine. “How did it stop?”
“I had burning when I peed and there were these yellowy stains in my underwear. It got so bad, I finally had to tell my mother. She said it was probably a urinary or yeast infection. She took me to the doctor to get antibiotics. He ran some tests and found out that I had chlamydia. But an STD wasn’t the worst of it, I was also pregnant.”
“And you had no idea?”
