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“Good thing you’re a doctor,” I said thickly.
He leaned against the frame again, his gazed angled down to mine. “Babe, you have to go to the hospital.”
I gripped my one good fist around crusty, drying paint on my dress. “Amos, I can’t,” I whispered, and my voice broke on the last word.
“Why?” he asked softly. He seemed to have tempered his rage and replaced it with reluctant patience.
I imagined all the people who would be there. The nurse who would touch me. The doctor I didn’t know who would press their hands against my body the way Archer had done. Panic clawed up my throat like a deranged demon. I tried to swallow the hysteria away, and I stared at my fist. “I just want you,” I said at last. It was the best way I could word it. I couldn’t make myself tell him out loud. It was hard enough to let him see how pathetically I needed him.
I felt Amos’s indecision from the way his posture shifted, and then finally, he straightened and shut my door. I watched him pace around the back of the car through the rearview mirrors, and he pulled out his phone to talk to someone as he kept pacing.
Finally, he slid back into the driver’s side and zipped his seatbelt into place.
“Where are we going?” I rasped in the vacuum-like quiet.
He started the car. “Home.”
Relief pulled my body into an exhausted slump. Thank God. Also, he’d said “home.” Not “my home” or “my apartment.” He’d said, “home.”
I shouldn’t have let myself love that, but I did. I really did.
Twenty Two
Amos
June looked like she might nod off. I reached over to squeeze her good knee and said, “Stay awake, Matthews. We’re almost there.”
She nodded numbly, her eyes glazed over and far away. I hadn’t noted any symptoms of shock, but the concussion had me worried. She also had a dislocated shoulder, a pre-tibial laceration that would need extensive debridement because of all the paint drying in the wound, and the contusions on her shin and elbow had the possibility of being fractures. I could hold her over at home for a while, but she needed to get to the hospital for X-rays, eventually.
As we crawled through stop lights, I asked, “What did you fall from?”
“Ladder,” she said dully. At first, I thought she was annoyed, but no. It was something else. She didn’t want to think about it, whatever had happened. It was unlike June to clam up and not spill her thoughts for the whole world to hear. That, more than anything, caused my pulse to skyrocket.
Several times, I’d been a furious heartbeat away from breaking down those gates and snapping necks. Those people in that tourist trap monstrosity had not only done something to June, but they’d watched a bleeding, severely injured girl limp out of their front door and down their lawn, and they had said nothing. When I’d asked, they simply said she had left. The fact that they hadn’t called her an ambulance told me all I needed to know about them and how June had gotten hurt.
But the way June had shrank from my touch had changed things. “Tell me,” I said, keeping the volume of my voice low. But the intensity of my words crackled through the air, and June turned to look at me finally. She had paint everywhere. On her face, in her hair, all down her side and the front of her dress. I hadn’t missed the male handprints in that paint. I wanted to be wrong, but I knew I wasn’t.
She sniffed and wiped the back of her hand under her nose. “I don’t know. It happened so fast.”
“Start with how you felt about them,” I said. Our conversation this morning had scared me witless as it was. She couldn’t know what I had seen reflected in her micro-expressions, but she hadn’t felt comfortable with them even then. She’d been terrified to go back.
She looked forward again. “At first, I thought I was seeing things or overreacting. He… he just was… interested in me. And watched me a lot.”
“Who?” I asked roughly. She opened her mouth, choked, and swallowed. “I need a name, June,” I said seriously.
“Archer,” she whispered. “His name is Archer Holmeyer.”
“And when you got to Archer’s house, what did he do?”
“Nothing at first,” she insisted, but her voice sounded hesitant. She wasn’t telling the truth. She was in too much shock to realize that the evidence of what he’d done was all over her clothing.
“Okay,” I bit out, and I hoped my lack of patience might break through her reticence. “Let’s be more direct. How and where did he touch you?”
Her gaze flew to mine, wide and reflecting her surprise. “I think it was a game for them,” June said finally. “The wife, Meg, and Archer, too. He likes to bring women into the house, and she likes to play the victim when he inevitably,” she paused, closing her eyes and swallowing.
I wanted to touch her again, but I didn’t want to make it worse for her. “Rip off the band-aid, baby. Just be direct.”
She drew in a breath. “When he would touch them or, I assume, abuse them, Meg would play the victim. He liked his wife begging for his attention, and she liked the power of sending the girls away. I think.”
