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“I’ve only just realized that I’ve never been sated before if this is what it feels like.Christ, I think I could get used to this feeling.”Barkley told her that he’d not last very long if they made love like this daily.“True.I never thought about that.”
Getting up off the floor, he made his way to the dresser.He would swear that it moved back away from him several feet for each step he took.Making his way back to the bed, he was a little more energetic as he couldn’t wait to see his ring on her finger.
“I love you, Carrie Boone.Will you be my wife?”She told him she’d already told him yes downstairs but asked him if he was going to propose properly to her.“If you want the entire thing, like me getting down on one knee, you’re going to be disappointed.I can barely walk as it is.But I do love you.”
Barkley put the ring on her finger, and it fit as if it had been made just for her.If he didn’t know better, he’d swear that it looked better on her hand than it did on his granny’s when she’d worn it before passing away.He told her where the ring had come from.
“It was my mom’s mother’s ring.We were never close.Not any of us boys were close to her.She was a stickler for people doing the right thing.Rules were her friends.”Carrie asked him if she’d been mean to them as boys.“Not mean.But she was difficult to get to know all that well.We were only allowed to hug her when she’d put a towel on her dress first.She would talk to us nicely, but she was never one for physical contact.I think that’s why my mom loves to hug people when she meets them.Dad, too, I think.He told me once that Grannie Wilson was a nice old lady, but he thought that she’d been old long before her time.I didn’t understand that until I was older and watched my other grannie getting around.”
“You’re very lucky to have all your family around you.I do have my brothers, but I was young when our parents died.They raised me.By then, Robert was almost twenty-one and in a relationship with Dan.The others, my brothers, weren’t hard on me, but they did make sure that I was well cared for and got a good education.”He said he could tell.“Thanks.”She smiled at him when she laid her head on his chest as he got back into bed.“I’m going to go and see Mick tomorrow.I just want some answers about my sister.Like, did she ever mention us?Did she ever try to get in touch with any of us?I don’t think that she did, but I’d like to know if he has the reason for her not being a part of our lives.”
“Just be careful.”She told him that she would be.“I’m going to have to go and inspect some land tomorrow that we’re thinking of purchasing.Want me to reschedule it?”
“No.I’m going to be in a police station with a lot of armed officers around.I think I’ll be just fine.”Barkley was sure that she would be, but he also didn’t want her to be hurt.Mentally nor physically.“I’m going to tell my brothers where I’m going so that if I come up missing, they’ll know where to start looking.”
“That’s not funny.”She laughed at him for a good hour as they dressed and made their way downstairs to find something to munch on.He was glad that Robert and Dan had started dinner and left out things they could eat.Barkley suddenly found himself starved.
Chapter 6
Mick couldn’t stand being in the cell next to his fathers.It was one of the main reasons that he’d moved out of the family home when he’d been old enough.His father was a pervert and a bastard.It wasn’t until spending time next to him like this that Mick realized that he hated him.And more than likely had for most of his life.
Mick could hear his father when he made the slightest moves or when he passed gas.He made no apologies for it but laughed.Especially at night.The fucking bastard would jack off twice a night and call out his daughters’ names.It was sickening, and he wanted to crawl through the bars and beat him until he was dead.It was all he could do on most nights not to throw up all over himself.
“You’re being moved.”He looked at the officer standing in front of him.He’d not heard him come up to the cell.He’d been thinking so hard about how to get into his dad’s cell and kill him.“Gather your stuff up and follow me, Cartwright.”
“Where are we going?”Turning, Mick nearly snarled at his father to shut up.He was the one being spoken to when the officer said that it was only him that was moving.He had forever done that.Answered questions that had been put to him or just thinking that everything revolved around him.“No.No, I won’t have that.I need my son here.We’ve lost so much together, and I want him right here where I can console him when he needs it.Besides, we have to make plans for when the two of us get out of here.There are those babies that need to be brought home so that—”
“You’re not moving.It’s just him.I’m doing just what I was told, so you sit there and keep your trap shut.”He didn’t bother telling his father goodbye or even telling him that he’d talk to them about moving him too.Mick was out the door and with the officer before anyone changed their minds.They were nearly to the front of the place where the cells were when he spoke again.“You’re going to be on the B wing for the rest of your stay here.”
He hadn’t any idea what that meant.They had wings in this jailhouse?When they were rounding the corner of the hallway they were on, he noticed a young woman sitting in a chair next to a cell.When he was put inside the cell she was near, she didn’t move but watched as he was told his cell number as well as his new schedule for his food trays.It was going to be ten minutes earlier than before.Once the officer left him, not saying a word about the woman, Mick stared at her.It occurred to him who she might well be.
“You’re related to Mattie.Her sister, I’m thinking.Not that you look all that much like her, but you do have the same brilliant blue eyes.”She said she was her younger sister, Carrie Boone.“I saw you the other day.When you were with one of the Strong men.”
“Yes.Barkley Strong.He was protecting me from you.Last night he asked me to marry him.”He could see it then, the shiny ring on her finger.If it was a diamond, it was one of the largest ones he’d ever seen.“I came here to talk to you about Mattie and what happened to her the years that she left us.You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.I understand that the two of you had made a life together and—”
“The twins, they’re not mine.”If he meant to shock her, he couldn’t tell by her expression.“They’re my fathers.I can’t have children.I mean, I can’t even get my dick to be—I’m sorry.I don’t mean to be so crude, but I had a botched-up circumcision when I was nineteen, and I can’t have sex, much less father children.I needed to get it done when my parents started talking about grandchildren.I couldn’t let that happen.”
“So Maddie had an affair with your father that produced the children.Is that the main reason that your mother killed her?”He said that Mom was all right with the two of them having an affair.Sometimes she’d join them.“That’s fucking sick.”
“Tell me about it.”He looked around and then back at her.“I’d like to talk to you.To confess, I guess.Also, I don’t know what is going to happen to me, but I’d like to make it so that my father can’t get to the girls.He’ll kill them if he keeps raping them.And he is.I’m afraid of my father—not just afraid but terrified of him.What he’ll do to me once this is over and—he has all these plans now that my wife and mother are gone.He wants me to live with him with the girls so that he can be around them all the time.He’s a sick bastard, and I can’t stand to be with or around him anymore.”Mick sobbed then.
He’d been holding it all in since he’d been a child, and it was getting the best of him now, not just with his father but with the things that were coming to him now from his childhood.There wasn’t any way that he was going to survive living with his father.Carrie asked him if he was all right.He nodded then she spoke again.
“What do you mean, confess?”He shrugged and looked up at the camera that had a glowing bright red light on the side of it.“They told me that you were aware of being recorded all the time.It records sound as well.”
“Yes, I’m aware of it.”He looked at her.“I want to confess everything that I know about my parents and my wife, Mattie.I’m no saint in all of the things that have happened.I’m well aware, too, that by not reporting the things that they did, it makes me just as guilty.And I did help with some of the things that my father did.I want to tell you all of it.If I had a gun, I’d use it on myself rather than to tell anyone what happened, but I think that it needs to be told, the story of my parents and Mattie.”He laughed a little.“I might well have used one a long time ago had I had access to a gun.”
She didn’t say anything to him about his attempt at humor.He wasn’t entirely sure that it was humor and more the truth than he’d ever expressed before.Once he settled himself on his cot after moving it closer to Carrie, he laid down.She didn’t say anything as he began talking to her.Or to himself.He wasn’t sure which, but he knew that he’d been holding onto it for far too long now.
“Before I start talking, I want you to know that I’ve kept journals all my life.Since I was old enough to put sentences together.I’ve kept them in my room under the floorboards until I left home.Then when I got myself a place of my own, I had a safe put in the floor so that no one would be able to get to them.There are hundreds of them under there.So when you go to get them, make sure that you take someone with you.I want you to use them to make sure that my father is found out.”She told him that she’d do that.Mick not only gave her the combination to the safe, but he also told her about the map.“It shows where all the bodies are hidden.At least those that I was there when they were killed and buried.I have the longitude and latitude of each place there with their names and the reason that they were killed.I will admit that I had killed two of the people there.My father wanted me to have a part in it so that I’d know what it felt like to end the life of a person.I don’t think I got the joy of it that he was hoping for.He nearly beat me to death when I threw up after killing the first person.”
“Your parents are sick fucks.I hope you know that.”He said that he did.More than she did.“I guess.I do have a question before you begin.The day that Mattie was killed.Why did she die if your father was having an affair with her?”
“He loved her.I mean, like he did my mother.In fact, he was having an affair with her long before I married her.It was the reason that I was told I had to marry her.So that he could conduct his affairs without anyone knowing about them.I don’t know why he cared.I think everyone in the town knew that they were in a relationship.Their love, it was strong too.I think because they were so much alike.My mom loved her too.”He thought about the time he’d walked in on his mother and wife in bed together and shivered.“They were lovers too.The two of them.It wasn’t until Mattie lost her first child that things started to change with her.She became…I guess you’d call it unstable.More so than before.”
Mick explained to Carrie that Mattie had been pregnant three times before the girls had been born.Each time she lost a child, she would get more and more unstable.It wasn’t until she passed the six month of carrying the girls that she started to behave like a normal person.
“Well, as normal as she could be, I guess.She’d always had a little bit of an emotional problem.Not just with depression, she’d been seeing someone for that, but Mattie couldn’t contain her emotions from one second to the next.No matter how many different combinations of drugs she was put on.”He remembered what Carrie had asked him.“After the girls were born, Mattie started acting out.Beating the girls for no reason.It got to the point where I’d not allow her to be around them.When I had to go away for a day even, I’d take them to my parents’ home.Then one day, I went to pick the girls up, and there was blood in their diapers.My mother told me that it was my father who had done it, that he’d been having a bit of fun with them.Like he did with me when I was little.I hadn’t remembered that until then.My dad and my mother raped me when I was a baby until I was about five years old.”
