Jeri worked her tongue around for a moment, then spit in Victoria’s face. Victoria snarled, “Do that again and I will hack off his balls and feed them to you.” She let that sink in, then she put her face six inches from Jeri’s. “Or would you like that, honey-bun? Have you ever eaten warm testicles, straight from the sac?”
Jeri turned her face away.
“I thought not,” Victoria said. She looked at each of us in turn. “There will be no spitting, kicking, or biting. If there is, you will see intestines. You will wear them like leis.”
Ice filled my belly. Kayla appeared sick. Jeri stared at me, still angry, but the previous look of combat was gone from her eyes.
Victoria picked up a wicked, hooked linoleum knife, gave Kayla a look, then me, before cutting the tape that held Jeri’s arms and legs to the plank. She stood within kicking distance, daring Jeri to try, allowing her threat to fill the room. Finally, satisfied, she tossed the knife onto the workbench as Winter carried the board back outside. She shut the door behind them, leaving the three of us alone for the time being.
“You okay?” I asked Jeri.
“So far.” She looked up at her hands, struggled for a moment to reach the knots, then gave up. “Shit,” she said.
“Any idea what time it is?”
“Afternoon, five or six, maybe later, I don’t know. It’s been daylight for hours.”
Christ, I’d been unconscious for at least fifteen hours. That was some hit Victoria had given me upstairs in the hallway. Most likely I had a concussion. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Neither of you should be here.”
“Or you,” Jeri retorted. “How’s your head?”
“It hurts.”
“No wonder. That vicious little bitch dragged you all the way down to the first floor by your feet, down all those stairs. Your head hit every damn one of them on the way down.”
Felt like it, too.
Jeri jerked on her ropes, hard. Nothing gave. She chinned herself then came down hard on the ropes with all her weight. Still nothing.
“I want to kill her,” she said with the kind of total ferocity she brought to international karate competitions. She glanced to her left. “You’re Kayla?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Jeri.” She looked at me, then managed a faint smile. “Jesus, Mort, she’s gorgeous. I didn’t know.”
Under the circumstances it was an incongruous remark, as if she were as lost as I was. I didn’t know how to respond. “Why’d they gag you, Jer?” I asked.
“Probably didn’t like what I was calling them. I was making stuff up, things they’d never heard before.” Her eyes locked with mine. “Whatever happens, Mort, don’t you dare give up, not ever.”
I took a little heart in that, the toughness in her voice, then the knob on the door clicked, turned, and Victoria and Winter came back into the room.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THEY BROUGHT IN a small flat-screen television and a DVD/ CD player. And a video camera that must have cost a thousand dollars.
“Oh, no. Not again!” Kayla cried.
Victoria smiled. “You didn’t like it? Maybe these two won’t be as critical.”
“I can’t see that again,” Kayla whispered.
“Then don’t watch, sister dear.”
Victoria positioned the screen where everyone could see it. She said, “I think you’ll find this interesting. But first—something of an explanation so you’ll understand what you’re seeing. Like so much of life, context is everything.”
Winter folded her arms and smiled at me, a spooky grin that made her face look skull-like. Something wasn’t right about her, other than the obvious, which was that she was a fucking maniac. It was that reptilian blink rate. Eerie goddamn kid. She needed to spend some quality time in the lockdown ward in a mental hospital. Like about fifty years.
“Jonathan Sjorgen raped Jacoba,” Victoria began. “He and David Milliken.” Her voice was all frost and death. “They took an innocent retarded girl for a ride in Jonnie’s shiny new automobile and raped her, thinking they could get away with it because she either wouldn’t tell, or couldn’t tell. She was too dumb. They could grope her, fondle her, run their engorged cocks into her with impunity, come in her, and no one would ever know.
“Smug bastards, so very rich and smart. They had everything. They’d never wanted for a single thing their entire lives, never known the least privation. To them, the retarded girl down the street was a joke, a toy, just part of what the world owed them, nothing but a warm body, a receptacle, a dumb object without feelings.”
Her words shriveled me, the venom in them, the depth of hatred that spilled out into the room. And the madness in her eyes, a live thing, as poisonous as cyanide. I couldn’t decide which of them was more demented, Victoria or her spooky kid.
“But they were caught,” Victoria went on. “Their fathers had to deal with Edna. She took Wendell Sjorgen’s house and large sums of money from both families. She also sent Jacoba away, to live with her sister, Jewel, in South Carolina.”
Her eyes softened briefly. “Edna did it for Jacoba. She was very old-fashioned, of course. She was sixty years old. She did what she thought was best. She was born in 1917. It was all she knew—one sends the pregnant child away, removes her from the heat of scandal, protects her. But even if Jacoba had stayed, she couldn’t have interpreted the stares or comprehended the words. In that regard, Edna was wrong, but she did what she thought was best.
“In due course, I was born. By the age of six, I was the mother, Jacoba was the daughter. Jewel was never a mother to either of us. She was nothing but a guardian, in the strictest sense of the word. She put a roof over our heads, paid for by Edna. Jewel was a cold woman, bitter and utterly humorless. She did only what she perceived to be her duty, nothing more. Jacoba and I had only each other. I loved her. God, how I
