“Get off me!”
She tried to push herself up. Michael pressed a forearm across her shoulder blades.
“I said, get off, motherfucker!” She pushed harder. “Damn it! Get the fuck off!”
“Relax, first. No one’s going to hurt you.”
He eased off the pressure enough to show he was serious, and beneath his arm, she went limp. Michael saw that she was barefoot, and that her skin was bug-bitten and dirty. She wore frayed shorts and a once-white tank top now stained gray. Her hair was dirty blond, full of twigs, and she was young enough for Michael to feel bad about the way he’d brought her down.
She was just a kid.
“Look, I’m sorry, okay. I didn’t realize…” Michael ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. “Did I hurt you?”
“Are you finished?”
Her voice was as light and girlish as the rest of her.
“Yeah. You bet.” Michael lifted his arm, but she stayed still and limp, a small, dirty girl brought down harder than she should have been. “Listen…”
Michael leaned forward, and she moved, rolling fast onto her back as one hand came up from beneath her right hip. Michael saw a whisk of silver; then she was scrambling away as pain flashed and a bright red line opened on his chest. He touched it once and his palm came away bloodied. When he looked at the girl, she was crouched five feet away, a straight razor in her hand. “Nobody touches me, ’less I say.”
Michael started to rise, and then caught the look on her face, the wide, frightened eyes, and the cherry lips open over bright teeth. She weighed all of ninety pounds, a smooth-limbed girl with a pretty face and blue eyes so wild and bright they almost hurt; but that’s not what took the fight out of Michael. It was deeper than that, and familiar. He settled back onto the dirt as she folded the razor and pushed it into the tight crevasse of her pocket.
“Next time,” she said, “I cut your pretty-boy face.”
Then she spit on the ground and ran, her blue eyes flashing once, her feet as bare and brown as summer dirt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
There’s humiliation and humbleness, and then there’s stupidity. Michael was feeling all three. “She was just a girl. Eighteen, maybe nineteen.”
“Hold still.” Michael sat on the hood of the Land Rover, his shirt a bloody mess on the dirt beneath him. Abigail stood between his knees, a first-aid kit open on the hood beside her. “This is going to hurt.”
The cut was shallow but long, a ten-inch diagonal slice that ran from the sixth rib on his right side to a spot just above his heart. Abigail cleaned it with alcohol, then pressed gauze against it and told Michael to hold it there while she unpackaged a dozen butterfly bandages.
“What did she look like?”
“Beautiful but dirty.” He closed his eyes to picture her. “Five-two, maybe, and all of ninety pounds. She had tangled hair, shoulder length and kind of blond. Small jaw. Large eyes.”
“Blue?”
“Like some kind of stone.” Michael lifted the gauze, frowned at the cut then put pressure back on. “She had a mouth like a sailor.”
“Let me guess the rest.” Abigail kept her eyes on the work she was doing. “Half-naked and wild as a cat in heat.”
“You sound like you know her.”
“Victorine Gautreaux. I know her mother.”
“What’s she doing here?” Abigail looked up, lips pursed, and Michael said, “Julian?”
She shrugged. “I’d call it a suspicion, but I’m pretty sure.”
“Why was she in the guest house?”
“I think she ran away from home. Maybe she was looking for Julian. Hang on. Give me that.”
He handed her more bandages. She pressed on the wound, then switched out gauze and applied more pressure.
“Did she run away for a reason?” Michael asked.
“I don’t much care to speculate about the workings of that family, but I do know social services took her away a few times when she was younger-once when she was about seven, then a couple more times when she was twelve or thirteen.”
“Why?”
“Various types of abuse and neglect. No medical history, basically illiterate. The kid barely went to school, and when she did she was fighting all the time, wild and unmanageable. She bit some students, and hurt a few pretty seriously. It went to court, but those idiots in county government never had the courage to take her away. Probably scared of her mother.” Abigail lifted the gauze, studied the wound, then pushed harder. “Kid never had a chance.”
“And you think she’s with Julian?”
“You saw how she looks. I doubt Julian had a chance.”
“She’s pretty, yes. But how would they have met?”
“Walking in the woods. Hell, I don’t know.”
When the bleeding stopped, she held the lips of the wound together and worked from right to left, sealing it shut with butterfly bandages. Afterward, she put fresh gauze over the wound and taped it in place. “You can get it stitched if you want, but that’ll hold it. It won’t be a pretty scar, but looking at the rest of you, I don’t think that’s an issue.” She gathered up the bloody shirt, the bandages. “Let’s go inside.”
Michael put on a fresh shirt, and they checked the house from front to back. Beyond the broken window, nothing looked disturbed. Michael tried one window frame and then the other. “Painted shut.”
“That explains the broken glass.” Abigail fingered raw wood where shards had been knocked out. “But not why she was here in the first place. Has to be a reason.”
They found it on the second pass-through.
“Abigail.” Michael called from the back bedroom. When she came in, she found him in the door of the closet. “Check it out.” He pointed up, and she slipped in next to him. The closet was basically empty-just a rod and a few wire hangers-but a trapdoor was visible in the corner of the ceiling. Around it, white paint was smeared with fingerprints and grime.
“The house has an attic. I don’t think there’s anything up there.” She looked around. “We need something to stand on.”
“I know where to find a stool.”
They retrieved the stool from the ferns outside, and put it down in the closet. “Those look like footprints to you?” Michael pointed at the stool, which was scuffed and muddy.
“Could be. Maybe.”
“Well, let’s take a look.”
“After you.”
Michael said, “I don’t suppose you have a flashlight?”
“Sorry.”
“Can’t have it all, I guess.” He mounted the stool, which wobbled but held his weight. The trapdoor opened, hinged at the back seam. “There’s a ladder. Step back.” Michael opened the trap all the way and pulled the ladder down as he descended from the stool. The ladder was hinged as well, and when it touched the floor, its angle was almost vertical. “That’s better.”
He climbed slowly, a vague, black emptiness above him. When his head broke the plane of the
