A Time of Torment (37 page)

She did not know what had happened to the children. Hannah and Sherah would say only that they were no longer in the Cut. Paige had given the girls names: Dorothy, after her mother, and Meredith, after her sister. Although they were the offspring of sexual assault, she continued to feel the pain of their loss. She tried to hide it from herself, but the trauma of her separation from them, even given the circumstances of their conception, was like an open wound in her flesh. Hardly a day went by that she did not weep for them.

She wondered if her mother was still alive. She wondered if her family was still searching for her, holding out hope that she might yet be returned to them, living or dead. She wondered if she ever would be, or if she, too, would eventually be laid to rest beneath a liar’s cross. She wasn’t sure that she could endure another assault, and this pregnancy was telling on her. Her body was worn out. When she looked in the plastic mirror that hung in the bathroom, she saw a woman whom she could barely recognize: older than her years, harder.

Sometimes – most of the time – Paige wanted to die, but if she died no one would ever discover what had befallen her, and this horror would go on: there would be more girls, more rapes, more pregnancies, more vanished children. So Paige endured, and waited patiently for her chance, because she knew that a chance must surely come. She refused to despair, because if she despaired she would go mad: mad, like Gayle.

Gayle had been plucked by the Cut from the streets of Washington D.C., another kid fleeing a bad home life for a chance in the big city, although what she imagined she’d find once she got there, apart from an even harder life in a bigger place, Paige wasn’t sure. Gayle had begun crying and screaming from the moment she regained consciousness. Paige had tried her best to quiet Gayle down, but it wasn’t as though she could offer her any great consolation. Paige even held back from Gayle, for a while, the length of time she herself had been kept prisoner in the hut. Eventually, though, she couldn’t keep the truth from the girl. She told her what would happen to her, and how best to cope with it, but Gayle had broken before the first assault even began. Perhaps she’d been broken before she ever got to D.C. Paige suspected as much. She bore the mark of a girl who believed that she had already seen the worst of men, but the ones in the Cut proved her wrong.

Sometimes Paige was able to have a coherent conversation with Gayle, but those times were growing less frequent since she had conceived. Mostly Gayle just crooned to herself, although Paige didn’t think she was singing to the child. During one of their rare substantial discussions, Gayle had asked Paige how she might go about aborting the baby. Paige dissuaded her from that line of thought, mainly because she’d initially contemplated the same action herself. Two things had caused her to reconsider. The first was that, even if she found some means of inducing an abortion, she might well damage herself fatally along with the fetus. The second was something Sherah told her after she conceived for the first time.

‘If you hurt the baby,’ Sherah said, ‘they’ll kill you. They’ll bury you in the woods along with the others. But if you carry it to term, they’ll look after you, and you won’t be harmed.’

Paige had stared at Sherah in disbelief when she’d said that. She’d been abducted, imprisoned, and raped until she conceived: if that wasn’t being ‘harmed’, then Paige didn’t know what was.

Sherah guessed the direction of her thoughts.

‘You’ll go hard,’ said Sherah. ‘Don’t think it’ll just be a bullet or a blade. They’ll burn you.’

Paige thought she’d misheard.

‘Burn?’

‘You wouldn’t be the first.’

Paige struggled to find the words to express what she was feeling. Imprisonment, rape, forced childbirth, and now burning? It was like she’d tumbled back into the Middle Ages.

‘Why are you letting them do this to me?’ she’d asked.

And Sherah had shrugged.

‘I don’t want you to suffer,’ she said, ‘and I’ll do my best to keep you safe and healthy: all of the women here will. But you’re not of the Cut, and the Cut looks after its own.’

In the beginning, Paige had screamed for help, just like Gayle later did, but no one outside the Cut heard her. Hannah had arrived to warn her to be quiet, but Paige had told her to go fuck herself.

After that, Oberon came, and Paige didn’t scream anymore.

Paige had tried to escape once, shortly after the first birth, when Martha, an older woman who had since died, came to bring Paige her daily hot meal. Paige had knocked her down and started running, but they caught her within minutes. Lucius had reached her first, and he’d struck her so hard on the side of the head that she was still partially deaf in her right ear. As punishment, she was placed in the basement under the floor of the hut. She hadn’t even known that there was a basement, so well had they hidden the entrance beneath a section of board. They left her down there in the blackness for two days with just bread and water, and a bucket to use for her ablutions. That was as close to madness as she had come.

For so long she had waited for someone to arrive in the Cut, someone from outside, but nobody ever came. Still, she had not entirely lost hope, or not until she overheard Cassander talking with Hannah after her latest pregnancy was confirmed. Paige had experienced trouble conceiving again, and the earlier miscarriage had been a source of concern. If she couldn’t give birth again, then what good would she be to them? Hannah and Cassander had believed her to be sleeping, but Paige woke up to pee, and heard them speaking not far from one of the vents in the wall.

‘It’s about time,’ said Cassander. ‘I thought we’d bled her dry.’

‘Perhaps you should think about looking for another. Three births would be as many as we’ve ever had from one woman. They get damaged. It’s not the same as it is between husband and wife.’

‘I know the difference.’

‘Good. Sherah would be unhappy otherwise.’

Cassander had laughed, and Paige had returned to bed, storing away this little piece of information even as she feared for her own life. Sherah was Oberon’s wife. Could Cassander possibly be sleeping with her behind his back?

But she had other, more immediate concerns. After this one, they would kill her. Paige knew it. She would have to try to run again, but they let her out for only an hour a day to exercise in the fenced-in yard behind the hut, and she was always being watched. The Cut women were careful to keep their distance, and they were sometimes armed. Even when they came to check on her and Gayle, they would do so by first separating them, and at least two women would always be present. Paige would be locked in her room while Gayle was being examined, and vice versa. No matter how often she considered the problem, and from how many angles, Paige could find no way to make her escape. She would die in the Cut, and soon.

The biggest of the slit windows was no more than a foot wide and three feet long, and fitted with Plexiglas that had grown worn over the years so that it gave a misty perspective to everything. Still, Paige liked to stand on a chair and gaze out on the world beyond the walls. When she lost the will and energy even to do that, then she’d probably welcome the final visit, and the walk into the woods to the waiting grave.

Now, at the window, she saw movement: Sherah and Hannah, coming up fast. They looked worried.

‘Something’s happening,’ she said.

Gayle stopped crooning, and looked up at the older woman.

‘Maybe they’re going to let us leave,’ said Gayle. She began to giggle, then stopped.

‘I think I’m going to hurt one of them,’ she said. She spoke as though she were considering trying on a different dress: the white one, or maybe the blue, but it was a tone that Paige had never heard her use before.

‘Which one?’ asked Paige, curious about this pronouncement.

‘Hannah. No, Sherah. She pretends that she cares, but she doesn’t care. At least Hannah doesn’t try to pretend.’

‘And when will you do this?’

Gayle mused on the question.

‘Today?’

Paige heard the question in it.
Maybe all is not lost for this girl
, she thought.

The Cut were drawing nearer. She moved away from the window and knelt carefully before Gayle, aware of the weight of the child she was carrying. ‘I’ll help you to hurt one of them, okay, but not today. Soon, though. You’ll just have to wait for my signal. Will you do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘And then I want to hurt Cassander, and Oberon, and Marius, and Lucius …’

First things first
, thought Paige.

‘Yes, we’ll find a way to hurt them too.’

H
enkel was part of the team that moved into the Cut from the south: they were ten in total, including their Cut minders, and they spread out in a line that permitted each man or woman to see the others to the right and left. They called out Perry Lutter’s name as they went, waited for a response, then moved on. They only had enough dogs to place one with each team, but so far none of them had picked up Perry’s scent. Although Henkel would never have said as much aloud, he didn’t hold out much hope of finding Perry in the Cut. If anyone from the Cut were responsible for Perry’s disappearance – or, God forbid, his murder – then a lesson would have been learned from the discovery of Killian and Huff, and he would have been buried far from this place.

Henkel also knew that his animosity toward Oberon and his kind was prejudicing the conduct of the search. It was entirely possible that the Cut had nothing to do with whatever had befallen Perry – and, most assuredly, something had – which meant that Henkel was wasting valuable time and resources on this incursion.

But while he had no direct evidence to link Perry to the Cut, he had nearly two decades of experience in law enforcement on which to draw. The Cut’s history of violence, and the rumors of possible criminality on its part, were an open secret in Plassey County. The only current point of contention was whether or not the Cut was winding down, and turning its back on its past in favor of a more conventional lifestyle, or as conventional as could be expected from a reclusive community that had sequestered itself away on private land and appeared never to have heard of an ordinary name like Dave or Steve. There might have been some element of truth to the belief that the Cut’s more dubious activities were in abeyance, but this did not mean they had ceased entirely. There was badness yet in the Cut.

The search was Henkel’s way of maintaining pressure on Oberon and his people. For now, with the focus of the investigation into Killian and Huff directed elsewhere, it was the best he could do. And if Perry Lutter didn’t show up soon, Henkel would be shouting his name on every TV channel and radio station that would broadcast it, and talking to every journalist who would listen, and would sow further seeds of doubt about the Cut’s nature. Pressure, pressure, pressure; soon, cracks would appear. Henkel was certain of it.

The line moved on. The dog sniffed and whined. When Henkel paused for a leak, taking some small pleasure in pissing on the Cut, he thought that he caught sight of at least two children following the searchers. A man named Bryan Kibble, who had once owned a hardware store in Turley that somehow managed to stay in business for thirty years, despite the presence of the big Sears just over the county line, waited for Henkel to rejoin the search, briefly shifting position to the right so that he and the sheriff were within earshot of each other.

‘You see them?’ said Kibble.

‘Yeah.’

‘Spooky little shits, and rough as pig iron. This whole place gives me the dismals.’

‘It’s just wood and dirt, like any other place.’

‘No it ain’t, and you know it.’

A figure moved across the back of the line, checking to see what was delaying the progress of the two men: Lucius, Cassander’s son. Henkel had noticed the bruising on his face as soon as he arrived, but it had swollen badly in the hour that had gone by since, and Lucius’s right eye was now half-closed.

‘Everything all right here?’ Lucius asked.

‘Catching a breath,’ said Henkel. ‘You ought to put something on that eye of yours.’

‘Truck door hit me,’ said Lucius.

‘Yeah,’ said Kibble dryly. ‘They’ll do that if you sneak up on ’em unexpected.’

Henkel, meanwhile, thought he could make out a tread mark on Lucius’s face, even amid the swelling. He might have been mistaken, but he was pretty certain Lucius had taken a boot to the face. It wasn’t from Perry Lutter, though: Perry always wore sneakers, rain or shine.

‘We ought to keep moving,’ said Lucius. ‘Don’t want to break the line.’ Henkel nodded, and took a final glance over his shoulder. A girl stood watching him from amid knee-high weeds, half-hidden by the trunk of a tree. She was wearing clothing of green and brown, so that she seemed almost an extension of the natural world, a sprite taking form from plant and bark.

Henkel shivered, and gave his back to her as he and Kibble returned to the search.

T
he lawyer named Daniel Starcher operated out of a small suite of offices in the pretty historic town of Lewisburg. He blended in perfectly amid its galleries and wine shops, its antiques stores and Realtors, striding the old and new worlds like a genial legal colossus, Southern manners allied to modern nous. From his office window he could see the monuments of the Old Stone Presbyterian Church Cemetery, and the BMW that was currently his vehicle of choice. His walls displayed a carefully curated mix of art, most of it by modern Southern artists. His practice specialized in civil cases, with only a little criminal work on the side. It was said locally that Daniel Starcher didn’t like to get his hands dirty, and preferred any clients who broke the law to have the decency to wear a white collar when they did it.

Starcher was the Cut’s lawyer, chosen as much for the unlikeliness of the juxtaposition between lawyer and client as for his ability and discretion. On those rare occasions when denizens of the Cut found themselves in legal difficulties of a criminal or civil nature, Starcher would farm the work out to one of a handful of tame litigators in nearby towns or cities, all of whom had trained under Starcher’s aegis and thus exposed themselves to his gentle but potent corruption. Starcher was a moral abyss, entirely sociopathic. In Lewisburg it was generally assumed he was gay, but Starcher was in fact virtually without a sexual drive. He did, though, very much like money. As far as he was concerned, those who chimed that wealth never made anyone happy simply hadn’t attained the correct level of financial security.