“You listen to me, you little bitch.” His breath was a foul mixture of coffee and whiskey. “You’re not telling your father a goddamn thing. Do you understand me?”
She couldn’t answer because his fingers were digging into her throat.
“I picked you up from Nardo’s. You were having a bullshit fight with Clay. I took you home. That’s it.” His grip tightened. “Do you understand me?”
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. Her eyelids started to flutter.
In an instant, he had let her go. Emily dropped to the floor. Her fingers went to her bruised neck. She could feel the arteries throbbing. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
Mr. Wexler squatted in front of her. His finger jammed in her face. “Tell me what you’re going to say.”
“It—” She coughed. Blood dribbled into her throat. “It wasn’t you.”
“It wasn’t me,” he repeated. “Nardo called me to pick you up. I went to his house. You were fighting with Clay. I drove you home. I never touched you, or ripped your dress, or …”
Emily watched his eyes narrow. His gaze traveled slowly down from her face to her belly. She could almost hear a bell go off inside of his head.
“Fuck,” Mr. Wexler said. “You’re pregnant.”
Emily listened to the word travel around the cinder block room. No one had really said it out loud before. Even Dr. Schroeder hadn’t used the actual word. Her father had called it knocked up. Her mother talked around it the same way you would if someone had cancer.
“Fuck!” Mr. Wexler pounded his fist into the wall. And then he screamed in pain, clutching his hand. His knuckles were bloody. “Fuck.”
“Mr. Wex—”
“Shut the fuck up,” he hissed. “Jesus Christ, you stupid bitch. Do you know what this means?”
Emily tried to stand, but her legs were too wobbly. “I’m—I’m sorry.”
“You’re damn right you are.”
“Mr. Wexler, I—” She tried to calm him down. “Dean, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m just—I’m scared, okay? I’m really scared because something bad happened and I can’t remember.”
He stared at her, but she couldn’t read his expression.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, feeling like those two words were the only two words she ever said to anybody anymore. “My grandmother saw me get out of your car, so I thought—I thought that maybe you …”
Her voice trailed off.
Mr. Wexler was still unreadable. Emily thought that they were going to stay like this forever, and then he broke the trance by standing up. He walked stiff-legged across the room. When he turned, she could see that blood from his knuckles had stained his shirt.
“I had mumps when I was a kid.” He tested his fingers to see if anything was broken. “It gave me orchitis.”
Emily stared up at him. She didn’t know what he was saying. “Look it up in the dictionary, you dumb cunt.” He sat down at his desk. “It means I’m not the fucking father.”
5
Bible looked up from the silver band that had been permanently clamped around the dead girl’s ankle.
“That’s what the inscription on the shackle says.” He asked them again, “Who is Alice Poulsen?”
Nardo looked at Wexler, who offered, “She’s a volunteer. I don’t know her.”
Bible stood up. He was clearly angry. “Volunteer for what, exactly? Being deprived of basic nutrition and banded like a damn test subject in a science lab?”
Nardo and Wexler stared, as if they were expecting the question to be rephrased.
“All right.” Bible’s jaw clenched. “How many volunteers you got working here?”
Again, Nardo let Wexler answer. “Ten, maybe fifteen or twenty in the high season.”
“Ten or fifteen or twenty. Sure, that’s a ton of people to keep up with.” Bible turned to Stilton. “Chief, I believe you said Ms. Poulsen tried to kill herself a year and a half ago. Cut open her wrists. Right?”
Stilton nodded. “That’s right.”
“So she’s been living here on this farm for at least that long, maybe longer.” Bible pointed his remarks back to Wexler. “How old is she?”
“Legal age,” Wexler said. “We only take legal adults here. Make them show their passports or ID.”
“But you don’t know this particular adult who’s been living and working on your property for eighteen months?”
Wexler picked a piece of tobacco off of his tongue, but said nothing.
Andrea could feel the tension hitting the triangle of Bible, Stilton and Dean Wexler. None of them were looking at the dead body on the ground, though two of them were clearly affected by the sight of the emaciated young woman.
Bible’s response was fury. Andrea’s was unfathomable horror. She felt overwhelmed by the darkness in front of her. This woman had been someone’s daughter, or classmate, or friend, or maybe even sister. And now she was dead.
All Andrea could do was follow Bible’s instructions. She documented the malice perpetrated on Alice Poulsen’s body. The sunken cheeks. The painfully thin limbs. The fingerprint bruises that circled her wrists. The whalebone of her ribcage sticking out like the carcass of a decayed animal. To say the young girl was malnourished told only half the story. There were open wounds at her elbows and hip bones that looked like bedsores. Patches of hair had fallen to the ground like silk from a corn stalk. Her fingernails curled from stomach acids where she’d clearly gagged herself into vomiting.
Had she willingly submitted to this torture?
Andrea focused the camera on the prescription bottle. The label had been removed. The cap was overturned. Her hands were shaking as she took the last photos of the ankle band, which might as well have been a shackle. She wiped her palms on her shorts as she stood up. Everything felt so wrong. This girl had been starved into a skeleton and tagged like a farm animal. Even if Alice Poulsen had committed suicide, someone had pushed her toward that end.
She looked at Nardo, knowing instinctively that he was the more sadistic of the two. “Who welded this onto her ankle? She didn’t do that to herself.”
“Hold on, girl,” Wexler said. “We don’t know anything about that.”
Andrea bit back the invectives that flooded into her mouth. He hadn’t been shocked to see the band, and he clearly knew who the girl was. Alice had been living on his property for over a year. None of this had happened without Wexler’s knowledge and approval. Andrea was so angry that she was shaking. The girl was barely out of high school. She had come here as a volunteer and she would leave in a body bag.
She pointed to the body. “She’s flesh and bone. How could you let her get this way? You had to have seen her. She’s must’ve been a walking corpse.”
Wexler shrugged. “Not my department.”
Andrea repeated Bible’s earlier question. “Who is Alice Poulsen?”
“Dunno.” Wexler shrugged again. “We got a couple of girls from Denmark last year. Could be she’s one of them.”
Of course he knew where she was from. “Who’s the other girl? You said a couple, that’s two, right?”