The man growled and his mother giggled, a sickening sound that made him want to puke. Then the man threw her onto the kitchen table. Pouncing on her, he tore at her clothes. Shoved her backward. Her head hit the table with a whack. Her shoes flew off and hit the floor.
The man rammed at her, knocking the chair over. Gripped her around the throat.
She screamed but he kept going, pounding and grunting and…
Bile rose in his throat, and he crawled back into the corner, pulled the coat back over him and tried to shut out everything. But in his mind he could still see those red shoes dangling from her feet through the crack in the door… The red shoes… The man smacking her as she screamed.
THIRTY-TWO
Briar Ridge Mobile Homes
Kat scrolled through one of her mama’s journal posts, intrigued. All her life she’d thought her mama was just a dumbass country girl who’d married a loser and both of them were boring and lame.
She’d gotten knocked up with her when she was a teenager, barely graduated high school, and they were so broke she never shopped anywhere except Goodwill and garage sales. At the grocery store, she bought day-old bread, off brands and coupon shopped. Once she heard Mama telling Daddy they’d make it big time when they could afford real beef hotdogs instead of the mystery meat ones you had to slather with ketchup and mustard just to choke down.
Once a year, Mama and Aunt Hetty ventured to the outlet mall in North Georgia to Christmas shop but that was as far as either one of them had ever traveled. It was as if they had glue on their shoes and rot in their brains.
Kat rolled her eyes and continued to read her mama’s rants:
I hate being a Bramble.Everyone knows Daddy is a mean drunk and now he’s been arrested again. This time for stealing from the dime store to buy moonshine. Apple pie is his favorite.
The. moonshiners are hillbillies you don’t want to mess with. Course if you cross them they can’t go to the police. No… they’ll come after you themselves.
Last week I saw a big scruffy one covered in tats outside my window. I know Daddy owes them money. I’m scared to death they’ll kill me to teach him a lesson.
They’re nasty, foul-mouthed, tobacco chewing, sorry recluses with the mentality of a gnat and the horniness of a dog in heat. Incest is as common as the weeds that choke the vegetable garden, squashing the zucchini that desperately tries to push though the hard Georgia red clay.
The law is no better, as useless as a butter knife trying to saw through a raw potato. Instead of turning the other cheek as Preacher says on Sundays, they turn a blind eye to whatever happens behind closed doors. A person’s business is his own, Daddy growled the other night through a mouthful of pinto beans, fat back and cornbread. Keep your mouth shut or I’ll shut it for you for good, he told Hetty.
Everyone knows me and Hetty live in the slums. That we come from dirt, that Daddy tends the graveyard. Digging graves by night and making pine boxes for the poor by day.
That’s how we got dubbed the Graveyard Girls by that bitch Ruth. That and the things we’ve seen and done this hellish hot summer.
We saw too much.
We said too little.
And we played hide-and-seek with a killer.
THIRTY-THREE
Crooked Creek
Ellie left Cord to supervise the dragging of the pond while she drove to the police station. The captain and deputies had gone for the day but she needed to know more about the Wileys. Everything was pointing to them as Bonnie’s killer.
Once she issued the APB for them, she left a message for the social worker who’d handled Bonnie’s case to call her. She wanted any information the woman had on the family, if they had other relatives or another address where they might have gone.
Next, she ran a background check and searched for information on their past. Mr. Wiley had grown up in the mountains with a single mother who cleaned houses for a living. After dropping out of school, he worked at a body shop but a back injury forced him to take disability.
His wife had lived in close proximity to the toxic land and had been in and out of the hospital in her twenties with depression issues. Ellie dug a little deeper to see how serious her illness was, but medical reports were confidential and she’d need a warrant to look at them.
Her phone buzzed and she connected. “This is Detective Reeves.”
“It’s Sally Emerson,” the social worker said. “You left a message?”
“Yes,” Ellie said. “I went to the Wileys’ house but it was literally empty.”
“So they moved?”
