but all I could tell was that his mind had been distracted from Maggie, that his need for a more immediate release had overcome his obsession with harming her. His mind had wandered to another, I realized, someone who would be far easier than Maggie to take, someone more helpless, more willing to submit to his promised mercy, someone more like the one who had started it all, who had betrayed him to Maggie in the first place: someone more like his daughter.
As Hayes unfolded his long limbs and fastidiously brushed the debris from his pants, I knew where he was going. I felt sick inside as I remembered the words I’d overheard on the school bus: “My dad is taking her to Bermuda for the weekend and he’s letting me stay by myself.”
That beautiful, naïve, trusting, unknowing girl. Alone in her house, surrounded by hedges that hid all that happened inside from the neighbors.
Hayes would take her that day.
I knew it with every fiber of my being.
He would take her, and then he would take out every ounce of his rage toward Maggie on that helpless young girl. She would pay the price for his frenzied hatred.
I had to get there before he did.
Chapter 29
The girl was not alone. I thanked god for teenage girls who disobey their parents and have boyfriends over when they’re not supposed to. And although I knew it was possible Hayes might try to take her anyway, and harm her companion in the process, Hayes was above all else a self-preservationist. I thought there was a good chance the six-foot-tall boy lounging in the television room with the girl might dissuade Hayes from making an attempt, at least for that day. The kid was muscular and his age made him very unpredictable. He was potentially dangerous and in no way the passive victim Hayes desired—and Hayes would know it.
The two teenagers were sitting side by side on the lumpy old couch in the den. Though it was barely afternoon and the room was flooded with sunlight, the boy was a teenager, after all, and taking full advantage of being alone with the girl. She was fending his hands off routinely as she watched television. No sooner had she removed his palm from one of her breasts than he was all over the other breast, or sliding his hand up her thigh, or trying to stroke the smooth expanse of her stomach. At first she was too engrossed in the movie to care much about these familiar territorial encroachments, but when a commercial flashed on, she turned her pent-up irritation on him.
“Will you stop that,” she snapped. “I told you, no. It’s broad daylight and a Sunday afternoon and you’re not even supposed to be here and I am not in the mood. Quit pawing me.”
The boy looked as if she had insulted him deeply. I’d have laughed under any other circumstances, since I’d tried that hangdog expression many a time myself as a teenager. But I could not laugh because I was terrified the tiff would escalate into a full-blown fight and he would leave her alone. She must not be left alone.
“Come on, baby. What’s the difference?” He smiled. “Let’s draw the blinds and pretend it’s Friday night.”
Wrong move. Ah, but high school football players should never go out with the smart girls. They’re just too easily outsmarted by them. The girl jumped to her feet, slapped his hand away, and told him to go now because she had to wash her hair.
“Seriously?” the guy asked. He was incredulous. “That is the oldest excuse in the book.”
“Really?” she asked, her eye blazing. “How’s this one? Get the hell out.”
“Oh, come on, baby,” he complained as he started to rise from the couch.
No, I rooted silently. How can you give up so easily? Stay put, man. Show some backbone. Don’t leave this girl alone. Please, dear god, do not walk out that door. Do not leave this girl alone.
“You don’t really mean it,” he told her when she refused to dignify his comment with anything but silence. “You’re just going to call me in twenty minutes and tell me to come back.”
It was so the wrong thing to say. Teenage boys and their egos. This one might cost the girl her life.
“I don’t think so,” she told him, then turned her back on him and pretended to be interested in the TV. My hopes sank. She was giving him the silent treatment. There was