RIOT HOUSE (Crooked Sinners #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,139
she needs, but it means that I sound like a robot when I speak. “No. Bigger. About the size of a golf ball. And her skull was...it had caved in around the hole.”
Aimée taps her fingernail against the table in a staccato beat. She stops when she notices me flinch. She goes back to my statement. “I screamed for Dad to get an ambulance, but I knew it was already too late. Her lips were blue. I checked for a pulse, though. I turned her over and put her on her back. I tried to give her CPR, but she was already dead.”
I remember saying all of this. And the look on the officer's face, too. He looked shell-shocked by the things I was telling him. But I don't remember feeling this rising anguish, rushing toward me like the inevitable end of a Shakespearean tragedy, refusing to slow or change its course. I know what's coming, and there's no holding it back. I wish I could.
“That's when he came and grabbed me,” Aimée reads from the statement. “He grabbed me from behind. He was so strong. I couldn't fight him. And I didn't think he was going to do anything bad. Not at first. But then he carried me over to the steel lockbox where he keeps his uniforms and his equipment. He handcuffed my arms behind my back, and then he put me inside. I kicked and screamed, and I fought, but I couldn't get out. A long time passed. I thought I was going to die. He came back later, and he seemed normal again, but he wouldn't let me out. He wouldn't let me out of the box.”
Aimée stares blankly at the report for a moment. “Is there anything else you want to add, Elodie? Anything else that you've remembered?”
“Yes.” I have to say this now, while I am not myself. I couldn't tell the officer who found me. He was too young. Too frightened. He'd thrown up on his shoes. This little room feels safer, though, and Aimée doesn't look like she will puke. “Something happened. Something before...he put me in the box.”
The detective narrows her eyes. “Yes?”
“He did to me what he did to my mom. He forced himself...into me. Between my legs. He held my head against the tiles, and he…he hurt me. I screamed. I tried to stop him, but...I could see my mom. Her eyes were still open, and she was looking right at me, and...”
That's it. That's all I have. I don't fall apart. I just run out of steam. I can't continue. Aimée looks at me, her lovely brown eyes boring into me, and a single tear wobbles on the end of her eyelashes. That single tear is more than I've shed for myself since I escaped from that lockbox. It seems wrong that she gets to be the first person to cry over how terrible this nightmare is. She knows it, too. She quickly bats the tear away, clamping down on her errant display of emotion. “We need to get you back to the hospital. I don't think they conducted a rape kit.”
Shame sets me alight. I try to shrink in on myself, trying not to imagine the humiliation that is to come.
“Just a few more questions and we'll get you out of here. What day was that, Elodie?”
“Yesterday. Friday. It happened after I came home from school.”
Aimée pales, the color leaching from her face as she glances down at the report in front of her. She doesn't appear to be looking at anything in particular. Her hand trembles and she quickly tucks it under the table, out of sight. “Do you have any idea what day it is now, Elodie?” she asks in a quiet voice.
Those endless hours in the dark, cramped into a ball, my joints screaming in agony, begging me to stretch out, with my nose pressed against those tiny holes. They felt like an eternity. A hell that spanned full lifetimes. I know how the mind plays tricks, though. Hours feel like days, that feel like years. I've been here at the station since three in the morning, which means it must have been around midnight when that officer cracked the lock off the box and released me. My brain balks at the idea of tackling the simplest of mathematics, but I force myself to count off the hours on my fingers. “It's Sunday,” I tell her. “The early hours of Sunday morning.”