Jolene. He was still laughing when she regained consciousness, making fun of her because she wasn’t a virgin. He said that the troopers wouldn’t even get him in trouble because it wasn’t rape if the girl was a slut already.
She’d found her voice at that, and screamed up at him, trying to scramble backwards like a crab. His hand shot to her mouth, plugging the scream. Pressing down with the weight of his body, he subdued her against the linoleum floor while the fingers of his free hand wrapped around her throat. All the while he laughed, grunting, chuckling, against her half-naked bucks and squirms. He was bigger. He was stronger. He could do whatever he wanted.
A cold realization gushed like ice water through her limbs.
He had won. There was nothing left to do but kill her.
The knife her uncle had used to butcher the ducks that morning had fallen on the floor during the struggle and now lay on the floor next to the carcasses. It was a small thing, serrated, like something you’d have next to your plate if you were eating a moose roast—not something you’d use to fend off a rapist. But it was all Birdie had.
Her fingers brushed the blade as she flailed. Somehow, through the fog of panic and fear, she realized what it was. Grabbing blindly, she screamed again, driving the little blade over and over again into Sascha’s neck and face. He must have thought she’d merely hit him at first, but his eyes went wide when he brought his hand back and saw the blood. She managed to stab him two more times in the neck and shoulder before he wrested the knife away. He’d tried to stab her too, but blood was slick and they were covered in it, making her impossible to hold now. He lashed out as she squirmed away, slicing her deep across the thigh before collapsing on the floor.
Birdie didn’t remember much after that, she’d lost a great deal of blood too, but she remembered the pain, and Sascha’s face, swathed in gore, as he lay there on her uncle’s floor with the knife clenched in his fist, beside a pile of butchered ducks.
Now, sixteen years later, Birdie sat on the edge of her bed and ran her fingers over her uneven collarbone, touched the scars on her hand and thigh. Her friend had come over to watch Jeopardy! like they’d planned, and found them both on the floor unconscious. Sascha had lived somehow, despite his wounds. He was, Birdie suspected, too evil to die without the chance to observe the hell he’d put her through. She was surprised she’d been able to say his name to Cutter, though he was an obvious suspect. It was something she rarely spoke out loud, certainly not to Jolene.
Birdie’s friends who were divorced, the smart ones anyway, took great pains to say good things about the fathers of their children. But Sascha wasn’t Jolene’s father. He wasn’t her dad. He was the rapist who got Birdie pregnant. There was not one thing good to say about him, but she didn’t speak ill of him either. That kind of talk would only bring down Jolene’s self-esteem—and that was low enough already. Kids with low self-esteem ran the risk of following Sylvia Red Fox’s path, dying alone on the loading dock with a packing strap around her neck.
Birdie shuddered, then fell against her pillow. No sleep tonight. She stared up at the light fixture on the ceiling. It was cracked, and filled with dust and the bodies of a dozen dead bugs. There was one way this might all work out. Deputy Cutter might very well have come along at just the right time. She felt bad for Rolf Hagen, but in some perverse way, she hoped Sascha had been the one to murder him and kidnap Sarah Mead. Prison had done nothing but give him time to feed that fantasy that he owned her. That was why he was hanging around now. It had to be. He’d go crazy jealous if he knew that Birdie and Arliss were friends. Birdie smiled, feeling relaxed for the first time in days. Sascha would fight if confronted. He was too vain not to, too impulsive. And when he fought, she had no doubt that Cutter would end him.
CHAPTER 32
Cutter and Lola walked through the doors of the school at a quarter past midnight, wet and chilled. Donna Taylor, Abe Richards, and Daisy Aguthluk