“Which guys are you talking about?” Cindy asked, alerted.
“Another ridiculous question,” Katrina spit out. “You think there’s a big difference between one and another? There isn’t. The bastards are all the same. But, there are ways of stopping them, too, if you’re smart.” Katrina’s shoulder rose and she looked at Cindy knowingly. “All of us women know how to do it. We know how to calm them down.”
Cindy hung on her every word. “How?”
Katrina looked at her scathingly for a moment. “Looks like you’ve never been up against one of them yourself? You’re just coming in here to tell others.”
“I’m coming in to solve a murder,” said Cindy plainly, “to gather all the information I can get.”
Katrina grinned oddly. “Say what you want. Shelly wasn’t smart either, she was like a bull in a china shop. Some of the other women thought so, too.”
Katrina looked around again, as if guarding herself from being overheard. Cindy wondered if her husband were still in the house.
“Is something the matter?” asked Cindy, growing edgy. “Is your husband at home?”
That really sparked Katrina. “Do you think I’d be talking to you, if Flan were here? My God, how stupid can you be? He owns a fleet of shark fishing boats and he’s out early every morning with tourists. Thank God. When he’s gone I can talk to you, when he’s here, it’s another thing.”
“Why?”
“Why? He’d slap me around good if he heard me saying anything he didn’t like. That’s what these guys do.” She looked down at the ground.
“He did that a lot?” asked Cindy.
“Of course,” said Katrina, “he can’t stop. And he’s done worse than that too! Plenty worse.”
“Why did you come back here with him?” Cindy had to ask that directly. It was hard to imagine what would bring Katrina back into the heart of fear she lived in.
Katrina started rocking in her chair. “Plenty of the women go back to the guys they love. They give it time, let things cool down, and then they go back to where they started.”
Cindy shivered.
“After a while, you forget what happened, you only remember how good it can be. And boy, it’s fabulous between me and Flan! Better than fabulous! We go to the moon!”
“You missed him?” Cindy filled in the pieces.
Katrina crossed her big legs. “Missing’s not the word for it. I craved the bastard every day. And, when he came back and said he was sorry, I saw he was craving me, too. Do you know what that kind of craving feels like, honey? You think it’s so easy to say no?”
Cindy said nothing. That infuriated Katrina.
“I can see you don’t have the vaguest idea about what it means to crave a guy,” Katrina spit out, contemptuous.
Cindy let that statement pass. Her personal life was none of Katrina’s business. Cindy felt uneasy as if she were sitting beside a volcano that was about to explode. It was probably caused by the terror Katrina lived in every day.
“How about Shelly, did she know what it was like to crave a guy?” Cindy decided to change the focus, was definitely not going to getting pulled into the undertow Katrina was swimming in.
“I already told you, Shelly was stupid,” Katrina now seemed to be playing with Cindy, dangling her, leading her on. “No one wanted Shelly to drop dead, but some of us thought she got what she deserved.”
Cindy was shocked. “Shelly deserved to die?”
Katrina got up then, towering over Cindy. “Listen up, sweetheart, Shelly looked like sweetness and light, but she was really bad news. Ever hear of people preying on people under the guise of helping? I saw how she’d look at the guys who came around. She liked hearing all the details from the women about their lives, but basically she only wanted their husbands for herself.”
“The women’s husbands aren’t allowed in the Shelter, they don’t know where the women are,” Cindy interjected, rankled.
“It doesn’t matter. Shelly asked the women too many questions about their husbands, seemed too interested. It made a lot of them feel creepy. And other guys came to the Shelter, staff, delivery men, all kinds of guys. Man, Shelly was one hungry dame! I should have never told her that Flan was secretly coming to meet me. When he came, the bitch found us and flirted with him in front of my eyes! I told her to cut it out, and she said I was imagining things. She was just trying to get him to leave me alone. What horseshit! The bitch was trying to take him away!”
Cindy remembered how Barbara warned her that the women at the Shelter could become paranoid – not to believe everything they said.