“You’ve been cleared of any wrongdoin’.”
“And the authorities are under the assumption I had no other choice. I could have apprehended him, but in that flash of a second, I realized he’d continue to make our lives a living hell. So I didn’t even entertain another option. I just pulled the trigger.” He squeezed my hands tighter. “And here’s the kicker—I’m not the least bit sorry. God help my soul. I don’t regret it for one minute. Now tell me what happened.”
“My boyfriend sold me to other men for sex,” I repeated, holding his gaze almost in challenge, although for the life of me, I didn’t know why I was feeling confrontational.
“Does Rose know?”
I shook my head. “No. She knows something bad happened in Ardmore, but she doesn’t know what. I can’t tell her yet.”
“Rose won’t judge you, Neely Kate, not that there’s anything to judge. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
I released a bitter laugh. “I did plenty wrong, but I know Rose won’t judge me. I’m just not ready. I can barely stand to tell you.”
“How long did this go on?”
“Months and months.”
He was quiet for a moment, looking perfectly still on the outside, but I saw emotions vacillating in his eyes—anger, grief—but after a few seconds, he was holding my gaze again, perfectly calm as he said, “So there’s a pattern of abuse. I suspect he locked you up at first.”
I was surprised he knew that, but then I wasn’t. He was good at his job. “But not at the end.”
“No, because he broke you.” His voice cracked and he took a breath. “The statute of limitations on rape and kidnapping is six years in Arkansas. I’ll check them for Oklahoma.”
My eyes flew wide. “What? No!”
“We’re not lettin’ that bastard get away with this, Neely Kate, and if that supposed boyfriend of yours now was worth his salt, he wouldn’t let him either.”
“I kicked my old boyfriend’s ass when he showed up to harass me, and my new boyfriend stood back and watched. He knew I needed to prove to myself that Branson couldn’t control me anymore.”
“You beat him up?”
I gave him a look of challenge. “Is that so hard to believe?”
“Hell, no,” he said, his face shining with pride. “You’re a spitfire.”
“My boyfriend would have preferred to have beat the crap out of Branson himself, and in fact did beat the crap out of his brother. He might have seriously injured him if I hadn’t stopped him.”
“He kicked his ass in your defense?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“So Branson—the trafficker who pretended to be your boyfriend—set you up with men to have sex with?”
Tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation with him, but that wasn’t what broke me down. “You called him a trafficker.”
“He sold you for sex, didn’t he?” he asked in a no-nonsense tone.
“It didn’t start out that way.”
“Maybe not, but how soon after you started dating did he start his . . . transactions?”
“A month or two.”
“That’s no boyfriend, Neely Kate. Let’s call a spade a spade. He’s a trafficker. I don’t ever want to hear you call him your boyfriend again.”
I started to cry harder.
Joe stood and pulled me from my seat, then engulfed me in his arms. “Oh, honey. I wish you’d told me sooner, even though I understand why you didn’t.” He leaned back and looked into my eyes. “Do you still want to keep this from Rose?”
I nodded.
“She’s turned off the shower. Leave her a note that we’re goin’ for a walk, and then you can tell me the rest.”
Chapter 8
I wrote a quick note and left it by the coffee pot. I also checked my phone, which was now charged to eight percent. Jed had made two calls and sent three texts. Turning my back to Joe, I called him back.
The phone barely rang once before he answered. “Neely Kate. Are you okay? Why weren’t you answering?”
“My phone died, but Joe showed up poundin’ on my door to let me know that Kate broke out. I’ll call you back in a bit.”
“Is Joe there now?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he know any details about her escape?”
I thought about the body that was still in my basement. “Not yet. I’ll call you later.”
“Call me the moment he leaves.”
“I will.”
As I hung up, Joe said, “This would go a whole lot faster if you just invited your new boyfriend over to share info.”
I gave him a piercing gaze. “You think I’m gonna fall for that?”
“Does he love you?”
“We haven’t gotten that far in our relationship. We only started something when we went to Ardmore. He went with me as a friend.”
Suspicion covered his face. “He went as your friend? I’m not buyin’ that for one minute. Why’d he really go, and how’d he find out you were goin’ in the first place?”
This was such a tangled web, I had no idea how to tell him parts and still keep others a secret without leaving huge gaping holes, but plenty of my secrets weren’t mine to share.
I headed for the back door. “We better get goin’ if we’re gonna evade Rose.”
He followed me outside.
“My boyfriend—let’s call him Bill,” I said as I started walking toward the path through the hayfields that connected Rose’s property to Joe’s. “I’ve known him for a while, and he made it clear months back that he was interested in me, but I’m still married to that lowlife Ronnie. Plus, I don’t trust my judgment with men at this point. After Branson and Ronnie… I wasn’t ready to start something. But Bill found out I was goin’ to see Kate and didn’t want me to go alone. So he went with me.”
“And the reason you’ve been seeing Kate is because she says she has something on you?”
“After you and I went to see her, she started sendin’ me letters, tellin’ me little things about meetin’ my momma, like what color shirt she was wearing. But the last letter said she knew what happened in Oklahoma and if I didn’t come see her, she was gonna tell everyone.”
“And Bill went with you?” He dragged out the name as though it was a personal insult against him. “You’d already told him what happened?”
“No. I didn’t want anyone to know, but my car is crap and I didn’t trust it to go to Little Rock. I planned to let him come with me and ditch him at the hospital and take a Greyhound bus to Ardmore.”
“Did he go in to see Kate with you?”
“Yes.”
“How’d you get in off the books?”
I hesitated. “I’d rather not say right now. It’s not pertinent to this story.”
He looked unconvinced but nodded. “Obviously you didn’t ditch him.”
“He found me at the bus station and told me he’d take me. I refused, so he bought a bus ticket and insisted on coming with me anyway. I realized he was serious and let him drive me.”
“Why was he so insistent?”
“He was worried about me. He said he’d let me do what I needed to do and be there for backup if I needed it.”
“So he knows you killed a man? I know you said he was helping you…”
I hesitated, then said, “He helped me dig up the body.”
Joe stopped walking and turned to me in shock. “And where is that body now?”
I couldn’t tell him that Jed had removed the body, dug a new hole, and burned it. He might not be so lenient where Jed was concerned. “I’d rather not say.”
His back stiffened. “You’d rather not say.”
“I trust you with me, Joe. Maybe that’s pure stupidity on my part based on all the other people who have screwed me over in my life, but there it is. I trust you. But I don’t trust you one iota with Bill. I’m not about to tell you anything to incriminate him.”
A hard look filled his eyes. “First of all, I’ll do everything in my power to protect you. You can trust me. I swear. But you realize just tellin’ me your boyfriend helped you dig up a body has already incriminated him, right?”
“Joe,” I said, sounding as exhausted as I felt. “I can’t fight you on this right now. If I’m tellin’ you, I need to do this with as little animosity as possible.”