“What’s he doing tonight then?” I questioned. “And how do you know what he does out there anyway?”
“He is quite an honest person. If you ask him something, he will give you a straight response. Please think about what you ask, though,” Rose warned. “Clover doesn’t like certain people and what he does occasionally is…” She trailed off, frowning into the distance.
“Is?” I prompted.
“He…disposes of people that do harm.”
My mouth fell open. “He murders them?” No, he couldn’t.
“Yes. That’s not quite how he sees it, though. The women, prostitutes, are doing harm. Harm to the innocent families of men that use them.”
“Bloody hell, listen to yourself,” I whispered, shocked. “You’re defending him.”
“I’m not defending him.”
“Yes you are. You’re making it sound like it’s okay.”
“It’s not, and I’m not. I’m just trying to explain how he did, that’s all.”
“So he spends his evenings out murdering prostitutes?” It couldn’t be true. Maybe he only said that to scare them into doing what he said. If prostitutes were being murdered all over the place it would be on the bloody news!
Rose frowned. “You make it sound like he’s doing it every night, and that’s not true.” How do you know? Well, it couldn’t be true. He couldn’t kill on a daily basis and still not have been caught. Surely.
I couldn’t believe how calmly I was talking about it. Shouldn’t I be freaking out and clawing at the door? Should I even worry about how I should or shouldn’t think, feel, or act? “How does he get away with it?”
“They’re prostitutes, Lily. Most of them have run away from home or have always been alone.” But still, for no one to notice. “He thinks they’re dirty and represent everything that’s wrong with humanity.” Rose looked at Poppy and Violet. “We think something happened when he was younger—no one just starts thinking that—but we’ve never asked.” Of course they hadn’t. It wasn’t worth their life.
“What does he do with them? How many?” I questioned. This was getting crazier by the second. He was like a character from a horror movie.
“I don’t know,” Violet replied.
“This is crazy. Totally screwed-up crazy. We need to get out of here. We can do it together. I know we can, but we have to work together.”
“No, Lily,” Rose said sternly, she reminded me of my teachers at school. “We can’t. There is no way out, so you need to get this idea out of your head now. You have no real idea of what he’s capable of. He has no concept of what is truly right and wrong. He can be very…brutal and unforgiving.”
A shiver ran through my entire body at her blunt warning. Brutal and unforgiving. I witnessed what he did to Violet, how angry he got and how he threatened her with a knife. How much worse could it get? I didn’t want to give up, that wasn’t me, but I was terrified.
Rose took a deep breath and stood up. “Now I’m going to clean the bathroom and then we can watch a movie.”
Wiping the tears from my eyes, I gulped down the rising sickly feeling in my stomach. “I can’t stay here. I need to go home.” Why wouldn’t they understand that?
Poppy shook her head and squeezed my hand. “I wish you could, Lily. Please don’t do anything stupid,” she said and got up. Her words whirled around my head. Please don’t do anything stupid. My mind instantly conjured the image of him holding a knife up to me and it sent a bolt of pure horror right to my bones. I shuddered.
“Which movie?” Rose asked.
Violet shrugged. “Some old romantic chick flick.” Was this what would happen every night? I felt a suffocating weight press down on my chest.
Rose put the movie on, and they both sat on the sofa with me. They quickly became absorbed in what was happening on the screen. How could they care about a movie when he was out there preying on some poor girl? I pictured her scared and confused, fighting him for her freedom. Her eyes, completely made up in my imagination, were too wide, popping out of her head in horror. But was he really doing that? For all we knew, he could be going to bingo and just making himself sound scarier to force us to behave and not fight him. My heart clenched. I wanted to know which one was true.
“Can we get normal TV?” I asked, blinking hard to get the girl’s eyes out of my mind. Would I be on the news? I must be by now.