“No. Yes. I mean, I’ve been to his house before, on the property, but I didn’t—I never made it inside here.”
She laid the side of her head against his jacket. The smell of blood and sweat mingled with the earthy smells of the tiny room. “Are you bleeding?”
“No,” he said, too quickly. “I mean, yeah. I think he put a pretty bad gash in my leg, but I’m alright, Jo.”
“What is this place? What does he use it for?”
Ray didn’t speak for several seconds. The only proof she had that he was still alive was the rise and fall of his chest beneath her cheek. She wondered if he’d fallen asleep. “Ray?”
“He uses it for… I mean, I think he uses it to keep… you know, women.”
Her tone was more strident this time. “‘Keep women?’”
His voice remained calm but sad. “Jo, when you came out here, what did you think you were going to find?”
“Is Isabelle Coleman here?”
“No,” he said with absolute conviction.
“How do you know?”
“Because I know.”
“We’re going to die here,” Josie said.
“No. I won’t let that happen.”
“Because you’re such good friends? You can just ask him to let us go and he’ll do it?”
He gave an exasperated sigh. “Josie.”
“I want the truth, Ray. All of it. How much you know and when you knew it. I need you to keep talking to me, or I’m going to lose it in here.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
“Last year,” he began and she cut him off with a high-pitched, “Last year?”
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“I’m sorry. Go on.”
He took another tack. “You know after things went down between us, I was a little out of control, right?”
She could feel his discomfort in the tensed muscles of his body. Revulsion churned her stomach. “That didn’t happen after we broke up. You were out of control long before that, and you know it.”
“Jo, you know I’m sorry. I don’t know how many times I can say it.”
She didn’t say anything because it was old territory. They’d been over it a thousand times. Ray remembered nothing from the night that had essentially ended their marriage, even before Misty came along.
“Jo, you know I didn’t mean it—”
“Don’t,” she snapped at him. “Just tell me what happened.”
He sighed. “Well, last year, me and Dusty and a bunch of the guys were out drinking. We were really tying one on, you know?”
“Yes, I do know.”
“Jo.”
“Just tell me.”
“I was upset. I was upset about losing you. I knew… I knew things would never be the same. I saw it your eyes every time you looked at me.”
She shook in his arms, half with rage and half with the remembered trauma of that night. “You told Dusty to stay,” she said.
“Dusty always stayed over.”
“You got so drunk, you told him he could fuck me if he wanted—and he tried, Ray.”
She remembered waking from a deep sleep to hands roaming all over her body, thinking it was Ray, and then as she floated closer to consciousness realizing that nothing about the person touching her felt like Ray.
“Dusty was drunk too, Jo.”
“Not as drunk as you, and that doesn’t excuse him. It doesn’t excuse any of it. I was asleep.”
She had sprung out of the bed, hitting and kicking Dusty so furiously that his cries brought Ray up the stairs. He had pulled Dusty away from Josie and, in that moment, she had been relieved. But then she saw his face. His blank eyes. Like he was looking at her but not seeing her at all. They flashed with anger. He had gone after her, calling her a bitch and a whore and accusing her of cheating on him with Dusty. It was at that point that Dusty, standing naked on the other side of the room, had said, “Dude, chill. You told me I could fuck her.”
“Jo, you know I never would have said that if I wasn’t drunk.”
“But you were that drunk, Ray. Drunk, angry, jealous, out of control. Just like your father was with your mother.”
She felt him tense but he said nothing. She was angry with him for what happened, but she hated him because he didn’t remember. He had flown into an explosive rage then, punching Dusty hard enough in the mouth to draw blood. When she told them both to get out, Ray had turned and punched her too. Just like that. He’d hit her so hard she hit the floor.
“You promised you’d never hurt me,” she whispered into the darkness.
“Jo, I’m sorry. I don’t even remember telling Dusty he could… I don’t remember fighting with either of you. I don’t remember any of it.”
“But you remember Dusty telling you about this place?”
“He didn’t tell me, really.”
“Then what happened?”
“The guys were trying to get my mind off you—our problems and all—and they asked Dusty if he had ever taken me to see Ramona. Dusty got real weird, like he didn’t want to talk about it. You know Dusty and I—we’ve been friends a long time. We don’t have many secrets from each other. So I asked him, who’s Ramona. He got real uncomfortable. Like, I could tell he really didn’t want to tell me. But the other guys, it was like they smelled blood, you know? So they really egged him on, but he wouldn’t talk. Then one of the other guys says, ‘Fuck it, let’s take him to see her’, and they… they brought me here.”
He paused for breath. She could feel his muscles twitch beneath her. He went on, “Well, not here, like back here, but to the Gosnells’ house. It was late, and I didn’t know whose house it was at first. Like, I had met Nick a couple of times. He fixed the john at the station house once, and I met him at Dusty’s parents’ house before when he was doing some plumbing there. But I didn’t really know the guy. Anyway, the guys get me out of the car, and we knock on the door to the house and Sherri Gosnell answers. They said they were here to see Ramona.”
“Sherri Gosnell is Ramona?”
Again she felt him shake his head. “No, Ramona is like a code word. Like, you come to the house and ask for her and they bring you here.” She felt him lift one hand to indicate where they were.
She thought of Ginger’s words and shivered. “To a black box like this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t go through with it. Sherri told us to wait and she would get Nick. Then he came out, and he was smiling like he was all happy and it reminded me of that guy at the body shop when we were kids. Remember him? He used to offer girls rides to the mall. Like, why is a grown man with no kids giving thirteen-year-olds rides to the mall, you know? Like, he was a perv.”
Josie swallowed the acid that rose in the back of her throat. “I remember him.”
“Well, that’s exactly how Nick looked. So he says come on back and leads us out into the woods. In the dark. He had one of those battery-operated lanterns. So we’re following him, and I ask Dusty what the hell are we doing, and he says Nick’s got girls. I said what do you mean and he just says, you know, Nick keeps girls back here, and if you know the code word and you’re willing to pay for it, you can come and do whatever you want with them. I asked where does he get the girls and Dusty got all mad at me and told me to shut up and stop being such a pussy.”
“Never mind that you’re all cops,” she muttered. “So, what happened next?”
“Well we get down to the bunker. I can see there’s a door, but before we go inside Dusty gives me this whole thing about how once I go in, there’s no turning back. He kept calling it a brotherhood, like, you can’t rat people out. He said if I said something to the wrong person, it could get me killed. Or you. He kept asking me, are you sure you want to do this, or maybe you should just ask out the stripper at the club.”
“You chose Misty.”
“No. Yes. No, no. I mean, it wasn’t about Misty. The truth is…”
He trailed off and she felt him raise his chin and blow out a long stream of air. “I was scared, okay? I had a bad feeling. Why did he need to threaten me? And there was no light coming from the place or anything. It was just weird. It was weird that you needed a code word. I didn’t really want to know what was on the other side of the door, ’cause if I knew then I would have to do something about it, and—”