Outside there would be cars, trees, people, music, but for Lucinda, outside no longer existed. In the beginning she tried singing. College songs, camp songs, rock and roll. Anything she could remember, belted out as loudly as she could. The sound of her own voice was comforting, reminding her she was still alive, she still existed. I sing, therefore I am. Back then she hoped the singing might irritate her captor. It did. He hurt her for it. Once he burned her thighs and breasts. Little round burns that scarred and still hurt. He told her that the next time she made so much noise he would burn her face.
Now she lay silent, using memories, vainly, to drive back the numbing fear, to keep the silence from destroying all reason. She concentrated on reliving her childhood day by day, on remembering every detail. Today was a Sunday in summer. She was four, Patti was seven. They sat at the kitchen table in the white frame house on Keepers Lane in North Berwick. They moved from that house two years later, but that was later. Today, Poppy, always up before Mommy on Sunday mornings, was making blueberry pancakes for breakfast. She loved blueberry pancakes. Saliva formed in her mouth at the thought.
The eternal cigarette dangled from Poppy’s lips, an impossibly long ash hanging over the batter, the scent of burning tobacco filling the room. Patti warned Poppy she wouldn’t eat the pancakes if the ash fell in. He cupped his hand under it and walked to the sink, plucked it from his mouth, and held the tiny butt under the water to wash away the ash and extinguish the burning tip. The cigarettes would kill him a few years later, but not yet.
This was the year Poppy bought them the pony. She and Patti. ‘A small thing,’ he told them, though he looked big enough to Lucy. ‘Only thirteen hands high. Fifteen years old.’
Thirteen of whose hands, she’d wondered. Surely not hers, which were so small compared to his own. Not Patti’s, which were only a little bigger.
They named the pony Keener. Poppy said it was because he was always keener to go for a ride than any other pony he had ever known. Patti, who was wise in these things, said it was really because Poppy bought the pony from a farm near Keene in New Hampshire and considered him a Keener, just as they called people from Maine Mainers.
Keener was a leopard Appaloosa, gray with dark spots all over him. As the youngest, Lucinda got to ride him first. Poppy hoisted her up onto the shiny brown leather saddle. English. Not western. No pommel to hold on to, he told her, just the reins. He adjusted the stirrups so her legs would reach. Put a foot in each. Then off they went. Poppy held the pony’s harness. He walked alongside as she rode, talking gently all the while, telling her to hold her back straight, telling her to let Keener know who was in charge. After a bit, without her noticing it, he let go of the harness and she rode on her own for the first time. ‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ Poppy said. ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’
Nothing to be afraid of.
Only the blackness and the man who came to do things to her body and sometimes to hurt her. No food. Just some disgusting chocolate stuff in a can that gave her diarrhea. For the thousandth time she took an inventory of the things in the room. Things she couldn’t see but knew were there. The most important, the bottle of Gatorade on the wooden table by the bed. He told her where to find it. She’d knocked it over once, feeling for it and missing. She’d had to wash the sticky stuff from the floor. He hit her for that.
The only other thing she could find was the bucket in the corner she used as a toilet, and the roll of paper next to it. She supposed he emptied it when he came. The room didn’t seem to smell.
He’d led her to it, the first time. Held her hand while she squatted down and peed. So strange, peeing in the dark, her jailer clutching her hand to keep her from falling. He led her hand to the paper, showing her where it was so she could clean herself. The bottle and the bucket, the bed and the chair. All there was. Her entire universe. Beyond them, just the darkness, the memories, and visits from the man.
‘When will you come again?’ she wondered, longing for sensation. ‘Perhaps if I do the sex well enough, perhaps if I please you well enough, perhaps you won’t, so quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly, quickly …’ She repeated the single word over and over again – but couldn’t give voice to the word that followed.
36
Wednesday. 11:00 A.M.
‘They’re restricting me to desk duty pending the investigation.’ Maggie emerged from Al Blanchard’s office, closing the door behind her. Blanchard was the PPD’s only full-time Internal Affairs officer. He was assisted by a sergeant McCabe didn’t know, someone rotated on a temp basis out of Community Affairs. ‘I’m not supposed to work on the case.’
‘Shit,’ McCabe said, more to himself than to Maggie. He was seated outside, waiting his turn with Internal Affairs.
Maggie sat down next to him. ‘That’s the regs,’ she said. ‘I fired my weapon. IA gets to say if the use of force was appropriate, if I really needed to kill him.’
‘You did.’
‘I didn’t announce myself. I didn’t yell freeze. I just saw him swinging that knife toward your neck and I pulled the trigger.’
‘If you hadn’t killed him, he would’ve killed me,’ said McCabe. ‘He already killed Comisky.’
‘I could have wounded him.’