He clamped the tops of her thighs and forced them apart. She tried to scream again, but the mattress beneath her battered face muffled the sound. She couldn’t draw in sufficient air through either her nose or her split and bleeding lips. She feared suffocating.
But in a black and distant part of her mind, she wished she would.
His thrusts were brutal. His hands held her with bruising strength. His language was obscene, vicious, abasing. It seemed to go on forever.
Then, heaving and hot, he collapsed on top of her, leaden, compressing her lungs, making spears of the ribs he’d broken. But he lifted his hand from her head, allowing her to turn it aside and try to suck in air through her mouth, but nothing was functioning right. His sweat had combined with the cloying scent of his cologne, making her gag. She choked on blood.
Finally he pushed off of her. Standing beside the bed, he righted himself. She heard the rustle of his clothing, the jingle of his belt buckle, the clink of his watch fob. The floorboards creaked under his weight as he crossed the room toward the door. It whooshed open, the clothes hanging on the back of it swishing.
In a voice that was eerily detached, he said, “If you have the misfortune of surviving, and if you breathe a word of this, I’ll tie that brat of yours in a sack and throw him in the Brazos.”
He walked out of the bedroom. He left the house.
Norma was too benumbed to move.
Forty-Five
Laurel baked all day. Recollections of what had happened between Thatcher and her last night were persistent distractions, and her feelings about them ranged from delirium to despair. Work helped to keep those troubling thoughts from swamping her, but they lurked at the fringes of her mind, teasing and tormenting.
While her last batch of pies was cooling, she delivered Clyde Martin’s order to the café. By dusk when the O’Connors showed up, she had pies boxed and ready for them.
“Where’s the whiskey?” Davy asked.
“We’re fresh out. There’s been some trouble. Our distiller had to shut down and relocate in a hurry. I’m hopeful he’ll do a run tonight, but at this point, I just don’t know. In the meantime, we’re in the pie business exclusively.”
The twins took the news with a surprising lack of despondency. “Don’t worry yourself, lovely Laurel,” Davy said. “In view of our recent shortfall, we’ve been courting another supplier to keep us in moonshine should another shortage occur. Which it has. Once we’re up and running again—”
“Wait. What other supplier? Who?”
“Now, Laurel, you know better than to ask,” Mike said. “We can’t give you his name any more than we’d give him yours. It’s all very discreet.”
“Is he reliable?”
“Yes,” Davy said, “but reliability is expensive.”
“How expensive?”
They told her the terms of the deal they’d negotiated, and they were reasonable. Nevertheless, she was leery. “I don’t like having to buy moonshine in order to sell it.”
“A temporary necessity,” Mike said.
His brother added, “And a smaller profit is better than none.”
“Is his whiskey any good?”
“We thought so,” Mike said.
His glazed eyes indicated that he had had more than a sampling, which reassured Laurel not at all. Dividing a stern look between them, she said, “You’re sure of this?”
Davy answered for both. “We wouldn’t let you down, sweetheart.”
Reluctantly, she counted out the currency they would need to purchase the moonshine. “Just this once.”
Before they set off, she pleaded with them, “Please, please be careful. A young man was killed last night right in front of the sheriff’s office.”
“Ah, we heard about that. Tragic for sure. But it’s rumored that it was a family dispute. Nothing to do with us.”
She could have argued that it wasn’t any ol’ family’s dispute, it was a Johnson family dispute, and that if they discovered that it was her still where their kinsman Tup had been maimed, the clan would be gunning for her.