I slowed to a stop alongside the fence. There was still a sagging section where my rolling body had smacked into it: twelve years, and Annabelle’s step-dad still hadn’t gotten around to fixing it. There: that’s where she found me. There was the tool shed, where she’d dragged me. Where she’d saved my life by hiding me.
My hands tightened on the handlebars. And how had I repaid her? I’d left her with a necklace and a promise. I’d left her alone for twelve years with...him. I hadn’t known, of course. I’d had no idea how much of a bastard her step-dad was. I hadn’t known he’d do something as unthinkable as selling her. But that didn’t stop the knowledge from knotting me up inside.
I knew now.#p#分页标题#e#
I climbed off my bike, unstrapped Caorthannach and brandished her in both hands. The rage built with every step I took towards the house, like I was soaking up all the evil in this place through the soles of my boots.
I realized I was going to enjoy this. I was going to enjoy beating the information out of him.
Ten years ago, the fields in front of the house had been full of dusty, dead maize. Now they were barren dirt. This was barely even a farm, anymore, just a slowly rotting house in a dead plot. I opened the screen door...and then, on instinct, I tried the door handle. It turned and the door swung open. I caught my breath, hands curling into fists, waiting for him to run at me...but no one appeared.
I stalked inside. Had he heard me approach? Was he lurking somewhere with a gun? I checked the living room: nothing. The kitchen: nothing. Upstairs, then.
I crept up the stairs as quietly as I could, wincing at every creak. But still no one appeared out of the shadows. The afternoon sunlight was lancing through windows, pinning motes of dust in midair. It was eerily quiet.
I checked each room I came to. One of them, I figured, was his bedroom: it stank and the bed looked used. But it was as empty as the rest.
Eventually, there was only one room left. Annabelle was hand-painted in big, blue and red balloon letters on the door, together with a butterfly. The whole thing had been painted over at some point, but whoever had done it had only used one coat of white and the colors still showed through.
I slowly pushed it open, holding my breath. I was expecting to find the step-dad holding a shotgun.
No one. He wasn’t home. So why had the front door been unlocked?
The closet was wide open. Inside, there was nothing but empty hangers swaying in the breeze from the open window. That made no sense, either. Annabelle hadn’t taken anything with her to the auction: I’d had to buy her new clothes. The drawers were empty, too. Pretty much all that was left in the room was a bookshelf on the wall: some very old books on engineering and—
I frowned at the thick book someone had carefully covered in paper and then in plastic to make it last. A Harley had been sketched on the spine, every line lovingly hand-drawn in pencil. I pulled it down and opened it at a random page. It took me several pages to realize I was looking at her diary.
She hadn’t written in it every day. She’d saved it for the really good times and the really bad times: the ones she wanted to remember and the ones she wanted to cleanse from her soul by trapping them in ink.
There were a lot more bad times than good times. I could tell the really bad ones by the circular stains that marked her tears.
Every page I turned notched the anger inside me higher. I knew reading it was wrong but I couldn’t stop.
I read about her mom dying, my chest growing tight.
I read about her step-dad hitting her and then letching after her, my fingers gripping the pages so hard I almost tore them.
It wasn’t just what had happened to her; it was how she dealt with it. Maybe she hadn’t even known she was doing it at the time, but she’d doodle things in the margin: motorbikes, leather cuts, even a good rendition of the Hell’s Princes logo. I could imagine her sitting there, tears in her eyes, drawing to work up courage to describe her day. I’d given her courage. Memories of me. I’d been her escape.
But it was worse than that. Carrick, it said, just after each bad day. Like writing it was her way of drawing a line underneath. Carrick. Carrick, Carrick, Carrick.
I’d been her rescue plan for twelve fucking years.
The rage was so strong, I could barely breathe. At first, my name was in elaborate balloon letters. As she got older, it became brutal and hard: dangerous and exciting. When she was in her late teens, it became sensual and flowing. And when she was an adult...it started to get smaller and smaller.#p#分页标题#e#
She’d given up hope.
I swung at the closest thing: the bookshelf on the wall. My fist snapped off the bracket that supported it and the whole thing tumbled to the bed, spilling a flood of books.