The Count of Carolina, page 11
part #2 of A Clean Up Crew Series
Gail’s expression belied her own emotional twist-up. “An awful problem either way. I hope you’re able to figure it out.”
“Oh, I’ll figure it out. I just don’t know how my decision will sit with me after everything is said and done.”
Gail opened the front door of her home and Nicole stepped out. “Maybe,” the handler said, “you should think about getting some sleep.”
“Okay,” Nicole said moving to the SUV, “I just thought about it. I’ll text you if I need anything else.”
With that, she was in the Rogue and pulling out of the driveway. Gail watched as the trail of dust once more formed behind Nicole as she sped away. I can’t even imagine, she thought, realizing the turmoil the cleaner was going through. And I pray I never can.
11
Staggering Into the Sleep of the Condemned
Nicole pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, realizing that she remembered nothing of the drive. She wondered if there’d been any close calls, since she was essentially a high-functioning zombie. She did a quick walk around of the rental and found no damage. Damn, I hate when I do that, she thought.
This time, there was no call from the front desk that a message was waiting as she entered the lobby, even though she half-expected another call from Darlene. But she supposed if anyone had tried to reach them, Dan would have taken the call.
God, I’m exhausted, she finally allowed herself to admit. The elevator doors closed her in. The absence of any other people and the faint hum of the mechanism made it feel womb-like to her. She moaned a little, then shook her head, realizing she’d been drifting off. The tone indicating she’d reached her floor a few seconds later startled her awake a second time.
By the time she reached the door of their room, Nicole could barely work the keycard. On her third failed attempt, Dan opened it from within.
“Jesus, Coley, you look like shit,” he said, realizing instantly that was a stupid thing to say.
Nicole brushed off the insult along with the attention. “I’m sure I do,” she said. She stumbled and Dan caught her.
“You’re lying down. Right now,” he said, his tone nullifying any potential rebuttal.
“Alright! Jesus Christ, Dan. Can’t a girl even stumble under the stupor of exhaustion anymore? What a world. What a world.”
“Nice Wizard of Oz reference. I’ll just take those ruby slippers,” Dan said, helping Nicole ease onto the bed and gently removing her shoes.
“Thanks. Okay, we can talk while I stretch out for a bit, but then it’s back to work.”
Dan smiled. He realized there was no point in trying to talk her out of filling him in, but at the same time, he knew that she wasn’t going to be talking for long. Not even the Legendary Nicole could stave off sleep for long when she was this drained.
“I talked with Gail. She showed me a picture of my mark. If nothing else, he certainly looks like a nasty creeper. She also shared some doubts…”
Dan waited a moment, then realized his wife had finally given in. Her slow, steady breathing caused him to smile once more.
“I didn’t like that part about the handler having doubts,” said J.J., who had been sitting in the room’s most comfortable chair reading a fantasy novel from her father’s Kindle as Dan had helped her mom.
“What?” Dan asked, turning to face her.
“Didn’t you hear what she said right before she crashed? ‘She also had some doubts?’”
“Actually, think she said, ‘shared some doubts.’”
“Whatever, Dad. Shit! Not the time!”
“Relax. Yes, I heard her. I’m guessing there’s quite a bit more to the story. But right now, your mother needs to sleep way more than we need to know about Gail’s doubts.”
The whirlwind of activity whipped into a froth by stress and adrenal gland fluctuation made for fitful sleep. As much as Nicole’s mind needed the sleep, it did not rest, even in her exhausted collapse.
Instead, as if commandeered by some psychopathic projectionist, it played a series of painful vignettes, beginning with the day of her mother’s funeral. That was the day Conrad had told the ten-year-old girl things were going to change around the Barker house. That she would need to begin to pull her weight. The little girl in the dream had no idea what this meant, but she was soon to learn.
Next, the dream shifted to a series of men’s faces, first hovering above her, contorted in exertion and pleasure, then beneath her, lifeless and gray-skinned, with a ragged piece of meat shoved into their mouths.
And finally, she saw herself as she looked today, looking at Clyde Davis and Conrad from behind. She had them right where she wanted them, as they gazed downward at a small cot set up in a remote shack. She raised the gun and leveled it. Then she heard the voice of her daughter from the cot. Mercifully, she could not see her daughter’s face, but clearly heard her call out, “No, I don’t want to… I SAID NO, CONRAD!”
With a gasp, she awoke. She looked to see Dan and J.J., seated together on the room’s sofa. The television was still on, a rerun of Golden Girls, but both her husband and daughter were asleep, J.J.’s head resting on her father’s shoulder, his arm around her shoulder. She was safe. They were all safe. But for how long?
As quietly as she could, Nicole climbed out of the bed and shut the bathroom door behind her before turning on the light. She looked at herself in the mirror. Dan was right. She did look like shit. A little of the exhaustion so clearly stamped there earlier was gone now, but the lines on her face were uncharacteristically deep and pronounced, and her skin tone did not display its usual vibrant glow. Even as she splashed it with cold water, Nicole knew it was not the strain of losing, then recovering her daughter. It was not even completely a matter of her ambiguous feelings toward the job, and the potential new danger to her daughter.
No, Nicole knew exactly why she was suffering. Suffering to a degree she hoped she would never experience again. Because she knew that until people like Conrad and Clyde, and maybe Nathan Lewis were stopped, she’d have no relief, and she would never be safe. None of them would.
It was time. It was finally time.
“I need you both to wake up,” Nicole said, softly putting a hand on each of their shoulders and gently shaking them. Dan’s eyes fluttered open first, followed an instant later by J.J.’s.
“What is it?” Dan asked, a hint of quick panic around the edges of his voice.
“Relax,” she said. “Everything’s fine. I just need to talk to you both.”
“What, Mom?” J.J. asked, holding out her hand to her mother. Nicole took it, gently holding it between hers as she sat beside her daughter.
“It’s a secret I’ve kept even longer than my work with Cleanup Crew. It’s how I became involved in the first place. I don’t expect it’s going to be easy for either of you to hear. It’s definitely not going to be any fun hearing the words out loud myself.”
Dan reached across his daughter and touched her face. “Are you sure? You don’t have to, you know. It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right. And I do have to. Especially now, with what has to come next.”
“Mom, you’re scaring me a little,” J.J. said.
“Good. You should be scared. It’s a scary story, and it begins with the death of Jennifer Barker.”
12
Crossing A Line
“My name is not Nicole,” she began, pausing for a second to gauge reaction. “I was born June Barker, no middle name, only child of two seemingly normal parents, and for ten years, I led a pretty much normal, carefree life. But then my mom got sick. She started to show signs right around the time of my birthday in February and…”
“Hold on,” Dan interrupted. “Your birthday is in July.”
“Nicole’s is. June’s is in February. Jesus, Danny, don’t let that throw you. You haven’t heard anything yet. So my mom got sick. It was ovarian cancer, and by the time she found out for sure what it was, it was already too late. She died in May.”
“Wow, that was fast,” J.J. said.
“It was, and it marked the beginning of a life of hell for me. Because I quickly learned that the reason the first nine years had been good was because I had Mama to stand between Daddy and me. And he didn’t wait long to prove it.
“Daddy had done fairly well for himself, rising above some very hardscrabble times in the deep country outside the city in his youth to become a successful contractor. He bought a nice house in Greenville, found a wife, and had a daughter. But he never lost touch with the country and the people who live there. That’s an important point.”
Dan and J.J. had both shifted on the sofa slightly, so that they were turned fully facing Nicole, their bodies as tight as a bowstring as she continued.
“On the day we buried my mother, right after her service, in fact, Daddy said, ‘We’re gonna take a little ride into the country. Time you learned where you come from.’ We left the graveyard and started out toward the west of the city, toward the Lake Hartwell area. Daddy went on, ‘Now you’re ten, and you got no mama, so it’s time for you to start pulling your weight. There’s not much you know how to do, so you’re going to need to learn a skill, and you’re going to start today.’” Nicole paused, drawing in a deep breath.
“We drove for what seemed like hours. I was actually a little excited. The thought of being able to do something to help my daddy sounded good to me. If he was anywhere near as sad as I was about my mama passing, then anything I could do to help sounded good to me. God, I was stupid.
“Anyway, we eventually arrived at a shack so far in the woods, I thought my father had lost his way a couple of times getting to it. Outside, sitting in a chair that was leaned back on its two rear legs was a man I knew as Uncle Clyde. He wasn’t really my dad’s brother, but he’d always been around… a friend from school or something. Uncle Clyde had always made me nervous when I was little. There was something about the way he looked at me. I remember thinking as we walked toward the shack that it looked like Uncle Clyde’s chair leaning against it like that was probably the only thing keeping the whole place from falling over.
“When we got to him, Clyde just kept sitting there. He was wearing a beat-up camo ball cap, and the brim was pulled down low, but I could still see his eyes peering out from underneath, looking at me that same way. ‘Now this is where you’re gonna earn your keep. Your Uncle Clyde here is going to teach you what you have to do. This time it’s for free, because your uncle has been waiting for this a long time. But everyone after him pays.’ I had no idea what he meant by that, but I didn’t think I liked the sound of it. I was pretty sure by that point I didn’t like any of it. I sure wasn’t excited about ‘pulling my weight’ anymore.”
“Finally, Uncle Clyde sat forward and let the chair’s front two legs settle on the rickety stoop. I still thought the shed might topple, so I kind of only half-saw Clyde stand up. He was a scrawny thing. At ten, I was almost as tall as him. But suddenly, his little boy hand was on my shoulder. ‘Come on, Junie,’ he said. ‘Time for you to become a woman.’”
“Oh, God. No,” Dan said. His chest felt constricted as Nicole continued.
“Clyde led me inside. There was no door. There had been once, because there were indentations where the hinges had been. No one ever told me why, and I never asked, but my theory was always that the shit-box had listed so far off-kilter that it probably didn’t fit in the opening anymore.”
J.J. had thus far shown no emotion. She was working very hard to maintain her calm, the better to hear everything, including the nuances of what her mother was saying. As Nicole paused for a second, seemingly to refocus, J.J. thought about how she kept remembering details as if she could actually see them. She realized Nicole was using them to keep from getting to the heart of the story.
When Nicole began again, she was still focused on the details of the setting. “As soon as I was inside, I wanted to throw up. Not because of the situation. Not yet. I still had no idea what was happening. My nausea was a reaction to the shed itself. I had been to farms before, and I had smelled some pretty horrible stuff, but never anything like that place. It’s tough to even begin to identify what it was like. Remember when we found that dead possum under the porch, J.J.?”
“Mm-hmm,” her daughter answered.
“Well, it was kind of like that, with sour milk and a pinch of raw sewage mixed in. There was only one thing inside the shack. It was an old wooden cot, with the filthiest bare mattress I’d ever seen. It was ancient, tired. The outer fabric was loose, as though it was too big for the little bit of stuffing inside. I thought the wind through the open door was making it ripple, but as I got a little closer, I realized the motion I saw was actually the bugs crawling all over it.
“Uncle Clyde was pulling off his shirt as he walked over towards the bed, and he used it to make a few swipes across the mattress, causing most of the insects to scatter. Then he turned to me and he said, ‘Now Junie, do you like things when they’re rough and painful, or when they’re nice? Nice and gentle?’
“I was still clueless. I knew this place was gross, and that I didn’t want to be there. I knew Uncle Clyde had always been kind of creepy, but he’d never done anything bad. He’d never hurt me. ‘Gentle,’ I remember saying in a squeaky little voice.
“’I thought you probably did. Well, here’s the thing about Uncle Clyde…’ he said as he started to undo his belt. “‘…Uncle Clyde likes it when things are a little rough and a little painful.’”
Nicole stopped again. Dan feared she might begin to cry, and he thought about getting up and moving down to sit beside her. But when he looked at her, it was not tears he saw. It was anger.
“That was the first moment I started to realize that something very bad was about to go down. I have always been so mad at little June for not knowing what was going to happen to her. Even then, I only thought he was getting ready to give me a whipping, and that was horrifying enough. But of course, it was much worse.”
This time when Nicole paused, she did cry. Dan quickly moved to her, and J.J. put a hand on her mother’s arm. It was several minutes before she could continue.
“I’m not going into detail about what he did to me. I’ll just say he took his job of teaching me all I would need to know about this ‘job’ very seriously. He didn’t stop until he was sure he’d covered everything. And for a little piece of shit, he was… big.” She did not expand on the topic. The delivery of her story had become very broken. She went on, but fitfully.
“After Clyde, it was a man named Clark Brockway. He was different. Clean, for one thing. Not stupid either. Sometimes he liked to talk. But not very often. He liked things rough and painful too.” Between each sentence, Nicole would draw in a sobbing gulp of air.
“After Clark, it was Adam Jeffers. Then Jacob Green. He used to say he was descended from General Nathanael Greene, the guy this whole cesspool of a town is named after. And just like a cesspool, he too was full of shit. But he was a doctor, and that turned out to be important as that first day did some bad things to little Junie’s body.”
J.J., still gently rubbing Nicole’s arm, noted that even as distraught as she clearly was, she continued to display her flair for wordplay.
“Anyway, after Jacob, it was… someone else. And then someone else again. A whole bunch of elses and a whole bunch of agains.”
“How long?” asked Dan. His voice startled everyone, as if a spell had been broken.
Nicole looked at his face. “How long that day? Or how many days?” She shrugged as she responded with her own questions.
“Jesus. Never mind. I don’t want to know either.”
J.J. could tell her father was just processing all this the best he could. Unfortunately, his best wasn’t that great, and he was annoying her a little.
“Well, sorry, because that’s where this story is headed. You see, this went on, more or less every day, for almost seven years. It was rarely like that first day had been. Usually only one, now and then two, but not…” She tailed off. But with a quick shake of her head, she pressed on. “There were ten of them in Daddy’s little fraternity, his little gentleman’s club. Eleven if you count Uncle Clyde. Like Daddy had said the first day, only the first one was free, and Uncle Clyde couldn’t afford what the other ten handed over to Daddy. Daddy always waited outside. As if there really was a difference between inside and outside at that place.
“A few of them stopped coming to the shack after a while. By that point, there wasn’t much about it that I didn’t understand, or couldn’t figure out, and I knew that they stopped coming because I didn’t look like a little girl anymore. Once my body began to mature, they moved on to other victims.
“But some still visited, right up to the end.” Again, Nicole’s voice changed, especially when she spoke the final two words. An absolutely chilling hardness had moved into the center of it.
“The end?” J.J. said, encouraging her to go on.
Nicole nodded. “Oh yes. I was just a month shy of turning seventeen. The shack was cold, but that didn’t stop the nightmare. Daddy just stuck a kerosene heater near the cot. To be honest, the winter months were better, because when the temperature got down near the thirties at night, the bugs tended to be less active. That day, there had been all three of my remaining ‘patrons,’ and it was late. The cabin was dark when the third guy left. It was Adam Jeffers. I assumed it was over for the night and I lay on my back, staring up at the blackness of the shack’s interior. All of a sudden, the cabin was filled with light, as Daddy walked in with a camping lantern. It was the first time he’d ever come into the building in the six plus years this had been going on. I was naked and ashamed for my father to see me like that, so I tried to cover myself with my hands, as there was nothing on the bed except me and a few of the hardiest insects.
