Left for Dead: A gripping psychological thriller (12 page)

“Nhung.”

“Thank you for the food, Nhung, and for looking after me.” I pick up the mug of tea on the side table and take a sip. “I’m Amelia Kellaway. What is the date please?”

“Date?”

“Day of the month?”

“Seventeenth.”

“Of September?”

“October.”

“You’re joking.” I’ve been lost in the wilderness for over a month.

I’m overcome with emotion and bury my face in my hands and cry. “I thought I was going to die out there.”

“The man who took you, he interfere with you?”

“Yes.”

“Son of bitch.”

The crying drains me and I’m sleepy again. I lie back down in the nest of blankets and watch the flames bob in the hearth.

“Don’t you get lonely out here all by yourself?” But I fall asleep before I can hear the answer.

33

For the next three days snow keeps us inside, apart from when Nhung bundles herself up in a heavy-duty jacket and ventures out to the backyard to empty the ash pan or feed her small menagerie of animals that consists of, as far as I can tell from my vantage point in the kitchen window, two pigs, three goats, four sheep, an unspecified number of chickens, and a deer. Nhung tells me the cabin is powered by a generator, which is powered by gasoline that Nhung keeps in the barn. She doesn’t have a working vehicle and because it’s a two-day walk to the closest neighbor, someone from the county drops off supplies once every two months.

The next visit is due in five weeks. We both know that’s too long to wait. My foot is getting worse despite Nhung’s best efforts and her twice daily treatments of applying her pungent concoction, a lumpy brown paste that smells vaguely of spoiled milk. The foot is totally useless and I can’t put any weight on it. A grape color has started to climb my calf like a vine.

In the barn there’s a dusty long-range two-way radio and Nhung retrieves it and every three hours winds it up to call for assistance. But the radio is old and Nhung tells me it often stops working during big snowfalls and storms and for other unexplained reasons. It belonged to her husband, Jack. The man in the photo. As a sixteen-year-old, she met Jack at a refugee camp in the 1970s when she and her family fled the Khmer Rouge. He was an American military liaison officer.

“Jack worked for the man who own this land—Mr. Hawkins, oil refinery man. He very rich and like Jack a lot. He help build this house and let us stay for as long as we want. That twenty year ago now. Then Jack got sick.”

“I’m sorry.”

Nhung frowns and smoothes more ointment onto my dismal foot.

“The cancer,” she says.

She nods toward the window. “He under the ponderosa.”

I think about how every night Nhung kneels in front of the tiny shrine, chanting softly, palms pressed together in prayer, the flame of the candle bobbing with her breath.

“You had no children?” I say.

She shakes her head. “Born still.”

Wiping the ointment from her hands with a cloth, Nhung lifts her shirt to reveal a zigzag of scars across her lower abdomen, bulbous and red and thickened with time. It looks like she’s been hacked at with a blunt piece of tin.

“Two boy, one girl,” Nhung says as she slips her shirt back into her pants. “Khmer rape me when I ten. Hurt inside where baby grow.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She tucks a wisp of gray hair behind her ear. “Sons of bitches will go to hell.”

She turns her attention back to my foot and finishes with the ointment then wraps it with a bandage. She looks at me. I know what she’s thinking. She mentioned it yesterday when she unfurled the bandage, sodden with my bodily fluids, and threw it into the fire like she’d done with the rest. The two-day walk to the neighbors’.

I grasp her hand. “Don’t leave me.”

“You need doctor.”

I grasp tighter. “
Please.
”

“Okay,” she says finally, getting to her feet. “I try radio again.”

*

I shudder awake. It’s night. The firelight draws an apricot ghost on the ceiling. Nhung is at the window looking out. She glances at me when she sees me awake.

“I get through. Someone be here soon. Take you back. See doctor. Police.”

Police.
Real life. I don’t like the sound of it, perverse as it seems, given what I’ve been through. Logically I know I can’t stay here in the warm, safe bubble of Nhung’s home, but nothing about any of this is logical. I fight the urge to tell Nhung that I don’t want to go and instead let her help me to her bedroom, the only other room in the cabin.

She points to the old-fashioned pitcher and basin of steaming water. “You wash. Put on fresh clothes.”

She leaves me and I gla
n
ce around at the neat plain walls, the large bookcase stacked with Harlequin romance novels, the crumpled black-and-white photograph wedged beneath the frame of the mirror—her and four siblings and mother and a bespectacled man who must be her father.

I remove the flannel nightgown and dip the cloth in the water and wipe my skin. I turn to look in the mirror. Reflected back is a body I don’t recognize, thin and slack and covered with bruises. I run a fingertip over the tracks of my ribs and say a prayer of thanks to my body for carrying me to Nhung.

I slip into fresh clothes that smell like lemon soap, and walk over to the bookshelf and select a well-thumbed Harlequin. I tear out the blank back page and pick up the pen from the dresser and write
Thank you
then put the note under Nhung’s pillow.

There’s a rumble outside. A car engine. I sit down on the end of the bed and take a deep breath. I think of all that’s to come—the city they will take me to, the doctors who will inspect and swab, the probing questions of detectives with pens and note pads, the explaining myself over and over. For a moment, I consider opening the window and fleeing back into the woods.

But before I can make good on this insane impulse, I hear the snap of the car door close, followed by a crunch of boots then voices in greeting.

It’s time. There’s no going back. I get to my feet, smooth down the bedspread, and hobble over and open the door. I blink, confused, at Nhung and the man standing next to her.

“Hello, Amelia,” says Rex. “I heard you were having a lick of trouble.”

34

I can’t move. The air has been sucked from the room. Rex in blue jeans. Plaid flannel shirt. Green puffer jacket with a Hawkins Oil Refinery logo.

I plunge a knuckle in my eye. Open. Blink. He’s still there.

“This Mr. Hawkins,” says Nhung. “Jack’s old boss. He good guy. He look after you now.” She stares at me and frowns. “What wrong? You white ghost.”

My mouth is cotton. I glance at Nhung, who is looking at Rex like he’s the greatest American hero, and I begin to doubt myself. Maybe it’s not him. Maybe it could just be the fact he’s a man. Maybe my fried brain is making all the wrong connections. I shake my head, literally shake my head, and look again. Then he does that thing, lifts his forefinger to rub the spot just above his top lip, and I know this is no mistake.

“You’re bleeding,” says Nhung, pointing.

I glance down. Blood is trickling down the inside of my thigh. I look at Rex.

“It’s him,” I say.

“What you mean?”

Rex turns to Nhung. “I put a gas can out the back for the generator. That should see you through the month.”

“He’s the one that took me from the parking lot.”

“And a sack of feed for the chickens.”

“The one who raped me.”

Rex looks at Nhung. “It’s the shock, Nhung. I take no offense.”

Nhung pauses and stares at me. “You confused. Mr. Hawkins our neighbor. Respected community man. He good guy.”

I take a step back. “He kidnapped me and took me to the woods and raped me and left me for dead.”

Nhung shakes her head, glances at Rex. “Don’t say these things.”

“It’s him. I know it is,” I say.

Rex places his hands on Nhung’s shoulders and looks at me over the top of her head.

“Trauma can do funny things to a person, Nhung,” he says. “Amelia will be better once the doctor sees her. Speaking of which, we should get going before that second snow front moves in.”

I take a step back. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

I glance to my right, see the shotgun in the kitchen corner, way out of reach.

“I wouldn’t,” says Rex, following my eyes.

“Leave us alone.” My voice trembles and I hate the way it sounds so weak. “Get in your car. Turn on the ignition, just drive away.”

“So you can report me to the police? Oh no, Amelia, jail isn’t for me.”

Nhung frowns. “What you saying, Mr. Hawkins?”

“What I’m saying, Nhung, is that Amelia here is a problem and so are you.”

Nhung pivots to look at Rex, but his hands close around her throat and he tightens his grip.

“Stop it!” I cry.

But he’s not listening. His jaw is set, determined, as if he’s breaking concrete with a pneumatic drill. Nhung tries to pry his hands away and swings her head back and forth, but it does no good. I lunge for him and jump on his back and gouge his eyes. He cries out and flings me off and I tumble backward and knock my head on the stove. Glass jars fall from the shelf above and shatter on the ground. Momentarily stunned, I need a few seconds to focus. When I look up, a limp Nhung is sliding from his hands onto the floor. Poor sweet, innocent Nhung.

He takes two steps toward me. I stagger to my feet and press myself against the wall.

“Stay away from me.”

I glance at the door. Outside is his truck. A chance to get away. I bolt. Rex grabs me, hands locking around my throat. I struggle and kick and try to knee him in the groin but the edges are growing closer and grayer, like I’m too far underwater to get back to the surface. I taste blood, feel the gristle of my tongue between my teeth. I try one last time to elbow him in the gut, but it lands softly, and I hear him laugh and whisper in my ear.

“Always the fighter.”

35

I open my eyes. I am in a sitting position, upright against the kitchen wall. Tiny cubes of glass are stabbing my thighs. Something is stuffed in my underwear, a dishcloth.

“You weren’t fooling this time, you really did get your monthly.”

Rex sits on the floor directly opposite, gun resting on his thigh. Just behind him, Nhung is lying prone and still.

“She’s in a better place,” he says, not turning around.

There’s a bloody half-crescent under his eye from where I gouged him that’s beginning to bruise.

“I’m proud of you, Amelia, really proud. You survived out there when most wouldn’t have stood a chance. I underestimated you.”

I squint at him through the gauze of pain. How can any of this be real? How can Nhung be dead? How can Rex be here?

“Please, I can’t take anymore.”

“Don’t be weak,” he says, sharply. “That’s not you.”

“Why don’t you just shoot me?”

He shrugs. “Maybe I want you to stick around for a while.” He leans close. “Maybe I’m beginning to respect you.”

He takes a breath and runs a hand over his face.

“You know I once saved a car full of kids? Their white trash mother pushed the minivan right into the lake. She was standing on the bank watching it sink when I drove past. When I got out of my truck, I saw three kids slapping the windows and hollering for help, and she was just standing there like it was any other day. I dove in, smashed the glass, pulled them out one by one, even gave the smallest boy mouth-to-mouth until the ambulance got there.” He blinks at me. “What kind of mother would do that to her own kin?”

I close my eyes. Everything hurts. Every muscle and joint. Every fiber of my being. The sound of his voice.

“I’m not all bad, Amelia.”

I think of the wolf.

“Open your eyes, Amelia.”

I think of how close I was to making it home.

“Look at me.”

I pry open my lids.

“Tell me about the day he left.”

“Who?”

“Your pop.”

Did his cruelty know no bounds? Did he have to take everything from me?

“Easy guess, Amelia. You have that little girl lost quality. There’s a loneliness in you. I have it, too. I know what it’s like when people let you down. It leaves you with a hole that can’t be filled.”

“I won’t talk about that.”

“It must have hurt to know he didn’t want you. Did you cry yourself to sleep?”

“Please be quiet.”

“Did you see his likeness in every suburban mall? Curl up with his favorite shirt? Miss him at the Christmas table?”

“Stop it.”

“Amelia, tell me about the pain.”

“It nearly destroyed me—is that what you want to hear?”