Million Dollar Road (7 page)

But nobody had warned her and Brett had gotten the one thing he wanted on the dark edge of the parking lot, in the cab of his truck after the game ended. In the most matter-of-fact way possible, he locked the doors. Then . . . he was all over her. Frightened and confused at first, Lireinne tried to fight him off, but he'd been too strong. In the end, she just gave up, quit struggling, and let Brett do it to her. She could only sob through her terror, her humiliation, and her pain. Outside the fogged windows of the truck in the cold January night, the other kids were getting in their cars, laughing, and shouting directions to one another to the postgame bonfire. Brett had casually put his big-knuckled hand over her mouth when she'd tried to scream out loud, calling to somebody, anybody, to help her.

Nobody would have cared anyway, not even if they'd heard that one cry. Who the hell was Lireinne Hooten? Brett hadn't even bothered to take off his LSU cap when he raped her, just ripped off her panties and held her down. Then, when he was done he'd driven back to the trailer without a word, as though Lireinne were something he'd picked up on the way, a blubbering bag of groceries slumped beside him on the front seat of his truck. He didn't even say good night.

And then the next day at school Brett had looked right through her like she was invisible again. That had been only what she expected, but she soon discovered that the word had rapidly gotten around that she was easy—whispers and mocking remarks, catcalls and the occasional shove into the lockers. Lireinne thought that her morning couldn't be any more of a nightmare, until she screwed up her courage and went to the school guidance office.

“You say Brett
Schenker
assaulted you?”

The counselor, wide-hipped Mrs. Cooper, had peered at Lireinne over the tops of her rimless glasses. The Schenkers, a huge clan entrenched in local politics, was an important Covington High booster family, always showing up with trays of cupcakes for bake sales and running the concession stands at the games. Nobody at school had ever known Lireinne Hooten from Adam's freaking housecat. This was her first trip to the guidance office in the two years she'd been at Covington High.

“Why didn't you call the police?”

Mrs. Cooper got up, turning her back to Lireinne to pick dead leaves off the discouraged philodendron on the sill behind her desk. “It seems . . .
odd
to me that you didn't.”

How was Lireinne to explain that she'd been terrified, nearly out of her mind with the paralyzing knowledge that if she called the cops, Bud would have to be told?

Talking about it to Mrs. Cooper had been bad enough, and nothing came out of
that
but a piece of paper with the date-rape crisis-counseling hotline number on it—oh, and a Kleenex to wipe her eyes. No, if he found out what Brett had done to her, Bud would've killed Brett for sure, and when he did, Lireinne had no doubt that he'd have ended up in jail for the rest of his life. Her stepfather hadn't even known she'd gone out with a boy. He'd been working late again, so she'd had to leave before she could tell him about her date.

Besides, whatever evidence to the rape there might have been was washed away. Trembling, white-faced, and tearstained, that night Lireinne had disappeared into the bathroom as soon as she stumbled in the trailer's door. Wolf was so deep into his Xbox he barely looked up, but she'd been glad for that. She wasn't going to talk about what had happened to anybody, not if she could help it.

Under the rain of the shower, Lireinne sobbed her disbelief and shame into her hands until long after the hot water had run out. The tears hadn't run out. Tears fell silently throughout the night until just before dawn, when her stepfather had headed off to work. As soon as the sound of his truck on the shell road faded, Lireinne ran outside and threw what she'd worn—her underwear, her nicest sweater, and a practically new pair of jeans—onto the burn pile, doused everything with diesel, and tossed a match on her clothes. Stony-eyed, Lireinne had decided that was the only way to begin to put Brett's assault behind her.

So, no evidence, not that it would've done any good anyhow. Nobody was going to believe her, now that everyone was calling her a whore.

And after a couple of hopeless anger-and-shame-filled months, the talk did die down some. But having to see Brett in the halls, strutting his newfound reputation as a ladies' man like a rooster, his life untouched while hers had been ruined, was one of the reasons—the main reason, really—dropping out of Covington High became a no-brainer for Lireinne. It wasn't any part of the reasons she'd shared with Bud. God, no. By then she only wanted to forget that night had ever happened. Lireinne had learned it wasn't that great, being noticed.

Already more than a few pounds overweight, those hateful months had been the start of the binge-eating, too. Food was a poor comfort, but it was better than none at all. She gained another fifteen pounds before she left school, as though she was hiding behind the layers of fat from the knowing, giggling whispers and dirty sniggers that had followed her in the halls. A reputation for being easy was bad. Fat and easy was worse. No, Lireinne had fled Covington High. That was the truth.

It was one thing working at the alligator farm had done for her: she'd lost the shame-weight and then some, and finding her body again after having lost it for a year had been . . . liberating.

Not as good as that night having never happened, but it was better than nothing.

 

Today her boss had freaked Lireinne out some, but at the same time the experience had been, well, kind of heady—as though she could have snapped her fingers and he'd have sat up like a dog. It was an unaccustomed feeling, one she'd never felt before in her life, but it probably didn't mean much. She was just a hoser. Would Mr. Costello look at her like that again if they ran into each other at the alligator farm? Lireinne wondered how she'd feel about it if he did.

“Hey, Bud.” They were in town at last. The old truck's tires crunched across the gravel as they turned into the lot at Ricky Montz's feed store. “Do you think I'm pretty?” Lireinne asked, trying to sound as though his answer wouldn't be important to her.

Bud didn't hesitate. “Sure are, honey. Pretty as a picture.” He shut off the loud roar of the diesel engine. In the sudden quiet he looked out the bug-streaked windshield, his eyes fixed on nothing, his face still.

“Just like your mother,” he said after a long moment.

That was way unusual, Bud bringing up the subject of her mother. Normally, he didn't volunteer much about his ex-wife and Lireinne was more than good with that. She knew all she needed to know about that bitch already.

Her mouth twisted. “Like, not exactly what I wanted to hear, but thanks anyhow.”

Lireinne's no-good mother had left Bud eleven years ago, left him for another man and a job as a blackjack dealer down in Biloxi when the big casinos had opened. She'd walked out on her kids, too, and never called, never even sent them so much as a Christmas card. Her daughter from an anonymous, previous liaison and her son by Bud were left behind like a litter of kittens that nobody wanted. Lireinne had no idea who her real dad had been and neither did anyone else. From the little she knew, she'd surmised that there had been too many men to count before Bud had stepped up and married her mother.

Lireinne herself had only a few memories of the woman who'd given birth to her. She remembered her mother had smoked, that she spent a lot of time on the phone, and she knew how to make fudge. That was about it, if you didn't count the fact that she'd been beautiful. According to the reluctant, spotty information Bud had let drop, though, before he'd been in the picture, ever since she was born, Lireinne had been passed around from relative to relative up in Tylertown, Mississippi while her mother, still a teenager, had run wild across three counties.

Apparently, she'd blown through those family relationships like a twister before Lireinne was three and her mother turned twenty. This was why none of Lireinne's Mississippi relatives wanted anything more to do with the irresponsible, unwed mother, nor with the solemn, quiet toddler who was dropped off for months at a time without even any money for her care. Lireinne only had a few memories of those years: the cramped trailers and small houses with too many kids in them, being hungry a lot, how nobody ever came to see what was wrong when she cried. Only her grandmother had been kind to her, giving Lireinne hugs, pieces of candy, and once, a pink stuffed bear. The bear was long gone, and her grandmother was dead now.

No, after they were shut of her, nobody else from Tylertown had wanted to know Lireinne, and now Lireinne didn't want to know anything about them or her mother either. Every bridge had been thoroughly burned, which was likely the only reason that bitch had bothered to marry Bud at all. She'd needed him to support her, and then when she found a new sucker, she just took off without a backward glance.

Except for Wolf, Bud was the only one who'd given a damn about Lireinne since she was three. If it hadn't been for Bud, the two of them would have been raised in foster homes, probably never seeing each other again. The double-wide wasn't much, but Bud made sure they were never hungry, and when he had money to spare—which wasn't often—he spent it on them, never on himself. The dead minivan, Wolf's Xbox, the aboveground pool nobody used anymore. Bud had done his best.

Lireinne unexpectedly knew an intense wave of affection for this man, this plodding, responsible man who'd always stood by her and her half brother, no matter what.

“Well, a course you're pretty,” Bud said now, turning to look at her with a smile. “Always have been to me, anyway.
Real
pretty since you slimmed down so much.” His honest face turned quizzical, horizontal lines creasing his sunburned forehead. He dug his bag of chewing tobacco out of his hip pocket. “Why you askin'?”

Lireinne shrugged, feeling embarrassed. “No reason. You coming in?” Shouldering her purse, she opened the truck's door and climbed down onto the gravel lot.

“I'll wait. You need money, baby girl?” Bud stuck a pinch of Red Man under his lip and reached for his spit cup.

“No, I got the rest of my pay. I won't be long.” In the scorching sunlight, she paused by the truck's open door.

“Love you.” Even as the words left her mouth, Lireinne was surprised at herself for saying them.

“Huh?” Bud said absently. “What'd you say?”

“Nothing.” She shut the truck's door and turned away. Lireinne didn't know why she'd said that in the first place.

Love
was a rare word in the Hooten household. Bud and Wolf became almost visibly uncomfortable whenever it came up. To Lireinne, saying
I love you
felt like one of those half-remembered French phrases—
la plume de ma tante est sur la table dans le jardin
—unfamiliar, wondering if she'd gotten it right. It seemed almost stupid to say it, as though she could have just ordered a well-done tractor or something equally ignorant from a snooty waiter.

Like she'd ever been to that kind of restaurant anyway, or ever would.

No, love must be what you
did,
like the kind of good stuff Bud was always doing, not something you said. Anybody could say, “I love you,” Lireinne reflected as she walked up the wooden steps of Montz's Feed Store. For all she knew, even her loser mother might have said it to Bud once upon a time.

And yet, having uttered the word
love,
Lireinne found herself wanting to say it again, wanting to feel the taste of it on her tongue once more. It was a painful, sweet wanting that was all the more compelling for that word,
love,
being a relative stranger to her.

Before she pulled the screened door open to go inside the store, Lireinne shaded her eyes, looking down at Bud, patiently waiting for her in the stifling truck.

She waved to him. Bud waved back.

Je t'aime
.

I
t was late in the day. When Emma's truck had pulled up to the feed store, the only other vehicle parked in the lot was a rusted red pickup. A big man was slumped on its front seat, dozing in the heat.

“Hell of a scorcher, Emma.” Sarah Fortune and Emma had gone inside and were waiting at the counter made of rough planks while Ricky Montz, the owner, was busy with another customer.

“Thanks for the ride into town,” Sarah added.

“No problem at all. You're on my way. What's the story with your car?” Emma asked.

“It's a piece-of-shit Mercedes, that's the story.” As always, Sarah's conversation was larded with profanity. “Goddamned parts take years to come in, even when it's a
new
car. My piece of shit's an antique.”

At first, eighty-year-old Sarah's casual, salty language had shocked Emma when the epithets dropped from those wrinkled old-lady lips in a shower of flaming horse-apples. Over the past year, though, she'd become accustomed to it and now this eccentricity barely registered.

“Damnation, isn't it ever going to rain?” Sarah complained. She took off her green John Deere cap and fanned her face, setting her wiry gray hair to wafting like Spanish moss in the warm air of the store. “My goddamned pond's drying up. I'm gonna have to haul water out to the damned horses. Always gets me down in my back.” She rubbed her bowed shoulder with a resigned smile. “Getting old, Em.”

“Ouch.” Emma smiled in sympathy. “My pond's not looking so good either, but it's got to rain soon.”

Cultivate gratitude
.

Gratitude.

Well, Emma was grateful summer would soon be winding down. She was grateful for Sarah's company. She was grateful for Xanax, too, even though the two tablets hadn't seemed to help very much. For several hours after talking to Con, she'd been too shaky to do anything more than pace and randomly pick up books and magazines, straightening an already obsessively clean house while praying, without much hope, the voices would be silent. Sheba had followed her from room to room, seemingly uneasy about this turn of events. Emma hadn't had a panic attack as bad as that one in over a month, not since the last time she'd talked to Con.

But thanks to the Xanax and time's passing, she'd eventually found a measure of calm once again. Feeling more herself, she got around to returning Sarah Fortune's call, and after hesitating for a long moment, Emma had agreed to take the old lady into Covington that Saturday afternoon. Sarah needed to buy oats for her horses, and Emma remembered she needed to go to Ricky Montz's store for chicken feed anyway, so this neighborly duty wasn't really a burden.

Then, too, driving Sarah into town should act as a remedy for her usual low spirits attendant upon a panic attack. The old woman had become surprisingly good—if sometimes abrasive—company, and Emma had learned from bitter experience it wouldn't be wise to be alone with her memories in the empty house, especially following this afternoon's harrowing conversation with Con.

“Thank God for air-conditioning,” Emma said. “But it's August. Fall will be here before we know it.”

“Can't come soon enough for me.” Sarah sniffed. “I'm turning into a goddamned raisin.”

Ricky Montz's feed store was housed in an old converted barn near the middle of downtown Covington. It was a dimly lit, confusing place with no apparent order to its fifty-pound bags of dog and cat food, plastic owl scarecrows, chainsaw parts, grass seed, sacks of oats and bales of hay, insecticides and fertilizers, garden tools and hoses, terra-cotta pots and watering troughs, tomato cages and stakes. All of this merchandise and more ranged haphazardly along the knot-holed plank walls and was piled in casual heaps on the dusty floor, as though it had been dropped there and forgotten as soon as it arrived. Trying to compete with the big-box “companion animal” emporiums, Ricky carried a fair assortment of pet products as well: leashes, collars, doghouses, and food bowls, plus a small selection of basic horse equipment like halters and lead ropes. At the moment, he was busy in the horse section helping a customer—a striking young girl, a heart-shape-faced beauty with long black hair. She was examining a bottle of fly spray with a dubious eye.

“I want some stuff that'll, like, kill the disgusting things
dead,
” the girl was saying with some vehemence. “Keeping flies off him's just a start, you know?”

Ricky shook his head. “Don't know of any spray what kills 'em outright, not what's safe for horses, nohow.”

Emma never really knew which eye she should focus on when she talked to Ricky, a big, gray-bearded man in bib overalls. One brown eye seemed to head east while the other wandered west. She hoped she didn't make him feel self-conscious about his walleye, but patient Ricky never seemed to notice. Generous with his time to a fault, he could be counted on to steer Emma through the bewildering array of farm products, always providing what answers he could to her usual laundry list of questions.

Ricky reached to get another spray bottle off the shelf. “Now this here stuff's the top of the line, claims to work longer.”

“What you
need
is some goddamned LarvaStop.” Sarah advanced on Ricky and the girl in wizened determination, her dentures clacking with enthusiasm. Bossy by nature, the old woman positively lived for the opportunity to give unsolicited advice to anyone who'd listen to it, and even those who wouldn't.

“Gotta kill the little bastards before they hatch out in the shit,” Sarah announced. She folded her arms across the sunken bosom of her faded print housedress. “Me, I use it all the time out at my place. Expensive as hell, but it's worth every damned dime if you hate flies—and who the hell doesn't?”

Emma covered her mouth to keep from laughing out loud at the girl's wide-eyed reaction. Meet my friend, the incomparable Sarah, she thought. She never met a cuss word she didn't like.

Ricky looked pained. “Okay, Miz Fortune,” he said. “Thanks for your usual ladylike input.” He turned to the girl. “She's right, though. I got some LarvaStop right here.” He handed a bright yellow plastic container down to her from the overhead shelf.

“How much is it?” The girl's scarred eyebrow lifted as she looked at the box. She handed it back.

Ricky studied the label. “Forty-four ninety-nine. Like Sarah said, LarvaStop ain't cheap, but it sure works good. Put a scoop of this in your horse's feed and the flies'll die before they can hatch out in the manure. You really ought to get the fly spray, too, if you want to do it right. That should fix you up fine.”

The girl compressed her lips, frowning as though she faced a tough decision.

“Feed? I don't know about
feed,
” she said uncertainly. She was quiet a moment. “It's just . . . he's so miserable, you know?” She paused, then the words tumbled out of her mouth in a rush. “Like, it sucks for him. Every summer, it's the same. I
hate
seeing him get all bit up.”

“Who's this ‘he,' young lady?” Sarah demanded.

“Mose.” With a shake of her head, the girl took only the bottle of fly spray from Ricky. “He's not really mine, though. Mose's just an old horse, but nobody looks after him but me. He's a good person—never tries to bite or kick.”

Sarah nodded in sage agreement. “Most of them won't, not if you're easy with 'em. Where's Mose stabled, anyhow?”

The girl hesitated again, seeming to weigh her words. “You're not going to call the Parish on me, are you? I'm doing my best, okay?”

“No ma'am,” Sarah said emphatically. “If you're looking after him, there's no need.”

The girl looked relieved. “Okay. Mose doesn't have a stable. He's behind our place, out off of Million Dollar Road, on back of the old Legendre property. I think they forgot about Mose when all the other horses went to the sale. He's been, like, all by himself in the field ever since I can remember.”

Sarah's sharp little eyes lit up like road flares. Emma knew Sarah's real passion was the low-key rescue operation she ran out of her farm, taking in abandoned and abused horses and finding them homes, one horse at a time. “Grew up with 'em,” she'd always said. “Isn't right, letting these old horses die of goddamned starvation when their idiot owners don't want to look after them anymore.” There were plenty of hard-luck cases in the Parish and so Sarah's pasture always had at least a couple of rescues grazing the lush grasses while they waited for what she called their “forever homes.”

“Holy shit!” Sarah crowed. “I
knew
there had to be another horse out there after Sammy Legendre quit the business. His old place is just down the road from Emma here and me. You're Bud Hooten's girl, Lireinne, aren't you? Well, you're doing the right thing, you know, by feeding him. That shit-for-brains Legendre up and went to stay with his son way the hell over to Bunkie after the bank took the farm. Sent all his stock to the killers himself, so you know
he
doesn't give a good goddamn anymore.”

“The pond in the field's gone dry, so I've been watering him every day,” Lireinne said. “But . . . he's
really
skinny.” She lowered her eyes—extraordinary, clear green eyes fringed with long, sooty lashes—and shrugged, her expression shamed. “Didn't know Mose needed
feed,
” she muttered. “There's a lot of grass, tons of it, and he eats it all the time.”

“Oh, that'll keep him alive, but that horse needs more than damned grass if he's pulled-down some. Look, take this.” Sarah dug into her ancient, cracked-leather pocketbook, strewing crumpled Kleenex, stub-ends of pencils, odd pieces of paper, assorted change, and half-used rolls of antacids by the wadded handful across Ricky's countertop. With an air of triumph, she located the wallet buried somewhere in the chaos of her purse.

“Here.” Sarah offered Lireinne a crumpled hundred-dollar bill. When the girl only stared at the money, the old woman flapped the note at her impatiently. “Go on, take it. Get rid of the goddamned flies and buy him some feed, too. He needs to
eat,
girl.”

Lireinne licked her full lips and furrowed her brow, obviously deciding if she should take Sarah's hundred dollars. Slowly, seeming distrustful as a kicked cat, she reached and took the bill, smoothing it between her fingers. She looked up from the money, her face luminous with a huge smile. Those amazing green eyes were shining, and in that instant Emma was startled anew by the girl's extraordinary looks.

“What kind of feed should I get?” Lireinne asked. “What do horses eat, anyhow?”

That was all Sarah needed to hear.

Emma exchanged a rueful glance with Ricky Montz. It would be a solid half hour before her neighbor was done managing the Hooten girl's business because, aside from rescuing horses, there was nothing in the world Sarah Fortune liked more than telling people what to do.

 

Later, after they'd gotten the bags of chicken and horse feed loaded up and were in her truck on the way home, Emma was still turning the encounter at Montz's over in her head.

The low, lush strings of a Dvo
ák symphony filled the cool, spacious cab of the big Ford, a counterpart to the hushed whisper of the air-conditioning vents. Wanting to talk, Emma turned down the volume and turned to her friend.

“I've been thinking about that girl,” Emma said. “It was so generous, what you did this afternoon. I feel like I ought to have done something, too, like . . . oh, I don't know. I never know, but
something,
at least. She seemed like she wanted to take good care of her horse, but she didn't really have any idea, did she? Or money to spare. You were kind to help her out. I wish I could have thought of a way to help, too.”

Sarah leaned forward in the deep leather passenger seat and switched the radio to the country music station she preferred. She also raised the volume: a pair of twanging guitars and nasal, syrupy lyrics replaced the Dvo
ák. Somebody was having a very bad time getting over somebody named Retta, communicating a nasal feedlot misery. The singer sounded as though he was ready to hurl himself, wailing, under an eighteen-wheeler to put an end to it.