Page 38 of The Chain House

As if on cue, Lizzie screamed next door. Trevor faced the window above the sink, hoping he’d misheard, but screams like that—full of terror—pierced him like a fiery sword to the gut. He felt Lizzie’s fear now because he knew it and had lived it and wore it as intimately as he wore his own skin. Because the anticipation of being hit was a fear even worse than the pain that followed.

What? What are you gonna do? If that son of a bitch touches her again, then what?

Except that wasn’t his own voice and it wasn’t Sam’s, either, asking that question—what are you gonna do?—but a blast from the past voice he thought he’d buried years ago, back when he was Tommy and not Trevor.

What are you gonna do, Tommy? Huh? You chickenshit little mouse … run to big brother?

“Fuck you,” he said to it, that memory voice in his head, to that face the voice belonged to, that lumpy head with the jagged scar running like a diagonal jack-o-lantern mouth across his face, over the ridge of his nose. “Fuck you … Justice Minks …”

Because goddamn it, kids who got bullied weren’t supposed to be bullied still as adults. But nobody told the world that, did they? And things were supposed to get better after his mom died by the needle and he went to stay with the half brother he barely knew he’d had, the two of them sired from a man who lived most of his life in jail for a murder he swore he never committed.

Lizzie Hall screamed again from next door and Trevor said, “Fuck you, too,” to Jake Hall, and with a hidden lifelong bottled-up rage crushing in on him from every direction, he saw blood. With the sudden irrational fear that he was about to lose his son, his Sam, he saw blood. He saw blood and stars and ants marching. He felt the hand against his throat, pinning him to the wall, his feet dangling above the floor. He saw himself on the floor and gasping for air. He saw dark rooms and locked doors and demons in the trees. He heard them laughing and felt the gut-wrenching pain when the Whistle-or-Lose-It game became a nauseating reality, and they laughed at Tiny Tommy and when he cried it only made it worse … and he smelled the stew bubbling on the stove, and he thought, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, as he walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway to his bedroom and grabbed the Louisville Slugger baseball bat leaning next to the window and stormed from his house. He rhythmically beat the barrel of the bat into the palm of his left hand, crossing the driveway toward the Halls’ house just as Lizzie screamed GET AWAY FROM ME, from inside the house, and Trevor bounded up their porch steps in one single leap, just like he imagined the lead singer of a rock band would have done it, just like Roger Daltry would have, shirt unbuttoned and flapping in the wind to show off his chest, and Trevor kicked at the door that was already open and thought, Here’s Trevor, you cock-sucking motherfucker, here’s pint-size Tiny Tommy.

And there Jake was, looming over Lizzie in the middle of the living room, her pleading for him to stop as she cowered on the floor, him as large as King Kong, arm cocked, fist raised like he was about to strike, or maybe he already had because the cut above her eye was open again and running blood down the side of her face, and Lizzie screamed, “Trevor, don’t!”

And Trevor only then realized he was about to, when Jake Hall, in full firefighter uniform and buzzed hair and thick mustache, turned to face him. And Trevor heard Lizzie’s voice from last night telling him how much she hated kissing Jake with that stupid mustache and they’d laughed about it over wine, and oh how she hated him, hated her husband and wished him dead … her asking if that was terrible of her to think that and him saying without hesitation that it wasn’t, and then thinking that he’d often wished her husband was dead, too, along with a lot of other people from his past, but he didn’t go there … because right now he had a job to do.

And maybe it was Jake’s smirk that put Trevor over-the-top, the smirk that said Trevor was more of a nuisance than a threat. But Trevor knew what it really was that sent him into full- fledge attack mode with that Louisville Slugger, and it had everything to do with Jake’s left hand clutching Lizzie’s hair, because that was a feeling of PTSD, that scalp-burn from the pressure and strain of a fist clenched with hair, that hit home hard and true.

Trevor said, “Let her go, Jake.”

And when Jake laughed and said Or what?—Trevor’s brain started pulsing and his heart went full-on rabid dog inside his chest.

Because it just dawned on him that Lizzie was naked. She’d had a towel on when Trevor had burst into the house seconds ago, but the wet towel was on the floor now. Her hair was still wet from the shower and there was a tiny water trail on the hardwood leading from the bathroom, like he’d chased her out of there, and you can’t get more vulnerable than unclothed.

Trevor raised the bat.

And Jake said, “Did you fuck my wife last night?”

And Lizzie shouted, “No, Jake. We didn’t do anything, I swear …”

Jake yanked on her hair, and she grabbed at his wrists and wrenched painfully along with his movement, her bare chest exposed, and Trevor—he so wanted to cover her up—with tears of rage and sorrow in his eyes, swung that bat with the full jagged force of his past. Maybe it was because Jake didn’t think he would do it. Maybe he thought Trevor Harper was all talk too. But Jake was slow to react and the barrel of the bat struck the side of his head with enough steam to crack something in his skull.

Jake Hall went down like a sack of grain, one solid thump that shook the house when he hit the floor. Face sideways on the carpet. Eyes open, unblinking.

Trevor thinking, What did I just do?

CHAPTER17

JENNIFER DALEY KNEW all about delayed reactions.

As whip-smart fast as she was, she was joke-slow, always last to a punchline, and therefore, among friends, known for her delayed reaction. She laughed late, laughed last, and most the time awkwardly, because by then the joke was long past.

But what she’d experienced inside that prison had been no joke.

Sal Batise was a monster in human skin. A beast hiding behind a charismatic smile.

Have you fucked her yet, Sam Harper?

The thought of those words gave her chills. Because how dare he even think it, let alone say it right in front of her? Like the fucking of her would be up to Sam Harper. So even as she’d taken Sam’s hand earlier as the two of them navigated the postinterview crowd—more like a mob—outside the prison, she’d been thinking of how she’d like to cut Sal’s balls off and shove them down his throat.

Thankfully Sam Harper was a gentleman and was equally mortified, if not more so.

Jennifer took pride in her toughness, a trait she got honest from the wonderful family who had taken her in. But while the Daley family was kind and loving and hardworking, for lack of a better word, they were poor. Her adoptive father, who she’d immediately bonded with over art, was a sculptor who often went months looking for projects. Her adoptive mother ran her own daycare out of their house and spent too much of the little they had on other peoples’ children, baby food and clothes, to make sure they were comfortable. Jennifer had been telling them for years that neither of them charged enough for their services—they were too nice. And she still wondered how they’d managed to pay for her college at SCAD in Savannah, yet every year her tuition got paid, and back to school she’d go. But the frugal life they all lived—along with her two new older brothers, who were both weirdly innocent, even as teenagers—had further instilled in Jennifer a level of toughness she readily added to what had been forged from her barely remembered life on the Freedom Ranch.

She’d used every bit of that toughness inside the prison, under the camera lights, sitting that close, again, after so many years, to Sal Batise. The way he’d stared at her with those cold, blue eyes—she knew he’d recognized her, which made her wonder if her existence had never been far from his mind. The girl who’d drawn that mural on the closet wall. The girl who’d drawn those incriminating pictures the detectives had found beneath her bed inside the children’s barracks. The girl whose artistic ability and genius-level foresight had made the mystery man, Justice Minks, more real in everyone’s mind, her convoluted mural helping solidify Beth Hawthorne’s claims that there had been another killer in that house that night in a Guy Fawkes mask.

So she’d kept her shit together through the brief ten-minute interview, which was already a blur. She’d kept her shit together outside the prison, even as she let go of Sam’s hand and she told him she’d be fine, watching as he was suddenly ushered back into the prison without her. She’d kept her shit together as she fought through the crowd on her own, and eventually found Carl’s truck in the parking lot, and even managed to keep it together as reporters hurried toward them as Carl pulled away and drove—to where, he didn’t know—because she’d told him, Drive, Carl … just drive … just get us out of here.