by Lexi Blake
Lila stood up and turned to her nurse.
“You’ve got a patient. She needs you,” Mabel said.
Lila grabbed her purse and didn’t look back.
* * *
• • •
She pulled the last stitch on Carrie Petrie’s cheek through and started the process to tie it off. The woman hadn’t even winced when she’d given her the local. She’d been sitting on the exam table like a zombie, no expression at all. She did everything Lila asked her to, but she’d said very little.
“How did you get here?” She was fairly certain Carrie didn’t have access to a car.
“I took the boat,” she said in a monotone. “Bobby and his brother are working. Mother Petrie visits a couple of other families who live out on the islands every week. Today’s the day. Normally I would go with her, but I couldn’t hide this. When she left, I took the old boat out and came here.”
She went silent again.
Lila finished her work and studied Carrie’s face. “I think I’ve got the stitches tight enough that it shouldn’t scar, but you have to understand how close this was. If he’d hit you an inch higher, he could have seriously compromised your eyesight.”
“It was an accident.” The words were hollow. Carrie had been almost silent since Lila had entered the room. All she would say was she’d had another accident.
Her stomach twisted and what had happened with Maryanne was right there, bumping up against the surface, threatening to break through. But what the hell was she supposed to do? She had legal obligations. “It wasn’t, and I’m going to have to tell the sheriff.”
Carrie’s jaw went stubborn. “You don’t know that it wasn’t an accident.”
“I know someone’s fist met your face.” There were some injuries that couldn’t be explained away, and Lila had made damn sure she’d detailed every single element of this one. She had X-rays and pictures. The fact that Carrie had allowed her to document her injuries made her think she was on the edge of admitting what was happening. “This wasn’t a door or you falling down. You were in a fight and you lost.”
Carrie was silent for a moment, staring down at her hands. “You told Sheriff LaVigne about the other day and Bobby was so mad.”
At least she’d admitted it. She needed to get Carrie talking. “I have a legal obligation to talk to the sheriff if I think you’re in danger, and I definitely think you’re going to keep getting hurt if you stay where you are.”
Carrie’s stare was on the floor. “He said he won’t do it again. He brought me flowers this morning.”
“But he didn’t bring you to see me.”
“He put a bandage on my face. He tried to take care of me when he realized what he’d done.”
“Then why did you come in here? You risked a lot to come to this clinic.” And that’s why she had some hope that she could get through to the younger woman. She wouldn’t be able to cover up the fact that she’d gotten medical attention. “He’s going to know you came here. You couldn’t do those stitches yourself.”
“It wasn’t closing up right.” She brought her hand up to touch her cheek.
“I think you know you have to get out. I think you know he’s going to take it too far one of these days, and then no amount of sweet words or apologies is going to bring you back from the dead.”
Carrie sniffled and used the tissue Lila had given her when she’d started crying during the exam. “I thought he loved me.”
That was the horrible thing about it all. She was sure Bobby told her regularly that he did love her. Bobby likely thought he loved her. “His love is twisted. It’s a nasty, selfish thing. It doesn’t have to be this way. There are good men out there.”
Men like Armie LaVigne, who had all the strength in the world and chose to use it to protect the people around him. He had the scars to prove it.
“None of them were ever interested in me,” Carrie said forlornly. “No one ever noticed me until Bobby. I thought I would spend my whole life alone, but then he asked me on a date and it was good. I know he was older than me, but he was handsome and he said he needed me.”
She’d heard that story before. “When did the abuse start?”
“The first time he hit me was a few days after our wedding. He never did anything to me before that. He was nice. Quiet but nice. He was good to my mom, and she was sick at the time. But then we came into Papillon for supplies and I met up with some friends from school. He didn’t like that. I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t flirting.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” She needed to make this very clear. “Carrie, even if you had been flirting, he didn’t have the right to hit you. If he walked in and you were making love to another man, he doesn’t have the right to lay a hand on you.”
Tears slipped from her eyes. “Mother Petrie told me it was my fault and I had to learn how to submit to my husband.”
“Mother Petrie is a righteous bitch.”
Carrie’s eyes widened and then she laughed. “She is. She really is.” She sobered. “She told me she went through the same thing with her husband and I should suck it up and be a woman. She told me she would kill me herself if I turned in her son. She doesn’t care about anything but her sons.”
She might need to have a conversation with Mother Petrie, but first she had to get Carrie to understand what needed to happen. “You can’t go back there.”
“But then where would I go?” The question came out in a dead tone, like she’d gone over this a thousand times and believed there wasn’t an answer. “My mom died a few years back. I have a cousin I grew up with, but she’s got three kids. I can’t put them in danger. I don’t have anywhere to go. Would they keep Bobby in jail?”
The court system worked slowly. It was what had happened to Maryanne. She’d gotten away, gotten her husband arrested. He hadn’t had a record so he hadn’t served any actual time. He’d been put on probation and told to stay away from his wife. The restraining order hadn’t stopped him from walking in and killing her. He’d done it three days before his trial was to begin. She’d never even gotten her day in court. She’d gotten a funeral.
She had to be honest with Carrie. “Probably not. The sheriff can arrest him but if he can make bail, they’ll let him go. We can get a restraining order, but it can’t work if he refuses to honor it. It’s possible if the sheriff thinks it’s serious enough that you could be put into protective custody, but they don’t typically do that for domestic abuse cases.”
“Bobby will come after me. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Her shoulders slumped. “I looked at myself in the mirror and realized if I didn’t get someone to stitch me up, I would look at that face for the rest of my life. It was like I needed to hide it, even from myself. He finally did something I can’t hide. What will he do when he realizes I came here? I don’t know how to explain this to him.”
“You don’t have to explain anything.” She couldn’t let this young woman walk back into hell. There were other ways. “If I found a women’s shelter for you, would you consider going to it?”
“A shelter. Is that like a homeless shelter? Because that’s what I’ll be.”
There wasn’t a shelter here in Papillon, but there was a well-run one in New Orleans. When she’d bought the clinic one of the first things she’d done was study up on all the resources she would need. Her clinic was about more than medicine. In a rural setting, she was the first line of defense when it came to a lot of her patients’ problems. “It’s not a homeless shelter, though many of the women who go through them are homeless. You would get a room and food, and more than that you’ll get counseling to help you set up a new life for yourself.”
“It’s just a house?” Carrie asked.
“It’s a house, but they have lots of security and no one would know where you are. I’ll take you there myself. I assure you I won’t tell anyone where you are.
But it’s important that you file charges against him.”
“I don’t know.” There was a wealth of uncertainty in Carrie’s tone.
“You talked about how you ended up with Bobby because he was the first man to show you some attention. Was your father not in the picture?” She had to keep Carrie talking. If she backed off, she would lose her and then she might have to deal with signing her first death certificate.
Carrie’s eyes came up. “My dad was the best man in the world. I loved my dad, but he died long before my mom. I was seven when he passed.”
She took the chance. She reached out and put her hand over Carrie’s. “Do you think your father would want you to go back to Bobby, or would he want you to fight for your life? I know you think that having someone to love you is the most important thing in the world, but that has to start with loving yourself. It’s not selfish to want to live, to want a good life, but it has to start with respecting yourself and understanding that you are worth more than this.”
There was a knock on the door and Mabel stepped in.
“Lila, I have a test result you should look at.” There was a grim set to Mabel’s expression. She held out a printout.
Unlike the first time she’d seen Carrie, this time she’d run all the tests she could. Including a urinalysis.
She glanced down and saw the one thing she hadn’t wanted to see. Damn it. “Carrie, you’re pregnant.”
It would very likely send her straight back into that nest of snakes. If she was afraid to be on her own, how would she feel about raising a child without any help?
Carrie sat there for a moment. “I’m pregnant? Are you sure?”
“Tests these days are very accurate.” She would run it again, but the result would be the same.
“I’m having a baby.” Carrie put a hand on her belly.
“You are and you need to think about that.” If she could get Carrie to see the counselors at the women’s shelter she might have a shot at convincing her to leave the toxic situation she found herself in. If she didn’t, then she wasn’t sure what she would do. She only knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing what was happening on that island. “You’re going to need prenatal care. You can get that at the shelter.”
A long silence stretched out and it took everything Lila had not to push. She had to be patient. She couldn’t overwhelm Carrie or she might lose. This had to be her choice.
Her head came up, her eyes lit with will for the first time since Lila had met her. “My husband hit me. He was angry that you talked to the sheriff. Apparently Armie has been asking questions around town, and he even got in touch with Bobby’s ex-wife. Bobby started drinking last night and that’s when he punched me. And two years ago he kicked me in the stomach and I lost our first baby. My baby. It was my baby, and this one is my baby, too, and I cannot lose it.”
Then again, some women found an iron will of strength when they realized they were going to be mothers.
“I always wondered about that,” Mabel said quietly. “I remember your first miscarriage. Doc didn’t ask, and I thought we should. He told me we had to keep our noses out of other people’s business. He was old school, but I think in this case he was wrong.”
He’d had a duty and he’d failed. She was not going to. It didn’t matter that it might not work, that she was putting herself in a position she’d been in before. There was right and there was wrong, and her own fear had no place here. “Let me get you to that shelter.”
Tears dripping from her eyes, Carrie nodded.
chapter twelve
“He’s already lawyered up,” Roxie said, her voice coming over his cell phone. “His brother found a lawyer from New Orleans who’s willing to work with them since Quaid turned them down.”
Armie sighed, but Roxie’s news hadn’t been unexpected. “He can’t post bail tonight. We’ve got at least until tomorrow morning.”
He stared down from the balcony. Bourbon Street was well warmed up for the night. He knew he should have picked a quieter hotel, but Lila had never been to New Orleans and he wanted to show it off to her.
They’d left Carrie at the nondescript house at the edge of the city that served as the women’s shelter for this part of Orleans Parish. It was a large home in a nice neighborhood. If a person wasn’t aware of what the home served as, he or she might think it was simply an upper-middle-class home where they took security seriously. It was peaceful, and damn he hoped it stayed that way.
He’d managed to talk Lila into staying in town for dinner. They’d checked into one of the nicer hotels in the Quarter, had dinner, and walked the streets, her hand in his. Still, he was worried about her.
“I will give it to the man. He’s good,” Roxie said. “He didn’t break character even once. Major and I were waiting for him when the fishing boats came in. Arrested him right there on the dock and all he did was ask about how Carrie was. He gave some song and dance about how weird she’d been acting lately. I think he’s setting it up to look like she’s crazy.”
“The medical records will disagree with him.” Lila had explained it all as he’d driven them from Papillon up here to New Orleans. She’d described how Carrie couldn’t have possibly given herself the injuries documented in her records. In this, the Petrie family’s desire to be isolated worked against them. There was no one else to blame the abuse on since Carrie rarely left the island. Or had been allowed to leave the island.
Why the hell hadn’t he seen it?
“Well, he’s locked up nice and tight for the time being,” Roxie assured him. “I’m going to stay overnight and Major’s here until midnight. Vince comes on for the night shift, so we’ve got this covered. Judge won’t be in until eleven tomorrow. I’ve been told he goes fishing every morning and no one is to disturb him.”
Ah, the joys of small-town living. “I’ll be back before then, but it’s late. We checked into a hotel for the night. Noelle is going to stay at Beth’s, and Mabel said she would take Peanut home with her. I think Lila needs a night away.”
“She probably saved Carrie’s life, but you have to know this fight isn’t over yet. Bobby, for all his calm, isn’t going to go down easy. He’ll try to get Carrie back.”
“But you didn’t have trouble bringing him in?”
“Not a lick,” Roxie replied. “Like I said, it was almost like he knew this would happen one day. He’s smooth, and that makes him more dangerous in my mind. There’s something dark in that one. He did ask about Lila.”
A chill went through Armie. “What exactly did he say?”
He turned and looked back into the room he’d found for them. He still had connections here in the city, and he’d managed to get them a table at Arnaud’s. She’d seemed to relax after two Sazeracs. He was fairly certain a lot of memories were playing through her head, and none of them good. If he’d taken her home, she likely would have insisted on going back to the clinic and updating files. She would have found an excuse, but he’d put her in a corner, telling her he was too tired to drive.
She needed someone to take her out of her head for a while, and that was his new favorite occupation.
He also needed to let her know that this wasn’t just sex for him. He wanted to take care of her.
“He asked if his wife was with Lila,” Roxie explained. “You have to know that neither I nor Major would ever have told him a thing.”
“He’s not an idiot. I went out there right after Carrie saw Lila the first time. This has apparently been going on for years. Carrie comes in, tells Doc it was an accident, and nothing happened. She sees Lila once and we were on his doorstep. Did he threaten her in any way?”
“No. He asked if Lila had taken care of her. He’s a careful little shit,” Roxie said with her usual candor. “If he’d said anything even indirectly, I would have called you immediately because he’s got a brother and I wouldn’t put it past them to
work together.”
“According to Carrie the brother never touched her.” He’d had a long discussion with Carrie while Lila had been on the phone to the shelter. He’d documented years of abuse, and the guilt sat in his gut. “The mother never physically abused her and I can’t put people in jail for being assholes.” God, he wished he could. “Call me if anything else happens. And treat Bobby Petrie like gold. I’m not joking. I don’t want anything sketchy about this arrest.”
“Got it. And, boss, this isn’t on you.”
“I’ve been the sheriff here for years.”
“And she was good at hiding it,” Roxie replied. “Doc was good at pretending it didn’t exist. He should have told you. You have a big jurisdiction. You can’t patrol every inch of it every day. Believe me, I know. You did good today, and tell your girlfriend that she rocks. I’ll hold the fort down here. You relax.”
He glanced at the bathroom door. It was slightly open and steam poured out. “I’ll try to do that. I’ll be back tomorrow before his arraignment. Be careful and keep your eyes open.”
“Will do.”
He hung up and stepped back into the room. They’d stopped at a convenience store and grabbed a few things they would need, but he hadn’t thought about the fact that she didn’t have clothes for tomorrow. Not that she would need them tonight.
She was inside the gorgeous stone-and-glass shower. His eyes caught on her graceful body, but there was a weariness to the way she held herself that kicked him in the gut. She was feeling every minute of the day.
He tugged his shirt over his head and ditched the rest of his clothes. He kept thinking about how much she needed him, but it was all a cover. He needed her. He thought about her all the time, his life utterly revolving around her moods and desires. If she smiled at him, he was happy. If she was sad, he had to try to fix it. There was no fixing what was bothering her now, but he could help her forget for a while.
