“Okay,” he said. He leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees and crossed his arms. “It all goes back to when I was a freshman in high school. You were a junior, and Marty, Bert, Scott, and Tony Campbell were sophomores. Reggie Campbell was a freshman, and we started hanging out together that spring.”
“Yeah, go on,” Wanda Nell said when he paused.
“Marty and Bert were the cool guys in the class. They were the ones the girls was always after, and Scott and Tony, too. Hotshots on the football team, real studs.” He laughed bitterly. “And me and Reggie wanted to be just like them. We tried tagging along with them, and they even let us in on a couple of their parties.”
“They were pretty wild, I guess,” Wanda Nell said.
“Yeah, especially Marty,” Rusty continued. “I guess because his daddy was the sheriff, he thought he could do anything and get away with it.”
“Sounds like he did,” Wanda Nell commented wryly.
“Pretty much. There was a lot of drinking and even some drugs, though I don’t know where Marty was getting the stuff. I think it was him, or maybe Bert, but they always seemed to have plenty of pot and some other stuff.”
“Were you smoking pot and taking drugs?” Wanda Nell tried not to sound shocked, but she couldn’t help remembering the lectures their daddy had given them against drugs and drinking.
“Yeah, I tried them a few times,” Rusty said. “Mostly they just made me sick, but I did drink some. We all got a little wild. There were plenty of girls around, too.” He stopped suddenly.
“And you had sex with some of them,” Wanda Nell said.
“No, I couldn’t,” Rusty said. He sounded almost embarrassed. “I mean, not with everyone else around. They always had these parties at a hunting camp Scott’s daddy owned, and if you were gonna do it, you pretty much had to do it in front of everybody else.” He laughed, still embarrassed. “I just couldn’t, even when I was drinking.”
“Well, I’m glad about that,” Wanda Nell said. The thought of those orgies made her sick to her stomach. She could never look Bert Vines or Marty Shaw in the face again, though she wouldn’t have much choice until this mess was settled.
“Okay,” she continued, “so Marty and Bert threw some wild parties and had sex orgies. Is that what you’re using to blackmail them with? It’s pretty bad, but I can’t see that it’s worth killing over, or even committing suicide over.”
“It’s not only that,” Rusty said. “I mean, all that’s bad enough, especially with the two of them being successful and respectable now. But if I told about all that, I’d also have to bring in all the girls who took part, and I can’t do that to those girls. Most of them were too drunk to know what was going on.”
“Then what kind of hold do you have over them?”
Wanda Nell couldn’t imagine anything worse than what Rusty had already told her.
“There was this girl in my class,” Rusty said, his voice soft and low. “She was real pretty, and kinda smart, too. I sat next to her in a couple classes, and we started talking a lot. I really liked her, and she liked me. I wanted to ask her out, but I was afraid to.”
“Why?” Wanda Nell asked. She had a sneaking suspicion who the girl had been.
“Because if anybody had seen us together, there would’ve been hell to pay,” Rusty said. “Her name was Lavinia Golliday, and she was black.”
Wanda Nell stretched out a hand and touched her brother’s shoulder. He sighed and sat back, crossing his arms over his chest.
“I called her Veenie,” he said. “She was so cute and so much fun. She had a great sense of humor, laughed at everything. I couldn’t look at another girl.”
“So what happened?” Rusty and Veenie had been together somehow, Lily was evidence of that.
“I asked Scott if it was okay for me to take a date to his daddy’s hunting camp, and he said it was,” Rusty said, his voice devoid of inflection. “Reggie already had his driver’s license, and he was going to take me and Veenie out there so we could be together. What I didn’t know was that Marty and Bert found out about it.
“Reggie drove me and Veenie out there, and I took some food and some Cokes. We were going to have a picnic, and Reggie was going to come back for us after a couple of hours.” Rusty paused for a moment. “We had barely been there for ten minutes before Marty, Bert, and Scott showed up. Reggie was right behind them.”
Wanda Nell felt like she was going to throw up. Rusty didn’t have to tell her what had happened after that. She had realized the truth.
But Rusty talked relentlessly. “I tried to stop them, and so did Reggie. But I think Reggie was getting a kick out of it. They were already drunk and ready to party.” Wanda Nell tried to put her arm around Rusty’s shoulders, but he shrugged her off.
“You remember what I was like then. I was still thin and. scrawny. They all outweighed me by at least fifty pounds, and they were all taller. I tried to stop them, but Scott knocked me down and sat on me. They made me watch while they raped her.”
Rusty started to cry, and this time, when Wanda Nell slipped her arms around him, he didn’t resist her. They cried together.
Chapter 24
How long they sat like that, Wanda Nell had no idea. She had never seen her brother cry like this, not even at the funerals of their parents. During those he had been stoic, remote. If he had cried over their deaths, he had not let her see him do it.
Finally, the tears stopped flowing. Rusty wiped his eyes with a semi-clean corner of his shirt and reached for his water bottle. Wanda Nell delved into her purse for a pack of Kleenex. She brought it out and pulled several from the pack, offering them to Rusty. He took them and blew his nose while she mopped her own face.
“I just don’t know what to say.” Wanda Nell’s throat ached from all the crying. She took several sips from her bottle of water. “I never imagined anything so awful.”
“I still have nightmares about it,” Rusty said. He rocked back and forth on the blanket beside Wanda Nell. “I wish I could have done something to stop them. But I couldn’t. They held me down until they were finished.” His voice trailed off.
“The bastards,” Wanda Nell said, a feeling of cold fury enveloping her. “I’d like to castrate all of them with a dull knife.” Those sorry excuses for men would pay for this somehow, she vowed.
“Too late,” Rusty said bitterly.
“What happened... afterward?” Wanda Nell hated to push him into talking more about it, but she had to know the rest of the story.
“When they were done, they let me go,” Rusty said, his voice once again flat. “I told them I’d kill them, and they just laughed at me. Said why was I getting so worked up over a nigra gal. Said that’s all she was good for anyway. I was so mad I would have killed all of ’em if I’d had a gun.” He shook his head. “They weren’t afraid of me. They laughed, and then they went off and left us there.
“Reggie at least waited to give us a ride back to town,” Rusty went on. “I wanted to knock him down and run over him, the bastard. He could have gotten away and gone for help, but he just stood there. He didn’t rape her, but he might just as well have.”
“Did you kill him?” Wanda Nell asked. “I can’t blame you if you did. I couldn’t blame you if you killed all of them.”
“No,” Rusty said. “I didn’t kill nobody. I might have wanted to, but I didn’t.” He sounded ashamed of himself.
“I got Veenie in the car, and I begged her to let me take her to the hospital, but she cried and cried. All she wanted was her mama. She didn’t even want me to touch her, to help her into the car.” Rusty paused a minute. “Marty told her I had brought her there for them, and by the time I could talk to her to tell her it was a lie, she wasn’t listening to me. She thought I had betrayed her.”
“Surely she knows better now,” Wanda Nell said, appalled.
“I guess, but it don’t make a whole lot of difference,” Rusty said. “If it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have been
there in the first place. She was really messed up after that. I tried to see her, but her mama wouldn’t let me. Told me to stay away, and finally I just gave up.”
“Did you tell Daddy and Mama?”
Rusty sighed deeply. “I told Daddy. I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted Marty and the others to be punished for what they’d done. I thought about taking one of Daddy’s guns and just killing them, but I chickened out. I couldn’t go through with it.”
“What did Daddy do?”
“He was real upset,” Rusty said. “At first he didn’t want to believe me. He thought maybe I had gotten involved in something and was trying put the blame on the others, but when he calmed down, he knew I wasn’t lying. I never lied to Daddy or Mama.” He stopped for a moment. “Then he went to the sheriff and told him what happened.”
“All this happened after Mama and Daddy sent me to stay with her cousins, didn’t it?” Wanda Nell asked. “Surely I would have known something was wrong if I had been here.”
“Yeah, it was a week or so after you went to Arkansas,” Rusty said. “By the time you came back, when Daddy died, I just couldn’t talk about it to nobody.”
“What did the sheriff do when Daddy talked to him?”
“Not a damn thing,” Rusty said. “He told Daddy it wasn’t none of his business. He said Marty had told him all about it, how they’d paid this girl to come with them and that she knew exactly what was going to happen. Marty said I was just mad because she wouldn’t let me do it with her, said I was too ugly.”
“And the sheriff believed that?” If Wanda Nell had had a gun in her hands right that moment, she would have shot Marty herself and been happy to do it.
“Who knows if he did or not? The main thing was, he wasn’t going to do a damn thing about it. He and Daddy had a big light about it, and Daddy swore up and down he’d spit in the sheriff’s face every time he saw him after that. I don’t think they ever spoke to each other again.”
“I can’t believe that man had the absolute gall to come to Daddy’s funeral after that,” Wanda Nell said. She had lost all the respect she had ever had for Sheriff Shaw. She would like to get him in a room and tell him exactly what she thought of him. Time enough for that later, though. “Did Mama know about any of this?”
“Not at first,” Rusty said. “I think Daddy told her not long before he died. It was awful, Wanda Nell. Daddy looked like he’d aged twenty years overnight. You were lucky you weren’t there to see him like that. Then he had that massive heart attack. He was too young to die.” Rusty stifled a sob. “And I killed him. I should have kept my mouth shut, and Daddy might still be alive.”
“Now, don’t you say that,” Wanda Nell said. “You had to talk to Daddy. You did the right thing. It’s not your fault what happened after that. Mama told me Daddy had a weak heart, some kind of problem with his arteries. They found that out when he went into the hospital. They said it was a wonder he hadn’t died before that.”
“That don’t make me feel no better,” Rusty said.
“I know,” Wanda Nell said gently. “I understand how you feel, but you’re not to blame here. If you want to blame somebody, blame those bastards Marty and Bert and the others. They’re the ones who did wrong.”
“They did, and I’m trying to make up for it, although it may be too late.”
“How?”
Rusty moved restlessly on the blanket. “I’m sure Lily told you what her problem is. She needs a kidney transplant, and she needs money. Her mama’s in too bad a shape to donate a kidney, and she don’t have any other family. Except her father.”
“And one of those men is her father,” Wanda Nell said. She thought a moment. “That’s why you had that information about DNA testing places, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Rusty said. “One of them is her daddy, and I want to be able to prove it.”
“So you were trying to force them into taking paternity tests and owning up to being her father?”
Rusty nodded.
“How did you find out Lily needed help?”
“I used to call Veenie sometimes to check on her and Lily. Sometimes she’d talk to me, and sometimes she wouldn’t. Sometimes they didn’t have a phone, and so I’d send her a money order and tell her to call me.” He fell silent a moment. “Then Veenie called me out of the blue about three weeks ago and told me how ill Lily is and asked could I help.”
“And that’s when you decided to blackmail Marty and them into helping?”
“Yeah,” Rusty said.
“How were you going to do that? It was just your word against theirs, and after all this time, who would listen to you? The sheriff sure ain’t going to.”
“I’ve got some evidence,” Rusty said with great satisfaction. “A few years ago, Reggie turned up in Nashville, and he looked me up. At first I wasn’t going to have anything to do with him, but I got an idea. I invited him over to my place, and I got him good and drunk.” He laughed. “When Reggie got drunk, all he wanted to do was talk. He’d tell anybody anything if you got him drunk enough.”
“And you recorded him?”
“I sure did,” Rusty said. “On video, no less. I had borrowed some equipment from the studio where I was working at the time. The dumb bastard never even knew I was doing it.”
“Where’s this video now? Is it somewhere safe?”
“Yeah,” Rusty said. “It’s somewhere they won’t ever think to look, and I’ve got plenty of copies. They’d never be able to find and destroy them all.”
“Did you confront Reggie when you got to town?” Wanda Nell could almost see the way events had unfolded.
“Yeah, I did,” Rusty said. “I went by the gas station late that night. I knew if I told him what I had and what I wanted, he’d tell the others for me. So that’s what I did. I told him I wanted Marty, Bert, Scott, and Tony to take DNA tests, and whichever one was her daddy was going to do whatever he had to do to get Lily her transplant and the medical care she needed. The others would have to contribute, too.”
“How did Reggie react?”
“He was stunned, and then mad,” Rusty said. “He was going to come at me, but I told him to back off. If anything happened to me, a copy of that tape would go to somebody who would make sure it got seen by the right people.” He laughed. “Reggie backed off then, and I could tell he was scared.”
“After you left him, he must have called the others,” Wanda Nell said.
“Yeah, and one of them killed him. He was such a stupid jerk, and he was the one who’d given me the evidence to fry their asses. Poor sucker didn’t stand a chance after that.” Rusty didn’t sound too regretful over Reggie’s death, and Wanda Nell couldn’t blame him. By all accounts, Reggie Campbell had been nasty, violent scum.
“Lily told me you’d been kidnapped, but that you managed to get away from them.”
“Yeah, they ambushed me when I was leaving the sheriff’s department the other night. They were waiting in the parking lot. Can you believe that?”
“Marty must be pretty sure of himself.”
“Because his daddy’s going to protect him, no matter what,” Rusty said.
Wanda Nell was beginning to have an idea about that, but she wasn’t ready to discuss it just yet.
“How did you get away from them?”
“They took me to Tony Campbell’s fancy new house and locked me in an upstairs bedroom. The assholes even tied my hands to the bedpost, but I saw this show once about how to hold your hands so you can get out of the rope. If they hadn’t all been drinking they might have figured it out. After that, all I had to do was wait until the middle of the night. I got loose and climbed out the window.”
“I wish I could have seen the looks on their faces,” Wanda Nell said, laughing.
“Yeah, me, too. They hit me a few times. That’s how I got this shiner,” Rusty said, touching his cheek.
“Then you went to see Veenie and Lily,” Wanda Nell said, prompting him.
“Yeah, I stayed
with them until about dawn. It took that long to talk Veenie into letting me have a blanket and her car. I was just going to hide out here a day or so and let Marty and them sweat a bit. But then the damn ceiling came down on me, and I was stuck till you come along.”
“Thank the Lord I was able to find you,” Wanda Nell said. “And now that I found you, I want to make sure you stay in one piece. We can’t let those bastards find you.”
“I could go back and stay with Veenie and Lily for a day or two, till we figure out what to do,” Rusty said.
“But they might come looking for you there,” Wanda Nell said. Surely Rusty didn’t want to put Veenie and Lily at risk of further harm.
“It would probably take them too long to find her, even if they knew where to look.”
“What do you mean,” Wanda Nell asked, completely floored, “ ‘if they knew where to look?’ They can probably find her faster than I found Lily.”
“Naw, when I talked to Reggie the other night, I told him they were in Memphis hiding out till I got everything arranged. I told him there was no way they could get to Veenie, even if they tried. I was bluffing, but they had no reason to know that.”
“Maybe not,” Wanda Nell said, “but to be on the safe side, I don’t think you’d better go back there.”
“Then I’ll just stay here.”
“No,” Wanda Nell said. “The condition this house is in, it’s just too dangerous.”
“I can’t come home with you,” Rusty said, getting exasperated. “Or go back to Mayrene’s. They’d find me in a heartbeat. You ain’t suggesting, I hope, that I go to the sheriff’s department and ask them to look after me.”
“No,” Wanda Nell said, “though that might not be such a bad idea.” She shook her head. “No, I’ve got a better idea. We’re going to need to be able to push them into a corner they can’t get out of. We can’t trust the sheriff, but we may be able to trust one of his men.”
Best Served Cold (A Trailer Park Mystery Book 3) Page 22
