Don't Make a Sound: A Sawyer Brooks Thriller

by T. R. Ragan

  Lily had been thirty-five when she made a connection with a man through an online dating app. She met him at the restaurant and was surprised to see that he looked like his profile picture. She was even more surprised that the conversation was good, bordering on great. He made a lot of effort to get to know her, asked all the right questions, and regaled her with childhood stories that involved the ups and downs of growing up in a big family. They talked for hours, ate, shared a bottle of wine. It wasn’t until they walked out of the restaurant that she began to feel dizzy and slightly nauseated. She knew immediately that something was terribly wrong.

  Her date showed no sign of disappointment when she turned down his offer to go back to his apartment. He simply walked her to her car. While she fumbled around for her keys, he pulled out his key fob and clicked the button. The black car parked next to hers whistled. His car had not been there when she’d pulled into the parking lot earlier, which meant he must have moved it when he excused himself to go to the men’s room.

  Before she could question him, her legs buckled, and he caught her in his arms, almost as if he’d been waiting for her to pass out. That was the last thing she remembered until she woke up in his bed the next morning, naked, her wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts. It was the weekend. She lived alone. Nobody would worry about her until Monday. For the next forty-eight hours, her blind date did unspeakable things to her. She fought him until 11:58 on Sunday. She knew the time because there was a clock on the wall, and she’d been staring at it throughout her ordeal. At 11:58, he untied her, dragged her into the bathroom, where he had the shower running. He washed her hair, scrubbed every inch of her body, then tossed her a towel and told her to get dressed and get out.

  She went to the hospital. The police were called. She filled out a report and told them he’d forced her to shower. They used a rape kit anyway. The whole procedure was invasive and time-consuming. She went home, showered again, and went to bed. The next day, she had her locks changed and the windows in her apartment inspected. She took a week off from work and had way too much time to think, analyze, and wonder when he’d spiked her wine. She had never once left the table. Follow-up with the doctor showed genital injuries. Semen was found. The authorities talked to her “date,” and he convinced them that their time together was consensual.

  The system for date-rape-drug testing didn’t help her either. The equipment used wasn’t sensitive enough to detect substances at low concentrations. Days had passed between the time Lily had been given the drug and when she arrived at the hospital.

  It was over. Only it wasn’t. Not even close.

  Bug. Twenty-seven. Five foot two inches. Smart. Dreadlocks, dark eyes, perfect teeth, wide smile. Cheerleader for the varsity football team. Held down by a defensive linebacker and raped by the quarterback and a wide receiver. She hoped to see them at her ten-year reunion. All The Crew did. She’d reported the football players to school authorities and had gone to the police station with her parents. The rapists were from affluent households, though. Bug was not. They were white. She was not.

  Malice. Verbally and physically fucked by those she trusted most.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sawyer climbed into her car. She needed to stop by Connor’s apartment and grab some things for her trip to River Rock. But first she pulled out her cell and sent Harper a text, asking if it was okay if she slept on the couch tonight, telling her she’d explain everything when she got there. There were a half dozen missed calls from Connor and double that number of texts. She deleted all of them without bothering to read them first.

  By the time Sawyer buckled her seat belt and turned on the car’s engine, her phone buzzed with a reply from Harper, letting Sawyer know she could stay the night.

  On the drive, Sawyer’s mind swirled with thoughts of her sisters. Their relationship was complicated. Sawyer couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive her older sister, Harper, for abandoning her. Let it go . . . Live in the now . . . Take responsibility. All good advice she’d received over time but not at all helpful. The thing that stung her most was that Harper was too messed up to talk about those dark days, holding them deep inside as if she thought that might make them disappear.

  To be honest, it was a wonder the three of them had come from the same two people. Harper had been a wild child who had since morphed into a cleaning fanatic and control freak. Aria was a worrier who shied away from conflict, intent on keeping everyone around her satisfied. Although many people pierced their bodies as a form of expression, Aria once admitted to Sawyer that she did it as a form of self-therapy and stress release.

  And then there was Sawyer—paranoid, unable to trust, and angry. Angry with her uncle for abusing her and Aria. Angry with her parents for being blind to it all. Angry with Harper for abandoning her. And especially angry with herself for being unable to move on.

  At the advice of a counselor, Sawyer had hired a private detective she couldn’t afford and had gone in search of her long-lost sisters. Five minutes after she’d handed the PI her money, she had an address for a Nate and Harper Pohler.

  She was twenty when she found them living in the same house they lived in now. Harper insisted Sawyer live with them while she worked on getting her degree. Sawyer hadn’t liked the idea of moving in with her sister, but neither did she enjoy living in a run-down apartment.

  Once she moved in, every day was like Groundhog Day. Sawyer woke up, went to school, came home, studied, and went to bed. Nobody talked about the elephant in the room. Everyone simply went about their business as if everything were hunky-dory.

  Her sisters’ ability to wash their hands of the past had only made things worse for Sawyer. For eight years she hadn’t heard from them, and yet they wanted to pretend everything was fine. It was bizarre, and it pissed her off. She struck out in the only way she knew how, by ignoring them, including all their small talk: How was your day? How are you doing? Do you need anything? Are you hungry?

  Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you, and fuck you.

  Except she also made sure they knew she was around by being loud. She walked loud, talked on the phone loud, made coffee loud. She wanted to punish them for leaving her behind, and she had been doing a pretty good job of making all their lives miserable until Aria had taken Sawyer aside and told her what had happened, starting with her own nightmarish childhood—every disgusting detail.

  Until that day, Sawyer had thought she was the only sister who’d been abused by Uncle Theo and his friends.

  But she’d been wrong.

  Aria told her that every time Mom and Dad had left Uncle Theo to watch over them, Harper would put Sawyer to bed and then run off to party with her friends. At first, Aria had enjoyed her time with Uncle Theo. He would make her hot cocoa, and they would watch movies together. She would often wake up the next morning feeling nauseated. It turned out Uncle Theo had drugged her and taken her to rape fantasy parties where she was passed around.

  It all sounded much too familiar. Until their little talk, Sawyer had no idea there was a name for that sort of perversion.

  Rape fantasy parties. Big business. Big money. Who knew?

  Aria said Uncle Theo had threatened to kill family and friends if she ever told a soul. So she’d kept quiet. He’d done the same with Sawyer. Threats were a common tactic used by many sexual abusers.

  Aria also went on to explain—something she’d often heard from Mom too—that Harper had been a rebellious child who drank and did drugs, nothing like the uptight woman who now used a lint roller on the floor of her bedroom to get every hair.

  It wasn’t until Harper was dropped off at one of her uncle’s parties, where she stumbled into a back room and saw what was happening to Aria, that a plan to escape River Rock was set into motion.

  The only thing Aria remembered about the night she and Harper left River Rock for good was being jostled awake, then staggering barefoot down the gravelly drive before being shoved inside the back seat of a truck, where she blacked out. It
dawned on Aria only later that Uncle Theo had drugged her before he’d left the house after warning them to stay put until he returned.

  That same night had been seared into Sawyer’s brain to relive over and over again—crying and out of breath, cold and shivering, she’d stood on the front porch, watching the twinkling back lights of a truck disappear down the road, her sisters inside, leaving her alone, and then Uncle Theo’s hand clamping down around her shoulder before he dragged her into the house and handed her off to four strangers.

  Nothing was ever the same again.

  The days had melded into eternity until her parents returned home. Sawyer had cried with relief, but Mom and Dad hardly batted an eye when they learned that two of their daughters had run off. Her parents had always been neglectful. They’d allowed their daughters to wander miles from home when they were much too young to do so. Sawyer and her sisters used to walk home from school, never worried about the time. They made their own meals, did their homework unassisted, figured things out on their own without much supervision.

  Most parents would have called the police and spent day and night searching for their missing daughters. But Mom and Dad were certain Harper and Aria would return. When a week passed and that didn’t happen, Mom blamed Harper, committed to her long-held belief that her eldest daughter was hyperactive and out of control, determined to disrupt their family since the day she was born.

  Sawyer had tried to work up the courage to tell her parents about Uncle Theo, but his threat of doing them harm stopped her every time. Without her parents, no matter how negligent, she would have no one. If not for Gramma being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and moving into their home months after her sisters ran off, Sawyer wasn’t sure she’d still be around. She imagined she might have taken her uncle’s life, or worse, her own.

  Sawyer parked at the curb in front of Connor’s house. She climbed out of the car, and as she walked toward the house, she realized she hadn’t thought of Connor all day.

  The door opened before she reached the welcome mat. “I knew you would come back,” he said.

  “I’m here to collect my things.” She stepped inside and walked to the bedroom they had shared for eight months. She grabbed her duffel bag from the closet, opened it wide, and began stuffing it with her clothes and shoes.

  “Please stay. That girl meant nothing.”

  Sawyer turned toward Connor and looked him in the eye. “I should have moved out a long time ago.”

  He stepped forward, reaching for her.

  She raised her hands high to avoid his touch. Connor, she realized, had been nothing more than an experiment. Every rape victim reacted differently, but Sawyer had been left with an extreme aversion to being touched. Her therapists said she suffered from haphephobia. She had many of the symptoms, and things hadn’t been any different with Connor. The first time he’d kissed her, she’d felt as if she were on fire. Every touch burned her skin. The first time they’d had sex, she’d spent the rest of the night in the bathroom throwing up. She knew in her heart that she’d used him in an attempt to desensitize herself, also known as self-exposure, something she and her therapist often discussed.

  Connor had backed off. He stood a few feet away, hands shoved into the front pockets of his pants. “I love you,” he said.

  He’d never said the words before, and she was glad for that. She grabbed a tote bag that hung from a chair in the corner and took it with her into the bathroom. Connor stayed close, watching as she plucked toiletries from the shower, bathroom cabinets, and drawers.

  “I only slept with her because—you know—you’ve been distant. I can’t remember the last time we made love.”

  They had never made love. They had fucked. There was a big difference. She put the strap of the tote over her shoulder, walked back into the bedroom, picked up her duffel bag from the floor, then exited the bedroom and headed for the front door. It wasn’t until she stepped outside that she turned to face him.

  His eyes pleaded.

  She sighed, trying to think of what a normal person might say under the circumstances. “I’m not the girl for you, Connor. Not even close.”

  “Stay,” he tried again. “We’ll talk it out.”

  She couldn’t do this—deal with Connor, talk to him, set him straight. It would serve no purpose she could conceive of to tell him the truth—that being with him had been a mistake, and she didn’t love him. Hell, she hardly liked him. “My gramma passed away,” she said flatly. “I’m going to River Rock for her funeral. Please don’t call me again.”

  She shut the door and walked away. The night air was warm and sticky as she put her things inside the trunk of her car. When she opened the car door, she noticed the same cat she’d seen earlier hiding behind her front tire. It was gray and white with black fur around its eyes.

  She leaned over and grabbed the cat by the scruff before it could run off. Holding the animal close to her chest, she slid in behind the wheel and used her free hand to shut the door. The cat freaked out, clawed its way out of her hold, and jumped over her to the back seat.

  Ouch! It had scratched her neck.

  She released a long breath. What was she doing? She didn’t have time for a cat, and yet she couldn’t leave the animal to fend for itself. Aria would help her out. She turned on the ignition and drove off.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sawyer sat in her car, parked outside a green, single-story, cookie-cutter house. She’d already shut off the engine and pulled the key from the ignition. Her neck stung where the cat had clawed her. She leaned over the seat to look for the cat, but it was hiding. She adjusted the rearview mirror to see a crisscross of bloody scratches on her chin and neck. Great.

  For a long moment, she simply sat still and observed the house where both of her sisters lived. It was growing dark, but the lights were on, and she could see movement inside.

  The house belonged to Harper and her husband, Nate. They had a boy, Lennon, fifteen, and a girl, Ella, ten. Aria lived in the garage, which sounded worse than it was since Nate was a contractor, and he’d fixed it up nice. There was a small kitchenette, lots of storage space, and plenty of light.

  She could count the number of times on one hand she’d seen Harper since moving in with Connor. Her sister tended to treat her like one of her kids, hovering and smothering, which was one of the reasons Sawyer had been eager to move in with Connor.

  Sawyer’s fingers turned white from holding on so tightly to the steering wheel. Her heart beat wildly within her chest. She’d caught Connor in bed with another woman. She’d found herself alone in a room with Kylie Hartford, murdered and lying in a pool of blood, eyes wide open. And Gramma Sally was dead.

  And yet she’d managed to keep it together.

  Until now.

  All it had taken was sitting outside her sister’s house to feel the full breadth of her anxiety. All sorts of images floated around in her mind. She squeezed her eyes shut to stop the panic from taking hold.

  She needed to calm down before knocking on the door. Heeding the advice she’d gotten from her therapist, she closed her eyes and imagined a long stretch of beach. She sank her toes under the warm sand, and when she opened her eyes again, she saw Connor’s slowly sinking dick.

  Shit.

  She blinked the vision away. No, she didn’t love Connor. But that didn’t stop his betrayal from making her gut ache, a mixture of anger and disappointment twisting and turning like clothes in a washing machine.

  She got out, opened the trunk, and grabbed an old towel that had been there forever. She then opened the back door, and when the cat made a run for it, she grabbed hold, rolled it in the towel like a burrito, and rushed across the stone walkway with its perfectly manicured lawn and rows of tulips, which defined her older sister perfectly. She’d never been diagnosed, but it was clear to anyone who knew Harper that she suffered from OCD.

  Her middle sister, Aria, wasn’t anything like Harper. Aria liked to pretend everything was okay. It seemed to Sawye
r that all the horrible things that had happened to Aria had been tamped down, shoved beneath layers of false forgiveness and pent-up rage. Sawyer hated the thought of what might happen once the plug was pulled and Aria’s anger was let loose.

  Bottom line was, terrible things had happened in River Rock.

  Aria was convinced that something bad had happened to Harper too. Something worse than Uncle Theo and his friends, which was why Aria and Sawyer agreed to leave her alone and never talk about the past.

  But that hadn’t stopped Sawyer from being angry at Harper for leaving her behind.

  Sawyer knocked on the door, doing her best to hang on to the cat.

  Lennon opened the door. He’d been so small when Sawyer had found her sisters. Now he was taller than his dad.

  She stepped inside, told him to hurry and shut the door before she set the towel on the ground. The cat took off in a blur.

  “Was that a raccoon?” Lennon asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s a cat.”

  “A feral cat?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Did it do that to your neck?”

  She’d already forgotten about the scratches. “Yes.”

  “Mom is going to be pissed.”

  “It’s our little secret, okay?” She folded the towel and set it down by the door.

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m staying out of it.”

  “Thanks for the support.” She headed inside and found Harper in the kitchen making lunches for the next day.

  Without missing a beat, Harper pointed at the refrigerator. “Grab three yogurts and a bag drink from the bottom drawer, would you?”

  “Sure.” Sawyer handed the items to her sister.

  “Your dinner is over there,” Harper told her. “We couldn’t wait any longer.”