Then she looked up again. When she spoke, her voice was calm and flat. “But then something changed in him. And pretty soon he’d dragged me so deep into hell I thought I’d be down there forever.”
Ethan sat there, barely breathing, as finally the truth began to come out.
Chapter
94
Tell me what you mean by hell,” Officer Danvers said.
AnnieLee gripped the cold metal seat of her chair. She didn’t know if she could do it. Ever since she’d left Houston, her survival had depended on denying everything she’d been through.
She stared at the cup of coffee she hadn’t even tasted. Her throat felt tight, as if the words she needed to summon wouldn’t have room to come out. It was so hard to admit the truth.
“Take your time,” said Officer Danvers.
AnnieLee’s gaze shifted to the clock above Danvers’s head, and she watched as the seconds ticked by: One thousand one, one thousand two…
“Gus was so charming at first,” she said finally. “He told me that I was the most beautiful girl west of the Mississippi River. ‘Probably east of it, too,’ he used to say, ‘but I ain’t ever bothered to cross it.’” She gave a derisive snort. “Can you believe that BS? Well, I could, because he was just about the first person to be nice to me since my mother died. I thought we were in love.”
“Did you…marry him?” Ethan asked in a low voice.
“Sir,” Officer Danvers said, “please let her continue without interruption.”
AnnieLee turned to Ethan, whose handsome face was full of pain. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “I told Clayton that we’d eloped so he’d let me move in with him. And things were good for a handful of months. Gus was really protective. Controlling, too, but I thought that was just his way of taking care of me.”
AnnieLee stopped and looked at Officer Danvers. “Has a man ever held your hand just a little too tightly, officer? And suddenly you realize that you’re not strong enough to get it free, and you just have to wait until he decides to let you go?”
“No,” Officer Danvers said quietly.
“Well, Gus liked to do that. He wanted to remind me who was stronger. And he said that there were people out there who wanted to hurt me, and so it was important that I didn’t go anywhere by myself.” She grabbed a ballpoint pen from a mug on the desk and began clicking its point in and out nervously. “He never left me alone.”
Officer Danvers pushed a box of tissues toward her, and that’s when AnnieLee realized that tears were sliding down her face. She pulled the box into her lap and went on.
“I wanted to get away,” she said, “but he told me I couldn’t leave. He said I owed him.” She dabbed a tissue onto her cheeks. “And that I needed to earn back what he’d spent on me.” She got up, walked over to the door, and rested her head against its cool metal.
“You’re safe now,” Officer Danvers said.
A sob forced its way up through AnnieLee’s throat. “I haven’t even gotten to the worst part!” she cried. “Gus said I wasn’t obedient enough or grateful enough. So he…sold me.” She was crying so hard now that she could hardly speak. “He sold me like a goddamn used car.”
Chapter
95
If Ethan had known any of this when he was at Gus Hobbs’s house, the police would’ve had to arrest him for murder. But he sat very still now, listening intently, as AnnieLee told the rest of her story.
A man from out of town—“Everyone called him D,” AnnieLee said, “but I never knew his real name or where he was from”—had taken her away in the middle of the night. He informed her that she belonged to him now, and that if she didn’t do exactly what he said, he would go back and get her sisters. The younger they were, he said, the more they were worth.
He set her up in a house with three other women on the outskirts of Little Rock. Later he took her to a motel in Houston. Then they moved on to Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and then back to Houston again.
“I never saw daylight,” AnnieLee said. “Just the insides of one shitty motel room after another and my own dead eyes in the bathroom mirror.”
Silence fell over the room. AnnieLee was crying, and the pain in Ethan’s chest made it feel like he was being slowly stabbed with a thick, dull knife.
After a while, Officer Danvers cleared her throat. “How did you escape?” she asked.
AnnieLee wiped her eyes. “One night D got really drunk and fell asleep in front of the TV. He’d done that before, but he was a light sleeper—he’d wake up if I so much as cracked a knuckle. But this time it was different—I could tell. So I sat there and watched him for a long time, thinking about what to do. I was so broken. I knew that if I ran and he caught me, he’d kill me. But what was death compared to where I was? Death was a damn picnic. So I ran, and now…well, here I am.”