Girl, 11 by Clarke Amy Suiter

Author:Clarke, Amy Suiter [Clarke, Amy Suiter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, Mystery, Crime, Suspense, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9780358494935
Goodreads: 54804141
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2021-04-20T07:00:00+00:00

21

Elle

January 17, 2020

She was in the room again. The gray sheets were rough under her fingertips as she lay flat on her back, blinking at the mold patches on the ceiling. He hadn’t come to get her for more than a day. All her water was gone, and her stomach cramped with hunger. It made her . . . want to see him. Even though she knew what he’d make her do when he came back.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, it was getting dark, the scrap of weak sunlight that came through her one small window disappearing like a dying flashlight. She could barely see the ceiling anymore.

Then he was in the room with her, thick arms and torso making a striking silhouette in the fading light.

The man sat on the bed, but her limbs were pinned down, frozen, as he leaned over her. He moved the thin blanket off her, examined her scabbed knees. She wanted to tell him to stop. She wanted to beg him for a drink of water. She wanted him to leave her alone.

She didn’t want to be alone.

In the gloaming, his face was a blur of indistinguishable features.

His fingers trailed up from her navel, across her sternum, and then landed on her throat. He pressed down, and this was new, this pain, this force he hadn’t used before that made it hard to breathe. She gasped, and it was tight against his palms, limited in a way her breathing had never been, and her chest clenched painfully.

“Please.” Her whisper was ragged in the cold air of the room. “Please.”

Elle jerked awake and sat up, her fingers throbbing against a pillow she had in a stranglehold. She dropped it as if it was on fire, pushing herself out of bed onto unsteady feet. The room was dark, and it took a moment to place where she was in time. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but something felt off. Something had happened.

And then it hit her with a sudden shiver of anxiety: she was supposed to pick up Natalie from piano lessons today. The black clock with big red numbers on Martín’s nightstand told her it was 5:22.

“Shit!” Her phone was nowhere to be seen. She ran down and rifled through her purse—sure enough, she’d missed seven calls from various numbers and had three texts from Natalie asking where she was. Even though Elle was only twenty minutes late, the first message from Natalie was from nearly an hour ago, just after she would have gotten off the bus in front of Ms. Turner’s house.

Something was wrong.

After shoving her feet into her boots and grabbing the nearest winter coat, Elle ran out to Martín’s car. She didn’t have time to let the engine warm up, and the car screeched in protest as she reversed out of the driveway. As she drove toward Ms. Turner’s house and the setting sun, Elle called Natalie’s phone. It went straight to voicemail. Once she got to a stoplight, she sent her a text.

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