The Fenway Stevenson Mysteries, Collection One: Books 1-3 by Paul Austin Ardoin

Author:Paul Austin Ardoin [Ardoin, Paul Austin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781949082104
Publisher: Pax Ardsen
Published: 2019-09-02T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Dez drove Fenway home, and she had a couple of hours before she had to meet the private investigator. She walked through the door to her apartment in a daze.

She set her purse down on the kitchen table and kicked off her clothes as she went into her bathroom. She turned on the shower as hot as she could stand it and stood underneath the pulsing spray, feeling the water’s fingers drum against the top of her head. She had done the same thing in the dorm in Bellingham after the attack. After the rape. Trying to wash it all away.

Her hair had gotten wet—she’d have to have a wrap or something tonight, or flatiron it later. But she tried to think about other things. She tried to think about Dr. Barry Klein, terrified, in a holding cell with drunks and fighters and thieves, a long, hellish night ahead of him. She tried to think of him shouting through the bars, trying to pull rank with the police—Don’t you know who I am? I’m on the board of supervisors! But she knew that Dez held more sway with the officers than Barry did.

Yet the thought of him spending a cold, frightened, miserable night didn’t make her feel any better. So she turned the water all the way to the cold side. It felt like ice on her skin. It felt like walking through the freezing sleet on her way to class in Bellingham the morning after it happened, thinking how she would get an A in the class just to spite him, and how she would change her major from English literature to nursing.

She changed the water again, this time to a comfortable temperature. She got the soap and scrubbed her body, her thighs, her shoulders, her chest, her neck. She felt it all again, like it had happened yesterday: the shame, the fear, the worry. But this time, it didn’t stick; like an imprint, a ghost of the emotion, like she had vomited all the shame and fear out and only flecks on her heart remained. And she wanted it to all disappear down the drain with the soap.

She rinsed herself clean, turned off the shower, then got out and dried herself carefully and thoroughly. She walked into her bedroom and looked at the clock; she still had an hour and a half. She blow-dried her hair and took forty minutes to flat-iron the unruly curls out of it; when she finished, it hung at her shoulders, slightly curling in toward her chin at the bottom, framing her face nicely.

She looked in the mirror and set her jaw. She hated that Barry Klein could do this to her with a short series of nine-year-old photographs from the worst day of her life. But she took a deep breath and put those memories in a box in her mind, and got dressed.

She knew her father would want to see her in a dress, and not the jeans and cap-sleeve V-neck she pulled on, but she made the decision to be comfortable in her own skin.

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