Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

'You'll have to ask him yourself.' Nick reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of damp notebook paper. 'When you told me you were in Reece, I assumed you might have some questions I couldn't answer. Sorry it got wet,' he apologized, unfolding the page. 'Old guy lives a far piece out, so you're gonna need a good map. I'll let you borrow mine if you promise to get it back to me.'

Jeffrey scanned the address, noted that the town was at least four hours away from Reece. 'He doesn't have a phone?'

'He's so far off the grid I'd be surprised if he's got electricity.'

Jeffrey looked again at the piece of paper Nick was offering him. Elawah wasn't his county. These weren't his people. Jake Valentine hadn't said word one about needing any help, and even if the man had, it wasn't Jeffrey's job to bail him out. He was here to help Lena, not take on a bunch of skinheads. The problem was, he didn't have much else to go on. Short of following up on Sara's idea and going to the county courthouse to look up the property deed, there was nothing else Jeffrey could think to do.

Sara. He couldn't leave her alone in the motel room while he drove to within spitting distance of the Florida border. Of course, she might make the trip look a little less official. Nick mentioned that Pfeiffer had a wife. Sara could help get the woman out of the way while Jeffrey asked the man some hard questions.

Nick was still holding out the paper. He asked, 'What's it gonna be, hoss?'

Jeffrey hesitated again, thinking about the terror in Lena 's voice as she'd told Sara to get out of town. He wasn't fooling anyone, especially himself. 'I'm going to need to borrow your map.'

The Home Sweet Home motel on the outskirts of Reece had been Lena 's only option the night before. The two-story cinder block building looked like a slasher movie set out of the sixties. Even as a kid, she'd thought of it as the Whore Hotel, the kind of place where people who didn't want to get to know each other too well met to fuck. At the age of sixteen, Lena had pretended to lose her virginity here. The guy, Ben Carver, was thirty-two, which was about the only thing she'd found attractive about him. He was dull and stupid to the point of being possibly retarded, and she'd been on the verge of breaking up with him until Hank had found out they were seeing each other. Hank forbade her to see Ben again, and the next night, Lena had found herself flat on her back at the Whore Hotel.

She wouldn't say it was the most boring three minutes of her life, but it came close. It was safe to say that when Ben didn't call her the next day, she was far from heartbroken. Lena had been too terrified to think about anything but her fear of being pregnant. Ben had said he would use a condom, but she had been too embarrassed to check. Lena had been completely powerless when it came to protecting herself. The only pharmacist in town refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. As far as she knew, the pharmacy was still owned by the same man today. She bet the bastard had no problem selling Viagra to unmarried men at ten bucks a pop.

Not that birth control pills were a hundred percent effective. There was always that less than one percent chance, that one time when the pill failed and the condom broke, and then before you knew it, you were sitting on a hard plastic chair at a clinic in Atlanta, waiting for your name to be called.

Lena could still remember everything about that day – the texture of the chairs, the posters hanging on the walls. Hank had waited outside, mumbling to himself, pacing the parking lot. He hadn't agreed with Lena 's decision, but in his fucked-up Hank way, he had supported her through the whole thing. 'I'm not in any position to cast judgment,' he'd told her. 'We all make mistakes.'

Was it a mistake, though? Most everybody was quick to say that abortion was okay in cases of rape, as if the fact that the woman didn't enjoy the sex negated any squeamishness they might have about the procedure. Lena 's relationship with Ethan was a lot of things: tumultuous, violent, brutal… but then sometimes it could be tender, loving, almost affectionate. The truth was that most of the time, she had willingly had sex with him. Most of the time, she had put her hands on his body, welcomed him into her bed. Could she trace back the conception of their mistake to a specific night, a specific time, and say whether or not it had been consensual or the other kind? Could she separate what it felt like to be beaten by him from the way it felt to be loved by him?

Could she really say that their baby had been a mistake?

Lena sat up in bed, not wanting to think about it anymore.

She made her way to the sink area and took her toothbrush out of her bag; she had not wanted to leave it by the sink last night. God only knew what people got up to on the cracked, plastic basin. The room was even more disgusting than she remembered; the carpet cupped the soles of her shoes as she walked across it and the sheets on the bed were so nasty that she had slept in her clothes. She had basically lay there all night, falling in and out of sleep, startling at any noise, afraid that the creepy night manager would use his passkey and try to catch her off guard. This was just the kind of place where that sort of thing happened.

She had slept with her gun by her hand.

The photograph from the newspaper was seared into her brain, and when she wasn't worrying about being raped and killed, she worried about her mother, the lies she and Sibyl had been told. It was clear now that Angela Adams had not died after two weeks spent lying comatose in the hospital. She had lived at least six months past Lena and Sibyl's birth. On the day the picture had been taken for the newspaper, she had held them in her arms, posing for the photographer as she told the reporter that she thought it was a travesty that her husband's murder had gone unsolved. I loved Calvin more than my own life,' she had told the reporter. 'He should be here now being a father to these precious little babies.'

Her words were much more saccharine than Lena would have liked, but the sentiment hit home. Her mother had loved them. She had been devastated by the loss of their father. She had held them in her arms.

Lena walked around the room as she brushed her teeth. When had Angela really died? And how? Hank had said that the thug leaving his house was the man who had killed Angela Adams. The drugs had let down Hank's guard, and she was certain that he had been telling the truth, or at least the truth as he saw it.

But did Hank mean the man had actually, physically killed her mother? He was certainly old enough to have been around when Calvin Adams was shot and killed. Had the thug been the one who ordered the hit on Calvin all those years ago, leaving Angela with no husband and two twin daughters to raise on her own? Had it been too much for Angela to bear? Had suicide seemed like the only way to make the pain stop? Lena could understand the draw. There had been many times in her life when she had considered the option herself.

Suicide might explain why Hank had lied about the timing, the mode, of Angela's death. He didn't want the girls to be burdened with the legacy of their mother's suicide. Lena could understand – if not forgive – that. At least there was some kind of logic to the lies.

If her mother had killed herself, it would also make sense that Hank was trying to do the same. Lena had seen it many times as a cop: suicides ran in families. Without a doubt, if Hank maintained his present lifestyle, he would be dead before the month was out. Whatever he was doing to himself, it was completely and entirely deliberate. Lena had never thought of Hank as anything but a survivor.