Page 29 of Two Kinds of Stranger (Eddie Flynn #9)

Elly

Elly picked through the items on her breakfast tray. Powdered eggs that tasted grainy. A yogurt from a brand she had never heard of before. She didn’t go near the fruit in a sealed plastic cup.

Suze took her roll.

She wasn’t hungry, and knew that if she did eat something there was every chance she would vomit it up within minutes.

Her stomach was going crazy. As she sat at a table with Suze, she noticed blood on the table.

Fresh blood. It came from the cuticles around her thumb.

Elly had picked the flesh away from her nail.

Same thing had happened in high school.

Elly was smart, kind of geeky, not funny, and she didn’t think of herself as good-looking or cool.

She guessed that none of her fellow high-school students did either.

She had few friends. Kept to herself. Did her homework over lunch, alone, picking through a different meal from a plastic tray in her school cafeteria, with the same kind of anxiety ripping through her system, and the nail on her index finger unconsciously ripping through the skin on the left side of her thumbnail.

She remembered one particularly bad lunch in that old cafeteria. She had saved up for a new pair of boots. Black biker books, ankle length. With a silver buckle. She’d seen a picture of Katy Perry wearing the same boots on Facebook and desperately wanted to emulate one of her teen idols.

Only problem was Elly never wore anything with a heel.

Vans and cheap Nikes had been staple footwear growing up.

She remembered that morning, and the looks from the blond witches who hung around the staircase at the entrance, the jocks who gathered at the lockers in the hallway and the geeks too – everyone noticed her boots.

And Elly never forgot that attention, because it was the first time she had ever felt even a modicum of self-confidence.

The confidence lasted until lunchtime, when she stumbled on the way to her table in the cafeteria, spilling half her lunch tray on the floor in front of the whole school. Everyone laughed.

Things were different back then. In the hell of high school, Elly could always come home to her parents.

She was an only child, so she got a lot of love and attention from her parents automatically, but they were the kind of people who loved being parents.

Family was a big thing in her home. Her mother, Susan, always described herself as a homemaker, even though she had her own pottery business, which she ran from the garage.

Elly remembered long evenings in the garage during the summer, her mom at the potter’s wheel, clay in her hands and her foot depressing the pedal to spin the wheel in time to the music her father had playing in the house.

Her dad, Stewart, owned a car-repair shop.

They would sit on old car seats that Dad had brought home from a wreck and watch her mom, listening to Dad’s records from the eighties, sipping coffee and talking.

She remembered that her parents worked with their hands and their hearts.

A lot of love went into everything they did, be it making a fruit bowl or fixing a clutch – the oil and dirt engrained in her father’s hands and the clay residue that coated her mom’s fingernails – it was all evidence of the love they put into their work, and their family.

Elly could never master pottery, and she was no good with a wrench either.

Instead, when Elly was nervous, she picked at her cuticles until they bled.

She didn’t have clay dust, or oil on her hands – only dried blood.

Perhaps her parents sensed her anxiety. Elly could tell her mom and dad anything.

Even falling over in the canteen because of her stupid expensive boots.

They had laughed when she told them the story, and their laughter took away her embarrassment and shame at the memory.

Falling over was part of life, her father had said.

You always get back up again.

She missed her parents a lot.

Now, more than ever.

Elly sat alone, again, at a table, in a max-security facility, and picked at the skin surrounding her nails until she felt the blood on her fingers.

Rosie’s wasn’t high school. It was much worse.

She guessed she was still in shock about the murder of her husband and best friend, because, while she had cried for them, she was also crying for herself.

She had no time to process what had happened to her.

She couldn’t mourn her husband or her friend.

Her emotions were already messed up, because these were the two people who had meant the most to her in the world, and they had betrayed her – and now they were dead.

Somehow, it made the betrayal permanent.

It could now never be resolved. There was no reconciliation, no closure, no way of dealing with those emotions. Their deaths were a wound to Elly. One she knew would never heal.

Even now, sitting with Suze, watching her, Elly’s fear and anxiety was constant. Yet some part of her brain told her to pay attention to Suze. That this was important.

This was survival.

She noticed the way Suze hunched over her breakfast tray, never once looking at what she was eating – her eyes forward, scanning the room, scanning the faces of the other detainees, assessing threats, watching hushed conversations, calculating, eating and waiting for the first move.

‘You bleedin’,’ said Suze.

‘What?’ asked Elly.

‘Your thumb. You bleedin’.’

‘Sorry, I do that when I’m nervous.’

‘I got some Band-Aids in the cell. You better keep that shit clean in here. All kinds of infections going around.’

Elly nodded, was about to speak.

‘Don’t thank me yet. You could be doin’ a whole lot more bleedin’ before tomorrow,’ she said, and gave a slight nod by way of indication.

Following Suze’s gaze, Elly saw the woman, Nance, and the small blond girl huddled in the corner with five other women.

At first, Elly didn’t notice anything sinister about the group.

Then she saw that as they spoke, they covered their mouths, and their eyes collectively zeroed in Elly’s direction.

Nance took something from one of the other women.

It was thin and black, but it had a shine to it.

‘She got herself a shiv,’ said Suze.

Fear is a strange thing.

It’s hard to tell if it’s physical, emotional or psychological. Maybe all three.

But when it bites it bites hard.

There is nothing else like it on this earth.

Elly felt every limb freeze. Her muscles. Her lungs.

Her heart.

Every nerve ending, every tiny hair follicle on her skin, tightened in alert. Her mouth was suddenly dry, her throat tight. With her eyes frozen on the thin black blade that Nance slid into her sock, Elly’s mind shut down.

‘I told them to lay off,’ said Suze. ‘They’re not listening. They gonna cut you. Then they gonna ask you for money.’

Elly’s mouth opened, but no words came. Tears filled her eyes and she started to shake.

‘Wo-won’t the guards see?’ said Elly.

‘Sure. They gonna take a cut of whatever you give to Nance. There ain’t no way out of this for you. You gotta pay ’cause you sure as shit can’t fight.’

‘I don’t have any money in here. I’m not sure I have anything left once I pay for my bail.’

‘They don’t care. You get cut and you pay. Or . . . ’

‘Can you help me?’ asked Elly.

‘I can try. Stay here.’

Suze got up and strolled over to Nance and the group of women in the corner. Elly tried to listen, to hear any snatches of their hushed conversation, but all she could hear was her own heartbeat thumping in her ears.

The group of women crowded around Suze. Elly heard them whispering.

To any casual observer it was nothing more than a conversation.

Until it wasn’t.

Until the scrawny blonde from Elly’s cell stepped forward.

Something shiny flashed in her hand.

And she stabbed Suze in the belly.

The alarms sounded like thunder. Steel doors banged open. Boots thudded on the floor. Cries and screams rent the air and Elly looked on as Suze fell to the floor, and the blonde continued to stab at her left side.

They landed in a pile and were enveloped by corrections officers, one of them grabbing the blonde round the waist and hoisting her clean into the air before pivoting and slamming her down onto the concrete floor, face first.

Calls for a medic.

The blonde was cuffed, unconscious, and dragged out by two COs, her face a bloody ruin. One of the COs picked up the shiv, while more worked on Suze.

Elly got up, moved toward them, trying to help, but she was told to back away.

The chaos was over as a medical team came in, and the house fell quiet.

Suze was carried out in the arms of a medic, her blood dark and shiny on the floor.

And, in the corner, her back against the wall, Nance glared at her, wearing a wicked smile.

There would be no one to protect her in the cell tonight against Nance.

With all that she had been through, Elly knew if she didn’t do something she may not live another day. She stared at the bank of three phones on the wall. Soon as the COs left, she had to make a call.

Her life depended on it.