Slowly, painfully, she rose to her knees, then to her feet. She couldn't see much, just a light and a green moving field she knew was the water. Dirty. Filthy. She had only one desire-to cleanse herself before she let the sea take her.
They found her standing in the water up to her waist, scrubbing furiously between her legs, trying to wash away the shame of what the monsters had done to her. Someone summoned a police officer, who waded into the water to escort her back to shore.
When he got close, he had to look away for a moment to compose himself. Her face was covered by a sheet of blood, her left eye swollen shut, her right eye hanging half out of its socket. Her lips were split, a black hole where her front teeth had been.
She screamed when he first reached out for her arm and pulled away from him. "Please, ma'am, let me help you to someplace safe."
Turning a sightless face toward the officer, she'd cried, "Don't you know, there's no such place!"
1
Friday, December 10
Hugh Louis shifted uncomfortably in the chair next to the desk of the television talk-show host. He'd once played tight end for the semipro New Jersey Packers football team as he worked his way through law school. But those days were more than twenty years under the bridge, and the chair complained like a bitter housewife beneath his bulk.
As he waited for the taping to begin, Louis mopped away with a handkerchief at the interlocking streams and tributaries of sweat that coursed over his broad face. The stage crew bustled around, including an intent young woman who dabbed away at his host, Natalie Fitz, with last-minute applications of makeup to disguise encroaching wrinkles and a chronic fatigue that had settled in when she realized some years before that her chances of anchoring network news were slim and none.
Unless, she thought with a glance toward Louis, making nice with this fat shyster gets me an Emmy. Then who knows, maybe not the evening spot but one of the news magazines or a morning show. She turned up the wattage on her smile when Louis caught her looking. He returned it with the same show of teeth and lack of sincerity.