Читать книгу Sacred Trust - Meg O'Brien - Страница 9

He grabbed her in the lot of the supermarket in Seaside, grabbed her from behind as she was stepping into her car. He shoved her face forward into the back seat, then blindfolded, bound and gagged her before she ever had a chance to see him.

She thought it must be a him because of the strength it had taken, trying to fight him off. Not once did he let her raise her face off the vinyl seat, his hand and knee pressing her down so hard she thought she would smother.

He took her keys, and she heard him lock the back door then slide into the driver’s seat. He drove forever, it seemed, and she wondered if they were on Highway 1. Along the way she tried desperately to remember every detail, counting three stoplights, three red then greenish hues making their way through the blindfold. If I can remember light and sounds, she thought, I might be able to tell the police where he took me.

At that point she still believed she might live to tell the police. He might rape her, then let her go. Rape would be terrible, but it was something she could find a way to live with, just as the women she’d been interviewing tonight had found a way.

It wouldn’t be easy, she knew. But if God were with her, if all her old saints were with her, she could do it.

Silently, she began to pray the words of the Memorare, words from the early days that took no effort but tumbled over and over from her mind like a mantra: Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Remember, oh most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled…

When the car came to a stop, the prayer did as well. And when he dragged her from the car and shoved her to the ground, tearing her clothes off piece by piece till she was naked, she tried to scream and plead through the gag, “Please don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.” But then he began to beat her, and she knew the flogging for what it was—an old familiar ritual when gently done, but now powered by the seeming hatred of a demented soul. The leather thongs had small metal balls attached to their ends, and he brought the flagrum down full force, first on her breasts, then, as she tried to squirm away, on her back. She felt the blows cut into the outer tissues, felt the capillaries break, then the veins. She knew when the blows reached into the muscles, when arterial blood began to spurt and her skin to hang in strips.

Smothering would have been a blessing, was her only coherent thought. If only she had smothered and had it done with.

Marti Bright never got to tell the police the many details she stored away that night. Not the way his hands felt on her mouth, the musty paper smell, nor the scuffling sounds he made after the flogging as he dragged her to the place on the hill.

She didn’t get to tell the police the way he wheezed and coughed with the effort it took to kill her, high, piercing sounds that were almost like that of a woman. Or the way she knew, finally, why this was being done to her. The why, if not the who.

There was time for only one thing in those final moments. Marti, still bound, was able to roll herself onto her side. From that position she used the fingers of one hand to write in the dirt. She prayed the darkness would cover the word, that it wouldn’t be seen until the police arrived.

She prayed for other things, too. For the souls of her dead mother and father, for her own soul, for those of her friends. She prayed for the child she had given up so many years before. And when her killer dragged her to the makeshift cross and lashed her to it with rags so tight they cut into her skin, when it dawned on her what he planned to do, she even found it in the long-lost depths of her soul to pray for the person who was doing this hideous deed.

Finally, as the nails punctured her palms, the prayer she screamed silently into the gag became, Mary, mother of God, save me. Please, oh, please, Mary, save me.

But even as Marti prayed, she knew it was far too late for that. The mother of God didn’t come around much anymore.