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“Did she say anything to you about what her husband did to her Saturday night?” Stokes asked.
“No.”
“You weren’t suspicious when you saw her looking like she’d been beat up?”
“I done been over all this with her,” she said irritably, shooting Annie a look like she was a traitor or something. “She told me she got hurt getting bales down. It’s none of my business what goes on between them. I’m just the hired hand.”
“What can you tell me about that white truck up by the house?” Stokes asked.
“What about it?” she snapped, her eyes darting from Stokes to Annie as Annie stepped back toward the open door. Either she didn’t want to be left alone with Stokes, or she didn’t want Annie going to the house. Why was that? Annie wondered.
“Do you know who might have been driving that truck Sunday night?” Stokes asked.
“How would I know? Sunday’s my day off.”
Annie slipped out the door as Stokes continued his questions. A fat Welsh corgi dogged her heels as she walked up the driveway toward the house. Something felt off, she thought, her nerves raising goose bumps down her arms. Maybe Izzy just didn’t like Stokes, or didn’t like men, but she had come across as tense and anxious, which was different than the other times Annie had spoken to her.
Her own anxiety rose like a slow tide as she neared the house. There shouldn’t have been any reason for that, she told herself. It was just the Ghost of Disaster Past. The anxiety was an oversensitive alarm she had to learn how to defuse. There was nothing dangerous about Tulsie Parcelle.
But even as she told herself that, her memory brought up the last person she had wrongly considered a non-threat.
She made one circuit around the white pickup, which had a couple of stuffed black garbage bags in the back. Raising up on her toes, she looked into the cab. There was a jacket and some dirty work gloves on the passenger seat, a few pieces of mail, a couple of discarded cash register receipts. An open can of Red Bull sat in the cup holder in the center console. Nothing out of the ordinary.
She left the truck and went up the front sidewalk, climbed the prefabricated concrete steps, and rang the doorbell. No one came.
Poor Tulsie, she thought, as she rang the bell a second time. She had been inconsolable the night before, sobbing to the point of gagging herself after she had admitted Cody had beaten her Saturday night. It wasn’t any wonder she was sick. Her entire world was coming down around her, and it was about to get worse. She wouldn’t be able to deny the video evidence. If she hadn’t been in one of those trucks, then who had been?
Annie got down from the steps and went around the side of the house, peeking in windows as she went, seeing nothing of note. A typical living room with an oversize brown leather couch, a coffee table cluttered with magazines and a silver bowl overflowing with horse show ribbons. On the walls hung framed photos of horses in competition.
She went back around under the carport and climbed another set of steps to the kitchen door. Cardboard had been taped over a couple of broken glass panes in the upper half of the door. Annie peered in, getting a view of a messy kitchen. She buzzed the video doorbell, then knocked, feeling impatient. Maybe Tulsie was sleeping off her migraine medication, but she could have as easily takenan overdose and willed herself to sleep for eternity. Her life was a mess and not about to get better. It wasn’t a stretch to think she might just want out altogether.
A wide deck ran the length of the back side of the house, with a gas grill and dining table and chairs right outside the sliding door into the kitchen. A patio lounge chair and a couple of swivel armchairs sat on the other end outside a second slider, along with another pair of stuffed garbage bags.
Annie went to the second sliding door and looked in at what had to be the master bedroom, squinting, willing her eyes to adjust. There were no lamps on in the room. Situated on the east side of the house, the room had little in the way of natural light.
Tulsie sat on the floor in the middle of the room with her back to the glass door, head down, shoulders slumped.
Unease ran like cold rain through Annie. She knocked on the slider. “Tulsie?” And knocked again. “Tulsie? It’s Annie Broussard.”
The girl didn’t respond, didn’t move.
“Tulsie!” Annie called louder, yanking the sliding door open.
The overwhelming smell of bleach nearly knocked her backward. Coughing on it, she went into the room, her focus on the girl, but her mind grabbing images like snapshots as she went—the bed stripped down to the mattress, a shattered mirror over a dresser, items that had been swept from the dresser and scattered on the floor…
The girl sat cross-legged on the floor, holding a bloody kitchen knife in her lap, tears streaming silently down her face, her eyes blank.
Oh, shit.
Her heart racing, Annie stepped slowly, carefully around the girl and crouched down into her line of sight. Tulsie had already cut both forearms a couple of times. In the wrong place and at the wrong angle to get the job done, but she was bleeding heavily nonetheless.
“Tulsie, put the knife aside,” Annie said firmly but quietly. “You don’t need that. I’m here to help you.”
Tulsie didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge her. In her peripheralvision, Annie could see damage done to one wall from what looked like a shotgun blast, and blood spatter someone had smeared on the drywall in an unsuccessful attempt to scrub it away. The mattress was stained. Sections of the carpet had been cut out and removed. That was probably what was in the garbage bags, she thought, bloodstained carpet and other evidence of violence.
“Tulsie, why don’t you give me that knife and tell me what happened?” she said, holding out her hand. “I know you probably think there’s no way out of this, but that’s not true.”
“I can’t do anything right,” Tulsie murmured, looking down at her bloody arms. “Cody always says I mess everything up, and he’s right. Look at me.”
