24 Hours

Not wanting to enter it in the dark, she reached out and rotated the dimmer switch on the wall. The sight of the bedroom startled her. Everything was in its proper place, yet nothing seemed familiar. Not the antique sleigh bed. Not the overstuffed chair and ottoman. Not the matched Henredon dressers or the cherrywood cabinet that held the television. Not even the Walter Anderson watercolors on the walls. All struck her as furnishings in some nameless hotel, not objects she had chosen with the greatest care.

“The lap of luxury,” Hickey said. “Looks like a nice place to pass an evening.”

He walked past her, fell back into the oversized chair, and kicked his feet up on the ottoman. His Top-Siders were so new that there were no marks on the soles. Only dirt from the trip to the cabin.

“I could use a drink,” he said. “Bourbon. Kentucky bourbon, if you got it.”

The bourbon was kept on a sideboard in Will’s study. Karen laid her jeans on the foot of the bed and went back up the hall, thankful for a chance to postpone what seemed inevitable. Had five other mothers submitted to this?

In the study, she saw Will’s computer glowing softly. For a moment she considered trying to send a message to his pager via the SkyTel, but she had never used it before. And besides, what could she say? I’m about to be raped? If she did, Will would probably do something heroic and stupid, and get Abby killed. As she poured a shot of Wild Turkey, she realized that bourbon might accomplish what defiance could not. If Hickey drank enough whiskey fast enough, he might not be able to perform. It was probably a long shot, though. Karen thought the old saying about alcohol increasing desire but decreasing ability was exaggerated. Some of the best sex she and Will ever had was consummated when they were drunk. Of course, that had been a while back, when Will was in his mid-thirties. This thought disturbed the deep well of guilt inside her, but mixed with it was enough resentment to force the guilt down.

She picked up the Wild Turkey bottle and walked back toward her bedroom. Unexpected images flashed in her mind, scenes from a film she had seen long ago and forgotten until now. It starred Nicole Kidman. She couldn’t remember its name, but Nicole and her husband had been blue-water sailing and had rescued a man in a life raft. The man turned out to be psychotic, and sailed off from Nicole’s husband with her aboard. To go back and save her husband, Nicole had to get control of the boat again. But the psychopath had the gun. Before long, he decided to rape her, and what Karen remembered about the film-what had stayed with her long after-was that Nicole had let it happen. She had known it was the wrong moment to resist, and she had endured the rape in the hope of surviving until the right moment came. And it had arrived, finally, proving her sacrifice worthwhile.

As Karen neared the bedroom, words from her dead mother rose in her mind. A genteel woman speaking of rape in the language of older generations of southern women. The “fate worse than death,” they called it. But they were wrong. Pride had bred a lot of wrong notions, and that was one. Karen had lived long enough to know that. Rape could scar forever, but it was not death. Where there’s life, there’s hope, her father had always said. And whatever it cost, she and Abby were going to live through this night.

Hickey was smiling when she stepped through the door. “Wild Turkey!” he cried. “I’ll be damned. Bring that here!”

She crossed the room and gave him the bottle, then took three steps back.

“Scared I’ll bite?” He unscrewed the cap and drank liberally from the wide glass mouth, then set the bottle between his legs. “I’ll tell you a little secret. I do.”

She looked away.

“Put your pants back on,” he said.

What should have been a welcome command only made her more anxious. She went to the bed and slipped her panties on, then slid her jeans up and snapped them.

“Look at me,” Hickey said.

She looked.

His black eyes seethed. “You know what a lap dance is?”

Lurid images from HBO movies went through her mind. Scantily clad women hunching over bar patrons in chairs, wiggling their silicone-enhanced breasts in the faces of bachelor party boys and rheumy-eyed older men.

“No,” she replied.

“You’re lying. You know what one is. What you don’t know is, my wife had to do them for a living for a while. That bugged me, Karen. That she had to do that.”

So why didn’t you get a decent job? she thought. But what she said was, “I’m sorry she had to do that.”

His face went sullen. “All those bastards feeling her up, slobbering all over her. Your husband was probably one of them. She danced right here in Jackson.”

“Will doesn’t go to those places.”

Hickey’s eyes glinted. “Who you think you’re kidding? You think hubby never had a lap dance?”

“No. At least I don’t think so.”