chapter one

1990

Grace Delacroix, named for her mother, heard the back door slam and shuddered; he was home too early. She quickly finished packing the rest of her few possessions into her well-used Jansport backpack and grabbed her guitar. Climbing out her window onto the roof of the small house, she ignored the calls to her that she couldn’t hear but knew were there. She didn’t hesitate to leave the only home she’d ever known as she ran to her brother’s truck and backed out of the driveway without turning on the engine.
She laughed without humor when she realized she still thought of the truck as belonging to William. After all, he’d left her alone with him three years ago, today. She was only thirteen at the time but she remembered it as if it were yesterday, you just don’t forget a thing like that. She wished she could, though, and she probably could’ve if she didn’t have to relive the horror of it every single night when she closed her eyes. She felt as if she hadn’t slept in years. Besides, it was her truck now. She had finished fixing it up after he left her and had practiced driving it whenever the risk of being caught didn’t exceed her set limitations.
When she had rolled away from the house as far as she could go, till the gentle slope of the asphalt was no more, she risked turning on the engine and floored it for a couple miles. When she got a hold on herself again she reluctantly lifted her foot off the pedal so she wouldn’t get pulled over by some overzealous pig who she just knew got off on busting some poor kid for going five miles over the limit.

After the first thirty miles or so it hit her; she was free. She’d been planning her escape since William died and left her to fend for herself. At first she had done it the stupid way like so many others in her situation and just left, no money, no car, no chance. She’d been caught within hours and was hauled back to Bradley’s false smile, which was meant for the pig that blew it for her (who, by the way, bought it and even listened to his praise with nauseating attention; willingly eating all the crap he was being fed). But the moment he got in his car and drove off, feeling mighty proud of himself, no doubt, she got the hell beat outta her for running away. Hell, he even had the audacity to tell her she would thank him for it later. But she now knew it was better that she had been caught for otherwise she would’ve ended up on the streets to succumb to some far worse fate then getting slapped around a bit.
Anyway, Grace got smart after that. She didn’t push him anymore since she finally got it into her thick head what he was capable of doing. She made him think she was scared shitless of him and wouldn’t dare do anything that would make him even a little upset and after a while he let his guard down, got too sure of himself. Fact is, she could think of little else but sticking a fucking knife in his gut whenever he so much as came within fifteen feet of her. Instead she usually just went scampering out of the room since that’s what he had come to expect of her: which is exactly what she wanted.
Although Bradley, of course, didn’t know this, she had stopped going to school after she finished seventh grade, that was the summer William was killed and she just didn’t see much point in going back. She had intercepted all the calls from her school when the year started up again. (This wasn’t very hard since Richard never answered the phone even when he was home. He saw himself as way too important for that and expected others to as well. As far as Grace could tell most people who called for Bradley assumed she was the maid or something.) She just pretended to be the new owners of the house and the school didn’t ask many questions since they really didn’t give a damn whether or not she was coming back. Not that she could blame them; it’s not like they would’ve known of her existence even if she had stayed in school.
Grace made sure that the all-knowing Richard Bradley didn’t know she had dropped the whole school thing. That way she could have six hours of the day to put her plan into motion. It was only a shadow of an idea back then, she only knew she was gonna need to get a part-time job, William’s truck (her truck) finished, and a fake ID. She knew it wasn’t gonna be so hard to do but it was going to take some time. So she was gonna have to be something she had never been before: patient.

She drove all night on the back-roads she had mapped out and had almost gotten five hundred glorious miles away from the hellhole she used to call home before the first rays of dawn shown through the clouds. It was the first sunrise she had ever witnessed and she was convinced that it was the most beautiful sight she had ever laid eyes on.
After a couple more hours of driving she pulled over at a motel that she thought looked very inconspicuous. It was a small one-storey off-white building with a wooden sign above the office that said only MOTEL in block letters. The doors to the rooms were unpainted with medium sized roman numerals on them which ranged from I - X. From where she was standing after getting out of the truck there were four of the ten wall to wall very temporary apartments, with not-so-welcoming mats, in her view.
Grace looked it up and down and thought that it was absolutely perfect. If it had had a neon sign someone might have been able to catch a glimpse of it from the highway but as it was it appeared almost invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for it. She was thankful she had gotten directions from her friend Doug after calling in to get a room for today. Doug had worked here before moving to Santa Monica where she had met him. He had told her the reason the place was so tucked away was cuz the owner, Truman, hated people. Now there’s a great business to run if you hate people. Truman had said he bought the place when it was just an old shack and turned it into a motel which then got a reputation for existing especially for people like her, people running from someone or something and who hear about it from a one who used to be running. Because of his acquired tastes this was not a fact that Truman particularly enjoyed. The guy got loaded in black market drugs and intended to use his little place for a cover up as much as for a rendezvous point to meet clients he could trust, which meant they usually met somewhere else. You just don’t want someone to know where you dwell today if they're gonna turn around and put a .45 to your temple tomorrow.
Grace walked to the office and went inside. The second she stepped in she almost regretted it. She was hit with a wave of the worst smell she’d ever known, it was a mixture of sweat, urine, cheap cigars, and a hint of something she recognized from that dreadful night years ago when she had found William sprawled on the living room floor. She stopped calling it the living room after that though. She found the source of the last stench when she saw a dead rat in the corner of the small space. It had apparently been there a while since part of it was eaten and there were tons of flies buzzing around it. She had to repress a shudder as she wondered, briefly, what had killed it. She quickly looked away.
Then a realization, accompanied by disdain, hit her: she’d rather live a lifetime in this cramped space than in the house that was once her haven and now her own personal hell. This epiphany instantly changed her mood to black.
When her eyes rested on the man behind the desk she considered looking back at the rodent. He was tall and lanky and seemed not in the least bothered by the flies or odor and she supposed they must have been around long enough for him to now regard them in a companionable manner. He was middle aged and had a drastic receding hairline. His jet-black eyes looked at her with naked lust and she repressed another shudder. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in centuries and his clothes were worse. She saw three barren bottles of Jack Daniel’s on his desk and a half-empty one in his hand. She surmised he had been drunk for at least an hour, being as close as a young child can possibly get to accustomed to drunken men from past experiences, but she wasn’t completely sure until he spoke to her with a heavy slur. According to the description she had attained from Doug this, for lack of a better word, person, was not Truman.
“What can I do for you, Hon?” he spoke with obvious effort.
Grace was able to hold back the first hundred angry remarks that came to her mind with that ‘Hon’ as well as her natural inclination; leaning right over the desk and socking him in the head, from practice. She said instead, “I called in for a room a couple days ago under Doe.”
“Oh yea, Jane huh? Very cute.” He waited for a response and when she didn’t oblige he gave her a key that had VII printed on it. “There ya go, behind the building like ya wanted.”
“Can I park by my room?”
“Yea, sure, hey listen how ‘bout—”
She got outta there as fast as she could while pretending not to hear him ask her to ‘come back when his shift was over to have a little fun,’ as he so eloquently put it. She climbed into William’s truck and drove it around to the back by Room 7. She saw only two other cars in the lot and figured one belonged to the desk clerk. She parked in the most discreet spot she could find, grabbed her backpack and guitar then walked to the entrance and exit of her room.
Before she could even turn the key she heard a loud crash to her right and jumped back. The desk clerk had come around the building and knocked down a trashcan. He stopped to see what was behind door number 9 and commenced painfully slamming his fist into it inducing a dull thud, thud and yelling profanities at the door. She went inside her room and turned the deadbolt before she witnessed anything else. She crossed the room in only three steps and sat down on the bed, listening to the banging and yelling two rooms away. She was suddenly plagued with what ifs: What if someone called the cops? What if they were already searching for her and saw her car? What if this was all for nothing; three years of careful planning, wasted because some ass didn’t pay on the same night the clerk decided to get himself drunk as hell? Right before she became panicky and stood up to ditch, the incessant banging stopped as suddenly as it had begun. She realized she had been holding her breath and let it out slowly.
When the banging didn’t continue she chose to, uncharacteristically, look at it as a good omen and relaxed, even going as far as smiling, though just faintly. She looked around the room she was in for the first time and was surprised that it wasn’t as bad as she assumed it would be. The bed she was sitting on had an off-white comforter on it and was made very neatly. The mattress wasn’t any worse than the one she had had back home so she was content. The walls were the same color as the comforter (as well as the rest of the damn building) and didn’t have too many noticeable stains. The carpet, however, was a different matter. It was brown with plenty of throw rugs everywhere; no doubt covering the unsightly blots of various bodily fluids that even the dark color of the carpet could not conceal. But all and all she knew she couldn’t dare complain.
The clock said it was eight a.m. so she decided to try to sleep until sunset since she hadn’t slept at all the night before. She undressed and lay on the bed without bothering to press her luck by getting under the covers and idiotically said something she wished she could take back as soon as she uttered the words:
“At least it couldn’t get much worse.”