Carolina Moon

that roar was a hideous excitement, a vile sort of pleasure I didn’t understand and recognize. No child should know that slippery undercoating, and from that, for a time, I was spared.
    The first time he beat me, I was five. My mother tried to stop him, and he blackened her eye for it. She never tried again. I don’t know what she did that night while he whaled away, beating at the devil that gave me visions. I couldn’t see, not with eyes nor with mind, anything but a bloodred haze.
    The haze was hate, but I didn’t recognize that either.
    He left me weeping and locked the door from the outside. After a while, the pain sent me to sleep.
    When I awoke, it was dark and it seemed a fire burned in me. I can’t say the pain was unbearable, because you bear it. What choice is there? I prayed, too, prayed that whatever was inside of me had finally been driven out. I didn’t want to be wicked.
    Yet even as I prayed, the pressure built in my belly, and the tingling came, like sharp little fingers dancing over the back of my neck. It was the first time it came into me this way, and I thought I was sick, feverish.
    Then I saw Hope, as vividly as if I were sitting beside her in our clearing in the swamp. I smelled the night, the water, heard the whine of mosquitoes, the buzz of insects. And, like Hope, I heard the rustling in the brush.
    Like Hope, I felt the fear. Fresh, hot gushes of it. When she ran, I ran, my breath sobbing out so that my chest hurt from it. I saw her fall under the weight of whatever leaped out at her. A shadow, a shape I couldn’t see clearly, though I could see her.
    She called for me. Screamed for me.
    Then I saw nothing but black. When I woke, the sun was up, and I was on the floor. And Hope was gone.

2
    S he’d chosen to lose herself in Charleston, and for nearly four years had managed it. The city had been like a lovely and generous woman to her, more than willing to press her against its soft bosom and soothe the nerves that had shattered on the unforgiving streets of New York City.
    In Charleston the voices were slower, and in their warm, fluid stream she could blend. She could hide, as she’d once believed she could hide in the thick, rushing crowds of the North.
    Money wasn’t a problem. She knew how to live frugally, and was willing to work. She guarded her savings like a hawk, and when that nest egg began to grow, allowed herself to dream of owning her own business, working for herself and living the quiet and settled life that always eluded her.
    She kept to herself. Real friendships meant real connections. She hadn’t been willing, or strong enough, to open herself to that again. People asked questions. They wanted to know things about you, or pretended they did.
    Tory had no answers to give, and nothing to tell.
    She found the little house—old, run-down, perfect—and had bargained fiercely to buy it.
    People often underestimated Victoria Bodeen. They saw a young woman, small and slight of build. They saw the soft skin and delicate features, a serious mouth, and clear gray eyes they often mistook for guileless. A small nose, just a little crooked, added a touch of sweetness to a face framed by quiet brown hair. They saw fragility, heard it in the gentle southern flow of her voice. And never saw the steel inside. Steel forged by countless strikes with a Sam Browne belt.
    What she wanted she worked for, fought for, with all the focus and determination of a frontline soldier taking a beach. She’d wanted the old house with its overgrown yard and peeling paint, and she’d wheeled and dealed, badgered and pushed, until it was hers. Apartments brought back memories of New York, and the disaster that had ended her life there. There would be no more apartments for Tory.
    She’d nurtured that investment as well, using her own time and labor and skill to rehabilitate the house, one room at a time. It had taken her three full years and now the sale of it, added to her savings, was going to make her dream come true.
    All she had to do was go back to Progress.
    At her kitchen table, Tory read over the rental agreement for the storefront on Market Street a third time. She wondered if Mr. Harlowe at the realtor’s office remembered her.
    She’d been barely ten when they’d moved away from Progress to Raleigh so her parents could find steady work. Better work, her father had claimed, than scratching out a living on a played-out plot of land leased from the almighty Lavelles.
    Of course