She opened her eyes, staring at Faith with startling intensity. "Alex and I were talking about what to do. I told her it was useless telling my parents, that nothing would happen. So, we decided to go to the police. There was this cop I knew. Only, I guess Tom followed us out to the woods. He was always watching us. He had this baby monitor he hid in my room. He'd listen to us and . . ." She shrugged, and Faith could very easily guess what Tom had been doing while he listened to his sister and her friend.
Pauline continued, "Anyway, Tom found us in the woods. He hit me in the back of the head with a rock. I don't know what he did to Alex. I didn't see her for a while. I think he was working on her, trying to break her. That was the hardest part. Was she dead? Was he beating her? Torturing her? Or maybe he'd let her go and she was keeping quiet because she was scared of him." She swallowed. "But, it wasn't that."
"What was it?"
"He was keeping her in the basement again. Priming her for the really bad stuff."
"No one heard her down there?"
Pauline shook her head. "Dad was gone, and Mom. . ." She shook her head again. Faith was convinced they would never really know what Judith Coldfield knew about her son's sadistic ways.
Pauline said, "I don't know how long it lasted, but eventually, Alex ended up the same place as me."
"Where was that?"
"In the ground," she said. "It was dark. We were blindfolded. He put cotton in our ears, but we could still hear each other. We were tied up. Still . . .we knew we were underground. There's a taste, right? Kind of like a wet, dirty taste you get in your mouth. He had dug a cave. It must've taken him weeks. He always liked to plan everything, to control every last detail."
"Was Tom with you all the time after that?"
"Not at first. I guess he was still working on his alibi. He just left us there for a few days—tied up so we couldn't move, couldn't see, could barely hear anything. We screamed at first, but . . ." She shook her head as if she could shake away the memory. "He brought us water, but not food. I guess a week went by. I was okay—I'd gone longer than that without eating. But Alex . . . She broke. She kept crying all the time, begging me to do something to help her. Then Tom would come, and I'd beg him to shut her up, to make it so I didn't have to hear it." She went silent again, lost in her memories. "And then one day, something changed. He started in on us."
"What did he do?"
"At first, he just talked. He was all into Biblical stuff—stuff my mom put into his head about him being a replacement for Judas, who betrayed Jesus. She was always saying how I had betrayed her, how she had carried me to be a good kid, but I had turned out rotten, made her family hate her with my lies."
Faith quoted the last sentence she had heard Tom Coldfield utter. "'Oh, Absolom, I am risen.'"
Pauline shivered, as if the words cut through her. "It's from the Bible. Amnon raped his own sister, and once he was finished with her, he cast her out for being a whore." Her torn lips twisted into an approximation of a smile. "Absolom was Amnon's brother. He killed him for raping their sister." She gave a harsh laugh. "Too bad I didn't have another brother."
"Was Tom always obsessed with religion?"
"Not a regular religion. Not normal. He twisted the Bible to suit whatever he wanted to do. That's why he was keeping me and Alex underground—so that we would have a chance to be reborn like Jesus." She looked up at Faith. "Crazy shit, right? He'd go on and on for hours, telling us how bad we were, talking about how he was going to redeem us. He'd touch me sometimes, but I couldn't see . . ." She shuddered again, her whole body shaking from the movement. Felix stirred, and she soothed him back to sleep.
Faith felt her heart thumping in her chest. She could remember her own struggle with Tom, the feel of his hot breath in her ear when he told her, "fight."
Will asked, "What did Tom do when he stopped talking to you and Alex?"
"What do you think he did?" she asked sarcastically. "He didn't know what he was doing, but he knew he liked it when he hurt us." She swallowed, her eyes tearing up. "It was our first time—both of us. We were only fifteen. Girls didn't sleep around a lot back then. We weren't angels or anything, but we weren't sluts, either."
"Did he do anything else?"
"He starved us. Not like what he did to the other women, but bad enough."
"The trash bags?"
She gave a single, tight nod. "We were trash to him. Nothing but trash."
Tom had said as much in the hallway. "No one missed you or Alex when Tom had you in the cave?"
"They thought we'd run away. Girls do that, right? They just run away from home, and if the parents are there to say that the girls are bad, that they lie all the time and can't be trusted, then it's no big deal, right?" She didn't let them answer. "I bet Tom got a hard-on lying to the cops, telling them he had no idea where we'd gone."
"How old was Tom when this happened?"
"Three years younger than me."
"Twelve," Will said.
"No," Pauline corrected. "He hadn't had his birthday yet. He was only eleven when it happened. He turned twelve a month later. Mom had a party. The little freak was out on bail and she threw him a birthday party."
"How did you get out of the cave?"
"He let us go. He said he was going to kill us if we told anybody, but Alex told her parents anyway, and they believed her." She snorted a laugh. "Fuck me if they didn't believe her."
"What happened to Tom?"
"He was arrested. The cops called, and Mom took him down to the station. They didn't come get him. They didn't arrest him. They just called us on the phone and said to bring him in." She paused, collecting herself. "Tom had a psychiatric evaluation. There was all this talk about sending him to adult prison, but he was only a kid, and the shrinks were screaming about how he needed help. Tom could look younger when he wanted—much younger than he actually was. Bewildered, like he didn't understand why people were saying all these bad things about him."
"What did the courts decide to do?"
"He was diagnosed with something. I don't know. Psychopath, probably."
"We have his Air Force records. Did you know he served?" Pauline shook her head, and Faith told her, "Six years. He was discharged in lieu of court martial."
"What does that mean?"
"Reading between the lines, I'd guess that the Air Force didn't want—or know how—to treat his disorder, so they offered him an honorable discharge and he took it." Tom Coldfield's military records were written in the sort of departmental code only a seasoned vet could decipher. As a doctor, Faith's brother Zeke had recognized all the clues. The nail in the coffin was the fact that Tom had never been called back up to serve in Iraq, even at the height of the war when enlistment standards had dropped to almost nonexistent.
Will asked, "What happened to Tom in Oregon?"
Pauline answered in a measured tone. "He was supposed to go to the state hospital, but Mom talked to the judge, said we had family back east and could we take him back and put him in a hospital there so he could be close to the people who cared about him. The judge said okay. I guess they were glad to get rid of us. Sort of like with the Air Force, huh? Out of sight, out of mind."