Dead Even Read Free

over those first months, screaming about the voice. She could not rid her memory of that low-pitched, guttural, noise. She had tried to explain it to the police. “It—It sounded sort of like when a person starts to talk, and they have a frog in their throat. Only his—his voice was that way all the time—like it was hard for him to speak.”
    â€œWhat did he say to you?” they had asked her.
    â€œI—I don’t remember,” she had answered.
    â€œYou were with him for over five hours. Can’t you remember anything at all he said to you?”
    She had covered her ears with her hands and screamed at them. “No! No, I can’t remember. Please don’t make me remember! Get out! Get out! I don’t want to talk to you any more!”
    Finally, they had let her alone.
    Did she have the strength to go through it all again? The questions. The looks. The newspaper accounts. She wasn’t seventeen now—there would be no keeping her name out of print this time. Should she go to the police? If she did, everyone would know.
    Audra put her head down on the steering wheel of her car. How could she even be considering not going to the police? Of course she would go. She couldn’t let that bastard get away with what he had done to her. She would just give the police her information, and they could take it from there.
    What information? It suddenly dawned on Audra she knew nothing about the caller. What would she say to the police? Someone called in to Party Line and, yes, sir, I know he is a rapist and would-be murderer? No, sir, I don’t know which caller it was. No, I don’t remember what he was selling.
    Audra clinched the steering wheel tightly in her hands. Think, damnit!
    If she could only remember more of what happened that night so long ago, but it was buried deep within her subconscious, and nothing she had tried would jar it loose. She could vaguely remember the rape, like a fuzzy dream, and begging with the man to stop. She could remember the knife held against her throat, and then plunged into her when he was finished. She even had a hazy recollection of pulling herself out of the ravine when she heard music blaring from a parked car a few minutes later. The two teenagers who finally noticed her saved her life that night. They had stripped off parts of their own clothing, bound her naked body as best they could to stem the flow of blood, and raced for the hospital. Dimly, she could even remember hearing a nurse comment that she would never make it—not with the amount of blood she had lost, and the way she was torn up inside.
    Those things she could remember, but nothing else. The face of her attacker was locked up somewhere in her mind and she had never been able to release it. The detective assigned to her case had tried everything, to no avail. She had been held for over five hours, but could not remember a single word the man said to her. She had not been able to give the police one concrete piece of information, except for her description of the man’s voice.
    Why? Why couldn’t she bring it forward? Even under hypnosis, she would reach a certain point, then begin screaming and have to be brought out of the hypnotic state. She had been in therapy for three years after the attack, an emotional wreck who could not handle even the most simple of tasks. Finally one day, she packed up her meager belongings in her father’s antiquated Ford station wagon that she had inherited, and headed west on I-70. Audra hadn’t the slightest idea where she was going, but knew only that she needed to get out of the city that held so many bad memories for her.
    The old Ford had lasted only about three hours, and coughed out its death rale just as she was approaching Hays, Kansas. She walked the half-mile into town, and had been there ever since.
    Hays had been good to her. When she trudged into town that night, with only eighty dollars to her name, she had