Chapter Three
Sanctuary
Abby Sciuto drove the Batmobile, her convertible rolling Lab, at a sedate thirty five along the winding black roads up and down the multitude of hills that most closely resembled a convulsed snake with a broken back. The forest road would eventually wind them back to Clarkston Lakes. The top was down and the wind had no effect upon Abby's twin pigtails but obliged Dawn to hold her long blonde hair in her left hand. Abby granted that the Interstate would be faster, and she would spend less time driving with the glare of the sun in her eyes, but she wanted to talk to her friend, try to calm her, and even Dawn's holding her hair in place would keep her alert even when she'd want to shut down. She hoped that the farms and rustic surroundings would soothe the younger woman.
'Yeah, right,' she thought bitterly, 'a country drive is going to counteract rape, being examined inside and out, then getting raped again by two Neanderthals with badges.' "Dawn, honey?"
The woman shook her head miserably, drowned in morose defeat. "I don't want to talk about it anymore. I'm sorry I got you involved. I shouldn't have made you come all this way. I shouldn't have bothered you with this. I'm sorry."
Abby stamped her foot on the brake and the convertible fishtailed with a screech of rubber. Dawn would have gone face first into the glove compartment had her safety belt not dug into her waist and torso, then threw her backward into the cushioned seat.
Shocked, she turned and recoiled at the incandescent fury on the face of her erstwhile baby-sitter.
"Get this straight right now, Sunshine! You've nothing to apologize for! What that Bastard did to you is his crime, not yours and I'm going to see that he pays! And if you ever so much as think that you're responsible for any of this, or that you shouldn't have called me for help, I'll slap every tooth out of your mouth!"
Dawn stared at her old friend, not knowing what to say or do. The incongruity of the threat would have been funny, but she was too overwhelmed by everything that had happened to her. The Goth woman was a trusted friend but in this moment frightened her as much as the rape had. She didn't know what to do.
Then the wellspring of pent-up emotions broke. Hours that felt like years of pain, misery and humiliation had choked her emotions until she could only feel nothingness press upon her. Now that wall was broken and she cried.
x
Abby waited quietly as Dawn's crying turned to sobs, and then to full blown wails of misery and pain, until everything she'd endured came out of her in a torrent that wracked her body with brutal force. She knew she could have offered comfort, she wanted to slide across the seat and take her weeping friend in her arms, but she would only after catharsis had left the woman depleted of all her despair and torment. Then it would be time for comforting.
She waited.
Dawn's misery built upon itself, fueled by mounting anger until, consumed by rage, she started pounding her fists upon the covering above the glove compartment as though to drive dents into it, wails of heart-wrenching misery becoming shrieks of insensate fury.
Ultimately, unable to sustain them any longer, the tears and fury faded and she collapsed back into the seat, utterly spent. Only then did Abby slide across the seat, draw her friend close.
There was no need or room for words. Abby simply held her as Dawn, her strength spent, clung to her. It was several minutes before she released her and Abby drew back. Her friend's eyes were red but she had no words that could convey her feelings, and Abby decided not to seek any. She silently slid back to her seat and restarted the car.
xx
Dawn was silent for a long time, keeping her eyes turned to the passing countryside. There were nine miles left along these back roads and she remained utterly silent. Abby realized Dawn wasn't looking at the countryside; she was avoiding looking at her. Her humiliation and embarrassment filled the car to overflowing.
Finally Abby reached out and turned on the radio. The jarring sounds of her favorite station filled the open convertible, but she turned the dial, seeking another station, slowing the car to a crawl while she did so. She had difficulty finding something suitable, most of her favorite stations were barely in range in these hills and would probably be too jarring right now. So as she searched, keeping her eyes carefully on the ever-twisting road, it finally attracted Dawn's attention. The younger woman suggested a station, and when Abby tuned it in, haunting piano music formed a much more relaxing melody. She listened for a few seconds. "Holst?"
Dawn nodded. "The Planets. This one is 'Venus, the Bringer of Peace'."
As far as Abby was concerned, there couldn't have been a more felicitous choice. She had been hoping to find something to draw her friend out, and when she resumed driving she kept to a slow pace that matched the music, letting the world flow by. When Venus gave way to another piece, she asked her friend the title after just ten notes. "Granados's 'The Beauty and the Nightingale'." This one was an equally relaxing violin piece with faint piano background. Though she knew the name, she decided while listening to it that she would ask about the next ones.
Though she also knew the next, Dawn had absolutely no trouble identifying Bach's 'Double Violin Concerto in D Minor; Second Movement'.
This was an old contest between them that rarely had a winner. Abby decided to keep it going as long as it kept Dawn talking, however brief those times might be.
xx
The gated entrance to Clarkston Lakes consisted of a single guard house barely large enough for two persons to stand together, occupied by a uniformed Security Officer. To the right and behind her now was a small rise on which stood a bungalow containing the Administrative Offices for the CLPOA, the Clarkston Lakes Property Owner's Association.
There was a sign attached to the guard house that contained a list of rules, and beyond the guardhouse was a single row of evergreens through which they could see the northern edge of the main lake.
Everything was as Abby remembered it from vacation weekends over the years. It seemed as though nothing in the community had changed and she was glad of it. It seemed to bring a certain measure of stability that was desperately needed at this moment. She wondered if Dawn felt any of it.
A blue uniformed Security Officer had stepped out of the guardhouse when he heard, then saw, the uncovered black convertible approach. But when he saw Dawn seated in the passenger seat he simply waved the car though unchecked.
"Great 'security' you have here," Abby quipped as they passed through, turned left and started along the main road that wound about the larger of two connected lakes. The irregular path circumnavigated the two and a half mile circumference of the freshwater lake. As far as she could tell, nothing at all had changed.
"Normally it's good." Dawn admitted with a voice billions of miles away. "They patrol. But I've been coming here for fifteen years with mom and dad. Pete's known me since forever."
"Where are Sam and Tina?" This was the first visit she had known the young woman to come up from Louisiana alone. Abby usually tried to visit at least one weekend each summer, while her friends were in range. It was strange not to have the whole family present.
"The store's not doing so well since they opened a K-mart down the block. They can't get away. This is the first Summer I've come up alone."
"I know. It seems kind of strange not seeing them."
"I wish they were here," she said forlornly.
Rachmaninov's 'Piano Concerto 2 in C Minor, Opus 18, Second Movement' wasn't enough to raise Dawn's spirits again.
x
They rode in silence for a short time, just listening, the identification contest abandoned. They were too equally matched.
The single paved road skirted left and right past the houses whose rear yards hugged the shore. Eventually they paused at the white beach on the eastern shore, enjoying for a moment the familiar wide vista. Across the lake was another beach. There were few homes on the lakefront that weren't obscured by trees that reached into the hills beyond.
There were many people on both beaches lazily escaping the limited heat of the mountains. At a half-mile elevation it was only 70 degrees, but one could not tell that for the crowds on each beach. There were primarily young families, children playing with wild abandon while mothers and an occasional father watched over them while engaging in their own conversations. There was a single white lifeguard seat on each opposing beach, the structures barely 7 feet high, set just beyond the edge of the lawn, which was itself spotted with picnic tables, swings, a slide and teeter-totters.
"They had barbecues last week on the fourth," Dawn said a little less distantly than she had been speaking earlier, the pleasant memory seeming to lift her momentarily. "After sundown they set off fireworks, alternating them so you didn't have to divide your attention. Some houses along the shores had their own, sort of a backdrop to the real thing. Someone had a radio playing patriotic music. It was a nice day."
"Sounds nice," Abby agreed, remembering her visits to this beach. This time she won't freak anyone out with a Goth bikini.
"What did you do?"
"I was on a beach too, in Hawaii. I met a great guy there."
"You did?" This was the first time she had shown real interest.
"Yeah. Afterwards I went with him to his hotel room and we had some real fireworks."
Dawn laughed. It was the first time Abby had heard her laugh in a long time. "Same old 'irrepressible Abby'. Don't you ever quit?"
"What, enjoying life? Never."
x
They turned left along the road which climbed upward, ascending one of the hills that surrounded the man-made lake, climbing for two blocks before turning right. They traveled past more woods on the right and a house on the left before they passed and turned right into the wide recessed driveway facing a single story blue bungalow. The front door and the trim about the windows were white, adding a counterpoint that could only be described as quaint.
There was a green Impala parked next to them, with markings in the rear designating it a local Hertz rental.
Abby turned off the radio, unlocked her door, pushed it open, turned to Dawn and stopped dead. "Sunshine?"
The younger blonde woman was rigid as a statue, her eyeslocked on the house. Utter terror marred her eyes and her breath was caught in her throat.
"Dawnie, talk to me."
"I – I –." Dawn could force no more of her tiny voice through strangled throat.
"What's wrong?" Abby was certain she knew the answer even before her friend forced herself to whisper in a reedy voice.
"I can't go in there!"
x
Watching her friend's terror mount, Abby didn't try to assure her that everything was fine, that she was safe nor use any other empty platitude that flashed through her mind. Instead she pulled the door closed again and asked in as calm and non-compelling a voice as possible: "Then what will you do?"
Dawn turned to her, naked pleading in her eyes even as she struggled to avoid asking what she was thinking, not wanting to give in to the terror, not wanting to seem weak, but unable to face the thought of ever entering that house again! She didn't want to ask what she most wanted to plead for.
Abby held out her hand. "Gimme the keys."
"The what?" She wanted to pretend it wasn't happening, that she didn't know what her friend was saying.
"The keys, dingbat. I'll pack you an overnight bag; you're spending the night with me. I hope you like the couch, cause there's no way we'll both fit into my bed."
Since Dawn had never visited her home up north, the younger woman had no idea how true this was. Abby slept in a slightly larger than usual silver deluxe coffin, having long maintained that when she went, she wanted to do so in familiar surroundings.
She doubted her friend was ready for the sight.
xxx
It was nearly two hours later that Abby parked her black convertible across the street from her apartment house and pushed the button which reset the roof into place. When she had come out of the bungalow, she'd found Dawn huddled into the front seat, hiding her face, hiding from that house. She hadn't said a word about it.
She led Dawn into her four story walk-up and wondered again if her younger friend was ready for the whole show. She lived in the middle level of three apartments and though much was conservative, an equal measure of her décor gave new depth to outré.
Dawn had become used, on the occasional weekend in the summers that they got together over the years, to the Goth fashions and the tattoos that decorated her body. But not even her closest associates and friends at NCIS, with the exception of Gibbs and McGee, had ever seen the whole picture. Tim had not only seen the full Sciuto experience, but in their early days together he had experienced considerably more.
Pushing open the door, the pale blue overnight bag in her hand, she advised her friend with a cryptic grin: "Don't touch anything – it might bite."
When Dawn stepped into Abby's living room, she stopped dead, mouth hanging open. Abby turned to her with a smile and put down the bag. "So, what da ya think?"
x
The apartment was black.
The walls were black, the carpet was black, the furniture was black, though the deep tones of the black leather couch set at the left wall compensated for the highly polished black wood of the large table and chairs set in the middle of the room. The television, set between two black draped windows, was black, the entertainment center was black; the paintings on the wall would have constituted the few spots of color in the room save that they were done on black velvet.
There were also several huge, super-magnified images; blown up pictures that seemed to defy imagination. They looked like modern impressionistic art. They were actually super enlargements of forensic images that had once graced her lab before they had given way to even more outrageous imagery. Set on black walls amid black furnishings, the bursts of color were unsettling.
The black framed posters on the walls were from various Hammer Horror movies. There were several African masks hanging from pegs, and on the mantle were dolls that looked incredibly lifelike. The dolls were Vaudun, what the casual observer might call voodoo.
There was a large standalone bookcase that divided the room, standing two feet from the left side of the couch and forming the edge of a corridor out from the doorway and short hall that led to the rear rooms. This was filled with records, books and a radio. Dawn doubted it was tuned to the local Classical station.
To the left was a black doorway that led to, she's sure, a black kitchen. Whatever room was beyond the short hallway past the bathroom was, she was sure, black. Suddenly she had no particular desire to use the bathroom. "I … I don't …."
"Really grabs you, doesn't it?" Abby asked, pleased and proud.
"By the throat." It took Dawn a few more moments to find her voice, and to lower it down from the high pitched gasp it had become. "Abby, what is all this?"
"Well, I might call it the dark reflection of my tortured soul, except I'm not tortured and its all kind of fun."
"Fun?" Dawn looked about again, searching for the fun.
"Quite a way from when I used to baby-sit you." Abby granted, referring to her family's home in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.
"Quite a way," Dawn admitted in a small voice.
"Yeah. Whoever thought I'd be doing it again?"
x
Seeing the stricken look in Dawn's eyes, she regretted her teasing, and decided to push past it quickly. "You'll be sleeping here," she indicated the black leather couch; then looked at the windows to her right. "I doubt the light will keep you up." Though there were two windows, one on either side of the television, the street light admitted through the heavy blackout curtains, now fortunately open, would be nil.
"I doubt I'll ever see the light again," Dawn answered, unable to imagine the depth of darkness this room could attain. "The bedroom's not black, is it?"
"Certainly not! What do you take me for?"
"Well, I–"
"Off black." She smiled at Dawn's unguarded reaction. "Well, I've gotta get black to work." Dawn winced. "They don't even really know I'm gone." She picked up the blue overnight bag as Dawn looked at her watch.
It had been nearly six hours since the call; it was after four now. Dawn refrained from pointing this out as Abby tossed her the bag and she caught it. "You can stow your gear in the bedroom and get comfortable until I get back. No one knows you're here, so you can relax. I want to get started working on those samples we took from the E.R. Oh! I almost forgot. Stupid of me."
She went over to the bookcase that split the room, pulled from one shelf a large camera and turned back to her friend. "I want to look at your breasts."