Don't have much to say this time around. Just a big thanks to all of you guys for still showing up!
Chapter 12:
Rachel looks up at the Peter with betrayal in her eyes. She is silently begging for him to help her, but he is staring at her with wide eyes. He looks as frightened about what might happen should Rachel not do what she is being told to as Rachel is frightened about might what happen if she does.
Rachel might feel bad for him had he not just sold her off to his drug dealer.
"Rachel, please, you have to trust me," Peter insists. His hands are shaking as he reaches out and grabs onto Rachel's upper arms with a surprisingly firm grip. The strength of such a skinny man surprises Rachel.
"You left Ohio to come find me. You were unhappy," Peter argues. Rachel realizes that he has a point. No sane person would ever run away from home and drive twelve hours just to meet a man you don't even know; even if that man is your father.
But while Rachel may have been unhappy with her fathers and with Shelby, she would hardly call herself unhappy. Certainly, she wasn't unhappy enough to leave Lima for good, to enter into a life of crime. She never asked for any of this.
"The two of us can make a lot of money together, Rachel," Peter continues, because Rachel is too frightened to respond. "We can live together, get to know each other."
He is rambling. Rachel does the same exact thing when she's nervous; but he is saying all the wrong things and instead of convincing Rachel to stay, he is making her want to run away even faster.
"My… my dads will worry…" Rachel finally manages to choke out. There are tears in her voice despite the fact that she's trying her hardest to keep them contained. Peter and Darlene don't care if she is crying. In fact, it would probably make Darlene kill her faster.
The thought alone makes her sob even harder.
"But they stole you from me!" Peter screams, giving Rachel a little shake that makes her flinch. He is losing his nerve and Rachel is worried about what that will mean for her. "Don't you understand, Rachel? They lied to the both of us. We can use that. We can get money from them and start a new life somewhere. Doesn't that sound nice?"
Rachel shakes her head, sputtering. That hardly sounds nice to her.
"I want to go home…" she spits through her tears, struggling to speak through her increasing panic. "This was a mistake. I'm sorry. I want to leave. I want to go home."
Sensing that the situation spiraling rapidly out of control, Darlene's face changes. She throws Peter away from Rachel. When she looks down at the girl, there is no sign of panic in her face at all, and Rachel realizes that what makes Peter dangerous is that he is desperate and pathetic. What makes Darlene dangerous is that she is cruel and violent.
"What did I just tell you, girl?" Darlene asks. Her voice is louder, but it is still calm despite the two unnerved people standing in front of her.
Rachel wishes that this woman would start using he real name. She remembers reading somewhere that a person is less likely to hurt or kill you if they know personal details about you like your first name.
Rachel is just building up the nerve to make the request when Darlene walks away from her.
She moves around the table until she is across from Rachel and sits down. Her eyes never leave Rachel's, even as she pulls a pistol out of seemingly nowhere and places it down on top of the table.
It is a threat, Rachel recognizes. The gun is sitting directly in the center of the table. If Rachel really wanted to, or if she had any idea how to use the thing, she could probably reach across the table, grab the gun, and use it on Darlene before the woman even knew what hit her.
It must be a measure of how pathetic she looks that Darlene doesn't even question whether or not this will happen. She already knows the answer.
Instead of trying anything with the gun, Rachel lets a small cry escape her lips.
"I won't say anything," Rachel sobs pathetically despite knowing how unbecoming it must be. "Just let me go. I'll go home. I'll leave you alone. You'll never see me again."
She knows that she has done this to herself. She knows that Shelby suggested that digging deeper into Peter Gabbanelli's life was a bad idea, but never in her wildest dreams did she imagine it would be this bad.
This seems like a pretty steep price to pay for naivety.
"Calm down, girl," she tells Rachel. She is entirely calm herself, suggesting to Rachel that this is not the first time she has been in this position. "You and me are going to have a little talk and then we can figure out what we're going to do with you."
Outside, Quinn continues to pace back and forth up and down the long driveway.
She goes as far as the street, which is probably a quarter mile away from the house before turning around to make her way back.
It does its job at keeping her warm. The cold has started to feel blistering. Her fingers are tingling painfully and as she turns back up to the darkened house, she flexes them a couple of times trying to get the feeling back.
When that doesn't work, she turns back towards Peter's truck, but the piece of crap rust bucket isn't running anymore. It must have died or ran out of gas. Quinn wouldn't be surprised by either scenario.
It is the final straw that cracks Quinn's calm. She rears her foot back and kicks the bed of the truck hard. Something falls off. She doesn't care. She feels angry enough to do worse.
She is angry at herself for being so stupid; to come all the way here, to tell Rachel about what her original plans with Beth had been, to have not stopped Rachel from going inside of that house on her own.
Quinn looks up at the house, silently praying that Rachel comes back soon, but the house looks dark and quiet.
Sighing, Quinn sits down on the back bumper of Peter's truck. She looks down at whatever had fallen out of the truck when she had kicked it.
It doesn't look mechanical or like anything else that belongs on the underside of a truck. Instead, it is a thick brick of plastic wrapped in duct tape.
Curious, Quinn picks it up. It isn't very big, but it is dense and heavy.
The blonde tears a little piece of the plastic away and tips the contents out into her palm. It comes out in a powder; off white and fine.
Quinn studies it hard underneath the poor lighting of the dark night. She is far from an expert, but she is not foolish enough to believe that this is anything other than what she thinks it is. She may have been spending the last several weeks trying to build her reputation as a Skank, but hard drugs such as this is out of her league. Hell, it was out of the Skanks' league.
Quinn throws the brick down into the dirt and wipes her hands clean of the little that had fallen out, afraid to be caught with it.
She doesn't even feel cold anymore. Her heart is pounding, flooding her body with the warmth of adrenaline. The only thing she can focus on now is how she is going to get in that house and get Rachel out.
Quinn runs up to the front porch. For a moment, she is foolish enough to think that she is going to barge inside, grab Rachel, and drag her out, consequences be damned.
She stops herself at the last minute. She has no idea what is going on inside of that house. She has made enough stupid decisions that has put her and Rachel in danger these past few weeks. She doesn't want to do anything else that might spook the people inside into seriously hurting Rachel… or worse.
Quinn tries not to think about that. Maybe Rachel doesn't even know what kind of danger she's in. Maybe Peter really is just introducing her to his boss. Maybe they'll come out of that house in a few minutes and Quinn will play dumb and let Peter take them to dinner like he'd promised just so the blonde doesn't provoke him or make Rachel angrier than she already is. Maybe Peter will drop them back off, and Quinn and Rachel will get back into her BMW and drive as fast as they can back to Lima where they would hug their parents tight and apologize for everything.
Quinn takes a deep breath and retreats off the porch. She slinks in the shadows, scaling the side of the house and peering through windows in search for Rachel, trying to gauge what is going on inside.
Quinn is really starting to wish that she hadn't thrown Rachel's cell phone out the car window on the way up here. It felt like poor planning now. She could have called her mom. She could have called Rachel's dads. She could have called the police, at the very least.
Quinn sees a sign of activity inside of the house at the third window she peers into.
She squints her eyes, trying to get a good look inside. She is standing in mud that is so wet and deep that it starts to soak through her shoes after a minute, but she hardly notices.
Peter is standing in front of the window. His back is luckily turned towards Quinn. His arms are crossed over his front, but he is so thin that they practically wrap all the way behind him.
Quinn cannot see Peter's face, but she doesn't need to read his expression to know that something is wrong. He is swaying back and forth on his feet. He looks jittery.
Maybe he's nervous. Or maybe he's just high on whatever drugs Quinn had found hiding underneath his truck.
Quinn doesn't know very much about drugs, but she wonders if she will get lucky and Peter will just pass out, giving her the chance to run inside, grab Rachel, and get the hell out of here.
Then, Peter shifts away from the window and Quinn realizes that her and Rachel leaving might not be as easy as Quinn previously thought.
The first thing that Quinn notices is that Rachel is sitting at a long table in tears. Somebody had hurt her.
A primordial instinct rips through the blonde's stomach in a way that Quinn knows only happens when someone you love is in danger and there is nothing that you can do about it.
Quinn bares her teeth. For a moment, she feels angry enough to dive through the window, kill Peter with her bare hands, and pull Rachel to safety.
Then she sees the gun.
Quinn takes a sharp breath, and then immediately pulls herself away from the window so that if anybody had heard her, she will not be caught.
The blonde presses her back into the siding of the house. She squeezes her eyes shut, breathing heavily. She doesn't look up; she can only pray that she doesn't hear a gunshot ring out in the darkness.
After a few moments in which nobody comes to investigate the sound, Quinn opens her eyes. She is afraid to make any noise, even to breathe, but she can hardly just stand here. She needs to help Rachel.
With one last silent breath, Quinn tip-toes towards the back of the house in the hopes that she can find an open door or window that is far away from where everybody is congregated in the dining room.
On the way, she spots a rotting old pipe within the vast pile of junk in the backyard. She picks it up and gives it a test swing. It is small, but solid. It will hardly be of any use against a handgun, but if she can capitalize on the element of surprise, it should be enough to get the job done.
The back door looks loose and rusty. Quinn doesn't want to press her luck by risking opening it and having it squeak louder than a trumpet blast.
Instead, she finds an open window that appears to lead into an empty kitchen. To add to her luck, there is a phone connected to the far wall. It's her best bet.
Quinn places the pipe in the waistband of her pants for safe-keeping and hoists herself through the large window. She steps into the kitchen silently like a cat. Never in her life has she been more grateful for Sue Sylvester and all those years of Cheerios for making her so nimble.
Quinn can hear Rachel's cries ringing throughout the house. They break Quinn's heart, but the blonde knows that as long as Rachel is still able to cry, Peter and his so-called friend haven't hurt her so badly.
I'll get you out of here soon, Quinn thinks, hoping that Rachel will somehow be able to pick up the message telepathically.
The blonde goes straight for the telephone on the wall. With trembling hands, she lifts the receiver off its cradle. It is an old-school-type phone with a rotary dial and a long, looping cord that attaches it permanently to the wall.
Her first instinct is to dial 911, but it takes longer than usual because she has to figure out how to use the rotary. She also has to move slowly. Every time she churns the gear to dial a number, it produces a mechanical whirring sound that seems to echo throughout the entire house.
Cringing, Quinn keeps her eyes trained down the hallway, searching for any signs of movement from the front of the house, but it never comes.
She finishes dialing the emergency number and holds the receiver up to her ear, waiting for the sound of an operator. But the only thing she gets is a busy signal.
What kind of Hills Have Eyes town is this?
The thought crosses the blonde's mind as she actively works to suppress a groan of frustration.
Quietly, she hangs up the phone before attempting 911 again, but once more, she only gets a busy signal.
Quinn has to actively work to suppress a sob. She can't get the help that she needs. Even if she had been able to reach the operator, how far away was the nearest police station? Quinn hadn't noticed any on the ride over here, and this has proven to be the kind of place where the nearest neighbors are miles down the road. They are truly in the middle of nowhere.
The blonde wishes that she knew the phone number that would connect her directly to the police station, but she doesn't. She doesn't even know her mother's cell number off the top of her head.
In fact, Quinn can only think of one phone number that she has committed to memory in recent weeks because while she was too stubborn and defiant to save it in her phone, she knew that it was the link that kept her close to Beth.
Figuring she has nothing left to lose, Quinn turns back towards the phone, prays for a miracle, and dials.
Shelby Corcoran is pulling her Range Rover through desolate, Midwestern highways at breakneck speeds.
She can tell that she is getting close, because the number of cars she is passing on the road is getting scarcer while the number of cows is now outnumbering the number of people.
She has stopped only once to fill up her gas tank, and according to her GPS, she has been driving over the speed limit enough that she has knocked over an hour of time off her drive.
Her eyes are heavy and wild from spending so many straight hours staring out onto the highway. Her bones feel stiff in her seat, and she is afraid that she won't even be able to stand up when she arrives to Nebraska, let alone drag Rachel and Quinn into her car to take them home.
The lines on the highway are starting to look like optical illusions. Shelby passes this off as exhaustion and takes another sip of the black coffee that she had picked up at the gas station a few hours ago. It's cold now, but Shelby is so concentrated on the road that she doesn't even notice.
When her cellphone starts to ring, the noise sounds like a gunshot. It's the first noise that she's heard in hours. She hadn't even had her radio on.
Shelby breathes through the startling sound and forces herself to look at her phone. The number is unfamiliar, but the small banner underneath tells her that it is coming from a Nebraska area code and that is enough to convince her to answer.
"Hello?" she gasps into the phone, praying that it is Quinn or Rachel. Her prayers are answered when she hears a response.
"Shelby?"
That sounds like Quinn, but she is whispering so Shelby cannot be sure.
"Quinn?" she asks, searching for a confirmation. "Is that you?"
"It's me."
Why is she whispering? Shelby asks herself. It is unusual enough that Shelby cannot even feel relieved that the blonde is reaching out to her.
"Quinn, what's wrong?" Shelby demands. Her grip on the steering wheel tightens. Subconsciously, she feels herself press her foot even harder on the gas pedal, pushing her Range Rover up to speeds she did not even know it could reach.
"Shelby, we need help," Quinn breathes and Shelby feels her heart leap into her throat as she starts to wonder what the hell Peter Gabbanelli has done to her and Rachel and whether or not they will be able to hold on until she is able to get there.
Shelby's attic bedroom is stifling this late in July.
Maybe it's the fact that she's four months pregnant, but she's never noticed just how hot it gets up here.
She is laying on her stomach on top of her bed, flipping through the yellow pages that she had found in the junk drawer downstairs despite the fact that it is a Saturday night.
While most of Shelby's friends are busy bouncing between endless graduation parties to celebrate the last few weeks before college, Shelby finds that she has lost her appetite for such events.
Not that she gets invited very many places anymore, anyway.
Trying not to think about that, Shelby reminds herself that she has more important things to worry about right now, anyway.
She hasn't seen Peter in weeks. With school being out, it is easier to avoid him. His absence is a blessing, but Shelby is not foolish enough to believe that he is gone from her life for good. All she knows for certain is that she is no longer safe here in Lima. Neither is her unborn child.
She finds the section in the yellow pages for family lawyers and begins to skim down the list with her finger. She jots down the number of every lawyer within ten miles of her house.
She has called a few lawyers already, but all of them have given her outrageous prices that she could never afford. She has a little bit of savings for New York, but she couldn't blow all of it on a lawyer. If she did, she would be forced to stay in Lima where Peter would find her easily and who knows what he would do to her then?
She is writing down phone numbers for nearly an hour when she feels a grueling blow to her ribs from somewhere inside of her body.
"Ouch!" Shelby gasps, cradling her right side where her child has just landed a vicious punch. Or maybe it was a kick. Shelby had read somewhere that an expecting mother should be able to tell the difference, but she hasn't grown fully accustomed to the growing baby inside of her just yet.
The adjustment has proven difficult. At her first appointment with her OB, the doctor had told her that her baby was the size of a chickpea, even though it had created a problem for Shelby as big as a galaxy.
Then, it had been easy to ignore the obvious, but as the weeks progressed, so did the very physical, very obvious manifestations of her pregnancy.
First, she was throwing up every hour. A few weeks later, her stomach started to puff out. More recently, she would be lying down trying to fall asleep only to be kept awake by a kick or a punch or a series of hiccups that would keep her up for hours.
Those were the worst parts of pregnancy, but there were also inexplicably beautiful ones too, like when both mother and child would finally settle down and Shelby would roll over to go to sleep and her baby would do the same, lodging itself in that same spot just underneath her diaphragm every night, where Shelby pretended that she could feel both of their heartbeats blending together.
If she could, Shelby would keep this baby safely inside of her for the rest of her life. But she can't do that; Shelby knows that. The only thing that can keep her and her child safe is one of these lawyers.
Shelby returns to her journal of phone numbers, but the infant inside of her is kicking at her again, and this time, she is not stopping.
"Getting restless in there?" Shelby speaks to her stomach, resting her hands gently against the slight arch. Now that she mentions it, she too is sick of all of this hard work she is doing.
"Me too…" the mother sighs, and then reaches over to pull on her sneakers, resolving to go for a walk around the block before the walls of this bedroom drive her even crazier than she already feels.
The city of Lima is busy on a Saturday night.
People pack the streets: couples holding hands, college students home for summer break, teenagers weaving their bikes recklessly through the crowds… Shelby feels like the only person who is outside by herself and she feels suddenly self-conscious for that.
She makes it only a couple of blocks from her house when she spots a familiar Rolls Royce idling on the corner at a red light. The car is obvious. Nobody else in town, or quite possibly in the entire county, drives a car like this.
For a moment, Shelby stares like a deer in headlights. She spots Peter sitting in the passenger seat of the car. His father is driving.
Swallowing, Shelby comes to her senses and ducks out of sight in between two buildings before either Peter or his father can spot her.
Shelby isn't sure if she just didn't want to see the truth about Peter and his family when they had started dating, or if she really had been naïve enough to believe that things like what the Gabbanelli family was involved in just didn't exist here in Lima.
When Peter had proudly announced that he would be taking over his father's business once he graduated high school, Shelby was happy because at the time, it meant that the man she then thought she would spend the rest of her life with would be able to take care of her. When they were given free meals at restaurants or didn't have to wait in line for movie tickets, Shelby had found it charming. One time, Peter had even been pulled over on the way home from a party driving 60 in a 35 with an open beer in his hand and the cop had still let him go without so much as a warning.
Peter and his family had money and more importantly they had power. They have only lived in Lima a few years, but they were already in charge and everybody knows it.
While Peter never outright told Shelby what his father was involved in, Shelby doubted very much that it was the construction business that he said his father owned.
Shelby stays wedged, hidden in between two buildings until she is certain that the car is gone. When she risks peering out to the street, the Rolls Royce is nowhere to be seen. There is no indication of Peter or his father. Shelby passes it off as a close call and decides to make her way back home before she can push her luck any further.
Her parents aren't home when she arrives. They were going out to dinner to celebrate their 20th anniversary although Shelby silently thinks that it is a miracle that they have made it so far.
Shelby settles herself onto the couch and grabs the remote control. The best part about being home alone is that she is finally able to watch what she wants on television for a change.
An hour into her TV binge, her pregnancy cravings start to kick in. Shelby stands up and makes her way into the kitchen.
Her mother has always been a stickler for healthy food, but Shelby had learned some time ago that if she hides a pint of ice cream in the back of the freezer underneath a frozen bag of broccoli that she is pretty sure has been in there since she was in elementary school, her mother wouldn't notice. As expected, she finds it there waiting for her when she opens the freezer.
She doesn't even bother to scoop the ice cream into a bowl. Instead, she peels off the lid, sticks a spoon into the heart of the ice cream, and makes her way back to her sitcoms.
She is halfway to the couch when her doorbell rings.
Raising an eyebrow, Shelby places her ice cream down on the table and makes her way towards the door. She isn't expecting any visitors. People haven't exactly been clamoring to come visit her since her pregnancy. Maybe it's one of her parents' friends.
Shelby pulls the front door open and finds that it isn't one of her parents' friends at all.
"Peter…" Shelby is unable to stop herself from gasping. "What are you doing here?"
"I saw you walking," he comments. Shelby swallows. So, he had seen her.
"Oh?" Shelby asks trying to keep her voice neutral.
She risks glancing up, taking Peter in. His hair has grown longer since the last time she saw him the night of their high school graduation. Loose curls dangle down and hug his smooth jawline. The look suites him. At one time in Shelby's life, she would have swooned over it, but now that she knows what he is capable of, she is unmoved.
"I've been trying to get a hold of you," Peter tells Shelby, pushing his way into the house without an invitation.
"I've been down in Cincinnati the last few weeks living with my aunt," Shelby informs him. "She had some work for me."
Shelby's aunt had had some work for Shelby. It was labor intensive and Shelby only really accepted because she knew it would keep her away from Peter. She worked the job as long as she could, but as her pregnancy progressed, her usefulness waned and her aunt had sent her back home.
"I get it," Peter shrugs stepping further into the Corcoran home. "I've been working with my father these last few weeks, too. He's got a lot of good opportunities for me."
"Oh?" Shelby breathes, feigning interest. She doesn't know what to say. Everybody in town knows what the Gabbanelli family does. She doesn't know what Peter is trying to imply, or what it might mean for her.
"Yup," Peter nods. He walks further and further into the house. Shelby doesn't even realize that he is backing her into a corner until her back hits a wall. "I've been very helpful to him lately. Things have been hard for us since we had to leave New York so… suddenly a few years ago. He's been using me to do some of the work that he can't do anymore. He needs to keep a low profile. You understand what that's like, don't you?"
Shelby feels her heart begin to pound as Peter's eyes slide down to her stomach. Instinctively, Shelby brings her hands up to cover it.
She doesn't know what to say. Peter has backed her all the way into her own kitchen. She should have never answered that doorbell. If she hadn't, then she would be sitting on the couch eating her ice cream and watching mindless television. She certainly wouldn't be fearing for her safety or for that of her child's...
"I thought I told you to get rid of it," Peter sneers after a long moment. His entire face changes and now, Shelby feels truly afraid.
"Please, Peter! You don't understand!" Shelby starts to beg immediately.
"I gave you the chance to do something about this on your own, Shelby," Peter tells her. He ignores her pleas. He has been doing that for some time now. "My father warned me about this. He told me that you would never go through with it. He told me that I would have to take care of things on my own."
"W-what do you mean?" Shelby stutters. She takes a small step backwards, trying to ease away from Peter slowly. The basement stairs are only a few feet behind her. The door locks from the inside. If she can just get past Peter, she can lock herself inside, use the cellar door to escape, and run to the neighbor's house to call for help.
But she doesn't move fast enough. Instead, she inadvertently positions herself right in front of the wide-open cellar door and the steep, wooden steps behind it.
Peter realizes what she is doing immediately. He gives her a tiny smirk to let her know that she has been caught and then, without another word, he presses his hands hard against Shelby's shoulders and gives her a hard shove.
Shelby feels herself stumble backwards. Her stomach gives a mighty whoosh as she tips backwards into the open doorway on her heels. With nothing behind her to catch her fall, gravity takes over.
The girl's arms circle a couple of times, looking for something to catch her, but they find nothing but air. There is a horrible handful of seconds that appear to happen in slow-motion in which Shelby knows that she is about to get hurt very, very badly. And her baby? That fragile being inside of her – the one that she was supposed to be protecting – wouldn't stand a chance.
Shelby catches a glimpse of Peter mid-fall. He is staring at her from the top of the stairs. There seems to be a sick sense of satisfaction in his eyes.
That is the last thing Shelby notices before she feels her back land against the old, wooden stairs with a crunch that sends a pain like lightning up her spine.
She tries her hardest to cry out, but her body is performing a remarkable series of backwards somersaults down the stairs to the basement floor. She feels every blow until finally, she lands on her stomach on the cool concrete floor. The side of her head connects with it so hard that she sees stars.
Surprisingly, she does not feel any pain. Instead, she is a little bit dizzy and very warm.
Her vision is fuzzy. When she blinks, her eyes refuse to focus. She tries to stand up, but she cannot move.
She sees a shadow at the top of the stairs and for a moment is afraid that Peter is going to come down to finish her off for good, but then she hears the front door open and close with a sound like she is underwater and Shelby realizes that he had left her here, convinced that he had done the job he'd intended.
Shelby stays on the floor for several minutes.
The immediate aftermath of her fall had been calm, but now that her body is starting to process her injuries, everything hurts. She can feel a cut that has opened up at her temple pooling blood underneath her and she wonders how bad it is.
When Shelby tries to lift her arm to prod at the cut, an explosion of pain erupts inside of her mid-section. She is unable to hold back the cry of pain.
Using all her effort, Shelby turns onto her back and cradles her pregnant stomach. On a normal day, she is begging for her child to stop moving. Now, she doesn't feel a thing and she finds herself desperate for a sign of life.
"Come on…" the mother whispers to the growing child still inside of her. "Come on, move… Please, move."
But Shelby doesn't feel anything; not a kick, not a punch, not so much as a sneeze. Nothing.
Sobbing, Shelby forces herself to her knees. Her vision goes blurry immediately and she has to stop to rest, but she cannot very well lie on this basement floor forever. She needs help. Her child needs help. She realizes increasingly, that she might be the only person in the world willing to provide it.
"Hang on," Shelby begs, grabbing onto one of the support beams and using it to force herself to her feet as she begins the daunting task of walking back up the stairs she had just taken a dramatic plunge down.
"I'll get you help," Shelby says, using her promises as motivation to make it up each step. "You'll be fine. I promise, you'll be just fine."
Something is wrong.
Quinn doesn't have to say anything for Shelby to understand this. Her maternal instinct is roaring. She thinks about Beth, hundreds of miles in behind her, and she thinks about Rachel just a handful in front, and she silently prays that she will make it in time to save both of them.
She has never hated anybody as much as she has hated Peter Gabbanelli. She has hated him for a long time, but now, he has put her back in a position where she has to question her daughters' futures.
She swore from the bottom of that staircase eighteen years ago that she would never be in this position again. Now here she is, and Shelby realizes that what she hates Peter for the most is for allowing her to go all these years thinking that she didn't still have reason to be afraid of him.
"Listen to me, Quinn. I know where you are and I'm coming to get you," Shelby insists. Her voice is punctuated and surprisingly strong. It is a promise that she intends to keep. She looks down at her GPS. It tells her she will be there in thirty minutes. Shelby knows she can make it in twenty if she pushes. Would that be too long?
"I'll be there soon," Shelby continues, forcing that lost thought away. "Until I get there I need you to find someplace safe and stay there. Can you do that? Are you somewhere safe?"
"N-no," Quinn stutters and although it is the answer that Shelby had been expecting, it sucks the air out of her lungs anyway. "Shelby, we're not where you think we are. We're not at Peter's."
"What do you mean?" Shelby stutters.
"Peter took us somewhere," Quinn explains quietly. "He… he said it was his boss's house, but I don't think it is."
"His boss's house?" Shelby questions. She has no idea what Quinn is trying to say. She doesn't even know if she is driving in the right direction anymore.
"Quinn, where are you?" Shelby demands loudly. Her voice is no-nonsense. The Coach Corcoran that is still ingrained inside of her personality is starting to seep out, but if that's what she needs to get answers from Quinn, then so be it. "Where's Rachel?"
There are so many things that the blonde is not saying. She is afraid, that much is clear, and she seems to be in some sort of precarious position judging by the way she refuses to allow her voice to elevate beyond a soft whisper, but beyond that, Shelby doesn't know anything of her whereabouts. And where is Rachel? Shelby hasn't heard any evidence of her daughter being with Quinn at all.
She grips the steering wheel a little bit tighter, suddenly not so sure that she wants the answer to her own question.
"I think… I think we're in some sort of drug house."
Shelby nearly swerves off the road. She has spent the last twelve hours trying to convince herself that she would find Rachel and Quinn and that they would be fine. She had told herself that they were smart girls, and that maybe Peter had changed his ways over the years. Now, she realizes that she had only been fooling herself.
"Rachel went inside with him. I… I found some drugs stowed away underneath his car and I panicked and went looking for Rachel and… and…" Quinn's breath is increasing. Shelby can hear it coming out, hot and heavy over the phone as she tries to relay her story to Shelby. Shelby reasons that she can get the details later. For now, her only priority is keeping the girls safe.
"Where are you Quinn?" Shelby insists. Her own strong tone helps the blonde regain her composure. Shelby hears Quinn take a deep breath before quickly stuttering out a series of instructions that she had memorized – to the best of her ability – on the drive from Peter's house. It turns out that the blonde's navigation skills are exceptional. She had been staring out the window the entire time that Peter had been driving, taking it all in.
Shelby tries her hardest to commit the instructions into her long-term memory. She closes her eyes and tries to repeat the directions back to herself: make a left out of Peter's driveway and another left at the farm silo. Cross the main street to the north side of town and make the first right. Or was it a left?
"Quinn, can you say that one more time?" Shelby asks.
"Quinn!" Shelby shouts after a moment, because the blonde seems to have gone temporarily deaf and is suddenly not answering her.
When she doesn't answer again, Shelby's face pales so suddenly that she can feel the blood draining from it and she forgets to take her next breath.
Shelby strains her ears, searching for any indication that Quinn is still on the line, but she hears nothing, not even the blonde's hushed breathing. A moment later, a series of beeps fills Shelby's ears, indicating that the line has gone dead.
"Dammit!" Shelby screams, slamming her fist into the steering wheel so hard that the horn beeps. Luckily, she is the only one on the road.
Shelby manages to take a few deep, steady breaths in an effort to regain control. Panicking isn't going to help her and it certainly wasn't going to help Rachel or Quinn.
She tries her hardest not to think about what the girls might be going through, or what state Shelby will find them in. Instead, she forces herself to be productive. She picks her cell back up, she dials 911, and then, she presses her foot even harder against the gas pedal, determined to get to Rachel and Quinn before it's too late.
It had taken Shelby longer than she intended to make it up the stairs to the phone in her living room to dial 911, but she had done it, and she felt proud of the accomplishment even though she did not feel proud of why she needed help in the first place.
She is sitting by herself on a cot in the ER waiting for the doctor to tell her whether or not she would need stitches on the cut in the side of her head.
He had already told her that remarkably, she had broken no bones in her fall. He wanted to take some X-Rays of her ribs just in case, but Shelby had refused, citing the fact that her child has been through enough already.
Instead of the X-Ray, she had endured an agonizing physical assessment of her ribcage to check for cracks and fractures. The doctor had pressed his hands into each and every one, and he had not been gentle about it.
He had found no breaks, but some severe bruising, and while she was bound to be very sore for the next several days, she had gotten lucky otherwise.
That was great news and all, but it is not her who she is concerned about.
The OB physician on call takes a long time to get to her. She had been delivering a set of twins upstairs in the maternity ward; a wing of the hospital Shelby once imagined she would be in. Now she can only hope.
"How old are you, hon?" the doctor asks her, only after she has taken all of Shelby's vitals and listened to her deny a request to call her parents.
"I'm eighteen."
"Eighteen, wow. I thought you were much older than that."
Shelby blushes although she knows that comment was meant to be a compliment. She has always presented herself with a certain air of confidence that made people think she was older.
"That was quite a fall you took earlier," the woman continues, peeling a pair of gloves onto her small hands. "The ER doctor said you fell down some stairs?"
Shelby pulls her bottom lip in between her teeth and nods. She had told the ER staff that she had fallen down her basement stairs, but she had failed to mention that she had been pushed. She had tested Peter's patience once before, and it had ended with her here. If Peter knew she told the doctors what really happened, he would kill her.
"I haven't felt the baby move since the fall," Shelby confides in her doctor. Her voice is quiet and terrified. She watches the doctor's face fall sympathetically.
"How about we take a quick look then," she offers. Shelby swallows her tears and forces herself to nod as the doctor drags an ultrasound close to the bed.
Shelby settles onto her back. At this point, she is well familiar with this process. She raises her shirt over the small bump in her stomach without prompting and doesn't even flinch when the doctor squeezes the cold gel onto it.
"How many weeks along are you?" the woman asks, gathering the transducer inside of her hands. Shelby feels her hands start to sweat in nervous anticipation.
"Eighteen weeks on Thursday," she answers quietly.
"Do you know the sex yet?" she asks, making small talk as she waves the wand over Shelby's stomach, searching for a clear picture.
"It doesn't matter," Shelby sighs. "I'm not keeping the baby."
"Alright," the doctor nods, continuing to work. She does not pass judgment. It isn't her job to do so. It comes across almost as a relief to Shelby, who has felt the judgment of everybody around her since the day she'd taken that damn pregnancy test. She has to resist the urge to reach out and touch the woman in front of her, just to ask if she is real. "What options are you considering?"
Shelby swallows. She knows that at eighteen weeks, her timeline to get an abortion is rapidly waning.
She had made an appointment after Peter had first told her to get rid of the baby, but she had missed it. Twice. Peter had warned her that he would take matters into his own hands if she failed to follow through, and he had. What a failure of a mother she turned out to be…
Before Shelby can gather the strength to answer the doctor's question, a soft, rapid thumping fills the room with a breath of relief that Shelby didn't even realize she was holding. Her baby's heartbeat. Shelby closes her eyes against the sound. She has heard a lot of music in her life, but this is the best by far.
"Heartbeat is strong," the doctor smiles.
"You said that you can tell the sex?" Shelby questions before she can stop herself. She looks up at the doctor with wide, pleading eyes and watches as the woman nods.
"Would you like to know?"
"Please," Shelby begs in an embarrassingly high-pitched voice.
"Okay," the doctor nods as she repositions the wand of the ultrasound, moving it around for a couple of minutes in search for a better image.
"Congratulations, Ms. Corcoran," the woman smiles brightly the moment she finds what she is looking for. "It's a girl."
Quinn notices the sound of the phone going dead before she notices the shadow hovering over her.
"Hello?" she whispers into the phone. "Shelby? Hello?"
The only thing that answers her is a dial tone. She recognizes the defeat and feels her concentration sidle back into her surroundings where finally, she notices that she is no longer alone inside of this kitchen.
From her position squatting against the kitchen wall – the best hiding spot she could find that the phone cord could stretch to – Quinn forces herself to look up.
There is a man that she doesn't recognize standing above her. His finger is holding down the hook switch of the phone, which explains her lost connection with Shelby.
The two stare at each other for a long moment. The man is wearing a slimy grin. Quinn is too afraid to even move. She says a little prayer for both herself and Rachel, even though she knows she is hardly in a position to be asking for favors from God of all people.
The man clicks his tongue with a tone like he had just struck gold. The sound makes Quinn's stomach roll over and she almost loses what little she'd had to eat today all over the filthy kitchen floor.
"What do we have here?"