Two minutes and forty-seven seconds.
That’s how long it took to die inside.
Alace knew it was longer. The whole encounter had been so much longer than that. About seventeen lifetimes, that’s how it seemed at the time. From the moment she rounded the corner of the alleyway and saw Trev and his posse waiting for her, a line of bodies spread out across the space, their practiced actions so coordinated, she knew she couldn’t be their first target. The instant she grasped that this wouldn’t be something she could outrun or avoid—and would be finally tossed to the side, landing on the cobblestones like nothing more than a used tissue—seventeen lifetimes seemed about right.
No. The not-quite three minutes—and that’s how their defense attorney categorized it, minimizing it as less time than a parking meter put on the clock for a quarter—was all the jury saw. A portion of her attack had been videoed on a phone, the footage whispered about in the hallways and bathrooms of the warehouse where she and her attackers all worked—the only employer left in the tiny New York town where Alace had lived all her life. Shaky footage discovered by a man’s wife one night when he was too drunk to discourage her exploration. A discovery shared with the police who pieced together that the blurry face held against the hood of a car, cheek flattened to the metal, white panties gagging her screams, must be the girl claiming rape at the local hospital.
She hadn’t named Trev when she went to the ER. God, no, I’ve never been stupid. If she’d named him, there would have been no saving her. She would have been found drowned in the river, another victim of the particular version of depression that seemed to run as a contagion in the little town. A taint acquired through exposure to the small pond bullies cultivated amidst the economic woes of the region.
Alace was just the daughter of the town slut, not even a father’s name to claim. It’d be the joke of the century if she had named names when asking for the slim care available at the tiny hospital. Blood tests and a pill to make sure their seed didn’t stick. That’s all she’d been looking for, the gift of reassurance, but none of that came without a price. With the local bleak climate, even her battered body wasn’t unique enough to justify a second glance.
Hopelessness breeds violence, and their town had ample evidence that crop was well rooted.
It wasn’t until the next girl turned up dead as well as raped that Alace realized exactly what they’d risk covering their tracks. Same age, same desperate confrontation, but a different, very permanent outcome because Tansy had talked, and talked, and talked until she wasn’t in any shape to talk anymore.
Two minutes and forty-seven seconds.
That’s the length of time the jury was required to watch the large screen brought into the courtroom for that command performance.
She sometimes wondered how long Tansy lasted.
Alace didn’t look at the projected images. She would have blocked out the sounds with her hands if she could, but the lawyer assigned to prosecute Trev and his hounds had warned her against that kind of avoidance. Said it could look like she was culpable, like she was trying to withdraw from owning the acts committed on her body. His contradictions didn’t make sense, but it didn’t matter. Frozen on the bench behind the barrier wall, separated from her attackers by only a few feet, forced to breathe their air, Alace sat quietly, but she wouldn’t watch. Couldn’t, not and stay sane.
She’d kept her eyes on the judge, noting he avoided the screen, too. But, of course, he’d seen it before since just the admittance of the video was a contentious point for the defense. Argued and argued behind closed doors, while the rustling masses stayed seated in the courtroom. Whispers and pointed fingers bringing the strain of humiliation down on Alace. Regardless of his angled chin turning his face away, she knew the man in the robes already had seen it, forced to watch and make a ruling, implacably throwing his weight on the side of the evidence.
The jury had watched. Some showing an apathetic disbelief, some with expressions of disgust, and one woman had worn such a look of avaricious delight on her face Alace had stared at her for long moments, uncertain of what she was seeing.
“Be quiet, bitch.” That had been the only phrase grunted loud enough for the cell phone speaker to pick up. Alace heard the words and was transported out of there, landing back in her crawling skin plastered against cold steel. The taste of her own panties shoved into her throat, heaving against the cloying feel of wet cotton, tasting the acid tang of ammonia, telltale evidence of her terror. Strands of her long hair in her mouth, tangled on her tongue, shoved in and held in place by the gag. “Be quiet, bitch.”
Alace wrestled her way back to reality in time to hear the sound of ripping fabric tear through the air of the courtroom. That would be her shirt, torn along the side seams so they could grapple at her breasts with flesh claws made from hands.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. That everyday sound was the suspension of the car as it rocked back and forth, a timeless motion that should have been comforting. Transformed to violence, the sound was obscene.
Sweat-wet flesh slapping together shared space with broken howls and cries. His thighs had been hammering against her haunches as her throat convulsed around a scream. Thick ribbons of bruises had banded her belly and hips for weeks, darkness slowly bleeding to purple and then green, yellow reminders of danger remaining the longest.
A loud scratching noise, sounding like beetle’s legs scrambling for purchase in a hot frying pan. Her nails had clawed at the unforgiving metal surface, bending back and ripping her nailbeds to the quick again and again, wrists pinned in place over her head. She fought so hard the pressure of his hand had torn all the skin off her right wrist, leaving a raw band of flesh that had burned and bled. Alace circled the long-healed wound with her palm, covering it protectively, knowing the action was far too little, too late.
Alace had waited, counting down every damned second of the playback from the worst day of her life.
The entire charade inside the courtroom wasn’t anything she’d asked for. In fact, when the police had shown at work and demanded to talk to her, she had told them there was nothing to report. One man, a detective, had looked at her with sad eyes. “I know your mother,” he had said, and she’d immediately directed her eyes down, not wanting to see the kindly expression morph to disdain on his face. His words didn’t make sense, and she dismissed them out of hand, only keeping the parts that fit into her view of the world. “Alace, what those men did was not okay. They hurt you, but they did so much worse to Tansy. We can do this without you, but with you is easier.”
He’d had to come back three days in a row before she would say anything other than, “Nothing happened.” Still, the sad-eyed detective had eventually worn her down, his murmured kind words and façade of caring too unfamiliar to resist.
In the end, it was all for naught.
“Not guilty.” The woman who’d been wild-eyed during the rape playback read the verdict, her voice shaking.
What if? Alace’s brain was plagued with the ideas. What if I’d spoken up first? She likely would have preceded Tansy on a walk off the train trestle. Would it have been a fair trade, if Tansy lived?
Tansy had a family who loved and mourned her, attending each day of the trial even if the charges for their daughter’s death weren’t on the docket. Weeping when Trev and his posse had been paraded in and out of the courtroom, the mother with her hand covering the bottom half of her face, capturing and holding her cries as the verdict rang through the room. I should have done something.
That night, Alace went to bed for the last time in her little room on the top floor of the hotel in town where she’d lived all her life, literally, having been born there eighteen years ago. The sign on the marquee read Palace Suites. At night, the P was dark, leaving just her name blazoned against the sky.
Alace Sweets.