CHAPTER 11
Mac Williams came to the property.
I was reading by lamplight when I heard a truck rumbling up the old path, park with a screech. The headlights, which had shone through the slats in the barn walls, flicked off. Footsteps crunched in the leaves, and I tried to quiet my fear, tell myself that I was safe. Still, though, I reached for my keys and held one between my fingers as I’d been shown to do at a useless self-defence class Hattie and I had taken in high school. I was hunched with a blanket around me, an open copy of Jane Eyre in my lap. The gothic moors had gotten to me, I told myself as the footsteps stopped and a man’s voice called out, accompanied by rapping on the large door.
‘Dirty Penny! You in there?’
Mac’s voice brought back his crude jokes, the kindred cruelty
