Ninety Days to Save My Sister Chapter 2

“Bolt the door from the outside,” Aunt Brenda snapped through the hallway. “Don’t let that little one wander out tonight.”

The heavy iron hasp clicked shut, followed by the dull snap of the padlock.

The spare bedroom was pitch black.

Wooden slats were nailed across the window frame, allowing only thin ribbons of cold moonlight to slice across the floorboards.

In the living room, the landline was ringing. In our hollow, Uncle Ray had the only working telephone on the ridge.

I pressed my ear against the bottom seam of the door.

“Yeah, got her back,” Uncle Ray’s voice carried through the drywall, low and measured. “Didn’t make it past the tree line… Right. Bring your flatbed up first thing in the morning.”

He paused. When he spoke again, his voice dropped an octave, dripping with quiet malice.

“Don’t you worry none. This time, I’ll take a blade to her heel cords before I let her bolt on you again.”

My fingernails dug into the grain of the door until the wood splintered beneath my skin.

In my first life, I had never heard this phone call.

In my first life, I had fallen asleep with that sweet tangerine flavor dissolving on my tongue, completely oblivious to the world burning around me.

June was locked in the canning lean-to on the west side of the porch.

I crawled to the window and tried to wedge my head between the wooden slats, but my collarbones caught hard against the rough pine. I pulled until my skin scraped raw, but I couldn't slip through.

A seven-year-old’s body was too weak.

Too small to even breach a window.

Around dawn, the smell of burnt cornmeal drifted from the kitchen.

The padlock clicked open.

Aunt Brenda shoved the door back, carrying a chipped ceramic bowl of cold grits. She set it on the nightstand with a thud.

“Eat,” she said.

“Aunt Brenda,” I whispered, looking up at her apron. “Let me see June.”

She wiped her hands on a grease-stained dish towel, not bothering to look down.

“Your sister’s fine. She’s leaving out out at sunrise.”

“She doesn't want to go.”

“What she wants don't pay the light bill,” Brenda retorted, slinging the towel over her bony shoulder. “Your uncle put food down your throats for ten years, and all we got out of her was an ungrateful brat. Harlan’s paying ten thousand dollars in clean cash. Wayne needs a down payment on that town home in the county seat, and you need shoes for school. You think money falls from the pine trees?”

“That’s selling her,” I said clearly.

Aunt Brenda stopped.

She turned, her face tightening not with fury, but with the cold, venomous irritation an adult reserves for a pest.

“Watch your mouth,” she hissed, leaning down until her stale coffee breath brushed my face. “It’s marriage. Decent country marriage. You best quit mimicking her nonsense, Annie, because I’m telling you right now—”

She gripped my chin, forcing my face up.

“You keep raising hell, your uncle said he’ll find a truck for you, too. Plenty of men up the ridges don't mind raising a girl up from young. You hear me?”

A cold chill ran down my spine, sinking into my marrow.

She wasn’t bluffing. Her eyes were dull, flat, the way she looked when she talked about gutting chickens for Sunday dinner.

“You hear me?” she repeated.

“…Yes ma'am.”

“Then eat your breakfast.”

She walked out, leaving the bedroom door unlatched. She didn't need to lock it anymore; she knew I had nowhere to run.

In my first life, Brenda had never spoken to me like that. In my first life, I had kept my mouth shut, swallowed my candy, and grew up quiet.

The grits were gelatinous and cold.

I picked up the tin spoon and forced them down, swallow by swallow, choking down the lumps.

I had to stay alive. I needed strength. I had to find a way.

June was still breathing.

Before Harlan Cross came with his truck, I had to find an adult—an adult that Uncle Ray couldn’t intimidate.

I put down the empty bowl and stepped into the gravel yard.

Uncle Ray was at the chopping block, splitting hickory logs. When he saw me emerge, his axe paused mid-air, resting on the stump.

“Annie,” he said, the easy, grandfatherly smile slipping back onto his mouth as if last night had never happened. “Uncle Ray ain’t mad at you. You’re small. You don't know no better.”

He wedged the axe head deep into the wood, stepped over, and crouched in front of me. His rough thumb brushed the swollen purple bruise on my cheek.

“Family business stays inside the fence line,” he whispered, his tone gentle, almost tender. “You take our business out to strangers, you break your old uncle’s heart.”

His skin felt like sandpaper against my bruised jaw.

I didn't cry.

“Uncle Ray, can I walk down to Mr. Lewis’s bait shop?”

“Go on,” he said softly. “Don’t dilly-dally.”

Old man Lewis ran the tackle and sundries shed down by the crossroads.

I didn't go there.

Instead, I broke into a dead sprint along the ditch, heading toward the county road to find Dwight Hollis, the district magistrate. He was the only man on our ridge who had a county-issued pickup truck and authority recognized by town folks.

When I reached his porch, Dwight was sitting on a rusted glider, shelling boiled peanuts while a small transistor radio buzzed with a baseball game.

“Mr. Dwight,” I gasped, clutching the porch railing. “My uncle sold my sister June. She don’t want to go with that man. Can you please help her?”

Dwight paused, cracking a soggy peanut shell between his thick thumbs.

“Annie girl,” he said slowly, chewing. “Your uncle already came by yesterday. Told me June made up her mind to settle down. Harlan Cross might be rough, but he owns fifty acres of timber. Good provider.”

“She didn't make up her mind! She was running away! He dragged her out of the shed!”

Dwight waved a dismissive, peanut-stained hand.

“Little girls don’t understand grown folks' arrangements. Your uncle like to broke his back keeping shoes on you two orphans. Getting her hitched to a landowner is a blessing.”

He popped another peanut into his mouth.

“Go on home now, Annie. Don’t be out here making up wild stories. Ray’s gonna wonder where you got to.”

I stood at the bottom of the porch steps, the high noon sun beating down until my scalp felt scalded.

This road was dead.

It had been dead in my first life, and it was dead now.

Dwight Hollis had shared moonshine and deer blinds with my uncle for thirty years. Out here, they called human trafficking an honest mountain wedding.

As I turned to leave, I heard Dwight mutter behind the screen door:

“Spitfire. Just like her sister.”