Black Widow - Part 2

-2-

She regained consciousness, lying on the basement floor with a horrible headache. Her pockets were empty and her finger was sore, they had wrenched her wedding ring from it. The knuckle was purple and she imagined her face was too. The basement was inescapable; she had tried before. They had the windows nailed shut to keep her inside, it smelled of mildew and backed up sewage. Water bugs and roaches crawled everywhere. She wondered how long they would keep her down here this time. The last time she refused to cooperate, it had only been a day, but they couldn’t take her to town with her face all bruised, swollen, and scraped. They would have to wait until she looked acceptable.

The basement door creaked, and she heard a soft thump on the floor just before the door squeaked shut again. Feeling around in the dim light, she found a brown paper lunch sack with a sandwich and juice pack inside. Eating the peanut butter sandwich, she hoped they had laced it with rat poison. No, she knew she would never be that fortunate.

Two days passed, her mother called down the stairs, “Mallory Borden, are you ready to behave yourself now?”

“It’s Mallory Vogel now, remember?”

The door slammed shut. If she had said, what she had wanted to say, her father would have pounded down the stairs and knocked her lights out again. She anticipated they wanted her to show up at the funeral, and accompany them to the lawyer’s office to collect what they considered their money from the old man’s estate. She would stall them as long as she could. Why hadn’t the authorities figured out what her parents were doing?

She remembered her first marriage when she was sixteen. Shuddering at the mental image, she remembered how Mother had dressed her up in a pretty, white dress, and bought her flowers. She hadn’t met the groom before her wedding day at the county courthouse. John Sawyer was almost eighty years old and a pig; literally, he hadn’t bothered to take a bath or so much as a put on a clean shirt when they stood before Judge. The overweight old man wheezed, and his breath was foul, as if his lungs were rotten. He seemed delighted to get him a virgin bride to share his life with him on the farm. She watched while they signed a bunch of papers, then the Judge married them, and afterward, he gave her father a wad of bills, and she thought the man was wealthy. The old farmhouse he took her to after the ceremony, was in danger of falling apart. Her wedding night was a nightmare. She had no experience, the girls at school had kind of told her about it, but they had not prepared her for what happened. Within a week, she was a widow. He suffered a stroke while he was on top of her, dying before she could work her way out from under him.

She actually cried. The day before, John took a bath for her and brushed his teeth. His brain was simple, but he hadn’t knocked her around as her father had. Mallory thought she could tolerate him. After his funeral, she had to go to the lawyer’s office and her parents made her sign the insurance check over to them.

They had taken her home to mend her broken heart and see the doctor for the infection John had given her. Her mother explained that this was the way of marriages that she had been married several times before she married Mallory’s father.

“It’s just a matter of finding a good match,” she said, “Everybody does it this way. John did not inform us that he was ailing or we would never have permitted it. We will try to find you another husband soon.”