“He didn’t know her very well,” Will allowed. “The problem got worse because Lisa got good at finding ways around him. She showered at the school. She wasn’t on a team, but the coaches came to believe her family was poor and had the water cut off. Lisa did not disabuse them of the notion and soon those coaches had used their own money to supply the girls’ locker room with everything she and any other girls without means would need. Shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste, pads, and tampons. When her father wouldn’t feed her, the actual real live pastor in town and his wife would find her on their doorstep on her way back home and give her a bowl of soup or a sandwich. Pastor Edwards called the county a dozen times, but every time child services left her there and it got worse. Until one night, Frank got angry enough that he locked her in a shed in the back of the house. It was pitch dark and she couldn’t move because the place was filthy and there were tools everywhere.”

“She must have been terrified.”

“Oh, yes. There was also a nest of snakes in the shed. By the time he came to let her out, she’d been bitten many times. Luckily they weren’t venomous, but she’d panicked and stepped on a garden hoe that cut her up pretty bad. They refused to take her to a hospital. I think his wife tried to clean her up, but the cuts got infected. We think she was there for at least three days, lying on a bed, dying of sepsis. My mom got out of jail and I have never seen her… She wasn’t the best mom, but she did love us. She didn’t wait for the caseworkers. She borrowed a shotgun and her cousin’s beat-up Ford and she brought Lisa to the hospital and then home. I don’t know what she said or did that day, but he never came around again. He died a few years later of cancer. Mom was all right for a couple of months after that. While Lisa was recovering, we were almost like a normal family. It didn’t last, but I remember those months fondly.”

“So when Biondo shut her in that trunk, it was like she was going into the shed all over again.” His heart ached at the thought and he wished he could go back in time, step in front of that man, and save his girl all that pain.

“I can only imagine. This is why we couldn’t put her in custody like that,” Will said. “Even a locked door can trigger her. She can lock herself in, but she has to know she can get out. And she can’t sleep in the dark.”