The Colonel Who Answered the Call

That night, Hazeline had finally told Hobart at dinner that she wanted to come stay with me for a few weeks to think. His mother had suggested, in front of the whole table, that Hazeline was clearly unwell and needed to be kept somewhere safe until she calmed down, which turned out to mean the guest house behind the main property, with her phone taken at the door “for her own good.” When Hazeline tried to leave anyway, Hobart had grabbed her by the wrist hard enough to fracture it, and when she fell against the door frame reaching for the handle, it was his hand, not an accident, that caught her across the face. A groundskeeper on the property, a man who had worked for the family for eleven years and had watched enough over those years to know exactly what he was looking at, drove her to the hospital himself and left before anyone in the main house noticed either of them was gone, then called the sheriff’s non-emergency line from the parking lot because he did not trust the department the Easterlings had been writing checks to for a decade.