The 45th Parallel

by Lisa Girolami

  “I don’t know what you thought you saw, but Cam wouldn’t do any of that. She’s not that way.”

  “Can you know for sure? Nedra seemed like a pillar of this town, and look what she ended up being. Cam was a troublemaker in high school. I was there, I saw it. Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall far from its own tree.”

  “Cam went to jail once,” Mr. Harlin said.

  “I know. She told me. She broke some windows at the high school.”

  “Did she tell you her brother actually did it? She took the blame because she was afraid if he went to jail for it, he’d never get over the stigma. She knew they were better than that, but he was too sensitive. So she protected him and did the time instead.

  “And she made restitution. She worked every job she could find to pay back the school. And she kept working until she could afford to send her brother to college in Seattle. She made sure he got out of this town because he never would have had a chance here. Because of that, she was stuck here all these years, suffering the name-calling and discrimination, but she rose above it and became a respectable businesswoman. And a good friend to me. And to you.”

  Mr. Harlin put his hand on the table and used it to stand up. He shuffled away from the chair. “Sometimes,” he said when Val stood, “if you look down on people, you lose the opportunity to help them up.”

  He ambled out of the dining room and Val walked with him, opening the front door for him.

  He turned to her and said, “For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” He bowed slightly, as if thanking her for her time. “That’s the first book of Samuel, 16:7.”

  She watched him stroll to his car and made sure he got in okay. He turned toward her as he started the engine. Val waved but realized her gesture was as tired and uncertain as she felt.

  Who was Cam, really? And why should she trust one old man?

  The bigger question was, why had she let herself get pulled into this mess? Why hadn’t she just taken care of her business and left town instead of playing some older and dumber version of Nancy Drew? If she’d been smarter, she would have never broken the law or allowed Cam access to her heart.

  Why had she taken it so damn far?

  And then, it was as if something or someone made her turn her head. Her gaze landed on the dining-room table where the metal piece and the spring still sat. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the key. She’d kept it with her since she and Cam had found it.

  And she had her answer.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Wait here,” a police officer instructed her. She sat on a metal chair across from another chair. A wall of bars separated the two. Cement cinder blocks made up the rest of the small room. They were painted white as if somehow the lightness of the color would brighten the ambiance of the room, but signs stating multiple restrictions ruined the effort. No cell phones. No contraband. No loud, abusive, or obscene language. No excessive kissing, touching, and/or grooming.

  Val’s hands shook as she tried to calm herself. It was a risk to show up at a police station that might be looking for her, but she was equally nervous about seeing Cam. She didn’t want to be here but she had questions. And she would demand answers.

  Cam was brought in through a series of barred doors. She was wearing a dark-blue smock and draw-string pants, but they were barely in the same color range as the bottoms, being at least four bleach shades lighter than the top. Val attempted to control her breathing as Cam passed through the last door. While the police officer instructed her about something, Cam kept her head down, looking only at the floor, which gave Val a chance to blow a few breaths out, readying herself for the confrontation.

  Cam looked awful. Her body slumped over slightly, maybe from the burden of her circumstances or maybe from the guilt of her actions, but it wasn’t until she turned toward her and looked up that Val saw the real source of her demeanor.

  Her face had been brutalized. Her eyes were black and were probably both bloodshot, but only one eye could open up at all. Her lip was split, and her left cheek was so swollen, it could have easily been broken. She had inflamed, dark-red scrapes across the right side of her face, and Val could tell by the parallel streaks that they came from being dragged along pavement of some kind.

  Val grew nauseous, and the pain of her recent beating

  came right back to her. She winced, as if actually feeling Cam’s wounds.

  The officer nodded and Cam walked toward Val. When she got to the chair and sat, she finally looked up. They were less than two feet apart, with a short table between them divided vertically by jail bars. Cam’s cheeks were swollen, and her forehead had dried blood from a few cuts that ran lengthwise across her hairline. One eye was swollen shut and the other was bloodshot. Her lip had been split open as well. Val was still so shocked by Cam’s horribly beaten face she lost whatever words she’d decided to say to her.

  “Did the police do this to you?”

  Cam furrowed her eyebrows. “No.” She seemed confused.

  “Who did?”

  “Mack.” Cam gingerly ran her tongue over a cut in her swollen bottom lip. “And those guys.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They beat the shit out of me.”

  “They—”

  “I don’t understand, Val. Why didn’t you come to the jail last night?”

  “I did. I was here being questioned by the police.” Val was becoming just as confused. And the more she looked at Cam’s face, both eyes gooped up with some sort of medicinal ointment, just seeing the amount of injury and pain made Val’s own eyes water in response.

  “When I went behind the church,” Val said, “you didn’t follow me. You went back out to your friends, didn’t you?”

  “You were running back behind the church, and I knew you were going to try to help that little boy. I didn’t want them to stop you so I ran back out to the parking lot, hoping they’d chase me instead of you. I was trying to lead them away from the church and past the parking lot, but they caught me and dragged me over to their cars.”

  “I saw you, Cam. You and Donna were standing close,” Val said, her stomach sour with the memory, “and whispering in each other’s ears.”

  Cam’s open eye narrowed and then closed a moment as she lowered her head. “She was threatening me,” she said, looking back up again. “She whispered in my ear that if I didn’t shut up about what I saw, Mack would make sure I was never found again. She told me that even if I did say something, no one in town would believe me anyway. And that my past would guarantee it. She said they’d find you and finish what they started and that this time the house would explode with you in it.” She hesitated and dug her fingers into the table in front of her. “She told me that the boys would probably rape you first, though, just for fun.

  “Then she tried to reason with me and sweet-talk me since we’d been lovers once. She said that instead of all that, I could choose to go along with it. They’d pay me to keep quiet and even give me a percentage of the profits from their enterprise if I kept my mouth shut.

  “And what you saw when I whispered back was me telling her to shove it up her ass like Mack probably liked to do. I also told her that if any of those assholes even touched you one more time, I’d kill every last one of them. That’s when I got pummeled.”

  Val was stunned. This was the last thing she’d expected Cam to say. She only had her gut to go by, and while Cam’s outward actions up until the night before had been consistent and seemingly sincere, did she really know Cam at all?

  Val was the outsider, the new stranger in town, the mark. And while it was indisputable that Nedra and Mack and the rest had deliberately gone after her to protect their sick venture, had Cam been the insider? Was she the magician’s shill in the naive audience of one? And if she wasn’t, how was Val supposed to just believe her?

  “If that’s true, why did you get arrested and not just Mack?”


  “When the police got there, Nedra and Pastor Kind said that I started the fight.” She laughed but sounded pitiful. “I told them Mack and the other two assholes had beaten me, so they decided to take us both in.”

  “And let the others go?”

  Cam looked as disappointed as Val felt. “Yeah.”

  “Well,” Val said. Things were beginning to make a bit more sense. If Cam had been in on the whole mess, Mack wouldn’t have beaten her up. “The fact that I got to this room without being arrested tells me that you haven’t said anything about me.”

  “Why would I? You’re the victim here.”

  Val looked at the woman she’d spent the last few days with. She was the woman who’d reached out to her, helped her, and made love to her. All the things that encouraged trust. Val had spent her life wary of pretty much everyone. She truly sucked at trusting people, but Cam had opened a door, and, for the first time, Val had walked in with open arms.

  “Why did you pursue this with me, Cam? If you’re telling the truth, you took a big chance when you met me. Until you stepped in, you didn’t have anything to do with this and could have walked away from it all.”

  “You needed help.”

  “Most of the town thinks you’re the person who’d do exactly what we did at the garage. But you tell me that you’ve spent years working hard to erase that reputation.”

  “I know what I’ve done and haven’t done,” She jerked her head back slightly to the jail cells behind her, and Val presumed she was indicating Nedra and the rest. “I’m not sure I’ll ever convince people of who I really am, but I had a chance to help substantiate the fact that Hemlock has some real villains. They’re the worst kind, too. They wear their upright citizen’s faces all day, get us to trust them, but they’re the worst, most despicable human beings imaginable.

  “I also got to know you and wanted to help you, no matter what you needed. That’s probably a fault of mine. Maybe I don’t know when to stop, but I didn’t want to stop with you. You needed someone to help you because everything seemed confusing and fucked up. You needed someone you could trust.”

  “Yeah, I know about trust, Cam. Especially how it can be stomped on and flung around like some abused alley cat.”

  Cam’s eye began to water and she folded her hands together, clenching them until her knuckles turned white.

  “I regret so many things right now,” Cam said. “We should have gone to the police long before last night. I shouldn’t have taken you back to the garage the second time. And I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep you from getting hurt by those people, Val. But most of all, I’m sorry you’re in so much pain right now. I can’t make you believe me. All I can do is tell you I’m so, so sorry.”

  Val inhaled a ragged breath full of overwhelming emotions. She was hurt and tired and confused. And she was crazy about Cam. She’d never before felt so exposed, and it terrified her.

  But what scared her even more was the thought of getting up and walking away from this jail and never being with Cam again. When she’d first seen her, so badly beaten, her face so broken by the fists of those horrible men, her doubt about Cam had started to crumble.

  Of course it made sense that Cam would try to fend them off for her. She was a protector.

  She’d protected her brother from a life she’d already been sentenced to and spent her life fighting the swift and relentless current of Hemlock’s cruel prejudice and small-minded judgment. And then she’d reached out to shelter and protect Val. The proof that Cam had been telling the truth about that night at the church had been horribly battered into her face.

  “I wanted to leave town this morning. Leave and never come back,” Val said. She pulled the key from her pocket and held it up. “But my mom left this. I believe she was asking me to do something with it. I believe she’d found out what Nedra was doing and was planning to go to the police. She made that list, locked it away in a safe place, and then hid the key in a place that only two people knew about.

  “But then she died and,” Val paused, swallowing back the wretched sadness that hung in her throat, “I think I was supposed to help her finish this. There were so many things I should have done and didn’t. But she gave me one more chance, and I needed to take it.

  “Mom could have written me off long ago,” she said. “My actions and my outward appearance told her I didn’t care anymore, but she knew that in my heart I was still her daughter. And she was right.” So was Mr. Harlin, she thought. “She saw my heart, not my actions.

  “And I saw that in you, Cam. I was exposed and defenseless, but you held out your hand to me. I took it and it felt so wonderful. I’m not good at trusting, I never have been, so when I saw you at the church with Donna, I just spun out.

  “Nevertheless, I want to trust your heart, Cam. It scares the hell out of me, but I know now that outward appearances aren’t the whole truth. And I know you aren’t the bad person this town thinks you are.”

  Cam was crying harder now. She looked so small in that oversized jail outfit. At that moment, Val knew that it was safe to trust her. Of all the people that she’d never completely allowed in, here was an ex-juvenile delinquent who’d turned out to be her true liberator. She found in being with Cam the desire to throw caution into the nearby ocean and let the waves pulverize it.

  Even though Cam’s hands were still clenched together, they shook, and Val wished she could reach out and hold her. But she couldn’t do that. Not just yet. There was, however, something she could do.

  “Cam, hang in there a little longer. I need to go make this all right.”

  Cam looked at her with such feeling that Val knew it wasn’t a lie. Her heart strained to break free from its cage of bones and flesh and pour out all the love it held for Cam.

  “I will be back. Believe me.”

  *

  Val met with a Hemlock detective named Randall and handed him the bag Mr. Harlin had brought over earlier that day.

  She told him everything, as it had happened. Detective Randall took copious notes, stopping every once in a while to give her a look. She couldn’t tell what was behind his expression, but it was either incredulity at the crazy events he was hearing about or frustration because he was now going to have to transcribe all of it into what would surely be a lengthy report.

  She admitted she’d broken into Mack’s garage and that the tapes came from his office. She also added that she hadn’t revealed that part to the police the night before because she knew it would implicate her.

  “But I don’t care any longer what happens to me,” she told the detective. “I broke in because I knew something bad was happening. If I get into trouble because of it, it’s okay. Those people had to stop what they were doing.”

  “The officer who took your statement last night said you’re Kris Montague’s kid.”

  “I am,” Val said.

  “She was a hell of a nice lady.”

  “That was nice of you to say, Detective Randall.”

  His nod seemed reverent, which meant a lot to her.

  “What happens now that I’ve told you about breaking into the garage?”

  The detective tapped his pen on the notebook. It made a deadened, thudding sound that Val likened to the second hand of a clock, ticking toward an answer that might be really bad.

  “We’ll need to conduct an investigation first. You admitted breaking in, so you’ll probably face charges.” For the first time that day, he looked at her differently. Gone was the lackluster but dubious expression of a police officer who wasn’t quite sure what to believe. In its place was an unexpected affability of sorts. “But I’m not going to detain you tonight. If there really turns out to be a child-pornography ring, and the evidence shows it, the district attorney’s office may decide to drop your burglary charge. They may cite that, in the interest of justice, it was for a reasonable cause. It doesn’t happen often, but it could. And if that fails, judges have been known to dismiss cases for the same reason.”

  “You
mean for the way I collected the evidence?”

  “Yes. But hear me when I say that you broke the law. There are no guarantees. You should talk to a lawyer.”

  The reality of her actions sobered her faster than a naked plunge in an ice pond. She didn’t want to be arrested for burglary, but she had broken in. The frightened face of little Edgar when he’d almost been accosted made her own fear dissipate quickly. Those bastards had to be stopped.

  “Thank you, Detective.”

  “And stick around. No flying back home unless you talk to us first,” Detective Randall said as he sat back and looked at the tape, metal plate, and spring sitting on the table in front of them. “Deer catapult, gas leak—that’s a wild story, you know.”

  “I do. And I never thought it’d lead to all this.”

  He got up and said, “Wait here.”

  Just outside the open door, the detective spoke with another officer. “Call Judge Turner and get a warrant for Mack’s place. It’s about the child-porn report from last night. Looks like we have evidence in his office.”

  Val waited until he returned and sat down. “There’s something else I need to tell you.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “It’s about Cam Nelson. She’s being held because of the fight last night at the church.”

  He nodded.

  “The same group I told you about.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s not part of them. She was with me when I went to the church. She tried to stop them. When I got the boy out of there, they caught her in the parking lot. They knew we’d found out what they were doing so they beat her up. She needs to be released. She had nothing to do with them.”

  “You know who Cam Nelson is, don’t you?”

  “If you’re referring to her reputation, I’m aware of the gossip. All I’m saying is that she’s not part of that child-porn stuff. They beat her up because they knew she’d go to the police.”

  He seemed to chew on that information for a minute. “We’ve got two things going on here: the he-said-she-said fight last night and separate allegations about what happened to Edgar Santorino. You say she’s not guilty of either offense.” He stood up and collected his notebook. “We’ll look into both.”