by Nancy Adams
“Well, there ain’t no one out here now. You can see that. Maybe you was mistaken or something.”
“But I was sure that it was them.”
Jules grabbed her arm gently and told her that it was time to go.
“NO!” she screamed out, and several of the avocado pickers threw their eyes in the couples’ direction.
Jules glanced around them, observing the attention they were getting.
“Please, Juliette, we gotta go,” he whispered softly to her.
“But where to? I keep thinking that this is Italy, but it doesn’t look like Italy. The people don’t look Italian.”
“It’s Mexico.”
“Mexico!? Well, no wonder I didn’t recognize it; I’ve never been to Mexico.” She paused and a worried look came over her pallid face. Turning to Jules, she added, “But what are we doing in Mexico?”
“We’ve come to live here.”
“But why? And what does Marco say?”
“I squared it with Marco, Juliette. He wished us a bon voyage.”
“Really? But I’m sure I saw him here a moment ago. He was laughing.”
“Can you just come back to the car, my love?”
“But what if they come back? We can’t just leave them out here in a field in Mexico.”
“They’ve got a car of their own,” he informed her. “They just came out here to have a look and then went back to their car. You must have missed them. They’ve already set off, so if we wait here any longer, they’ll get too far ahead and we’ll miss them.”
“A car of their own?” Juliette mumbled to herself in a half-whisper.
“Can you just come back with me?”
Juliette gazed forlornly ahead of her for a while, at the spot that she had seen so many ghosts standing a short time ago when she’d been at the roadside.
“Danny’s waiting for us,” Jules went on. “We can’t leave him on his own too long.”
Juliette was silent for a time, as if she were considering his last statement.
“But I was sure that I saw him here too,” she then said.
“You couldn’t’ve. You left him back there when you went off.”
“Of course I did,” she said aghast, turning to Jules. “I remember, he wouldn’t come. He wanted me to stay there and wait for you.”
“So does that mean you’ll come back to the car with me?”
She simply smiled and they both began making their ways along the row of avocado trees to the car. When they reached it, David let out a huge smile, seeing that Jules had retrieved his mother. However, the second Juliette saw the car, she turned sharply around and began walking off.
“Honey, what are you doing?” Jules pleaded.
“You wanna take me away,” she muttered as she stomped off. “They sent you,” she continued in a nervous stammer.
“No one sent me. I’m Jules, your husband.”
“I don’t have a husband. You’ve been sent from them and they want to exterminate me.”
“Who’s going to exterminate you?” he let out as he caught her up.
He took a firm hold of her arm and she immediately screamed and tried to pull it away. This alerted everyone around them, and they all began to ogle the strange scene playing out in front of them.
“I won’t go to one of your camps,” she screamed at him.
“It’s me, it’s me” he kept repeating in pleading mantra, trying to get her to look him in the eyes.
But the woman appeared to see nothing of him and merely continued to fight. Several locals came over and asked if it was all okay.
“He wants to take me somewhere and kill me,” Juliette let out.
“She’s very sick,” he informed them as he attempted to control her movements.
While this went on, David watched with alarm from inside the car. Unable to continue to sit by and do nothing, the boy opened the door and burst out toward them. The moment he reached his parents, he thrust himself between them and placed his arms warmly around Juliette’s waist, holding onto her tight.
“Momma,” he cried out. “Momma, stop. It’s Papa. It’s Papa.”
She looked down at him, her struggles ceasing for the moment, and continued to gaze upon the boy with her swollen green eyes.
“Danny,” she uttered, and her arms relaxed in Jules’s grip so that he felt confident enough to let them go.
Juliette placed her freed arms around the boy and then he walked her by the hand to the car, where she got in by her own free will. Jules then started the engine and they were back on their way, Juliette in the back being held comfortingly by the weeping David, the boy acting as a mother protector to her.
Meanwhile, in the driver’s seat, Jules’s mind raced at a hundred miles a minute. They had to find somewhere and fast, he had to settle her down. But where? He didn’t even know where he was going himself. And the little money that they had wouldn’t last anywhere for longer than two or three months, even if they were careful. Sure there was the money that would come from Jose, but surely if these guys following them were smart enough to trace phone calls, they were smart enough to trace money transfers. And it was obvious that they were already tracing Jose anyway; otherwise how else would they have gotten to the address and found out Jules’s mobile number, as well as pursuing it by satellite?
The more he thought about it, the more Jules realized that the family were caught in a quagmire; the more they would fight against it, the deeper they would be sucked into turmoil. As he came to this realization, he peered into the mirror and saw Juliette’s frightened face glaring back, little David with his arms around her, soothing her and whispering sweet words of comfort to her.
What about the boy? Jules thought. How could you be so stupid as to drag an innocent little boy into all of this? You call yourself a father? You’re no father.
And so forth went Jules’s recriminations as he drove worriedly down the freeway toward nowhere in particular.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
June was shivering and sobbing in the police station reception area, Agnes’s arms around her, rubbing her back. She was waiting for the sheriff to come back and confirm what she’d found on the USB and to look through Joe’s laptop.
“This guy in the garden must’ve really shaken you up,” Agnes put to her friend.
June, of course, had followed Claire’s advise to the letter and had told Agnes nothing of what her real motives for seeing the sheriff were. To her friend’s comment, June merely patted her hand softly down on that of Agnes, thankful that her friend was with her now, thankful that she had someone.
Having sat waiting for about fifteen minutes, Sheriff Daniels, a personal friend of the Priors, came through and asked June to come to one of the interview rooms with him to make a formal statement. When Agnes rose with her, June turned to her friend and told her that she needed to speak with him on her own.
“You sure?” Agnes inquired with a benevolent expression.
June said not one word and simply took her friend in an affectionate embrace.
“You’ve done enough, sweetie,” June whispered in the friend’s ear. “Just wait a while and I’ll soon be back.”
“Okay.”
June then went off with the sheriff, an awful forlornness to her movements; head bowed between her shoulders, her body moving listlessly, and the shiver of an occasional sob erupting through her as she shuffled along like a man in chains.
When they reached the interview room, Sheriff Daniels offered June a chair at one side of a table and then took a seat opposite.
“Now, June,” he began, “you may have a lawyer present if you wish.”
“Why would I need a lawyer, Tony?” she innocently asked, looking up at him with her swollen, dejected eyes.
“It’s just…you know, precaution. I don’t want you saying anything you don’t really want to.”
“But I need to tell you it all.”
“Okay, then we’ll begin.”
The sheriff push
ed a button on a tape recorder that sat in the center of the table, before giving the time and date as well as his own name and June’s.
“Now, June, explain for me why you brought the evidence to me today?” he inquired.
“I…well, I guess…I have suspected that my husband was having an affair.” This was something that she’d come up with herself. She wasn’t willing to involve Claire, seeing that it was her daughter’s own right to inform anyone of her own abuse. “So like most people suffering from suspicion I went looking for evidence. I looked on his laptop and computer, but I’m not good with those things, so I found nothing. Then I looked in his safe—which he always thought I didn’t know the combination for—and that’s when I found the memory stick with…with all those…those terrible…”
She began sobbing again and Sheriff Daniels offered her a tissue, which she took.
“And you can confirm that it was your husband, Joe Prior’s, safe that you found the evidence in, and that the laptop belongs to him?”
“Yes,” she weeped dreadfully.
“I’m sorry, June, I’m gonna need you to say it a little clearer for the recording.”
She leaned forward and spoke as clearly as she could straight into the microphone of the recorder.
“Regarding those images you found, June,” the sheriff continued, “our guys have found some pretty disturbing stuff. We also unlocked a lot of things from his laptop and are about to get a warrant for both Joe’s arrest and a full search of his homes and businesses. We believe that your husband has been up to quite a lot that you are perhaps oblivious to.”
“Oh Gosh!” she exclaimed through her tears.
She had prayed that it would only amount to the images on the USB, but that didn’t appear to be the case.
“What else have you found?” she asked in a trembling voice.
“At this moment I’m not at liberty to reveal this to you, but what I can say is it doesn’t look good for Joe. In fact, it already looks pretty bad, June.”
“Oh Gosh!”
“I just need this short statement from yourself explaining how you came to find these things and you’ve more than explained that. So can you confirm that you came about these things purely by chance and had no prior knowledge that he was into these…things?”
June paused here. No prior knowledge, flashed through her mind. Does the years of suspicion count? Does the fact that I always knew something was up—although I could have never counted on it being this—relevant to what he just said?
She breathed in deeply, before answering that she had never suspected anything other than that her husband was having an affair.
It was then that the sheriff stunned her with another question that struck straight to her heart.
“Your daughter Claire,” he began, “she’s—what—twenty-five now?”
“Yes, but I don’t see how—”
“Did she ever come to you with anything?” he went on, cutting her speech short. “Did you ever suspect anything about them? Did they ever seem off with each other? I’ve know you all for some twenty years and have often been to the house for barbecues, dinner parties and things like that. I always sensed an atmosphere between the two.”
“They’ve never been that close, if that’s what you mean.”
“That is what I mean, June. I’ve always sensed an atmosphere, and up until today I had no other reason to think that it wasn’t anything more than a simple lack of father-daughter bonding.”
“But she never said…or, well, I never really thought…please.” At this last instant she broke down once again, the ‘please’ coming in such a pleading voice that the old sheriff found it distressing to see his old friend so disheartened.
Sheriff Daniels decided to leave off this line of questioning and not torture the woman any further with such insinuations. For the record, he had what he wanted: her statement regarding how she found the items that she’d brought in and that she believed that they did indeed belong to Joe.
“Okay, June,” he said getting up, “you’re free to leave. And for the record; I’d like to say that it was a very brave thing you did today. You wouldn’t believe how many people out there wouldn’t have had the guts to bring this sort of thing in when it involved a loved one. It may surprise you how many times a police department investigates these types of things and find that the spouse often knew about it and had covered for her husband. What you’ve done takes extreme guts.”
She smiled faintly at him. He then made a short statement into the recorder ending the interview, before guiding a shocked and despondent June back to Agnes.
Once Sheriff Daniels had said his goodbyes to both women, the two friends left the station and went back to Agnes’s, where Agnes made June a cup of coffee and sat down with her in the kitchen. As the friend spied June’s desolate expression and constant stream of tears, as well as the fact that she hadn’t uttered more than two words since they’d left the station, she suspected that the garden intruder story was simply a cover.
“What really happened, Juney?” Agnes inquired.
June, whose eyes gazed blankly down at the time, looked up at her and said in an almost whisper, “He abused her, Agnes. He abused her…and probably others too. And the whole time, deep down, I think I may have know about it. Or at least suspected.”
“Who? Who’s abused who?”
“Joe. He’s a pedophile. He abused my own daughter right under my nose, and then he’s been looking at…things.”
“My word!” Agnes exclaimed, placing her hand mechanically over her mouth, as if she expected to scream at the news.
“I found stuff, Agnes…Stuff you’d never believe possible in a world of God. Things that make me question His existence. That things like that were possible under His eyes, I’d never have—that men would want to see such horror.”
“And that’s what you were taking to the police?”
“Yes,” June muttered. But then a thought hit her and she looked her friend in the eyes and added, “But this must go no further than this kitchen.”
Agnes crossed herself and stated firmly, “No further.”
“For years,” June began, her sore eyes gazing blankly forward, as though she were speaking to no one in particular, “I sensed a darkness in my house, under my own roof. There was always something there, like a ghost, hanging over us; especially over Joe and Claire. I sensed something horrid, and for a time I determined to find it out. But as the years went by and no one said anything, I let it go. When Claire went off to college that cloak of shadow was lifted a little and instead of realizing what that meant, I simply felt relieved.” June threw her head despairingly into her hands and shook it. “I hit her, Agnes,” she suddenly confessed through tears. “I hit my own daughter when she told me. The other day when your Beth took her to see me, she let it all out, told me everything. And my reaction was to hit her!”
Agnes got up from her chair and came around the table, placing her hands delicately around her friend’s shoulders.
“It’s okay, Juney,” she cooed into her friend’s ear.
“What kind of mother am I?” June went on in despair. “Did I know all the time? Did I know deep down, but hid it from myself? Did I know for real, or just in a dream? And is that why I hit her? Because I knew it and had been lying to myself all those years and now that lie had been exposed and I hated her for exposing it. Am I that horrible that I chose to lie to my myself, rather than do my duty as a mother and protect my own daughter?”
June was deep within a paroxysm of guilt and self-loathing, and Agnes could do nothing to sooth her.
At that moment, June’s phone went off in her handbag. Agnes fetched it for her and saw Claire’s name on the screen.
“It’s from Claire,” she informed June.
The latter immediately pulled her desolate face out of her hands and took it, answering the instant she could.
“Hey, honey,” she let out in a trembling voice.
“You did it?
”
June nodded, but the knot in her throat prevented her from actually saying anything.
“Ma?”
“Yes,” she finally let out, and with it a torrent of renewed sobbing.
“I’m so proud of you,” Claire said warmly.
“How can you…be proud…of me?” June weeped.
“Because you’ve stopped him, Ma. You’ve done something more than I ever did. You actually did something about it.”
“But I think I knew.”
“Not for sure did you know, Ma. Not for sure. You may have suspected something, and you always used to ask me if anything was up—”
“But not directly,” June let out desperately. “I never came straight out with it and asked.”
“You asked if anything was up between me and Joe, ma. You gave me more than just a chance to say something, but I just wanted it to go away. It ended when I was thirteen and that was good enough for me, I guess. That it had ended. But by not saying anything, I was more guilty than you’ll ever be. Because my silence allowed him to carry on. I’m real proud of you, Ma.”
“I don’t feel deserving of pride.”
“Well, you are and I am. What did the police say?”
“Tony—Sheriff Daniels—says that he couldn’t legally tell me exactly what they’d found. But he said that there was more on Joe’s laptop and they want to search everything else. I think that’s what they’re doing now. They took a copy of my house keys.”
“Have you told anyone where you are?”
“No. But surely your father won’t do anything. They’re gonna arrest him.”
“But he may get out on bail.”
“But he wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Ma, a long time ago, he told me that if I ever told anyone about it, he’d kill me, you, Kyle and then himself. He looked me straight in the eyes and said that to me. Now you’ve gone and done exactly that. You’ve been braver than me. But he may hurt you. That’s why I’ll be at Agnes’s in about four to five hours to come get you. Sam is returning in twenty minutes and after that we’re coming to get you.”
