The year She Fell

by Rasley, Alicia

  “But no note. No warning.”

  “No.”

  I waited. Finally she added, “She was in a . . . cheerless mood. I remember that. She usually liked coming home, liked seeing old friends. She was . . . something of a star, you know.”

  There was the ghost of pride in her voice, and I thought unwillingly of Laura, another star come home—but not to a proud mother. “But she didn’t meet with friends this time?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So she stayed home with you most of the time.”

  Reluctantly she nodded.

  “You must have talked.”

  Another nod.

  “She told you something. Something that later made you think that she was in—” I had to search for the words. “In despair.”

  “Yes.” This was just a whisper.

  “And it wasn’t about the second child.”

  “No. I didn’t know about him—until he wrote here to Ellen.”

  “It must have been about the first. Theresa.”

  She didn’t answer, so I pushed on. “This was just a few years after you took Theresa back from the Prices. Adopted her. And you didn’t know it, but it was on Cathy’s mind because she had to give up another child.”

  “She accepted what I’d done. For Theresa. But it . . . bothered her. She took it as a rebuke. That she couldn’t forget now, no matter how she tried. But it was too late. It wasn’t as if I could give Theresa back.” She pushed back slightly, into the pillows, and said, “But Cathy would rather have forgotten having her. Forgotten conceiving her.”

  “And she told you that before she died.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she told you something else. Something about the father. Something you didn’t know before.” I was guessing. But I was right.

  “Back when she was just a girl, and she came to me and told me she was pregnant . . . she said that a boy in her class was the father.”

  “But that wasn’t true, was it? And she corrected that, before she died.”

  “She told me she had to speak the truth. She said it was an older man. A teacher.”

  Very softly, I said, “Why did she tell you at that point, after so many years of silence?”

  Mrs. Wakefield was silent for a moment, gazing out the window at the fading evening light. Finally she said, “Now I understand. She realized that she had . . . gone off track. That she was—what do they call it? Acting out. Being self-destructive. She didn’t say that, but now I understand. Seducing her sister’s boyfriend . . . giving up another child. Taking greater risks in her climbing. And she realized that it was because of what happened to her years earlier.”

  “It is rape, you know. Even if it seemed consensual. She was under sixteen.”

  “I know. Now. But then, I thought it was a boy her own age, just two children who got carried away. That the best thing to do was handle it discreetly. And I did.” Her manicured hand moved slowly on the coverlet, stroking the wrinkles smooth. “But then, finally, she told me the truth. And she said that she wanted to—”

  When she didn’t finish, I finished for her. “She wanted to prosecute. To expose him. To put him in jail.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  Another moment, and a sigh. “I said she couldn’t. It had been too long. And Theresa would learn the truth. And we would never recover from that.”

  Theresa would know the truth now. The wall of secrecy was cracking. “What did Cathy say?” “She . . . agreed. Finally. She understood that it would hurt Theresa most of all.”

  “And she died—”

  “Two days later.”

  She laid her head back against the pillows, and I let her rest for a moment. Then I said, “Something happened this spring to make you think it wasn’t suicide after all. That she was killed.”

  She sighed again. “First was that letter, from that boy. Brian. He addressed it to Ellen, because that was the name on his birth certificate. But I knew right away it couldn’t be Ellen who delivered him. And I thought perhaps it was Cathy.”

  “What else?”

  She hesitated, then said, “There was a sketch. Her father had made one for each of the girls. Just a study of a landmark on the Loudon campus. He so hoped they’d all go there—but only Cathy ended up enrolling.” She looked away again, out the window, as if she could see across town to the campus. “What with everything, I never noticed. But Cathy’s sketch disappeared at some point. I didn’t know it, but she’d given it away.”

  “To the teacher.”

  “Yes. Even when she was just a girl, she attended the summer camps and classes at the college. And so, I suppose, she thought that would be a lovely gift to a teacher there.”

  “And so, this spring, you saw the sketch.”

  “Yes. It was on the wall of an office there on campus. I’m sure he never realized the significance of it. Perhaps he didn’t even recall where he got it.”

  “And that’s when you started your investigation.”

  “Yes.”

  “When you gave me that DNA sample—you were trying to prove that this man was Theresa’s father.”

  “Yes. I was going to get a hair from Theresa’s hairbrush for comparison. But . . .”

  “You realized that if he was the father, he might have killed Cathy.”

  “I thought she might have gone to him. I had discouraged her from going to the authorities. I was thinking of . . . us. She was thinking of other girls he might hurt. So she might have called him, asked him to meet her. Confronted him. Threatened to expose him.”

  “Who is it?” I knew, but I asked anyway.

  She turned her face away. Gently I said, “It’s the college president, isn’t it? He was a teacher there at Loudon when Cathy was a teenager. He went away, and then came back recently as president. And he hung that sketch she gave him in his office.”

  “He wanted to cultivate me. As a donor. So he invited me to his office when he first came in as president. It is hard to imagine—how he could invite Cathy’s mother. Hard to imagine such . . . ruthlessness”

  “You’ve been trying to trap him. Pretending to want to donate money to the college. Trying to find him on the Internet.”

  “There is a Loudon College recruitment chatroom, you see. I thought I might pretend to be a teenage girl.”

  It was hard to imagine, this proper matron searching for clues, conducting her own investigation. “What else?”

  “Recently he spoke to my garden club. He mentioned an ex-wife. I went to see her. I didn’t tell her why I was there, and she gave me little help. But she was obviously antipathetic to him. She was quite adamant that she had sole custody of their son, and that the child seldom visited his father.”

  “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  She shrugged. “You wouldn’t have believed me. You were not interested in pursuing the Internet angle.”

  I didn’t bother to point out that Mrs. Wakefield hadn’t given me much to work with. I just said, “And if I did investigate, it would become a criminal matter. And it would all come out— about Cathy being molested. About Theresa.”

  “Yes. I thought . . . I thought perhaps I would just ruin him. Destroy him professionally somehow. I thought I’d promise the college a big gift, and then withdraw it, and tell the trustees that he was rude to me. Or trap him in a compromising position on the Internet. I don’t know. I thought I could ruin him.”

  I could hardly argue with this. It was exactly what I’d done to that rapist in New York, now all over the airwaves protesting that he didn’t know where those date-rape drugs came from. It was some sort of justice. But murder, if that’s what this is, required more than just ruination.

  “But now I know. And I can’t bury it. You know that.”

  “You are a police officer. You investigate. Arrest. Prosecute.”

  “Yes.”

  She whispered, “Are you certain?”

  It was like the transfer of a terrible
duty. And for the first time, I felt a connection to her. I said, quietly, “I’ll make certain.”

  She gripped my hand. Her touch was hot and dry and papery. “It could . . . destroy everything.”

  “You have lost it all anyway. Everything the lies created. Your daughters didn’t stay with you. They didn’t do what you wanted. They didn’t love you more.”

  After this harsh assessment, her hand fell away from mine. And then, in only a whisper, she said, “My husband never had to know. He died thinking that Cathy was still safe with us.”

  “But she wasn’t. You couldn’t keep her safe. Not by keeping this all secret. And she finally realized that, didn’t she?” It was cruel, sure. But that was because it was true. “She finally realized that she was wrecking her own life, trying to get back at men. Trying to get back at you.”

  “She wanted something I couldn’t give then. Approval. To bring it all down.”

  “But now—”

  She started to cry. It was a frightening thing, to watch a woman like that cry. She cried silently, her face hard and her eyes fierce.

  That’s when Laura came in, her shoes tapping lightly on the tiles and then halting. I looked around and saw her standing there, framed in the doorway. She took one look at her mother and said icily, “Jack, that’s enough. I asked you not to—”

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “It’s all right.”

  I rose and Laura took my place on the bed. She sat there, just a foot away, both of them rigid. Then Laura awkwardly reached out and patted her mother’s hand. “We know, Mother,” she murmured. “Don’t worry. We know. Theresa knows. We’ll be okay.”

  Mrs. Wakefield gazed down at their joined hands. Then slowly she withdrew hers. Laura made a little noise, something between a gasp and a sigh, and started to rise. But then her mother leaned forward and put her arms out, and Laura hesitated. Then, careful of the IV lines, she came into her mother’s embrace.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  It was dark, or as dark as a June evening gets, and Laura and her sisters were shadows against the greater darkness of the old house. I found them in the backyard, Laura and Ellen at the picnic table on either side of a flickering citronella candle, and Theresa on the Adirondack chair. The kid—Brian—was hunched up on the stairs of the deck. I guessed he had more success with his birthmother’s sisters than with his birth father—who had gone back to Virginia without making whatever acknowledgment the kid had been wanting.

  “Come over here,” I told him, and sullenly he moved towards me. In a second I had him against the railing of the deck and gave him a quick pat down, with maybe a little bit more neck-grab than was recommended back at the training academy. He squirmed, his breath coming fast and scared. I let him go, though I kept his pocketknife.

  “Is that really necessary?” Theresa said.

  “Sure is. Get one chance in this town, and he’s already used it up.” I watched him walk back to the steps, sulky and disarmed, and turned to see Laura’s smile. She hid it quickly, but I saw her mouth curve in the candlelight. I guessed she didn’t like him all that much either.

  Or maybe it was just that macho displays made her hot.

  No reaction from Ellen. Maybe she’d run through her patience with the boy. Or maybe she was wondering about her husband.

  Anyway, I asked Laura, “You filled them in yet?”

  “As much as I know. But Mother said you’d explain.”

  And so I did. I told them about their mother’s suspicions, and about her conversation with Cathy just before the accident out on the bridge. At first, they didn’t ask any questions. Stunned, I guess. Then Theresa made a noise—very quiet, almost too quiet to hear over the calls of the crickets in the grass. And finally she said, “You’re trying to say that I’m the product of statutory rape?”

  “That’s what we suspect.”

  “And that he m—”

  She couldn’t go on. I couldn’t blame her.

  “Look, nothing’s certain. But it’s not just your mother’s suspicions. The police had questions at the time, and I do now. Someone left a footprint—a Bass moccasin shoeprint—there at the scene. And it never made any sense that she’d be climbing that time of day, and make an amateur’s mistake.”

  Laura said slowly, “You think she met him there. By the bridge. To confront him.” After a pause, she added, “She always kept her climbing equipment in her truck. Just in case she got a chance to climb.”

  “Yeah.” I leaned against the railing, chose my words carefully. “She wasn’t climbing that day, I don’t think. I think she probably just wanted to talk to him. And —”

  “He knew how to climb.” Ellen spoke for the first time. “That first summer camp, he took us all to search for lichen on the cliffs. He showed off, rappelling down and climbing back up.” She added, “But Cathy was better even then. He called her his best student.”

  Theresa had her hands in her lap, and stared down at them. “I always knew . . . that I was the child of sin.”

  Ellen was there in an instant, kneeling at her side. “That’s not true. You know that God doesn’t visit the sins of the father on the child. You were innocent. Nothing about this means anything about you.”

  Laura came closer, put her hand on Theresa’s arm. “Besides, you’re good. You’ve done nothing but good things in your life. No sins to speak of.”

  “You don’t know,” Theresa whispered.

  “I do know,” Laura said firmly. “The only reason you think you’re a sinner is that you have such high standards for yourself. You’re way better than average.”

  Brian finally spoke up. “You are good. You helped me, even though I was lying to you.”

  He huddled into himself, and I could imagine what he was thinking, that he’d brought this all down on the family . . . well, maybe he wasn’t thinking anything like that. I wasn’t sure the kid had that sort of self-awareness. And anyway, I was the one who kept saying the truth should come out, so if his lies led to this revelation, I should be thanking him.

  He probably shouldn’t hold his breath waiting.

  Theresa accepted her sisters’ embrace, and she put her head down on Ellen’s shoulder. After a moment, Laura rose and came to stand by me. “Do you have to?”

  “You know I do.”

  Theresa looked up. Even if the flickering candlelight, I could see the anguish on her face. “I was—was sired by a child molester, you’re saying. And when she went to him to make him face what he’d done, he pushed my birthmother into a ravine.”

  That was a pretty concise summary, so I just nodded.

  Theresa pushed Ellen’s arms away and stood up. Her face was hard now. “Then get him. Get him for her sake. And mine.”

  A quarter-hour later, Laura was still arguing temperance and caution and all that good Wakefield stuff. “Can’t you just . . . ruin him? Like you—”

  She broke off, but I knew she was thinking about the number I’d done on the man in New York. That wasn’t murder, however. “If I got enough evidence for murder, I’d have to take it to the prosecutor. But—” I shrugged. “After seventeen years, I don’t know whether we can find much evidence. The shoeprint is intriguing, sure. But those shoes are long gone.”

  “What do you need?” Ellen asked.

  “A confession would be good. On tape. But I don’t think I’m going to get that.” I thought with some longing about my former force—a half-dozen detectives and cutting-edge wiretap equipment. “My best chance is trying to trap him. Your mother was trying to do that, pretending she was a teenage girl, trying to entice him in a chatroom.”

  Ellen and Laura exchanged glances. “So that was what all that laptop interest was about,” Ellen said. “And she wanted help in figuring chat software out. And finding Loudon College chatrooms. And all that time I just thought she was trying to keep up with the times.”

  “Well, she cottoned on pretty quick.” I tried to think through the angles. “I’ll have a tech look at her lap
top, but I don’t think we’re going to find anything. She didn’t keep logs, and somehow I doubt he did either.”

  “He doesn’t know that she didn’t keep logs.”

  It was the boy—his first contribution. I looked down at him, sitting hunched on the porch step. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I don’t know. I mean—” he floundered for a moment. But he was in the generation that grew up with Instant Messenger, and it didn’t take him long to figure something out. “If he thinks that the police are investigating his chats with girls, well, maybe he’ll do something stupid.”

  “I can’t just forge logs.” Unfortunately.

  “Yeah, well, maybe just implying you got them? And implying you can track down the other PC used in the chats? I mean, you know. Every computer’s got a unique IP number, right?”

  “Right,” I said slowly. “So you’re saying, if he thinks we can trace it to his computer . . .”

  “Maybe he’ll confess to something,” Ellen said. “Something not so bad. Like he might try to say that he did have a chat, but he didn’t know she was underage. And once you get him in an interrogation room, well, he’ll be looking at the end of his career.”

  “He might say something incriminating,” Theresa said. She was still shaken, but she sat ramrod straight in her low chair. I wondered what it was like, to want vengeance on the man who sired you. She was tougher than I’d be, after so many revelations coming so fast, and none of them good.

  I pushed away from the railing. “Well, let me see what I can come up with tomorrow. I’ll keep you informed.”

  Laura followed me around the house to my car. I held out my arms, but she kept her distance. “Jack, if you can get him on some Internet predator count, then maybe that’ll be all you need.”

  “I can’t get him on that,” I told her wearily. It had been a long day, and it looked like it was going to be a long, lonely night. “He probably didn’t break any laws with your mother. It’s not like she’s actually a teenager. So we just have to hope he screws up somehow. And he’s a college president. He should be smart enough not to screw up much.”

  Laura’s eyes narrowed, and she said coolly, “Well, he decided to mess with my sister, and I think he screwed up then.”