by Linda Barlow
“I don’t have a criminal record.”
“Look, April.” His voice was low and confident. “I’m not bluffing and I’m not on a fishing expedition. I have copies of your files. Would you like to see them?”
“Yes,” she said tightly.
He took several sheets of paper, folded lengthwise, from the back pocket of his jeans. April glanced through them quickly, feeling sick.
“Well?” He raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Nothing to say, for once?”
“I was a juvenile. The records were sealed.”
“Yeah, well, this is the nineties. There are no secrets on the information highway. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” He took the sheets away from her and returned them to his pocket. “You were tried in the juvenile system in Washington, D.C., in 1969 for second-degree murder. Seems you stabbed a guy to death.”
So, she thought. It was going to come out, after alL
Chapter Sixteen
“I was acquitted,” April said. “Innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Blackthorn.”
“Yeah, I know. You got off. Is that why you weren’t worried about paperwork? Did you think acquittals simply vanish without a trace?”
April turned away from him. There was a grassy slope just a few feet away. Unceremoniously, she sat down.
Blackthorn joined her. “Spare me the state-of-shock act, okay? You must have known there was a good chance I’d find out about this. I can’t believe Anaheim or the feds didn’t turn it up at the beginning of their investigation. It was buried pretty deep, I must admit. But my computer guy is terrific.” He paused. “You want to tell me about it?”
She raised her head. “Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
She wasn’t afraid, she realized. She was relieved, in a way. She was sick of worrying about this. She met his eyes steadily. “I stabbed him, yes, with a letter opener.” She paused. “Do you want to know why?”
“I think I can guess why,” Blackthorn said slowly.
“No, I don’t think you can.” Her hands were clenched in her lap. “My attorney—who was very good—defended me by claiming that the man—his name was Miquel— was trying to rape me. That was his interpretation, not mine. Mine was that Miquel was trying to kill me. I believed it then and I still believe it now.”
He looked at her. His blue eyes seemed to bore into hers. “Talk to me,” he said.
Her memory of the top-floor apartment with the view of the Washington Monument was still vivid. She’d loved to sit in the open window with the humid evening breezes ruffling through her long, unruly hair, imagining herself at the top of the Monument with the world stretching out in all directions. On several occasions she had climbed to the top, so she knew how broad the world looked from up there. It was a world in which she could do anything, be anything. Nothing was impossible to dream.
“When I was sixteen, I ran away from the boarding school in Connecticut where my mother had left me,” she told Blackthorn. “The mother superior was a bitter woman who believed that God had assigned her a mission to beat all willful young girls into shape. I hated her.
“I kept waiting for my mother to come and take me away from there. But a year went by, and then another. Rina didn’t come.
“I think I’d have gone crazy if it hadn’t been for the books I found in the school library. I read voraciously, everything I could get my hands on. There were a lot of nineteenth-century romances and adventures in the library, along with the complete work of Alexandre Dumas, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens.”
It was Dickens, she remembered, who’d started her thinking about running away. His characters seemed to lead lives that were even crueler and more appalling than her own, yet they were clever, and they survived. If David Copperfield could do it, she’d told herself, so can I.
“I waited until the spring of my fourth year. I was tall for my age. I sneaked out of the convent school early one morning, bought myself some hair coloring in a drugstore and dyed my red hair black, a trick I remembered from Rina’s instructions about evading bill collectors. Then I got out of town.
“It was 1969, and there were live-ins and street people and potheads everywhere. I hitchhiked south to Washington, D.C.—I don’t know why—maybe because it was the home of the president of the United States, and JFK had briefly been my mother’s lover.
“I hung out with a variety of college dropouts, war protesters, and flower children. I made posters, held up picket signs, cooked beans and rice for the long-haired males who were the self-appointed leaders of the movement, and marched my feet off on behalf of the cause. It wasn’t the cause I really cared about, though. What the peace movement gave me, I think, was something I’d yearned for all my life—the feeling that I belonged.”
Gently, Blackthorn touched her hand. April glanced up at him. He was listening intently, his expression serious, his eyes compassionate.
“Life wasn’t easy, though,” she went on. “I shared a small apartment with four other girls. My clothes were old and ragged. Sometimes it was a problem getting enough to eat. But none of that mattered towards the end of the summer of 1969 because I was in love—” she smiled wryly “—and love makes everything okay.
“It was a hot, sticky August day, and I was the only one of the five roommates who was home. I was waiting for my boyfriend. I’d met him two weeks ago at an antiwar demonstration. He was twenty-one, and I’d told him I was eighteen.
“His name was Miquel. I loved the way the syllables seemed to roll off the tongue. He was from Mexico and spoke bad English, but of course that didn’t matter at all.
“He had the sexiest eyes. Dark brown and very soulful. Sometimes they looked a little hard, which made me wonder what his past life had been like. He hadn’t told me much, except that he was poor, but proud.
“We were planning to visit the Smithsonian together that day. He’d never been, and he wanted to see the aviation display. He had a dream of someday learning to fly…”
April shifted uneasily on the grass. Telling the story had already brought some very vivid images into her head. She wished she didn’t have to continue… and yet she knew she did. Not just because of Rob Blackthorn, but because this was a piece of her past that she had been avoiding.
“Miquel came by the apartment to pick me up. I invited him in and offered him a Coke. He was wearing jeans and a ragged T-shirt. His skin was tan, and his hair was long and dark and curly. His body was incredible.
“I showed him around, I remember feeling shy about it, and very conscious that we were alone. We weren’t lovers. I was a virgin, in fact. He’d kissed me a couple of times, but that was all.
“I didn’t take him into my bedroom—I just pointed it out from the threshold. He gazed at the two narrow beds in the tiny room and sipped his Coke.
“I had to go to the bathroom, so I left him alone in the hallway. When I came out, Miquel was waiting for me. He grabbed me in the hallway and turned me to him and began kissing me passionately.
“Next thing I knew, he’d lifted me in his arms and was carrying me into the bedroom. I knew I ought to protest, but it was all so exciting, and, I foolishly thought, so very romantic.”
Blackthorn pressed her hand, but April hardly noticed. “He carried me to the bed, choosing my roommate Julie’s instead of mine, but I didn’t bother to correct him. He laid me down and fell on top and continued kissing me. He was heavy and strong, and when I tried to shift to a more comfortable position, I couldn’t.
“I was never entirely sure, afterwards, when my arousal turned to fear. It was something to do with the way he didn’t say anything. He unbuttoned my blouse and pushed it aside to caress my breasts, but his hands were cold and impersonal. He was kissing me, but it didn’t feel right. It felt more as if he was trying to distract me and keep me occupied.
“And then suddenly he put his hands around my throat and started to squeeze. At first I thought he was just fooling around, but his grip turned painful and I couldn’t
breathe.” April’s heart fluttered as she remembered how it had felt to gasp for breath. “I struggled, but he was on his knees now, straddling my chest, and I looked up into his eyes and saw something there that chilled my soul. I didn’t know this man. He wasn’t cute, sweet, mysterious Miquel. He was a killer.
“I tried to thrust him away. I tore at his fingers around my throat, at his face, at his hair. I could feel the rapid pulse pounding in my ears, and my lungs were screaming for air. But the pain around my throat got worse and worse, and I was so dizzy that I couldn’t think or breathe. I knew I was going to die…”
“Jesus, April,” Blackthorn said. He pulled her into his arms, and she held on to him as if he were anchoring her to the earth. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t really look at him, either. She was looking into the past.
One of her wildly thrashing hands swiped at the bedside table that Julie had littered with paperback books, her water glass, some letters from her boyfriend in New York, and… something sharp. April dimly remembered that Julie always used a silver letter opener. Her grandmother had given it to her, saying that “ladies never tear open their mail “
With her last surge of consciousness, April groped for the handle, found it, gripped it, then lunged upwards and slashed her arm down at the same moment, sinking the point of the letter opener into the middle of Miquel’s back.
He groaned and his grip on her throat loosened. April smashed him in the face with her other hand. He rolled off her and fell onto the floor.
She stumbled from the bed, sobbing. Without looking to see what condition he was in, she ran from the apartment.
“I remember banging on the building superintendent’s door, and shivering in the hallway while the woman went upstairs to investigate. And all I could imagine was the police coming and interrogating me and finding out who I was and where I’d come from. They would send me back to that horrible boarding school in Connecticut. Worse, they would notify my mother and tell her the story of how I’d let a man into my bedroom and how he’d tried to rape me and kill me.
“It was too much for a sixteen-year-old to contemplate. I lost my nerve entirely, and I fled the superintendent’s apartment, leaving behind the few possessions I owned, seeking the safety and anonymity of the streets.
“For three weeks I wandered from one ramshackle shelter to another, earning a few coins by begging on street corners. I was in a constant state of terror—torn between nightmares about Miquel, my mother, Armand, and the police. I didn’t understand what had happened, or more importantly why; and I didn’t know if Miquel was alive or dead. The thought that I might have killed him was horrifying, but even worse was the thought that he might still be stalking me.
“Finally one night, hungry, exhausted, and emotionally wrung out, I sought refuge with a kindly priest whose mission was to help the ‘flower children.’ I told him my story, he comforted me, and together we contacted the police.
“That was when I learned that Miquel had died in the hospital. It wasn’t directly because of the stab wound, but because of an infection that had set in afterwards, but apparently that doesn’t matter to the courts. I’d caused the wound and therefore I was responsible.
“Also, before dying he’d given a false statement to the authorities insisting that he’d done nothing criminal, and that I’d stabbed him in a jealous rage because he’d expressed an interest in my roommate.
“Meanwhile, the bruises on my throat that would have helped to establish my side of the story had, by this time, vanished. So the police arrested me for second degree murder.”
April folded her arms tightly around her middle and shivered.
“You need a break?” Blackthorn said. “I can see this is hard for you to talk about.”
She looked at him. Although he had not said anything particularly comforting, the expression in his blue eyes was sympathetic, and she could feel the emotion coming off him in waves.
She sighed. “I’m okay, I think. After all, I guess this is what I’m supposed to be doing—confronting my past. It’s why I approached my mother at the ABA, and it’s why I decided to accept her job. It’s just—?” Her voice trailed off. She looked at Rob Blackthorn. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Yes,” he said.
“It doesn’t go away. Even when it’s self-defense. It never goes away.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s not supposed to. If it did—that would be an indication that something was seriously wrong.”
She nodded. “I’ve never understood what happened. It came out in the trial that Miquel was an illegal alien. No one knew exactly where he’d come from. They did trace him back to his village in Mexico, but apparently he’d left there six years before, and nobody knew where he’d been or what he’d been doing in the meantime. I suppose he must have been some sort of wandering sociopath. Did he kill anyone before his attack on me? If so he got away with it because he’d never been arrested.”
“He may have been a serial killer,” Blackthorn said. “We know now that they sometimes move from state to state, making it a lot harder for police to put the evidence together.”
“Running from the crime scene was the worst mistake I could have made. It would have been easier to convince the judge if they’d had the physical evidence of the bruises on my throat. And, as it turned out, I’d run away for nothing. During the entire process of being arrested and tried, I kept expecting my mother to show up. But she never did, even though she and Armand were back in New York by that time, for at least part of every year.”
“No wonder you were angry with her,” Blackthorn said.
April nodded. “After it was over and I was free, I came to my senses about a lot of things. I understood and accepted that Rina had truly abandoned me and that I would probably never see her again. Which was fine with me. I no longer wanted to see her again. I also realized that the life I’d been leading was pointless and wasteful. It was a turning point for me. I guess you could say that I grew up.”
Blackthorn made an affirmative sound.
“Father Jacobs—the priest I’d turned myself in to—arranged for shelter for me in a community center for troubled teenagers. I got a part-time job in a donut shop and I went back and finished high school. When I got out, I found a clerical job and went to college in the evening. It took six years, but I got my degree.”
Blackthorn nodded, and she realized that he probably already knew this, thanks to the miracles of modern data processing.
“I put the past behind me. All of it—my mother, the nuns, the counterculture, Miquel. It seemed a good way to live. Forgetting the past was the only way to make the present tolerable and the future worth looking forward to.”
“Some of us live entirely too much in the past.”
She shot him a curious look. He knew all about her now, she thought. But she knew nothing about him.
“Why’d you change your mind about that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I made a lot of progress over the years. But at some point I got stuck. I realized I wasn’t happy. I was married—I suppose you know that too?”
He nodded. “To the guy who gave you your current last name.”
“Jonathan Harrington, yes. He was a good man. But it didn’t last. I could never—I don’t know—I couldn’t completely relax. I expected him to leave me. Finally, I left him.”
“If you initiated the split, he couldn’t?”
She nodded. “Something like that, I guess. It was the same with other relationships. Finally it became evident that I probably wouldn’t ever allow myself to be happy until I understood why my mother had abandoned me.”
“So you decided to confront her.”
“And when I confronted her, she died.” Unexpectedly, her voice broke. Once again, Blackthorn reached out a hand. She took it and felt the warm pressure of his fingers. It felt good, very good. He was gentle, and there was something amazingly comforting about him.
“That’s one helluva story, April.”
“Do you believe me?”
He shrugged. His thumb drew lazy circles on the back of her hand.
“I’ve told you the truth.”
“Why didn’t you tell it to me sooner?”
“I was acquitted. I didn’t know whether they kept records on people who turn out not to be guilty of a crime. And if they did, well it was juvenile court, and I was hoping that whatever paperwork they had on me was sealed. I didn’t want to play back those memories. I didn’t think I’d have to.”
He did not reply.
“I’ll admit I’ve been afraid somebody would find out, though,” she said. She paused. “I don’t suppose there’s any point in my asking you to keep what you’ve learned confidential?”
“Depends on the incentive,” he said slowly, as she watched a smile take shape on his lips.
Her body received his message even before her mind could analyze it. She shook her head, surprised. Yet he was still holding her hand, and the contact was creating a pleasant little buzz.
He was coming on, and amazingly, she felt receptive.
“I don’t believe this.” She kept her tone light. “I tell you a bitter story about sexual violence and you respond with sexual innuendo?”
“Men are scum,” he observed.
In spite of herself, she laughed. He was sitting very close to her, but there was no longer any sense of threat emanating from him, except of the sensual variety.
She liked him, she thought suddenly.
She definitely liked the warmth and sensuality in his palm…
“At the will reading, I was surprised to hear that Rina left something to you, in memory of your late wife. When did she die?” she asked.
He seemed surprised at her change of subject. For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he nodded once and said, “Nearly two years ago. She had cancer.”
“I’m sorry,” April said gently.
“So am I,” he said with more fervor than she had ever heard in his voice.
“It must be very hard,” she said tentatively. “I mean, there are so many ways that relationships end, but death— being widowed at a relatively young age—that’s unusual.”
