“That would’ve been hard to explain,” Margaux said. “We’d want to know why.”
“I’d want to know,” Liddie said.
“You would,” Ryan said.
“We’d all want to know,” Margaux said. “But why hide it for so long?”
“Mom,” Mary said from the window. “That’s why. He didn’t want Mom to know.”
Liddie thought it over. When had her parents started dating? What was that story they used to tell? They’d met during a semester abroad in Australia. Two Canadians meeting on the underside of the world. But what year was that? Sometime in the seventies, but when?
“Did Dad cheat on Mom with . . . with your mother?” Kate asked Sean. “Is that the timeline?” Her lip was trembling.
“That’s what’s making you upset, Kate?” Liddie said, exasperated. “That Dad might’ve gone to a prostitute?”
“It’s all of it, okay? Everything. What the hell is wrong with this family?”
No one had an answer for that, and Kate’s rhetorical question seemed to suck the air out of the room. They all looked at one another, waiting for someone to come up with an explanation, feeling like the solution had to be somewhere in this room, if only someone would talk.
“Well,” Ryan said finally. “There’s one way to resolve the Sean question, at least.”
“What’s that?” Margaux said.
“A DNA test.”
“Oh,” Liddie said, her hand flying to her mouth.
“What is it, babe?” Owen asked.
She wasn’t sure why her courage was failing her all of a sudden. She used to be so sure. Something about this weekend was eroding her sense of self. She felt as if she were turning into Kate—unsure, forgetful, wanting everyone to get along.
“Maybe we don’t need a DNA test,” she said.
“Why not?” Ryan said. “Do you know something?”
She reached into her pocket and touched the piece of paper there. She’d thought it was evidence against Ryan, but now it was all clicking into place.
“It depends . . . Sean, were you on the Island that night?”
Sean’s eyes darted toward Margaux. “Yes.”
“He took the kids over in the crash boat, remember?” Kate said.
“I didn’t mean then. I meant later. Did you go back to the Island?”
Another look at Margaux. “Yes.”
“What?” Ryan said. “You did what?”
“Quiet, Ryan!” Margaux said. “Let Liddie do this.”
Was that what she’d wanted to tell Kate? That Sean had been on the Island? Had she known that this whole time? But if so, why was she protecting him, even now?
“When did you go over there?”
“I got there about one thirty.”
“Did you see Ryan there?”
“No, he’d left. I saw him come back to camp. I left right after.”
“I told you,” Ryan said.
“Hush, Ryan. Why did you go?”
“I heard those guys out on their boat—they woke me up, you know how sound carries across the water at night. I wanted to make sure that . . . I wanted to make sure everyone was okay.”
“But you didn’t come to our side of the Island,” Mary said, still not turning around. “We didn’t see you.”
“No, I went to Back Beach.”
“Why? Were you trying to sneak around?”
“I saw Ryan coming from there. I was . . . I thought I’d go see what he’d been up to.”
“So it wasn’t because of the guys on the boat.”
“Not only, no.”
“What happened when you got there? Did you see Amanda?”
“Yes.”
Liddie tried to imagine the scene. Amanda sitting on the beach, probably crying because of Ryan treating her like shit. Then Sean arriving, like . . . what? Liddie’s imagination couldn’t take her far enough.
“Did you . . . did you sleep with her that night?”
Sean paled.
“Why would you think that?” Kate asked.
Liddie removed the second piece of paper she’d taken from the Amanda file from her pocket and unfolded it. “Dad had this. It’s a DNA test from Amanda’s . . . rape kit, I guess.”
“She was raped?”
“No,” Swift said. “There was no sign of forced sexual contact.”
“Did everyone know that?” Liddie asked, searching the faces of her family. “Margaux?”
“I didn’t know,” Margaux said. “No one was talking about that at all.”
“It was kept quiet at the behest of her family,” Swift said.
“But Dad had the test results?” Kate said. “How?”
“I don’t know how he got it from the police file . . . but anyway, they tried to match her, um, sample to Ryan—I guess you gave them your DNA?”
Ryan’s eyes were wide, his breathing shallow. I should stop this now, Liddie thought, before he has a real heart attack, but she couldn’t.
“Yes,” Ryan said. “I could’ve refused, but Swift said it was the best way to exonerate myself if I was innocent.”
“I did,” Swift said. “Ryan had admitted in his interview that he’d been on the Island that night to see Amanda and that they’d had a disagreement, and once the police heard that, they basically disregarded any other possible suspects.”
“I told them the truth, but they didn’t believe me. So I did it, I gave them a sample. And then a few weeks later they closed the case. They never told me why they wanted the sample though. I always assumed it was because they’d found some blood on her, or skin under her fingernails or something. They never told me that she slept with someone that night. But you knew, Swift?”
Swift looked embarrassed, perhaps for Amanda. “Yes. I had a . . . contact on the force. It was the reason I recommended that you take the test. You were so adamant that you hadn’t been intimate with her. It was the only way to prove it.”
“And the results confirmed I wasn’t.”
“Ah, well, the results were inconclusive, actually,” Swift said. “They found your DNA on her—a hair sample, I believe—but as for the, ah, semen, there was only a partial match.” Swift looked around at their confused faces. “You have to remember that DNA testing then was not like it is now. There weren’t kits you could order on the internet; the techniques were not as refined. And since your father was away from camp that night, and there were no other male relatives on-site, I convinced the police that there must’ve been contamination in the lab. When that was put together with Ryan’s alibi—he’d spoken with another counselor, Ty, when he got back to camp—they dropped the case.”
Ryan wheeled on Sean. “You slept with Amanda.”
“Yes.”
No one stopped Ryan from punching Sean that time.
CHAPTER 44
RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
Ryan
Ryan knew he should stop himself, that violence didn’t solve anything, but God did his fist hitting Sean’s face feel good. So he did it again, and then again, though he could hear the shouts of his sisters and hands on his back, trying to pull him away, off, to get him to stop.
“Ryan! You’re scaring the girls.”
He dropped his arms and let Sean go. He turned around slowly. His daughters were huddled around Kerry. They looked frightened, a look he’d promised himself he’d never produce on any woman’s face again. He’d failed in that already this weekend. He might be innocent of what his father accused him of, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t guilty of other things.
“I need help,” Ryan said, looking at Kerry. “Will you help me?” He crossed the room to her. She wrapped her arms around him. She smelled warm and like the honey-lemon scent of her shampoo. If he could hold on to this feeling, to her, he knew he could make it through.
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“Why were you hitting Uncle Sean?” Maisy asked through her hiccuping tears. The girls were standing together, looking afraid.
He let Kerry go to drop down and look his daughters in the eye. “I found out something that upset me. But it wasn’t okay what I did. It is never okay to hit another person, even if they hit you.”
“We know, Daddy,” Sasha said.
“Yeah,” Claire added. “Mommy always says, ‘Violence doesn’t solve anything.’ ”
Ryan chuckled at this dead-on impersonation of Kerry. “She does say that, doesn’t she?”
“Whenever we start fighting. Which is pretty much all the time.”
Ryan felt as if his heart were breaking again, like the night before in the lodge, but he’d survive without a trip to the hospital this time.
He knew he needed to stand up and take stock of what he’d left on the other side of the room, but he wanted one more moment of this. The innocence of his daughters’ faces. A fresh moment where his family knew and finally believed that he was innocent, but before they’d have to push through to the awful conclusion that if it wasn’t him, it was Sean.
Sean. He’d always hated him in a way. Was jealous of his connection to their father. Wondered what he could do to be given the responsibility Sean seemed to have. Allowed to drive the boat, allowed to drive the camp van—whatever stupid thing Ryan was using as a measure of how his father had failed him.
But he’d gotten that wrong; they both had. Ryan had failed his father, and his father had put his trust in the wrong person.
“Ryan?” Margaux asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s going on?”
He looked up at Kerry. She was looking down at him with concern. “Are you going to be okay? Should we call an ambulance?”
He kissed Claire’s forehead and stood up. “I’m all right. But maybe Sean . . .”
He turned around. Sean was sitting on the ground, his head hanging between his knees. His nose was bleeding. It was dripping on the carpet. Everyone else seemed frozen in the place he’d left them. Mary still at the window, though she’d turned around. Liddie and Kate huddled on the couch with Owen. Margaux standing by Swift’s side. They were all looking at him. For what? Was he supposed to solve this?
“Kerry, can you take the girls down to the lodge?”
“Honey?”
“We’ll be okay. I’ll explain it to you as soon as I can.” He turned around and faced her. “They shouldn’t be here for this.”
“Yes, okay. You’ll join us soon?”
“As soon as I can. Be good for Mommy, girls.”
“Uncle Sean is bleeding on the rug,” Maisy said. “Grandma wouldn’t like that.”
“You’re right, bug. She wouldn’t. Margaux, can you get him a towel?”
Margaux passed him, heading to the kitchen. He felt a strange sense of power as Kerry led his daughters out of the house. Was this how his father had felt? In charge? Was it because they’d just witnessed his violence? Were they simply frightened of him?
Margaux returned with a wet towel. She knelt down by Sean, who seemed to be dazed, and pressed it to his face. He started at her touch and stood, pushing her away.
Ryan had a million questions for him—or was it just the one?—but he felt the need to delay the inevitable. Or maybe he was savoring it. He deserved that, didn’t he? After everything?
“What I don’t get, Swift, is why, knowing all of this, my father would still think I did it.”
Swift blinked a few times, getting his bearings. “He didn’t know.”
“How is that possible?”
“I didn’t tell him the details. I simply told him that the DNA evidence had backed up your story and that the investigation was closed. I had to protect my source, you see. We could’ve both gotten in hot water if it had come out.”
Ryan felt a measure of relief. His father hadn’t chosen a guilty Sean over an innocent Ryan. “How did you convince the police to drop the investigation? Why wasn’t partial DNA enough?”
“Like I said before, DNA wasn’t what it is now. It was only a few years after the O.J. Simpson trial. And the police lab out here had its own screwup in a rape case a few months before. When the results came back inconclusive, I knew there was an opening. They didn’t want another embarrassment on their hands. We’d been successful, you see, up until then, in keeping it out of the press.”
“How did you do that?”
“Yes, well, I, um, convinced the local press not to run with innuendo. Camp Macaw was—is—a respected institution in the Townships. Nobody wanted to see it ruined. It ran as a small story that made it seem as if it was an accident. The newspapers in Montreal never picked it up.”
“Amanda’s parents went along with this?”
“That posed a problem. But they saw reason eventually.”
“You bought them off.”
“Yes.”
“With what money?”
“Your parents’ retirement fund. They were quite diligent savers, and your father had made a few well-timed investments. They liquidated their portfolio and set up a trust for Amanda’s care so she could have a private room in the facility here and extra nurses when she needed them.”
“So that’s why,” Kate said. “That’s why they wouldn’t let me take over.”
“Perhaps. We never discussed it.”
“I would’ve understood if they told me,” Kate said. “I wish they’d told me.”
It was almost too much for Ryan to take in. His parents had paid someone off to make this all go away. And yet . . .
“What changed his mind?” Ryan said. “I mean, if he did all this back then, he must’ve thought I was innocent.”
“I believe he did.”
“Then why? Why set up the will like that?”
“He found the DNA test somehow,” Liddie said. “It was in his files.”
“What files?”
“The files he had on all of us. Kate and I found them in the house. He’d been following all of us around forever. Investigating us.”
That must be the explanation, but still, it stung. Faced with a DNA test that could point in two directions, he’d chosen to believe Ryan had done it. And even though he understood why—he’d admitted being with Amanda, being on the Island, he had a temper, Stacey—he wished his father was still there to ask: Had he even considered Sean, or had it never even entered his mind as a possibility?
He couldn’t ask his father. But he could ask Sean. It was time.
Ryan walked over to the fallen wing chair and righted it. “Sit here, Sean.”
Sean was backing away from him, pressed up against the glass patio doors.
“I’m not going to hurt you . . . again. I promise.”
“I understand why you hit me.”
“Yeah, well, I shouldn’t have. Will you sit?”
“Oh, let him stand where he wants,” Margaux said, her voice high-pitched. “Who cares if he’s sitting?”
And like that, the spell was broken. Ryan could feel the power shift away from him, like a receding tide.
“Fine. Do what you want. Tell us how it happened.”
“How what happened?”
“What you did to Amanda.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Please.”
“It’s true. I did . . . I did sleep with her that night. That was very wrong of me. I shouldn’t have taken advantage of her like that, when she was vulnerable because of . . .”
“You’re not blaming me for this, are you?”
“I’m trying to explain.”
“You’re doing a bad job.”
Sean dropped the wet cloth to the floor. His nose was broken, crooked, and there was already a bruise forming under his eye. Ryan felt an answering twinge of pain in h
is hand. His knuckles were scraped and red.
“I hurt Amanda,” Sean said. “I did, but I didn’t hit her in the head with a paddle. When I left, after . . . she was okay. I don’t know what happened next.”
“Why should we believe you?”
“I’ve never given you any reason to doubt me.”
“You never told anyone that you were there . . . what you did together.”
“I was protecting her.” His eyes moved to where Margaux was standing, a few feet away. “You understand, don’t you, Margaux?”
She shook her head. “I told you before that I didn’t.”
“Before? What?” Liddie said.
“Sean told me about this before the memorial. It’s what I wanted to talk to Kate about.”
The anger was leaving Ryan’s body, like a slow leak. All that was left was exhaustion. “You wanted to know if you should tell everyone before the vote?” he asked Margaux.
“I’m sorry.”
“We should vote,” Liddie said.
“What? You still think Sean should get the property?”
“I didn’t mean about that. I meant if we should call the police.”
“The police,” Margaux said, her voice trembling. “Why?”
“You heard Swift. They only closed the investigation because of the DNA evidence and Ryan’s alibi. But Sean doesn’t have an alibi. Do you, Sean?”
Sean’s eyes were moving back and forth rapidly between Margaux and Liddie. “No.”
“I didn’t think so.” She turned to Kate. “We saw him. It was Sean we saw, not Ryan.”
Kate looked stunned. “Sean?”
“Yes.”
“You saw Sean when?” Mary asked.
“That night,” Liddie said. “We . . . we were swimming that night, and we saw a man pulling the boat Amanda was in away from the Island.”
“And you thought it was me,” Ryan said.
“We didn’t know who it was.”
Ryan felt the weight of it. All the secrets. The burden he’d placed on his sisters. How much easier this all might’ve been if they’d talked to one another twenty years ago. But they were kids. Kids. Even he was a kid then.
“I say we vote,” Liddie said.
I'll Never Tell Page 26
