Secret Lives (28 page)

“But you must have done something to make
them think you did it.”

He looked toward the hills again, and when he
spoke he sounded very tired. “I didn't do anything. Doesn't matter
though. Whenever someone finds out about it, they turn their back
on me. I was hoping that wouldn't happen with you."

She remembered his joyful run to the
drugstore for condoms, the thunderous lovemaking in the woods. He
was a man who rescued lobsters from restaurants, who protected
spiders in his bathroom. He couldn't possibly have molested his own
child.

“I don't know what to think, Ben,” she said
quietly. “'There's nothing you could tell me you'd done that would
disgust me quite as much. I think I'd be less horrified if you told
me you'd been convicted of killing someone.”

He gritted his teeth. “I didn't do it.”

“Whether you did or not, I wish you'd told me
about this sooner."

“You didn't want to know.”

She thought of last night again. She'd felt
listened to. Safe. Loved. Or had she just been used by a man no one
else would have? If he'd told her sooner she never would have slept
with him. I fucked Eden Riley. The muscles in her arms contracted;
her hands curled into fists. “I had no idea it was anything like
this,” she said, her voice rising.

“You're right,” he said wearily. “I should
have told you sooner. I could have saved both of us a lot of
grief.”

She looked down at the water. “Last night was
so nice,” she said. “I felt…hopeful. I felt…” She bit her lower lip
to stop its trembling, then turned to face him. “If you'd only been
accused, Ben, I might feel differently. But a conviction.” She
thought of the little blond girl in the photograph and tears sprang
to her eyes. “What did they say you did to her?”

He didn't answer. Instead he turned around so
quickly she had to grab the guy wires to keep her balance. He
packed the wine into the basket and pushed it closer to her. “Go,”
he said, his eyes a cold, hard gray. “Please just go.”

Kyle and Lou were eating chicken salad
sandwiches at the kitchen table when Eden returned to the house.
She set the picnic basket on the counter and took a seat at the
table.

“I wish you'd told me about Ben,” she said to
Kyle. “It's not as though he was caught shoplifting a candy
bar.”

Kyle put down his sandwich. “I tried to warn
you off him, honey, but I didn't think it was my place to tell you
the whole story. And frankly, I never expected the two of you to be
interested in each other.”

“You don't believe him?” Lou asked.

“I don't know what to believe. Of course he's
going to deny it—who wouldn't? But he was convicted, Lou.”

Kyle shook his head. “I think he was wrong
not to tell you right off the bat, but I understand his thinking.
Everyone who knows about him has taken off in the other direction
as fast as they could run. I had a couple of graduate students
working with me before he came, and when they found out it was Ben
Alexander I'd hired to help out they quit on the spot. Everybody
thinks like you do, Eden, that if he was convicted he must be
guilty. But I'm as sure as I can be that he's not.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I've known him for sixteen years. I
watched him grow from an enthusiastic but very young student into a
well-respected archaeologist. Do you know he didn't even have to
apply for that professorship? Universities were soliciting him. He
had his pick. But he's lost all that now. At first there was a lot
of disbelief among his colleagues. Then it turned to disgust and
now he's pretty much become the butt of their jokes.”

“Kyle.” She shook her head at her uncle's
naïveté. “Profession has nothing to do with it. Neither does skill
or enthusiasm or anything else. You can't possibly know who's
capable of molesting a child by those things.”

“We traveled all over with him. Shared hotel
rooms. Spent weeks together without ever being out of each other's
sight. There would have been a clue, something, that he had a
problem.”

“He hung himself at the trial,” Lou said.
“They were going to put his daughter on the stand to testify
against him and—”

“A four-year-old?” Eden interrupted. She
tried to picture Cassie in a courtroom, telling a roomful of adults
the terrible things that had happened to her, and her heart broke
for that blond wisp of a child on Ben's dresser mirror.

“Yes,” Lou said. “Ben couldn't stand to see
her up there, so he pled guilty, right in the middle of the trial.
He told the judge he wasn't really guilty, but that he wanted to
spare his daughter going through any more torture.”

“He was a fool to do it,” Kyle said, “but I
guess you don't think straight under those circumstances. The judge
ordered a recess and Ben's lawyer talked him into sticking it out,
but the damage was done because the jury heard him say it. I think
they should have started over with a new jury, but then I wasn't
the judge.”

Eden sighed. “I don't know, Kyle. I can't
imagine why he'd blurt out he was guilty if there wasn't something
to it.”

“I've watched him with Sharon and I've
watched him with his daughter,” Kyle said. “He was a real family
man. He was as content as he could be with his marriage and his
life.”

“That's what convinced me he was innocent, if
nothing else,” said Lou. “If he had admitted he hurt Bliss, all
they would have done was slap him on the wrist and put him in a
counseling program and he could have had his family back. But he
couldn't admit to something he hadn't done. So instead he was
locked up for six months and told he could never see his daughter
again. He would never have made that choice unless he saw no way
out of it.”

In spite of herself, in spite of the
revulsion that still festered in her stomach, she felt sorry for
him.

“When he first moved down here, we talked
about it for hours and hours,” Lou continued. “We sat right here at
this table and talked. You should let him tell you, Eden. I don't
think you can listen to his side of the story and still think he's
guilty. They twist things in a courtroom. He made a grave tactical
error, and the prosecution had a better lawyer. That's what it
boils down to sometimes.”

Kyle leaned away from the table and shook his
head. “He was in bad shape when he first got here. I think he
sometimes wanted to kill himself. Scared us, didn't it?” He looked
at Lou, who nodded. “We made him stay here a few nights because he
got so upset talking about it we were afraid to let him go back up
to his cabin. He never came right out and said he was suicidal, but
he'd talk about wishing he were dead, not seeing much point to
going on. It was hard to argue with him. Everything he'd worked for
and cared about was gone."

She remembered the photograph he'd shown her
of his house in Annapolis. His pride. His loss. She thought of the
way he'd told her to leave him alone, the coolness in his eyes. The
Valium in his bathroom.

“I had a couple of nightmares when he first
got here,” Kyle said. “I dreamt that I'd go up to the cabin and
find him sitting in a rocker—though he doesn't have one up
there—with a shotgun in his arms and his head splattered all over
the wall behind him.”

“I don't think he'd use a gun,” she said
quietly. “He has some Valium.”

Kyle narrowed his eyes. “Was he upset when
you left him?”

A think so.”

“Maybe I'd better go up and check on
him.”

“No.” She stood up. “I'll go.”

Lou caught her hand, squeezed it hard.
“You're wise to be leery of him, Eden,” she said. “He's going to
carry that conviction around with him for the rest of his life.
You're a public figure and a mother—you wouldn't be able to shake
it. If you want to end your relationship with him, do it on those
grounds, not because you think he hurt his daughter.”

–
28–

Ben wanted to get to his cabin, to the
whiskey, before the jagged teeth of his memories had a chance to do
their damage. But they caught up to him at his front door, and by
the time he had the top off the bottle, by the time he felt the
liquid burn his throat, he was theirs.

The moment that had changed his life forever
had come on a cold January day, one week into the spring semester.
He had stopped at the public library on his way home from the
university, as he did at least once a week, to pick up some books
for Bliss's bedtime stories. When he arrived home he found Sharon
sitting at the kitchen table, her hands folded in her lap. Her
strawberry-blond hair was up in a ponytail and she wore her usual
jeans and sweatshirt, but there was some-thing peculiar in the way
she sat, in the way she looked at him. It was six-thirty but there
was no sign of dinner, and the house was strangely quiet, no
customary wild greeting from his daughter. He set the books on the
counter and loosened his tie.

“Where's Bliss?” he asked.

“At Alex and Leslie's.”

He frowned, trying to remember. Were he and
Sharon supposed to go out tonight? Had he forgotten something?

Sharon was so still that he shuddered. He
took a step closer and leaned down to kiss her, but she turned her
head away. “What's the matter?” he asked.

She looked up at him as though he should
know.

“Is it your father?” Her father had been sick
for months.

She shook her head and then stood up. “Pat
Kelley and Joan Dove spoke with me when I picked Bliss up
today.”

“About what?” Pat Kelley was the director of
Bliss's daycare center and Joan Dove, Bliss's teacher.

“She said they've noticed a change in Bliss's
behavior. She's irritable and she cries a lot and she's more
fearful than she used to be.”

“Same as at home,” he said. Bliss had started
sucking her thumb again and crying at bedtime. A few times recently
she'd wet the bed.

“Joan said that during naptime yesterday
Bliss was masturbating and trying to snuggle up to Jason Peterson.
Joan thought it was a little odd but didn't say anything to her
except to move her away from Jason.” Sharon was watching him
carefully, waiting for him to piece the puzzle of her words
together. But he had no idea where she was going with this. “Then
yesterday during her nap Bliss wet herself. I'd taken Joan a change
of underpants a few weeks ago in case Bliss had an accident during
the day. When Joan changed her she noticed a rash.” Sharon put her
hand to her mouth and tears filled her eyes. “I noticed it during
her bath yesterday, but I thought it was just from wetting herself.
I never asked her about it.”

Sharon looked so guilty that he put his arms
around her, but she jerked away from him.

“You know what I'm talking about, Ben, don't
you?”

He frowned, shook his head. “I have no
idea.”

“Joan asked Bliss how she got so sore down
there and Bliss said you did it.”

“What?”

“She said you put your finger inside
her.”

He stood very still. He could feel his heart
beating. “Why would she say that?”

“You tell me.”

“Joan must have misunderstood her.”

Sharon shook her head. “I thought so too. But
on the way home in the car I asked her myself. I said, 'Ms. Dove
says you have a rash around your vagina,' and she said, 'She said I
can't put a Band-Aid on it.' And I said, 'How do you think you got
a rash there?'—I was careful, Ben. I didn't want to lead her—and
she said, 'Daddy put his finger in my vagina.' She said it just
like that, every word clear as a bell, and then she said, 'I wish
he'd stop that. It hurts sometimes.' I started crying and I had to
pull over. That scared her, seeing me fall apart like that, but I
couldn't help myself.”

A wave of nausea passed through him and he
sat down at the table. “Sharon, I never touched her. I would never
hurt her.”

“Then why would she say you did?”

“I don't know. Could she have dreamt it?”

Sharon shook her head. “Joan says there's too
much evidence that she's been molested. The fearfulness, the
wetting, the seductive stuff with Jason. You don't dream up a rash.
And she's been masturbating so much lately. I thought maybe she
irritated herself.” She looked at him hopefully.

“That must be it.” He heard the flatness, the
uncertainty in his voice.

“But why would she say it was you?”

“I don't know. Look, let's go pick her up and
talk to her. If I can talk to her I'm sure—”

“No! I don't want you talking to her.”

He frowned at her in disbelief. How dare she
tell him he couldn't talk to his own daughter? But he spoke calmly.
“You can be there too. I'm sure if—”

“You can't, Ben. She has to stay at Alex and
Leslie's tonight. I told them we were going out. I couldn't tell
them the truth.” Sharon sat down again. Her hands shook as she
rested them on the table, and she lowered them once more to her
lap. “Look, Pat and Joan wanted to call the child protection people
right away but I persuaded them to wait until tomorrow so I could
talk to Bliss myself and talk to you… At that point I really didn't
believe it. I told them you were the best father imaginable…”
Sharon's voice broke. “I defended you. I rattled on. I gave them
examples of how you take her places with you, read to her, give up
your own activities for her. They kept nodding, and Pat finally
said that it's often the fathers who seem most sensitive and caring
about their children who are the abusers. I wanted to hit them. I
felt they were so wrong about you.”

“And now?” He watched her face, and in the
silence that followed he could hear the quiet ticking of the clock
on the wall behind him.

“Now I don't know what to think,” she said
finally. “But I had to promise them to keep you away from Bliss
tonight. That was the only way I could get them to agree to wait on
the call.”

“This is insane!” He pounded the table with
his fist and stood up. “She's my daughter! Nobody can tell me I
can't see her.”