The Girls He Adored (33 page)

“How did your parents feel about what was going on?”

“Well, little lady, Ah guess ya could say my pop was kind of embarrassed. Soon as they got out on bail he took his doublebarrel and blew mah mom's brains all over the wall with one round a double ought six, then blew his own head off with another.”

A John Wayne impression. Irene sensed that he was close to cracking—still, she had to ask the question. “And how did you feel about that—your whole life changing, losing your parents? It must have been terribly difficult.”

He turned around to face her. “Guilty, I guess,” he said in his
own voice. “And glad. And guilty at feeling glad. I killed them as surely as if I'd pulled the trigger. But there would be no more beatings, no more rapes, no more being locked in the closet or terrorized in the basement. Plus I had Miss Miller. Can we take that swimming break now? This is tougher than I thought.”

“Of course. But it just occurred to me, I haven't brought a bathing suit.”

“No problem,” replied Maxwell. “I'm sure we can dig one up some place.”

T
HE RIDGE WAS FIRST
settled by pot growers back in the sixties, Christopher explained to Irene as they returned to the house. The hippies had lived in psychedelic-painted school buses at first, he told her, and with the money from their first few sinsemilla harvests they'd dug wells and paid the electric company to run power lines up from Charbonneau Road. With power for the water pumps, they were able to irrigate the next crop with drip lines and double their yield.

Rolling in dough by now, the tree-hugging hippies reluctantly cut down a few Douglas firs and built the house on the very ground where the trees had stood. They also bought an old barn in the valley, took it apart, and reassembled it board by board on Scorned Ridge to use as a drying shed. Unfortunately, summer was too short and autumn too damp in Umpqua County to allow sufficient curing time—they eventually dug a pit six feet deep in the meadow, lined it with concrete, and roofed it over with thick Plexiglas.

Mystery solved, thought Irene. It was the drying shed she'd spotted in the meadow this morning. “What happened to them— the growers?”

It was a big operation, Christopher explained—too big, even for Oregon's liberal drug-enforcement policies. In the late seventies, helicopters descended upon the plantation in the meadow. The hippies managed to escape, but the crop was burned and the property seized, to be sold at auction several years later—Miss Miller's representative just barely managed to outbid the lumber companies.

The house at the edge of the forest was high and narrow like a Swiss chalet, with a sharply peaked shake-shingled roof and overhanging eaves. As they approached, Irene noticed that many of the dark-stained deal boards were warped, bowed, and even split.

Maxwell followed her eyes, read her thoughts. “They nailed it up green,” he explained. “Someday I'm going to have to rebuild the whole damn thing.”

The rear, kitchen door faced the forest; Christopher led Irene around the side of the house to the screened-in front porch that faced west, across the meadow.

“I've seen some incredible sunsets from here,” he said, holding open the screen door for her.

“I can imagine.”

Christopher closed the screen door and hurried ahead of Irene to hold open the heavy front door that led from the porch into the house. A dark, narrow, wood-paneled hallway ran the length of the house, passing the parlor and dining room on the right, and the steep stairway leading to the upper floors on the left, on its way to the kitchen in back.

“I'll pack a picnic lunch for us,” Christopher announced. “I think you'll find the bathing suits on the top back shelf of your closet. Meet you down here in half an hour?”

Irene checked her watch, which was the only personal item in her possession, other than the clothes she'd gone jogging in two days earlier. “One o'clock, then.”

The trembling began as she started up the stairs. By the time she reached her bedroom Irene was shaking so violently that the brass bedstead rattled when she sat down. She thought of the victims of long-term trauma she'd seen. The blank stares, the long silences, the sudden and unprovoked shudders and withdrawals. True, they were all still alive, but it wasn't quite what she had in mind when she'd coined her affirmation, her mantra.

Irene had always prided herself on her rational nature. She'd sometimes been accused of being too rational, of keeping too tight a rein on her emotions. But deep down inside, she'd never been able to shake the feeling that if she ever allowed herself to really let go, she'd fly to pieces like a busted watch in a cartoon. It was fear of weakness that kept her strong, fear of falling apart that held her together.

So she sat on the edge of the bed and hugged herself tightly,
rocking to and fro as she struggled for control. It was only partly fear for herself that was driving her so close to the edge, she realized. There were also strong components of pity, for that little boy who'd been so terribly abused, and anger at his abusers. The pity was easier to deal with—a good psychiatrist had to be able to take in her patients' trauma without taking it on—but the anger was difficult to handle. Irene forced herself to bear in mind that little Lyssy's parents and the Miller woman had probably been abused as children—almost all adult abusers had.

When the trembling finally stopped, Irene searched the closet shelves until she found a peach-colored one-piece maillot bathing suit with a Nieman-Marcus label. For her sanity's sake, she tried not to think about, or at least not to dwell upon, the identity or fate of the previous owner. That way lay panic, if not madness.

Irene undressed in the small bathroom adjoining her bedroom, and tried the suit on. It was a little large, and loose in the bust, but she liked the way it was cut high on the leg, all the way to the hip— she'd always been proud of her legs. And when she slipped on a pair of white mules from the closet, she had to admit that her calves looked pretty darn good for forty-one. Then it occurred to her that the last thing she wanted was to appear sexually attractive—shaking her head at her own foolishness, she opted for rubber flip-flops.

Christopher was wearing a lavender T-shirt and a pair of faded jeans—how well the colors complemented his bleached hair. He looked her up and down as she stepped out onto the porch, and whistled appreciatively. She followed him across the meadow to a gate in the fence at the southwest corner of the property. Both fence and gate bore high-voltage warnings. Irene flinched as Christopher reached forward to unlock the gate—he told her not to worry, that he'd turned the juice off back at the house. She filed the information away, telling herself it might come in useful some night.

On the other side of the fence, a steep trail led down the side of the ravine. Christopher had been carrying a backpack; now he slung it on and helped Irene pick her way down to the fast-running creek. They walked along the bank until they came to a wide slowdrifting pool shaded by the overhanging branches of river willows, just downstream from a sharp bend in the creek. A classic ol' swimmin' hole. Christopher hung the knapsack on a tree branch and stripped down to a purple Speedo.

It was the first time she'd seen his torso—he hadn't bothered to take off his shirt during the attempted rape. The figure that had appeared slender, almost delicate, clothed, was instead lean, hard, lithe. Narrow but powerful shoulders and upper arms, smooth rounded pecs, a six-pack set of abs, a hard little BB butt, smoothmuscled thighs and calves—if there was an ounce of fat on the lad, it wasn't visible.

“Last one in is a rotten egg,” he said, running gracefully along the bank to just above the bend in the creek, where he executed a shallow dive into the fast-moving water and let the current carry him down to the pool.

Irene followed him upstream, then slipped off her flip-flops and tiptoed into the water. She had always been a tentative swimmer, even in backyard pools, but the cold current soon proved too strong for wading—when she was knee deep it swiped her feet out from under her. She fell backward, flailing her arms, and cried out, alarmed but exhilarated, as the water swept her along downstream like the flume ride at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk.

Seconds later she found herself bobbing on her back in the still, sun-dappled water of the swimming hole, looking up at the lacy green willow boughs waving gently overhead, silhouetted against the distant blue of the sky above the ravine.

“Did you love it?” asked a soft voice behind her.

Irene turned to see Christopher treading water. His boyish face was only inches from hers, wet and shiny in the dappled light reflecting up from the marble-green water. His bleached hair was plastered back, his dark eyes were soft and vulnerable, his unnaturally red lips were parted, and he was breathing hard.

“I did, I loved it.” Irene's own chest was heaving, her skin was tingling, and the adrenaline was coursing through her. She knew he was about to kiss her; how easy it would be to let him. And probably less dangerous than turning her back.

She tried repeating her new mantra to herself—
just stay alive, just stay alive, just stay alive
—as he brought his lips closer and closer to hers, but when the moment came, her head turned away of its own volition and she took the kiss on the cheek.

“I have to try that waterslide again,” she said lightly, rolling onto her side and striking out for the creek bank, praying wordlessly that he would not come after her, knowing that if he did, she would have to fight him, even if it cost her her life.

And she never used her mantra again.

A
FTER INTERVIEWING
M
RS.
E
DWINA
C
OMB,
Pender visited three more of Donna Hughes's “best friends.” 0 for three. Not that he'd expected much—basically he was just killing time until he heard from Thom Davies.

The call came in around six-thirty in the evening, at the Holiday Inn off I-75 in Plano. Pender had checked in and enjoyed a long hot shower, protecting his bandaged scalp with a plastic shower cap—an afternoon with the anomic rich of Plano left him feeling dirtier than a night in the Sleep-Tite. He was in the bar listening to a cocktail pianist warbling “Michelle” when his sky pager began vibrating in his pocket. He recognized the number and hurried back to his room to return the call.

“What've you got for me, T. D.?”

“Jam,” said Thom Davies. “Jammety-jam-jam.”

“Remind me—in Davies-speak, jam is good or bad?”

“Jam is good. Jam is loovely. Forty-three criminal Buckleys in Oregon, nineteen of whom began their careers in juvenile facilities. Of those nineteen, eleven, representing five different facilities, are within our target age range.”

“Any of those have records for assault? Strong-arm stuff, anything like that?”

A pause while Davies counted. “Six.”

“How many are still in custody or on parole?” Those would be the easiest to locate.

“Five out of the six. Three in custody, two on parole. Do you have a fax there?—I'll send you the printout.”

Pender read him the Holiday Inn's fax number from the placard by the phone.

“All righty, then—I'll whip it right off to you.”

“Thanks, T.D. Thanks for everything. You went above and beyond—I truly owe you. Sorry I had to ruin your Sunday.”

“Never mind, it's my own bloody fault. After ten years with the bureau, I should know better than to answer the phone on my day off.”

A
ROUND THE TIME
P
ENDER
was receiving the Buckley printout in Texas, Irene and Christopher were just beginning their Sunday-afternoon therapy session in Oregon. The late-afternoon light was golden in the office in the forest; the forest floor still retained the day's heat, but a cool breeze had sprung up from the west.