As she stretched out an arm and her fingertips brushed the door, he clutched her ankles and dragged her back and away from freedom.
It began again.
What am I doing here?
11
Bent Oak, Missouri, 1987.
Two days before Luther Lunt’s fourteenth birthday, state employees in Jefferson City dropped a cyanide pellet in the gas chamber, killing Luther’s father.
Luther’s mother had already been dead for more than a year. She’d died on the same day and in the same way as his sister, Verna, beneath the thunder and buckshot hail of his dad’s Remington twelve-gauge. Luther had hunted with the gun twice and knew what it could do to a rabbit. What it had done to his mom and Verna was lots worse.
Seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, even listening to the slowing trickle of blood from his mom’s ruined throat, was the kind of thing that stayed in the mind.
Luther cried almost nonstop for days and nights, wondering why Verna had to go tell their mom what she and Dad had been up to. He shouldn’t blame her, Luther knew, as she was only twelve, and it was his father, after all, who’d squeezed off the shots from the old double-barrel.
But the fact was, Luther did blame Verna, as well as his mother. They all knew anyway, and it was Verna and his mom who brought it all into the open, who uttered the words that made it real so something had to be done about it. Everything had been going along fine until then. Going along, at least.
And since his father had taken it on himself to start going into Verna’s room, he’d stopped coming into Luther’s.
Verna’s fault.
Verna and his mom’s.
Then his father’d been taken from Luther to rot away in a cell in Jeff City, waiting to die when his appeals ran out.
Leaving Luther alone.
“He’s suffered something terrible,” Luther’s great-aunt Marjean from Saint Louis had said of him after the murders, “but I’m eighty-seven years of age and get by hardscrabble on my Social Security. No way I can help the poor thing.”
So Luther had gone into the foster-care system, and was taken in by the Black family, Dara and her husband, Norbert. The Blacks had temporary custody of three children besides Luther, who was the oldest. Dara Black, a stout woman with an apple-round face who almost always wore the same stained apron, watched over the children in the old farmhouse, while Norbert was away painting barns and houses in the surrounding countryside.
Luther used to watch her bustle around the house, smiling too much and even sometimes whistling while she got her work done. Luther was aware that she knew and didn’t know that Norbert was molesting the children. Nobody ever talked about the subject. Luther thought that was best.
The state paid the Blacks a stipend for their foster care, and Norbert’s painting brought in some more money. And it was true Luther would someday have to learn a trade, which was the excuse Norbert came up with to take Luther in as an unpaid apprentice, meaning Luther would do a lot of the heavy work, lugging five-gallon paint buckets, moving ladders and scaffolding, scraping weathered paint off hardwood with Norbert’s good-for-shit tools. What Luther learned mostly was how to work all day in the boiling sun.
The day after his father was executed, he ran away.
And eleven months and three days later he was found sleeping behind a Dumpster in Kansas City and returned to the Black farm.
Life as Luther knew it, with its hardships and terrible, intricate balances, began again.
12
New York, 2004.
Anna Caruso remembered.
She had no choice, because now he was back, and they were reminding her of him in newspapers, on television, in conversations overheard in subways and at bus stops and in diners. Frank Quinn, her rapist.
They were also reminding people of his past, of the terrible thing he’d done to her a little over four years ago, but Anna could already sense the drift of the story. Quinn, who had never even stood trial for what he’d done, would be forgiven. After all, he’d never been charged, much less found guilty. And wasn’t a rapist innocent until proven guilty? Even a child molester? It was in the Constitution.
That was what the prosecutors had told Anna and her mother and family, how they couldn’t arrest and try Quinn because, in the minds of the prosecutors, there simply wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest. A big man, a stocking mask, a scar seen by a terrified child in her dim bedroom, a button like one missing from one of Quinn’s shirts and a thousand other shirts. Evidence, but not solid. Then there were the child porn sites visited on his police computer. It would all make for emotional but not really substantial testimony, so said the prosecuting attorney. It was a shame the rapist had been smart enough to use a condom, or they’d have DNA to use against him.
On the other hand, Anna might be pregnant.
What the hell kinds of alternatives were those, when whichever happened to you, you’d be wishing for the other?
Anna at eighteen wasn’t much bigger than she’d been on her fourteenth birthday. She had breasts now, and her legs and hips were those of a woman rather than a child. But she was still thin, frail, and afraid. Still, in many ways she was the same narrow-faced, brown-eyed girl Quinn had molested, but now made even more beautiful by the sweep of her jaw and her slightly oversize but perfect nose. She was a raven-haired, Hispanic child-woman with a bold, even hawk-like look in profile. But when she turned, you saw in her eyes that she was haunted and, in her way, would always remain young and in pain.
Sometimes she wondered if it would have been otherwise except for Quinn. Had he actually somehow altered her exterior as well as interior growth? Had he cursed her for all time?
She looked away from the cracks in her bedroom ceiling and closed her eyes. This was not fair! Especially this morning. This is not goddamn fair!
For the past several days she hadn’t been able to control her thoughts. The dreams were back, which meant he was back, his hunched form as he squeezed through her stuck bedroom window in her mother and father’s apartment—her mother’s now, since her father had left. Quinn, when she’d first seen him. A big man who appeared huge in night and shadow, wearing a stocking mask that disfigured his face and made him other than human. His bent spine had scraped the metal window frame through his shirt, making the only sound in the quiet room. A sound that remained to this day in Anna’s mind, that played over and over and begged for meaning and release. She knew it was in her music sometimes, and she tried to stop it.
Anna, a month shy of her fourteenth birthday, had been too terrified to scream. She was paralyzed; her throat was closed, so she had to struggle for breath. There in her perspiration-soaked bed, her panties and oversize T-shirt seemed so little cover and protection.
And they were.
Some of the details of what followed she still chose not to confront. They were hidden somewhere she never wanted to revisit.
She did recall that her attacker’s sleeves were rolled up and she noticed the jagged scar on his right forearm. Something told her to remember the scar. Remember.
She knew even through her terror and agony that he was being deliberately rough, trying to hurt her.
Why? What had she done? She didn’t even know this man.
Or did she?
She rejected the notion as soon as it entered her mind, and she concentrated on being somewhere else, someone else, until this was over. Someone else was being humiliated, soiled forever, ruined forever. The sisters at school had warned her, had warned all the girls.