“I need to know, Daddy.”
“No, you don’t.”
Twenty years ago that would have been that. Hell, twenty days ago it might have been.
“I’m thirty-seven years old. Old enough to determine for myself what’s important to me.”
“You don’t know what you don’t know.”
She’d known this wasn’t going to be easy. Her insides were shaking. She’d always gotten knots in her stomach at the thought of standing up to him. But this time anxiety wasn’t going to stop her.
“I’m not going away on this one. I can’t anymore,” she said softly, as much for herself as anything else. “I’ve just spent the past twenty years of my life doing as you wanted, as Brent wanted, and look where it got me. Right back where I was at sixteen, trying to pick up the pieces of my life, with my father there taking care of everything for me. Except, this time, I also have the memory of an ex-husband so dissatisfied with me that he had no hesitation breaking our marriage vows.”
“He’s a fool—and a man. He’d have gotten over it.”
“I don’t think so.” And it wouldn’t matter if he had. The trust was gone.
The second bolt was loose with one twist and soon the new seat was securely in place.
“You sell yourself short,” he said, gathering up his tools. “You run a nationally recognized organization, one built almost entirely by your efforts. You have the respect of many of this country’s most important movers and shakers.”
That said, he left the room.
After unrolling the new purple-and-green bathroom rugs she’d bought to go with the shower curtain, towels and light purple paint that would soon be on the walls, Sara followed him. He was in the laundry room now, hooking up the washer.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll ask someone else.”
She received a long under-the-arm glance for her efforts. But the usual look of steely determination that he used to perfection was not there.
Sara’s hands started to shake.
THEY ENDED UP in the kitchen with glasses of iced tea. Sara couldn’t remember a time when she and her parents had had any serious discussion any place other than the kitchen table. If you had to talk, that’s where you went. Period.
That’s where they’d discussed the results of the pregnancy test and, ultimately, the adoption. The college she’d attend. It had been over a Sunday steak dinner that she’d introduced them to Brent. And lasagna on a Friday night, when she and Brent announced their engagement.
It had been at the kitchen table, five years before, that her father had told her about the car accident that had killed her mother. She’d received a call at work, asking her to meet him at home. All the way from Columbus to Maricopa she’d imagined what she might find there. From her parents selling everything and retiring to Florida, to one of them finding out he was ill, she’d run the gamut. And come up horribly short.
“What do you want to know?” Her father’s question was brusque.
“Everything.”
Sitting up straight, his fingers tapping the sides of his glass, he frowned. “I don’t see how, after all these years—”
“You and Mom were still asleep that morning when the call came.”
“That’s right.”
“Who called?”
“Chris Watson.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Neither did I. He was a freshman at Wright State, new to town, and he came to the party with the rest of them.”
“How many people were there?”
He stared at her for a long time and Sara realized she shouldn’t have done this. Not because she didn’t need to know. She did—should’ve asked years ago. But she shouldn’t have done this to him.
Never once, in all these years, had she looked at that night and the months that followed through the eyes of a man who loved his only daughter. When she’d seen her father’s part in it all, it had been as her father, the enforcer, the sheriff. The big, strong man who always did the right thing and made damn sure those around him did, as well.
“Twenty-three for at least part of the evening,” he finally said. “Twenty-one of them male. I questioned everyone who’d been within half a mile of that lake, from the family who’d driven down to do some stargazing and left when they arrived to find a party in full swing, to the gas station attendant down the road who’d seen cars go by. And everyone who’d known about the party, as well, whether they attended or not. I’m certain there wasn’t a person in the vicinity I didn’t talk to.”
She’d known her father had worked exhaustively on the case. And she would have tried to find out more at the time if she’d been in any state to think for herself. In the months immediately following the rape, she’d been adamant about one thing. She was not going to have the abortion her parents were pressuring her to consider.
For everything else, she did as she was told. Ate the foods her doctor recommended, studied the lessons her mother prepared, visited with the two girlfriends her father encouraged her to see.
“In the end, the physical evidence did the work for us,” he said now, bending over his iced tea glass. There were lines around his eyes she’d never noticed before.
As soon as he left, she’d hook up her computer—she’d been planning to, anyway. And then she’d do what she’d never allowed herself to do before and begin to dredge up the past. She’d find the articles Ryan had found—articles that, until he’d told her about the small town news archives, she’d never even considered having at her disposal. She’d read about the night that had stolen away her childhood. It had taken an unfaithful husband, meeting her son for the first time, the shock of a quick divorce, but she was finally ready to rock the boat she’d been floating in precariously ever since that horrible night.
However, there was at least one thing she wouldn’t find in old newspaper articles.
And she had the chief investigator right here.
“Aside from the…incident…with me, was there anything else unusual about the party? Any fights? Or evidence of misconduct?”
“Other than littering?” her father asked. “No. By all accounts, and believe me I heard them all, the goal was to get trashed. It was the week before finals and they’d brought cases of whiskey, beer and wine to drown themselves. They put their car keys in a can, buried it and drank until they puked. Repeatedly, judging by what we saw at the party site the next day.”
“Were they smoking pot?”
John shook his head. “We found cigarette butts, but no drug paraphernalia of any kind.”
“Was anyone tested for drugs?”
“No. There was nothing to indicate drug use.”
“What about the fact that at least a few of us couldn’t remember anything the next day?” Ryan’s doubts confused an already blurry situation.
“You reeked of alcohol and were obviously passed out, drunk. With the number of empty bottles, divided by the number of people at the party, added to the fact that you’d mixed beer, wine and whiskey, we were more concerned with getting you awake and sober.”
And dealing with the rape. Sara filled in the blanks her father’s expression left hanging there.
“And you have no doubt that nothing else happened there that night?”
“Honey, I know the details of that party so well I could have been there myself.”