“Were you hurt?” Junior asked.
“My eye swelled shut and was black, my nose was bleeding terribly. The next day I had bruises everywhere.”
“Did you try to leave the house?”
“First I ran into the bedroom and got my suitcase from the closet. I don’t know why I didn’t just leave. I think I must have wanted him to understand that it was over, that I really was leaving him at last. He got madder and madder, but I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t care if he killed me. I really didn’t care. Dean screamed and yelled and told me he and I would die together before I’d be with Newell. I told Dean that I knew he had killed those poor boys, that I saw him with Newell’s car and his gun, and I wouldn’t let him do that to Newell. It was too late, Dean claimed that he’d already told the FBI the whole story and it was on tape. He said they believed him.” She frowned. “I couldn’t imagine anyone would believe anything he said, but here we are after all these years for that very reason.”
“What happened next?” Junior asked.
“Then he threw me down on the bed and tried to kiss me. I kneed him hard and ran into the kitchen, where I got a butcher knife.” She spoke so quickly that the words began to run together. “I told him-”
“Could you please talk a bit slower, Miss Kenney?” Judge McNabb asked.
“Sorry,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I told him that if he tried to touch me again, ever, I’d kill him, that he disgusted me, that I hated him, and that I would make sure no one believed anything he said. I told him he wouldn’t see me or Camille ever again.”
“What did he do?”
“What he always did after he hit me. He started crying and apologizing about how he didn’t mean to hurt me, how he loved me and would do anything for me. But I told him that I was getting a divorce, and I left. I ran over to Norma’s, my friend down the street who had Camille.”
“Did you see Dean Reese again?”
“No. When I came back the next day he was dead. Newell came over and we talked about what to do. Finally we decided not to talk about the murders at all, ever, not to tell anyone about what we knew, that the truth wouldn’t help anyone. Justice had been done. Besides, we didn’t really trust the FBI. After all, they’d paid a crazy person all that time and they’d believed him too. Without the FBI behind him, he wouldn’t have had the nerve to murder those boys.”
“How long did you stay in Tallagumsa?”
“I left town the next week. It was hard to leave Newell, but I couldn’t stay. He couldn’t leave. We’ve kept in touch over the years, but never so much as mentioned the murders. I thought I’d heard the last of it until Newell called a few months ago and told me some reporter was digging into it. We discussed what we should do and concluded it made sense to do the same thing we’d done before--that is, say and do nothing.”
“Why?”Junior asked.
“We worried about the consequences to my daughter. She never knew anything about her father. I didn’t want her to get to know him this way. Over the years I had painted a very flattering picture of the father she never knew, and I thought she would be devastated if she learned the truth. Imagine growing up in a happy, basically average household and finding out at age sixteen that your father was a monster. Sixteen is a very sensitive age, especially for a girl. And Newell felt very strongly that our past relationship was nobody’s business. I agreed. We assumed the reporter would give up.”
“When did you change your plans?” Junior asked.
“When Newell was indicted I offered to help, to risk exposure, because it was obvious that the whole thing wasn’t going away. But he said no, that the government couldn’t prove anything, not to worry. He dug in his heels, positive he’d never be convicted on my husband’s word.”
“Is that why you denied knowledge of any of these events when I first contacted you in August?” Junior asked.
“Yes.”
“Why have you come forward now?”
“Saturday you called me and told me that you had talked with someone who planned to go to the press with the basics of the story I just told you if I didn’t testify. So here I am. My agreeing to come gave me time to talk to Camille and try to explain the circumstances to her. I didn’t want her reading about her father in the paper or hearing some distorted version of our past, though I doubt that would have been much worse for her than my telling her was. Still, she was better off hearing the truth out of my mouth first and under my terms, if you know what I mean. And after reading the news accounts of the first two days of the trial, I wasn’t so sure that the State wasn’t successfully proving the wrong person had committed the crime. I was upset about what was going to happen to Newell.”
I cried softly during Liz Reese’s testimony. My first emotion was one of relief-immense relief that the trial was over and that my father was innocent. I never believed he had killed Turnbow and Johnson, but until I heard Liz Reese’s testimony there was always that unspeakable possibility, which I couldn’t acknowledge until it was no longer a possibility, that he had done it. On the heels of relief came a strong sense of outrage. Not at Ben, not at Junior, but at my father. How dare he do this to our family? And for what? To protect someone else’s family while his own self-destructed. To keep his sordid, pathetic little affair a secret.
Judge McNabb asked Liz Reese a few questions, but I couldn’t concentrate. I began to shake all over. All I could think about was how many times over the last months I’d begged my father to tell me the truth. How many times he’d smugly refused. The horrible things I’d said to my sister and mother. The brush-off I’d given Eddie whenever he tried to talk to me.
What a thoughtless bastard my father really was. All he had to do was tell me the truth that day I called him and told him that Ben had the FBI documents. All he had to do was tell the simple truth. Surely at that time the matter could have been settled discreetly. And even if Ben had insisted on going public with the whole story, at least our family would have been spared the worst of living through this torturous nightmare my father had so selfishly created. I hated him.
When Judge McNabb finished questioning Liz Reese, she glided off the witness stand. She stopped at my father’s table, leaned over and whispered something to him, lightly touched his hand, then smiled and walked away.
Judge McNabb asked everyone to quiet down for one more minute, dismissed the case, and thanked everyone for being so patient. He was obviously relieved to have the case end without having to make the hard decision himself
I stood up and walked to the front of the courtroom, pushed open the swinging gate, and went past the bar. My father grinned, showing about as much remorse as a little boy who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
I couldn’t stop myself I slapped him across his cheek as hard as I could.
The packed courtroom fell silent. Everyone stared at me as I strode out of the courtroom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Imagine a sixteenth-century navigator on a great ship plying the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. It is a cloudless night, weeks after leaving Spain, and he glances up to take solace from the familiar Pole Star, the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere, the star on which he and all navigators rely in charting their routes, the star around which the rest of the night sky is arranged and which puts everything into perspective. On that night he looks to its expected location and, not finding it, begins to search the sky ever more desperately. Finally he shakes his head as if to shake loose something lodged there and looks again. The Pole Star is gone. Breathing deeply, he moans and then sobs in utter despair. He is lost, hopelessly lost, and nothing will ever be the same again.
I knew that nothing would ever be the same in my life after that trial. My father had been the one constant in my universe, and had he died I would not have felt any more adrift than I did when the charges against him were dismissed. I would have grieved, longer and perhaps more deeply than most, but I would have survived and gone on about my life w
ithout this feeling of absolute disillusionment compounded by a pervasive sense of my own culpability.
At the moment I slapped him and walked out of the courtroom, I would almost have preferred my father’s death to what he’d revealed about himself by heartlessly covering up his fifteen-year-old love affair.
I spent the first nights and days after the trial in hiding, refusing all phone calls and visits. Jolene covered for me, as always. She even slept at our house--worried, I suppose, about whether I was competent to care for the children should a middle-of-the-night emergency arise. Estelle and Roland ran the Steak House. When I wasn’t asleep (my preferred state), I played with Jessie and the twins. My favorite make-believe game with Jessie was one I invented. Four of her Barbie dolls lived on the planet Zygor in a distant galaxy. The dolls were all alone, just the four of them; they took care of each other, and they knew and needed no one.
I realized during my second day at home that the answer was simple. We would move, far away from Tallagumsa, leaving behind the entire experience and, most important, my father. Outside the state, I would never have to meet the eyes of all the people who knew our tawdry secrets. With that decision as a talisman against what I knew everyone must be saying and thinking, I emerged from my house on Thursday afternoon, three days after the trial ended.
The minute I stepped outside I sensed a change in the weather, a sharpening in the air that signaled a change of seasons. A breeze carrying the first gentle touches of fall rustled the still-green leaves.
I drove first to Jane and Buck’s, anxious to assure myself about the welfare of Jane and the baby. Jolene had informed me during my three days in hiding that Jane was out of danger, but I couldn’t be sure that Jolene wasn’t shading the truth to protect my vulnerable psyche.
Jane and Buck’s house was in a new subdivision of Tallagumsa called Overlook, a neighborhood of lonely-looking brick mini-mansions, complete with columns, pools, and foyers as big as my house, built in the middle of two and a half acres of barren land. Hundreds of acres of magnificent trees had been bulldozed to build the subdivision. In their place, the developer had planted small, pitiful-looking saplings along the sidewalks and every few hundred feet in the yards.
Buck’s silver Cadillac was in the driveway. I pressed the doorbell. Chimes reminiscent of church bells rang for at least a minute before Buck opened the door.
He was surprised and not particularly happy to see me. “I wanted to see how Jane was doing, if there’s anything I could do,” I said.
“She’s better,” he said quietly, blocking the doorway.
Buck seemed a shrunken version of himself. He looked pale and exhausted. All his bluster and hot air were gone. To my surprise, I missed them. I wanted him to call me by some movie star’s name, or pat me on the back, a little too hard, or criticize my jeans and T-shirt.
“Can I see her?” I asked him.
When he didn’t answer, I took his hand and begged, “Please, Buck?”
“Okay. You can come in for a quick visit, but only if you promise not to upset her. That means don’t talk about what all’s happened,” he said sternly. “I know you want to, but don’t. She’s under doctor’s orders to stay in bed and remain calm.”
There went my plans to bare my soul and beg for Jane’s forgiveness. I understood that I could never have stopped Daddy from letting Chip tear Jane apart on the stand, even if I’d known the truth about Jane’s past. But I had taken my father’s side, again and again, and attacked Jane for her refusal to do the same, and for that I owed her an apology.
Buck followed me into their bedroom and hovered about like a mother hen, obviously distrustful of my intentions.
When I saw Jane’s turtlelike shape lying in the canopied bed I’d always thought more suitable for a junior-high girl, I fought back tears, determined for once to rise above my own self-indulgent sorrow and put her best interests ahead of my needs.
“Hey, Sis,” I said, reverting to my childhood name for her. I leaned down to kiss her cheek. Her face was not as puffy as it had been the last time I saw her. She looked relaxed, the strain of the trial replaced, I hoped, by optimism about her future as a mother. Without the usual layer of hair spray, her hair had a soft, girlish look.
“When did they let you come home from the hospital?” I asked.
“Two days ago, when my blood pressure finally came down and the fluid drained out of my face and hands. They were so swollen,” she said. “I looked like a balloon, but I feel much better now.”
“You look wonderful,” I said.
“You want to sit down?” she asked, turning her hand in the direction of a wingback chair covered in the same lavender-flowered material as the bed canopy.
I glanced at Buck. He frowned; clearly he did not want me to get too comfortable. “No, thanks,” I said. “I just stopped by for a minute.”
“Did you know I probably have to stay in bed the whole rest of the pregnancy?” Jane asked.
“You are a braver woman than I,” I said.
“It won’t be that bad,” she said cheerfully. “I have my knitting and my magazines and those romance books you hate, and Buck can do a lot of the legwork for me.” She smiled at her husband. “It’s worth it.”
“Where’s Mother?” I asked.
“She’s not staying here anymore. She’s home,” Jane said.
“Home?” I said, surprised. I’d assumed that once she got as far as Jane and Buck’s, she’d never go back to Daddy and the lake house she’d never wanted in the first place.
“Yeah. She went home when I got back from the hospital,” Jane said.
After several uncomfortable silences, punctuated only by small talk about my children and the weather, I said good-bye. At least Jane and Buck had let me in the house. It was a beginning. I would miss them when I moved.
My next stop was my parents’. Mercifully, only Mother’s beige Buick sedan was parked next to the house. I walked along the wooden walkway to the back of the house, which faced the lake. Two squirrels ran across my path, scared off by my footsteps. Bright sunlight fought its way through the thick, leafy overhang, forming shifting spots of light.
Through the wall of glass, I could see Mother sitting on the living-room floor, pulling clothes out of boxes. She folded the clothes and placed them in three separate piles. Wearing old baggy brown slacks and a pink pin-striped shirt of Daddy’s, she hadn’t dressed with her usual impeccable care. Her hair hadn’t been brushed either. Was she leaving Daddy? What all had happened while I was holed up at home?
“Where are you going, Mother?” I asked, opening the back screen door.
She looked up at me, and a smile lit her face. “Nowhere. I’m sorting through these old clothes for the church collection. I got a call in the middle of the night that Frank, our church janitor, lost his home in a fire. Everything’s gone. Bad wiring caused the fire. That’s why I look like this,” she said, referring to her unkempt hair and clothes. Her voice was hoarse.
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No, but ten people who lived in a two-bedroom house are homeless and without food and clothing. I’m in charge of the relief effort for our church. You want to help me sort through these? I’m washing the dirty ones and sewing the ones that need it.”
“Are you sick?”
“My voice, you mean? No, I’ve just been talking too much, organizing the relief effort and not getting much sleep for the last week.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“At his office.”
“He’s working already?”
“He never stopped.”
“I guess I’m not surprised. Nothing fazes him, does it?”
“You can come all the way in, LuAnn,” she said. “I won’t bite.”
I realized then that I had been standing half in, half out of the doorway, with my hand on the door handle. I came inside and closed the door behind me. The country-music station on her radio was playing “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”<
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“I’ve tried to reach you every day this week,” Mother said. “I’ve been worried about you. Are you all right?”
“Jolene told me you called. Thanks for worrying about me at all after the way I’ve acted. I’m physically okay but mentally kind of a wreck. I just couldn’t face anyone for a few days, and I’m still not really ready, but Jessie was starting to look at me funny-you know, very concerned-so I got up and left.”
“I’m glad you ventured out, but I must say, you don’t look well.” Mother stood up and set the clothes in her lap on a chair. “Come on in the kitchen and I’ll get you some tea. Have you eaten?”
“I don’t think I can eat. Every day when I wake up it feels like somebody has grabbed my stomach and squeezed it into a little ball, then kicked it a few times for good measure.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll make you something light. Maybe that’ll put some color in those cheeks.” She walked over to me and touched my cheek lightly. “You really do look too thin.”
I shrugged and followed her into the kitchen. I doubted I could eat, but it was easier to follow her than to argue.
She prepared the hot tea, handed it to me along with a plastic bear full of honey and started to prepare scrambled eggs and toast. As she worked she hummed something I couldn’t identify.
I cupped the tea with my palms, enjoying the cup’s warmth on my hands.
When my parents moved out to the lake, my frugal mother had insisted on bringing all the antique furniture from the old house, even though it seemed incongruous in this modern glass-and-wood setting.
The kitchen table where I now sat was the one I’d grown up with, a round oak table with an ornately carved base and two leaves. On the edge across from me was the bum mark I’d made one night smoking when I was a teenager. A high-school junior home alone and experimenting with smoking, I’d left a lit cigarette resting on the table while I put a stack of records on the turntable. I was horrified to find that the cigarette had burned all the way down to the filter, right through the wood grain, leaving an ugly, indented black mark. I never admitted that I was the person responsible for that damage either, but I guess Mother and Daddy must have known all along.
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