The Forgotten Girl

by David Bell

  Mrs. Tyndal nodded her head slowly. As Jason watched her, he could imagine that in her mind she was traveling back all those years to a moment just a few days after their high school graduation, a day when Regan came to her apartment in Ednaville and told her a story about her son—

  “The police had already been to see me,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “When Logan didn’t come home after graduation, they came and asked questions. His father called as well. He was angry, of course. Suspicious. He assumed I had Logan at my apartment, hiding him out or something. I told them all the truth at that time—I had no idea where Logan was or where he had gone.”

  “That was the truth,” Regan said. “Until I came to see you.”

  “When you knocked on my door, I knew you were going to tell me something about Logan. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Either you were going to tell me what happened to him, which I probably didn’t want to hear. Or you were going to tell me something he’d done. I thought that might even be worse.”

  “Did you expect her to tell you he was dead?” Jason asked.

  “No.” She lifted her hand and placed it against her chest. “I wasn’t ready for that.” She looked over at Regan. “You saw me that day. I was devastated.”

  “You were.”

  “I wanted to crawl in the floor and never come out. That was my child, my only child. And he was gone.” She was still looking at Regan. Intently. “You’re a mother. You know.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Regan said.

  “But when Regan told me the how and the why of all of it, I understood a lot more. At first, I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to hear those stories about my son, and I wanted to accuse you of lying. But I couldn’t hide from what I really knew. I realized how something like that could happen.”

  “Why did you agree to keep quiet about it?” Jason asked. “I guess that’s the thing I don’t really get. And I’m not sure Regan has helped me understand either. Your son was killed. He was doing something awful, something terrible, but that doesn’t mean a mother would think he deserved to be killed. Does it?”

  “Not deserved,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “I certainly wouldn’t say he deserved to be killed. But I could understand how it happened. Those young men were protecting Regan.”

  “Okay, but wouldn’t you want the truth to come out about all of it? Wouldn’t you want the world to know that Logan wasn’t alive? That he hadn’t just run off somewhere? People were going to think he was living the high life somewhere. . . . That’s what I thought. I thought he’d turned his back on everything.”

  “You mean he turned his back on everyone?” Mrs. Tyndal asked.

  Jason didn’t answer right away. Regan turned her head a little and gave Jason an encouraging look.

  “Yes, everyone,” Jason said.

  “I had to think about two things,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “I had to think about this young woman’s feelings. And she had made it very clear to me she really didn’t want the whole story coming out. Regan, you had only come to my apartment that day because you said you couldn’t imagine me not knowing the truth.”

  “I thought about my own mother,” Regan said. “I’d want her to know. And you were always so nice to me growing up. Looking back, I realize I was taking a huge risk. I didn’t know that you wouldn’t want to go to the police and have the whole story come out, which was exactly what I didn’t want to happen. I was so dumb back then. So naive and just . . .”

  “You weren’t dumb,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “You were distraught. In shock.”

  “Yes,” Regan said. “I thought you’d understand. You were the only adult I thought I could turn to.”

  “I understood that. The other thing I had to think about was my son. His memory. Would I want the world to think that my son was a monster? Someone who had attacked a young woman in such an awful way? That’s all they’d remember. That’s all his father would have to face over the years. I thought about it a lot when Regan was sitting in my apartment, and I decided it was better off for everyone involved if we just pretended Logan was gone. That he ran away. I would live with my private grief. I was okay with that. I’d carried things inside before. And carried them alone. Things about Logan.”

  “Things about Logan?” Jason asked. “What things?”

  So much had fallen away over the past twenty-four hours that he didn’t think it was possible for anything else to be revealed. But there he was on the brink of learning something else, and his stomach rose and fell with the anticipation, like someone who had just ridden a roller coaster to the top of a tall hill and was about to plunge down to an uncertain destination.

  “You’ve been talking to that lawyer, haven’t you?” Mrs. Tyndal asked.

  “Colton?”

  “Yes. Him.”

  “We all went to school together. He’s trying to find Logan.”

  “His family, him and his father before him, have always been shills for my ex-husband. Whatever they do, the motivation is to make my ex-husband look good. And to line their own pockets, of course.”

  Her vitriol surprised Jason a little, although Colton had certainly irritated him on more than one occasion. “I think that’s an accurate assessment of his character.”

  “And he probably told you something about me. Something about me and a staircase.”

  “He did.”

  “And he said that I shoved Logan down the stairs while I was drunk?”

  Jason didn’t want to answer. He really didn’t need to. The answer to all of the questions was hanging in the air between them.

  But Jason felt the anger rising inside his chest again, the rage at the injustice of his friend being an abused child.

  “He told me that,” Jason said. “Yes.”

  “But that’s not really true,” Mrs. Tyndal said.

  “What’s not true?” Jason asked.

  “It was Logan,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “Logan pushed me down the stairs that day.”

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Jason looked over at Regan. She stared straight ahead, her lips slightly parted.

  “I don’t understand,” Regan said. She went from looking at Mrs. Tyndal to looking at Jason, her neck rotating to the left in an almost mechanical fashion. “Jason, you told me that she shoved Logan down the stairs.”

  “Colton told me that, and I told you. He said that’s why she wasn’t around Logan as much when we were growing up. Basically he implied that Mrs. Tyndal wasn’t allowed to see Logan, that they were afraid she would harm him.”

  Regan turned back to the woman before them. “That’s not true, is it?”

  Mrs. Tyndal spoke without any real trace of emotion. She seemed resigned, accepting. “It’s not true at all.” She raised her hand quickly. “Well, let me say, I did drink too much back then. I admit that. I was a lonely housewife. I found different ways to get through my days. But I never harmed my child. Never. Not in that way. I harmed him in other ways, mostly by letting his father have such an influence over his life. I know that now. But I never laid a hand on him.”

  “What happened?” Jason asked, his voice low even to his own ears, his eyes staring at the pristine carpet. When the woman started to speak, Jason forced himself to look up and meet her eye.

  “The boy had a temper,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “Temper tantrums, we called them back then. I guess today he’d be at a shrink and taking a lot of medication, but we didn’t do those things back then. Especially not if your father was a prominent businessman who didn’t want people to talk. But it could be bad with Logan. I was with him all the time. I had to discipline him. His father would come home and take his side. Indulge him. That made it tough to parent, as you can imagine.”

  “Sure,” Regan said.

  “I remember what it was,” Mrs. Tyndal said. She pointed at Jason. “You boys, you used to play with these things. These giant monsters . . . th
ey used to shoot things at each other. What were they?”

  Jason knew. “Shogun Warriors.”

  “Yes, that’s it. No computers back then. Not many video games.”

  “No.”

  “I guess one thing about video games, there wasn’t a mess to clean up. Logan never cleaned up his messes. He left it there, and Pauline took care of it for him most of the time. I didn’t want my boy to grow up like that, thinking that someone else would always clean up for him. I didn’t come from money. I didn’t understand it. I just wanted Logan to be”—her voice caught a little—“normal, like everyone else. Like the kids you were both turning out to be.”

  She hesitated a moment. Jason felt embarrassed for her. His own face flushed. They’d shown up unannounced and opened a quarter of a century of old wounds for her.

  “Well, I told him to clean up his mess that day. Like I had done many other days. This was after school, maybe just before dinnertime. His father was coming home, and I admit, I’d been drinking. I wasn’t drunk, but that sounds like hairsplitting, doesn’t it? That’s when I knew I had a problem of my own, when I used to make that fine distinction over and over again. I’m drinking, but I’m not drunk. Not a way for a mother to be.”

  The television started playing loud in the other room. A sitcom from the sound of it. People laughed uproariously, an odd counterpoint to the conversation they were involved in.

  “Are we disturbing your husband?” Regan asked.

  “No,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “He knows all of this. Or he knew it at one time. I’m afraid he and I are in the middle of a long good-bye.”

  “I’m sorry,” Regan said.

  “It’s what we do as we get older.” She adjusted herself in her chair, then said, “I told Logan to clean up that day, and he wouldn’t do it. He just wouldn’t. Like an idiot I tried the oldest trick in the mother’s playbook. I told him to wait until his father got home. Even as I said it, I knew it wouldn’t work. It sounded like an empty threat as it left my mouth. His father . . . he wasn’t going to do anything. We all knew it. Most of all, Logan knew it.” Her mouth drew into a tight line as though she were biting back on decades-old anger. “He laughed at me, Logan did. He just laughed at me, a cutting, mocking laugh.” She shook her head. “I got angry. Angrier than I should have. I should have walked away, or sent him to his room. Something. I wish I’d done something different. But isn’t that the story of so many things? We wish we’d done something different?”

  “Amen,” Regan said.

  “I went for him,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “I tried to grab his arm. I missed first, and then I got ahold of him. A good tight grip. I realized I was squeezing too tight, that I was going to leave a bruise, so I let go. And when I did . . . we were right at the top of those stairs in the center of the house. You remember them?”

  Jason nodded. “I do.”

  “Logan put both of his hands on me, right around my waist. He was a strong kid, always was. Feisty. And the alcohol made me a little unsteady on my feet. That contributed to the whole thing. But he pushed, and down I went. I fell backwards, and my feet swung up in the air above my head. I went down those stairs like someone doing a couple of reverse somersaults. Until I hit the wall at the bottom.”

  A rushing sound filled Jason’s ears. He tried to pinpoint the source by cocking his head and listening to see if it was an airplane passing above the house. But it wasn’t. The sound came from inside of him, and it was coupled with the sense that he was being overwhelmed.

  “I’m sorry,” Regan said. She seemed on the brink of letting her emotions spill out. “Were you hurt?”

  “In the end, I had a concussion,” she said. “Self-diagnosed.”

  “What did you do?” Jason asked, the noise in his ears still there but lessening.

  Mrs. Tyndal hesitated, a smile on her face that was more sad than anything else. “I called the police. I didn’t know what else to do. I was dizzy and a little shaky. So I called the police. Then I called Peter. Mr. Shaw. When he found out I’d called the police, he flipped.”

  “What was Logan’s reaction after you went down the stairs?” Regan asked.

  Mrs. Tyndal’s eyes grew distant behind the big glasses. The television continued to play from the other room, an announcer’s voice asking the viewers if they wanted to save money on their car insurance. “When I figured out what had happened, when I first gathered my bearings and looked back up to the top of the stairs, Logan was up there on the top step looking down at me. He had a look on his face that I didn’t understand. There was some fear there. I could see that. But it was . . . How do I want to say this? A happy fear?”

  “Gleeful,” Regan said.

  “Yes. I guess so.”

  “Like he was afraid of what he had done, but at the same time, he’d enjoyed doing it.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right.” Mrs. Tyndal scooted forward in her chair and held her hand out toward Regan like she wanted to pat her on the leg and offer comfort. But it was too far for her to reach. “I forgot that you’ve seen that very same look.”

  “What happened with the police?” Jason asked.

  “Peter Shaw couldn’t have the police coming to his house,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “And he certainly couldn’t have the police coming to his house because of something that his ten-year-old son had done, something that if everyone found out . . . well, you can imagine the way people would talk. We couldn’t have that. Not in Ednaville. Not about his son. Peter arrived at just about the same time as the police. And the police had to be told something. It was a different time, over thirty years ago. A man with Peter’s influence could make the police go away, and he did. I know he told them some story out of my earshot, something about me.”

  “He said you were drunk,” Jason said.

  Mrs. Tyndal nodded. “I have a feeling he showed them the bruise on the boy’s arm. It all added up.”

  “And after that, you got divorced?” Regan asked.

  “We were going to get divorced anyway. That was coming. The only question was how much time I was going to be allowed to spend with my son. Peter was determined to see that I only spent a limited amount of time with him. I wanted to see Logan get into therapy and find some help. He clearly had some problems. Anger management. Narcissism. I’ve read the books over the years. I know some of the terms. But Peter didn’t want any of that. He said Logan would be better if I was out of the picture. He said I was the bad influence. Me and my drinking.”

  “He needed the discipline,” Regan said.

  “He needed something.” Mrs. Tyndal held her hands in the air, turning them palms up. “It wasn’t going to be me giving it to him on a daily basis. I was shaken after that incident with the stairs. Not scared, really, but shaken. To my core. I didn’t know how responsible I was for what happened that day, but I knew some of it belonged to me. I stopped drinking after that, after I moved out. I went to therapy. I got better.” She shifted in the seat again. “But Logan didn’t. I saw him as much as I could. I loved him. But I could tell he wasn’t getting the help he needed. He was becoming more and more . . . I don’t know. . . .”

  “Reckless?” Jason said.

  “That,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “Reckless and self-centered. A dangerous combination.” She focused her look on Regan. “When you came to me and told me what happened on that graduation night, it was a confirmation of everything that I feared about Logan. I didn’t think he was going to have a good end.”

  “And you respected my wish not to tell anyone,” Regan said. “To not get those boys into trouble for what they’d done.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered, would it? It wasn’t going to bring Logan back. And those boys were protecting you.” She swallowed and licked her lips. “I grieved for him, my boy. For many years, I grieved. Alone, mostly.”

  “I don’t understand something,” Jason said.

  Th
ey both turned to look at him. He moved his body so he was sitting up straighter. “I don’t have children, so maybe I don’t understand. But I’m wondering how a mother could let the men who killed her son go. How were you okay knowing that nothing was going to be done to those two?”

  Mrs. Tyndal stared at Jason as she formulated her answer. He’d never seen it before, but the resemblance to Logan was there. The brightness of the eyes, the toughness, the intelligence. Logan inherited it from his mother and not his father.

  “It was my fault,” she said. “None of this would have happened if I had fought harder for Logan’s well-being when he shoved me down those stairs. I enabled him as much as his father, so I felt I bore a share of the responsibility for what happened to Regan that night. I wasn’t in a position to ask for anything else.”

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  “Are you willing to tell all of this to the police?” Jason asked. “You’re the only person who can corroborate Regan’s and Derrick’s stories about our graduation night.”

  Mrs. Tyndal didn’t hesitate. She turned to Regan. “I’m willing to do it if it’s okay with you.”

  “It’s okay with me,” Regan said. “That’s why we came here.”

  “That’s what I was wondering,” Mrs. Tyndal said. “What does it matter if everyone knows the story now? After all, you’re asking me to tell the world that my son was a . . . that he sexually assaulted a woman.”

  “I just don’t think those guys, especially Derrick, should have the world think they did things they didn’t do,” Jason said. “It doesn’t seem right for their families. For their children. It all started because they were protecting you.”

  “No, it doesn’t seem right,” Regan said. “We’ve all been keeping these things to ourselves for decades. Maybe it’s time we just got it all out.”