“Allene,” she said sharply. “Come down here. This instant.”
Allene started to protest and then slowly she gathered up her pocketbook and climbed down from the bleachers, her cowboy boots clattering on the wooden slats. As the girl made her way down the steps, Lillie glanced back out on the field. No sign of Grayson yet. He and Pink were no doubt still busily discussing their secrets, trying to avoid her wrath. But Grayson was not going to get away from her this time.
Allene reached the bottom seat. Lillie reached out a hand to her and helped her as she jumped off. The small-boned freckled hand was cold in her own, and Lillie felt as if she were guiding the girl down from a high ledge where she had gotten herself trapped.
Oh, no, Lillie thought furiously. Grayson was not going to have a chance to run roughshod over this girl, or any other girl, because she was not going to let him. He who had not even had the guts to defend his own sister. He was not fit to have a girlfriend. He was not going to hurt anybody else, ever again. She would see to that.
“Allene,” Lillie said sternly. “Do your parents know that you’re seeing Grayson again?”
Allene shook her head sadly.
“Well, you better just stop seeing him, or I am going to tell them. I mean it, Allene. Forget about Grayson. Don’t waste yourself on him. He’ll only hurt you. He doesn’t care for you.”
Lillie half expected the girl to be defiant but instead Allene shrugged and shoved her hands in her pockets. “I know, I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t you be sorry,” said Lillie. “You just scoot.”
“Grayson’ll be mad,” she said worriedly.
“I’ll take care of Grayson,” Lillie said grimly.
“Miz Burdette, please don’t tell my mom.”
“Not unless I catch you hanging around with him again. Now go.”
The girl hoisted her pocketbook onto her shoulder and said good-bye. Lillie watched as she disappeared around the corner of the bleachers. Then she turned and looked back across the muddy field. Grayson was coming out of the locker room.
He must have glanced up to see if Allene was still there admiring him because he had already spotted his mother and was on his way to her, loping toward the bleachers, his handsome face a study in feigned innocence.
“What happened to Allene?” he asked by way of greeting.
“I sent her home. Get over here,” hissed Lillie. She could feel her heart thudding in her chest as she turned her back on him and started down the aisle.
“Mom, I’ve got practice,” he said stubbornly.
Lillie turned on him, her eyes flashing. “Don’t pretend you don’t know why I’m here. I know that was your father on the phone. Now do as I tell you,” she spat out at him. “I am still your mother.”
Her tone silenced him and he lowered his languid blue eyes. A redness crept up his neck above the dirty uniform. He glanced up at her and saw the bruise forming beneath her eye and across her cheekbone. “Mom!” he exclaimed. “Where’d you get that?”
“Never mind that,” she snapped.
“Sorry,” he said with a shrug, and followed her docilely to the end of the bleachers.
Lillie, trembling with rage, did not turn around until she was satisfied that they were out of sight of the others. She wanted to say every vile thing that was on her mind. She had come prepared to rail at him, to vent her fury on him like a storm. She wanted to hurt him, humiliate him, accuse him. But when she turned and saw him standing there obediently behind her, his helmet on one hip, his fair hair mussed as if from sleep, his wide eyes on her, as if he only wanted to ease her mind, she felt the fury deflate inside her and what remained was confusion and disbelief. This was her son. Her little boy. Pink must have gotten it wrong somehow. He would never have deserted his sister that way. Maybe he wasn’t even there. Maybe Tyler just said that. There had to be some other explanation.
“Grayson,” she began, her tone severe, her voice shaking, “as I’m sure your father just told you on the phone, I heard what happened. That Tyler Ansley killed your sister and that you stood by and let him.”
Grayson gripped his helmet and stared at her, wide-eyed, the flush gone from his neck, his skin now pale.
Lillie hesitated in the face of his silence. It isn’t so, she thought with a sudden, wild hope in her heart. He’ll tell me that it did not happen. That he wasn’t there. That Tyler made it up. “Is this true?” she asked.
Don’t answer that, she thought.
Grayson looked away from her, squinting out, unseeing, over the field, and then shifted his weight to the other hip.
“Well?” she said.
Grayson shook his head. His voice was small. “I’m sorry, Mom. I hoped you’d never find out.”
To her surprise, his admission stunned her, almost as if she had never heard a word of this before. “Grayson,” she whispered. “My God…”
“Mom,” he pleaded. “Mom, I’m sorry. It was just…it was a freak thing…”
Lillie struggled to retain control. But she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. “You tell me what happened,” she said, and the words burst forth between gasps. “I cannot believe…what your father told me…was the whole story. That you let him…kill your sister. Grayson, I have to know…how could this be?”
His face was contorted and tears fell from his eyes. “Mom, I know you’re mad at me…“he said.
“Mad?” she cried, almost wanting to laugh at the inadequacy, the incongruity, of the word. “Grayson, look at me. I know you. You’re my son. You wouldn’t…you couldn’t do that. Just leave her there. Let her die. I mean, you and Michele, you loved her…” Her voice was high, pleading.
“I did. You know I did,” he cried. “But I swear, Mom. I never thought Tyler would hurt her. I thought he was just kidding around.”
He looked at her miserably, waiting a moment for her to speak, but she did not. “We were drinking,” Grayson said. “I know we weren’t supposed to, but all the kids do, you know.”
She was peering at him as if it were a struggle to understand him, as if he were speaking a foreign language.
Grayson shifted uneasily under her gaze and continued haltingly. “Michele actually…she wasn’t supposed to be there. I mean, she overheard us saying we were going down there and she just insisted on tagging along. I tried to tell her to go home but she…she liked him, you know. I guess she thought it was a good chance to be around him or something.
“So, anyway, we were drinking and she was teasing him, and he was waving the baseball bat around, and Michele was laughing and then bam, bam. Before I knew it, he hit her. And she fell.”
“Stop it,” Lillie shrieked, clapping her hands over her ears. She could not stand to hear it. She did not want to picture her little girl struck down. She could not bear to hear her son recounting it, the way he would some incident at school.
“Mom, listen,” he said urgently. “How did I know he would hit her?”
“You should have…You should have taken care of her,” Lillie cried.
“Mom, I couldn’t. Please.” He stepped toward her. “Don’t.”
She was backing away from him, flailing one fist feebly at him, as if to keep him away. She bumped into the bleacher and grabbed on to it, tears blinding her again. She wiped her eyes angrily.
“So,” she declared in a cold, cruel voice, “this boy killed your sister and you stood by like a complete coward and did nothing. Except to lie about it and protect him, of course.”
“No,” he yelped. “No. I jumped on him. I hit him. It was too late. Mom, you weren’t there. I’m telling you. Nobody could have prevented it.”
“That’s all you can say about it? You were helpless?”
“Come on, Mom. Don’t you think I would have done something if I could?” His eyes were bright with tears, and he wiped the muddy sleeve of his jersey across them, streaking his face with dirt.
Lillie shook her head furiously, her own tears choking her. “I don’t know,” she wail
ed. “I’ll never know. You stand there and tell me this. As if you don’t realize how you betrayed her. You betrayed Michele. And me. All of us. Aren’t you ashamed?”
This seemed to prick him and his face hardened. “Look,” he said, “I’m not the only one…”
“I cannot understand this,” she said. “No matter how hard I try. How could you stand there? And do nothing? How can you sleep at night for thinking of it? How can you walk around each day as if none of this had ever happened?”
“I said I was sorry,” he cried hoarsely. “Look, what do you want from me? What do you want me to do? Just tell me and I’ll do it.”
Lillie turned away from him and looked up at the steely gray sky. It was true. What else could he say? Michele was dead. Of course he was sorry. How many ways could he say it? His tears told her everything. For all the good it did, he was as sorry as could be.
Lillie shook her head and sank down on the edge of one of the bleacher seats, staring blankly out ahead of her. “I don’t want to torture you with this,” she said softly. “You’re my son. I know you are sorry. And I know you have suffered too. But I can’t just let it go. All these lies.” She shook her head. “What about Michele? When you agreed to all these lies, to this silence, didn’t any of you think of her?”
“What do you mean?” he asked warily.
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Your sister is murdered and the whole lot of you just bent over backward to pretend it never even happened.”
“Wait a minute, Mom,” he said. “We couldn’t tell. Once it came out that I was there too—”
“I know,” she interrupted him. “You don’t want to face the humiliation. Maybe even a trial. God help me, I don’t want you to either. And now your father is involved. And the sheriff. But, tell me something, Grayson. Do you think this boy who killed your sister should just go free? Go unpunished? How can we live with that?”
Grayson stood silently above her, chewing the inside of his mouth absently as he stared out over the field. Then slowly, gingerly, he sat down on the bleacher beside her. “Mom, there’s another reason,” he said. ‘This is hard to tell you…. There’s more to this than you really know about.”
Lillie frowned at him. “Meaning what?”
Grayson licked his lips and turned his helmet in his hands, avoiding her eyes. He seemed to be concentrating on something, wrestling with it. Then he said, “There’s something else that happened that night. Dad doesn’t even know about it.”
“Since when do you tell me and not your father?” she asked stiffly.
Grayson sighed. “I didn’t tell Dad because…it’s about Michele. I didn’t want him to know this. I mean, you know how he is about her. I mean, in his eyes, she was just…you know, his little girl.”
“What are you trying to say?” Lillie demanded. “I can’t take much more, Grayson.”
“Look, I know you think I’m a coward and that’s why I wanted to cover this mess up, but I’m trying to protect Michele too, in my own way. So it won’t come out what happened.”
“Wait a minute,” Lillie cried. “No. You can’t think that you are going to turn around now and somehow blame this whole thing on your sister? Are you going to tell me maybe that she had a drink and she hit him first? Don’t you dare, Grayson. Don’t you dare try to blame this on her.”
“Not a drink, Mom,” he interrupted her. “We all had a drink.”
“You stood there and you watched it happen and you did nothing. At least be man enough to admit it now, Grayson.”
“I wasn’t standing there. The truth is…I walked away,” Grayson said. “I was leaving.”
“We know that, Grayson,” she said sharply.
“I had to.”
“You did not have to. You chose to,” Lillie insisted.
“I had to,” he cried. “She…she took off her blouse.”
Lillie stared at him. There was a bright pink flush rising up his neck to his cheeks. He did not look at her. Her own face felt hot. “She did not,” Lillie said in a shaky voice.
“Mom, she did,” Grayson said. “She liked him. She had a crush on Tyler. I guess she had some idea that it would make him interested…I don’t know. She said it was too hot out and she took it off. I couldn’t just stand there, Mom. It was too embarrassing. I had to leave.”
Lillie was shaking her head. Not Michele, she thought, her cheeks burning with shame for her daughter. Not my baby. But she was not a baby.
“I guess she thought he’d like it, but he must have thought she was a tease or something.” Grayson sighed. “Anyway, I went to leave and I heard it happen, and when I turned back…”
Lillie hid her face in her hands, humiliated, terrified, as if she herself were reliving her daughter’s final moments.
“I put her shirt back on her after it was over,” said Grayson. ‘There was nothing else I could do. I didn’t want anyone to find her like that.”
Lillie squeezed her eyes shut but she could not blot out the image of her shy Michele, made reckless by infatuation and moonshine and moonlight, trying to be daring. Never suspecting…a victim of her own innocence.
Grayson interrupted her thoughts. “Don’t tell Dad,” he said earnestly. “Okay, Mom? I don’t want him to know about this.”
Lillie nodded numbly.
“What does that mean?” said Grayson. “Are you going to tell him or not?”
Lillie looked at her son with vacant eyes. “I don’t want to talk to your father right now.”
“I don’t want anyone else knowing this about her,” Grayson said. “They’ll get the wrong idea about her. She really wasn’t like that usually. She was kind of shy of boys. I still don’t know why she did it.”
Why? Lillie thought, more empty than angry now. Did she think, as young girls sometimes do, that no one would ever want her? She should have told me how she felt, Lillie thought bitterly. I could have made her understand that she never had to flaunt herself. That one day she would be loved, pursued, cherished. Lillie felt as if her head were spinning from this new revelation. You could have confided in me, Lillie wanted to cry out. We were so close. There was a sick churning in her stomach.
“I was trying to protect her, Mom,” Grayson said urgently.
Lillie looked at her son as if he had awoken her from a trance, and she felt her heart soften toward him. She searched his troubled eyes as if from far away and then nodded. “I can see that,” she said, reaching over and gripping his forearm for a second. Despite the renewed anguish she felt, picturing the clumsy attempt at seduction, the explosive consequences, she was glad he had told her. It was like a rickety bridge back to her son, reconnecting them. It was as if her heart had stopped completely, and now she could feel it, feebly beating again.
‘Thank you for doing that for her,” she said.
“I just wish I could have saved her, Mom,” he cried.
“Oh, Grayson, so do I.” Lillie moaned, shaking her head. Slowly she got up from the bleacher seat and brushed herself off.
Grayson scrambled to his feet. “When you get home—” he said.
“I’m not going home,” Lillie interrupted.
“Where are you going?” he asked, alarmed.
Lillie looked around the playing field, empty now, the clouds low and smoky, the darkness gathering. “I’m going to Aunt Brenda’s. I’m going to stay there tonight, if she’ll have me.”
He glanced at her bruised eye and nodded. “Because of that.”
“Because of everything. I just can’t. Grayson, I need to think. I don’t know what to do next. I just need to be by myself and think about all this.”
“Well, what are you going to do?” he asked anxiously.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t mind telling you that I have never felt so completely at a loss in all my life.”
“It takes a while to get used to it all,” he said. “But I don’t think you should be away from home right now.”
“Don’t worry about me,” sh
e said. “You just go get dressed. I’ll be fine.”
Grayson glanced at her through narrowed eyes. “You’re not going to tell Aunt Brenda about this, are you?”
“I am not telling anybody anything tonight, believe me. I am just going there to have some privacy. Some room to breathe.”
This answer seemed to reassure him. “Listen, Mom,” he said. “I have given this a lot of thought. And I am sorry.”
“I know,” she said dully.
“But it’s too late now to start dredging it all up to other people. Everybody gets hurt that way.”
“Everybody’s already hurt,” she said.
“Yeah, but now we have to think about the future. I mean, what good would it do to have to go through it all over again?”
“I have to go, Grayson.” Lillie sighed. “Tell your father where I went, okay?”
She did not wait for him to reply. She had to get away from him. From all of it. She felt battered, inside and out. She had thought that Michele’s murder had been the ultimate nightmare. She smiled bitterly at her own naivete. It seemed now that her daughter’s death had been just the beginning. She felt as if everything that held her world in place was coming apart.
Lillie walked slowly toward the parking lot and her car. When she reached the car, she turned and looked back. Her son was still standing there in the gathering dusk, feet apart, fists clenched, his eyes boring into her. His padded figure was silhouetted against the gray sky like some large, impossibly idealized sculpture of a man.
Chapter 20
IN THE GLOOM OF A FOGGY EVENING, the cluster of dimly lit Georgian-style buildings of the Sentinel Military Academy looked like a fortress built into the North Carolina hillside. Jordan passed the sign that indicated the school had been founded in 1887 and drove slowly up the hill and down the driveway until he reached the parking lot beside the main quadrangle.
It was nearly seven o’clock and he was weary from his trip, but he wanted to accomplish his mission right away. He was edgy and anxious about how he was going to handle the boy, and it was best to just get it over with. There was an American flag, and a WWI vintage riding gun anchored in the center of a grassy island in front of the central building. Jordan figured that was where he was bound to find the person in authority. A couple of gray-uniformed cadets hurried past him on the walkway, their heads down, and some dried leaves rustled across the lawns, but otherwise it was quiet. Jordan climbed the steps to the main building, walked inside, and looked around.
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