Alyssa felt as if her legs had turned to water. It was one thing to encounter him at the UP&S plant—even at her school, for that matter. To find him waiting for her in her own living room was another matter. Alyssa’s first impulse to turn around and run back out the front door.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Shawn said, as she reached for the doorknob. “Look at this. Here. Do you know what this is?”
Shawn momentarily shifted the light so that she could take a look at the metallic object in his hand. It was a pistol of some sort.
“I’m going to assume that you aren’t particularly knowledgeable about guns,” he elaborated. “This is a Smith & Wesson 9 mm semiautomatic. I brought it along just in case your mother was to show up unexpectedly. I haven’t forgotten about her hitting me with that mop handle, you know. I didn’t think I would need to use the gun on you. But if you’re going to be uncooperative—”
He raised the pistol and pointed it directly at her. She could see its black muzzle in the glare of the flashlight. Would he really shoot her, right here in her own living room?
There was no telling what Shawn Myers would do. He was obviously crazy. Insane. She couldn’t take the chance. She folded her hands in front of her, feeling herself tremble. Why had this man come here? What did he want? Then she considered what he had wanted that night in the hallway at UP&S.
He seemed to be reading her thoughts. “No, I’m not going to rape you. Forget about that.” He waved his hand dismissively, as if the sexual assault had been nothing more than a minor misunderstanding. Then he looked at her as a man might look at something disgusting that he had just stepped in. “To tell you the truth, you’ve lost your appeal for me. You’ve been an awful lot of trouble. A lot more trouble than you’re worth.”
Alyssa felt a momentary surge of relief. At least this man was not going to finish the assault that her mother had interrupted.
“But,” he said. “That doesn't mean that you’re off the hook. This matter with the police: You and your bitchy mother have landed me in a heap of trouble, with your little tattletale routine. I’m a busy man, Alyssa. I don't have time for this sort of crap. That means that you have to change your story.”
Of course. Now she saw what he wanted. This man was in a lot of trouble. According to her mother, the county prosecutor, Mr. McKnight, had said as much. Alyssa also knew that the sexual assault charges could cause him a great deal of embarrassment, even though he had somehow managed to keep the matter mostly quiet so far.
“I can be a bad person when I want to be—when I need to be. I did something really bad once.” He paused for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to reveal more details about this. Finally, he shook his head. “No. You don’t need to know exactly what that was. And maybe it would be better to let you use your imagination, anyway.”
This apparently struck him as funny. He let out a low, nervous little laugh. Alyssa could feel gooseflesh rising on her arms.
“Are you scared yet?” he asked.
“Yes,” Alyssa answered truthfully. Lying would have been beyond her.
Shawn considered this. “That’s good. Very good, in fact. Here’s what you need to get through your head: If you don’t change your story, I’ll kill you. But first I’m going to rape you. And before that, I’m going to rape and kill your mother.”
He said all of this very matter-of-factly, as if he were relating tasks that he had performed at the office earlier in the day.
“You tell that prosecutor,” he went on. “You tell him that I never sexually assaulted you. You tell him that it was a misunderstanding. I’ll let you figure out the details. You’re a smart girl. You’ll be able to make it work. I have confidence in you, Alyssa.”
He turned off the flashlight, and the room plunged into total darkness again.
Abruptly, Shawn stood up from the chair. Before she could react, he was on top of her—towering over her. He had not been this close since the night when he had assaulted her.
Only now she was alone with him. Her mother would not appear from nowhere with a makeshift weapon. Nor could she count on rescue from the other man. The man who had slammed Shawn up against the wall that night.
He was so close that she could take in his scent, a combination of rancid sweat, men’s cologne, and of course, some sort of liquor. Was it beer? Or whiskey? She didn’t know.
And there was something else in that swirl of odors of well: the smell of raw masculine desire. He had said that he no longer desired her; but this had been a lie, she knew. A man’s empty display of bravado.
She wanted to run—wanted to punch him in the groin. She wanted to scream. But she couldn’t make her body follow any of the commands inside her head.
He bent down and kissed her on the forehead. There was something about the gesture that was almost courtly.
“Remember,” he said. “First your mother, and then you.”
Then he turned and walked away from her. She closed her eyes and stood there, trying to catch her breath. Her heart seemed to be beating impossibly fast. At any second, it might explode outward through her chest.
She could hear Shawn making his way through the darkened house. She heard his footsteps in the kitchen. Then the sound of a doorknob turning, the back door being opened.
So that was how he had gotten in. Perhaps he had picked the lock. Or maybe he had found the key that her mother kept beneath the flowerpot on the back porch. Alyssa recalled that Donna had placed the spare key there as a backup, after she had forgotten to take her key to school one day. Or maybe Shawn had simply found the backdoor unlocked; every once in while, either she or her mother forgot to lock it. These were all possibilities.
She stood there in the living room for quite a while, listening to the sounds of the empty house. Somewhere above her, a piece of lumber, perhaps one of the house’s main support beams, shifted and settled. This nearly caused her to cry aloud. She kept expecting to the hear the back door open again, kept expecting to hear Shawn’s footsteps on the kitchen floor. Then he would announce that he had changed his mind—that tonight would be as good a time as any to rape and kill her.
But Shawn did not return. After a long while—she didn’t know if this was a half hour or an hour—she was able to summon the composure to move from the spot where he had left her standing.
Chapter 43
Alyssa was sitting in Tim McKnight’s office with her mother when she derailed the criminal proceedings—just as Shawn had ordered her to do.
She didn’t exactly change her story. That was impossible, given what her mother had witnessed. She merely indicated that she didn't want to testify—wouldn’t testify, in fact.
“What are you saying?” Donna asked, aghast, when Alyssa dropped this bombshell.
As expected, her mother received the news like a slap in the face. Alyssa knew, of course, that her own timing could not have been worse. She should have spoken with Donna before this meeting, in private, without the county prosecutor for an audience.
But she had been procrastinating—wavering. She knew that her mother was dead-set on moving the legal process forward. She also knew that Shawn Myers would kill them both if she went along with it.
“So you’re saying that I attacked our largest customer by mistake?” Donna went on. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Alyssa could see the color rising in her mother’s cheeks. Now the interrogation would follow. If only her mother would let this go. She had no idea that both of their lives were in danger. She had no idea that this was the only way she could possibly save them.
Alyssa had briefly contemplated telling her mother about Shawn’s visit. She had just as quickly decided that this would only make certain that Shawn would carry out the worst of his threats. She couldn't tell Donna the whole truth. Given her mother’s volatile temper, that news would send her off the deep end. She would take some precipitous step that would only get her killed. Her mother was impetuous. She always wanted to “take the
bull by the horns,” didn’t she? Well, that wouldn’t work with a crazy man like Shawn Myers.
Donna would immediately call the police, and then she would confront Shawn Myers. Probably take after him with the mop handle again. Shawn would deny that he had had ever been in the house. She knew that he would have been clever enough to cover his tracks, to leave no fingerprints.
And what about the police? Would the police protect her? Well, the police hadn’t been able to protect her so far, had they? What protection could they provide, given that they obviously had no intention of arresting Shawn Myers and holding him in jail? Would they assign her and her mother police escorts every time they left home? Would they maintain a patrol car at the end of their driveway?
She knew better. New Hastings was a small town, and she was no one important. She and her mother were on their own.
So this was the only way. If pushed further into a corner, Shawn’s next response would be to kill Donna. Shawn had explicitly promised as much. With her father no longer a regular part of her life, Alyssa had lost one parent already. She couldn't afford to lose her mother as well. Therefore, the best thing to do was to let this go—and then Shawn Myers would most likely go away and leave them alone.
“Alyssa, I don’t understand—”
Suddenly, she felt the floodgates open. She began to cry, right there in front of her mother and the county prosecutor. On one level, the outburst was a response to the situation before her, this impossible dilemma. Whatever she did, she would likely bring harm to both herself and her mother—without even punishing the man who threatened them both.
She knew, though, that beneath those tears were tears for something else: She had been so hopeful that she and Noah would be able to overcome their mutual shyness and finally connect. She had been waiting, tentatively taking small steps of her own in Noah’s direction.
But now that was probably ruined forever, too: Only yesterday Noah had approached her in the hallway at school, smiling that irresistible, shy smile of his. But Alyssa had detected that he was a little nervous, too.
She had known even as he approached what his intentions were: He was planning to ask her to the school’s Holiday Dance. That would have been the gesture that would have gotten them started—a bridging of the gap of awkwardness that separated them.
Noah had begun, trying to sound more casual than was his usual manner: “Hey, Alyssa, I was wondering if—”
And she had turned abruptly away from him, giving him the literal cold shoulder. It was not that she didn't want to go to the dance with Noah. (She desired it more than anything, in fact.) However, she couldn't be with Noah while she was still trying to rid herself of the tactile memory of Shawn Myer’s hands on her breasts. Shawn’s hands on her privates.
She needed time. But there had been no way to explain that to Noah, so she had simply turned her back on him. The boy had walked away, crestfallen, almost certainly convinced that she wanted nothing to do with him.
And how wrong that was. How horribly wrong!
Recalling all of this, she saw the prosecutor staring at her across the wide expanse of his desk with searching eyes. He didn't understand. How could he?
Alyssa leapt up, knocking over her chair in the process. Her mother called out for her to wait; but Alyssa yanked open the door of Tim McKnight’s office and ran into the hallway.
After catching up with Alyssa, Donna requested, demanded, and finally pleaded for the girl to explain her actions. Why did she now refuse to testify against the man who had violated and humiliated her? It didn’t make sense.
Finally she had ushered Alyssa into the lobby of the county building. They would go, but first she would have to apologize to the county prosecutor for the unexpected twist that her daughter had delivered. She owed the man no less.
Also, she would ask McKnight if the case against Shawn Myers could still be salvaged. McKnight had already told her that much would ride on her daughter’s formal testimony.
Walking back to the office, Donna was completely bewildered—and more than a little annoyed—at her daughter’s behavior. And this was only the beginning of her bewilderment and annoyance. No—her disillusionment and her rage. She had caught Shawn Myers red-handed. He had already been arrested once—or at least questioned by the police. The prosecutor seemed inclined to press forward with criminal charges. But the prosecutor’s intentions came with conditions and caveats.
Donna assumed that Alyssa’s stubborn refusal to cooperate would change matters. It would have to. There had been no rape—thank God—but that also meant that there was no concrete evidence. Only the word of her and her daughter against a powerful man whose father was even more powerful.
Correction: Now it was only her word against the powerful man and his father.
“I’m sorry,” she told Tim McKnight as she closed the door to his office behind her. “Alyssa is hysterical. I should probably take her home. But first I need to ask you: Can you still move this forward?”
Tim McKnight let out a long sigh before speaking.
“Okay, I’m going to level with you here. This weakens our chances if I were to press charges. Your daughter wasn’t penetrated. She wasn’t bruised. This means that there is no physical evidence of a crime having been committed.”
“But I saw what happened,” Donna said. “I was there.”
“You saw what appeared to be a struggle between your daughter and Mr. Myers,” McKnight said. “You didn’t see the entire confrontation.”
Donna felt her temper begin to rise. They had been through this before. She checked her anger; she needed to control her frustration for her daughter’s sake.
“But I saw what happened,” she repeated. “I saw that man put his hands on my daughter.”
“You may have seen Shawn Myers tussling with your daughter, Ms. Chalmers. But there could be a lot of possible explanations for that; and not all of them come down to sex. Shawn Myers could even manage to turn this around, and claim that your daughter assaulted him because he reprimanded her for using foul language or for performing her cleaning duties improperly.”
“Would anyone actually buy that?” Donna asked incredulously.
“Teenagers assault adults all the time,” Tim McKnight said. “Shawn Myers could also claim that she came on to him in a sexual manner, and the struggle ensued when he pushed her away.”
“But she’s only fifteen years old.”
“And only two years younger than Amy Fisher was when she had a consensual affair with a man who was eighteen years her senior. Do you remember that case, Ms. Chalmers? Fisher subsequently shot her lover’s wife in the face.”
“You’re comparing Alyssa to the ‘Long Island Lolita’?” Donna asked, recalling the sensationalized attempted murder case from twenty years earlier.
“I’m simply pointing out that not all teenaged girls are angels. And yes, some of them do initiate sexual relations with much older men. Some of them commit acts of violence. I’m saying that we can’t build a case solely on the grounds that there was a mostly verbal altercation between your daughter and Mr. Myers, not without some corroborating evidence or testimony that proves your version of the events.”
Donna felt momentarily overwhelmed by what McKnight was saying. She understood the gist of his words, all right: She was trapped in a legal grey area, where so much would come down to a matter of interpretation. Shawn Myers could lie and get away with it—unless they could prove that he was lying.
“Ms. Chalmers,” McKnight continued. “There are many things that would make a difference here: It would make a difference if your daughter had been raped, and I could point to semen samples and evidence of vaginal trauma. It would make a difference if there had been another person present when the altercation took place. But now it’s your word against the word of Shawn Myers. And you can bet that he’s going to throw every resource that he can at the county if I decide to formally charge him with sexual assault.”
Donna shook her head. It
all came down to money again.
McKnight lifted a stack of folders from his desk. “Do you know what these are, Ms. Chalmers? These are all potential criminal cases. Every one of them represents a person who is probably guilty of something. My job as county prosecutor is to analyze each one of them, and make a determination of how to best serve the victims and the public, with an eye to utilizing the county’s resources most effectively.”
“Okay,” Donna said, defeated. “I understand.”
“Listen, Ms. Chalmers. Get your daughter into counseling. Obviously something occurred between her and Shawn Myers—something that is deeply troubling her. We may not be able to turn it into a successful criminal case, but that doesn’t mean that you should forget all about it. Your daughter needs help.”
McKnight began thumbing through the open Rolodex atop his desk. “I happen to be aware of an excellent counseling program for victims of sexual assault, Ms. Chalmers. It’s subsidized by the state, so it’s mostly free of charge. Here—take one of their business cards.”
Having left McKnight’s office empty-handed except for the business card of the counseling service, Donna contemplated her next move. Did she even have a next move? Perhaps not.
As McKnight said, it would probably be a good idea for her to contact a sexual trauma counselor. As she started the van, Donna glanced at the card. The generic-sounding organization apparently operated throughout the state. The card that McKnight had given her contained the telephone number and email address of a volunteer counselor named Tina Shields.
Yes, she would give this woman a call, or send her an email. It couldn't hurt.
From the passenger seat, Alyssa gave the business card a questioning stare. Donna decided to raise the subject of counseling a bit later, after Alyssa had calmed down. She tucked the card into her purse and put the van in gear.
What accounted for Alyssa’s sudden about-face? The girl said nothing as they left the county building’s parking lot and began the drive home. Finally, during the drive home, Donna broached the subject again.
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