The Damage

by Caitlin Wahrer

  In that moment, a realization washed over him slow and warm, like sinking into bathwater. He knew what she had done, but he had been wrong about why.

  She’d saved her children from losing their father. She’d saved her husband from becoming a murderer. And she’d saved Ray Walker’s life. Maybe she hadn’t cared so much about that, but the purity of it all was overwhelming him. She had saved Walker’s life. Not a good man, but a man nonetheless. Julia held the fence now and tilted her head down. Rice imagined what she might look like if he were facing her from the yard. A single tendril of her hair loose from her hat. Tears in her eyes, lips trembling in a smile. Overcome with joy, watching her children play and knowing they would be safe, knowing they would have their parents. Knowing she had committed a lesser sin only to halt a greater one.

  Rice had watched her a moment longer, then put the car into drive. He’d driven down the country lane until it met an outlet, through the town center, onto the highway, and back to the station. And then he went inside, and he sat at his desk, and he said nothing.

  Over the following months he and O’Malley had worked off of the 8:15 p.m. passenger list, trying to trace Walker’s journey. The “truck’s” license plate was only partially captured and totally indiscernible, so chasing Walker himself was the only option. The security footage confirmed that Walker had shown an ID to board the bus, and his real name was absent from the passenger list, so they meticulously moved through the names that had prepurchased tickets. They ran criminal and driving histories, searched social media, and compared pictures of the male passengers against the surveillance footage. It was slow going, and they were too bogged down with other work to make fast progress, but O’Malley was tenacious. She worked from a place of hell-bent rage that Walker had evaded justice and would move on to new victims. For his part, Rice worked alongside her, treating the horrific guilt he felt as penance for his sin. But he felt he, like Julia, had chosen the lesser of two evils.

  They’d enlisted the help of the local FBI, in theory, but it was O’Malley who determined that Raymond Walker was the passenger listed as “Steven Sanford,” and that “Steven Sanford” had also bought a train ticket from Boston to Chicago. The tickets were bought with stolen credit card information from the dark web, the federal agent told them. That was the sum total of his help.

  As best they could tell, Walker never made it to Chicago. Where he’d gotten off early they never determined.

  When the news broke that Walker had fled, Britny Cressey stepped into the light she’d been waiting for. She gave interviews to the local stations and papers, detailing what she’d learned from Walker before his flight. She was quick to qualify that she knew nothing about the escape itself or how he planned it. He’d never mentioned it to her, she said, but he had talked at length about the court process, the money he owed, the dread he felt that the game was rigged against him.

  Eventually the story of the man who evaded his justice grew stale, and the news coverage stopped, and life moved on without Raymond Walker.

  And then a month after Walker ran, Rice got a call from Linda Davis. Nick Hall had called her and asked her to dismiss the case against Raymond Walker.

  “He says he wants to just move on,” she said. “He really didn’t want to get into it. But he wanted us to know something: he was awake during Walker’s assault.”

  Rice had been stunned.

  “I know,” Linda said. “He sounds like he wants to just move on from the whole thing. I can’t say I blame him.”

  He’d been awake. Rice thought of O’Malley’s work early on the case, about serial rapists. There was a second type of sadist that they’d ruled out initially: the type of person who didn’t hurt their victims for the fun of it, but who fantasized about it. Maybe Walker was that type. Maybe he’d never had a victim fight back as hard as Nick, and it woke something up in him. Maybe that was why they never found anyone before Nick. He wasn’t the first—he was just the first Walker had left unable to hide the violence that was done to him.

  * * *

  The silence had stretched on long enough.

  “Julia,” he said. “Say something.”

  80

  Julia Hall, 2019

  He knew what happened. He’d always wondered if Julia realized it, too. He was saying he thought she might have known that he knew what she had done—of course not. She’d have lost her mind. He knew what she did. He knew? How? He’d always known. Why tell her now if not then? Why didn’t he arrest her? What had she thought would happen? She would go to prison now. The kids—oh Christ, the kids. What did he want? What could she do? Julia’s mind was barraged with thoughts, and she’d failed to piece together a coherent sentence when the dying detective spoke again.

  “Julia. Say something.” He sounded exhausted, like she was a child who wouldn’t stop getting out of bed at night.

  In all her years as a defender, she’d never met anyone guilty of a crime who was glad he spoke to the police, even to deny it or offer explanation. But then, a defense attorney wouldn’t meet someone who successfully misled the police, would she? And her silence was damning. When she spoke her voice was miniscule.

  “I don’t know what you mean, about whatever happened.”

  She should have kept her mouth shut.

  Detective Rice leaned back into his chair, and it squeaked under him. He was calmer than she would have imagined, if this was a prelude to her arrest. If this wasn’t a conversation but an interrogation. But then, what did she know of his self-control?

  “You know,” he said, “that depot’s security cameras captured cars out by the road.”

  Shit. Her eyes went wider. Oh, shit shit shit. She’d thought of it just after, and a million times since, but no one had come asking questions. She should have called him a cab, or dropped him even farther away, but she had to see him get on that bus.

  “I know it was you that dropped off Walker in Portland,” the detective went on. “There weren’t a lot of people driving those ugly Bajas.” He laughed as he said the sentence, and when he finished, he was coughing hard. He reached for the mask at his side.

  It gave her time to think. Why was he doing this? It had to be a trap. Without moving her head, her eyes scanned the room: no blinking light, no obvious recording devices. That recorder he used to use was so small, though; it could have been under her chair. Had he chosen her seat for her? Yes, he’d definitely told her to sit in this one . . . she’d gone for the other.

  Julia drew a quiet, shaky breath and expelled it. If she didn’t calm down she was going to have a panic attack. She breathed in. Calm down. She breathed out. Calm down. Detective Rice was reholstering his mask to the tank. He’d known for three years. Maybe this wasn’t him coming after her, maybe it was something else. Because why now? Had something new happened?

  Did they find Walker?

  At the thought, the room began pressing in from all sides; an electronic hum rang in her ears. The light began to dim, and Julia felt the urge to tip forward to her knees. She did, and Detective Rice’s voice was far away behind the hum.

  She scooted backward against her chair and put her head between her knees. With each breath, the hum quieted and the rush of panic softened. When she opened her eyes, the room was light again.

  “Julia.” His warm hand was on her shoulder. “Julia.”

  She looked back at him then turned forward again. “Sorry.”

  “You all right?”

  Julia nodded.

  “Was that a panic attack?”

  She nodded again. There was nothing to say. Her body had betrayed her guilt.

  “Julia, I’m not—I didn’t ask you here to arrest you or interrogate you. I’ve done this all wrong.” He seemed to say the last bit more to himself than to her. “Please, sit so I can see you?”

  On leaden legs, Julia pushed herself back up into the armchair.

>   “I’m not trying to scare you. Or, well . . .” He shook his head. “I dunno. Maybe I was.”

  She glanced at him sideways, then turned to him fully. His face was apologetic, and maybe something else.

  “No one else knows,” he said quietly.

  “You said my car was on camera.”

  The detective smiled. “It looked like a truck. It was never identified as yours, not officially.” He paused. “But I knew.”

  When Julia didn’t speak, he went on. “I’m moving to hospice next week, and I didn’t want to do this there. And, well, I don’t want to die without having the conversation at all.”

  “Okay,” she said quietly.

  “I do think I get why you helped him run away. I didn’t at first, and I meant to come out with it—expose what you’d done—but I wanted to talk to you before that. And then I went to see you, at your house. I saw you playing with the kids outside, and suddenly I understood.”

  “Understood?”

  “That you did it for them. For your kids, and for him—for Tony. You thought he’d kill him.”

  She almost nodded.

  “So you saved him instead.”

  Her eyes welled, and a heavy tear rolled down her cheek.

  “You are so good,” he said quietly. “It was always so clear about you. I was so angry when I saw your car on that tape. I felt like you’d betrayed me, isn’t that strange? I wanted to scream at you, understand why you weren’t who I thought you were. I drove to your house. Did you know that?”

  She shook her head. She hadn’t known. She couldn’t even place the day.

  “I was ready to rumble,” he said with a laugh. “My mother would have called me spittin’ mad. But then I saw you, in the yard with your kids. And it just hit me that I was wrong. I did know you. You were good. It was the only thing you knew to do.”

  The detective was looking at her with such tenderness that it seemed impossible he could be faking it.

  “You sent him away,” he said.

  More tears slid down her cheeks. She still got upset sometimes, when she thought about what she did and how terrified she had been afterward.

  Detective Rice had known all along. All the times she made herself sick wondering what would happen if he found out, he already knew.

  “Was Tony angry with you?”

  She was so tired.

  Just a single word. It wasn’t a confession.

  “No,” she said.

  81

  Tony Hall, 2016

  Sometime after 10:00 p.m. on the day Raymond Walker went missing, Tony held very still at Julia’s side, his hand frozen on her thigh, while she told him what she had done.

  When she was finished, Tony laid his head down on her lap. He only had a single thought: the only way forward was to tell her the truth.

  “Jules.”

  “Do you hate me?”

  “Jules, I changed my mind.”

  Her eyes went wide. “What?”

  He told her everything that Nick had said. That Nick wanted to go through with the trial. That Nick needed him to stop trying to fix everything. That sitting in the visiting room at Goodspring, Tony changed his mind.

  “Okay,” Julia said. “Okay. Okay. Okay.” Her mouth was a record, skipping on the word.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Tony said quickly. He didn’t have a clue how; he just wanted to take away whatever she was feeling.

  “Okay,” she said again. “I’ll just call Elisa. I’ll tell her to send him back.”

  “He’s not gonna come back.”

  “She has everything he needs: the money, the passport. If she won’t give it to him, he’ll have to.”

  “Or he’ll turn on you.” Look what he’d done. Look what he’d fucking done.

  “That was always a risk I was taking. We’ll just have to deal with it.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll deny whatever he says. It’ll get messy, but it already is. We have to get him back.”

  Tony stood. “Honey, the exact thing you were trying to protect the kids from could happen. You could get caught.” His voice broke, and he finished in a whisper. “You could go to prison. Who knows how they’d punish this?”

  Julia stood from the table and took his hands. “Take a breath. We’ll figure it out.”

  “What if the police connect the tickets to the woman, Elisa,” Tony said.

  “They can’t,” Julia said. “And even if they did, she won’t give them anything.”

  Tony spoke slowly. “Why blow it all up?”

  “I’ve taken the one thing Nick had left.”

  “You didn’t do that. I did.”

  “What if he doesn’t forgive you? After everything he just told you.”

  She was right. Nick would have every reason to blame this on him—it was all his fault. But he would have to live with that.

  “They’ll figure out Walker got on a bus,” Julia said. “It might take them a bit, but they’ll have to figure that out.”

  “I think so,” Tony said.

  “So Nick will think he ran, too.”

  “Right,” Tony said. “You’re right.”

  “But what will he do? What will Nick do if he can’t have a trial?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think that’s for us to figure out.”

  He walked around Julia and pulled out a chair. She sat back down beside him.

  He leaned his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands. “I’m sorry I went so far away from you.”

  Julia pulled her chair closer to his. “It wasn’t just you. I couldn’t even see I was doing the same thing. If I’d just told you . . . we should have been doing it together.”

  They sat at the table talking it through. There was no way to unwind what was set in motion. The damage was already done. So they decided, together, to let Walker go.

  82

  Nick Hall, 2016

  A month after Raymond Walker disappeared, Nick sat on a couch across from his counselor. Not at a hospital, not at a program, but at an office in Wells.

  “So, how are you doing?”

  Today Jeff’s sweater was navy blue with a fisherman-style knit. He started the session with the same question he always did.

  Nick sat forward on the couch. “I actually wanted to ask you that.”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “No.” Nick laughed. “I mean, how do you think I’m doing?”

  “Mm,” Jeff said. “I don’t like this game.”

  “I know how I feel. I know I’m not gonna just be ‘better’ or ‘fixed,’ but what’s my prognosis?”

  Jeff raised a salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “Prognosis?”

  “You must have it written down somewhere. Or you have one in your head.”

  Jeff fiddled with the band of his silver wristwatch.

  “When will I sleep normal? I mean, am I ever gonna go home with a guy I like again?”

  Jeff smiled. “Your prognosis is good, Nick.”

  Nick leaned back into the couch. Jeff might have been humoring him, but he didn’t care.

  “When we look at the data, you have some factors working in your favor toward a good outcome. But you know I’m not only about that. This right here is the most important piece, and it’s also the only one you have in your control. Keep putting in the work, and your prognosis is real good.”

  It was like a knot in Nick’s stomach untied itself. A feeling of comfort spread through his body as he listened to Jeff’s voice.

  “We can keep working through what happened with Ray, the stories you tell yourself about what the assault meant. How those stories have been scripted by your society, your father, even your brother. And we can work on integrating your identity—who you are as a man—with this one thing that happened to y
ou. And eventually, it’s going to get better. There isn’t gonna be a last day you ever have any symptoms. I still have nightmares about my abuse, and I’m old as dirt. But it will get better. And how you see yourself, how you see other people, romantic relationships—all that looks good to me.”

  “Cool,” Nick said. Sometimes he didn’t have the words to match how he felt when he met with Jeff. The future Jeff had just imagined for him was everything he wanted. But what it would take to get there—reliving that night, saying out loud the worst things he thought about himself, airing every stupid thing he had ever heard about what it meant to be dominated by someone else—it would be brutal. But he would do whatever it took to get to the future Jeff thought he could have.

  “Any updates on court?”

  “Yeah, actually. I’ve decided to dismiss the case.”

  “Really? Why?”

  It happened last week, after Nick had moved home from Goodspring. At first, when Ray went missing, Nick couldn’t stop thinking that Tony had done something stupid. Worse than stupid. He knew from Julia that the police had gone to interview his brother, and she seemed worried. But then the ADA herself called Nick: Ray had gotten on a bus to Boston. The coward had run away. Their next court date was in March, Linda said. She wasn’t sure if the judge would let her go forward with a trial if Ray hadn’t been found by then, but she wanted to try. Nick decided not to tell her the truth about his testimony just yet. It sounded like he had some time to think about it.

  Then last week Julia came to his apartment.

  It was snowing softly, and the city hadn’t plowed Spring Street. They trudged down it anyway.

  Ray didn’t jump bail alone, she told him. She, Nick’s sister-in-law, had helped his rapist escape.

  Nick was stunned. It sounded like a joke without a punchline.

  “I need you to know,” she said, “you changed his mind. It was just too late.”