“Yeah, right,” she said and very carefully and slowly set the Waterford carafe down before she dropped it.
She wanted to call an ambulance but her mother wouldn’t allow it. “You can’t,” she said, her voice as cracked as her ribs. “You can’t, Sally. Your father would be ruined, if anyone believed us. I can’t allow that to happen.”
“He deserves to be ruined,” Sally said, but she obeyed. She was only sixteen years old, home for the weekend from her private girls’ school in Laurelberg, Virginia. Why wouldn’t they be believed?
“No, dearest,” her mother whispered, the pain bowing her in on herself. “No. Get me that blue bottle of pills in the medicine cabinet. Hurry, Sally. The blue bottle.”
As she watched her mother swallow three of the pills, groaning as she did so, she realized the pills were there because her father had struck her mother before. Deep down, Sally had known it. She hated herself because she’d never asked, never said a word.
That night her mother became Noelle, and the next week Sally left her girls’ school and moved back to her parents’ home in Washington, D.C., in hopes of protecting her mother. She read everything she could find on abuse-not that it helped.
That was ten years ago, though sometimes it seemed like last week. Noelle had stayed with her husband, refusing to seek counseling, refusing to read any of the books Sally brought her. It made no sense to Sally, but she’d stayed as close as possible, until she’d met Scott Brainerd at the Whistler exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and married him two months later.
She didn’t want to think about Scott or about her father now. Despite her vigilance, she knew her father had hit Noelle whenever she happened to be gone from the house. She’d seen the bruises her mother had tried to hide from her, seen her walking carefully, like an old woman. Once he broke her mother’s arm, but Noelle refused to go to the hospital, to the doctor, and ordered Susan to keep quiet. Her father just looked at her, daring her, and she did nothing. Nothing.
Her fingers rubbed unconsciously over the white line where the ring had been. She could remember the past so clearly-her first day at school, when she was on the seesaw and a little boy pointed, laughing that he saw her panties.
It was just the past week that was a near blank in her mind. The week her father had been killed. The whole week was like a very long dream that had almost dissolved into nothing more than an occasional wisp of memory with the coming of the morning.
Sally knew she’d been at her parents’ house that night, but she couldn’t remember anything more, at least nothing she could grasp-just vague shadows that blurred, then faded in and out. But they didn’t know that. They wanted her badly, she’d realized that soon enough. If they couldn’t use her to prove that Noelle had killed her husband, why, then they’d take her and prove that she’d killed her father. Why not? Other children had murdered their fathers. Although there were plenty of times she’d wanted to, she didn’t believe she’d killed him.
On the other hand, she just didn’t know. It was all a blank, locked tightly away in her brain. She knew she was capable of killing that bastard, but had she? There were many people who could have wanted her father dead. Perhaps they’d found out she’d been there after all. Yes, that was it. She’d been a witness and they knew it. She probably had been. She just didn’t remember.
She had to stay focused on the present. She looked out the Greyhound window at the small town the bus was going through. Ugly gray exhaust spewed out the back of the bus. She bet the locals loved that.
They were driving along Highway 101 southwest. Just another half hour, she thought, just thirty more minutes, and she wouldn’t have to worry anymore, at least for a while. She would take any safe time she could get. Soon she wouldn’t have to be afraid of anyone who chanced to look at her. No one knew about her aunt, no one.