Joshua said, “Why didn’t they just claim Katherine was raped by a migrant farm worker or some stranger passing through? She wouldn’t have had to send an innocent man to jail to support a story like that. She could have given the police a totally phony description. And even if, by some wild chance, they’d found a guy who fit that description, some poor son of a bitch who didn’t have an alibi … well, then she could have said he wasn’t the right man. She wouldn’t have been forced to railroad anyone.”
“That’s right,” Tony said. “Most rape cases of that sort are never solved. The police would probably have been surprised if Katherine had made a positive identification of anybody they rounded up.”
“I can understand why she wouldn’t have been eager to cry rape,” Hilary said. “She would have had to endure endless humiliation and embarrassment. A lot of people think every woman who’s raped was just asking for it.”
“I’m aware of that,” Joshua said. “I’m the one who keeps saying that most of my fellow human beings are idiots, asses and buffoons. Remember? But St. Helena has always been a relatively openminded town. The people there wouldn’t have blamed Katherine for being raped. At least most of them wouldn’t have. She would have had to deal with a few crude characters and a measure of embarrassment, naturally, but in the long run she would have had everyone’s sympathy. And it seems to me that it would have been a lot easier taking that route than trying to make everyone believe an elaborate lie about Mary Gunther–and then having to worry about maintaining that lie for the rest of her life.”
The cat turned over on Mrs. Yancy’s lap. She rubbed its belly.
“Leo didn’t want to blame the pregnancy on a rapist because that would have brought in the cops,” Mrs. Yancy said. “Leo had great respect for the cops. He was an authoritarian type. He believed the cops were better at their jobs than they really were, and he was afraid they would smell something fishy about any rape story that he and Katherine could concoct. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself, not attention like that. He was scared to death the cops would sniff out the truth. He wasn’t about to risk going to jail for child molestation and incest.”
“Katherine told you that?” Hilary asked.
“That’s right. As I said before, she’d been living with the shame of Leo’s abuse all her life, and when she thought maybe she was going to die in childbirth, she wanted to tell someone, anyone, what she’d been through. Anyway, Leo was sure he’d be safe if Katherine could conceal her pregnancy, hide it completely, and fool everyone in St. Helena. Then it would be possible to pass the child off as the illegitimate baby of an unfortunate friend from Katherine’s college days.”
“So her father forced her to wear the girdles,” Hilary said, feeling sorrier for Katherine Frye than she would have thought possible when she first walked into Mrs. Yancy’s parlor. “He put her through that agony to protect himself. It was his idea.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Yancy said. “She’d never been able to stand up to him. She’d always done what he’d told her to do. It wasn’t any different this time. She did this thing with the girdles and the dieting, even though it caused her a hell of a lot of pain. She did it because she was afraid to disobey him. Which isn’t surprising when you consider that he’d spent twenty-some years breaking her spirit.”
“She went away to college,” Tony said. “Wasn’t that an attempt to gain independence?”
“No,” Mrs. Yancy said. “College was Leo’s idea. In 1937, he went to Europe for seven or eight months to sell off the last of his holdings in the old country. He saw World War Two coming, and he didn’t want to have any assets frozen over there. He didn’t want to take Katherine on the trip with him. I suspect he intended to combine business with pleasure. He was a highly-sexed man. And I hear tell some of those European brothels offer all kinds of kinky thrills, just the sort of things to appeal to him. The dirty old goat. Katherine would have been in his way. He decided she should go to college while he was out of the country, and he arranged for her to stay with a family he knew in San Francisco. They owned a company that distributed wine, beer, and liquor in the Bay Area, and one of the things they handled was Shade Tree products.”