“What did you want to call me about?” Jenny tossed a bedsheet into the laundry basket.

“I thought maybe you’d want to get pizza.”

“When?”

“Now?”

“Sure.” Jenny took down the last of the laundry and carried the basket inside under her arm. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

He went outside and leaned back against the hood of his car, tapping his fingers against the metal until Jenny emerged in a cloud of honeysuckle. It was the perfume we’d given her for her sixteenth birthday. She was dressed in jeans and a sleeveless button-down apricot shirt.

She looked prettier than I’d seen her in weeks. Glowing with happiness. Her long hair hung loose down her back. She wore pink lipstick and tiny blue crystal earrings. He opened the car door for her before going around to the driver’s seat. I thought to myself that Mom, who was asleep in her room, would have liked that boy if she’d seen the way he treated Jenny.

I fell asleep watching television and woke with a dry mouth and a wooly head when I heard a car approach. I lay back on the sofa, pretending to be asleep, when the screen door creaked open and Jenny came inside. A moment later, I heard a car drive away.

I watched Jenny through half-closed eyes as I lay still as a log. Her hair was messy and stuck with pine needles. The flushed excitement that I’d seen when she’d left had disappeared. She seemed numb and sad. She tossed her house keys onto the hall table and collapsed on an armchair where she buried her head in her hands. I thought she was tired until I saw her shoulders shudder as she swallowed her sobs.

Jenny never said a word to me about what happened on the date to make her cry. As for the boy, he never stopped by again.

Jenny went into town the next day and came back home to tell us that she’d been hired to pack shelves in the supermarket where Mom used to work.

After that, she was barely home. She left the house early for work and came back at dusk most days. With Jenny away, I was stuck at home. Frustrated and bored.

Mom found an old blow-up swimming pool, which she inflated and filled with water. I spent days lying in that pool, watching wisps of clouds drift across the otherwise clear blue afternoon sky like flotsam. Mom lay on a sun lounger and threaded beads onto nylon strings. She had an idea to make beaded necklaces and sell them down at the Sunday market. She said that would give us an income. She’d be able to string beads even when she felt ill and was confined to bed. She said that Jenny and I could do the selling.

Sometimes I’d sit on the front porch stairs and look out longingly toward the sea. One afternoon, Mom saw me and said she was feeling well enough to drive me there.

We arrived late in the afternoon when the light was low and there was nobody around except for surfers out by the headland. I paddled around in the foam near the edge of the water while Mom floated on her back with a straw hat on her head. When I got bored, I flopped down on my towel and drew pictures in the sand with the edge of a broken shell.

“How’s that sister of yours?”

I looked up to see the driver from the pickup and his friend Bobby, whose eyes seemed grayer than usual. The driver tossed his cigarette onto the sand, not bothering to extinguish it. Bobby kicked sand over it as if it was his job to clean up the mess.

“I asked how’s your sister,” the driver repeated.

“She’s fine,” I answered.

“Haven’t seen her for a while,” he continued.

“She doesn’t come to the beach.”

“Why not?”

“She has a job,” I answered.

“Where’s she working?” I sensed there was nothing casual about the question.

“I don’t know,” I lied, kicking myself for mentioning the job. Mom, who was in the sea, had stopped swimming to watch me.

The driver stared at me and Mom and then walked off. Bobby tossed me a piece of gum before rushing after his friend. I saw them later with a group of boys by the headland. They were sitting on rocks, drinking from liquor bottles hidden in paper bags.

We stopped at the gas station at the Old Mill Road after we left the beach so Mom could buy me ice cream as a treat. Rick was at the counter. This time he was nice as pie. Told me he’d known my mother since she was knee-high. It was only when we were waiting our turn at the old bridge that Mom asked me what those boys wanted.

“Nothing,” I said, licking the last of my ice cream off the stick.

“They sure seemed to have something to say to you.”

I shrugged.

“I know those boys,” Mom said. “I knew some of their dads, too. They’re trouble. The one who gave you the gum follows his friends around like he’s their shadow. I reckon he’d do anything they tell him to keep in their good books. He’s the only one whose daddy isn’t a ‘somebody’ in this town. The only one with something to prove. That makes him the most dangerous of all.”

34

Rachel

Dr. Katrina Lawrence made a terrible witness, thought Rachel, watching the jury grimace as the thin falsetto of Kelly’s therapist came through the sound system so high-pitched that the sketch artist sitting next to Rachel winced as she drew. In her sketchbook was the rough drawing of a tall woman with long straight hair and a tightly buttoned burgundy jacket.

Dr. Lawrence made an affirmation used by atheists instead of taking her oath on the Bible. It was a misstep. It wouldn’t have mattered if it were a trial in a big city, but Neapolis was a conservative Southern town with a significant Evangelical population. It antagonized the jury from the start. Rachel suspected that Mitch Alkins had done his best to convey that fact to Dr. Lawrence, who seemed remarkably obtuse for someone who made her living studying the human psyche.

Alkins could see his witness was grating on the jury from the moment he asked her about her credentials. But he needed her testimony. She was, after all, Kelly Moore’s therapist. By the same token, he couldn’t afford to lose the jury in the process. He skipped whole pages of questions, flipping through his notepad to elicit her key testimony so he could get her off the stand as quickly as possible.

For her own selfish reasons, Rachel hoped Dr. Lawrence’s testimony would end quickly. She wanted to corner Alkins at the lunch recess and ask him what he remembered about Jenny Stills. When Rachel returned to her hotel the previous afternoon after talking with Estelle, she immediately tried to contact Alkins. She’d left several messages with his personal assistant but hadn’t received a call back from him or his staff.

Rachel stifled a yawn. Alkins worked through his questions, growing increasingly frustrated as the psychotherapist gave long, dry responses when short answers would have both sufficed and gone down much better with the jury.

Rachel took notes as the psychotherapist testified that Kelly had been a well-adjusted teenager before that night with Scott Blair. Afterward, Kelly exhibited all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Dr. Lawrence said was common among victims of sexual assault. The effects ranged from anxiety and depression to panic attacks and nightmares.

“Dr. Lawrence, what is the normal reaction of a victim in the aftermath of a sexual assault?” Alkins asked.

“It depends,” she responded, leaning into the microphone.

“On what?”

“On the victim,” she answered. “There’s no typical reaction. Some victims become hysterical, cry and so on. Others seem calm and normal, as if nothing happened, and only later show the effects. Others are in shock. They’re numb. They don’t cry, but they can’t cope.”

“Dr. Lawrence, is it normal, for instance, for a sexual assault victim to get on a bus, buy a bus ticket, and sit alongside other people without showing any indication of having been assaulted hours earlier?”

This was a crucial question. Dale Quinn was expected to call to the stand the bus driver and several passengers from the bus that Kelly took home that day. Already, some of them had publicly said that Kelly acted normally that day, smiling at the driver when she disembarked, and they didn’t believe she’d been raped.

“It’s common for the emotional and psychological effects after a sexual assault to be delayed by hours, days. Even weeks,” Dr. Lawrence responded. “I believe Kelly was trying to hold herself together emotionally until she was in a safe space. Indeed, once she arrived home, she broke down.”

“In your dealings with Kelly, have you found her to be truthful and credible?” Alkins asked.

“In every way,” she said.

“Is there a chance that she misinterpreted what happened? Or exaggerated, maybe even lied about some details, or all of it?”