False Allegations

She shifted slightly in her chair. 'Why are you asking all this?'

I looked over her shoulder. Heather was in the same spot, standing stony. 'Just background,' I said.

She looked over at Kite. He didn't respond, watching her as though she was a chemical experiment, waiting for the result.

It was quiet for a long minute. 'No, I didn't visit him,' she said quietly. 'We're not close.'

'Are your parents still together?' I asked.

'No. No they're not. Is that 'background' too?'

'Yes, it is, Miss Dalton,' I said smoothly. 'These are…delicate matters. I want to establish a foundation before we explore the central issues.'

She took a breath through her mouth, her shallow chest not involved in the process. 'Go ahead,' she said finally.

'Your turn now,' I said, switching gears. 'Just tell me about it.'

'He—'

'From the beginning,' I said softly. 'From before it started, okay?'

She gulped another breath. 'Okay. When I was twelve…I know that's when it was because it was just after my birthday, that's just before Thanksgiving…School was already started. I was doing all right there. Not great or anything, mostly B's and C's on my report card. And I was never any trouble. My teachers liked me. I had friends and everything. But my parents thought I should be doing better.'

'Your grades?'

'Not just my grades. I was a puller.'

'Trichotillomania?'

'Yes!' her eyes rolled up, settled back down, focusing on my face. 'How did you know about that?'

'I had a friend who had it,' I lied. 'Did they send you to a doctor?'

'No. They didn't know it was a…disease, then. They just thought I was strange, I think.'

'So what did they do?'

'My parents were very religious. Psalmists—do you know it?'

'No. It sounds fundamentalist.'

'Well it's not,' she said primly. 'The official name of the church is the Gospel of Job's Song. And its prophet is Job, not Jesus. It was founded in the sixteenth century by John Michael, a man who suffered terrible misfortunes— he had epilepsy, and he underwent a crisis in faith. When the revelations came to him, he started the church. Eventually, the Psalmists had to emigrate to America to escape persecution. They settled in upstate New York. Some say their teachings were an influence on Joseph Smith.'

'The Mormon prophet?'

'Do you know his work?' she asked, a faint look of surprise playing across her face.

'Only what I've read,' I told her. I didn't know what Kite had told her about my background, so I didn't tell her where I read about religion—prisons get more missionaries than tropical islands. 'You were raised in the church?' I asked.

'We both were, me and my brother. But we didn't shun others, Psalmists aren't a cult or anything.'

'So they turned to the church for help with your…problems?'

'They said I needed lessons. Religious lessons. So they sent me to Brother Jacob. Psalmists believe you have to pay with your own labor for what you receive. So I had to clean Brother Jacob's house in exchange for the lessons.'

'Tell me about the lessons,' I said, leaning forward. Heather was a rock in the middle distance, the hologram winking behind her, shape–shifting in the morning light.

'The lessons were all about loving myself. Brother Jacob said if I didn't love myself, I would keep hurting myself. He said that's what people did when they were drunks, or drug addicts. Or even murderers. They hurt themselves. That's why I pulled my hair. And I had to stop or I would never be happy.'

'Lessons from the Bible?'

'From Psalms. The Psalms are the truth, the real truth in the Bible. Brother Jacob said the Bible was written. By people, not God. But the Psalms were songs that had stood the test of time way before anyone knew how to write.'

'So he taught you the Psalms?'

'The meaning of the Psalms.'

'And how did he teach you, Jennifer.'

'First with the ruler,' she said, face tightened as her skin bleached slightly. 'He said the ruler was for learning rules.'

'A wooden ruler, like for measuring?'

'It was for correction, not measuring,' she said in a mechanical voice. 'First I would get it on my palm. He would ask me, every time, if I was pulling my hair out. If I told him yes, I would get the ruler. It stung at first, but I got used to it. After a while, he'd have to hit me really hard to make me cry.'

'But he did that?'

'Yes. I always had to cry.'

'When did he switch?'

'Switch?'

'To someplace else. Besides your palm?'

'How did you know that?' she asked, dry–washing her hands, looking at her lap. 'How could you—?'

'Just a guess,' I said. 'Maybe an educated guess.'

'One day, I didn't want to get hit. So I lied. I told him I wasn't pulling my hair out. I used to sleep with gloves on. Even with a ski mask on my head—so I couldn't get to my hair. It didn't work. But when he asked me, I lied.'

'And then…?'

'He used it on my thighs. He made me lift my dress and he hit me on the back of my thighs with the ruler.'

'And it hurt worse?'

'Yes! Not just my…legs. It made me feel all…crawly inside.'

'So you stopped lying?'

'Yes. I mean, no. It didn't matter. He started asking me if I had learned to love myself. Every time I said I couldn't, he would hit me. Sometimes with my pants down. After a while, he made me take all my clothes off to be hit.'

Heather had shifted her stance slightly, leaning forward with her back arched, like a ship's figurehead cutting the wind, mouth set and hard. 'Did you ever tell your parents, Jennifer?' I asked her. 'About what Brother Jacob was doing?'

'I…tried. But when I started, my mother told me I had to trust him. He was from the church, so I had to trust him. Whatever he was doing, whatever it was, it was for my own good. I never told her any more after that.'

'What happened next?'

'How did you know there was a 'next,' Mr. Burke?' her voice hardening with suspicion.

'There's always a 'next,'' I told her. 'The only question is what it was.'

'Don't you know?' she leaned forward in her chair, a sly, challenging look on her face.

'You learned to love yourself.'

She put her face in her hands and started to cry. Heather stepped close behind her, putting her hands on the woman's shoulders, unblinking orange eyes steady on mine.

Kite didn't move.

If I was a therapist, I would have stopped it then. We'd been going a long time, it was a natural place for a break. But if anything was going to break, it was going to be Jennifer Dalton. 'Tell me about it,' I said.

She looked up at me, her thin face framed by her hands, too–big eyes blurry from the tears. 'It sounds like you could tell me,' she said. 'How did you know? I need to know how you knew!'

'I didn't really know anything,' I assured her. 'But when you hear the same material over and over again from