You’re afraid you’ll hurt her feelings. Am I right?”
“Not even close. You haven’t read it yourself?”
“She won’t let me near the thing. Keeps saying it’s private, like a diary. Which is fine. I can respect that.” Bement cocked his head at Mitch curiously. “So why are you here?”
“To tell you I think it will be published to great success.”
Bement drew his breath in, flabbergasted. “You’re… kidding me, right?”
“I’m absolutely not kidding you.”
Bement sat there in stunned silence, absently massaging the skinned, swollen knuckles of his right hand. “Collided with Don-nie’s face yesterday,” he explained, flexing the hand. “A guy’s cheekbone is a hell of a lot sturdier than your fist is. They never mention that in the old westerns, do they?”
“The sound effects are usually wrong, too. It should be a dull thud, not a smack.” Mitch sipped his coffee, studying Bement. “Do you have any idea what her book is about?”
“I really don’t, Mitch. Teeny never works on it when we’re together. Don’t ask me why.”
“I’m going to tell you why, actually. And you’d better brace yourself, because this may be a bit hard to take. It’s about a smalltown New England teenaged girl who is brutally raped by her two older brothers, who then turn her out. First she takes on half the boys in town, then their fathers.”
Bement pulled on the last of his Lucky and flicked the butt off into the weeds, his face revealing nothing. Until suddenly he lunged across the table and grabbed Mitch by the front of his jacket. “Are you trying to say my girlfriend was the town bang?”
“This is a very good question you ask,” Mitch responded hoarsely. “Want to let go of me?”
“Not until you tell me what you’re getting at.” Bement’s eyes were narrow slits.
“Let go of the material, Bement.”
Bement abruptly released him and sat back on his bench, a blue vein throbbing in his forehead.
Mitch straightened the collar of his jacket. “Freak out much?”
He ran a hand through his shoulder-length hair and reached for his coffee, his hands shaking. “I just love her so damned much that I lose it sometimes. I apologize, man. Really, I do.”
“No harm, no foul.”
“I couldn’t stay away from her, you know,” he confessed miserably. “I was out there in Palo Alto, starting my senior year at Stanford, and I was a total nut job. I can’t make it when we’re not together. I begged her to join me out there, but she wouldn’t. I guess she’s more attached to this place than she lets on. That’s why I dropped out. She’s why. I had to be with her. It was like she controlled me.” Bement shook his head slowly. “Whatever love is, it’s sure not about being smart. Me getting my degree from Stanford? That would have been smart.”
“You’re not enjoying what you’re doing?”
“No, I am. And the two of us are real happy together. But my mom’s pissed at me all of the time. Hell, the whole town’s pissed at me. They watched me grow up. They act like I’ve let them down.”
“You can still get your degree, Bement. Plenty of colleges around here would take you.”
“I don’t see the point anymore.” Bement gazed across the gorge at the bare winter hills beyond. “I don’t even know who I am.”
“Again, that’s why they invented college.”
“What are you, a campus recruiter?”
“You just don’t strike me as the kind of guy to sail off and hide from the world, that’s all. I happen to know a little about hiding. I spent twenty years in darkened movie theaters doing just that.”
“And what are you doing now, exactly?”
“Trying to understand people, I guess. We’re a lot more screwed up than I ever realized.”
Bement let out a short laugh. “Now you’re talking about my parents. My dad’s totally lost. Which for me is way weird, because your dad’s the one who’s supposed to have the road map, you know? They’ve always had to work at their marriage, but he doesn’t even want to try anymore. My mom’s freaking, as you can imagine. And totally pretending that she’s not. It’s just a huge mess. My dad’s a good guy, too. I love him to death. Hell, I love both of them.” Bement drained the last of his coffee, glancing at Mitch coolly. “You wanted to tell me about Teeny’s book. Is there more?”
“There is. And I mean to be as tactful as I can, but it’s still going to come out blunt. Justine won’t tell me whether it’s a true story or not. Frankly, it’s so detailed and explicit that I find it hard to believe it’s not at least partly based on personal experience.”
Bement’s nostrils flared slightly. “Mitch, who my girlfriend may have banged is not my idea of a legitimate topic of conversation between us, okay? I barely know you. And even if we were blood brothers, I still don’t know if it’s any of your damned business.”
“I don’t disagree.”
“Then why are you sweating me?”
“Because once this book is published it’ll become everyone’s business. If there’s one thing I do understand, it’s the media, and I’m telling you right now that Justine is about to get one hell of a lot of attention. And so are you.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because you’re the man she’s seeing. Total strangers will want to know everything about you. You’d better prepare yourself, Bement, because if you can’t handle it, then your life will become a special kind of hell.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” he pointed out hotly.
“I know that. But I’m here to tell you that it’s what you’re looking at.”
Bement Widdifield stared at Mitch long and hard. Not so much with anger now. He had a solemn look on his handsome face. “Fine, if it’s an answer you want then I’ll give you one. But I won’t discuss this with you or anyone else ever again. This is it. Teeny was never raped by her brothers. She never did their friends. She never did their fathers. None of those things ever happened to her.”
“How do you know this, Bement?”
“I know it, okay?”
“Not okay. How?”
“Because we’ve been going together a lot longer than most people know. Since we were in high school. We had to sneak around so our parents wouldn’t find out. Teeny was seventeen the first time we slept together. That was the night of our senior prom and I… I was her very first. She was a virgin, okay? Teeny was still a virgin.” Bement crumpled his Styrofoam cup angrily in his fist. “Now do you believe me?”
CHAPTER 12
Poochie’s muck-splattered Isuzu Trooper was up on the lifter in one of the service bays, where a mechanic was working on it. Doug was on the computer in his glassed-in office ordering parts from a catalogue. He got off of it quickly when he saw Des standing there in his doorway.
“How’s that working out for you?” she asked him, gesturing at the Isuzu through the glass wall.
“She’s a hurting girl, but we’ll get her right soon enough.” Doug Garvey was big and balding, with an easy- does-it small town air. More than a few of Dorset’s high school boys over the years got their first paying work pumping gas for him here at his Sunoco. A lot of them bought their first ride from him, too. Doug moved a lot of cars on consignment. Also rented them out by the week. The man was no easy-does-it businessman. He owned summer rental cottages in several shoreline towns. A piece of the boatyard at the Dorset Marina, a car wash in Old Saybrook, convenience stores in Branford and New Haven. “Have a seat, Des. How can I help you?”
She sat in the chair across the desk from him, twirling her hat in her fingers. “I’m sorry to tell you that Pete’s dead.”
“Aw, hell, that’s a damned shame. He seemed perfectly fine this morning, too. What was it, heart attack?”
“No, somebody bashed in his head.”
Doug’s eyes widened in shock. “Where did this happen?”
“Near the foot of the driveway to Four Chimneys. The Major Crime Squad is up there investigating it right
