She started clicking: One out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or a completed rape in her lifetime, adding up to 17.7 million people.
Sixty-six percent of rape victims know their assailant. Forty-eight percent are raped by a friend.
Twenty percent of rapes take place at the home of a friend, neighbor, or relative.
More than half occur within a mile of the victim's home. Eighty percent of rape victims are under age thirty. Girls between ages sixteen and nineteen are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of sexual assault. Sixty-one percent of rapes are not reported to the police. If a rape is reported, there's a 50.8 percent chance that an arrest will be made. If an arrest is made, there's an 80 percent chance of prosecution. If there's a prosecution, there's a 58 percent chance of felony conviction. If there's a felony conviction, there's a 69 percent chance that the rapist will actually spend time in jail. Of the 39 percent of rapes that are reported to police, then, there's only a 16.3 percent chance that the rapist will wind up in prison. If you factor in all the unreported rapes, 94 percent of rapists walk free.
Laura stared at the screen, at the cursor blinking on one of the multiple percent signs. Trixie was one of these numbers now, one of these percents. She wondered how it was that she'd never truly studied this statistical symbol before: a figure split in two, a pair of empty circles on either side.
* * *
Daniel had to park far away from the entrance to the municipal rink, which wasn't surprising on a Saturday afternoon. High school hockey games in Bethel, Maine, drew the same kind of crowds high school football did in Midwestern communities. There were girls standing in the lobby, fixing their lipstick in the reflection of the plate- glass windows, and toddlers weaving through the denim forest of grown-up legs. The grizzled man who sold hot dogs and nachos
and Swiss Miss cocoa had taken up residence behind the kitchenette and was singing Motown as he ladled sauerkraut into a bun.
Daniel walked through the crowd as if he were invisible, staring at the proud parents and spirited students who had come to cheer on their hometown heroes. He followed the swell of the human tide
through the double doors of the lobby, the ones that opened into the rink. He didn't have a plan, really. What he wanted was to feel Jason Underhill's flesh under his fists. To smack his head up against the wall and scare him into contrition.
Daniel was just about to swing inside the home team's locker room when the door opened beneath his hand. He flattened himself up against the boards in time to see Detective Bartholemew leading Jason Underhill out. The kid was still wearing his hockey gear, in his stocking feet, carrying his skates in one hand. His face was flushed and his eyes were trained on the rubber mats on the floor. The coach followed close behind, yelling, “If it's just a chat, damn it, you could wait till after the game!”
Gradually, the people in the stands noticed Jason's departure and grew quiet, unsure of what they were watching. One man Jason's father, presumably - pushed down from the bleachers and started running toward his son.
Daniel stood very still for a moment, certain that Bartholemew hadn't seen him, until the detective turned back and looked him straight in the eye. By now the crowd was buzzing with speculation; the air around Daniel's ears was pounding like a timpani . . . but for that moment, the two men existed in a vacuum, acknowledging each other with the smallest of nods and the quiet understanding that each of them would do what he had to.
* * *
“You went to the rink, didn't you,” Laura said, as soon as Daniel walked through the door.
He nodded and busied himself with unzipping his coat, hanging it carefully on one of the pegs in the mudroom.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Vengeance was a funny thing: You wanted the satisfaction of knowing it had occurred, but you never wanted to actually hear the words out loud, because then you'd have to admit to yourself that you'd wanted proof, and that somehow made you baser, less civilized. Daniel found himself staring at Laura as he sank to the stairs. “Shouldn't I be asking you that?” he said quietly. Just that quickly, this had become a different conversation, a train run off its course. Laura stepped back as if he'd struck her, and bright spots of color rose on her cheeks. “How long have you known?”
Daniel shrugged. “A while, I guess.”
“Why didn't you say anything?”
He had asked himself the same question in the last few days a hundred times over. He'd pretended not to see all the late nights, the disconnections, because then he'd have been forced to make a choice: Could you really love someone who was capable of falling in love with somebody else?
But there had been a point in his relationship with Laura where Daniel had been irredeemable, and she had believed he could change. Did he owe her any less? And for that matter, if he let his anger and his shame get the best of him and threw her out of the house, wouldn't he be acting on adrenaline, the way he used to when he lost control?
It was this simple: If he couldn't forgive Laura - if he let himself be consumed by this - he was behaving like the kind of man he used to be.
But he did not have the words to say all this. “If I'd said something about it,” Daniel said, “then you would have told me it was true.”
“It's over, if that means anything.”
He looked up at Laura, his gaze narrow. “Because of Trixie?”
“Before.” She moved across the brick floor, her arms folded across her chest, and stood in a shaft of fading light. “I broke it off the night that she . . . that Trixie . . .” Her sentence unraveled at its edge.
“Were you fucking him the night our daughter was raped?”
“Jesus, Daniel”
“Were you? Is that why you didn't answer the phone when I was trying to tell you about Trixie?” A muscle tightened along the column of Daniel's throat. “What's his name, Laura? I think you owe me that much. I think I
