through it.
“Who? The redhead? The question is, Who is she?”
“Sh-sh-sh-sh-she…”
“Take it easy,” Fraley said. “She what?”
There was a sudden explosion as the fluorescent lights above Fraley shattered behind their plastic coverings. Fraley flinched and found himself on his knees beside the table, gun drawn, the room enveloped in darkness.
Boyer let out a bloodcurdling scream. “Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhh! It’s her! It’s her! She’ll kill us! She’ll kill us all!”
The door flew open and Fraley could see the beams of flashlights in the hall.
“You okay in there?” Fraley recognized the voice. It was Norcross. Fraley rose from his crouch by the table and moved to the door. Boyer continued to scream.
“It’s Satan! She has the power of Satan!”
“Shut up!” Fraley yelled at Boyer. He turned to Norcross. “What the hell happened?”
“Not sure. Power surge or something. Whole building’s dark.”
“Stay with this guy.”
The office was chaotic. Agents were running up and down the hallways, in and out of the front door, shouting commands and asking questions. Fraley moved out of the doorway and down the hall towards his office. The agent who had been watching over the redhead was gone. The office was black. Fraley reached into his pocket for his Zippo cigarette lighter. He flipped open the top, flicked the wheel with his thumb, and stepped inside.
He could see her silhouette in the chair. As he moved closer, the lighter went out. He flipped the wheel again. Nothing. Again. It came to life briefly, just long enough for Fraley to see that she was smiling.
Fraley recognized her now. He’d seen her only briefly, and she’d been wearing the big hat and the patch over her eye, but it had to be her.
The girl cuffed to the chair was the girl in the park.
I spent a sleepless night lying in bed next to Caroline. Her left breast was covered by a large, bloodstained bandage. Another dressing covered a stitched wound and a drain beneath her left arm. The medication she’d been given at the surgery center helped her sleep, but she moaned occasionally and mumbled almost continuously. At four in the morning I tried to call the TBI office to see if I could find out how the interrogations were going, but the number was busy every time I called. I didn’t want to call Fraley’s cell phone; I knew he’d let me know when-or if- he needed me.
At five thirty a.m., about forty minutes before sunrise, I gave up the idea of getting any sleep and got up to fix a pot of coffee. I let Rio out and wandered through the kitchen onto the back deck. The eastern sky was just beginning to streak with pink and orange light. A soft breeze was blowing out of the southwest, sending the little blue-and-orange sailboat wind gauges that Caroline loved so much spinning slowly in circles. It was a time of day that I usually enjoyed, the calmness of the dawn. Typically, I used the time to contemplate the vastness of the sky, to appreciate the way the light played off of the trees across the lake as the sun crept over the hill to the east, or to daydream about sitting in a luxury box at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park someday, watching Jack play with the big boys.
But this morning I found myself in a dark mood. The murders weighed heavily on my mind, but even more disturbing were the thoughts of what was happening to Caroline. I knew Caroline would fight with every ounce of her strength, and I sincerely believed she would survive, but I couldn’t stop thinking that cancer would change her in some fundamental way. I imagined her without a breast, and I wondered if she would become somehow inhibited, whether she would lose her confidence or some of her zest for life. I wondered how such a drastic change in her appearance would affect our relationship, and selfishly hoped it wouldn’t lessen the intimacy we’d always enjoyed. I thought about the scars she’d soon have, how a reconstructed breast would look, how I’d react to her losing her hair, what it would be like to make love to her.
At the hospital, I’d heard Sarah mention something about how fortunate we were that my new job provided insurance coverage that would pay for Caroline’s treatment. From what I’d read, the treatment could cost a quarter of a million dollars, maybe more. I overheard Sarah tell Caroline’s mother that God had intervened. It was God who had caused me to go to work for the district attorney’s office. It was God who had saved us from financial calamity.
But as I stood on the deck, I didn’t appreciate Sarah’s reasoning or God’s kindness. I would have much preferred He spare Caroline the pain and heartache she was experiencing by falling victim to such a terrible disease. How could the benevolent, loving God that Sarah described allow such a thing to happen to a person so kind, so gentle, so full of love?
Thoughts of God took me back to my grandmother’s dining room table in the little house in Unicoi County where she and my grandfather lived with my uncle Raymond, who was then fourteen years old. It was a Sunday afternoon, two years before the rape, and my mother, Sarah, and I had made our weekly trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Sarah and I would play while Ma fixed lunch in the kitchen. A little after noon, the door would open and Grandpa, Grandma and Raymond, looking scrubbed and wearing their Sunday clothes, would arrive from church. I was six, old enough that I’d begun to wonder why we didn’t go to church with them. For some reason, I thought that day would be a good day to ask.
As I sat at the table picking at a piece of fried chicken, I looked up at my mother.
“Ma, how come we don’t go to church with Grandma and Grandpa?” I said.
An expression of horror came over my mother’s face and she dropped her fork. It clanged noisily off of her plate and fell to the hardwood floor.
“Hush your mouth and eat,” she said.
Everyone was quiet for a minute, until my grandma spoke.
“Why don’t you explain it to him, Elizabeth?” she said to my mother. There was a coolness in her voice I’d never heard. “Why don’t you tell the boy why he doesn’t go to church? I’d like to know myself.”
At the time, I knew very little of my family history, but I knew my father had been killed in a war in a faraway place called Vietnam not long before I was born. Most mothers would probably have described a fallen soldier to their sons as a hero, but not my mother. His death was a “waste,” she said. Politicians were to blame, politicians greedy to feed what she called the “war machine.” My father didn’t want to go to Vietnam. He didn’t volunteer to go. He was drafted, forced to leave his home and his pregnant wife to fight a war in which neither he nor his country had any business. My mother was full of bitterness, contempt, and distrust for anyone or anything that might be able to exert power or control over her, including, as I was about to find out, God.
Confronted with my grandma’s challenge, my mother turned to her with narrowed eyes.
“You know good and well why he doesn’t go to church,” she said. “He doesn’t go because I don’t want him to go. He doesn’t go because he’s my son, it’s my choice, and I choose not to have his head filled with lies and false hope. He doesn’t go because there is no God, and if you had the least bit of sense you’d have realized it by now.”
“How dare you!” my grandma yelled, rising from the table. “How dare you blaspheme the Lord in my home!”
I didn’t know the definition of blaspheme, but even at that early age, I was capable of discerning meaning from context. I’d never before heard my grandma raise her voice. She was trembling as she pointed her fork at my mother’s face.
“Are you going to raise him to be a godless heathen?” she yelled. “How do you expect him to get through life without faith?”
“He’ll get through the same way I do,” my mother shot back. “He’ll learn to rely on himself.”
“Joseph!” Grandma said harshly. “Take your sister and go outside. Now! Raymond, you go with them.”
I looked at my grandpa, who was sitting there with a bewildered look on his face. He rarely spoke, and it appeared that he had no intention of inserting himself into the battle I’d unintentionally started. I crawled down off the chair and walked outside to the front porch with Sarah and Raymond right behind me. As soon as we walked onto the porch, Raymond shoved me hard in the back and I went sprawling onto the front lawn.
“Moron,” he hissed. “Why can’t you keep your fucking mouth shut? Now my dinner’s gonna get cold.”
