survival. She longed for death.
The next part was a blur too. She remembered reading somewhere that you should relax and not fight-get your rapist to think he’s won or something like that. So Susan did that. When his guard was down, she got a hand free and grabbed his testicles as hard as she could. She held on and twisted and he screamed and pulled away.
Susan rolled off the bed and found the knife.
Her rapist was down and rolling on the ground. There was no more fight in him. She could have opened the door and run out of the room and screamed for help. That would have been the smart move. But she didn’t do that.
Instead Susan plunged the knife deep into his chest.
His body went rigid. There was this horrible convulsion as the blade pierced the heart.
And then her rapist was dead.
“You feel tense, hon,” Dante said to her now, eleven years later.
Dante began to knead her shoulders. She let him, though it offered no comfort.
With the knife still in the rapist’s chest, Susan ran from that motel room.
She ran for a very long time. Her head began to clear. She found a pay phone and called her parents. Her father picked her up. They talked. Her father drove past the motel. There were red lights flash- ing. The cops were already there. So her father took her to her childhood home.
“Who will believe you now?” her mother said to her.
She wondered.
“What will Dante think?”
Another good question.
“A mother needs to protect her family. This is what a woman does. We are stronger than the men this way. We can take this blow and go on. If you tell him, your husband will never look at you the same. No man will. You like the way he looks at you, yes? He will always wonder why you went out. He will wonder how you ended up in that man’s room. He may believe you, but it will never be right. Do you understand?”
So she waited for the police to come to her. But they never did. She read about the dead man in the papers-saw his name even- but those stories only lasted a day or two. The police suspected that her rapist died in a robbery or drug deal gone wrong. The man had a record.
So Susan went on, just like her mother said. Dante came home. She made love to him. She did not like it. She still did not like it. But she loved him and wanted him happy. Dante wondered why his beautiful bride was more sullen, but he somehow knew better than to ask.
Susan started going to church again. Her mother had been right. The truth would have destroyed her family. So she carried the secret and protected Dante and their children. Time did indeed make it better. Sometimes she went whole days without thinking about that night. If Dante realized that she no longer liked sex, he didn’t show it. Where Susan used to like the admiring looks from men, now they made her stomach hurt.
That was what she couldn’t tell Ilene Goldfarb. There was no point in asking the rapist for help.
He was dead.
“You’re skin is so cold,” Dante said.
“I’m fine.”
“Let me get you a blanket.”
“No, I’m okay.”
He could see that she just wanted to be alone. Those moments never happened before that night. But they happened now. He never asked either, never pushed it, always giving her exactly the space she needed.
“We will save him,” he said.
He walked back into the house. She stayed out there and sipped her drink. Her finger still toyed with the gold cross. It had been her mother’s. She had given it to her only child on her deathbed.
“You pay for your sins,” her mother had told her.
That she could accept. Susan would pay gladly for her sins. But God should leave her son the hell alone.
37
PIETRA heard the cars pull up. She looked out the window and saw a small woman with a purposeful stride moving toward the front door. Pietra looked out the window to her right and saw four squad cars, and she knew.
There was no hesitation. She picked up her cell phone. There was only one number in the speed dial. She pressed down and heard it ring twice.
Nash said, “What’s wrong?”
“The police are here.”
WHEN Joe Lewiston came back down the stairs, Dolly took one look and said, “What happened?”
“Nothing,” he said, his lips feeling numb.
“You look flushed.”
“I’m fine.”
But Dolly knew her husband. She wasn’t buying. She got up and moved toward him. He almost backpedaled and started running away.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, I swear.”
She was now standing directly in front of him.
“Was it Guy Novak?” she asked. “Did he do something else? Because if he did…”
Joe put his hands on his wife’s shoulders. Her eyes moved over her face. She could always read him. That was the problem. She knew him so well. They had so very few secrets. But this was one of them.
Marianne Gillespie.
She had called for a parent-teacher conference, playing the role of a concerned parent. Marianne had heard about the terrible thing Joe had said to her daughter, Yasmin, but she sounded understanding. People blurt things out, she told him on the phone. People make mistakes. Her ex-husband was crazed with anger, yes, but Marianne said that she was not. She wanted to sit and talk and hear Joe’s side of the story.
Maybe, Marianne had suggested, there was a way to make this better.
Joe had been so relieved.
They sat and they talked. Marianne sympathized. She touched his arm. She loved his teaching philosophy. She looked at him with longing and she wore something low-cut and clingy. When they embraced at the end of the conference, it lasted a few seconds too long. She kept her lips near his neck. Her breathing grew funny. So did his.
How could he have been so stupid?
“Joe?” Dolly took a step back. “What is it?”
Marianne had planned the seduction revenge from the beginning. How could he have not seen that? And once Marianne got her way, within hours of leaving her hotel room, the calls started:
Marianne had hidden a camera in the hotel room and threatened to send the tape first to Dolly, then the school board, then every e-mail she could dig out of the school directory. For three days she made the threats. Joe couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. He lost weight. He begged her not to do it. At some point Marianne seemed to lose her drive, as though the whole enterprise of vengeance suddenly wore her out. She called and told him that she wasn’t sure if she would send it or not.
She had wanted him to suffer-and he had-and maybe that would be enough for her.
The next day, Marianne sent an e-mail to his wife’s work address.
The lying bitch.
Fortunately Dolly was not big on e-mail. Joe had her access code. When he saw the e-mail with the video attached, he totally freaked. He deleted it and changed Dolly’s password, so that she couldn’t see her own e-mail.
But how long would he be able to pull that off?
He didn’t know what to do. There was no one he could talk to about it, no one who would understand and be unconditionally on his side.
And then he thought of Nash.
“Oh God, Dolly…”
“What?”
He had to put an end to this. Nash had killed someone. He had actually murdered Marianne Gillespie. And the Cordova woman was missing. Joe tried to put it together. Maybe Marianne had given a copy to Reba Cordova. That would make sense.
“Joe, talk to me.”
What Joe had done was bad, but bringing in Nash had compounded his crime a thousandfold. He wanted to tell Dolly everything. He knew that it was the only way.
Dolly looked him in the eyes and nodded. “It’s okay,” she said. “Just tell me.”
But then a funny thing happened to Joe Lewiston. The survival instinct kicked in. Yes, what Nash had done was horrible, but why amplify it by committing marital suicide? Why make it worse by destroying Dolly and maybe his family? This was, after all, on Nash. Joe hadn’t asked him to go this far-certainly not to kill anyone! He had assumed that maybe Nash would offer to buy the tape from Marianne or make a deal with her or, at worst, scare her. Nash always hit Joe as playing near the edge, but
