Lie in Wait (30 page)

The room seemed to be closing in on Test, she felt claustrophobic and filthy.

“ ‘Close your eyes,' he said. ‘Tell me when it hurts.' He said—­” Jon laughed, a sad, sickening laugh. “He said, ‘It's important to isolate your pain, keep it separate from yourself.' And he had me remove my shorts and started in with the massage. Telling me maybe he could be my personal trainer. How'd I like it if he got me into shape for the baseball team? Got me a spot on the team. How'd that be?' I was thrilled. You can imagine. I was a homely, weak, scrawny kid, athletic as spit.

“He must have sensed my nervousness. My innate fear. Because he said he could take me to see Nurse Jill. ‘You rather have a woman look at your privates?' I didn't want that, of course. A woman. I was eight.”

Jon shook his head.

“He told me to shut my eyes and to think of something I liked. Pain shot down my inner thigh. The muscle was livid, but slowly it loosened, the muscle warmed, and blood flowed. The pain—­” He put his face in his hands. “The pain wasn't pain anymore.”

He took his hands from his face, his cheeks and forehead florid.

“He asked if it was good. And I nodded. Fuck if I didn't. Fuck if I didn't nod. Fuck if I didn't. Fuck fuck fuck.” His voice splintered and pitched with an agony that can only come from wanting to claim back a moment that alters your life for the worse, forever, but cannot be reclaimed. “Fuck if I didn't.”

He stood suddenly, kicked his chair back so it slammed against the wall. Test nearly fell back out of her chair at the suddenness of it. Her hand went reflexively for her weapon. Jon wiped at his mouth, his chest heaving. Test relaxed.

“You know what the worst of it is?” he said, pointing at her now, waving his hands around wildly, towering. “I
liked
it. I was eight. Fucking
eight
. It took a long time for me to realize what was done to me. What I'd
allowed
to be done.” He looked around behind him, as if he'd heard a sound that startled him. But nothing was there. “In time, living in my own skin sickened me. I've felt unnatural ever since. With myself and with others; suspicious of everyone's intentions, what they really wanted to pry out of me. What they wanted to use me for. Everyone uses everyone else for something. Nothing is free. I was fucking eight. But I was an accomplice to the crime committed against me.”

“No you weren't,” Test said, spooking herself with her own voice.

“I
was
. I allowed it.”

“You were coerced. Manipulated. He was an adult. A mentor. He had the power, he—­”

Merryfield slammed his fist against the wall and Test jumped.

“I liked it!” Merryfield shouted. “I fucking liked it!”

This was beyond Test's expertise, this was out of her realm. This was not a confession of a crime of the murder of Jessica. This was a purging of the soul.

Jon's left eyelid spasmed as his behavior grew more erratic and he stalked about the room shaking his finger and head furiously.

“Please,” Test said. “Sit down and take a breath. Please.” She got up and picked his chair off the floor. She was aware that this still could be a ruse. She needed to get him back to tonight. To what had transpired between him and Randy Clark.

Merryfield paced, but he finally sat down.

He rested his head in his hands.

“It happened other times,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I could have said no to any of them. But I didn't.”

Test did not know much about such abuse, but everything she did know indicated that being groomed was not an easy thing to break from, especially if the victims were victimized by someone they admired and trusted. It went far beyond Stockholm syndrome. After everything he'd said, Test remained no more or less certain that Jon had killed Jessica. What was the motive? Had she come on to him, or him to her and he'd been rejected? Was what Test was being told only meant to manipulate her into sympathy?

“Everything that happened during that time, has led to this moment,” Jon said. “Led to the murder of Jessica.”

“What do you mean?” Test said quickly. Was he confessing?

“Jessica would not be dead if I'd never let that happen to me.”

“Tell me why you met Randy Clark the night of Jessica's murder.”

“He has nothing on me now,” Jon mumbled. “It's all out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Two weeks ago, I got a call. It was just eight words. ‘It's Randy. Stop what you're doing, or else.'“

“What did that mean?”

“Stop defending Scott and Gregory.”

Test was beginning to form a picture. Just a foggy outline of it, like the shoreline of a lake just emerging from the morning fog.

“He was mad about that?” Test said.

“Raving mad. And at me because I never helped him. When I saw him in the truck that night, he saw me too. I was seventeen. And he was the age I was when I was with Coach.”

With Coach.
The phrase shocked and repulsed Test. It was a euphemism one would use for dating. Test was speaking to a wounded boy.

“I was in high school. A senior. And he was in maybe third grade. And, the look on his face.” Jon was silent for a minute, collecting himself. Several times he seemed about to continue, only to hold a hand up:
Give me a second.

Finally, he said, “The look on his face. What I buried for years, but what won't stay buried now, is not the misery and shame, which were there, but his look of hope. When I appeared outside that truck window and he saw me looking in, a big kid, nearly a man, big enough to take on Coach and stop what was happening, his face of agony lit with hope. He would be saved. Spared. And I walked away and I left him.”

Test looked at the clock. It just after eleven in the morning, but her body had the logy and lethargic torpor of the middle of the night, 2:30 or 3:00
A.M
. Her throat was sore, her glands swollen, and it stung to swallow.

“So,” she said, “This was the first you'd ever heard from him since then?”

“I ran into him, once. In Charlottesville, Virginia, when I was at law school. He must have been twenty or so. He saw me in passing one day. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I thought he was just someone I'd seen around campus. Then I saw him at a diner. He sat right beside me. I didn't recognize him, but he recognized me. He became unstable when I insisted I didn't know him. He was adamant I knew him. I made to leave and I thought he was going to hurt me. I realized then he wasn't a student. He stank and his teeth were bad, his breath foul, his clothes threadbare. He was destitute, possibly deranged. I pulled away and he said, ‘We have someone in common.' And he whispered a word in my ear.”

“What did he whisper?” Test asked.

“Coach,” Jon said. “And I knew. And I left. Again.”

“When he called two weeks ago, what did he want?”

“I told you. To stop representing Scott and Gregory. He thought it was disgusting, me representing them. His mind is confused. He equates their sexuality to the likes of Coach. He can't separate the two. It's clear he never learned to separate, to compartmentalize like I did. I told him when we met the first time at his request a ­couple weeks ago that he needed to do it to survive. Forget. Separate. Survive. To succumb is to give the predator more power. To be a victim all over again. I made a choice to make a life for myself despite what was done to me. He did not. And now look at him.”

“So, you met him the night of the murder in the school parking lot. Why? And why there?”

“He chose that spot to make me feel guilty. To drum up old memories and try to soften me. Like I said, he dwells. He's stuck in that moment. I understand it. I do. It took me years. To escape my memories. And I still trust no one. Not my wife. Not myself. Worse. I don't care to trust. What's the point? So what if someone betrays me. So what if a wife cheats or friend backstabs me. What could possibly be done to me that is worse than what happened to me when I was eight years old?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Test pondered it anyway. There was nothing worse. Nothing at all.

“So, he wanted you to stop, and, what?” Test asked. “Why did you go through the woods? The school is practically across the street from your house.”

“It was the direction I'd come from that night, years ago. The restaurant was an arcade back then. It was like he wanted to re-­create that night. The ten days prior to our meeting, with his calls coming in and e-­mails, I was so scared and confused about what he might want that I couldn't leave home. I pretended to be sick. I didn't want this ever getting out. Ever. It made me sick, too, literally. I lost sleep. I lost my appetite. And he wanted to tell everyone. The press. Everyone. He said he'd go to the police about it if I didn't stop the case, stop representing perverts. I wasn't going to
stop.
No
one
is ever going to make me do anything I don't want to do ever again.” Spittle flew as he spat the words. “No one. I certainly wasn't going to let
him
push me the fuck around.”

The way Merryfield spoke of Randy Clark felt like he was talking about a brother, a sibling relationship polluted by the bonds of anger and resentment.

“Why didn't you tell anyone what happened to you years ago?” Test said.

“Are you serious?” Merryfield looked at her as if she were an idiot. “Back then? I was eight. He was a legend. It took
years
for me to even understand what happened, that something wrong had been done. And when I finally understood, I blamed myself. Have you seen the media circuses around this shit? These kids get excoriated. I was raised by my grandparents. I was an only child. I was already alone and lonely. And—­” A distant look came over him. “I remember after it happened, my grandmother telling ­people ‘He's grown so shy. So . . .
serious
.' Other kids seemed so ridiculous and pathetic and spoiled to me after that. I was no longer a boy, but something else. Not a man. I've never become a man. I was a nameless creature. I lost the few friends I had and I made no new friends. And I
tried
to forget. I willed myself day and night to forget. To be spared a moment without memory.”

He took a deep breath.

“Still, when you realized what had happened—­” Test began.

“I was going to tell. Once,” he said. “I was prepared. When I was fifteen. I had mustered the courage for months. It was the summer that news flooded the region of a teacher in Bakersfield who had had been arrested for ‘doing stuff' to junior-­high girls. The town buzzed with the words
molestation, pervert
,
sicko
. For weeks, my grandparents spoke of nothing else. They said things like ‘They should cut his balls off. A man like that should never go free. Touching young girls like that. Hang the son of a bitch.' And I realized what had happened to me. I'd been prey. And that felt like the bigger betrayal. That hurt most. Because Coach had told me I was a miracle. And I'd believed it. I'd felt like I was. And I was so stung. I was prepared to tell. Until.” He reached across the table and took Test's glass of water and drank from it. “Until I overheard my grandparents and their friend talking. They were entertaining friends in the kitchen below the vent in my room, playing bridge. And I heard my grandmother say, “You wonder how a man could get away with it so long. I mean for a year,
three
girls, and not
one
of them speaks up? Something's not right with that picture.' Another woman said it made her wonder. And that she'd seen at least one of the girls in town with no bra. Short shorts. She couldn't believe how girls acted those days. How they dressed. So brazen. And it wasn't like he had a gun to their heads or anything. Some of these girls today can seem so innocent but go around asking for it. They like it. They're just plain wicked.'“

Jon peeled at a loose thumb cuticle. “Wicked,” he said. “Junior-­high girls.” He laughed. “Wicked. Like me.”

Test missed her husband and her kids so acutely at the moment she had to fight back a sob of emotion. “So. You told Randy you wouldn't stop working the case?”

“I've created an identity. Made a life out of prosecuting scum on behalf of boys like me, but also championing for those who are bullied and oppressed and threatened otherwise.” His face was crimson with anger. “No one, especially not Randy, was going to make demands on me and bring this to light and sully me.”

“So, you just left it at that?”

“I called his bluff. I didn't believe he'd trot all that garbage out after all these years and subject himself to the ridicule and suspicion. Especially when it was clear I would deny it if he came forward. So, I told him no, I wouldn't quit the case and if he brought it up I'd deny it. He was on his own. And I walked away.”

For a third time, Merryfield walked away, Test thought. What had that triggered in Randy Clark? What anger?

“And what did he do?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You left. Did he yell after you? Go after you? Just stand there and let you go?”

“He didn't yell or go after me. I don't know what he did. Or how long he stood there.”

“It was your wife's idea to go out to dinner that night.”

Test's comment seemed to give Jon a start.

“So?” he said, collecting himself.

“How did you know she would suggest it? That you'd end up going to the restaurant for you to even slip out from there to see Randall? Especially since you'd been sick, if not for the reasons everyone had thought.”

“Bethany and I always go to the Village Fare on Wednesday night. I knew she'd ask, even if I was under the weather. She's pushy like that. And if she hadn't asked. I would have gone out for a walk to get some air, or something. Then just walked through the woods.”