Presumption of Guilt (21 page)

“The dog saved her life,” he said.

Jimmy's eyebrows rose. “Dodger saved her? Where is he?”

Nick swallowed. “Jimmy, I'm sorry, but Dodger's—” He stopped, gesturing hopelessly, trying to think of a way to break the news.

Jimmy's face fell. “He's dead, isn't he?”

Nick looked at Lynda and Jake, wishing for someone to say it for him. But there were no takers.

“I'm afraid so. If he hadn't done what he did, Beth might be the one dead instead.”

Jimmy tried to plaster on his tough-kid look, and nodded stoically. He turned away from them and went to look out the window. Jake followed him, laying a hand on his shoulders, but the boy shrugged him away.

Nick turned back to the doctor. “When can I see her?”

“In a little while. We've put her in a room, and she should be waking up soon. We'll be keeping her until we're satisfied that there aren't any complications. Maybe she can go home tomorrow.”

Home,
Nick thought. Her home was in bad shape. She wouldn't be going there.

Lynda patted his back. “We'll wait here, Nick. You go on in and see her.”

Nick was grateful that they didn't make him wait.

T
here was a nurse standing over her bed when she woke up.“Beth, how do you feel?” the nurse asked.

Beth had to think for a minute. “Okay,” she whispered, but realized instantly that that wasn't exactly true. “Where is this?”

“The hospital,” the nurse said. “You were in an explosion. Do you remember it?”

It started to come back to her in film-clip images . . . the package . . . the tape that was too tough to tear . . . Dodger getting it away from her . . .

“You've had some injuries, but you're going to be fine. I'm going to run out for just a minute and let the doctor know that you're awake, okay?”

She watched the nurse leave the room, and lay there for a moment, looking around at the cold, barren room, with nothing in it that belonged to her, and realized how alone she was. Just like Tracy.

She closed her eyes, her mind moving slowly through disjointed images until it called up a time when she was ten, when she'd broken into a huge home of a wealthy businessman. No one had been home, but he'd had a bird that she hadn't been told about. The bird had fluttered in its cage, spooking her, and she'd taken off running. She'd been so spooked that she had run through the sliding glass door to his patio. It had shattered around her, knocking her out and cutting her in a million places. The other kids had quickly carried her out and thrown her into the van.

Bill had refused to take her to the hospital because he was afraid someone would make the connection between the glass door shattered in a robbery attempt and the little girl covered in glass fragments. Then they'd be caught for sure. So he'd kept her in a room by herself at the home, where he had tweezed the fragments out one by one. It had been a slow torture, one he had seemed to enjoy, and he had followed each withdrawal with a swab of alcohol that had stung worse than any pain she'd ever felt before or since. She still had small scars in some places to remind her.

She'd had bruises all over her body from that incident, and must have had a concussion as well, for she'd slept at least three days following the accident.

Lying here in this room alone reminded her of the week she'd spent in bed in that room at SCCH as a child, wondering if anyone out there cared at all about her, wondering if anyone even gave her a thought.

Bill had told her as he picked glass out of her that they had ways of identifying the blood on glass shards, and that he expected them to arrest her at any moment. It was her fault she was in this position, he'd told her, because she shouldn't have panicked. He was trying to protect her by keeping her here, he'd told her, but Bill's kind of caring wasn't the kind she craved. His was a sick, self-centered concern that frightened her to death.

Funny that Bill was behind this injury, as well. He had almost succeeded at keeping her quiet. He had almost killed her along with her story.

Tears rolled down her face. Lying here, alone, she felt like a wasted, discarded, useless body—the way Tracy probably felt.Was God really there, watching out for her, or was he just disgusted by her?

She thought of the lies she'd told about this story, the anonymous confession, the sneaky way she'd tried to get Maria to confess so that she, Beth, wouldn't have to. She thought of the secrets she'd kept from Nick, from Phil, from the law enforcement officers who needed to know the name of the only available adult witness. The secrets she had kept from little Jimmy, who needed to know that there was someone who truly understood his plight as no one else could, someone who had been there and suffered as he was suffering, someone who had survived it—maybe even grown through it.

Could God see through those sins and walk with her now? The consequences of confessing those sins loomed ever bigger in her consciousness, reminding her that there would be a price to pay. But all those children were still paying. Paying and paying, and they would continue to pay as they grew older and broke free of Bill Brandon. They would pay like she was paying until someone broke the cycle.

And that's what she'd been trying to do. But she'd been trying to do it the easy way, the cheap way. Maybe there was no cheap way. Maybe the only way was to accept the possibility of losing her job and her reputation, and to tell the truth. Maybe then she could have a chance with God.

To do that, she'd have to forget the story she'd written so neatly and remotely, and instead offer herself as a witness who could put Bill Brandon away for life. The buck had to stop somewhere, and it was going to stop here. Unless he stopped her first.

She heard a knock on the door, and then it opened. Nick stood there, looking as fragile and shaken as she'd felt lying out on the dirt with her house burning behind her. He tried to smile, but she could see that the effort was almost too great for him.

He came and leaned over her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Her voice was hoarse, weak. “Yes. Amazingly, I am. I wasn't supposed to be, though. He intended to kill me.”

She could see that Nick agreed with her.

“If I could have just gotten the package away from you before you opened it,” he whispered. “I should have realized right away . . . I should have taken it and—”

“Shhh,” she whispered, reaching up to touch his lips. “Don't. He set us up. He knew I wouldn't be able to resist a package with Marlene's name on it. He's smart, Nick. I told you how smart he is.” She closed her eyes, fighting the tears. “Poor Dodger. He didn't know what hit him.”

Nick clearly didn't know what to say. He just stroked her hair back from her face, and she closed her eyes.

A memory, white-hot and miserable, came back to her, a memory of another little dog they had found at the home. It had wandered up onto the lawn one day, and they had played with it, then asked Bill if they could keep it. He'd told them no.

She wasn't sure why that little dog had created such a fierce longing in them, why the children had wanted him badly enough to risk Bill's wrath, but someone had suggested that they hide it and keep it anyway, that they could keep it a secret from Bill. They had all agreed.

They had hidden the little dog in a storage shed at the back of the grounds at night, then moved him wherever he was least likely to be found during the day. He had been a kind, gentle secret that bound the children, so unlike the dark, ugly secrets they had shared before.

But one night, when they'd come in from robbing the home of the president of the local college, Bill told them that he'd discovered the puppy, and that he realized how much they must love the dog to work so hard to hide him for so long. He told them that they had worked hard for him, too, and that they deserved something of their own for their labors. He told them they didn't have to hide the puppy anymore.

Eagerly, they had all run out to the shed to get the puppy and bring him in, each of them arguing about which one of them the dog would sleep with that night. They had reached the shed, thrown open the door, flicked on the light—

The puppy lay dead on the floor, shot through the head.

Bill had taught them a valuable lesson.

She wondered how many more “valuable lessons” he had taught to Jimmy and Lisa and all those other children at the home—lessons that might twist and scar them for life. How many times over the years had she fantasized about a rescuer who would come and save them all from Bill. Maybe that was why she had suffered the childhood she had. Maybe God was grooming Beth to be the rescuer of these children. Maybe she was going to be their Esther, groomed “for such a time as this.”

“I have to go,” she said weakly, trying to sit up. “I have to get out of here.”

“You can't leave, Beth. You have to stay, at least overnight.”

“No, I can't. I have to talk to Phil, my editor. I have to tell him what happened. I have to tell him some other things.”

“I've put too much pressure on you,” Nick said, his eyes misting over. “I've made this seem like the most important thing in the world, and you almost got killed. It's not worth it.”

“Of course it is! Until I get that story printed, I'm in danger.

Once the story's out, it would be too obvious if anything happened to me. He wouldn't dare try anything.” She looked up at him.

“Nick, tell them I'm okay. That I can go. Please?”

“No,” he said. “You're not as strong as you think. You have to lie still, Beth. You have to stay here.”

“Then make Phil come to me,” she said. “And call Lynda, and Larry Millsaps and Tony Danks at the St. Clair Police Department.” “Lynda's already here,” he said. “With Jake and Jimmy. But I'll call the others. I'll tell them to come tomorrow.”

“No, not tomorrow. Now! I have something I have to tell all of you, Jake and Jimmy, too. Something important, Nick. Please.It really can't wait.”

“Okay,” he said finally. “Just calm down. Be still. I'll go call them now.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

T
he doctors were at first strongly opposed to having such a group in her room so soon after her injuries, but when Beth convinced them that her long-term safety depended on a quick arrest of the one who'd injured her, they finally allowed it.

Phil was the first one in when the group came quietly into her room. “Beth, are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes, for now,” she said. “But I need to talk to you. All of you.”

Lynda rushed forward and hugged her. “I'm so glad you're okay. And what a miracle that Jimmy wasn't there.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Where is he?”

“I'm right here,” Jimmy said from behind Lynda. He came up to the bed, hands in his pockets, and glanced awkwardly at her. “Bill did this, you know.”

She swallowed hard and nodded. “I know.”

“But he'll get away with it. He always does.”

“Not this time, Jimmy.”

Jake bent over the bed and pressed a kiss on her cheek, and she saw Tony and Larry coming in. Nick was last to enter the room, and she held out a hand to him. He came to the bed and held her hand, lending her support he didn't even know she was going to need.

“Thanks for coming, everybody,” she said. “I won't keep you long. You've probably all figured out by now that someone's trying to kill me, to keep me from finishing the story I'm working on, about the St. Clair Children's Home. Last night, the
St. Clair News
building was burned down, and this morning, the explosion—Bill Brandon doesn't want it printed.” She cleared her throat and looked at her editor.

“Phil, you kept saying you wanted one more quote. Yesterday, I gave you one, but it was from an anonymous source.” She hesitated, then forced herself to go on. “But it's time to tell who that source is. The reason this story is such a passion for me is that . . . I was the anonymous witness who grew up at SCCH.”

Nick looked more stunned than anyone. His mouth fell open. “You what?”

Jimmy gasped, then narrowed his eyes and studied her closely. The others looked first at one another, then at her, shock evident on their faces.

“I didn't want to tell anyone because . . . being in Bill's home brings with it some degree of . . . guilt.”

“Wait a minute,” Phil said, scratching his head. “Are you telling me that you've seen these abuses firsthand?”

She closed her eyes again, and Nick tightened his hold on her hand. “I'm telling you that I've been involved in them.”

Larry and Tony got up from their chairs and came closer to the bed. “So you were one of the kids in his crime ring? He actually used you to break into homes and steal things?”

“That's right. From the time I was eight years old until I left the home at eighteen.” She lifted her chin high, to fight the tears pushing into her eyes, and met Nick's stunned gaze. “I'm sorry, Nick. I should have told you—”

Nick took a few steps closer, his face twisting as he tried to understand. “You were in that home? But I worked for HRS then.

I would have seen you.”

“No, Sheila Axelrod is the one who processed my release when I turned eighteen. And actually, we did cross paths a couple of times. But I've changed my hair color and cut it, and I changed my name. But I came to you when I decided to expose Bill, because I knew you seemed like someone who would listen. I knew that from the way you treated some of my housemates.”

Nick was still gaping, disbelieving, and she turned back to Larry and Tony. “I realize that this confession could get me into trouble, and that's why I've tried not to expose myself in this story.

But Bill Brandon has got to be stopped. An old friend of mine from the home told me yesterday that if I wouldn't even talk, what made me think anyone else would? Well, now I'm talking.” She looked at Phil. “You wanted a reliable adult's word? Well, here it is. She's got a name and everything.”