The Year We Hid Away (26 page)

I laughed. “Where are you guys? I’m just walking back to Vanderberg.” I’d been in the library, studying for my stats exam.

“It took me awhile to get out of there,” he said. “I had to thank a whole lot of people who came to show their support, even though the judge didn’t call on anyone except the dean. Now we’re parking Brian’s car about one minute away from you. Wait for us outside?”

“Sure.” I hung up the phone and tried not to feel creeped out by the fact that Bridger’s number would pop up on Azzan’s spy report. Shoving the phone into my purse, I decided that it was time to let Luke take the spywear off. I’d left it on long enough that my father’s handlers wouldn’t assume that I’d noticed their spying. And it had occurred to me that if I traded up for a newer phone, the transition would look accidental.

I was so distracted by my own scheming that I didn’t notice who was waiting for me outside of Vanderberg.

“Hi Scarlet.”

I lifted my chin to find the district attorney Madeline Teeter standing outside my entryway door. “I told you I couldn’t talk to you,” I said immediately.

“I know you did,” she said evenly. “But if you’ll give me thirty seconds, I can explain why I came all the way down here to ask you a single question about the layout of your family home.”

The layout of our house?
That piqued my interest, although it didn’t make much sense. The police had combed through the place with their search warrants several times after the arrest.

“Scarlet?” Bridger arrived, his arm coming around my shoulders. Brian joined us, too, flanking my other side. “Who is this?”

“The prosecutor,” Brian supplied. “She interviewed me two months ago, after which J.P.’s security team followed me around Massachusetts for three days.”

“I can’t talk to you,” I repeated. If I did, Azzan would find out, and then he’d threaten Bridger again. And I would do anything to spare him that heartache.

“Your father won’t find out,” Ms. Teeter said, reading my mind. “We’re never putting you on our witness list.”

“You can’t promise me that,” I protested. “Besides, I’m already on the list.”

She shook her head. “That’s just a front the defense is putting up. They’ll never call you to the stand.”

“Why not?” I asked.

The prosecutor rubbed her hands together. “I’d prefer to explain it to you in the office I’m borrowing downtown.”

“Explain it to her here,” my Uncle Brian said.

“Fine.” She trained her serious blue eyes on me. “I’m not putting you on the stand, because asking a daughter to testify against her father looks desperate. Unless the daughter has something crucial to say.”

“Which I don’t,” I put in.

“I’m sure that’s true,” she said kindly. “If you did, your father’s legal team wouldn’t dare make you available. But they’re not going to call you either, and I can prove it.”

“Go ahead,” Brian said.

The prosecutor pulled a file out of the elegant leather satchel she carried over her arm. Under the other arm was a paper tube, as if she were toting a poster around. “If your father puts you on the stand as a ploy to defend himself, I’m going to call a witness by the name of David Clancy.”

That made no sense. “My hockey teammate’s father? Why?”

“Because he — and several others, too — gave a deposition about your father’s behavior toward you during hockey games. And it is not the kind of thing your father wants a jury to hear. Your father filled in as your team coach for a couple of games two years ago. Do you remember that?”

I nodded, steeling myself. Our regular coach had been out of town for a funeral. And with Dad in charge, I’d been a wreck. Those games did not go well for me, and now both my boyfriend and my uncle were going to hear the gory details.

“The witness said that you gave up two goals within three minutes, and your father was heard to shout…”

This next part was going to be even more humiliating than my hockey errors.

“…
You stupid little bitch. Only a whore could get herself fucked so hard as you just did
.”

Beside me, Bridger’s body went absolutely solid, and Uncle Brian cursed under his breath.

“That sounds really bad out of context,” I said, my face getting hot.

“Out of
context?
” Bridger’s voice was tight. “There is no context in which that is an acceptable thing to say to your child.”

“I was sixteen,” I said, pointlessly. I don’t know why I gave even a half-hearted defense of my father. Maybe because I felt like an idiot for living with a man who would say those things to me without realizing that he was capable of far worse.

Beside me, Uncle Brian bent down to put his hands on his knees, dropping his head.

“Are you okay?” Bridger asked, looking down at him.

“Give me a minute,” he muttered.

“Please, Scarlet,” the prosecutor said. “I will only ask you questions about the layout of your home. And your uncle can sit in on the interview. If you don’t like the questions, you can just get up and leave. But I need this. And the boys who were victims need this.”

My father had called me a whore in front of a few hundred people. But those boys got much worse.

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

“The office is on South Street,” she said.

“We just came from there,” Bridger said.

Brian straightened up, his face red and strained. “I guess we’re going back.”

Ten minutes later, I found myself sitting in a little government conference room, which the prosecutor had borrowed from her colleagues in the Harkness County prosecutor’s office. The tube she’d been carrying under her arm proved to be a detailed architectural floor plan of my New Hampshire home. She and her assistant spread it out on the table.

“I need to ask you about your basement,” Ms. Teeter said. “It doesn’t seem very basement-like.”

“Well, it’s a walk-out,” I supplied, pointing at the drawing. “These sliding glass doors open into the back yard. The house is on a slope, so only one side of the basement is really underground.”

“And there aren’t any walls or partitions down there?” she asked.

I shook my head. “The drawing is accurate.”

She nodded. “Tell us about this utility space.” She pointed at the little mechanical room under the stairs. “Is it roomy?”

“Not at all,” I said. “You can barely get in there. My mother has always kept her Christmas wrapping paper in there, but I discovered it when I was in the second grade.”

Brian let out a strangled chuckle and pinched the sides of his nose.

“Is it insulated?” the prosecutor pressed. “If someone was in there, could you hear it?”

“There’s no way it’s insulated,” I said. “Why are you asking me this?”

She sighed. “There are some old stories about a basement. Or a dungeon. But there’s nothing dungeon-like in your house. In fact, there isn’t even a
door
on your basement.”

That was true. It was all very airy and open.

“This has bothered me,” the prosecutor confessed, “because I want rock-solid details in court. And — no matter what people say about lawyers — I want my complaint to be completely truthful. I don’t have time for exaggeration. And this dungeon bit doesn’t ring true to me. Has the basement
changed
at all in the last ten years? Did your parents have any work done down there?”

I shook my head. “The only renovations in the house that I can remember were the kitchens and bathrooms.”

“The basement wasn’t touched?”

“No. It was finished and modern when we moved into the place. That’s why they chose to knock down the
other
house when they bought that second property. That one was really old…” I broke off that sentence. Something bothered me about that idea, and I couldn’t figure out what.

“A second house?” the prosecutor asked, her voice hushed.

“Yes…” Again, my brain snagged on something. “My father wanted a big yard, so he could have an ice rink…” I pictured the rink and the yard. And the dark, shadowed corner of the property where I did not like to walk, ever since our yard had doubled in size.

“There are doors,” I croaked, surprised at myself.

“What doors?” the prosecutor asked.

“There are…” I swallowed hard, and my throat was like sandpaper. “…Those doors in the ground. Like in
The Wizard of Oz
.” I slapped my hand down at the edge of the floor plan. “Over there. Off the edge of your map. They were part of the old house.”

The prosecutor locked eyes with her assistant. “Call the investigator. Check the search warrant to make sure that outbuildings are covered.”

The assistant bolted out of the room, and a terrible shiver ripped down my spine. Those doors had always scared me. I never wanted to go near them. When I was eight or nine, I thought that monsters lived down there.

“Oh my God,” I gasped, shoving my hands in front of my mouth.

“Whoa,” Brian asked, standing up from his chair so fast that it fell over. “This interview is over. We’re done here.”

The prosecutor held up two hands in a defensive position. “Okay. No more questions. And I’m going to step out. The room is yours. Scarlet, you’ve been very helpful.”

I didn’t answer her. Because there were tears stinging my eyes. I’d
heard
something in that abandoned old cellar. I was in grade school, and I was dawdling outside when I was supposed to be doing my homework. And I’d heard muffled shouting from that corner of my yard. “Oh my God,” I said again. “Oh my God.”

“Shh, shh,” Brian said, righting his chair and pulling it close. He sat, wrapping his arms around me. “Shh. I’m so sorry.”

“I think there was somebody
down there
once,” I squeaked.

Brian swiped at my tears. “Sweetie, were
you
ever down there?”

Violently, I shook my head. “Never. I didn’t really
know
. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.
I didn’t know
.”

He pulled my head into his shoulder. “You didn’t know,” he whispered, rocking me. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not!”

“You didn’t
hurt
anyone, Sweetie. You were a child. Just breathe for me. Deep breaths.”

Slowly, I forced myself to calm down. “Can we leave, now? I really want to go.” Maybe if I just got out of this room, the world would stop tilting.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Brian said. “Let’s go and eat somewhere. We need to decompress.”

“Decompress,” I repeated, stupidly. When I looked up, I saw Bridger standing very still across the table from us. His head was cocked to the side, as if trying to solve a puzzle. “Bridge?”

He stared for another long moment. “Sure, Scarlet,” he said eventually. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Nineteen:
Take a Look at the News

—
Scarlet

Bridger took us to Capri’s, which was a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint where the hockey team often hung out. But it was too early for the bar crowd, so we had a booth in the back corner all to ourselves. We ate a pie with sausage and olives. Bridger drank a beer while Brian and I had Cokes.

I snuggled against Bridger’s shoulder, feeling worn out. I didn’t know what to do with the suspicion that I’d heard something potentially terrible. And so long ago, too. I’d been Lucy’s age when I’d started avoiding that corner of the yard.

“The dean said I’ll have an apartment over on Osage Street before Christmas,” Bridger said. “Apparently, things always turn over during the holidays, because some people depart over the semester break. Until then, Lucy will stay one more week in Beaumont, and maybe a week at Hartley’s if we need it.” He loosened his tie. “This week has been my worst nightmare. Thank you both for talking me through it.”

“You are welcome,” Brian said. “I’m happy for you.” My uncle began to play with the straw in his drink, then. His face became somber. “But now we need to spend a little time talking about my worst nightmare.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

My uncle turned serious eyes on me. “There are some things you need to understand about your family.”

“Okay?” I watched his eyebrows knit together.

“Did you know your father and I were adopted?”

“No. Really?”

“Really. Your grandparents aren’t your blood relatives.”

“He never said anything about it.” But that wasn’t surprising. My father wasn’t a sharer. Not about anything.

“Your so-called grandfather…” Brian cleared his throat. “It was by design that he adopted two little
boys
.”

Oh
.

My insides clenched at the direction that I feared his story was taking.

Brian dropped his gaze to the tabletop. “He wasn’t a good man. And it messed both of us up pretty bad. You already know some of what it did to me. I drank and I stole things. But J.P.…” he sighed. “I thought J.P. had held it together. He was the one of us who seemed to rise above it. He was the big hockey star, with the great big career. That’s what I thought, anyway. Until the news broke.”