Sam Bourne - The Chosen One

‘My daughter’s only “illness” was to have a beautiful face. That was her illness. She wasn’t sick . Pamela never had a day’s sickness in her life. She was healthy as an ox, like her mother. Same bones, same genes.’

She looked to the wall, to the picture of Pamela in a ball gown, at the James Madison High prom.

‘We said that she had gotten sick. That was the deal.’

‘The deal?’

‘That’s what he made us say. After the fire.’

Maggie felt herself shudder. ‘What fire?’ But she knew the answer already.

‘Twenty-six years ago, on March 15, there was a fire at the Meredith Hotel in Aberdeen, Washington. Huge blaze. They said that everyone survived. That they got all the guests out of the rooms, standing outside in the street in their pyjamas and all.’ She paused, a shadow falling over her face again. ‘But it wasn’t true.’

‘Pamela was in that hotel?’

Slowly, as if her head weighed heavily on her neck, Mrs Everett nodded. ‘We don’t know who with. Some boy, on spring break. Using her for sex. She was cursed with a body that men hungered for.’ She looked down at her hands, clasped together. ‘We didn’t know she had been in the hotel. We thought she was having a sleepover with her girlfriends.’

She smiled a bitter smile at her own naïveté.

‘It was early the next morning. We weren’t even aware she was missing. We hadn’t called the police. We were just waiting for her to come home, like she always did on a Sunday after a Saturday night. And then there he was, at the door.’

‘Who was there?’

‘The man. From the hotel, I thought – at first, anyway. He explained there had been an accident, a fire. Pamela had been killed.’ The last word came out in a croak. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You take your time.’

Anne Everett poured the rest of the bottle into a glass and swallowed it whole. ‘You see,’ she said, looking up at Maggie, ‘I’ve carried this for so long. Randall never would let me tell. But it’s eaten me alive, this secret. He took it to his grave, but it killed him too.’

Maggie nodded, knowing she needed to say nothing.

‘The man said Pamela was dead. And there would never be anything we could do to bring her back. All that would be left was her reputation. She could either be remembered as a “goodtime girl” – those were the words that man used – who had died in someone’s bed, or as prom queen Pamela Everett of James Madison High. It was up to us.

‘All we had to do was tell people, starting that day, that Pam was not feeling well, that she’d come down with something. That she couldn’t see anyone. Then, a week or so later, we should say it was more serious. That she was being transferred to Tacoma. Still no visitors allowed. Then, a week after that, there would be an announcement of her death. He would take care of everything. We wouldn’t have to do anything, except stay home and tell people our daughter was sick.

‘And in return he would pay us a lot of money, more than Randall would make in a year. Hell, in five years. To show he was serious, he had one of those attaché cases with him. The kind men used to carry back then. And inside it was cash. A lot of cash. I don’t think I’d ever seen that much money in my life. And he promised there would be more.

‘Well, Randall threw him out, of course. Said it was blood money. How dare he? Lots of noise. But the man left the case there. Just sitting in that room in Aberdeen where Pamela should have been.

‘The hours went by and we were sobbing about our daughter, our little baby. But we were also looking at that money. All that money. Might have been fifty thousand dollars in that bag.’

Now she hunched over, making small, noiseless sobs. Maggie crossed the vast space between them and placed a hand on her shoulder. Instantly, like an animal reflex, Mrs Everett grabbed it and held it tight. Raising her head, her eyes rheumy with tears, she let out a howl of anguish. ‘I said we should take the money! God curse me for it, I accepted it. I did it.’

‘I understand,’ Maggie said, shaken.

‘I believed what he said, you see. He said we could get away; we should get away. Aberdeen would only ever be a “place of death” for us. And we could use the money to set up some kind of memorial for Pamela. Perhaps a scholarship. Some way of keeping her memory alive. So we said yes. We called the number on the card. Randall made the call.

‘Of course we never did set up that memorial. We were too ashamed. Everyone there at the funeral, believing Pamela had suffered through a terrible illness. Imagine that, lying about your own child’s death. We deserved to be cast out. So that’s what we did. We cast ourselves out. As far away as possible. Middle of nowhere. So that we wouldn’t have to see anybody ever again. But you can’t run away from your own shame. It stays with you.’

Maggie spoke softly. ‘The money? Did the man ever pay it?’

Anne Everett looked up, as if jolted from a daydream. ‘Oh yes, all of it. It kept coming into the bank account, a few thousand more, piling up month after month. I can’t bring myself to spend a penny of it, of course. Nor could Randall. It’s filthy.’

‘And who did it come from?’

‘Like I said, we never knew. We were too grief-stricken to ask. Too stupid too, probably. We talked about it, of course. Wondering and guessing. Until Randall stopped talking, a few years ago. His mouth just clammed up, I guess. That’s shame for you.’

Maggie had a question burning to get onto her tongue until it could be held back no longer. ‘And what about this…boy she was with that night? Did you ever-’

Anne Everett shook her head furiously. ‘Never did, never wanted to. We would have killed him with our bare hands if we’d have found out who he was.’

‘Do you have your suspicions?’

‘Well, it’s funny you should ask that.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Put it this way, this last year or two, I’d been wondering when somebody would knock on that door and ask about Pamela. No one ever did, but I thought they might. I thought a journalist might come here.’

‘Why a journalist?’

‘Because of the boy my Pamela loved when she was at high school, the boy she adored until the day she died.’

‘What boy?’

‘Haven’t you guessed? I thought you’d have guessed by now.’ She looked into the bottom of her glass as if it were a deep well. ‘Pamela was in love with Stephen Baker.’

From the Daily Dish blog, posted at 18.46, Sunday March 26:

Did you see the faces of the crowds that gathered on the Mall today? The sheer diversity of those faces? It was awe-inspiring – the reason why those of us who chose to be American citizens can feel glad, despite everything that has happened in the last insane few days, that we joined this remarkable country.

With the minimum of advance publicity – yours truly only heard that it was happening about an hour or two before it started – we gathered this afternoon on the steps of the Capitol to send a message to Congress: Hands off our President.

This was the Baker Nation, the young, hopeful America that elected our young, hopeful president just months ago. They resent the notion that a cabal of Republican headbangers, together with a couple of craven Democratic enablers, might drive from office the man who represents a chance for our country at last to be the nation it was meant to be.

The TV estimates the crowd at ten thousand. I would say, looking at it, that it appears larger than that. Even if you accept the lower figure, it is a remarkable achievement. There was next to no preparation or organization. This was the closest we might get to an organic, spontaneous demonstration of popular outrage. Call it leaderless resistance, American-style.