Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

His voice was hoarse with anger. “You’ve lied to me over and over. You lied about where you were that night and what you were doing. You lied about remembering the fight between you and Laura. You were at the crime scene when Laura was murdered, and you never said a word about what you saw. You’ve deceived me from the outset.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve irreparably compromised this investigation.”

“Without me, there would be no investigation,” Tish reminded him. “I’m the only reason anyone cares. If I made mistakes, they weren’t with any malice. You have to understand-”

Stride sliced the air with his hand, cutting her off. She stared at him, scared and silent. Maggie studied the floor with her arms folded. He shoved his chair back and paced in the small space of the office, wrestling with his fury. He stared at the photographs on his credenza.

“Did Cindy know you were there?” he asked.

“Yes,” Tish admitted.

“That’s why she wanted you to do the book, isn’t it? That’s why she went to you, not me.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head in disbelief. He felt as if he now had to question all the years they had spent together. His wife had lied to him and kept secrets from him. He wasn’t just angry at Tish. He was angry at Cindy, too.

“Start at the beginning,” Stride told her. “Tell me everything.”

Tish took a slow breath. “It was a different world. You know that.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning there were things you didn’t talk about. Not to anyone. Look, it’s hard enough being a gay teenager today, even when most schools have resources and counselors. All you want to do is fit in, and you don’t. Back then, it was a secret you kept to save your life. I struggled with it, but at least I knew who I was. It was much harder for Laura. She resisted. She was scared. She was desperate to be normal.”

“Did Laura know you were gay?” Maggie asked.

Tish’s fingers twitched. Stride knew she was desperate for a cigarette.

“Not at first,” she said. “We were just friends. I was attracted to her, but I didn’t do anything about it for months, because I didn’t know how Laura felt, and I didn’t want to scare her off. I mean, on some level, I was pretty sure she felt the way I did, but she was so deep in the closet that she wasn’t ready to admit it to herself. A lot of people never do.”

“At some point you told her,” Stride concluded.

“Yes.”

“Is that what the fight was about?” he guessed. “Is that what split you up?”

“Yes,” Tish acknowledged. “Things were changing between us. We were touching more. It was casual, but it meant something. We’d do homework on her bed, and we’d drape our legs over each other and sort of idly caress and pretend it was nothing. We’d give each other massages after we went running. We’d sleep together, not doing anything, but sharing the same bed. It was like we were circling each other, groping toward both of us admitting what was going on.”

“What happened next?”

“Laura was getting very anxious about her feelings,” Tish said. “She started going out on dates with boys. Like she was trying to convince herself she was straight. I didn’t like it. I was really upset and jealous, but I didn’t let on. Most of the dates were disasters. She froze up. Peter Stanhope was the worst. He kept pressuring her for sex, and Laura didn’t want that at all, but she didn’t really understand why. It came to a point where I couldn’t stand by and do nothing. I loved her too much, and I was sure she loved me. So finally, in May of our senior year, I suggested we go camping on a Saturday night. It was just the two of us. We shared a sleeping bag, and we were talking and laughing, and my heart was just aching for her. I don’t even remember how it happened, but I kissed her. She kissed me back. Romantic kisses, not like friends. I told her I loved her. And things- happened.”

“What went wrong?” Maggie asked.

“It was a mistake. We went too far, too fast. Laura wasn’t ready to accept that she was gay. She rebelled against it. She rebelled against me. The next day, she hardly said a word to me. She began avoiding me. She was never home. She just shut me out of her life. I was devastated.”

“What did you do?”

“I had never felt so totally alone. When school was over, I ran away. I moved down to the Cities, and I tried to forget about Laura, but I couldn’t. I was still completely in love with her.”

“Did you contact her?”

“Yes, I wrote to her and told her where I was. I told her I was sorry. I asked if we could just be friends, nothing else, nothing physical. That wasn’t what I wanted, and I was kidding myself to think I could be around her at that point without needing to be with her. But I would have done anything to have her back in my life.”

“Did Laura write back?”

“Yes. A few days later, she sent me this long, long letter. About how scared she had been. About how ashamed she was for running away from me. She said she had finally accepted the truth about who she was, and she loved me and wanted to be with me. I don’t have to tell you, I was over the moon. Ecstatic. This was going to be the real deal, our whole lives. Sure, we were naive. We were teenagers. But I’ve never loved anyone like that, ever again.”

“Tell us about the night in the park,” Stride said.

Tish closed her eyes. “I try not to think about that night. I’ve pushed it out of my mind.”

“You have to tell us.”

“It’s too awful. It was the best night of my life, and then just like that, it became the worst night of my life. I couldn’t believe God would be so cruel. So heartless.”

“What happened?” Stride asked.

“Laura and I talked on the phone every night. We made plans to run away. I had an old car, so I told her I would come up to Duluth and meet her. She picked July 4. She said it was her independence day. We said we’d meet on the north beach. It was going to be magical.” Tish gave a sad smile. “For a little while, it was.”

“She found you there?” Maggie asked.

“Yes, I came early to wait for her. She came running out of the trees. She told me what had happened in the field, that someone had attacked her. I knew all about the person who had been stalking her, and I knew how scared she was. I thought we should leave right away, but Laura didn’t want to go back into the woods yet. So we waited. And the longer we were there, the more we forgot about anything else, because we were so happy to be together again. I can’t remember how many times we said we loved each other. Being there on the beach, in the wake of the storm, was like a cocoon. We kissed. We made love. We fell asleep for a little while in the sand in each other’s arms. We never wanted to leave.”

Stride remembered being on the opposite side of the lake on that same night, with Cindy, and feeling the same way.

“It didn’t last,” he murmured.

Tish blinked. Her voice was so low he could barely hear it. “No.”

Tish lay awake, naked, and stared at the sky. The clouds had broken up into a patchwork of dark islands, and she could see open spaces crowded with stars. Near her feet, the lake slurped at the shore. Tufts of cottonwood blew like snow out of the forest and drifted to the ground beside wet masses of heart-shaped leaves. The two of them were on their backs, sand rubbing their skin. Their fingers were laced together, their legs apart, like two dolls in a paper chain. She propped herself on one elbow and watched Laura sleep beside her. She saw a teardrop of rain land on Laura’s breast, and she bent over and tasted it with her tongue and then closed her lips over the nub of a hardened nipple. She was rewarded with a sigh of pleasure, a stirring, a rumbling in Laura’s throat.