Tami Hoag - Cry Wolf

She shook her head, wrapping her arms around herself as if trying to physically hold herself together. A fresh sheen of tears glistened in her eyes as she resumed her pacing. "I don't know how I'll be able to hold my head up in town."

"That's all you care about?" Laurel demanded, stunned. "You think Savannah embarrassed you by falling prey to a psychopath?"

Vivian wheeled on her, eyes flashing. "That's not what I said!"

"Yes, it is! That's exactly what you said. Christ, she was your daughter!"

"Yes, she was my daughter," Vivian snapped, her face turning a mottled red as long-held feelings surfaced inside her. "And I will never understand how that could be, how God could give me a child like her-so beautiful on the outside and rotten to the core. I will never understand-"

"Because we kept it from you!" Laurel cried.

She clamped her hands on top of her head and turned around, everything within her in turmoil. She had tried to tamp the truth down inside her again, to bury it for all time, but it ripped loose and clawed its way free. Savannah was dead indirectly because of what Ross had made her into. And because I kept the silence.

The guilt was like a vise, twisting and twisting, crushing her. She couldn't change the past, but someone had to pay. Vivian couldn't go on living in her watercolor fantasies. Ross couldn't be allowed to escape the consequences of his actions. Justice had to be served somehow, some way.

Vivian watched her with wary eyes. She swiped a strand of ash blond hair back behind her ear in an impatient gesture. "What do you mean, 'kept it from me'? Kept what from me?"

"That Ross, the wonderful, well-bred, charitable knight in shining armor who swept in and rescued you, molested your daughter." She met her mother's shocked stare evenly, unblinking. "He used her, in the carnal sense, night after night, week after week, year after year."

"You're lying!" Vivian said on a gasp. She clutched a hand to her throat and swallowed twice, as if the words Laurel had spoken were gagging her. "That's a horrid lie! Why would you say such a thing?"

"Because it's the truth and because I'm sick to death of keeping it a secret!" Laurel advanced on her mother, her hands balled into tight, white-knuckled fists at her side. "Everything Savannah became is because of Ross Leighton. Now she's dead, and the one person who should be inconsolable is more concerned about her own image than her daughter's murder. I can't stand it!"

The slap connected solidly with her cheek and snapped her head to the side. She didn't try to block it or the second blow Vivian glanced off her shoulder. She deserved worse-not for what she had said to her mother, but for what she hadn't said all those years ago. Vivian shoved her, then backed away, her eyes wild, her lips twitching and trembling.

"You ungrateful little bitch!" she spat, her silky hair falling across her forehead and into her eyes. "Lies. That's all you have in you is lies! You lied to those people in Georgia, now you're lying to me! You hated Ross from day one. You'd do anything to hurt him!"

"Yes, I hate him. I hate him for taking my father's place, but I hate him more for taking my sister." The incredulity she had known during those years came back in a violent rush. How could their mother not have realized? How could that have gone on in her house without her suspecting? "Didn't you ever wonder where he was all those nights, Mama? Or were you just thankful he wasn't coming to your bed?"

Vivian's face washed white, and she brought a trembling hand up to press against her mouth, to press back the cry, to hold back the bile that rose in her throat. She'd never cared for sex. It was messy and revolting, all that grunting and sweating. She'd never questioned Ross's calm acceptance of her disinclination to share her bed. She'd never thought once of where he might be relieving his manly urges-as long as he was discreet, she didn't care. But with her own daughter?

No. It couldn't be. Things like that didn't happen in good families.

"No," she said softly, rejecting the possibility with her mind, with her body. She flung her hands out as if to push the idea away.

"Yes," Laurel insisted. "He came to her room two or three nights a week and had his way with her, whatever way he happened to be in a mood for-intercourse, oral sex-"

"Shut up! Shut up! I won't listen to this!" Vivian planted her hands over her ears to try to block out the ugly accusations. Laurel grabbed her wrists and jerked them down, shouting in her face.

"You will listen! You should have listened twenty years ago! If you had given a damn about anyone but yourself, you would have seen, you would have known," she said, the realization bringing tears of bitterness to cloud her vision. "I wouldn't have been afraid to tell you. I wouldn't have been afraid of losing your love. I was too young to know you weren't capable of giving any."

Her mother pulled back from her, reeling as if she had been struck full in the face. "I always loved you!"

"When it was convenient. When we were good little girls and no trouble. That's not love, Mama," Laurel murmured, despair choking her. "If you had loved us, you would have seen that Savannah needed help, that something was wrong, that Ross was a child molester."

"He wasn't!" He couldn't be. She couldn't bear the thought of it.

"Ross Leighton treated your daughter like a whore until she believed that was all she could ever be."

The red had crept back into Vivian's face, and her eyes bulged out like T-Grace Delahoussaye's. "I don't believe you. You're a vicious little liar. Get out. Get out of my house!" she screamed. "You're not my daughter! I don't have any daughters!"

Laurel gave her a long, hard stare. The hurt was sharp and deep, the disillusionment absolute. "You know something," she said quietly, the fury spent. "I wish to God that were true."

She left the room without looking back, without acknowledging the maid who had been eavesdropping in the hall. The more people who knew the truth, the better. Now that it was out of that terrible little black box of secrets inside her, Laurel had every intention of making Ross Leighton's perversity common knowledge in Partout Parish. He would never face the charges in court, but he could damn well face them every time he walked down a street or walked into a store or a restaurant. He would never do time inside the walls of a penitentiary; a sentence of public disgrace would have to suffice.

The front door swung open as Laurel came down the grand staircase, and her stepfather ushered in Reverend Stipple.

"Laurel," Ross said, beaming one of his bland smiles up at her. "I'm so glad you could come for your mother's sake."

"You won't be." Laurel stepped down onto the polished marble and cut a glance at the minister, whose small eyes widened as he scented trouble like a mouse scenting the approach of cats. He took an instinctive step back, his bony hands fumbling to straighten his limp seersucker jacket. Laurel wondered what he would think of Ross Leighton now; if he would condemn, or in his weak and ineffectual way find some excuse to make it all right.

"I told her," she said, turning back to her stepfather.

Understanding dawned like shock in his eyes, but he pretended not to know, as he had pretended innocence all these years. "Told her what, darlin'?"

"The truth about the way you used my sister when she was too young to stop you. The truth about the way you turned her into a whore for your own personal enjoyment."

Reverend Stipple gasped at the words and their implications. Color crept up Ross's thick neck and into his face. He opened his mouth to protest, but Laurel cut him off with a sharp motion of her hand.

"Don't bother denying it while I'm standing here, you son of a bitch. I know what happened. I knew all along. I know what you turned her into. I know that she's dead because of it. I kept the silence all this time, kept that terrible secret inside me, let you get off scot-free. Not anymore," she promised, her voice trembling as badly as the rest of her.