Даниэла Стил - Finding Ashley [calibre]

“I’m not brave, and you’re right, I ran away too.”

“What kind of work did you do before?” It was the first he had heard of her career when she said she had given up her work.

“I used to write. Articles, books. I ran out of words after my son died. Everything seemed so irrelevant after that, so small compared to him.”

“Do you miss writing?” He was curious about her now. She had shown him pieces of the puzzle, but not the whole, which had whetted his appetite to know more.

“Not anymore,” she said. “It was part of another life. My husband was my agent, that’s how we met. He’s still active in New York. His wife is a moderately successful mystery writer. He keeps busy with her. He tried to get me to start writing again, but I couldn’t. I’d rather work with my hands now. I have no desire to write again. My books were pretty dark. It was another time.” He had a suspicion that she had talent. She was well read and very bright. There was a look of determination in her eyes when she spoke of not writing again. She had chosen a different path.

“Would I have read any of your work?” he asked, curious. “Did you write under your name? Fiction?”

“I wrote under my maiden name, Melissa Stevens. It was the truth thinly veiled as fiction.”

He looked shocked. “That’s you? I read a few of your books. They were very upsetting and haunting. We’ve all felt like that at times, enraged by the injustices done to us, and helpless to avenge the past, or forget it. You spoke for all of us, but were brave enough to say it. I read two of them twice. They were beautifully written. You’re a big deal, Melissa,” he said, impressed.

“It felt important to me to say it. But what’s the point? The people I was angry at are all dead. My mother was a bitter, angry, mean woman. My father was weak and a drunk who wasted his life. There’s nothing left to say.”

“It’s a shame to bury a talent like that,” he said kindly, and she shrugged.

“I have other things that I want to do. It’s painful, stripping yourself naked like that.”

“But it must be healing too, a kind of catharsis.” She didn’t answer. She just nodded. It was obvious that she didn’t want to discuss it. He left a little while later.

He thought of their conversation on his way home. There was a mysterious side of her that fascinated him. She wasn’t just an interesting woman who had opted for a quiet country life. She had run away from a husband, a life, a career, fame, success, a city, even her own family ties by avoiding her sister. He could tell that she was a woman who had been deeply wounded, maybe by more than just the loss of her son. And as the author of the books he’d read, he knew that her youth and childhood had been a nightmare of emotional abuse by a cruel mother.

Her fury at the young arsonist seemed extreme to him. Her reaction was visceral, pure rage. It seemed out of character for her. She was so distant and cool and uncommunicative, but she had never seemed that angry to him before. The boy’s youth and obvious problems didn’t mitigate the crime for her. He had jeopardized the home she loved, and she hated him for it.

—

Like a moth drawn to flame, when Melissa read in the paper of the arraignment, which was open to the public, she drove to the county courthouse the morning that it was to occur. She wanted to see what would happen, and to see his face in person. She was fueled by anger and indignation as she drove to the courthouse on the appointed day. She was shocked when she saw the boy, led into the courtroom by sheriff’s deputies, in handcuffs, and shackles on his legs. He looked about fourteen years old, and there were tears streaming down his face.

His name was Luke Willoughby, and he was represented by the public defender. Other locals had come to see the proceedings as well, and how he would be dealt with. Melissa suspected that many of the people who filled the courtroom had lost their homes. She had less reason to be there, but curiosity about him and raw anger had impelled her to come.

The public defender requested that the judge remand him into the custody of the juvenile court system, which was denied, given the severity of the crime. He hadn’t graduated from high school, had dropped out of school that spring, and was turning eighteen in September, so technically he was not yet an adult. He pled not guilty, and the judge sent him to an adult psychiatric facility to determine if he was able to stand trial. The only words he spoke during the entire proceeding were “Not guilty, Your Honor.” He sounded respectful and looked broken, and the public defender confirmed that his parents were not in the courtroom. He explained that his father had disappeared when Luke was seven, and his mother had been sent to rehab by the court, and had been unable to come. He said that they had been homeless for several years, and he was living alone in a shack in his mother’s absence. The judge nodded and his face registered no emotion.

The deputies walked him past Melissa when they took him back to jail, and the anger she had felt for him suddenly ebbed away like sand through her fingers. He looked so tragic and so forlorn that it was hard to imagine him committing so heinous a crime that had cost several lives and caused so many people pain. She wanted to reach out and touch him, and as Norm had said, the idea of sending him to prison with adult men seemed suddenly wrong. He didn’t appear insane either, just desperately lost. She wanted to ask him why he had done it, but she didn’t know him, and there was no chance to talk.

His terrified face haunted her all the way home, and she was ashamed to have gone there at all. He was in a hell all his own, and no good would come of it, whatever they decided to do with him. He was precisely what Norm had guessed, a lost soul who had slipped through the system at an early age, and needed help. She might have felt differently if she’d lost her home as a result of his crime, but she hadn’t, and the steam had gone out of everything she had thought about him before. She couldn’t imagine a life like the one he had led as a child, and the punishment he had ahead of him now, either confined to a mental hospital or in prison. Either way, he had hard times ahead, little or no future, and had led a hard life until then. Seeing him had opened her heart to forgiveness.

It struck her again that the arsonist was only a year older than Robbie would have been, and the same age she was when her mother died and she became her sister’s surrogate mother and was fully responsible for her within a year. What if her own anger at her mother had expressed itself in a life of crime? Instead she had written about it and transformed it into a lucrative career. But this was a helpless, sick boy, unable to surmount his own pain except by starting fires, damaging property and causing people’s deaths. Her heart ached for the tragedy of his life, and it made her own anger at her mother’s coldness seem so small. The young arsonist’s life was sure to get worse now instead of better. It was truly tragic, and she felt only grief and compassion for him.

It made her think of her sister when she got home. Her worst crime, in Melissa’s eyes, had been joining a religious order, which Melissa had been deeply critical of at the time. But apparently it suited her, if she was still there eighteen years later. Her two years in Africa nursing orphans and life as a nurse in a hospital were admirable. Suddenly Melissa wanted to see her again. Even if they had nothing in common now, they had a shared history, and still loved each other, even though things had gone so wrong.

She sent her an email, and invited her to come up. Hattie’s response came through on Melissa’s computer in less than an hour. She accepted the invitation gratefully, said she wouldn’t spend the night, but would make the round trip the same day. It was a four-hour drive from New York, which meant they wouldn’t have too many hours together, which might be for the best for a first visit after so long. They were almost strangers to each other now.