Janice Johnson - Dead Wrong

He was staying at his father’s while he looked for a place to live. Their relationship was pleasant but cool, thanks to Will’s long-held belief that his parents in their professional capacities were responsible for the scum who’d killed Gillian being out on the street and therefore free to rape and mutilate. If they’d done their jobs…

But they hadn’t, for reasons he understood intellectually if not emotionally. Now, six years later, he also understood that his anger had mostly been misplaced. But things once said couldn’t be taken back, and much as he regretted the fact, Will knew he couldn’t have back what he’d lost that night.

This week, his father was away at a conference for sheriffs and police chiefs. With him gone, Will was able to relax a little. He got along well with Beth, his dad’s wife, and with her kids.

Stephanie was a senior in high school this year, a really smart girl who had applied to private colleges like Whitman and even Vassar back east. Pretty, with her mother’s dark hair and blue eyes, she was the same serious kid she’d been when her mother married Jack Murray, Sheriff of Butte County.

Redheaded Lauren, fourteen, was in contrast currently grounded because she’d been caught cutting classes. She was a cheerleader and, according to her mother, a social butterfly who was a teenager with a capital T. Will could see what she meant. Lauren was all giggles and glow one minute, sulky the next. He sympathized, since he remembered his own teenage angst when his mom and he moved to Elk Springs so he could finally get to know his father. One minute, he’d believed he could clear Juanita Butte in a single bound, and the next he’d been sure his mother was trying to ruin his life.

So far, both girls seemed pleased to have their stepbrother around.

He’d been okay earlier, watching a TV movie with Steph and explaining to her why the whole trial scene was crap. Lauren had wandered in once, curled her lip, said, “That looks boring,” and gone off to instant message with the friends she was banned from seeing out of school until next Wednesday. “An eternity,” she’d moaned at dinner, after Beth had declined to release her from purgatory.

But after the movie, when Steph disappeared to her room and Beth went to the den to work on orders for her stationery business, Will sat in the empty living room and thought, What am I doing? I must be nuts.

The room, the house, got to him. He’d helped his dad strip these floors and the woodwork and then stain and refinish them. They’d both learned as they went, repairing plaster walls, painting, plumbing, even rewiring. Maybe because he’d been without a father for the first fourteen years of his life, Will had been more eager to spend time with his than most of his buddies were. Now this big old Queen Anne style house made him edgy. Aware of times past, of lost trust and easy affection.

The house was part of his history with Gillian, too. She’d spent weekends and school breaks here with him. They’d had incredible talks right here in the living room, made passionate love upstairs in his bedroom. They’d had that last fight in his bedroom, too, one that had been quiet but intense until she’d walked out on him. He’d run after her and, not caring who heard, stood on the porch and yelled, “Go! I don’t give a shit!”

But he’d given a shit when the cops were on his dad’s doorstep the next morning to inform him that his girlfriend had been found raped and strangled in Deschutes Park. He’d given a shit when they politely and inexorably questioned his whereabouts during the night even as his gut roiled with disbelief and horror and guilt, because he’d let Gilly stalk out without trying to stop her.

From where he sat right now, in a leather club chair, he could see the entry. Empty, but for ghosts. A rangy, carefree version of himself with Dad, scraping thick layers of varnish from the stair banister. He and Gilly, tiptoeing in after going out with some of his high school friends, stifling giggles, pausing to make out just inside the front door, two or three times on the staircase, barely getting the bedroom door shut before shedding their clothes. A slightly older Gillian screaming, “We’re done! Over!” before she flung open the front door to leave. Two officers wearing the familiar Butte County Sheriff’s Department green, saying, “I’m sorry to inform you…”

He groaned and laid his head back, his eyes closed. He didn’t even know why he felt compelled to leave cosmopolitan Portland for this small town that held so many complex memories. He loved Elk Springs, but he hated it, too.

Even for himself, the best explanation he could come up with for accepting the job in the Butte County prosecutor’s office was that he needed answers. Closure. Understanding.

He had an uneasy relationship with both his parents, although Gilly and his accusations had gone un-mentioned on all sides for five years or more. Mad because he’d hurt his mom, his aunt Abby hardly spoke to him, he didn’t know his own half-brother and -sister the way he should, and the stories about his grandfather Patton had begun to seem apocryphal. Had he been anywhere near as bad as they said? Even if he was, did that justify both Meg Patton and Jack Murray being so soft on a troubled young kid that they let him slide out of taking responsibility for one crime after another?

And Gilly… Why hadn’t she just driven back to Salem? Why did she have to go to a bar? Was she getting in her car with the intention of returning here, maybe to say, “I’m sorry,” when a hand closed over her mouth from behind? Had she thought Will might still come after her? Somehow save her?

Still caught in that hazy nexus of past and present, he wondered with a dull ache why he hadn’t gone after her. Her parents grieved to this day. They claimed not to blame him, but they must.

He blamed himself.

The doorbell rang, and he jerked, his eyes opening. Who in hell at this time of night?

Eyes wide with instinctive alarm, Beth emerged from the home office at the back of the house, but Will, who had reached the front hall before her, said, “Let me find out who it is.”

Through the peephole he saw the dark green of sheriff’s department uniforms. His sense of disorientation returned. Gillian?

But when he opened the door, it was his mother he found on the porch, along with another officer. A young woman who appeared vaguely familiar.

“Mom?”

Her face looked drawn, her eyes tired. “Will, I need to talk to you.”

He backed up. Cold air rushed in with them. Or maybe the chill was inside him.

“Hi, Beth.” Mom tried to smile.

“Meg.” Beth pressed a hand to her breast. “Is everything all right? It’s not Jack?”

“No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. No, everybody in the family is fine.”

But somebody, Will diagnosed, wasn’t fine. Somebody Will knew, or she wouldn’t be here.

The wife of a cop, Beth knew, too. She looked Will’s mother over with an experienced eye. “Can I get you coffee? Better yet, a bite to eat? I’ll bet you haven’t stopped, have you?”

“I’m fine…” Meg stopped. She gave a faint laugh. “Actually, I’m starved. A snack would be great, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Don’t be silly.” Beth shooed them towards the living room. “Coming right up.”

His mother pulled off her gloves, then began to shrug out of her coat. He took it and the other cop’s, too, and hung them on the tree near the front door.

He took a few steps into the living room, then stopped. “What’s up?”

“Detective Giallombardo, this is my son Will. Will, Trina Giallombardo. You may remember her from school.”

“You look familiar,” he admitted.

“I was a couple of years behind you.”