Danielle Steel - Malice

“They practically said I raped him! Did you hear what that bastard said?” Grace was outraged by what the chief of police had said about her, he had called her “pretty sick” and said she had “tantalized” her father. “Can't we sue them?”

“Maybe,” Charles said, trying to sound calm, for hers and the children's sake. “First we have to see what happens. There's going to be a lot of noise over this. We have to be ready for it.”

“How much worse can it get?” she asked angrily.

“A lot,” he said knowingly. His aides had warned him, and he knew that from his experience with the press years before.

By seven o'clock there were television cameras outside their house. One channel even used a bullhorn to address her, and urge her to come out and talk to them. Charles called the police, but the best they could do for them was get the reporters off their property, and force them to stand across the street, which they did. They put two camera crews in the trees so they could shoot into their bedroom windows. And Charles went upstairs and closed the shades. They were under siege.

“How long is this going to last?” Grace asked miserably after the children went to bed. They were still out there.

“Awhile probably. Maybe a long while.” And then as they sat in the kitchen, looking at each other in exhaustion, he asked her if she wanted to talk to them at some point and tell them her side of the story.

“Should I? Can't we sue them for what they said?”

“I don't know any of the answers.” He had already put in calls to two major libel lawyers, but he also realized that their phones could be tapped by the press, and he didn't want to talk to the attorneys from the house, or even from his office. For the moment, at least, it was a genuine disaster.

The next morning, the press were still there, and Charles and Grace were tipped off again about new coverage on local and national talk shows. She was the hot news of the hour all over the country.

Two guards were interviewed at Dwight, who claimed they knew her really well. Both were young and Grace knew for certain she'd never seen them.

“I've never laid eyes on them,” she said to Charles, feeling sick again. He had stayed home with her, to lend her support, as she was stuck in the house, and Abby had refused to get out of bed. But a friend had offered to take Andrew and Matt to school, and Grace was relieved they'd gone. It was hard enough dealing with Abby, and herself.

The two prison guards said that Grace had been a member of a real tough gang, and they implied, but didn't actually say, that she'd used drugs in prison.

“What are they doing to me?” She burst into tears and put her face in her hands. She didn't understand it. Why were these people lying about her?

“Grace, they want a piece of the action. A moment of glory. That's all it is. They want to be on television, they want to be a star just like you are.”

“I'm not a star. I'm a housewife,” she said naively.

“To them, you're a star.” He was a lot wiser than she was.

On another channel, they were interviewing the chief of police again. And in Watseka, a girl who claimed to have been Grace's best friend in school, and whom Grace had also never seen before, said that Grace had always talked to her a lot about how much she loved her father and how jealous she was of her mother. The impression being created there was that she had killed her father in a jealous rage.

“Are these people crazy, or am I? That woman looks twice my age, and I don't even know who she is.” Even her name was unfamiliar.

They interviewed one of the arresting officers from that night, who looked like an old man now, and he admitted that Grace had looked really scared and she was shaking really badly when they found her.

“Did she look like she'd been raped?” the interviewer said without hesitation.

“It was hard to tell, you know, I'm no doctor,” he said shyly, “but she didn't have any clothes on.”

“She was naked ?” The interviewer looked straight into the camera, shocked, and the policeman nodded.

“Yeah, but I don't think the doctors at the hospital said she'd been raped. They just said she'd had sex with her boyfriend or something. Maybe her father walked in on them.”

“Thank you, Sergeant Johnson.”

And then came the pièce de résistance on yet another channel. A moment with Frank Wills, who looked even worse and sleazier than he had twenty years before, if that was possible, and he said bluntly that Grace had always been a strange kid and had always been after her father's money.

“What? He got everything there was, and God knows it wasn't much,” she shouted at Charles, and then laid her head back in despair again.

“Grace, you have to stop going crazy over everything they say. You know they're not going to tell the truth. Why should they?” Where were David Glass and Molly? Why wasn't someone saying anything decent about her? Why didn't anybody love her? Why hadn't they? Why had Molly died, and David disappeared? Where the hell were they now?

“I can't stand this,” she said hysterically. There was no getting away from it, and it was unbearable. There was no relief and in this case, there was no reward for this kind of pain and torture.

“You have to stand it,” Charles said matter-of-factiy. “It's not going to disappear overnight.” Charles knew better than anyone that it could take a long time to die down once the flames had grown to such major proportions.

“Why do I have to stand this?” she asked, crying again.

“Because people love this garbage. They eat it up. When I was married to Michelle, the tabloids crawled all over her constantly, they told lies, they snuck stories, they did everything they could to torture her. You just have to accept that. That's the way it is.”

“I can't. She was a movie star, she wanted the attention. She must have wanted what went with it.” Grace was refusing to see the similarity in their lives.

“And the presumption is that I do too, because I'm a politician.”

She sat in the den with him for an hour and cried, and then she went upstairs and tried to talk to Abby. But Abby didn't want to hear any of it from her. She had been flipping the dial, and hearing all the same things in her mother's bedroom.

“How could you do those things?” Abby sobbed as Grace looked at her in anguish.

“I didn't,” Grace said through tears. “I was miserable, I was alone, I was scared. I was terrified of him … he beat me … he raped me for four years … and I couldn't help it. I don't even know if I meant to kill him. I just did. I was like a wounded animal. I struck out any way I could to save myself from him. I had no choice, Abby.” She was sobbing as Abby watched her, crying too. “But most of the other things they said on TV aren't true.” Grace hated them for what they were doing to her daughter. “None of those things was true. I don't even know those people, except the man who was my father's partner, and what he said wasn't true either. He took alt my father's money. I hardly got anything, and what I got I gave to charity. I've spent my life trying to give back to people like me, to help them survive too. I never forgot what I went through. And oh God, Abby,” she put her arms around her, “I love you so much, I don't ever want you to suffer because of me. It breaks my heart to see you so unhappy. Abby, I had a miserable life as a kid. No one was ever decent to me until I met your father. He gave me a life, he gave me love and all of you. He's one of the few human beings who's ever been kind to me … Abby,” she was sobbing uncontrollably, and her daughter was hugging her, “I'm so sorry, and I love you so much … please forgive me …”