As the big man started to doze, Jake was seized by melancholy, and the image of Travis fixed itself in his thoughts. Was there at least a safety net for his son-a level below which he wouldn’t fall? Jake wanted to believe that even if the fight to prove his and Carolyn’s innocence dragged on, the boy would be cut loose and-
What?
It worried Jake that even if he saw his most fervent wish fulfilled and Travis staged a full recovery, the likelihood was that his son would become a ward of the state.
A thought materialized out of nowhere. It was a wild one-one that was formed more from exhaustion than logic-yet in the space of seconds it grew from merely a seedling notion to a fine compromise to a question in need of speedy resolution. He turned urgently to Thorne and tapped the man’s knee, startling him from a fragile sleep.
“I’ve got a question for you.”
Thorne raised an eyebrow.
“What do you think Harry would say if I asked him to take charge of Travis while all of this business plays itself out?”
“He’d say no,” Thorne replied grumpily. He’d been enjoying his shut-eye.
“Why?” Suddenly, Jake was wide awake. He sat up straight. “I mean, he’s family, right? The courts would surely be inclined to grant temporary custody to family. Christ, Carolyn thinks the sun rises and sets with the old bastard.”
Thorne shook his head. “It’s a question Mr. Sinclair anticipated. The answer is no.”
“It’d be better than shuttling the poor kid from stranger to stranger,” Jake countered. “At least Harry could give some stability.”
“Your boy isn’t Mr. Sinclair’s problem,” Thorne said simply. “I mean, as kids go, yours ain’t so bad, but a kid’s a kid. You know of any kids Mr. Sinclair ever had? I don’t. He doesn’t like them.”
Jake wasn’t about to let it go. “But what about Carolyn? His Sunshine? I mean, she’s-”
“She’s different,” Thorne interrupted. He thought about saying something else but then stopped himself. “She’s different.”
In that instant, Jake saw a look in Thorne’s face that came as close to tenderness as a man like him could ever generate. “Tell me about her childhood,” he said softly.
Thorne’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want to know? She was a kid. Mr. Sinclair liked her.”
“But she has nightmares. Horrible ones. She wakes up screaming, yet she won’t talk about them. I know nothing of her parents. When I try to probe, she just pulls away.”
Thorne looked away, uncomfortable with the topic. “Then she doesn’t want you to know,” he said. “You should just let it go.”
“So why does she adore Harry the way she does?” Jake pressed. “What is it about that ornery old man that makes her melt at the mention of his name?”
Thorne just shook his head. These questions were not even worth answering.
“Did Harry abuse Carolyn?” Jake asked out of nowhere.
“What?”
“Did Harry abuse my wife when she was a little girl?” Jake said it again firmly, without hesitation. “There are signs, sometimes, that she was molested as a kid. She pulls away occasionally, she frequently doesn’t sleep. And the nightmares. I just thought that maybe…” His voice trailed off. He’d never verbalized his concerns to anyone before, and he was shocked by the emotions that welled up within him.
Thorne’s eyes hardened. “So you think Mr. Sinclair raped his niece? And that afterward she decided to adore him?” He leaned heavily on Jake’s word.
Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s so much weird psychological bullshit you read about. I thought maybe…”
“You really got it bad for Sunshine, don’t you?” Thorne seemed surprised.
Jake looked away, embarrassed. “More than you could know,” he said.
Thorne inhaled deeply through his nose and let it go through puffed cheeks. “Mr. Sinclair’s little sister, Rebecca-she wasn’t very tough… very confident about herself,” he said softly. “She was sick a lot as a kid, and as she got older, she started into that whiny teenage shit, where she thought she was ugly and no guys would ever like her. I never knew her back then, you know, but Mr. Sinclair was very bothered by her attitude. Said she was a pretty thing, but how do you make a kid sister listen?”
He shifted again. “So when she’s eighteen, along comes a twenty-five-year-old dickhead named Mike Skepanski. Him I knew, and you could tell just from looking at him what a useless pile of shit he was. Mr. Sinclair hated him. Hell, everybody hated him. Everybody but Rebecca, of course, who fell in love with the guy and married him. Just weeks out of high school, knows nothing about anything, and she’s attached to this jerk for the rest of her life.”
As he spoke, Thorne’s story took on a momentum of its own, seeming to propel him more than he was propelling it. “Well, he does a stint as a construction worker for a while, but then the poor baby cuts his hand and doesn’t want to do that anymore. So he sits around the house for a few months until some idiot offers him a job as a security guard. He takes it, because he’s allowed to carry a gun and the gun makes him feel like a big man.
“That doesn’t work out either, of course, because he’s a worthless loser. Seems to me, he got caught sleeping on the job, or some such thing, and he got fired. It’s like this his whole life. He can’t hold a job, Rebecca’s miserable, and in the middle of it all, Carolyn is born.” Thorne allowed himself a smile as he looked back to Jake. “Now, I gotta tell you, I’m not much into kids, but Carolyn was a cutie. Big eyes, always smiling. And for the first time, Rebecca begins to think good thoughts about herself, you know?” The smile went away. “Until the Polack starts knocking her around just for the hell of it. Rebecca never said a word to anybody. Instead, she got heavy into drugs and booze and shit.”
He fell quiet for a moment, clearly girding himself for the rest of the story. “So I get a phone call one day that scares me. Rebecca’s not right, you know? And she wants to talk to her brother. I think that’s the first time I got clued in to the drinking. Well, Mr. Sinclair talks on the phone and comes out breathing fire. He grabs me, and we go driving all the way up to Milwaukee. He wouldn’t say why we were going up there, but I couldn’t drive fast enough to suit him.
“We pull up to their crappy little house about six at night, and as we get outa the car, we hear these screams. Not like angry screams, you know? Like terrified screams. Little-girl screams. We go inside and run upstairs, and there they are, all three of them in little Carolyn’s bedroom. She’s maybe nine, ten years old now.”
His voice trailed off. Another deep breath, and he recrossed his legs. “The Polack is drunk off his ass, beating the living shit out of both of them. Little Carolyn was screaming for him to stop, crying and crying while he just beat her with his fists.”
“Oh, my God,” Jake moaned. He felt ill.
“Rebecca was out of it,” Thorne went on, his voice growing thicker. “She’d already been pounded numb. Maybe it was the drugs, but she was never the same.” He paused. “Mr. Sinclair took the girls to the hospital, and I took care of the Polack.”
The tone and the body language told Jake that Thorne was done, but he couldn’t let it end there. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Thorne said, shrugging. “But Mr. Sinclair made sure that Rebecca and Sunshine had everything they needed.” He locked his gaze on Jake and scowled.
“What did you do with her father?”
Thorne’s eyes narrowed, and his jaw set. His position sort of uncoiled as he leaned back and placed his palms on the arms of the chair. “You ask a lot of questions, Jake. Are you sure you want to know the answers?”
Jake paused just long enough to convey his uneasiness. “Yes,” he said at length, “I want to know. I think I ought to know.”
“Okay,” Thorne said, leaning his elbows on his knees. “This is just between you and me, right? Mikey and I went for a little drive in the country. We talked for a little while, and then I blew his fucking head off.” He smiled, still pleased with himself after all these years. “He’s fertilizer now, and as far as I know, no one even reported the bastard missing.”