Again, Will glanced up at Sara. She made a circling motion, indicating he should keep Amanda talking.
Will’s throat was too tight. He couldn’t force out the words, couldn’t pretend that they were all just a bunch of friends who’d had a bad day.
Amanda didn’t seem to need encouragement. She chuckled under her breath. “They laughed at me. They laughed at me when I got there. They laughed at me when I took the report. They laughed at me when I left. No one thought women should be in uniform. The station would get calls every week—someone reporting that a woman had stolen a squad car. They couldn’t believe we were on the job.”
Sara said, “I think they’re here,” just as Will heard the distant wail of a siren. “I’ll go wave them down.”
Will waited until Sara’s footsteps were on the front porch. It took everything in him not to grab Amanda by the shoulders and shake her. “Why are you here?”
“Is Sara gone?”
“Why are you here?”
Amanda’s tone turned uncharacteristically gentle. “I have to tell you something.”
“I don’t care,” he shot back. “How did you know—”
“Shut up and listen,” she hissed. “Are you listening?”
Will felt the dread come flooding back. The siren was louder. The ambulance braked hard in front of the house.
“Are you listening?”
Will found himself speechless again.
“It’s about your father.”
She said more, but Will’s ears felt muffled, as if he was listening to her voice underwater. As a kid, Will had ruined the earpiece to his transistor radio that way, putting the bud in his ear, dunking his head in the bathtub, thinking that would be a cool new way to hear music. It had been in this very house. Two floors up in the boys’ bathroom. He was lucky he hadn’t electrocuted himself.
There was a loud thunk overhead as paramedics shoved open the front door. Heavy footsteps banged across the floor. The bright beam of a Maglite suddenly filled the basement. Will blinked in the glare. He felt dizzy. His lungs ached for breath.
Amanda’s words came rushing back to him the same way sound had come back to his ears when he’d grabbed the sides of the tub and thrust his head above water.
“Listen to me,” she’d ordered.
But he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to know what she had to say.
The parole board had met. They had let Will’s father out of prison.
three
October 15, 1974
LUCY BENNETT
Lucy had lost track of time once the symptoms had subsided. She knew it took heroin three days to fully leave your bloodstream. She knew that the sweats and sickness lasted a week or more, depending on how far gone you were. The stomach cramps. The throbbing pain in your legs. The alternating constipation and diarrhea. The bright red blood from your lungs giving up the Drano or baby formula or whatever was used to cut down the Boy.
People had died trying to leave H on their own. The drug was vengeful. It owned you. It clawed into your skin and wouldn’t let go. Lucy had seen its castoffs laid out in back rooms and vacant parking lots. Their flesh desiccated. Fingers and toes curled. Their nails and hair kept growing. They looked like mummified witches.
Weeks? Months? Years?
The stifling August heat had been broken by what could only be fall temperatures. Cool mornings. Cold nights. Was winter coming? Was it still 1974, or had she missed Thanksgiving, Christmas, her birthday?
Sands through the hourglass.
Did it really matter anymore?
Every day, Lucy wished that she was dead. The heroin was gone, but not a second went by when she wasn’t thinking about that high. The transcendence. The obliteration. The numbing of her mind. The ecstasy of the needle hitting vein. The rush of fire burning through her senses. Those first few days, Lucy could still taste the H in her vomit. She’d tried to eat it, but the man had forced her to stop.
The man.
The monster.
Who would do something like this? It defied logic. There was no pattern in Lucy’s life to explain why this was happening. As bad as some of her johns were, they always let her go. Once they got what they wanted, they tossed her back into the street. They didn’t want to see her again. They hated the sight of her. They kicked her if she didn’t move fast enough. They shoved her out of their cars and sped away.
But not him. Not this man. Not this devil.
Lucy wanted him to fuck her. She wanted him to beat her. She wanted him to do anything but the loathsome routine she had to endure every day. The way he brushed her hair and teeth. The way he bathed her. The chaste way he used the rag to wash between her legs. The gentle pats of the towel as he dried her. The look of pity every time her eyes opened and closed. And the praying. The constant praying.
“Wash away your sins. Wash away your sins.” It was his mantra. He said nothing directly to her. He only spoke to God, as if He would listen to an animal like this man. Lucy asked why—why her? Why this? She screamed at him. She begged him. She offered him anything, and all he said was, “Wash away your sins.”
Lucy had grown up with prayer. Over the years, she had often found solace in religion. The smell of a burning candle or the taste of wine could send her back to the church pew, where she happily sat between her mother and father. Her brother, Henry, would scribble crude drawings on the bulletin, bored nearly to death, but Lucy loved listening to the preacher extol the vast rewards of a godly life. On the streets, it gave her comfort to think about those sermons from long ago. Even as a sinner, she was not completely without salvation. The crucifixion meant nothing if not to redeem Lucy Bennett’s soul.
But not like this. Never like this. Not the soap and water. Not the blood and wine. Not the needle and thread.
There was penance, and then there was torture.
four
July 7, 1975
MONDAY
Amanda Wagner let out a long sigh of relief as she drove out of her father’s Ansley Park neighborhood. Duke had been in rare form this morning. He’d begun a litany of complaints the moment Amanda walked through his kitchen door and not stopped until she was waving goodbye from behind the wheel of her car. Feckless veterans looking for handouts. Gas prices through the roof. New York City expecting the rest of the country to bail them out. There was not one story in the morning paper about which Duke did not share his opinion. By the time he’d started listing the seemingly endless faults of the newly organized Atlanta Police Department, Amanda was only half listening, nodding occasionally to keep his temper from turning in the wrong direction.
She cooked his breakfast. She kept his coffee mug filled. She emptied his ashtrays. She laid out a shirt and tie on his bed. She wrote down directions for thawing the roast so she could fix his supper after work. Meanwhile, the only thing that made it all bearable was thinking about her tiny studio apartment on Peachtree Street.
The place was less than five minutes away from her father’s house, but it might as well be on the moon. Stuck between the library and the hippie compound along Fourteenth Street, the apartment was one of six units in an old Victorian mansion. Duke had taken one look at the space and snorted that he’d had better accommodations on Midway during the war. None of the windows would properly close. The freezer wasn’t cold enough to make ice. The kitchen table had to be moved before the oven door could be opened. The toilet lid scraped the side of the bathtub.