"It wouldn't surprise me," Tanya hissed. "If they had tried that, I would have killed them myself. In fact, just thinking about it makes me wish I had."
"But you didn't?" Ralph asked.
"No. So help me God, I didn't."
Ralph is good, but he missed the most important part of what Tanya Dunseth had said. My homicide-trained ear zeroed in on it.
"You said ‘they,'" I pointed out quietly. "They who?"
Tanya looked over at me, her eyes suddenly steady and solemn. "Martin Shore and Daphne Lewis," she said. "Who else did you think I meant?"
Ralph and I exchanged startled glances. "You knew them both?" I asked.
Tanya shook her head. "Go away," she said. "I don't want to talk about it anymore."
"But you're saying Martin Shore and Daphne Lewis were connected? That they knew each other?"
"I've said too much already. Leave me alone." Her eyes filled with tears.
Gordon Fraymore had told me he was looking for a connection between Daphne Lewis and Martin Shore. He claimed that if one existed, he hadn't found it yet. Either he had lied to me-a distinct possibility-or Tanya hadn't told him what she'd just told us. Which was it?
"When Fraymore was here, did you tell him about that?"
Tanya shook her head. "He's getting paid to find things out. Why should I tell him anything? Why make it easy? Like you said, he already thinks I killed them, and he's going to arrest me."
She stood up suddenly. "Where are you going?" I asked.
"To put Amber in her crib. She's too heavy to hold like this. I'll be right back." With that, Tanya Dunseth hurried into the house, leaving Ralph and me sitting on the picnic benches and stewing in our own juices.
"Will she come back out?" Ralph asked.
"Beats me," I said. "That's anyone's guess, but I don't think we'd better go in after her. We weren't invited."
Where Marjorie Connors was concerned, I wasn't about to take any chances.
CHAPTER 11
We were ready to give up and leave when Tanya returned to the deck. Her eyes were red; she'd been crying. She had changed out of her shorts into a denim skirt. In the soft evening light, she seemed both insubstantial and defeated. This time she sat down on the bench next to Ralph. She folded her hands together on the table and sat staring at them.
"I wouldn't want what happened to me to happen to anyone else, but I'm not ashamed of what I did," she said thoughtfully. "Even though I was very young, I'm willing to accept full responsibility for all of it. No matter what anybody says, where I ended up was way better than where I started. But now it's not just me anymore, either. There's Amber to worry about. I've spent all afternoon trying to decide what to do. It's hard to know where to turn, who to trust."
"You have to start somewhere," Ralph replied.
She looked over at him through lashes still veiled in tears. "You want me to talk about it?"
"If you want us to try to help you, yes."
"But it's so hard. I've spent years trying to forget it-to block it out of my memory, to make myself believe that it never happened. Or, if it did, that it happened to someone else."
Ralph reached over and gently placed one hand over Tanya's. "Please tell us, Tanya," he urged quietly. "It's the only way."
When Tanya spoke again, her voice was a hushed whisper. "I thought I had forgotten about it, but then, as soon as I saw Elise, it came back. All of it."
"Elise?" I asked. "Who's she?"
"Elise was what she called herself years ago when I first knew her. Detective Fraymore told me her name was Daphne Lewis."
"This was when you saw her in the Members' Lounge?" Tanya nodded. "What came back?" Ralph prodded.
His insistence propelled Tanya up off the bench, away from the table and us. She paced over to the handrail where she stood facing off the deck, gripping the railing with thin, white-knuckled fingers. For several long minutes, she didn't speak.
"Tanya," I said finally. "Were Shore and Daphne in the movie business together?"
"Yes."
"I can see why it's difficult for you to talk about it, but you have to understand that the people who make kiddie porn are animals, the very worst kind of vermin. Whatever Martin Shore did to hurt you…"
Tanya Dunseth spun around and faced me, her face distorted into an ugly mask by a burst of derisive, caustic laughter. "Martin Shore? He never hurt me, not once. Oh, he tried, but he wasn't any good at it. What Jacques liked-that was his name back then, Jacques-was that I was still so flat-chested and young-looking. He thought that meant I was a virgin. The idea of cracking a virgin on film was a real turn-on for him."
She paused. "I wasn't, though," she continued. "Hadn't been for years, but I let Jacques think I was. I always wanted to be an actress, and I told myself it was my first real acting job. When he came into the room to get me, I knew he wanted me to be scared, so I acted scared. When he wanted to hurt me, I screamed and cried and pretended like it hurt. And when he wanted me to like it? Well-I knew how to do that, too."
Her voice drifted away and disappeared, the way a dying breeze leaves behind an unexpected silence. I felt as though her story had taken an unforeseen detour, wandered off the beaten path and left me flailing around an unfamiliar cross-roads in the dark. Tanya was telling us a story I hadn't expected to hear.
"You say Martin Shore never hurt you?"
"Never. Sometimes I had to fight to keep from laughing. Nothing poor old Jacques ever did to me for the camera was any worse than what my own father had done to me a hundred times before. Nothing that happened to me later was worse than that."
Her father? Stunned by Tanya's words, I glanced at Ralph Ames. His face was ashen, his jawline set. The horrific similarity to Anne Corley's own story was far closer than either one of us could possibly have imagined. Or wanted to.
"That's my first conscious memory," she added quietly, "my father coming into my room at night. His shadow would fall across my bed, and then he'd be standing in front of the window, blocking out the moon. For years the memories ended there."
I found myself cursed with sudden, unwanted insight. "Is that what you meant when you said seeing Daphne brought it back? You remembered?"
"Yes," she said.
No wonder she had spilled her drink in the Members' Lounge.
When Tanya continued, her eyes gazed off into space, her voice distant, remote. "I remember the terrible weight of him on my body, so heavy I could barely breathe, the ugly noises he made, and the pain, the terrible pain. And I remember going to the bathroom in the dark to clean myself up. Afterward, I cried myself to sleep. Why didn't my mother ever come to me or hold me? Why did she let it happen?"
Finally, Tanya fell silent, and a long, involuntary sob shook her body. I wanted to go to her and do for her what her mother never had, put an arm around her and offer some word of comfort, but I didn't dare. For one thing, I didn't know what Tanya's reaction would be. For another, I didn't trust myself to talk. No words are enough to counter that kind of parental betrayal.
Even Ralph was stunned beyond his depth. We both sat there like lumps and waited for the wild onslaught of tears to subside.
"Is that how you ended up with Shore and Daphne?" he asked at last. "To get away from your father?"
Tanya nodded. "Like I said, Daphne wasn't her name then, not when I first met her in Walla Walla. She called herself Elise-Elise Morgan. She was only a few years older than I was, but she claimed to be a well-known New York model. She and Jacques went to small-town schools all over Washington and Oregon running seminars that told star-struck kids like me to forget about investing in modeling school. Not to brother. All they needed to break into modeling was a great portfolio."
"Ah," Ralph said in sudden comprehension. "The old modeling-portfolio scam. Were they really selling portfolios?"