Sara thought of her conversation with her mother yesterday. "My gut tells me to trust him."
"Mine, too," Nell said. "I remember when Julia came to school the next day after she said she was raped. It was horrible. She told anybody who would listen. The details just filtered through so that by lunchtime we were all thinking she was bruised and battered." She paused. "Then I saw her in the hall, and she didn't look that upset to me. She seemed to be enjoying the attention." Nell gave another shrug. "The thing was, she lied all the time. Lied for attention, lied for pity. No one believed her. She probably didn't even believe herself."
"What did she say exactly?"
"That Robert took her to the cave, gave her some beer, loosened her up."
"Where does Jeffrey come in?"
"Later," Nell answered. "The story took on a life of its own, just like these things always do. He swore up and down he was with Robert when it happened, and she said sweet as you please that, by the way, Jeffrey was there, too. Said they both took turns on her."
"She changed her story?"
"From what I heard, but gossip goes both ways. She could have been saying they were both involved from the beginning and I just heard it wrong. It was a mess. By the end of the day there were rumors she'd been gang-raped by a group of boys from Comer. Some of the football team was talking about going after them. People just go crazy with that kind of thing."
"Were the police -" Sara stopped. "Hoss."
"Oh, yeah. Hoss was called. Some teacher at the school overheard Julia crying about it and they called in Hoss."
"What did he do?"
"He interviewed her, I guess. God knows he knew where she lived. Right before her father died, Hoss was there every weekend breaking up a fight between him and Lane."
"Did he interview Jeffrey and Robert?"
"Probably," Nell said, not sounding certain. "Julia backed off the story real quick after Hoss was called in. Stopped talking about it at school, stopped acting like the injured party. People tried to get her to say something – not because they were concerned but because it was a good scandal – but she wouldn't talk. Wouldn't say a thing. She was gone a month or so later."
"Gone where?"
"To have that baby, I'd guess," Nell said. "Fat as Lane is, no one made a connection when she told everybody she was pregnant again. Her husband had just died and we all felt sorry for her." Nell paused.
"Now, there was a blessing, that old man dying. He was a terror, worse than Lane ever thought to be. Worse than Jeffrey's dad, I'd say. Just a mean, nasty piece of work."
"How many children did she have?"
"Last count, six."
"Is the one I saw today – Sonny – her youngest one?"
"He's a cousin. I don't know why she took him on. Probably for the extra money the state gives her."
"That's unbelievable," Sara said, wondering how anyone could allow that woman to raise a child, let alone two.
"Julia came back nine or ten months later and there was Eric, her new brother."
"No one said anything about the timing?"
"What were they going to say?" Nell asked. "And then a few more weeks later, she was gone again. It was just easier to say that Lane was the mother and Julia had run off somewhere. Dan Phillips, one of the boys who'd been on the football team, ran off around that time. There were all kinds of rumors, but they died off pretty quick. It made it easier for everybody, I guess."
Nell sat up on the couch and took a photo album out from under the coffee table. She thumbed through some of the pages until she found what she was looking for. "That's her, there in back."
Sara saw a photograph of Possum, Robert, and Jeffrey standing in the bleachers of a football stadium. They were all wearing their letterman jackets with their last names stitched on the front above their football jersey numbers. Jeffrey had his arm around Nell, and she leaned into him like a love-struck young girl. Inexplicably, Sara felt a stab of jealousy.
"Bastard never would give me his jacket," Nell said, and Sara laughed, but felt secretly relieved for some reason. In high school, wearing a boy's letterman jacket was right up there with wearing his class ring. It was not so much a symbol of the boy's love, but a way for the girl to make the rest of her friends jealous.
As if reading her mind, Nell asked, "Whose ring did you wear?"
Sara felt herself blush, but more from shame than anything else. Steve Mann's class ring had been a hulking chunk of gold with a hideous chess knight on the side – nothing like the football and basketball rings the athletes wore. Sara had hated wearing it and took it off as soon as she moved to Atlanta. Three months passed before she got up the nerve to mail it back to him along with a note explaining that she wanted to break up. To her credit, she had apologized to him years later, but Sara wondered if she would have given it a second thought had she not been forced to move back to Grant after what happened in Atlanta.
Nell took her silence for something else, probably assuming someone like Sara had not dated much in high school. She said, "Well, it's stupid anyway. Jeffrey didn't have a class ring – couldn't afford it – but all the other girls wore theirs like a damn wedding ring." She laughed. "The only way they could get them to fit was by wrapping half a roll of tape around the band."
Sara allowed a smile. She had done the same thing.
Nell returned to the photo album, saying "There" as she put her finger beside a blurry image of a young girl standing behind a picture of Possum and Robert. "That's Julia."
Sara had been expecting something horrible from Nell's description, but Julia looked like any other teenage girl from that time period. Her hair was straight to her waist and she was wearing a simple dress with a floral pattern. She looked sad more than anything else, and as sudden as her previous stab of jealousy, Sara felt a sharp sense of sympathy for the teenager.
Nell leaned over to look. "Now that I'm seeing her again, she wasn't that bad. You really can't judge personality in a picture, can you?"
"No," Sara agreed, thinking the girl was fairly attractive. Yet, that had not been enough to help her transcend the circumstances of her family life. She asked, "Was her father abusive?"
"He beat the crap out of them."
"No," Sara said. "The other way."
"Oh, you mean…" Nell seemed to think about it. "I have no idea, but it'd make sense."
"Do you know who the father of her child might have been?"
"No telling," Nell said. "If you wanted a list of everybody she'd been with, it'd end up being half the town." She gave Sara a pointed look. "Reggie Ray included."
"He was younger than her."
"So?"
Sara conceded the point, then said, "From what Lane said, it sounds like Eric has to go to the hospital a lot to get treatments. So he has to have some sort of clotting problem with his blood." She tried to think of other possibilities. "There has to be an autosomal recessive or dominant transmission." She saw Nell's perplexed expression and said, "Sorry, it means that the disorder is genetic. It has to do with one of the two proteins that make up clotting factors."
"Is that supposed to make sense?"
"Bleeding disorders are passed from parent to child."
"Ah."
"Do you know if Julia had anything like that?"
"I wouldn't think so," Nell said. "I remember one time during home ec, she sliced her finger open pretty bad with a pair of scissors. Whether or not it was an accident, I don't know, but she didn't seem to bleed any longer than a normal person would."
"If she had something like von Willebrand's disease, then having a child without proper medical supervision would have been life-threatening," Sara said. "There would also be other people in her family who were affected, and Lane pretty much said that wasn't the case."