through the double doors of the lobby, the ones that opened into the rink. He didn't have a plan, really. What he wanted was to feel Jason Underhill's flesh under his fists. To smack his head up against the wall and scare him into contrition.
Daniel was just about to swing inside the home team's locker room when the door opened beneath his hand. He flattened himself up against the boards in time to see Detective Bartholemew leading Jason Underhill out. The kid was still wearing his hockey gear, in his stocking feet, carrying his skates in one hand. His face was flushed and his eyes were trained on the rubber mats on the floor. The coach followed close behind, yelling, “If it's just a chat, damn it, you could wait till after the game!”
Gradually, the people in the stands noticed Jason's departure and grew quiet, unsure of what they were watching. One man Jason's father, presumably - pushed down from the bleachers and started running toward his son.
Daniel stood very still for a moment, certain that Bartholemew hadn't seen him, until the detective turned back and looked him straight in the eye. By now the crowd was buzzing with speculation; the air around Daniel's ears was pounding like a timpani . . . but for that moment, the two men existed in a vacuum, acknowledging each other with the smallest of nods and the quiet understanding that each of them would do what he had to.
* * *
“You went to the rink, didn't you,” Laura said, as soon as Daniel walked through the door.
He nodded and busied himself with unzipping his coat, hanging it carefully on one of the pegs in the mudroom.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Vengeance was a funny thing: You wanted the satisfaction of knowing it had occurred, but you never wanted to actually hear the words out loud, because then you'd have to admit to yourself that you'd wanted proof, and that somehow made you baser, less civilized. Daniel found himself staring at Laura as he sank to the stairs. “Shouldn't I be asking you that?” he said quietly. Just that quickly, this had become a different conversation, a train run off its course. Laura stepped back as if he'd struck her, and bright spots of color rose on her cheeks. “How long have you known?”
Daniel shrugged. “A while, I guess.”
“Why didn't you say anything?”
He had asked himself the same question in the last few days a hundred times over. He'd pretended not to see all the late nights, the disconnections, because then he'd have been forced to make a choice: Could you really love someone who was capable of falling in love with somebody else?
But there had been a point in his relationship with Laura where Daniel had been irredeemable, and she had believed he could change. Did he owe her any less? And for that matter, if he let his anger and his shame get the best of him and threw her out of the house, wouldn't he be acting on adrenaline, the way he used to when he lost control?
It was this simple: If he couldn't forgive Laura - if he let himself be consumed by this - he was behaving like the kind of man he used to be.
But he did not have the words to say all this. “If I'd said something about it,” Daniel said, “then you would have told me it was true.”
“It's over, if that means anything.”
He looked up at Laura, his gaze narrow. “Because of Trixie?”
“Before.” She moved across the brick floor, her arms folded across her chest, and stood in a shaft of fading light. “I broke it off the night that she . . . that Trixie . . .” Her sentence unraveled at its edge.
“Were you fucking him the night our daughter was raped?”
“Jesus, Daniel”
“Were you? Is that why you didn't answer the phone when I was trying to tell you about Trixie?” A muscle tightened along the column of Daniel's throat. “What's his name, Laura? I think you owe me that much. I think I ought to know who you wanted when you stopped wanting me.”
Laura turned away from him. “I want to stop talking about this.”
Suddenly, Daniel was on his feet, pinning Laura against the wall, his body a fortress, his anger an electric current. He grabbed Laura's upper arms and shook her so hard that her head snapped back and her eyes went wide with fear. He threw her own words back at her: “What you want,” he said, his voice raw. '“What you want?”
Then Laura shoved at him, stronger than he'd given her credit for being. She circled him, never losing eye contact, a lion tamer unwilling to turn her back on the beast. It was enough to bring Daniel to his senses. He stared down at his hands - the ones that had seized
her - as if they belonged to someone else.
In that instant, he was standing again in the spring bog behind the school in Akiak, striped with mud and blood, holding his fists high. During the fight, he'd broken two ribs, he had lost a tooth, he had opened a gash over his left eye. He was weaving, but he wasn't about to give in to the pain. Who else, Daniel had challenged, until one by one, their hot black gazes fell to the ground like stones.
Shaken, Daniel tried to shove the violence back from wherever it had spilled, but it was like repacking a parachute - part of it trailed between him and Laura, a reminder that the next time he jumped off that cliff of emotion, he might not wind up safe. “I didn't mean to hurt you,” he muttered. “I'm sorry.” Laura bowed her head, but not before he saw the tears in her eyes. “Oh, Daniel,” she said. “Me too.”
* * *
Trixie slept through Jason Underhill's unofficial interrogation in the lobby of the hockey rink, and the moment shortly thereafter when he was officially taken into custody. She slept while the secretary at the police department took her lunch break and called her husband on the phone to tell him who'd been booked not ten minutes before. She slept as that man told his coworkers at the paper mill that Bethel might not win the Maine State hockey championship after all, and why. She was still sleeping when one of the millworkers had a beer on the way home that night with his brother, a reporter for the Augusta Tribune, who made a few phone calls and found out that a warrant had indeed been sworn out that morning, charging a minor with gross sexual assault. She slept while the reporter phoned the Bethel PD pretending to be the father of a girl who'd been in earlier that day to give a statement, asking if he'd left a hat behind. “No, Mr. Stone,” the secretary had said, “but I'll call you if it turns up.” Trixie continued to sleep while the story was filed, while it was printed. She stayed asleep while the paper was bound with string and sent off in newspaper vans, tossed from the windows of the delivery boys' ratty Hondas. She was asleep still the next morning when everyone in Bethel read the front page. But by then, they already knew why Jason Underhill had been summoned away from a Bethel High School hockey game the previous day. They knew that Roy Underhill had hired his son a Portland lawyer and was telling anyone who'd listen that his son had been framed. And even though the article was ethical enough never to refer to her by name, everyone knew that it was Trixie Stone, still asleep, who had set this tragedy in motion.
* * *
Because Jason was seventeen, the district court judge was sitting as a juvenile judge. And because Jason was seventeen, the courtroom
was closed to spectators. Jason was wearing the brand-new blazer and tie his mother had bought him for college interviews. He'd gotten a haircut. His attorney had made sure of that, said sometimes a judge's decisions could hinge on something as frivolous as whether or not he could see your eyes. Dutch Oosterhaus, his lawyer, was so smooth that every now and then Jason was tempted to look at the floor as he walked by, to see if he'd left a slick trail. He wore shoes that squeaked and the kind of shirts that required cuff links. But his father said Dutch was the best in the state and that he'd be able to make this mess go away.