“Hasn't my daughter been victimized enough?” Bartholemew instinctively went into calming mode, softening his voice. “I know you're upset, but we're doing everything we can.” Stone scraped his gaze over Bartholemew's off-duty attire. Yeah. You look like you're working your ass off.“ He looked up at the detective. ”You told us that Underhill's not supposed to have anything to do with Trixie."
“Our computer tech guys traced the photo to Moss Minton's cell phone, not Jason Underhill's.”
“It doesn't matter. My daughter's not the one who's supposed to be on trial.” Stone set his jaw. “I want the judge to know this happened.”
“Then he's also going to know that your daughter was the one who took off her clothes. He's going to know that every eyewitness at that party I've interviewed says Trixie was coming on to a whole bunch of different guys that night,” Bartholemew said.
“Look. I know you're angry. But you don't want to press this right now, when it might wind up backfiring.”
Daniel Stone ripped the printed photo from the detective's grasp. “Would you be saying that if this was your daughter?”
“If it was my daughter,” Bartholemew said, “I'd be thrilled. I'd be fucking delirious. Because it would mean she was still alive.”
The truth rolled like mercury, and like any poison, it was the last thing either of them wanted to touch. You'd think, in this age of technology, there'd be some kind of network between fathers, one that let a guy who was in danger of losing his daughter instinctively recognize someone who'd already walked that barren road. As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.
He expected Daniel Stone to offer his condolences, to tell Bartholemew he was sorry for mouthing off. But instead, the man threw the printed photo onto the ground between them like a gauntlet. “Then of all people,” he said, “you should understand.”
* * *
She didn't have a lot of time.
Trixie's mother's voice swam up the stairs. Her mom was on babysitting detail and hadn't let Trixie out of her sight until she had headed for the bathroom. Her father, right now, was chewing out Detective Bartholemew or the superintendent of schools or maybe even both of them. And what difference would it make?
They could burn every last copy of that awful picture of her, and a few months from now, someone else would have a chance to strip her naked in court.
Sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, she accidentally banged her funny bone against the wall. “Fuck!” she cried, tears springing to her eyes.
Once, Trixie had had her mouth washed out with soap for roadtesting four-letter words. She was four years old, at the supermarket with her father, and she repeated what he'd whispered under his breath when the cashier couldn't do the math to make change: Use the damn register.
She knew all sorts of four-letter words now; they just weren't the ones that most people considered foul language. Love.
Help.
Rape.
Stop.
Then.
As a child, she'd been afraid of the dark. The closet door had to be shut tight, with her desk chair wedged under the knob, to keep the monsters from getting out. Her blanket had to be pulled up to her neck, or the devil might get her. She had to sleep on her belly, or a vampire could come and put a stake through her heart.
She was still afraid, years later - not of the dark but of the days. One after another, and no end in sight.
“Trixie?”
Trixie heard her mother again and swiftly reached into the medicine cabinet. The hilarious thing - the thing that no one bothered to tell you - was that being raped wasn't the worst part of everything she'd been through. In fact, that first frantic fall didn't hurt nearly as much as getting back on your feet afterward.
* * *
It was the kind of doorknob that needed only a straightened wire hanger to pop the bolt. The minute Laura stepped inside the
bathroom, she saw it - blood smearing the white wall of the sink,
blood pooling beneath Trixie on the floor, blood covering Trixie's
shirt as she hugged her slashed wrists to her chest.
“Oh, my God,” Laura cried, grabbing Trixie's arms to try to stop the flow. "Oh,
Trixie, no ..."
Trixie's eyelids fluttered. She looked at Laura for a half second and then sank into unconsciousness. Laura held her daughter's limp Body up against her own, knowing that she had to get to a phone
- equally sure that if she left Trixie alone, she'd never see her again.
The paramedics who came minutes later asked Laura a barrage of questions: How long had Trixie been unconscious? Had Trixie been suicidal before? Did Laura know where the razor blade had come from? Laura answered each of these, but they didn't ask the question she was expecting, the one she didn't have a response for: What if Jason Underhill wasn't the biggest threat to Trixie?
What if that was Trixie herself?
* * *
Trixie had been doing this for a while. Not in-your-face suicide attempts but recreational cutting. Ironically, the doctors said, that might have been what saved her. Most girls who cut did so horizontally across the wrist, in light little lines. Today, Trixie had cut a deeper slash, but in the same direction. People who meant business or who knew better, killed themselves by cutting vertically, which
meant they'd bleed out faster.
Either way, if Laura hadn't gone in when she did, they probably would have been standing over their daughter's grave instead of her
hospital bed.
The lights were turned off in the room, and there was a glowing red clamp on one of Trixie's fingers, keeping tabs on her oxygen levels. Someone - a nurse? - had put Trixie in a hospital gown. Daniel had no idea what had happened to her clothes. Did they get saved as evidence, like the ones she had been wearing the night she was raped? As proof of a girl who desperately wanted to trade in her title of survivor?
“Did you know?” Laura asked softly, her voice reaching through the dark.
Daniel looked up at her. All he could see was the shine of her eyes. “No.”
“Do you think we should have?”
She wasn't blaming him; that note wasn't in her voice. She was asking if there had been clues missed, trails ignored. She was trying to pinpoint the moment that it all started to disintegrate. Daniel knew there was no answer to that. It was like a trapeze act: How could you really tell at what second the acrobat pushed away, at what moment the anchor let go? You couldn't, and that was that. You made your deductions from the outcome: a successful landing or a spiraling fall. “I think Trixie was doing her best to make sure we didn't know.”
He had a sudden memory of Trixie dressed as a bunch of grapes for Halloween one year. She was five and had been so excited about
the costume - they'd spent a month making papier-mache globes in
the basement and painting them purple - but when the time came to
trick-or-treat, she refused to get dressed.
It was dark outside, there were trolling monsters and witches plenty of reasons, in short, that a kid might get cold feet. Trix, he had asked, what are you scared of?
How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I don't look like me?
Laura's head was bent over her folded hands, and her lips were moving. She didn't go to church anymore, but she'd been raised Catholic. Daniel had never been particularly religious. Growing up,
he and his mother hadn't gone to church, although most of their neighbors had. The Yupiit got Christianity from the Moravian church, and it had stuck fast. For an Eskimo, it wasn't inconsistent
to believe both that Jesus was his Savior, and that a seal's soul lived
in its bladder until a hunter returned it to the sea. Laura brushed Trixie's hair off her face. “Dante believed God punished suicides by trapping the person's spirit in a tree trunk. On Judgment Day, they were the only sinners who didn't get their souls back, because they tried to get rid of them once before.”