It seemed his father had a whole litany of questions/demands to spring on him. “Secondly, what were you doing in their house at all at this time of night on a school night? And third, you can’t possibly have seen what you think you did. I think you were drinking, Mitchell. I suspect you may have been taking drugs.”
Mitch threw his head back, and groaned.
“Mitchell!”
This was crazy! Mitch thought, feeling a kind of desperation deep inside. He had just witnessed a barbaric act committed on the dead body of a beautiful girl by one of his father’s best friends, and all his father could do was act like a fucking robot parent!
But then, he thought again, trying to comprehend his father’s strange reactions…of course. He was talking about his father’s best friends, men who were as close to Tom Newquist as Abby and Rex were to him. If his father had come to him with such a story about Rex and Abby, he wouldn’t have believed it, either. Not at first, anyway, and not without some pretty goddamned convincing proof.
Mitch was amazed he could even think so clearly.
He knew he was going to have to slow down again, as if his father was a slow learner, which God knew, he usually was not. But this was different. This wasn’t a criminal case in his courtroom concerning people he didn’t know. This was personal. Mitch felt as if he, himself, had nearly gone into shock when he saw it; he knew his own brain had wanted to reject it, so was it any wonder that his father was being obtuse?
With a sigh of resignation, Mitch realized he was going to have to tell the entire truth, condoms and all. There was a bowl of his mother’s favorite buttermints beside him; he took one of the pale yellow candies and popped it in his mouth, buying a little time while he ate and swallowed it.
Then he started talking.
Twenty minutes later, when he had finished doing that, it was his father who seemed to be shivering. Staring at the judge, Mitch caught a glimpse of how his father would look as an old man.
“My God,” his father said, in a near-whisper. “This is true, Mitch?”
“Gospel, Dad.” He forced himself to ask, “What do we do now?”
His father’s head jerked up. In an instant, the temporary aging fled from his face and body, and he was immediately himself again, straight-backed, intimidating, commanding. “I’ll figure that out. You will go to bed, and you won’t do anything until I tell you what it’s going to be.” His voice and face softened just a little. “Try to get some sleep.”
Mitch felt immense relief to know his father had taken the awful burden from him.
He got to his feet, stumbling a little on the bottom edge of the blanket.
Without another word, suddenly far too exhausted to talk anymore, he did what his father had told him to do. When he was leaving the room, his father had a hand on the telephone.
His mother woke him before the sun was up.
When Mitch dragged his eyes open, he didn’t understand what he saw: His mother had two large suitcases open on the floor of his room. She was pulling his belongings out of his dresser drawers, and putting them in the luggage.
“Mom? What are you doing?”
He was tired, with an exhaustion that made his eyes want to sink back into his skull, that made him feel like throwing up.
His vision cleared enough for him to realize she was upset.
“Mom? What’s going on? What’s the matter?”
“Your father’s taking you out of town.” Her voice sounded strange, as if it were clogged with tears or anger. Was she mad at him? What had he done? He heard her say, “Get up and get dressed, and help me pack your things. Take as much as you can. I’ll pack everything else up and send it to you.”
“Send it to me where? I don’t understand. Are you mad at me?”
She finally turned around so he could see her better. His mom was also tall, also imposing in her way, though her way consisted of elegance of fashion and sharpness of tongue. Mitch was honest with himself-he’d never liked his mother very much, and he wasn’t absolutely sure he even loved her. He knew he was supposed to, because didn’t all sons love their mothers? But she wasn’t any fun, she was a little scary, because nobody ever knew who she was going to cut to the quick next, and she was about the least huggable mom there could be. Not like Margie Reynolds, who he loved almost as much as he loved Abby. Not like Verna Shellenberger, who was practically a walking hug. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he liked his father better. If he could have picked a father, it wouldn’t have been Nathan Shellenberger, though. It would have been Abby’s dad…
His fuzzy brain stopped cold at the words, “Abby’s dad.”
A sickening memory of the previous night came back to him.
Awake now, and filled with foreboding, Mitch looked up at his mother.
“You have to go,” she said, and turned back to emptying his drawers.
“Go where? Why?”
But he got no answer from her, just increasingly peremptory instructions to move, move, move. He tried to hurry, without understanding the reason for the haste. When he stepped outside of his room, he saw his father carrying a suitcase of his own down the hallway. When he saw that, Mitch sensed, with an ever-deepening feeling of sick dread, that all these strange goings-on had something to do with the awful thing he had accidentally seen the night before. He wished-for what would turn out to be the first of a million times in his lifetime-that he had never been at Abby’s house the night before, that he had never sneaked down their stairs, never hidden and watched from the closet.
He could hardly believe they were taking to the roads in such deep snow.
His father put chains on the tires, something Mitch had never seen him do before. The judge seemed as determined as Mitch’s mother was to remove him from home as quickly as they could get him to budge.
Mitch took it as long as he could, until his father drove past the Shellenberger ranch, and then he burst out, “Tell me!”
Without taking his eyes from the road, his father said, “They’re denying what you saw, son. Quentin and Nathan. They claim it never happened the way you said it did. They say she was already beaten when Nathan and Patrick took her in.”
“Dad, no! I saw Quentin use the bat!”
“They say that if you tell that story to anyone, they will point out that she worked for us-”
“She worked for lots of people, Dad!”
The girl, Sarah-whose last name still escaped his memory-had only cleaned for his mother for a few months. He wasn’t even sure how often she had done it. Maybe once a week? That seemed like the usual thing. He was pretty sure she had cleaned other people’s houses on other days. She was older than Mitch, already out of high school, and earning her own money that way because there were probably zero jobs where she came from. He didn’t know what she was earning it for, whether for living or for college, maybe. He didn’t know anything about her family. He knew that all his friends practically swooned every time they caught a glimpse of her. And he knew that he hadn’t paid any attention when she stopped working for his mom. One day there was some other woman doing it, and she wasn’t gorgeous like Sarah had been, that’s all he knew.
“I know she worked for other people,” his father answered him, sounding as deliberate and patient as Mitch had forced himself to be the night before. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t those people who saw what you saw last night. They’ll say that she was young, like you. They’re claiming that everybody knew she had a crush on you-”