All Is Not Forgotten(26)

She said this, and I realized that it was the first time I had heard her voice. She did not sound anything like what I’d expected. That may be a strange thing to say, but we all do this, we all impute certain missing variables to people we meet based on our preconceptions or past experiences. I was expecting Jenny’s voice to be high pitched, maybe even childlike. But it was not. It was deep, slightly raspy, as you might expect from a middle-aged blues singer. It is not uncommon. Think about it—you will surely have before you one or two people from your life who have this type of voice.

She wore a hospital gown, tied in the back, and a robe her parents had brought from home. There was no sash, for obvious reasons, so it hung loosely around her in the wheelchair. I could see the white bandages poking out from beneath the sleeves.

Tom was eager to meet me. He stood and shook my hand vigorously, as though he could shake the cure for his daughter from my limbs. We are so happy we found you.

Tom was sincere. We all sat down and they looked at me, waiting for something brilliant to emerge from my mouth.

“I’m happy to help, if I can.” I said, “But, Jenny. I have to ask you one very important question.”

She nodded. Tom looked at Charlotte, who seemed to reassure him with the look she returned. They both nodded at me, and then I continued.

“Jenny. Do you want to remember what happened to you that night in the woods?”

I will never forget her face in that moment. It was as though I had solved the mystery of the universe, discovered the truth about God. She knew when I spoke these words what she hadn’t known before but what was suddenly crystal clear. And her expression carried relief and gratitude so profound—I will never have a more satisfying moment in my professional career.

She nodded her head, choking back tears, but then they just exploded out of her. Yes! she said.

Then she said it over and over as her father hugged her, her mother wrapping her arms around herself.

Yes, yes, yes …





Chapter Ten

I suppose I should get to the blue Honda Civic and how it was found again in Fairview. If you recall, the Civic was spotted by a neighbor’s kid on the night of the rape. He said it was parked on the street along the side that bordered the woods. He thought it had New York plates. But that was all. He could not narrow down the model year or anything else that might have helped to locate the car.

One thing I have to give to Detective Parsons is that he is very good at taking credit for things that are not exactly on his side of the scorecard. The blue Civic was one of them. Technically, Parsons was responsible for the acute awareness within the town to the importance of this car. Public notices appeared weekly in the local paper. Official police flyers were kept on community boards at every diner and coffee shop and nail salon. And Parsons reminded the force at every staff meeting. I pitied anyone who dared enter our borders with a blue sedan. There had been over two dozen false reports during the course of the year. Officers were pulled from their posts to drive by the pharmacy parking lot, or the line for the car wash, or someone’s driveway, only to find a blue Chevy or Saturn or Hyundai. Not one Civic.

As you have likely ascertained, Detective Parsons worked not only for the Town of Fairview, but also for Tom Kramer. Tom’s single-minded obsession with vengeance, as he put it, had stripped him of any social inhibitions, and he hounded Parsons relentlessly. And Parsons was a nine-to-fiver at heart. Some people just are, and you can’t shake it out of them. He treasured his free time. He did not have a family and I did not know whether or not he had a girlfriend. Or boyfriend, for that matter. I had not been able to discern his orientation. He liked to play sports and stay fit. Recreational soccer, softball. He was an avid swimmer. Tom’s demands interfered with his life. It wasn’t just with the blue Civic. At Tom’s insistence, Parsons and the Fairview police force had reached out across the country, not only through various computer-based systems, but through actual personal contact as well. Tom advised me once that there are about 12,000 local police agencies in the United States. He said it was his intent to have Parsons call, write, or e-mail every single one of them.

Rapists rarely strike just once. And this guy—well, he left some calling cards, didn’t he? The black mask. The way he shaved himself, wore a condom. And that thing he did with the stick.

Tom spoke with a strained professional tone, like he had transformed from the victim’s father to a police investigator. He did this sometimes in our sessions, particularly when he would first arrive and was bursting at the seams to give me a status report. Still, it was telling that he would not use more precise language to describe the carving on his daughter’s back.

I did not learn about the carving until I began treating Jenny and her parents. Detective Parsons had given me a copy of the entire police file, and so I first came upon it in a written document. This was very disconcerting to me. The scar from the carving was the only external physical manifestation of the rape. And it was the scar that Jenny reached for when the emotional memory from that night broke free inside her. It was in our second office session that she first showed it to me. It was nothing, really. Just a vertical, one-inch straight-line discoloration to the right of her spine. It was nothing. But it was the only thing.

Getting back to Tom and the story of the Civic:

You would be shocked by the inadequacy of our country’s interagency communications. No one can agree on one system, so not every agency has a system that’s compatible with any one sharing service. There’s no real Interpol equivalent, even after 911, when it became so clear that this type of sharing was necessary. I mean, efforts were made. But there are just too many cooks in the kitchen, twelve thousand agencies across fifty states. And there are even more that are nonlocal special forces. I get that it would be impossible to track down a hundred thousand car owners, and that even if we did, it’s not like any of them would ever admit to raping a teenage girl. But this was different. You put a few guys on it, have them spend an hour each day, calling, e-mailing … five days a week, and it gets done, you know? Now every department has the facts, specific facts, and maybe, just maybe, something similar happened in one of their small towns. Think about that. I mean, what do Fairview cops do all day? They find clever places to hide with their speed radars. Parsons gave me a hard time at first, but then he could see I was right. An hour a day on the phone instead of catching up on Facebook. That’s a small price to pay, compared to the reward. A very small price.