In the Clearing (Tracy Crosswhite #3)(88)
“What about my head?” Hastey said. “What am I going to tell them happened to my head?”
“I got a first-aid kit in the truck. My dad keeps it there for when he goes hunting. We’ll clean you up and put a bandage on your head. Tomorrow you wear a ball cap. The cut is high enough that no one will see it. At the game you’ll have a helmet on. You can say you cut your head during the game.” Eric rubbed his forehead as if fighting a massive headache. Then he wiped away tears. “Nobody will know.” He looked at all of them, speaking quickly. “Nobody needs to know, okay? Nothing needs to change. Tomorrow we win a championship and we go on with our lives, just like we planned. We go on with our lives. Archie, you’ll go in the Army, and Darren and I will go to UW. And Hastey, you’ll go to community college and get your grades up, then you can come join us. We can’t help Kimi now. She’s dead. It was an accident, but she’s dead. If we say anything, then we might as well all be dead too, because then our lives will be over.”
Darren heard the words, but now they sounded as if they were coming from some far-off place, as if they weren’t real, as if none of this were real. White stars continued to flicker in front of his eyes, concussion stars that he’d played through so many times. That’s what this was—a concussion. He wasn’t thinking straight. He was imagining this. He had to be imagining this. It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real.
None of this was real.
Tracy set down the last page of the counselor’s report. From the rest of the file, she’d gleaned that Darren had initially gone to the clinic for anxiety, though he didn’t know the cause. He’d told his counselor that he’d awake early in the morning, his mind racing, unable to get back to sleep. He said that soon thereafter he became anxious at night, and he’d started having trouble falling asleep. The lack of sleep was making him a zombie at work, so he started taking sleeping pills and washing them down with Scotch. He told his counselor he had nightmares. In them he saw a teenage girl, her body broken and battered. He said the nightmare started when Rebecca turned fifteen, and soon thereafter the girl in his dreams began to haunt him every night, no matter how many pills he took or how much Scotch he drank. She always came.
In his nightmare he stood over her, thinking her dead, but then she’d open her eyes and look up at him from the ground and whisper, “Help me. Please, help me.”
The counselor thought the girl was Rebecca, and that Darren was suffering an irrational fear of losing his daughter. It had been a lengthy two-year process before Darren was able to identify the girl and recall what had happened to Kimi Kanasket. In her final report in the file, after Darren had recounted the incident in great detail, the counselor wrote that Darren had “a major breakthrough” and acknowledged that his dream was not a dream—it was recollection. He remembered that night as vividly as if it were yesterday. She wrote that when he left the office that afternoon, Darren had expressed relief and said he felt lighter than he had in years, unburdened.
Then he drove home and shot himself.
Tracy closed the file and stood, but she didn’t leave right away. After a long moment, she picked up her pen and her notepad. She hadn’t taken a single note.
On the drive back to Tiffany Martin’s house, she thought about what she’d say, ultimately deciding she’d keep it simple. She felt anxious as she climbed the porch steps, and her heart raced when she knocked on the front door. Tiffany opened it, Rachel and Rebecca standing behind her, the three looking worn-out.
“Your husband,” Tracy said to Tiffany, then looking to Rachel and Rebecca, “and your father, was a very good man. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he was a very good, decent man.”
The three women started to weep, tears streaming from the corners of their eyes, hands covering their sobs. They turned to one another and grasped hold in a fierce embrace.
CHAPTER 31
The image of Tiffany Martin and her two daughters crying tears of sadness and tears of regret, but also tears of joy, was not one Tracy would soon forget. She suspected that even before she had appeared in their lives, the three women had suffered their share of sleepless nights, wondering why their husband and father had taken his life. She knew from experience that when the answer doesn’t readily present itself, the mind can come up with terrible things; during the twenty years following Sarah’s disappearance, Tracy had imagined all types of horrible scenarios.
Tracy wanted to drive straight to Eric Reynolds’s home, to let him know that she knew, definitively, what had happened to Kimi. She wanted to wipe the smug and confident smile off his face, to ask him why he got to enjoy a privileged life when he’d ruined so many others. That was the travesty of a murder. It was never just a single life lost. It destroyed many lives. But Tracy also knew that knowing Reynolds was guilty wasn’t the same as proving it in a court of law. Yes, Tracy had the physical evidence from Buzz Almond’s photographs. She also had Kaylee Wright’s and Kelly Rosa’s analyses, but they could only offer opinions, not facts.
Now, on the drive home, her mind was processing the problems with Darren Gallentine’s counselor’s file. Even if they could get it into evidence, which wasn’t necessarily a given, a good defense lawyer would pick it apart. Any number of arguments could be made—the false recollection of a troubled man who was recounting what happened in a manner that he could live with but which was far from the truth. It was also hearsay. What Darren had told his counselor—Tracy might or might not be able to still find her—was an out-of-court statement that would be offered as the truth. The defense would argue it was untrustworthy, not subject to cross-examination, and, therefore, inadmissible.