The Forgotten Hours(45)
“Thought as much.” Piper’s voice was deep, a smoker’s voice. She smelled of gin and cigarettes. Katie didn’t remember her smoking when she’d stayed over that night. It occurred to her that she should never sneak another cigarette again, no matter how infrequently. “What the hell you doing here?” Piper asked.
“Uh, I’m back at the cabin for a few days,” Katie said. Her mind was racing ahead to whether Piper might be able to help her in some way. “Cleaning it up. At Eagle Lake, you know?”
Piper did not feel the need to respond. She seemed like the kind of person who could wait for hours for you to be who she expected you to be. Her eyes were narrow and watery.
“But, um, I was wondering . . .” Katie continued. “How is Lulu? Have you been in touch with her recently? How is she doing?”
Piper crushed the cigarette under the toe of her slipper and pulled out a pack of Merits from the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Yeah, well. She comes around sometimes, always wanting something from me. Like I have the answers. And she expects me to sit around and give them to her? After she went off like that, you know—after that whole mess she started with you all.”
Katie felt a rush of relief: Piper was on her side. “Do you know how I can reach her?” she asked. They looked at each other as Piper dragged on her fresh cigarette. Her hands were still elegant, the fingernails long and chipped, painted blue.
“She’s not in witness protection, if that’s what you mean.” Piper laughed, tight lipped, and Katie saw that she would still be pretty if she were happy. “Look her up. She’s in Vermont now, or New Hampshire. Up north.”
“You’re not, uh—you guys aren’t close?” Katie thought of her own mother, up north, sitting in some pretty house on a lake with a man named Michel.
Piper inspected the cuticle around her thumb. “My cousin got in deep with this guy, and that pig dumped her as soon as she got pregnant. Me and my husband, we couldn’t have kids. So we thought we’d take her . . .” She trailed off and then shrugged. “I didn’t think I’d be doing it alone.”
“Oh, wow. I didn’t know. I mean, Lulu was adopted?”
“Mm-hmm. And the thanks I got. What a lot of trouble she stirred up. You read that stuff about her? After the trial and all?”
Katie shook her head. Just moments earlier she had been feeling a sense of relief, but now she was sickened. Shouldn’t a mother always be on her daughter’s side, no matter what? There was something horrifying about Piper’s betrayal of her child that stirred up Katie’s pity, even if it seemed to support the idea of her father’s innocence.
“Well, she’s a pretty piece of work. Her saying my cousin wasn’t looking after her right and all. That Jody’s boyfriends did bad shit to her. That girl would say anything to get her own way.”
And with that Piper was done. She walked away and did not look back.
As soon as Katie got back to the cabin, she brewed a pot of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with her laptop. She wanted to find out right away what Piper had been talking about. First she typed in John Gregory. There were hundreds of entries for such a common name. A preemie and a British author. A skinny middle-aged man posing in the nude. She typed in John F. Gregory. Up came what looked like the title of a master’s thesis, written four years earlier: Dissociative Disorder Arguments in Rape Cases: Bogus Claims or Breakthrough? Her father’s name emerged in bold amid the two-line description.
Defendant Cannot Present Testimony in Rape Trial
on Alleged Victim’s Prior Abuse
By George C. Manta
A recent ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court stated that a rape defendant may not introduce expert testimony on “dissociation disorder.” In addition, the defendant may not present evidence that the alleged victim was sexually abused as a young child and that, as a result of a possible “dissociation disorder,” she might have fabricated her allegations of rape. The previous district judge had also ruled the expert testimony inadmissible.
Alleged rape
In August 2007, fourteen-year-old “Sarah” spent much of the summer with her best friend at a private lake community near the Catskills in New York State. Sarah, who was adopted at age four years and three months, had allegedly suffered sexual abuse by two of her biological mother’s boyfriends as a young child, before being adopted.
At the end of the summer, defendant John F. Gregory, the father of Sarah’s friend, allegedly had intercourse with Sarah. Four months later, during a discussion of issues pertaining to sexual abuse in her tenth-grade classroom, Sarah brought up the alleged incident. According to her, during class, “it popped into my head, what happened with Mr. Gregory at Eagle Lake.” Shortly thereafter the defendant, John F. Gregory, a resident of West Mills, New York, was indicted in Superior Court in Deloitte County, in the town of Blackbrooke, on two counts of statutory rape.
At a jury trial before Judge Jemima P. Sonnenheim, Sarah’s testimony revealed major gaps and inconsistencies in her memories of the night the alleged abuse occurred.
Defense counsel sought to present two theories about why Sarah’s allegations against her friend’s father were not believable. The first theory was that Sarah had been seeking attention and had acted as she did because she believed “this is what all men do.” This belief was based on the fact that she claimed to have previously been raped by two men who were considered to be “close family friends” of her biological mother.