The Girl Who Survived(12)

Why hadn’t someone contacted her?

Oh, right? How many calls did you refuse to answer and delete?

Absently she took a swallow from her glass. Saw that her hand was shaking, the wine sloshing wildly.

Calm down. So he’s out. So what?

You don’t think he’s a killer, do you?

She bit her lip.

Oh, Kara. Have you been lying to yourself all this time?

“Shut up!” she said, and stood, spilling some of the Merlot as she walked to the sink and poured the reminder of the wine down the drain.

She glanced out the window, to the dark night beyond, and saw not only the flickering images of the TV in the glass, but her own stark reflection, her face pale as death, her eyes large and sunken, her cheeks hollow.

Who was she kidding?

Not Aunt Faiza. Not Dr. Zhou. Not even herself, if she were truthful. She was the same terrified girl who had been locked in the closet twenty years earlier, the girl who had witnessed the bloody aftermath of her family’s slaughter.

Though Jonas had been the one on trial, Kara had felt as if she, too, were being judged.

It had been long ago, and yet close enough that she felt as if she could reach out and touch it. As if it had been just yesterday.

At eight years old, she’d sat on the hard chair in the witness stand, a waif of a girl. Terrified. Afraid she would say the wrong thing. She’d been coached and was smart, “older than her years,” Auntie Fai had said, but still . . .

The judge, a dark-skinned woman in black robes and rimless glasses, had been seated high above her, sharp eyes assessing as the attorneys asked questions she barely understood, but knew the answers, had been primed with the right way to respond. They had approached her, had smiled, had outwardly appeared to be friendly, as if they were just curious, but she’d known better. Instinctively. Had sensed a darker purpose in their questions. She remembered forcing herself to meet their gazes, to appear calm while her fingers, as if of their own accord, had rubbed together endlessly.

It had seemed to go on forever.

Now, two decades later, Kara tried to shake off the feeling of being trapped that had been with her on that witness stand, to put it behind her and concentrate on the television screen. She knew a lot more about what had happened as an adult and understood that she, a shell-shocked eight-year-old, had been manipulated, played by the prosecutors, by the defense attorneys, by her aunt. By every damned one.

She reached for her empty glass in the sink, thought better of it, and walked back to the TV area. She backed up the program, starting over again, with the reporter standing at the gates of the prison.

Mesmerized, she watched as the jacketed reporter on the screen was wrapping up and signing off. “Back to you, Elliot,” she said, snowflakes collecting in her hair as the prison loomed behind her.

Kara’s stomach twisted.

Banhoff Prison had been Jonas’s home for all of his adult life.

Her cell buzzed and she tore her gaze from the TV to check the phone’s tiny screen. Aunt Faiza’s name appeared. Again. “Great.” She wasn’t in the mood to talk to the woman who had raised her, a woman as different from Mama as night to day. It was hard to believe they had been sisters.

“Stubborn as a mule,” Mama had confided once while lighting a cigarette on the wide back porch of their city home, “and determined. Let me tell you, Kara, don’t try to talk her out of anything. It’s a waste of breath.” She’d taken a deep drag from her Virginia Slim, then exhaled and waved the smoke away. “I tried to tell her about Roger, but would she listen? Hell no.” Mama’s eyebrows had pulled together then as she’d smoked. Mama had never liked “uncle” Roger, Faiza’s boyfriend. Kara hadn’t understood it then. At the time Roger had been tall and slim like Daddy, but he’d had thick brown hair and pale blue eyes that flashed in his perpetual tan, while Daddy had black hair that curled a little and light brown eyes that had seemed to look past everyone’s fa?ade and see right to the heart of them. But then Kara had lived with Faiza and Roger all of her preteen and high school years. And she’d seen Roger for what he really was—a man who could never hold a job, a man with huge appetites and, Kara suspected, even bigger secrets.

The phone rang in her hand again and Kara snapped back to the present and, gritting her teeth, said, “Faiza.”

“There you are! I’ve been calling all afternoon!”

“Yeah, sorry.” Then asked, “I just caught the news. Is Jonas really out of prison?”

“Why do you think I’ve been trying to reach you?” Faiza asked frantically. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what?” Faiza asked suspiciously. “What could be so important that you couldn’t answer the phone or text me back?”

What did it matter? Jonas was out of prison! But Kara answered. “Working.” Not really true, but . . .

Faiza let out a soft, “Humph.” A brassier blonde than Mama had been, Faiza wore her hair curly and sprayed so that it fanned out around her face, where she’d always applied what Kara’s mother had referred to as extreme makeup. “She never got over the ultra-glam of the eighties,” Mama had confided. “If Faiza had her way, she’d have curly hair to her shoulders, out-there bangs and jean jackets with huge shoulder pads.” She hadn’t toned it down much over the years. “Working,” she repeated with more than a little edge of doubt.