Beneath Devil's Bridge(94)
RACHEL
NOW
Monday, November 22. Present day.
It’s late afternoon, and I’m drinking tea and cuddling Scout by the fire when Granger enters the living room.
He stands in the doorway, studying me and Scout in silence. He looks like a wreck. Like he needs clean clothes and a shower. I don’t know that I have the energy to even start this.
“Rachel, I—”
“You had a duty, Granger. As a therapist,” I say quietly. “A duty to report a patient if you knew him to be an immediate danger to children. Your client was a teacher, for God’s sakes. A guidance counselor. He worked with kids. Vulnerable human beings. He was sexually abusing my daughter, and he had a baby in his house, and he was seeking help from you. And if you knew he was in a position to do harm, that negates any idea of therapist-patient confidentiality.”
He enters the living room and slumps into his leather chair. “I didn’t know about Maddy, or about the porn, the pedophilia. Honest. Not until my last session with him did I learn about the child pornography, when I was trying to figure out whether there was any underlying trauma that caused him to drink. In retrospect, I believe now that he actually came to me for help with his paraphilia, but he was afraid to voice it. So he thought if I could cure him of the alcohol habit, he could apply the techniques to his deeper, more problematic addiction.” He rubs the stubble on his jaw. “When his predilection for child porn was revealed to me while he was under hypnosis, I confess, I was shocked, and I . . . sort of lost my logic, lost my head . . . I seeded the details about Leena’s murder into his unconscious, suggesting to him that he’d done it and was hiding from it. At that point I was worried about Johnny, and that jacket. I knew Leena was wearing a jacket like it, and I knew by then that Clay Pelley had been at the bonfire. And Merle had just been to see me, and I’d learned the details of the murder from her, and it just happened.”
“Just happened? You just happened to insert holdback evidence into a client’s brain?”
He rubs his face again, moistens his lips. “It put him away, Rachel. I figured if it got Clay locked up, it would be a good thing. He’d get help on the inside. It would get him into the system. The kids would be safe. He was not a well man.”
“It allowed the real killers to go free. It allowed this damage to go on for years.”
“You have two lovely grandchildren, Rache. If Darren had been taken away back th—”
“Are you kidding me?” I surge to my feet. “Are you actually trying to tell me that if Darren had been locked away as a teen that he and Maddy would not have gotten married, and I would not have Daisy and Lily in my life? I hardly had Daisy and Lily in my life. I barely had my own daughter in my life. They were estranged from me in part because Maddy could never live with her own guilt. She thought she’d killed Leena with her friends. When Clay confessed, it stopped anyone from coming clean. They all just shut up. Buried the trauma. And it made them ill.”
“The coroner’s report said she would’ve died from her injuries if she hadn’t been drowned. Maddy was justified in believing she’d killed Leena.”
“Damn you to hell, Granger. How dare you? I’ve gone through that report again several times, and Maddy told me exactly what was in her statement to the RCMP. The blows Leena sustained on the south side of the bridge were not fatal. It was the blows to her head—mostly from being run into the tree—and from a rock, and a head stomp, that caused the brain swelling that would have killed her had she not been drowned.”
“What Maddy and the girls did was still wrong.”
“Bullying and physically assaulting a fellow student is always wrong. But it wasn’t murder. You know what? If you had not done this, Maddy might have told me what happened. Or Luke and I would have kept digging on the case. The bullies would have been brought in and punished. The two who ‘finished her off’ would have been dealt with by the law. And maybe, Granger, just maybe, Maddy and I would have had a relationship. Maybe she wouldn’t have attacked me and everyone else. Maybe she wouldn’t have continued throwing herself against that mountain as some kind of self-flagellation, a way of bashing away her own guilt and memories. Maybe”—I am shaking now, jabbing my finger in the air toward him—“maybe Johnny would have atoned for his rape of Leena, and he wouldn’t have been deceived all his life by an evil little narcissist with sadistic and controlling tendencies, and married her. A sadistic little killer who was allowed to become the mother of his children. Your grandchildren. And now they have to deal for the rest of their lives with the fact their mother will be going to prison, responsible for the terrible killing of a classmate. And what about your son? He now has to live with the weight of likely having a wife behind bars. Because you helped us all blame the wrong man.”
“He was still a sick man, Rachel.”
“What you did is unconscionable.”
“What about you? You sat on that photo of the girls with the locket around Maddy’s neck. I saw it on the whiteboard in your office. If you’d acted—”
“I did ask Maddy about it back then. She claimed Leena took things, and that Leena had been in our house. And then Clay confessed. In. Great. Detail. Thanks to you. So I didn’t follow it further.”
“You are no better than I, Rachel.”