Wilde Lake(76)

Possibly because she’d rather contemplate Jonnie’s grooming routines than the questions that have brought her here.

Still, she gets right to it once she is seated on the green sofa in Jonnie’s living room, no formalities: “When did you realize that you were Rudy Drysdale’s intended victim?”

“Who says I was?”

“His own lawyer.” Okay, so it’s a lie. It’s not like this is an official proceeding. Lu can say whatever she wants to shake the truth loose. And Fred all but said it. Maybe he, too, is trying to figure out just how smart Lu is.

“I didn’t know until the newspaper published his name. I honestly didn’t recognize him when I saw him hanging around here. He’s put on weight since high school. He was just another creepy homeless guy. But I did feel as if he were watching me. Then I saw his name and I remembered I knew him, but—well, I was glad it wasn’t me. Sorry, I was.”

Definitely a case of hashtag sorrynotsorry.

“How well did you know him? Back in high school?”

“We both worked at the mall. Sometimes he gave me a ride. That was about the extent of it.”

“Then why would he want to kill you?”

“No idea.” Jonnie’s eyes flick right, toward the patio doors off her living room, the sliding doors that Rudy meant to come through almost four months ago.

“It’s against the law to lie to an officer of the court,” Lu lies. She’s not on official business. Jonnie can lie her head off.

“I’m not lying. I never did anything to him. I haven’t spoken to him for thirty-five years. I don’t know. Who says he wanted to kill me, or anyone? Maybe he had a crush on me, all those years ago. He was always doing favors for me. Then again, lots of guys did favors for me.”

“And you did favors for lots of guys.” It just slips out. Lu wishes she could take the words back. It’s as if she’s channeling bitchy Lynne. But the woman’s confidence is annoying for reasons she can’t pinpoint.

Jonnie shrugs it off. “What? You don’t think guys would like me unless I had sex with them. Because I had acne? Guys always liked me. Because I was fun. And I’m not talking about sex. I liked to laugh and I drank beer and I wasn’t a drag like the prissy girls. I didn’t sleep with anybody I didn’t want to sleep with. Until the night that Davey Robinson raped me.”

Lu cannot believe she is still clinging to that story, after all these years.

“Davey Robinson did not rape you. A grand jury heard your testimony and decided not to indict him. Wasn’t it obvious that your father was the one who beat you? That you lied to protect him?”

“I told the truth to get my father to stop beating me for being a slut. Sure, I had sex with Davey before that night. We’d been having sex for a year. I liked him. But not that night. He held me down, he raped me, then acted as if everything was normal. So I did, too. I wasn’t going to break down in front of his friends. But I was upset, I drank too much, and those stupid shits just dumped me on my doorstep. They could have walked me around, cleaned me up. Even with the vomit caked on my clothes, I smelled like sex. My father beat me because I wouldn’t tell him, at first, who it was. Me saying I was raped—telling the truth—probably saved Davey’s life because the police got to him before my dad did. If I had told my father we’d been together a bunch of times before that night, he would have just driven to Davey’s house and straight up killed him then.”

Over a year. Again, Lu hears Lynne’s cruel taunt, realizes that Davey is already sleeping with the girl that his friends are mocking. Maybe he blushed, too, that day, but his dark skin concealed the blood rushing to his face.

“You were mad at him keeping the relationship a secret. You can’t deny that. The other boys all said they heard you fighting.”

“We both wanted it to be a secret. My dad wasn’t going to let me have a black boyfriend. Davey’s parents didn’t want him to have any girlfriend at all. So he took different girls to dances and I was okay with that. But he took that Sarah chick to homecoming, then went to homecoming at her school, and that wasn’t part of the deal. That’s why I got mad. We were in love, we really were. I never knew anyone like him. And, yeah, maybe at first, he liked me because I was cool with sex. But that’s not why he stayed. That’s not what he said to me. He said he loved me.”

Before or after orgasm, Lu wants to ask, but manages to keep this to herself. Why do people put so much stock in that word, love? As if no one ever uses it falsely, as if it’s always true. Love can be the biggest lie of all.

“Your brothers did their best to finish the job your father didn’t have a chance to do.”

“And one of my brothers died,” Jonnie says softly. “Everyone seems to forget that. Just because you have seven brothers doesn’t mean you don’t mind losing one. My dad was never the same. My mom, either. It tore my family apart, what happened to Ben. Tom ended up dying in a car accident a few years later, drunk and high. Both my parents were dead before I was thirty-five. That left the six of us. But we’re really tight. We have to be.”

“Ben died because he tried to kill another person—and ended up maiming him. A person who did not, by law, rape you.”

“Yeah, that’s what the law said. But who was there, who was in that room? Me and Davey. Who held who down? Who had bruises? He weighed, I don’t know, probably about two hundred pounds? I weighed a hundred and ten and wore size 3 jeans. You see, I knew what sex was like. I didn’t have any confusion about how it was supposed to go. What happened that night was rape. The fact that he was my boyfriend, that he kissed me when he was done—that didn’t change it.”