Wilde Lake(77)

“Of course that’s what you’d say now. But the law—”

“The law? You mean your father? Well, f*ck him. Big, handsome, rich Davey Robinson held down a stupid little acne-scarred slut, forced her to have sex, but no one believed her. Turns out there were all these tests, all these rules I didn’t know. ‘Did you scream?’ Sorry, I didn’t know I had to scream for it to be a crime. Next time, I’ll make sure I scream. ‘Did you struggle?’ Yeah, I struggled, for all the good it did me. I said no. But because I had said yes all the other times, no didn’t count.”

Lu believes her. Almost. Which is to say, she thinks Jonnie is telling what is now the truth in her head, but it’s a story born of thirty-five years of hindsight. Davey, the gentle giant, would never have done such a thing. Lu can see, however, that Jonnie absolutely believes what she’s saying. She has conveniently forgotten that she had a motive to lie back in 1979. She was angry at Davey. She was trying to protect her father, who had beaten her severely enough to require an ER visit. Her refusal to tell the truth about the beating benefited him.

“Davey Robinson ended up with a life sentence that the law never would have given him—paralyzed from the waist down. Didn’t that satisfy you?”

“For a while,” she says, then looks startled by her own unvarnished honesty.

Silence, a dead end. Lu, not sure what to say, asks: “What happened to Mr. Forke?”

“Oh, him. I don’t know. I was almost twenty-seven when I got married, which seemed late to me, old enough to make good choices. We had three kids, boom, boom, boom. He took off after the third one. But I raised good kids. I’m a grandma now and proud to be one. That’s Joni Rose.”

She indicates a set of three photographs in a triptych on the table next to the bright orange armchair where she sits. A baby, a toddler, a little girl, maybe four or so. All the same kid, Lu assumes. Bald as a doorknob as a baby, with one of those ridiculous headbands that proclaims, I am a girl, dammit. Still pretty wispy haired as a toddler and kid. Too bad she didn’t get Jonnie’s genes. The woman’s hair is impressive, thick and glossy.

“Did you ever see Davey again?”

“Why would I do that?”

Nonresponsive. The witness is directed to answer the question.

“Heck, you might have run into him somewhere. He still lives here.” Davey and AJ lost contact years ago. But Lu knows—anyone who reads a newspaper knows—that Davey is a minister, one of the leading opponents of Maryland’s move toward marriage equality two years ago. “He’s at the big, new superchurch in far west Howard County.”

“Well, I’m not much for churchgoing,” Nita says with a harsh laugh. “God hasn’t done too well by me and my family.”

Lu gives up, bids the woman good evening. She leaves believing that Jonnie-Nita Flood-Forke has her suspicions about why Rudy Drysdale targeted her—and has no intention of sharing them. Lu can’t force her to talk. Rudy is dead, his intent no longer important. And it would not be particularly comforting to Mary McNally’s family to learn that she was an even more random target than anyone ever dreamed.

Back in her car, Lu picks the Sinatra station on Sirius, hoping to quiet her mind, roiling with nervous energy. She catches the end of “You Couldn’t Be Cuter.”

“Ella Fitzgerald,” she says out loud, as if Gabe were still there, quizzing her. “Written by Jerome Kern.” She could almost always identify the vocalists, even if she couldn’t tell Django Reinhardt from . . . well, whoever else was famous for playing jazz guitar. Gabe would have considered Reinhardt too well-known for his pop quizzes. This song is on the Jerome Kern Songbook album and Lu is old enough to remember albums, the days when one listened to a record in order. When the song dies out, she half expects to hear what would have followed on the album or CD: “She Didn’t Say Yes.” Now, there was a politically incorrect song if ever there was one. And yet a wise one because it realized that people, most people, could not get outside their own heads. So what did she do? . . . She did just what you’d do too. Translated: People behave as you would. And if they don’t? They’re probably wrong.

Nita Flood didn’t say yes, she didn’t say no. Nita Flood, caught in a lie about being raped, came to believe it. Our minds shape our memories to be something we can bear. Happens all the time. What if Nita decided that her story, more credible now because of the way times had changed, was something she should go public with, despite the potential embarrassment for a very public, very righteous pastor? There was no record; Davey had been no-billed by the grand jury, everyone involved was a minor. Ben Flood’s attack on Davey was always reported as provoked by unfounded rumors. At the insistence of Lu’s father—again, he had always been thinking of Nita, the way her lies could destroy her future. The Wilde Lake students who had once gossiped about the story probably had dim memories now: Nita Flood was a slut who got drunk, had sex with her boyfriend, then accused him of rape because he wouldn’t take her out in public. Yet over the past year, more and more women had come forward with stories about being drugged and molested by a famous comedian. What would happen if Nita Flood tried to do the same thing to Davey Robinson? Would people still be so quick to ignore her?

Lu can’t imagine the young man she knew hiring a homeless drifter to kill his former girlfriend. But then—she can’t imagine Davey opposing marriage equality and supporting the death penalty. Davey has power; he has been in the media a lot over the past few years. He doesn’t even believe in sex out of wedlock. What would he do if his former girlfriend threatened to speak publicly about what happened between them?