Wilde Lake(90)

“You raped her,” Lu says.

“I didn’t. I went into the room and just—looked at her. I was still a virgin. I didn’t want my first time to be like that. Noel made the same decision, although he pretended he made mad passionate love to her. That was his phrase, of course. What’s that from? Some movie, I guess. ‘Mad passionate love. Oh, yes, I made mad passionate love to her.’ Later, he took it back and I told him I hadn’t done anything either. He didn’t believe me. I didn’t believe him. That was what ended our friendship. Realizing that each of us thought the other was a liar. I thought Noel would have sex with her, just to see if he was gay. He thought I’d have sex with a dead-drunk girl because she would never know.”

“What about Bash?” Lu asks, wishing that her interest was dispassionate, only a matter of fact-finding.

AJ turns back, able to face her now. “Oh, I’m sure Bash had no compunction. He’s a Neanderthal, Lu. He’d do it with a knothole.”

She feels the urge to defend him, but maybe it’s herself she wants to defend.

“Then she was raped that night. No matter what happened between her and Davey, even if you and Noel declined. She was raped. Bash raped her. Probably Davey, too, but I get why you didn’t make that distinction.”

“Yes, if the facts of that night were to be examined today, it was rape. But—that’s not how people thought then, Lu. I’m sorry, but it’s true. And remember, she wasn’t saying anyone else had sex with her. She also was lying her head off, claiming Davey beat her up. Don’t forget that part. She lied. We just left out the stuff that would have detracted from the lies she was telling to protect her rotten bastard of a father.”

Only the lies didn’t end with Nita. Where did the lies end?

“So last fall, Nita asked everyone for money. But only Davey paid up.”

AJ kneels in front of Lu and clasps his hands around hers, as earnest and sincere a man as anyone Lu has ever known. “It was your election, you know. That and her granddaughter being sick. If it weren’t for you running for office, Nita wouldn’t have had any traction. She contacted Davey last fall, said she was going to ‘make some noise’ if we didn’t pay her. Davey gave her a week’s worth of collections from his church, but all that did was make her greedy. She started calling me. Over the years, I had kept tabs on Rudy. Well, truth be told, he kept tabs on me. As soon as I landed back in Baltimore, he started finding ways to make contact with me. It was like high school all over again, Rudy showing up on the fringes of events, watching me. I had to tell Rudy. He was involved, too.”

“Why would Rudy care? Nita never knew what he saw. She didn’t even know he was there. He wasn’t going to be drawn into this.”

The question clearly flummoxes AJ. Her brother, who makes a point of living without air-conditioning as much as possible, pops a sweat so sudden and noticeable that she wants to offer him one of Bash’s magical pills for menopause. His eyes shift right and left—toward the perfect little lap pool, then back toward this trompe l’oeil of a house, designed to look like three discrete rowhouses from the front, revealing its true nature only from the back, behind this high fence, which protects him from not only the neighborhood kids’ petty larcenies, but their prying eyes. What do people find when they spy on people who think no one can see them? What did Rudy see at Davey’s house that night? Why would Rudy care what Nita decided to say? What did Rudy, of all people, have to lose? Rudy hid in the woods, watching other boys have fun, but he didn’t participate. Rudy followed AJ’s crowd around, keeping his distance. Watching, forever watching.

Like high school all over again, showing up on the fringes of events.

Lu sees her brother, studying a copse of trees on their Memorial Day walk, becoming overwhelmed. He becomes so overwhelmed that he tells her the secret of their mother, a story he was comfortable keeping for almost thirty-five years. She sees now that he was desperate to change the subject, end the conversations about Nita and Davey, shut down his inquisitive sister, who was at once so close and so far away from the truth.

“Graduation night,” she says. “Rudy was there.”

AJ nods, his expression a combination of misery and respect. His smart little sister has figured it all out.

“He was fast, Rudy was. I was chasing Ben and, all of a sudden, there was Rudy, passing me, catching up to Ben. I was trying to tackle Rudy when I fell and broke my arm. He killed Ben, Lu. In cold blood. That thing about Ben falling on his knife—that’s not how it happened.”

“But you were down, you didn’t see, and the investigation cleared you—”

“The fix was in, Lu. As long as everyone thought it was Andrew Jackson Brant’s boy who was the hero, no questions would be asked, no difficult questions about how the story didn’t exactly match the evidence. I always told Rudy that it was better that way. Ben Flood had reason to attack Davey and me. I’d be forgiven for chasing him, for fighting him. Rudy wouldn’t. It wasn’t his fight. Again, he was always there, watching, wanting to ‘repay’ us. You know what? If I could live my whole life over again, I would just let those sad f*cks from Glenelg High School have their fun with him and be done. I’ve paid a thousand times over for doing the right thing. I wasn’t going to let Nita Flood punish me for something I didn’t even do.”