Reunion in Death (In Death #14)(59)

"You won't get an argument there from me. I helped put her in a cage once before. I'm asking you to help me do it again."

"I got a life of my own. It took me a long time to get it back so I could wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror."

He took a dirt-brown Stetson hat from a stand with pegs just inside the door, fit it on his head. Then he stepped out, shut the door at his back. "I don't want this in my house. I'm sorry not to be hospitable, but I don't want her in my house. We'll talk outside. I want to take a look at the stock anyhow."

As a concession against the white glare of the sun, Eve dug out shaded glasses. "Has she been in contact with you at all?"

"I haven't heard a peep from that girl since she walked out the day she turned eighteen. The day she told her mama what had been going on. The day she laughed in my face."

"Do you know if she's been in contact with her mother?"

"Couldn't say. Lost track of Kara when she left me. Heard she'd taken a job off planet. Farming satellite. Far away from me, I'd say, as she could manage."

Eve nodded. She knew Kara Dunne Parker Rowan's location. She'd remarried four years earlier, and refused to speak to Eve regarding her daughter. Her daughter, she'd informed Eve during their brief transmission, was dead. Eve imagined Julianna had the same attitude toward the woman who'd birthed her.

"Did you rape Julianna, Mr. Parker?"

His face tightened, like old leather stretching over a frame. "If you mean did I force myself on her, I did not. I've done a lot of atoning for what I did, Lieutenant."

He paused at a paddock fence, propped one booted foot on a bottom rung, and stared out at his men and horses. "There was a time I put all the blame on her. Took me a long while before I could spread that out to myself and deal with it. She was fifteen, chronologically speaking anyways. Fifteen, and a man more than fifty has no right touching those kinda goods. A man married to a good woman, hell to any woman's got no right touching her daughter. No excuses."

"But you did touch her."

"I did." He straightened his massive shoulders as if taking on weight. "I'm gonna tell this my way, just saying up front I know what I did was as wrong as it gets, and I take the blame and responsibility for that."

"All right, Mr. Parker. Tell me your way."

"She'd slither around the house wearing next to nothing. Crawl in my lap and call me Daddy, but there wasn't anything daughterly in how she said it."

He set his teeth, looked away from Eve, and out over his land. "Her own daddy was a man hard on women, but he next to worshipped that girl, so her mama told me. Julianna could do no wrong and when she did, he blamed her mama. I loved that woman. I loved my wife," he said, stepping back, flicking his gaze to Eve's face before he began to walk again. "She was a good woman, churchgoing, quiet-natured, sturdy. If she had a blind spot, it was that girl. She has a way of blinding people."

"She behaved provocatively with you."

"Shit. Pardon my French. Fifteen years old, and she knew just how to wrap a man around her finger, get whatever she wanted. She stirred up something in me that shouldn't've been stirred up. I shouldn't have let it happen. I started thinking about her, looking at her in a way that damned me straight to hell. But I couldn't stop. Maybe didn't want to, not then. I know right from wrong, Lieutenant. I know damn well where the line is."

"And you crossed it."

"I did. One night when her mama's out at one of her women's meetings, she came into the study, slid on my lap. I ain't going into the details of it, except to say I didn't force her into a damn thing. She was as willing as they come. But I crossed that line, one a man can't ever step back over."

"You were intimate with her."

"I was. That night, and whenever I could manage it for nearly three years after. She made it easy to manage. She talked her mother into going off with friends on a weekend shopping spree. And I lay with my stepdaughter in my marriage bed. I loved her, God is my witness, I loved her in a kind of insane way. I believed she felt the same."

He shook his head at his own foolishness. "Man old enough to know better. I gave her money. God only knows how much over those three years. Bought her cars, fancy clothes, whatever she asked for. I told myself we'd go away together. Soon as she was old enough, I'd leave her mama and we'd go off anywhere she wanted. I was a fool. I've learned to live with that. Harder was to learn to live with the sins I'd committed."

She imagined him sitting in the witness chair at Julianna's trial, speaking in just that no bullshit way. Things, Eve decided, would have gone differently if he had.

"After her arrest, during her trial, she claimed you had raped and abused her, and used that to bargain for a lesser sentence. You made no attempt to set the record straight, to defend yourself."

"No, I did not." He looked down at Eve from under the wide brim of his hat. "Have you ever done anything, Lieutenant, something that shames you so deep it puts fear in your throat and ice in your belly?"

She thought of Dallas, and what lurked there. "I know what it's like to be afraid, Mr. Parker."

"I was afraid of her. I was afraid of what I became with her. If I'd testified about how it was, I'd still have been a grown man who'd committed adultery with the minor child of his own wife. That's about the time I went into counseling, starting working at accepting my responsibility. Nothing I could do for the men she'd killed. And the fact was, it would've been her word against mine. If I hadn't been there at the time, I'd've believed hers."