The Summer Everything Changed (27 page)

She deleted the words immediately. No one would read them. She would go to her grave with this secret.

A surge of anger rose in Isobel's breast. This was her mother's fault. It was her mother's fault that she was trapped in this tiny town. If she still lived in Massachusetts, she could—what? Escape? Hide?

The anger died quickly, as it always did, to be replaced by a feeling of intense resignation.

With willpower she didn't know she had, Isobel left her room and carefully, cautiously, left the inn. She was as sure as she could be that no one had seen her leave. At the road she turned toward town and the public library. Cars and pickup trucks and men and women on bikes passed her, but Isobel barely noticed the traffic.

The day before Jeff had accused her of flirting with Quentin. He had backed her against a wall, loomed over her in a sick reversal of protective intimacy.

She had denied the charge vehemently. “Besides,” she had added, “Quentin likes Gwen. He has no interest in me.”

“No guy could possibly like Gwen,” he had replied with an expression of revulsion. “Not even that loser Quentin. She's fat and weird.”

Now Isobel was scared for Quentin, too. Quentin was strong but Jeff was big, and where Quentin would fight fair if forced to fight at all, Jeff would fight dirty. About that, she had no doubt at all.

Since the day he had left her prisoner in his home, Jeff's bad behavior had escalated. Now there was no softening of the blows, no reversal of a harsh verdict like there had been earlier in the relationship. He spoke unapologetically now, and Isobel had come to realize that all those reversals and explanations he had offered had been sops, meant to fool her into believing that he was someone he was not. A normal person.

Twenty minutes after leaving the inn, Isobel turned onto the path before the charming stone building that now held no charm for her. She was pretty sure that Jeff never used the library. In the weeks she had known him, she had never seen him with a book or heard him mention one he was reading. Still, she glanced over her shoulder before entering the library, afraid that she had been followed, if not by Jeff himself then by one of the friends she had never met or heard of.

“Isobel, hello,” the librarian, Nancy, said, with a welcoming smile.

Isobel forced a smile to her own face. “Hi.”

“How's your mother holding up with this big wedding looming? The whole town is talking about it.”

“Just fine, thank you.”

“That's good news. Can I help you find a book?”

“No, thanks. I just need . . . I mean, I want to use a computer, if that's okay.”

Nancy directed Isobel to a computer and went back to her desk. Isobel wondered if the librarian would trace her online history once she had gone. Maybe she was required to; Isobel just didn't know. But the possibility frightened her. She debated abandoning her search for information that might help her out of the horrible situation in which she found herself. But somehow, she screwed up her courage and stayed. If someone confronted her about being where she was and doing what she was doing, she could always lie. She could say that she was researching information for a friend back in Massachusetts.

It took about thirty seconds for Isobel to realize that there were hundreds of websites devoted to domestic abuse in all of its forms. Where to begin? “At the beginning,” Isobel murmured, choosing the first site on the list.

Twenty minutes later, Isobel felt hot and dizzy. There was so much information. Some of it could be helpful, depending. Some of it was not helpful at all. Several of the websites she had already glanced at advised a victim—or a person who thought she might be a victim—to use her intuition. Isobel almost laughed out loud at that. She had ignored her intuition for so long that it had finally fled, abandoning her to a constant state of doubt and confusion.

Other websites advised a victim to tell a friend about the abuse. But that well-meaning bit of advice was also useless to Isobel. If she told a friend about Jeff's behavior, then that friend—Gwen or Catherine, even Flynn or The Jimmies—might also become one of Jeff's victims. He was a vindictive person, she knew that now, and emotionally unstable.

Yet another website demanded in no uncertain terms that the victim “get out of the abusive relationship!” This time, a chuckle did escape Isobel. Well, that was easier said than done! Who had written that spectacularly unhelpful and insulting bit of “advice”? If she knew how to get out of the abusive relationship, she wouldn't be crouched over the public library's computer, looking for answers to that desperate question!

Isobel shut her eyes and tried to steady her breathing. There was no point in getting angry now . . . After a moment she opened her eyes and clicked on yet another website.

“A large portion of men and women who experience rape or physical violence first do so when they are between the ages of eleven and seventeen.”

Isobel read this statistic and felt the panic rise in her chest. Oh God, she thought. Was there a way for people like her to avoid the fate of being abused as an adult? There had to be. Her mother seemed to have avoided it but maybe her mother was hiding things from her, like she had been hiding things from her mother . . . Could her father have abused her mother, too, not just that long-ago boyfriend? No. Isobel couldn't bear to think about it. If that were the truth, it would surely kill her.

With every ounce of will she possessed, she forced herself to read on.

The bad stuff, she discovered, was even closer than far-off adulthood. Victims of teen dating violence were more likely to do poorly in school; to binge drink; to attempt suicide. And—this was appalling—many of the victims grew up to act violently as adults.

Isobel felt sweat prickle under her arms. So, chances were good she might become a victim once again or, a fate even more awful to contemplate, become an abuser herself. Was her future preordained, all because she had accidentally bumped into this charming, deceptively powerful person . . .

Or had something in her past already sealed her fate, some fatal flaw of character with which she had come into this world? Did the fact that her mother had been abused by a boyfriend condemn Isobel to the same future?

It was all so horribly confusing and so very, very depressing. And yet, Isobel pressed on. Knowledge was power; she believed that. Or she once had believed that . . .

Abuse, she read, could be a learned behavior. Often, the abuser was simply following in a parent's footsteps. Did Jeff's father, Jack Otten, abuse his wife? Was that where Jeff had learned how to bully someone he supposedly cared for? If that were the case, it would take some of the blame away from Jeff. It wouldn't exonerate him, but it might help explain why he had been treating Isobel so badly.

But what if there was no abuse at home for Jeff to mimic? What if Mr. Otten treated his wife beautifully? What if some people were simply born bad? What if Jeff had no real reason for behaving the way he did; what if he just believed that he had a right to do whatever he wanted to do? Was there any hope for such a person? Was such a person suffering from a certifiable ego disorder? Was it evidence of psychosis or of something much worse—evidence of evil?

Before that moment Isobel had never, ever given serious thought to the notion of evil. Before now she had associated the word with superstition and a Dark Ages sort of ignorance and gory, exploitive horror films. In short, she had dismissed the notion of evil as an unpleasant, destructive fiction.

Now, she wasn't so sure.

There was one more bit of research she wanted to accomplish. With another look over her shoulder to be sure that no one was watching her, she typed in the words
restraining order
. She had heard her mother telling anyone who would listen that a restraining order wasn't a magic bullet. Still, it might be better than no protection at all, so she learned where and how to get one. She learned what security it could and could not provide.

And then she thought: When Jeff learned that she had taken out a restraining order against him, wouldn't it make him even more furious and more likely to hurt her? Hadn't she just learned from her reading that any resistance, any show of independence, was likely to drive an abuser to more violence?

Isobel rubbed her forehead. If only there was someone she could turn to who could fix this awful situation, someone who could pluck her safely and forever out of harm's way, someone beyond the range of Jeff's frightening influence.

Someone like her father? Would he come to her rescue? No. He would not. Because, Isobel reminded herself ruthlessly, he had two other little girls to love, and a new baby on the way. He had effectively abandoned Isobel, after duping her for almost an entire year, so why would she even imagine turning to him in a crisis, like she had when she was a child? She was angry with herself for this weakness. Her father was a coward. A person didn't become a hero unless he wanted to become a hero.

Isobel shut down the computer. She felt more frightened and less hopeful than she had before she had done the research.

She thought that the librarian looked at her keenly as she passed the front desk with a quick wave of farewell. Did she know? Could she tell? She felt a crazy urge to stop and blurt the truth to Nancy but knew that it would only draw another innocent person into the web of danger. Isobel had become toxic.

Once out on the sidewalk, she peered warily up and down the street for any sign of Jeff. She would get home the way she had come, though the journey along the long stretches of narrow, winding road was dangerous. She simply couldn't risk Jeff seeing her in a car with anyone and taking out his anger on him—or on her.

The sidewalk was teeming with happy tourist families, wearing brightly colored T-shirts, eating ice-cream cones, and carrying Boogieboards. The contrast between the carefree vacationers and herself, caught in a hellish trap, felt too enormous to bear.

She stumbled; she wasn't even aware that she had taken a step. A hand reached out and grabbed her arm. With a cry, she jerked her arm away.

“Sorry,” the old man said, his face flushed with sunburn or embarrassment. “I thought you were going to fall.”

Isobel mumbled words resembling “thank you” and turned toward home.

Her eyes were rimmed in red. The skin around them looked bruised. The rest of her face was pale.

It had been a bad night, worse than ever. The dream had come in another new and ghastly form. This time, Louise had seen Isobel's teenaged face on the dead baby. It was by far the most appalling version of the nightmare yet. Louise honestly didn't know how she could survive anything worse.

She had stumbled down to the kitchen that morning, earlier than usual, in desperate need of coffee. Three cups and several hours later, she felt no better.

Catherine, who had just come by, confirmed that Louise looked as bad as she felt.

“You look awful. Sorry, but you do. Are you sick?”

“No,” Louise said, too tired to take offense at her friend's honest though blunt comment. After all, Bella had said much the same thing. “I just didn't sleep well. Again. It's the stress of this wedding.”

“Speaking of which . . .”

“Did you talk to Calvin Streep?” Louise asked. She hadn't had the nerve or the energy to fight Flora Michaels's assistant the day before when he had issued a particularly outrageous demand. She had complained about his behavior to Catherine; Catherine had asked for his contact information and promised to “set things straight.” Louise had not protested her assistance.

Catherine laughed. “Oh, I talked to him.”

“And?”

“And he's a pompous little ass. But don't worry. Everything is settled. In your favor, of course.”

Louise put her hand to her heart. “Oh Catherine, what a relief! I don't know how to thank you.”

“You should have asked me for help with this sort of thing before now. Those two have been completely out of control with their crazy demands.”

“I wanted to do it all on my own,” Louise admitted.

“That's usually not a good way to do business.”

“Now I know.”

“Yes. Now you do. Well, I can't stay. My car is out front, with Charlie in it. I'm taking her to the vet. I get so disgustingly nervous, even when it's just a routine checkup. Charlie is calm as a cucumber while Mommy sweats and shakes.”

Louise smiled. “The parenting instinct is strong. The thought of our child in pain is almost unbearable.”

“Maybe it's a good thing I never had a baby. I'd be dead of a heart attack before her third birthday and she'd spend most of her life in therapy as a consequence.”

With that final lugubrious comment Catherine left. Louise didn't realize how Catherine's presence had helped calm her until she was gone. The memory of the nightmare wasn't the only thing bothering her. Andrew had sent her an e-mail the afternoon before with an excuse (work was crazy; he had had a bad cold) for not having been in more touch with Isobel. She had lost her temper and shot back an angry and unconsidered reply, to which there had been no response. Well, Andrew was a smart man; self-preservation was high on his list of priorities.

It should be high on her list of priorities, as well. But how to banish the macabre image of Isobel's current face where the baby's should have been? She knew it would haunt her forever; eventually it might destroy her.

Louise gasped. She thought she had seen movement just outside the kitchen door. Cautiously, she peered through the window, but there was no one and nothing there.

She knew beyond a doubt that something in her life was very wrong. But exactly what was very wrong was maddeningly beyond her grasp.