Woman in Red (29 page)

Alice, holding her hands clasped in her lap to keep them from trembling, asked, “So what are we looking at?”

“Most likely, it’ll go to trial.

“When?”

“I can probably buy us another six months. We still have the evidentiary hearing, and there are pre-trial motions I can file. Meanwhile, drum up as many witnesses as you can who’ll testify to Jeremy’s good character.”

“What about
her
character? There must be people who could testify that she’s not exactly the Virgin Mary.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but it won’t do us any good. The D.A. will file a motion
in limini
to block any testimony on her sexual history. At least, that’s what I would do in his place.”

It hit Alice then, with the full force of a blow. “So there’s a real possibility Jeremy could go to prison?”

“There’s always that chance, yes.” His eyes met hers and she saw the compassion in his face, mixed with a hard dose of reality—he knew better than to pull punches with her. But Alice needed no reminding of what was at stake.
It’s happening all over again
, she thought,
only this time with Jeremy
. Colin’s voice seemed to come from very far away as he went on, “But I’m still optimistic. And don’t forget, a lot can happen between now and then.” He dropped his voice. “What did you find out from your brother-in-law?”

“Nothing so far,” she told him. When she’d floated the idea of foul play, Gary had looked at her as if she were insane. But it wasn’t so much what he’d said as what he
hadn’t
said. Gary hadn’t asked what she was basing her suspicions on. There had been something evasive about his manner, too. He’d seemed jumpy and he’d had trouble meeting her gaze. Had he been hiding something, or was it just that she’d placed him in an awkward position?

Colin echoed her thoughts, asking, “Do you think he knows something?”

“I can’t be certain, but I got the impression he wasn’t being a hundred percent straight with me.” She chose her words carefully, not wanting to portray her brother-in-law unfairly.

“Maybe your sister can get it out of him.”

Alice frowned, reluctant to drag Denise into this. “I wouldn’t want her to think I was accusing him of withholding information.”

“I’m sorry,” Colin said, putting his hand over hers. “I know this puts you in an awkward position.”

“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “But when it comes to my son, I’ll do whatever I have to.” Even if it meant putting her beloved sister on the spot.

Colin drained his glass, then pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. “I should get going. I have a biologist from Western Washington coming out to the house. He’s supposed to be one of the country’s foremost experts on bivalves.”

“How’s that going?” she asked, walking him to the door.

“So far so good, but I’m still a long way from being fully operational. It keeps me occupied, though, and that’s sort of the point.” His eyes were clear as he spoke, his expression that of someone looking to the future, not mired in the past. Clearly this fledgling enterprise of his, however unlikely an undertaking for a big city lawyer, was just what the doctor had ordered. “For such a simple creature, oysters can be pretty complicated. You’d be surprised how many things can go wrong.”

“I never thought running a restaurant would be this hard, either,” she said “If it gets any slower, we won’t even have to bother opening up.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that. I sure would miss your cooking.”

“You and about five other people,” she said, with an ironic laugh.

He made a sympathetic face. “I wish I knew what to tell you. You seem to be doing everything right.”

“The trouble is, it’s not enough. We need some sort of gimmick to get people in the door.”

Calpernia, busy setting the tables for dinner, must have overhead, for she appeared before them just then. Dressed in a flowing skirt and scoop-necked jersey top that swagged like bunting from her breasts, her hair coiled atop her head in elaborate whorls and sporting earrings the size of chandeliers, she might have been the deposed queen of some newly democratized African nation. “Long as it don’t involve no black folks putting on costumes,” she muttered seditiously, folding her arms over her chest.

“The thought hadn’t occurred to me. But if you have any other bright ideas, I’d love to hear them,” Alice remarked dryly.

Calpernia pondered it a moment, frowning in thought. Then all at once she erupted into motion, smacking her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Damn! Don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. My old grandpa down in Mississippi would’ve come up with it in about two seconds flat and he never made it past the second grade.”

Then she told them her idea.

Jeremy was enjoying a newfound popularity. Other boys who’d barely acknowledged him in the past were giving him knowing leers or thumbs-up signs when they passed him in the halls. And the other day Jimmy DeLorenzi, a jock who’d only spoken to him once before, to ask if he could borrow Jeremy’s notes for a class he’d missed, had taken him aside during study hall to murmur, with a brotherly clap on the back, “Hang in there, buddy. Everyone knows Carrie Ann’s a slut. We got your back, okay?” Even the girls were nicer to him. He was no longer a nameless, faceless neuter. In their eyes, he carried about him now a hint of danger, a suggestion of non-parental approved activities. With one regrettable drunken episode, he’d gone from invisible man to cool dude, while Carrie Ann Flagler was shunned, a social pariah.

Jeremy should have been happy about it, but he was miserable. He knew he should hate Carrie Ann for what she’d done, but more and more, it had come to seem as if they were in this together, like in movies where two people are trapped in a collapsed mine shaft or clinging to a liferaft in
the wake of a shipwreck. Maybe in her mind she wasn’t lying; maybe she truly believed what she’d told the police. Things had a way of getting distorted when you were drunk—who knew that better than him? And she’d been so wasted that night. They both were. If Jeremy’s memory of that seminal event weren’t so clear—however crappy it ended up, you didn’t forget your first time—he might have wondered if it had, in fact, happened just the way she’d said.

Most of the time, when he didn’t have to meet with his lawyer or appear in court, he didn’t think about it. Whole hours would go by, and then out of the blue it would hit him: He’d been accused of rape. Him. Jeremy Kessler. Who’d never so much as grazed a girl’s breasts before this. It was so surreal, he could almost believe it was happening to someone else.

One blustery day in early December he was hurrying along the corridor at school, trying to make it to his science class before the final bell, when something he spotted out of the corner of his eye brought him to a sudden halt. Carrie Ann. She was crying, scrubbing furiously with a wad of wet paper towels at graffiti that had been scrawled on her locker with what looked to have been a Magic Marker: the single, crudely drawn word SLUT. He watched her for a moment, feeling vaguely responsible somehow, though anywhere but in this upended universe, where all normal rules were suspended, her humiliation would have been cause for celebration.

She didn’t appear to notice him, she was so caught up in her frenzied scrubbing. He was about to sidle past when she whipped around suddenly. “
What are you looking at?”
she hissed, her face screwed into an angry red knot.

Heat flared in his cheeks. “N-nothing,” he stammered. He’d been warned by his parents and Mr. McGinty to steer
clear of her. Until now, that hadn’t been a problem. She wasn’t in any of his classes. But Jeremy should have known he’d run into her eventually. He should have been prepared.

“It’s all your fault.
This whole thing
.” She flung her arm out in a gesture that seemed to take in, not just the defaced locker, but the whole school. She was quivering, her voice choked with tears. “You’ve been shit-talking me. Telling everyone I made the whole thing up. Haven’t you? Go on, admit it.” She advanced on him, the wad of paper towels in her hand, now reduced to a blackened clump, thrust at him accusingly.

“I haven’t said a word to anyone, I swear,” Jeremy blurted in knee-jerk defense. At the same time he was thinking,
This is all wrong. Shouldn’t
I
be the one accusing her
?

“Yeah, right,” she said in a sarcastic tone. “I saw you talking to Jimmy. Now suddenly you’re his best friend? He didn’t even fucking know you
existed
before this.” She swiped angrily with the back of her wrist at the tears running down her slapped-red cheeks. It came back to him now, Carrie Ann calling out Jimmy’s name while they were having sex. He recalled, too, that she and Jimmy DeLorenzi used to be a couple, before Jimmy dumped her for supposedly cheating on him. “In fact, I’ll bet you put him up to this,” she gestured toward her locker

“Why would I want to do that?” Jeremy spoke with such surprised innocence that Carrie Ann halted in her tracks, her angry expression switching to one of narrow-eyed disbelief.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“I don’t think you’re a slut,” he said, his face growing even hotter at the hazy memory of them tangled together naked on the mattress in Mike Dimmock’s apartment.

“You hate me, though.” She spoke as though it were a fact.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I probably should.”

Her eyes widened. “You mean you don’t?”

He thought for a moment, probing the recesses of his mind the way he might have probed an infected tooth with the tip of his tongue. Finally, in a tone of near-wonderment, as if he were having difficulty believing it himself, he replied, “No. I guess I don’t.”

“Wow.” She stared at him incredulously.

Now that they were actually having a conversation, if that’s what this was, Jeremy felt emboldened to continue. “Look. I’m sure I
would
be pissed if I thought you were doing this just to mess with me. But I’m guessing you really believe that stuff you told the police. Why else put yourself through all this?”

He expected her to erupt in anger again. After all, wasn’t he all but accusing her of making the whole thing up? But Carrie Ann just stared at him with a thoughtful, assessing look, as if she were seeing him for the first time. When at last she spoke, her voice was surprisingly calm. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you, you know. My parents would kill me if they knew.”

“Yeah. Mine, too.” A corner of his mouth hooked up in a tentative smile. He didn’t see Carrie Ann as his tormenter, but more as a kid who’d been playing with matches and who’d accidentally started a fire, one that had quickly spread out of control. “Want some help with that?” He indicated her locker, where the first two of the letters scrawled on the front had been rubbed into a indecipherable gray smear, leaving only the U and the T.

She frowned. “What if someone sees you? It’d look pretty weird, wouldn’t it?”

He glanced around. “Yeah, well, there’s no one to see.”

Jeremy fetched more paper towels from the boys’ bathroom and helped her scrub off the rest of the graffiti, neither of them speaking another word. They were just finishing up when the third period bell rang. That was when the full realization hit him: He’d blown off biology to help a girl who could send him to jail.

Reflecting on it as he hurried off to his next class, he thought that as bizarre as it might have seemed to others, it had felt like the right thing to do. There was no reason his parents or Mr. McGinty had to know. They wouldn’t understand. Jeremy wasn’t sure he understood it, either. All he knew was that after weeks of feeling like shit, he felt a little better about himself. Not so much better as
different,
more in charge.

He imagined how it had gone down with Carrie Ann: her parents confronting her that night when she’d stumbled into the house, and Carrie Ann blurting out some tearful, drunken version of what had happened. And once adults got involved, things had a way of snowballing. Look at his own parents. A month ago they hadn’t even been speaking and now they were on the phone with each other practically every other day. Jeremy didn’t know how he felt about that. Part of him was glad that his parents were getting along, but another part of him was fearful. He and his dad had been managing just fine without his mom all these years. Wasn’t it better for things to stay as they were than to risk getting hurt again if down the line she decided to take off?

Luckily, his fourth period class was gym, for Jeremy doubted he’d have been able to concentrate right now on anything more mentally taxing than kicking a ball around the soccer field. He was so preoccupied with the thoughts tumbling in his head—Carrie Ann, his mom, the Bio class he’d blown—that he didn’t see Rud until he’d practically bumped into him.

“Yo, dude. Just the man I wanted to see.” Rud greeted him as if they were the best of friends, as if he and his buddies hadn’t left Jeremy swinging in the wind. “Me and Chuckie are heading over to Mike’s after school, to check out the bro’s new hog. Wanna come along?”