Carry Me Home (20 page)

ONE HELL OF A WOMAN

Cal really did live in a farmhouse. Big and white, its solid lines softened by a wide covered porch that wrapped around two sides, with a porch swing hanging from chains that looked ready for lazy summer evenings. Set on a hill overlooking his fields, above a big metal shed that he called “the shop,” and an actual red barn.

“It looks . . . old,” she said when they came up the long driveway in his truck.

“You sound surprised.” He pulled the truck into the garage, hopped out, and unclipped Junior from his spot in the bed. The dog leaped over the side, headed for the snowy yard, and romped as if he’d been tied up for a week, and Zoe slammed her own door and laughed at his antics.

“I told you,” Cal said, leading the way across a shoveled walk and up the porch steps. “A farmer, in a farmhouse.”

“I know, but I wasn’t expecting it to actually be a . . .
farmhouse
.”

“What? A McMansion, cleverly disguised as a humble farmhouse?”

“Well . . .”

“Nope. Smack-dab in the middle of my fields, the house my great-grandfather built. The house I grew up in. The house I thought . . .” He stopped, shrugged, and held the door for her.

“That your kids would grow up in,” she guessed, heading inside.

“Well, yeah. I did. Because I like it. It’s a good place.”

“But she didn’t?” Zoe guessed.

“Nope. She didn’t.”

Zoe had to wonder at that. Because what she saw inside couldn’t have been anything close to the original. The cherry cabinets and high-end German appliances in the kitchen weren’t anything his parents had had done, she’d have bet money on it. It wasn’t a McMansion, but it was a pretty great house. A comfortable house. She looked out through picture windows over curved lines of white and gray against the horizon of blue, punctuated by the red of the barn, and felt . . . peace. Even after the night before, even facing the week ahead. Peace.

Stomping up the hill in her snowshoes an hour later, she tried to tell him something of that. “This is a good place,” she said. “I think anybody would be happy to live here. In all this quiet, all this space. All this peace.”

“Ah,” he said. “Well. Kind of a matter of opinion, I guess. One man’s peace is another woman’s . . . boredom.”

She hadn’t heard that note in his voice before. “Oh. I see.”

He laughed, a sharp sound that she hadn’t heard, either. “I sound bitter, don’t I? Bad idea. Scratch that.”

“No,” she said. “I asked.”

“You did, didn’t you?” He stepped over a bank onto an unplowed road that wound up and around the butte, reached back with a gloved hand for one of hers. “Here.”

His hand closed over hers, and he helped her onto the bank, set out beside her up the road. They walked for a while in silence, Junior romping ahead, racing back to circle around them before heading off again. Other than that, it was snow, and sky, and silence.

“But it is good here, isn’t it?” Cal asked, glancing at her.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

One final turn in the road, and they were cresting the hill. Cal walked to the highest point and stopped, turned in a circle.

“Here you go,” he said with satisfaction. “Home.”

She turned herself, less gracefully than Cal had in the awkward snowshoes. She nearly overbalanced, and he reached a hand out for hers, then kept hold of it.

It was a sea. That was the only way to describe it. Wave after wave of rolling white, hills and dips delineated by the black stripes of roads, dotted with a farmhouse here, a cluster of outbuildings there, a barn, a stand of trees, all with their coating of white. And the blue of the low mountains to the east providing a backdrop to it all.

“Paradise,” Cal said. She thought for a moment he was describing it, then realized he was pointing to the town, the university’s water tower and domed stadium clearly visible in the distance. He turned 180 degrees, her hand still in his. “South. That’s Fulton, and the grade down there”—he pointed to the canyon—“going on down to Union City.”

The road she’d driven the night before. She shivered a little, and he felt it, looked down at her.

“Where did I go off?” she asked.

“Right down there.” He pointed to the spot on the highway.

“I was close to your farm, then, because isn’t that where we came from?”

“Yep. Lucky thing.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was.”

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I know that’s easy for me to say, but we’ll figure this thing out. Greg’s a lousy cop, I’d bet money, but Jim isn’t. And you and I are pretty smart.”

“So we’re going to crack the case? The two of us?”

“We’re going to ride Jim’s tail until he does. We’ll put it like that.”

“And meanwhile?”

“Yeah. Meanwhile. What would you think,” he said, his casual tone immediately setting off her alarm bells, “about staying with my folks for a while?”

“With your
parents
?”

“Why not? You’d be safe there. They’re both around a fair amount.”

“Why on earth would they want to do that?”

He looked at her, smiled a little. “You really can’t think of an answer to that?”

The warmth she’d felt all morning, in contrast to the chill in the air, increased a little more at the look in his eyes. His hand was still around hers, and she withdrew her own on the pretext of adjusting her hat.
His
hat, a gray wool watch cap he’d loaned her. Nothing fancy, because there wasn’t anything fancy about him. Just that strength, and how she wanted to relax into that, to rely on it.

“No,” she said. “Thank you,” she added hastily. “But I’m not even sure I’m in danger.” And it would feel too weird.

“How would you be sure?” he asked. “Wait for him to break in? Not until we know more, and not without a plan for that. Not without a
good
plan.”

“You know . . .” she said, and laughed a little. “You take ownership of every single situation you’re in. Do you realize that?”

“Ownership, huh?” This time there was heat as well as warmth in his gaze, and she turned away again.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound as flustered as a high school girl with her crush. “I meant—”

“Yeah, I get it. I’m bossy. Check.”

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.”

He sighed. “Would you stop with that word? I’ve got to tell you, I’m really hating it. So let’s hear
your
plan instead. The one you’ve worked out for yourself to stay safe.”

“All right.” She was totally flustered now, but she struggled with herself, focused. “My plan is to call Rochelle and see if I can sleep on her couch for a week or so, until I can beef up the locks on my doors. See what your cousin turns up, if anything. What you said, an MO. See if there really is a predator out there, and make a plan based on that. A plan that’s something other than running away.”

“Because if he’s done it once, he’s done it more than that.”

“Yes. He will have.” She looked away, over those flowing contours, those peaceful rolling hills and valleys. “They always do it again. They do it because they enjoy it. I don’t think rape is ever a one-time deal. And you could tell that what he did with Amy was planned. That was a pattern he was working.” She rubbed her hands over her arms. “And maybe with me.”

“We’ll get moving again,” he suggested.

She nodded, and he led the way down the hill.

“Sounds like you know,” he said after a minute.

“What?”

“That they do it again. And you don’t seem as . . . horrified as I’d have imagined about all this.”

“
What?
” He didn’t think she was
horrified
? “Are you kidding?”

“Whoa.” He turned, waited for her to catch up, then started off again, next to her this time. “I mean that you haven’t seemed surprised. Made me wonder if all that, the assault on campus thing . . .”

“The rape on campus thing,” she said. “Call it what it is. It’s always such belittling language, isn’t it? ‘Date rape.’ ‘Sexual assault.’ Maybe if people said ‘rape,’ they’d take it seriously.” She was getting worked up, and she stopped, took a breath. “Sorry. Not fair to take it out on you.”

“So why?” he asked. “What happened to make you care so much? And how you were with me. Why?”

“How I was
what
with you?”

He gestured with his ski pole, and Junior, who always seemed to have one eye on him, bounded back, circled them, and, at some apparent signal Zoe couldn’t read, took off again.

“That I was a jock,” Cal said. “That you didn’t like jocks. Not getting out of your car when you were in the ditch, not riding in my truck. All that. You don’t have to tell me why, but I’d sure like a hint.”

“That’s what women do, though.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I mean,” he went on hastily, “all right. I accept that. But I still think there’s more, and I’d like to know what it is.”

“You want to know if I was raped. Or if I just know people who were raped.”

“Yeah,” he said, his gaze steady on her. He had left her the trail groomed by their snowshoes on the way up, was breaking a new one beside her. “I do.”

She debated for a minute. “No,” she finally said. “It wasn’t me. All that happened to me was the usual. I got better-looking, like I told you, in college, but I still thought of myself as a . . . Well, let’s say that I was too flattered that anybody would notice me, and I made a few mistakes.”

“Ah. Jocks.”

“Yep,” she said with a sigh. “Especially one jock. And walking by him a week later, hearing him say, ‘Yeah, I nailed that bitch’ to his buddies, and hearing them laugh? Call it a teaching moment.”

“Ouch.”

“Anyway, it happened, and I got over it. I got more cautious, and that’s nothing but a good thing. But my roommate was raped. My best friend in college.”

“By another jock,” he guessed.

“Yes.” She didn’t want to talk about this, or think about it, but it had been coming to the surface more and more these past weeks. Well, of course it had. “We were freshmen,” she said. “About Amy’s age. Ten years ago. And the thing is—you’d never have known it, to look at him. He hid it, or maybe he didn’t feel like he had to hide it, because he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He had this total confidence. Like a . . . a god. Like you would have been.”

“I wasn’t a god.”

If he didn’t know, she couldn’t tell him. “You know what I felt really bad about afterwards?” she asked him. “That I’d been jealous. He was in a history class with us, and we both had a crush on him, even though I tried not to. But he was so cool, so far above everybody else. Bigger, and better-looking, and so much hotter than all the other guys. Just like you.”

“Except that I’m not that guy,” Cal said. “And I never was.”

“I know,” she sighed. “I know, all right? But you asked.”

“Yep. I did. So tell me. You both had a crush on him.”

“We sure did. But he paid more attention to Holly. I thought it was because she was prettier. Now, I think it’s because I was tougher.”

“Bet you’re right.”

“Yeah. He started out asking to borrow her notes, because he was gone. For games, you know. Before long, she was copying them for him every time. So happy to do it, too. So happy for his attention. Which meant that the day he asked her to a party, she thought that was it, the big step, that she meant something to him, that it was going somewhere. Here he was, a junior, a football player, asking her out. It never occurred to either of us that the guy had never even asked her to have a cup of coffee. Had never done anything but take advantage of her. We should have known that. We should have noticed.”

“She blamed herself for that? How was she supposed to know?”

She stabbed her poles into the snow. “I blamed myself. All right, she was dazzled. She was excited. But I should have seen. I wasn’t dazzled. But I didn’t realize until that year that men would just . . . lie. Flat-out lie, and use, and hurt. I mostly dated my friends, once I dated at all. I didn’t know that some men would do . . . what they do.”

She stopped, but he didn’t say anything, and after a minute, she went on. “It was a frat party. I only found out the rest afterwards. She didn’t come home until morning. I’d gone to breakfast, and when I came home, she was in the shower. The worst thing she could have done, not that it would have mattered. Not that anybody cared.”

She turned to him, stopped on her snowshoes, and he stopped, too. “You know what he did? He kicked her out. She woke up not knowing where she was. The last she remembered, she’d been dancing with him, and she’d felt so woozy, and he’d put his arm around her, told her she needed to lie down. That was the last she knew until she woke up without her underwear, with him yelling at her to leave. She was crying, finding her way out again from his room in this big building, because she didn’t even remember going up there, and some of the other guys were out there, and they were laughing at her.
Laughing.
”

“Because they were assholes,” he said.

“All of them? There was nobody who had the guts to stand up and say,
This isn’t right. I don’t want to live with people like this.
Nobody?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not excusing it. But I think when you’re young, it does take a lot of guts for a guy to speak up like that.”

She started walking again. “Then I think they’d better get some guts,” she said. “If they want to call themselves men.”

“I think you’re right.”

She wasn’t listening, though. “She didn’t even know it had happened,” she said, “until she realized she was hurting. She didn’t know because she was
unconscious
. What kind of man wants to have sex with somebody who’s unconscious?”

“A rapist.”

“At least you get it.”

“Of course I get it.” He was frowning at her now. “That doesn’t take a big stretch.”

“She didn’t even know how many of them it was. She didn’t even know if it was just him. Can you imagine that?”

“No. I can’t. So what happened? Did she report it?”

“Yes. Because I made her. And what do you think happened next?”

“I think,” he said, “that they dropped it.”