Stolen in the Night (9 page)

D
espite the fact that he had summoned her, Rusty Bosworth kept Tess waiting for about
twenty minutes. She sat in the wooden office chair outside the frosted-glass-windowed
wall of his office and waited. She could hear the murmur of a voice, rising and falling,
inside his office. She presumed that he was talking on the phone, for there were long
lapses in the conversation during which there was silence, but she could not make
out the content of the conversation.

While she sat there, tapping her toe anxiously, Tess looked around the old station
house. It looked very much as it had twenty years earlier when she had been brought
here, wrapped in a blanket, and set down, shivering, on a green leather chair in front
of the chief’s desk. She could still picture Chief Fuller’s worried eyes as he gently
questioned her and feel the warmth of her father’s hand, clutching hers, as she explained
all that had happened, describing the man who had stolen her sister in the night.

God, I hope he doesn’t still have that green leather chair, she thought. She was afraid
she would pass out, or burst out crying, if she had to sit in that chair again. Just
the thought of it brought every horrible memory rushing back to her.

Just as she was reassuring herself that she could face it, that she was tougher than
that, the office door opened and Rusty Bosworth stepped out, clutching a wad of papers
in his meaty fist. Tess stood up, expecting to be invited inside.

Bosworth’s mustache twitched, and he looked at her with cold, assessing eyes. “Let’s
go down the hall,” he said.

Without waiting for a reply, he began to lumber down the corridor. Tess picked up
her bag and followed in his wake. His bulky frame took up most of the hallway and
his large head seemed to graze the bottom of the light fixtures. When he reached a
door that had “Interrogation Room” printed on the frosted glass, he opened it and
gestured for her to go inside.

“Interrogation?” Tess said.

Bosworth’s small eyes betrayed no expression. “Means questioning,” he said.

Tess took a deep breath. “No kidding,” she muttered as she went inside.

“Have a seat,” said Rusty, pointing to a wooden ladderback chair on the far side of
a battered oak table. Tess walked around the table and sat down. The small room was
bare. There was a white plastic carafe on the table and a stack of paper cups. In
a nod to the new, a videocamera was mounted in the corner of the room. As Tess looked
at it, a red light went on, indicating that it was running.

“Thirsty?” the chief asked.

Tess shook her head.

The police chief cleared his throat. His florid complexion and his rust-colored hair
and mustache seemed to flame in the dun-colored room. “All right, Miss DeGraff, let
me explain the situation to you.”

I think I understand the situation, Tess wanted to say, but she restrained herself.

“I know you’re probably wondering why you’re here,” said Chief Bosworth. “When those
DNA results came back yesterday, it became obvious that a mistake had been made somewhere
along the line. Now, it seems to me that there are two possibilities. Only you can
tell us which one applies. Either you were mistaken in your identification of Lazarus
Abbott…”

“I was not mistaken,” Tess insisted.

Bosworth continued as if she had not spoken. “Or you were deliberately lying.”

“Deliberately lying?” Tess cried. “I was nine years old. Why would I lie about such
a thing?”

Rusty waited impassively. “I don’t know. I’m asking you that.”

Tess shook her head. “Lying? That’s ridiculous.”

The chief stared at her with steely eyes.

Tess looked at him impatiently. “Is that your theory? That I was lying?” Tess shook
her head. “That makes no sense.”

“Let me just give you a ‘what if,’” said the chief, glancing down at the sheaf of
notes that he had placed on the table. “What if, say, someone you knew entered the
tent that night.”

“Someone I knew!” Tess exclaimed. “The tent was slit down the side by an intruder
with a knife.”

“Well, if someone wanted to make it appear that it was an intruder…”

Tess looked at him and shook her head. “What?”

“You were just a child at the time. What if someone you loved…someone you were accustomed
to obey, told you to say that the tent had been slit by an intruder…”

“What are you talking about?” Tess demanded.

Chief Bosworth cleared his throat. “I’m trying to consider every possibility.”

“You’ve lost me,” said Tess.

Chief Bosworth raised his voice and hardened his tone. “We need to clear this matter
up, Miss DeGraff. And if you have been…protecting someone all these years, it’s time
to admit it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Tess.

“The truth can’t hurt him anymore, Miss DeGraff. He’s beyond all that now.”

“Hurt who?” said Tess.

Rusty Bosworth cleared his throat. “You may think that we are just small-town cops.
But let me tell you, I’ve seen more than my share of the unsavory. The downright repellent…I
know perfectly well that sometimes parents…fathers, in particular…have unnatural appetites…”

Tess’s eyes widened and she jerked back in her chair as if his words had slapped her
face. “My father? You are accusing my
father
?”

“I’m not accusing anyone,” he said. “I’m asking you to tell the truth.”

Tess shook her head. “No. I don’t have to listen to this. That is the most disgusting—”

Rusty Bosworth leaned toward her. “More disgusting than putting an innocent man to
death?”

“You keep your filthy accusations to yourself!” she said.

Rusty Bosworth stood up and slammed his hands, palms down, on the table. “Listen,
Miss DeGraff, this police force is under attack. We are taking the blame for your
mistake and I’ve had enough of it. Now, I intend to explore all the options this time
around. Including the possibility that you lied to cover up your father’s crime.”

For a moment Tess was too outraged to even form a sentence. Finally she took a deep
breath and said, “My father was a wonderful man whose life was destroyed by what your
cousin, Lazarus Abbott, did…”

Rusty’s eyes narrowed. “No need for you to remind me of my relationship to the victim,”
he said.

“The victim?” she cried.

“As you have pointed out, the victim of this miscarriage of justice was my cousin.
But I think I can still be objective. You, on the other hand, were an impressionable
child when all this happened. Now, I want to make this clear. You were a little girl.
A good little girl. If someone told you not to tell…someone you cared for…like your
father…”

Tess put her hands up. “All right, that’s it. That’s enough. You can say that until
you’re blue in the face. It won’t make it true. It was not my father.”

“Your brother, Jake, perhaps?”

“My brother Jake was at a dance in town that night,” Tess snapped. “You know that.
Every kid in Stone Hill was there.”

“I’m aware of your brother’s alibi,” said Bosworth.

“Alibi!” Tess yelped.

“But your father had no such alibi. Perhaps he was lying awake while his exhausted
wife slept. Lying there wondering if he could coerce one daughter into cooperation.
And the other into silence.”

Outraged, Tess glared at the chief. “Not in a million years. The only person who coerced
me into being silent was Lazarus Abbott.”

“That is not possible, Miss DeGraff,” Rusty Bosworth said coolly. “Everybody knows
that now. You have to stop saying that.”

Tess felt her outrage ebbing, being replaced by confusion.

“Now, either you mistook someone else for Lazarus or you were lying,” he said. “Which
was it?”

Tess stared back at him. “I didn’t lie. But…I…don’t know…I can’t explain it.”

“Can’t or won’t?” he persisted.

Tess shook her head.

“If you lied about it, that’s perjury, Miss DeGraff. That’s a felony. It’s called
a delinquent act and you can still be arrested for it.”

Tess stared at him in disbelief.

“It’s time to tell the truth, Miss DeGraff.”

“I told the truth,” she said.

“I’ll remind you again,” he said in a menacing tone. “That is not possible. Let me
give you the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it was an honest mistake. Perhaps you were
saying that you saw someone who looked a certain way…and the adults around you jumped
to an incorrect conclusion.”

Tess immediately remembered her conversation with Aldous Fuller. The former chief
was afraid that blame would fall on him and now it seemed that Rusty Bosworth was
suggesting exactly that. It was Lazarus, she wanted to say. Lazarus. But the words
stuck in her throat. The chief was not going to listen to that. He was not going to
listen until she at least acknowledged the possiblity that she had been mistaken.
Tess thought again of her college boyfriend. The one she thought she saw leaving the
dorm, when he was actually several states away. What was the point of insisting on
the impossible? She thought of Erny, and shame swept over her as she remembered his
words: You told the cops that guy was guilty, and that was a lie.

Not a lie, she insisted silently.

“Miss DeGraff.”

“I don’t know for sure what happened,” she said.

Rusty pounced, his eyes gleaming. “You were wrong. You admit it.”

Tess stuck out her chin. “All I admit is that it doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s not good enough,” said the chief.

Tess summoned all her nerve. “That’s all I can tell you. That’s all I know. And that’s
all I’m going to say to you without an attorney present. I want to leave now. I’m
not under arrest. I assume I can leave.”

Rusty scowled at the mention of a lawyer and raised a hand, as if to detain her, but
then seemed to think better of it. “All right. You can go. For now,” said Rusty Bosworth.
“But I warn you, Miss DeGraff. If I find out that you committed perjury, you will
face criminal charges. Take my advice. If my hunch is correct, you’ll be sacrificing
yourself to protect a man who doesn’t deserve your loyalty. Not if he killed your
sister…”

Tess stood up, even though her legs trembled beneath her. “My father would have died
to protect my sister,” she said in a raspy voice. “To protect any one of us.”

Rusty Bosworth peered at her. “But he didn’t, did he?” he said.

Tess wanted to shout at him or slap his face. She wanted to shriek at him that no
one had suffered more than Rob DeGraff over what happened to Phoebe. She wanted to,
but she didn’t. Bosworth was an enemy who had made up his mind.

Erny was already in bed by the time Tess got back to the inn. Julie had sent a helping
of chicken pot pie home with Dawn for Tess. Dawn heated it up for Tess and set it
down in front of her, but Tess had little appetite. She picked at it and ate a few
forkfuls.

“What did he want, honey?” Dawn asked.

Tess shook her head and avoided her mother’s gaze. She was not about to tell Dawn
about Rusty Bosworth’s speculation that Dawn’s husband was responsible for the murder
of their daughter. Tess could not imagine even uttering the words, much less forcing
her mother to hear them. “He was asking me about that night. What I remembered,” she
said blandly. “Just hoping I might be able to provide some new information for the
case.”

Dawn nodded. Tess excused herself after barely eating anything. “I’m exhausted,” she
said. “I’m going to turn in.”

“Try and sleep,” Dawn said, although, judging by the dark circles beneath her eyes,
Dawn was unable to take her own advice.

Tess shook her head. “I’ll try. Good night, Mom.”

Dawn hugged her for a long time and Tess could feel her mother’s frame shaking. “Are
you okay, Mom?” Tess asked.

“Oh sure,” said Dawn. “It’s just…this never ends, does it?”

Tess left her mother in the kitchen and went down the hall to her room. The room was
dark except for the moonlight that spilled in through the window. Tess got changed
in the bathroom and slipped under the covers of her bed. Across the room, she could
hear Erny’s steady breathing. Tess lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. She
felt as if she were pinned there by a dead weight. In the last forty-eight hours,
she had done nothing, it seemed, but react to the disorientation caused by unfolding
events. The unexpected results of the DNA tests had upended the one certainty she
had clung to about the death of her sister. The identity of the killer. She did not
know why he had done it, or where, or why he had picked on them out of all the people
in the world. But at least she had always known who was guilty. Lazarus Abbott. The
man she described to the police. The killer.

Now even that was gone.

Who is wrong and who is right? And who is truly to blame? The room was quiet and Tess
longed to sleep, but she couldn’t turn her thoughts off, couldn’t stop thinking about
what she knew and didn’t know. The DNA results were a fact. They exonerated Lazarus
Abbott. That meant that he could not have raped Phoebe.

But no matter what preposterous theory Chief Bosworth floated about her father, she
knew for a fact that it was not him. As for her mistaking Lazarus for someone else,
Tess remembered the face of Lazarus Abbott. And even if, over time, she thought she
might have altered the face she saw that night to fit the face of the man they arrested,
Chief Fuller’s words this morning came back to her. When she had described the man
with the knife that long-ago night, Chief Fuller had recognized her description instantly.
When Lazarus Abbott had been brought into the police station, she had screamed at
the sight of him.

That reaction was not an accident. So where did that leave her? What if, she asked
herself, your identification is right, and also the DNA is right? How, she wondered,
can I reconcile two facts that seem to be mutually exclusive? It was Lazarus Abbott
who took her. It was not Lazarus Abbott who killed her.