The Survivors Club (33 page)

He flipped open his phone and got Waters on the line.

“Sorry, Griff—” Waters started.

“We know who it is,” Griffin cut him off. “I mean, we know how it was done. We just need a name. Meet me at the Pawtucket sperm bank in ten minutes.”

“Where?”

“The sperm bank. Where the College Hill Rapist works.”

“All right,” Waters said, but he didn’t sound as excited as Griffin thought he would. And then he finally heard the sounds coming from behind Waters in the busy bar. A woman’s voice talking. Maureen Haverill, introducing David Price to the general viewing public on the bar’s big- screen TV. One
P
.
M
. Griffin and Fitz had just run out of time.

CHAPTER 36

The Victims Club

I
T WAS DARK.
M
EG KEPT SQUINTING HER EYES, TRYING TO
peer into the gloom. It didn’t do her any good. The dark was a thick, tangible presence, as smothering as any wool blanket, as pervasive as an endless sea.

She twisted her body, straining against the ties that held her hands captive above her head. The latex bindings dug into her wrists cruelly. She felt a fresh trickle of moisture running down her arm and guessed that it was blood. At least she didn’t feel much pain anymore. Her hands had gone numb hours ago, her bound feet shortly thereafter. She still had a dull ache in her shoulder blades from the awkward position. She imagined that would be gone soon, as well. And then?

She shifted her bound feet again. Tried to find leverage against the corner wall, as if she could climb her way up the vertical surface, slog her way through the ocean of black and burst out the top, gulping for air. Of course, she could do no such thing. She remained a captive twenty-year-old girl. Peering into the dark, inhaling the stomach-churning scent of latex, and feeling the blood drip down her arm.

Sound. She shifted, trying to guess the direction of the noise. Footsteps. Above her. From the right? From the left? She never realized how much the darkness echoed before she had been tied up in this musty basement.

Closer, definitely, closer. Humming now. The man, she thought, recoiling reflexively, then holding her breath.

He had called her name in the mini-mart parking lot. She had stopped on instinct, even though she hadn’t recognized the car or the driver inside. Not recognizing someone was hardly new at this point, and mostly she remembered feeling faintly curious. Who was this stranger and what stories from her past would he know?

Instead, he’d told her there’d been an accident. Molly needed her right away. While she was still absorbing that shock, he’d hustled her into the passenger’s side of his car. At the last moment, something inside her had balked. She’d seen him open the driver’s-side door, watched his body bend down to slide inside and something had stirred in the dark pit of her mind. Not a memory, per se. But an emotion. Fear, stark and raw and instantaneous. She’d grabbed for the door handle at the same time he’d hit the lock button and flashed his gun.

She’d known him then. She’d stared at his face, and while the individual features still sparked no recognition, she had a clear image of a body laboring above hers in the dark. The grunting, the groaning, the endless noises to accompany her endless shame. How the ties, the horrible latex ties, kept her body exposed, vulnerable and there for his taking.

And just when she thought it would never end, she could take no more, and her body would be ripped in half, he had finally collapsed on top of her, heavy with sweat.

The man had laughed low in his throat. And then he’d murmured, “David said you liked it rough. Need a brother or sister for Molly, Meg? Or maybe I’ll just wait a few years and give little Molly a try instead.”

She had started screaming then. But the gag smothered the sound, forced it back into her lungs, where it built and built and built. A scream without end.

“David misses you, Meg. David wants you, Meg. You never should’ve turned him down. Now he’s sitting in prison, surrounded by beasts eager to learn your name. We all get out sometime and we all know where you live.”

The man rolled off of her, reached for his shirt. “Oh yeah,” he said casually. “David sends his love.”

The scream had grown too big then. It had exploded up her throat and ripped through her mind. It had burst out of her eyeballs and wiped out her brain. It had gone on and on and on, a sonic boom of a scream. And still she never made a sound. No one heard a thing.

And then as violently as it had started, the scream recoiled, turned in on itself, sank back into her body and took her with it into a dark, velvety abyss.

She had spent a year wanting to remember. Now, in the car with this man, Meg wished she could forget.

He had driven her to a section of town she didn’t recognize. Remote. Desolate. The kind of place where only bad things happened. Pulling into a side alley, he took her hands in a surprisingly strong grasp. She smelled the latex before she saw it. Her stomach roiled. She thought she would be sick. He slid the figure-eight ties over her wrists, tightened the bindings, then placed his hand on her breast.

So this was it, she’d realized.

Absurdly, she thought of Jillian. The classes they’d taken in self-defense, the books they’d read on surviving assault.

Women do not have to be victims.

But then why did they make men with such strong grips?

“We have a few hours,” he said lightly. “I have some things I need to do first. But once I’ve completed my chores . . . Don’t worry, Meg. I remember how you like it.” He flicked his thumb over her nipple. He gave her one last cruel smile, then tied a rolled black T-shirt around her head.

She had been living in darkness ever since.

More sounds now. Banging. Cupboard doors opening and closing. The rattle of pans. Her stomach growled and she suddenly knew what he was doing. He was making lunch. The monster had brought her to his lair, tied her up, captive, terrified for her life, and now he was fixing himself a goddamn cup of soup.

She jerked her arms painfully. Pulled hard on the bindings looped through a metal anchor above her head. Nothing, nothing,
nothing!
She wanted to scream in frustration.

Women are not victims! She was not a victim! Dammit, she had read the books, she had taken the courses. She had listened to Jillian and she had
believed
. How could one girl be so damn unlucky? How could she have spent the last year coming so far, just to wind up here?

She yanked on the bindings again. Felt the concrete hold strong while her own flesh tore, and her wrist once again began to bleed.

And then she just wanted to weep.

He would finish eating soon. He would open the door at the top of the stairs. He would descend into the basement with its musty smell of decay and fresh-turned earth.

And then?

Jillian had told them that they could control their own lives. Jillian had told them that if they tried hard enough, they could win. They could be confident and independent and strong.

But Meg couldn’t think like Jillian anymore. She was just a twenty-year-old girl. And she was tired and she was hungry and she was terrified. And soon, very soon, something bad was going to happen. Something worse than even the College Hill Rapist.

Very soon, the man had promised her, David would be here.

In the intensive care unit, Dan sat reading a book.
Recovering from Rape: A Guide for Victims and Their Families
. He had bought the book two weeks ago. He was now on the chapter “The First Anniversary and Beyond—When You Are Not ‘Over It.’ ”

Monitors beeped in steady rhythm to his wife’s pulse. Down the hall, some other machine started to beep frantically and a nurse boomed, “Code, code, code!” The words were swiftly followed by the clatter of wheels and metal as someone raced a crash cart to the rescue.

Carol never stirred. Her chest rose and fell peacefully. Her head lay serenely on a golden pool of hair. The white sheets remained smooth and unmussed over the faint mound of her chest.

Every now and then, her right hand would twitch. In the last twenty hours, it was the closest they’d gotten to any sign of consciousness.

Dan finished the chapter from the survivor’s point of view. Now he moved on to “The Significant Other—When She’s Not ‘Over It.’ ”

He read, and though he was not aware of it, sometimes he cried.

Down the hall, the doctors and nurses fought desperately to save a life. While in Carol’s room her heart beat steadily, her lungs worked rhythmically, and her very peacefulness threatened to steal her away.

Dan finished the chapter. Now he gazed at his sleeping wife, his elbows planted on his knees, his head bent. His left arm still ached where Carol had shot him. He barely noticed it anymore.

Twenty hours of vigilance. Twenty hours of hoping and praying and wishing and cursing.

He thought of all the years and all the ways fate had been unkind. He thought of all the things Carol had done and he had done. He wondered why we always hurt the people we love. And then he wondered why it took an emergency room visit to understand what was really important in life.

He would turn back the clock if he could. He would forget the lure of blackjack; he would find a way to be happy at a corporate law firm. He would come home more, ignore his wife less, concentrate on all the little things that used to make her smile. He would be the perfect husband, a man who came home in time to stop the vicious attacker, a man who didn’t drive his wife to bingeing, purging, booze and pills.

Of course that wasn’t an option. All he could do now was slog messily on, with his injured arm and massive debts and drowning sense of guilt. Carol was broken, he was broken. According to the rape book, such feelings were natural and it would probably be a while before either one of them felt whole—if they ever felt whole. You just had to keep going, the book advised. Wade through the pain, keep looking for the other side.

There had to be another side.

“I love you,” he said to Carol.

He got no response.

“Dammit, Carol, don’t let him win like this!”

Still no response.

Down the hall, things took a turn for the worse. No more frantic noises. Just a far eerier silence. Then a doctor’s voice penetrated the hush. “Time of death,” the doctor announced.

“Fuck it!” Dan cried. He threw down the book. He climbed onto the white hospital bed. He negotiated wires and tape and tubes until he could gather up his wife. Her head lolled against his shoulder. Her long blond hair poured down his chest.

Dan got his arms around Carol. He pressed her against his body, and he held her as close as he could.

While down the hall, the crash team wearily retreated to the break room, where they turned their attention to the TV.

“Hey,” someone said. “Isn’t that David Price?”

Still sitting in the Pesaturos’ living room, Jillian didn’t know what to do. Tom was staring at the floor, as if the worn carpet held the secret to life. Laurie had disappeared into the kitchen, where, judging from the distinct smell of Pine-Sol, she was waging a holy war against dirt. That left Libby and Toppi to entertain Molly. The little girl now had Libby picking through a shoe box of Barbie clothes while Toppi was in charge of getting a hot-pink cape onto a stuffed Winnie the Pooh. Jillian couldn’t begin to fathom what that was all about.

Tom stared, Laurie cleaned, Molly played, and Jillian . . . ? She didn’t know what she was supposed to do. The Survivors Club was fractured. They had careened away from one another, whether they had meant to or not, and alone they definitely weren’t as strong as they had been together. Bitter Carol had given in to her self-destructive rage. Flaky Meg had vanished when her family needed her the most. And Jillian? Grim, determined, holier-than-thou Jillian? She had no troops to lead into battle. She sat next to her mother, slowly twisting Trisha’s gold St. Christopher pendant, and tried to rein in her scattered thoughts.

If Griffin was right, the Survivors Club had been doubly victimized. First the rapist had battered their bodies. Then he’d duped them into wreaking not their vengeance, but
his
vengeance upon some poor guy who’d tried to tell them better. Poor Eddie Como, proclaiming his innocence right up to the bitter end.

If Jillian thought about that too much, thought of the man, Eddie, them, Trish, she was afraid she would start with yelling and end with breaking every object in the room.

If she thought about it too much, she would be down in her sister’s dark apartment again. The man would be squeezing her throat, calling her vile names. And while he did these things, he would be laughing on the inside, because he already knew that when she tried to seek justice later, she’d only be serving his needs once again.

While Trish died on the bed.

One year ago, she had called Meg, she had called Carol. She had told them that they had been victimized once, but it never had to happen again. She had told them they could reclaim their lives. She had told them they could win.

She had lied.

Is this what life came down to in the end? You tried and you failed, you tried and you failed. The opposition was not just physically stronger than you but smarter as well? You could struggle as hard as you knew how, but still your sister died. You could finally arrest a murdering pedophile, and the man would simply smile and tell you exactly what he had done to your wife.

David Price. David Price. It all came down to David Price. Charming, seemingly harmless, perfect neighbor, David Price.

Jillian gripped Trisha’s medallion in her hand. It wasn’t so hard to transfer her rage after all. She wanted David Price dead. And then, for the first time, she truly understood Griffin. And then, for the first time, she had an inkling of an idea.

The front door opened and shut. Laurie, who had gone out to get the mail, walked into the family room, sifting through the pile.

She came to the middle. Meg’s mother started to scream.