Ike gives a giant nod. “Don’t tell! She made us promise not to tell. She’ll be really mad.”
Next to him, Samuel screws up his face and begins to cry. “Now we’re going to go to the jail for bad kids!” he cries. “They do stuff to Amish kids!” He looks at his younger brother. “You ruined everything!”
“No one’s going to jail,” Tomasetti says.
I’m not so sure. Someone’s going to go to jail. But it won’t be these two little boys.
CHAPTER 20
I’ve never been good at sitting on the sidelines. That’s especially true when it comes to my job. This morning, the fact that I’ve been effectively locked out of the investigation is excruciating. Two hours have passed since Tomasetti, Ike, Samuel, and I sat in the barn and the boys shocked us with the revelation that Salome was complicit in the attempt on their lives.
I’m still reeling inside. Hurting, if I want to be honest. But most of all, I’m angry. Angry because I was lied to and manipulated by someone I trusted, someone I cared about. But I’m angriest with myself. Because I allowed this to happen on my watch. Because I so willingly believed the lies I was spoon-fed. I stood by while two little boys were brutalized by their older siblings. Worse, I felt sympathy for their would-be murderer.
I’m at the police station, feeling out of place because I’m not in uniform, pacing the hall outside the interview room, pissed because the goddamn door is closed. Tomasetti, Adam Slabaugh, Sheriff Rasmussen, and a young attorney who doesn’t look old enough to have graduated from law school are inside, questioning Salome. The need to know what’s happening is like a bamboo sliver being slowly wedged beneath my fingernail.
I’ve just reached the end of the hall, and I’m staring, unseeing, into the reception area when the door clicks open. I spin and see Rasmussen emerge, looking like he’s just been roused from a nap. His hair is mussed, as if he’s been running his fingers through it. “I figured you’d have a path worn in that floor by now,” he says.
Trying to turn down my intensity, I cross to him. “No budget for new flooring.”
He’s looking at me a little too closely, the way people do when they know something isn’t quite right about you. “How are you holding up?”
I’m so focused on learning the outcome of the interview with Salome, it takes me a moment to realize he’s asking about the shooting. “I’m fine.” I say the words with a little too much attitude. But no cop is going to admit she’s spent the last twenty-four hours bouncing off the walls. That would be the ultimate bad form after a shooting. You can drink and you can fight, but you can’t admit it’s messing with your head.
“Good to hear.”
I don’t waste any time getting to the point. “What did Salome have to say?”
“Jesus, Kate. That kid’s been through hell, that’s for sure.”
That isn’t what I expected to hear. “Did she incriminate herself?”
“Every time she started to talk, that fuckin’ attorney shut her down.” He sighs tiredly, gives me a grim look. “She claims her dad was molesting her. Going into her bedroom at night and raping her since she was twelve. She confided in Mose about it. She thinks Mose confronted their father and they might have gotten into an argument the morning Slabaugh ended up in that pit.”
“That doesn’t explain why her brothers told Tomasetti and me that she’s the one who pushed them into the pit. It doesn’t explain how the uncle got into the pit. Or why she started having sex with Mose.”
He looks at me as if I should have a little more compassion for a girl who’s been through so much, and I get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. “She says she doesn’t know how any of them got in the pit. She hinted around that maybe the uncle went in to rescue Solly and that Mose couldn’t get him out. That’s how it usually happens. One person goes in, the would-be rescuers succumb to the lack of oxygen and follow suit. An unconscious man would be very difficult for a seventeen-year-old boy to extract from that pit.” He shrugs. “If Mose had gone in after them, he probably would have ended up dead, too.”
“Do you believe that?”
“It’s hard to know what happened, since everyone is dead.”
“Not everyone.” I can’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “How did the two little boys end up in the pit?”
“Salome says Mose did it. She was afraid he might, so she threw in the ball for them to use as a floatation device just in case. But she didn’t know Mose had actually done the deed until after the fact.”
“That’s not what those boys told me and Tomasetti.”