“Did you torture and kill them as the state police claim?”
He was tall and straight and so ready to believe the worst. Elizabeth wanted to share the truth if only to prove him wrong, but she thought of the girl in the house behind her and remembered how it was to be helpless in the dark, to be a child again and nearly broken. Channing saved her from that fate, from monsters that go bump in the night and the emotion that wept like blood from every part of her. That mattered more than her father, her pride, or anything else, so Elizabeth kept her back straight. “I killed them, yes.” She handed the photos to her father. “I would do it again.”
He sighed deeply, frustrated and disappointed and sad. “Do you know nothing of regret?”
“I think I know more than most.”
“Yet, what you sound is prideful.”
“I am only what God and my father have made me.”
They were bitter words, and he looked away from them. His daughter was a killer, and unrepentant. That was the truth he accepted. “What shall I tell your mother?”
“Tell her that I love her.”
“And the rest of it?” He meant the photographs and Liz and her confession.
“You once told Captain Dyer that the cracks in me are so deep God’s own light can’t find the bottom. Do you really believe that?”
“I believe you are but a short fall from hell itself.”
“Then we have nothing to discuss. Do we?”
“Elizabeth, please—”
“Good-bye, Dad.”
She opened his car door, and the moment ended badly between them. He glanced a final time at her face, then nodded wearily and slipped into the car. Elizabeth watched him back onto the empty street and drive away. When he was gone, she looked at the bathroom window, then crossed the yard and sat again on the porch. When Channing came out, she was in the same clothes, but her hair was wet and her face flushed with heat. She kept her eyes on the dusty floor, and that’s when Elizabeth knew for sure. “You heard all that?”
“Bits and pieces. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
“It’s okay if you did.”
“I’m a guest in your house. I wouldn’t do that.” The girl sniffed and showed the big eyes. “It was your father?”
“Yes.”
“You lied to me,” Channing said.
“I know I did. I’m sorry.”
“You said you never told him what that boy did to you.”
“You’re upset.”
“I thought we were friends, that you understood.”
“We are. I do.”
“Then why?”
“Why the lie?” Channing nodded, and Elizabeth took a moment because some doors were hard to open, and others impossible to close. When she spoke, it was done softly and with care. “I came up in my father’s church,” she said. “Raised on prayer and abstinence and piety. It was a spare childhood, but one I believed in, God’s love and the wisdom of my father. I didn’t realize I was so sheltered, that I was na?ve in a way kids today could never understand. We didn’t have television or the Internet or video games. I didn’t go to movies or read fiction or think about boys the way another seventeen-year-old girl might. The church was my family, and it was very close. You understand? Protected. Insular.” Channing nodded, and Elizabeth turned her chair to face the girl straight on. “After Harrison attacked me, I didn’t tell my father for five weeks, and only then because I had no choice. When I did it, though, I felt dirty and small. I wanted him to make it right, to tell me I would be okay and had done nothing wrong. Mostly, I wanted Harrison to pay for what he did.”
“Did he?”
“Pay? No. My father called him to the church and made us pray together, the two of us side by side. I wanted justice, and my father wanted some kind of grand redemption. So we spent five hours on our knees asking God to forgive the unforgivable, to fix a thing that could never be fixed. Two days later I tried to kill myself at the quarry. My father never did call the police.”
“That’s why you don’t get along?”
“Yes.”
“It seems like more. So many years. That kind of poison.”
Elizabeth stared at the girl, marveling at her perspicacity. “There is more. Why we don’t speak. Why I went to the quarry.” Elizabeth stood because, after so many years, this was the meat of it, the thumping, blood-filled core. “I was pregnant,” she confessed. “He wanted me to keep it.”