“Did you ever have something happen to you where it wasn’t your fault—I mean, you know it wasn’t your fault—but you still hold yourself responsible?” Mel asked.
Let me count the ways, I thought.
My mother died of cancer. My ex-wife died of cancer. Sue Danielson died of gunshot wounds. Anne Corley died of gunshot wounds. Only with Anne did I personally fire the weapon that killed her, and even that ended up being ruled justifiable homicide—self-defense. In all the others I was held blameless—as far as the world was concerned, but not on my own personal scorecard.
“Once or twice,” I conceded.
“Have I ever mentioned Sarah Matthews to you?”
I racked my brain and came up empty. “I don’t think so. Who’s she?”
“She was my best friend in high school—Austin High School in El Paso. Her father was a staff sergeant in the army and my dad was a major at the time. We were in the same homeroom.”
I was scrambling to pull together what little I did know about Mel Soames’s background. She had grown up as an army brat. Her dad, William Majors, was retired military who now lived somewhere in Italy with his second wife, Doris. Mel’s mother, Katy, was living in Florida with a long-term boyfriend, name unknown, whom she had so far declined to marry. I knew there had been bad blood all around during the breakup of their almost thirty-year marriage. As a result I had yet to meet any of Mel’s parental units.
“Major Majors?” I asked, trying to inject a little humor. “That must have been fun.
Mel didn’t respond in kind, and her grim expression didn’t change.
“Sarah and I were in the same homeroom for three years,” she continued. “My senior year Dad was transferred back to D.C. Sarah and I stayed in touch for a year or so—through graduation and for the first semester of our freshman year in college. She committed suicide a few days before Christmas of that year. She shot herself.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In the head,” Mel answered. “Blew her brains out.”
“No. I mean where was she when she died?”
“She was still in Texas—University of Texas at El Paso.”
I knew Mel had graduated from the University of Virginia. “So you weren’t anywhere around when it happened?” I asked.
“No,” Mel said. “Sarah was in El Paso. I was in Charlottesville.”
“So how could her committing suicide possibly be your fault?” I asked.
For an answer, Mel picked up a small book that had been sitting on the floor beside her. She got up, walked across the room, and handed it to me.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Sarah’s diary,” Mel replied. “I’m sure she was afraid someone at home might find it, so she must have hidden it on my bookshelf. When we moved, it got stuck in a box of books that stayed in storage until after my parents bought the house in Manassas at the beginning of my sophomore year. Mom found it and gave it to me. It pretty much explains everything.”
I was holding the book, but I didn’t think Mel actually intended for me to read it.
“What does it say?” I asked.
Mel’s eyes filled with tears. “Her father molested her,” she said. “From the time she was little. She tried to tell her mother, but her mom didn’t believe her.”
“Did she tell you?” I asked.
Mel shook her head. “Not in so many words. I think she tried, but I was too naive to understand what she was really saying. But if I had bothered to read the book…”
“You just told me that you didn’t know about the diary until after she was already dead.”
“Right, but…”
“But what?”
“If I had been a better friend, I would have listened more. And when her father tried to put the moves on me—”
“He went after you?” I demanded.
Mel nodded. “It was at a Christmas party at a neighbor’s house. He caught up with me out in the backyard. He was drunk enough that I was able to get away, and I never told anyone about what had happened. I was too embarrassed.”
“He was what,” I asked, “in his thirties?”
“Around there,” Mel conceded.
“And you were in high school? Whatever happened has nothing to do with you,” I declared. “It was his fault, not yours.”
“It’s not so much what happened before I read the diary,” Mel interjected. “It’s what happened afterward.”
“What did happen?”
“Nothing,” Mel answered hopelessly. “Not one damned thing. I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say a single word. By then Sarah’s mother, Lois, was already sick, crippled by MS and confined to a wheelchair. She was totally dependent on the man. If he’d gone to the slammer then, I don’t know what would have become of her. Sarah was already dead. What difference did it make? Even now, I doubt the diary itself would have been enough to convict him. So I just kept quiet.”
Mel sat in the window seat. She seemed to be staring out at the water, but I doubt she was seeing any of it.