Are You in the House Alone? (13 page)

“It’s my business to see my patients aren’t hassled. And that’s big business around this place. You talk to this girl when the doctor says so and when her parents say so. Until then—out!”

I was almost as afraid of her as the police chief was, once we were alone again. She jerked hospital corners in my bed sheets until I felt bound like a mummy. Still she said nothing. After a quick look around the room, she marched out.

I was lying there thinking what a poor place a hospital is for peace and quiet when the door opened very slowly and the police chief and his partner were standing there. They were looking for the nurse, and when they didn’t see her, the chief swaggered in. He snapped his fingers, and the young kid took out a note pad and a ballpoint.

“Okay, honey, we want to get on top of this matter. A couple of questions.”

“I don’t think . . . maybe Dr. Reynolds ought to be here.”

“He’s making his rounds about now,” the chief said. “He’ll be along before we’re finished, most likely.”

“My parents—”

“Little early for visiting hours. What’s the matter, honey, don’t you want to cooperate?”

Is there an answer to that when two hundred pounds of the law is leaning over your bed? I started a long version of the story, hoping somebody would come in pretty soon. The story took longer than I’d planned, with his questions breaking in. “You baby-sit for this Mrs. Montgomery regular?”

“Yes, every Saturday night.”

“What’s a good-looking kid like you baby-sitting for Saturday nights? Haven’t you got a boyfriend?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“But what?”

“But what’s that got to do with anything?” The young cop was forgetting to take notes. He kept looking back and forth at the two of us.

“Your boyfriend ever come over and keep you company when you’re baby-sitting?”

“No.”

“Well, go on. Tell it like it was, just in your own words. I’m all ears.”

“I’d called St . . . my boyfriend, and his mother answered so I asked her to have him come over when he got home because—”

“Because you were feeling kind of lonesome, right?”

“Because I was feeling scared.”

“Scared of what, the dark?”

“I’d been getting phone calls, notes. I was scared because a boy was trying to scare me.”

“You’re kind of grown up to let a thing like that worry you, aren’t you?”

“No, I don’t think anybody is.”

“So somebody comes to the door, and you let him in, and he pulls a gun on you, right?”

“No. I mean I let him in, but he didn’t have a gun.”

“A knife, maybe.”

“No.”

“Now wait a minute, honey. Let me get this straight in my mind. You open the door to a perfect stranger and without threatening you, he rapes you, right?”

I could feel a thickness in my throat. It was the panic I’d felt when Phil Lawver started walking toward me. That same no-place-to-hide feeling. “No, that’s not right. He
wasn’t
a stranger. I let him in because I know him and he overpowered me, threw me down, and then knocked me out with the fireplace poker.”

“Oh yeah.” He squinted at my forehead. “You got some stitches up there. How’d it happen?”

“I just told you.”

“Okay, honey. I think I got the drift of it now.” He rubbed the back of his big neck and took a deep breath. I barely sensed that he was playing his role for the benefit of the younger cop. “Let me run it back for you. A friend of yours—I’m not saying it’s your boyfriend—a good-looking kid like you knows plenty of boys. Anyway, this particular one drops by where you’re baby-sitting. He knows you’re there because you sit regular. And you and him talk on the phone—keep in touch.

“It’s just the two of you together. The little kids are asleep upstairs. There’s nothing much on TV. You start horsing around a little, completely innocent. All you kids do it. Then you lead him on a little, and he gets—overheated. Tries to get you to do what you don’t want to do. Or let’s be honest about it. He gets you to do what you
both want to do, but you’re a nice girl and don’t give in that easy.

“So maybe there’s some rough stuff. The two of you tussle around a little, and you bump your head. So here you’ve got you this nasty cut on the head and how are you going to explain that to your folks? So you kind of build up a story around it. That about the way things went?”

My head began to pound again. And somehow I managed to do the only possible right thing. I reached over to the little bulb-shaped thing with the button in it to ring for the nurse. The chief saw me just before I could touch it.

“Hold on there, honey. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe we’d better take it from the top.” He stood there, with a great show of patience while I tried to tell the whole thing again. The only way I could get through it was by fastening my eyes on the young cop who hadn’t said anything and looked uncomfortable. I got right to the end that time, and then the chief said, “Okay now, honey, so be it. Let’s have the name of this boy.”

“Phil Lawver.” The young cop seemed to come alive and scrawled the name on his pad.

The chief turned on him and roared, “That’s a helluva time to start taking notes! Scratch that!” He turned back to me and leaned over the bed. I could smell bacon on his breath. “You trying to involve the Lawver boy. Otis Lawver’s son?”

“He raped me.”

The chief looked very weary then, and disgusted. “Honey, you’re just asking for trouble. You know that?”

There was screaming that echoed down the hospital halls, metallic echoes bouncing off all the flat, smooth, polished surfaces. My screaming. All I had to do was ring for the nurse, but I screamed instead, loud howls, finally forming words.
“Get . . . them . . . out . . . of . . . here!”
The screams hurt my own ears and wouldn’t stop.

The next moment the room was busy with people. The nurse was across the room on squeaky shoes, booming in the chiefs ear at the top of her big lungs. Dr. Reynolds was right behind her. My screams slid into blubbering hiccups. The chief kept clearing his throat. “She was cool as a cucumber up to just a little bit ago. She’s a little mixed up though. Maybe it’d be better if we come on back a little later on.”

They were gone then, and Dr. Reynolds was beside me, pretending to examine my stitches, trying to swing us both back into the doctor-patient routine. “Don’t give me another shot of Valium or anything. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

“I won’t,” he said and stood there holding my hand while I tried to stop shuddering and sobbing.

Down at the foot of the bed, the nurse was shaking out a blanket. She was deep purple and muttering something about a “tin-badge creep” and a few other words.

Dr. Reynolds gave her an uncertain glance, but I whispered, “That’s my guardian angel down there.” She muttered on, but I think she heard me.

“Gail, did you tell the police it was Phil Lawver?” Dr. Reynolds asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I guess you won’t be bothered by the chief again.”

“Why?”

“You just won’t.”

“But why?”

“Because he’s not going to get involved with an arrest.”

“The Lawvers are above that, aren’t they?” I think I’d known that for as long as I’d been conscious.

“It’s not that simple.” But he wasn’t looking my way when he spoke. “You can get up and sit on the edge of the bed.” I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to take one step nearer the world.

The rest of the morning got no better. I was down from my Valium high, and the screaming had clarified the bleakness of the day. When Mother arrived and heard what happened, she told Dr. Reynolds in very direct terms that “our own doctor wouldn’t have called in the police.” He escaped then, to his pregnant patients, probably relieved for a change of scene.

Dad came shortly after that, with our attorney. Mrs. Montgomery was back too, standing around in the background, never taking off her coat, looking haunted.

Finally it got through to me that she felt the whole business was her fault. When she was beside my bed, I said, “Look, it was going to happen. If not at your house, some other place.” (Hadn’t I said this all before, to Steve? How many people was I going to have to reassure?) “I should have—”

“You shouldn’t have had to do anything, Gail,” she said. “You have a right to . . . to be safe. And I knew you were worried and jumpy. I’ve gone over it a hundred times in my mind. I should have foreseen . . . I’m sick about what happened to you, and yet I keep thinking about my own kids, growing up in this town, growing up anywhere. I’m scared for them, and I want to make this up to you, and—and I can’t do anything for anybody.”

“But you care,” I said. “That counts.” I had to say something.

She cried then, and it upset me because I thought of her as a very tough lady.

Dad approached me with caution, fumbling for my hand. “We’re going to try to get some . . . satisfaction out of this, if that’s the word.” The lawyer stepped up beside him. “This is Ted Naylor. He’s talked to Dr. Reynolds, and he’s more or less in the picture already.”

Mr. Naylor was young and wore a three-piece suit. I noticed he was good-looking, though my interest in the opposite sex was at a very low ebb. Permanently low, I thought. He sat down next to the bed, and Mother and Dad crouched on the edges of chairs farther off. Mrs. Montgomery didn’t know whether to stay or leave, but Mother beckoned her back from the door. I was glad she wanted her there.

“I understand the police have given you a hard time, Gail,” Mr. Naylor said. I nodded.

“Before we get into anything else, why don’t you tell me what you think the police chief’s attitude was.”

It wasn’t hard to put into words. “He thought it wasn’t a . . . rape at all. He thought maybe I was . . . involved with Phil Lawver and trying to get him into trouble because I was—mad at him or feeling guilty or something.”

“That’s the usual official posture,” Mr. Naylor said. “And if he hadn’t had the medical report, he’d have been convinced nothing happened at all.”

“Is the medical report a point in our favor?”

“It would be if . . .”

“If what?”

“Several ifs. If the assailant had forced his way in—picked a lock or broken a window.

“If he’d been a stranger.

“If you’d been a virgin.

“If you hadn’t been on birth control pills, because that’s part of the medical report.

“Even, I’m sorry to say, if you’d been screaming and hysterical and incoherent throughout the police interview. And . . .”

“And if it hadn’t been Phil Lawver,” I said.

“Yes, if it hadn’t been Phil Lawver. That may seem the biggest
if
in our minds, Gail. But the combination of the other factors would work against you anyway, even in the unlikely event that we could take this to court.”

“What’s so damned unlikely about that, Ted?” Dad said. He was on his feet, pacing around, ready to punch a wall. Maybe ready to punch Mr. Naylor.

“Sit down, Neal. I can’t offer you a thing you’ll want to hear. But I can give you a pretty accurate projection of the way things work. First of all, our next step should logically be to swear out a complaint against the Lawver boy. We
can do this even without the cooperation of the police. But the court can deny our complaint. Moreover, if we succeeded in getting an arrest, there’s the problem of a countersuit. The Lawvers could get us for false arrest. There weren’t any witnesses, for a start.”

Mrs. Montgomery burst out, “But I—”

“You were there later, Mrs. Montgomery. I mean actual on-the-spot witnesses.” She crumpled back in her chair.

“Now then, let’s proceed on the long shot that we managed to get an arrest. The judge may opt against prosecution entirely. In most cases, typical cases, he’ll let the rape charge go if the rapist agrees to plead guilty to a lesser charge: assault, disorderly conduct—any one of a dozen completely irrelevant charges. This is called plea-bargaining, and it’s arranged entirely between the court authority and the defense lawyer. I—we have absolutely no control over it.

“However if we did, by some miracle, bring this to trial, you’d get a public grilling, Gail, a good deal more savage than the chief of police is capable of dealing out. You’d be questioned under oath. If you admitted to having had any sexual relationship with any boy at any previous time, the proceedings are over, and we’ve lost.

“But that key question might come many hours after a lot of other questions, all designed to implicate you as a willing partner. To portray you as provocative, immoral, even delinquent. The defending lawyer doesn’t even have to accuse you of anything directly. He can imply.”

“We can’t have that,” Mother murmured.

“But what about Phil?” I said.

“Phil,” Mr. Naylor said heavily, “would be portrayed as a star athlete, a handsome, gifted, promising boy from one of the best families, whose entire future is jeopardized by a
scheming, possibly unbalanced young girl out to ruin him because of some obscure grudge of her own.”

“Ted, I can’t take any more of this!” Dad shouted. “What good—”

“What good am I as your lawyer? Not much, I guess, if you think I can revolutionize the entire legal setup—at the expense of your daughter. I’ll go with this as far as you want me to go, as far as Gail wants. But I wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t tell you what we’re up against.”

“But Phil’s crazy,” I said. “Who knows what he’ll do next? Those letters just show—”

“What letters?” Mr. Naylor said.

“Two of them. Even the guidance counselor said one of them was psychotic. They weren’t signed, but Phil sent them. He admitted it.”

“Where are they?”

I had to stop and think. “Alison. She has one. I mean she had it.”

“Oh no,” Mother said

“Who’s Alison?”

“She’s a friend—a girl I know. But that’s not the point. She and Phil Lawver—”

“Say no more. What about the other letter?” Mr. Naylor said.

“Mr. Sampson. He’s the Dean of Boys at school. He took it.”

“You’d gone with this problem to him—before?”

“Yes. But even at the time I knew he didn’t take it seriously. Probably didn’t even keep the note. And if he found out . . . well, if he had an incriminating letter that could be traced to Phil, he’d destroy it even if he hasn’t already.”