The Philadelphia Quarry (25 page)

Wesley and I had always kind of teamed up against poor Lewis. I say “poor Lewis” because, even though she was four and six years older than we were, we always seemed to be able to get her goat. Lewis didn’t have much of a sense of humor, and I always felt that she didn’t think she was as well-liked by our parents as Wesley and I were when we were young, but that’s just me.

We would play tricks on her, taking advantage of her when she was supposed to be babysitting us. She would report us to our parents (although she never could bring herself, later, to report on what really needed to be brought to their attention), but they likely as not would tell her that we were just children, to just laugh it off.

That night, our parents were having drinks out on the patio, and I was doing my homework.

Wesley must have slipped away from the group home. I don’t think it was too hard. My bedroom had a little side door that opened to the outside, kind of hidden away. I heard a light tapping, and when I looked out, there was Wesley, holding his index finger to his lips.

I let him in. He kissed me and told me that we were going to the Quarry.

I told him that I had homework, but the look of disappointment was enough to make me close my book.

I told my parents I was going up the street to see some friends. They didn’t even ask which ones. When they got beyond the second gin and tonic, they didn’t ask a lot of probing questions.

I met Wesley out on the street and asked him why we were going to the Quarry. He smiled down at me and said, “So we can be alone.”

I didn’t resist. I never did, really. We walked downhill until we got to the entrance. I remember that the night was still and sticky, like there was a storm brewing.

We slipped in through the hole in the fence. The water probably was still plenty warm for swimming, but of course Wesley had other ideas.

I was led, willing as a sheep to the slaughter, to the men’s dressing room. It still smelled of the damp of summer bathing trunks and the chemicals used when they cleaned the toilet.

I let him strip me and lay me down on the hard wooden bench. He produced some kind of lightweight rope, pulled my hands over my head and tied me to a hook hanging on the wall behind me. When he’d tied me up before, it seemed to be less scary, mostly because we were in our own house.

He teased me a little, with his hands, and something in his eyes, shining from a light pole somewhere in the distance, scared me. He didn’t seem like the old Wesley at all anymore.

I begged him to untie me, that I was scared. He said, “You should be,” and then he put my panties in my mouth.

And then he had me. He’d had me many times before, of course, but this was different. He was like an animal rutting, grunting and biting as he went at me.

He came twice, and then we heard the patrol car shush-shush-shushing through the gravel.

Wesley motioned for me to be quiet, a superfluous request, since my underwear was in my mouth. He almost appeared to be grinning as he got off me. I thought he was going to untie me, but he just zipped his pants, scooped up my shorts, bra and T-shirt and slipped away, gone into the night.

It seemed like an hour before they found me. I could hear voices the whole time, and was trying to keep quiet, thinking I would prefer to take my chances wriggling free from the ropes sometime before morning, rather than be discovered
au naturel
by some of Richmond’s finest.

But it was not to be. The policeman who poked his head in the door didn’t seem to see me at first. I suppose he was still a little night-blind. But then he stopped. He said, “Holy shit,” and then there were three of them. They seemed as embarrassed as I was as they untied me. Somebody found a robe.

They could see the shape I was in. They could see everything. When they brought the boy in, he looked frightened and confused.

“Is this the one?” one of the cops asked. I could have said he wasn’t, but somebody did it, and telling the police the truth seemed too much to bear. In my cowardice, I nodded my head, and they took him away.

I have never since, to this day, seen Richard Slade in person. . . .

Dec. 26

I see, to my amazement, that I am almost finished. I count 152 pages so far. I feel better, even if I don’t know what to do with this just yet.

If I give this, my confession, to the police, it will leave a stain on our family name that might never go away.

If I don’t, I am doomed. I cannot live any longer with what I have done.

Lewis knows something, and she is afraid, I think. When I mentioned writing “my memoirs,” she turned pale and said some things were better left unsaid.

I think she has been snooping around my computer, which is why I have been making printouts as I go along.

The one I feel most sorry for, believe it or not,
is
Wesley.

How, though, can I be silent any longer?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I
open the front door for Lewis, still not sure where we’re going. She doesn’t lock it as we leave. I guess this is a pretty safe neighborhood.

She takes her keys out and heads for the Lexus.

“I’ll drive,” she says.

I ask her where we’re going.

“It’s not far.”

I make sure the recorder in my breast pocket is on and away we go. A couple of turns, and I realize we’re on the street above the Quarry. Ahead, I see the home where Lewis, Wesley and Alicia were reared, where I was last seen burglarizing the brick patio and trying to keep Wesley from beating me to death me with a shovel.

Lewis uses the turn signal despite the fact that there probably is no moving vehicle within three blocks of us.

But she doesn’t reach the driveway. Instead, she turns just before the fence. There’s a long expanse of lawn in front of us, probably a lot that Harper Simpson bought so his nearest neighbors would be a little farther away, or maybe so that one of his kids would build next door someday.

She drives us for maybe fifty yards and then she stops but leaves the engine running. I look back and can see the outline of the big house behind us to my left. We seem to be in some sort of clearing. It’s a little warm with the heat on, and I open the passenger side window about halfway. I can feel the winter damp sitting on us like a cold, wet towel.

“Well,” Lewis says. “Here we are.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re at the place where you get to hear the truth, Mr. Black. The jumping-off point, so to speak.”

I hear what sounds like a chuckle, but when I look at her face, she isn’t smiling. She’s staring straight ahead, into the blackness.

“You seem to have it all figured out, Mr. Black,” she says. “You’re a very clever man. But maybe you don’t have it all figured out. Why don’t you tell me what you know.”

“I can tell you what I suspect.”

“That’ll do, then.”

“I don’t think Richard Slade had anything to do with your sister’s death.”

Lewis turns toward me.

“Well, if not Mr. Slade, then who?”

“I think I know. I think you know. Your brother.”

Lewis doesn’t deny it, just sighs.

“Let me enlighten you,” she says.

“I knew. I pretty much knew right from the start, when they would disappear into one another’s bedrooms and not come out for a couple of hours. I should have stopped it, but how do you tell your parents something like that? And they both would have denied it.

“They liked to rub my nose in it, really, the way they would smirk at me, playing grab-ass with each other right in front of me, daring me to confront them with it.

“I never did confront Wesley, but I did try to talk some sense into Alicia. But she would do whatever Wesley wanted her to do. Alicia was easily led.”

After what she calls “the incident at the Quarry” and Wesley’s disappearance, things were more or less as normal as they apparently ever got around the Simpson household.

“But something would always happen. He’d go off his medication and his illness would start all over again. He told me one time that the drugs made him feel like he was at the bottom of the sea, in the world’s heaviest diving suit.”

I ask Lewis if she minds if I smoke. I promise I’ll blow it out the half-open window.

She starts to say no, then shrugs.

“Why not? What’s the harm?”

I suck in the much-needed carcinogens and exhale them into the night like a blue fog.

“You’re sure,” Lewis asks me, “that you can’t be persuaded to part with Alicia’s manuscript? I’ve read it already, you know.”

Alicia had suspected that, so I’m not all that surprised.

I tell her that, for the time being, I’d prefer to keep it.

“As you wish.”

She cracks her window an inch or two. Even with mine half-open, it’s getting pretty warm in here.

“Well,” she says, “then I guess you might as well know everything. Confession is good for the soul.”

She surprises me by taking the Camel from my mouth, taking a big drag.

“I quit ten years ago,” she says, “but you never lose the itch, do you?”

I concede that you apparently don’t.

She hands the cigarette back.

“I thought the whole mess was over. It had receded into the past until it had almost vanished from sight.”

She told me that Alicia hadn’t seemed to be fazed much when the story first broke. But when it became more and more obvious that Richard Slade had not raped her, that he had been in prison all those years because of a case of mistaken identity, she became more and more withdrawn.

“Then, last Thanksgiving, she told me she was writing her ‘memoirs.’ I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen. She said confession was good for the soul, and I told her that was a crock, that confession was good for nothing but ruining a perfectly good life.”

Lewis sighs, looking straight ahead. I don’t think she’s even talking to me now. She might not even know I’m here.

“She just stared at me. And then you know what she said? She said, ‘You think this has been a perfectly good life? You think hell is a perfectly good life?’

“I had always thought there was more to the story than Alicia let on, even back when it first happened, but I was still fool enough to think it was just her feeling guilty about maybe being mistaken, maybe sending the wrong man to prison for the rest of his life.

“I thought that right up to the time I finally got to read what she had written. How could I have been so stupid?”

All through the holidays, Alicia was writing. She didn’t try very hard to hide the fact, Lewis said. When asked about what exactly she was writing, Alicia just smiled and said, “The truth.”

“I tried to stop her,” Lewis says, “and she told me at one point that she had quit. But I knew she hadn’t.”

The wind is starting to pick up. I pitch the butt out the window and roll it up a little.

The day after Richard Slade was officially exonerated by the state, Alicia went to the gym. She left to work out at five every morning. That, a little grocery shopping and meetings of various charity boards she was on comprised most of her time away from the home where she had spent most of her life. If she lived in a bigger town with meaner or at least less lazy media types, her front lawn would have been strewn with cameramen and talking heads all night.

Lewis says she used her key to get into her parents’ old house. She went up to Alicia’s study and got on her computer. Alicia apparently hadn’t tried to hide anything.

“She hadn’t changed her password in the last ten years, when she told me what it was—Simpson. All I had to do was log in, and there, on her desktop, was a folder that said, ‘Confession.’

“I took a glance at the first chapter, and I knew what it was.”

There were some disks in the drawer, so Lewis made a copy and left.

“That night, after Carl went to bed, I went to my laptop and started reading. By the time I was finished, light was coming in the window, and I knew everything. Everything I never wanted anyone else to know.”

The next day, a Wednesday, she went to her parents’ home again before dawn, went back to the computer and erased everything.

She sighs.

“Except, of course, that my careless little sister wasn’t so careless after all. She had copied everything. Hell, she probably even has it copied on a disk somewhere, although I haven’t been able to find it. When I told her I had erased everything, that it was for her own good, she just smiled and shrugged her shoulders. She said she’d just go to the police and the newspaper and tell them everything. She was beyond caring, Mr. Black.

“I knew what I had to do.”

I hesitate to break the spell. It’s always good to let the subject talk for as long as he or she wants, give them enough rope for a proper hanging. Sometimes, I feel like a shrink or a priest. But I have to ask.

“So, when did you tell Wesley about all this?”

She looks at me like I’m speaking Urdu. She laughs.

“Wesley didn’t know anything about all this until yesterday,” she says.