What Happened to Hannah (38 page)

“In the dark my face was stiff and tight and twice its normal size.” Her voice was dull and weary. “I couldn’t move at first. I thought . . . I thought that I was paralyzed. But everything hurt so bad. I couldn’t see out of my left eye. There were cuts inside my mouth, my teeth were all there but they were loose. I could taste blood. I wanted to die. Just lie there and die. But it was so dark and the house was so quiet I began to worry that maybe he’d gone after you, again. I was confused, disoriented. I couldn’t imagine where Mama and Ruth were or why they left me on the kitchen floor like that unless he’d taken them with him. Ruth or Mama always came when they could, to help me. We helped each other. Always.

“I finally pulled myself up to the sink. My right ankle kept giving out and I remembered Daddy stomping on it. I rinsed the blood out of my mouth, but when I put my cold, wet hand on my face it stung like hell.” She stopped and looked straight at him. “I knew your parents would take care of you, protect you, but I was still frantic with worry—for you, for me . . . for Ruth and Mama. I don’t remember how I got to your house. I kept thinking I’d be safe with you. Your mother probably told you more than I remember of what happened next. I heard her tell me you wouldn’t be back until the next afternoon and then I remembered—and all I could think about was where could I hide until then?

“I didn’t know where else to go. I
had
nowhere else to go. So I went home. The next thing I remember is being in our barn. My ankle hurt so bad I was crying and I didn’t even realize it. I took a quick chance on the light, hoping no one in the house would see it, and wiped my right eye clear to take a look at my ankle. It was red and black and the size of a cantaloupe.” She raised her right leg and used her hands around her ankle to show him. “I guess I must have fallen down a hundred times staggering back and forth between our houses that night because along with all the bruises Daddy gave me were cuts and scratches.” She gave a soft awkward laugh, then grew sober again. “I was a mess.” She took a deep breath. “I turned the light out. I was so afraid he’d find me. The only place I could hope to hide in the barn was up in the loft, but there was no way I could climb the ladder with my ankle. I got lucky, though, and found hay bales stacked well enough that I could pull myself up on them until I could reach out and drag myself up. It was close to dawn. There was a dark blue light filtering in through the cracks. I crawled to the front of the barn and found a place to peek out. Daddy’s truck was parked where he left it the night before. It didn’t look like anyone was up yet but I watched—with my one good eye—for as long as I could. It took a while before I realized I wasn’t blind in my left eye, it was simply swollen shut.

“Routine stuff at our house.” She reached out for her coffee cup, drank it dry, and set it back on his desk. She uncrossed and crossed her legs, shifting her weight in the chair. “When I was too tired to hurt anymore or to worry about being caught or to care about anything really, I covered myself in hay to get warm and fell asleep.

“Sometimes it feels like I never woke up. I hear his voice in my dreams calling me, but I don’t know if he actually went looking for me or if I dreamt it. And at first I didn’t know if I was dreaming the screams or if they were real, you know? I was in so much pain that sometimes I thought the screams were mine and I’d put my hands over my mouth but I could still hear them.

“I . . . I told you that Daddy didn’t hit Ruth, that he . . . I think he was molesting her, though she never said so. But she hadn’t gone down in the cellar for a couple of years . . . I hadn’t heard her scream . . . I didn’t recognize it, at first. My mama’s screams, I knew, and I could hear him yelling all the way out in the barn. He thought they knew where I was, that they’d hidden me from him.”

She was talking so fast now she had to stop to take a breath. “I thought it was a dream. I’ve had that same dream over and over ever since. Mama crying out and Ruthie’s screams.” She closed her eyes. Tears slipped down her cheeks from the corner of each one. “It went on and on and on while I listened, too weak and in too much pain to help them. But then I opened my eyes. I saw Ruth sprawled in the doorway to the hall. She had a split lip and a cut on her forehead. There was blood everywhere. On her little face and dress. Mama came up beside me. I’d never seen her so bad. There were whole chunks of hair missing from her head and those horrible marks around her throat from where he choked her, but she was looking and acting more afraid of me than she was of him. She reached out, like this . . .” Hannah opened her eyes and showed him trembling fingers. “And that’s when I looked down . . . and saw Daddy on the floor . . . and saw the fry pan I hit him in the head with in my hand.” Another deep jagged breath. “Mama took the pan from me by the handle and . . . and she said she’d lie for me, that she’d take the blame. But I’m the one who killed him.”

The silence that followed her declaration made it seem unfinished somehow, like there was a great deal more to the story that she wasn’t telling. They stared at each other across the desk until she cleared her throat and asked, “What?”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

He’d read the police reports. He’d seen the crime scene photos. There was more to the story.

“Did your mother say anything else to you?”

She’d been so forthcoming with the rest of the story that her sudden reluctance was telling. This was the deepest, darkest part of her secret—this hurt the worst, affected her most.

She’d tell him. He sensed that she’d come to get everything off her chest once and for all. He listened to himself breathing while he waited for her to speak. How she’d survived that house with her mind and soul and her heart intact, he couldn’t guess. His gaze roamed over her face and slender form with gentle appreciation. She looked like a flesh-and-blood woman to him—a smart, kindhearted, funny, wonderful woman. Who knew mere humans could walk out the front gates of hell and then thrive?

She looked out his office window into a long-ago kitchen where her sister and father lay on the linoleum bleeding—dazed both then and now.

A grimace crossed her face and the right side of her body cringed protectively.

“What, Hannah?”

“Mama. She takes the fry pan from my hands and raised it over her head. She’s going to hit me with it but then . . .” she winced and covered her right ear with her hand, “ . . . she starts screaming at me. She tells me to get out of her house. She says my blood is tainted by his. I’m a violent soul. I killed him. That makes me as evil as he is and now I’ll go to jail. I’ll rot in prison. Someone, me I guess, I say, But . . . he was going to kill us. Not
you
, she says, not this time. He was after her and Ruth, looking for me, but it wasn’t self-defense for me. And no one will believe I was there with them because there was no fresh blood on me. They’ll know I came back to kill him—murder him. I have to go. She’ll take the blame for killing him; she’s my mama and she owes me that much, but I’m not to ask her for anything more. Ever. She wants me to go and never come back.” The sorrow and defeat in her eyes when they gravitated around to meet his was crushing. “So that’s what I did.”

He studied her for a long minute. “That’s it then? That’s all?”

“Jesus, Grady, I just confessed to killing my own father. What more do you want?”

He almost grinned. There she was, his scrapper.
That’s
how she’d survived in that house, she was a fighter. He stood and walked to the other side of the desk—to be closer to her but also to nonverbally let her know the worst was over and he was there for her. “Well, for starters I’d like to know why you gave in, why you decided to come in and tell me all this.”

“Anna.” She sighed. “Mostly. I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives lying to her. Everything I say to her should be the truth. Ruth told her I was a hero for running away . . . and I think there’s a part of her that thinks I’m a jerk for not coming back for Ruth when I got on my feet. I want her to know the truth. And Mama . . . Anna has no idea who that woman was when I left here because I have no idea who they’re talking about now. She’s like Jekyll and Hyde . . . Hyde when I left and then Dr. Jekyll. She raised Anna very differently than she raised me. Thank God.”

“I would imagine that getting out from under your father’s fist your mother simply reverted to the woman she was meant to be in the first place. Maybe. She did change a lot. I didn’t recognize her when I first came back to town.”

She nodded and went silent for a moment. “I’m glad . . . I guess . . . you know, that she found a way to become happy with her life. We have that in common, at least. That we survived and made better lives for ourselves.”

Grady loved that her expressions were so easy for him to read now. He watched the dawning of awareness light her features. She’d confessed to murder—
her
better life was no more.

“And if Mama straightened herself out to set a good example for Anna, then I feel like I should, too.” She stood, faced him, and put her wrists out ready for cuffing. “If I’m never able to teach her anything else maybe I can show her that I loved her enough to tell the truth and to take responsibility for my actions. That’s something good parents teach their kids, isn’t it? Taking responsibility?” She dropped her hands abruptly. “And you are going to take care of her for me, aren’t you? Raise her with Lucy? She’ll have plenty of money after the farm sells and I have savings I won’t be using. Promise me, Grady.” He shook his head. “Grady! Please.”

“Hannah. Sit down. Please. You may be finished, but I’m not. I have a couple more questions.”

“Oh.” She sank back into the chair. “Sorry. I’ve never been arrested before and I want to get it over with. But maybe I shouldn’t be so eager, huh? Go ahead.”

Now that the story was out she was calm talking about it, relaxed with the fact that she’d killed her own father. “Did you ever think your mother might be wrong? That you could have claimed self-defense or temporary insanity from what he’d put you through the night before?”

“Not at first, no. I believed her completely. It was years before I even wondered if maybe . . . you know, after watching TV and reading newspapers. But I was scared. Once I even considered going to a lawyer and asking, you know, because they have attorney-client privilege . . . but aren’t they also obligated to report a crime if they know one’s been committed?” He nodded. “I guess they could have defended me then, but I’d also covered up and withheld the information for so long that I figured that even if I somehow got off for killing him I’d still go to jail for keeping quiet. Right?”

He shrugged. “Theoretically. But probably not.”

She thought for a moment. “I also thought I’d have to be sorry I did it, like show remorse for my crime? But I was never sorry. Killing him was the best thing I ever did for me and my family. The only regret I have is that it’s going to keep Anna and me apart.”

He folded his arms across his chest and stretched his legs out in front of him. “Something in your story doesn’t add up for me.”

“What?”

“You haven’t mentioned how many times you hit him.”

“How many–” He could tell she was rewinding the film in her head to come up with a plausible number. “Once? I think, just the once. The pan was heavy. Really heavy. And I was in bad shape. I could barely hold it off the floor when Mama took it from me. I don’t remember how I got from the barn to the house . . . or deciding to kill him but. . . .”

“Okay, answer me this: When you left the house, when you ran, could you still recognize your father’s face?”

“What?”

“Hannah, honey, I’m trying to avoid showing you the crime scene photos. Tell me if your father’s face was . . . intact when you left.”

She jerked a slow nod, her expression wary. In a soft voice, she muttered, “Show me.”

“You don’t want to see.”

“Please.”

Reluctant to leave her side, he went back to his chair and opened the bottom drawer of his desk to remove a thin file folder. Clutching it close to his chest, to keep as many of the memories of that night inside and unseen, he combed through the pictures until he found the least gruesome shot of Karl Benson’s corpse.

Glancing up at Hannah again he saw that she’d steeled herself for whatever was about to come but he still hesitated.

“You don’t need to do this. I believe that you only hit him once.”

“Show me.”

Reaching across the desk he laid out one 8 x 10 photo of a large body in a pool of blood on an old linoleum floor with a mash of meaty pulp where his head should have been. Hannah leaned forward, took half a glance and squeezed her eyes shut. He flipped the photo over and brought it back to his side of the desk.

“You stopped him, Hannah, but she killed him. Just like she always said.”

When she opened her eyes, they were brimming with tears and pain. “She . . . All this time . . . She let me think, all this time, that I killed him. She . . . she could have looked for me . . . she knew I wasn’t dead. She could have looked for me sooner and told me. Even if she didn’t want me back, she could have told me. She should have.” She was full out crying now and it was tearing him apart. He knew the recorder was still on but he hadn’t put a tape in it anyway. He couldn’t sit in his chair and pretend to be professional any longer. He scooped her into his arms, held her close, and let her cry. “Why couldn’t she love me, too?”

He didn’t know what to say—he didn’t understand it any better than she did.

Chapter Twenty-one

September 9, 2007

Dear Hannah,

If you are reading this I have gone to meet my Maker. Even as I write I am hoping and praying that I have already found the strength in my soul to contact you and the courage and humility in my heart to apologize for the way I have treated you.

Many times I have started this letter and many times I have failed. I have been a coward all my life, something you will never have to lower your pride to admit.