Page 106 of Snow Creek

“Start,” I say to her. “Tell me everything.”

She inhales half the oxygen in the room. It’s a long pause. Not of the kind to create drama, but the kind to stoke some courage.

“Your mom said she stopped to help someone who was trying to load some things into the back of a truck. The things weren’t heavy, she told me later. Just awkward. Your mom is like that. Always helping people. When she wasn’t looking, he came from behind her and put something over her mouth. Chloroform, she thinks. It could have been something else…”

She let her words trail off. I give her a moment. Reliving whatever happened to Mom is painful.

For her.

For me.

Her words pummel me: “captive, abused, tortured.” She says that my mother was subjected to the vilest of humiliations. She says that only the sickest, most depraved mind could conceive of the things done to her. Now that she started, it all comes tumbling out, and my aunt seems to be in another, horrifying, world until her eyes focus back on mine, realizing who I am. How old I am.

I remember her staring at me with her pale, penetrating eyes. She wanted me to understand the next part, to embrace it.

“A weaker person would have folded and given up,” she says. “Courtney is the bravest girl who ever lived.”

How she could say that? Mom, brave? We’d been running all of our lives. Exactly how is hiding brave?

“How did she get away?” I ask.

“She said she was able to drug his coffee. She doesn’t even know what the pills she used were. She should have cut his throat while she had the chance. It was the biggest mistake of her life. She regretted it more than anyone could ever know. She said she was too weak to kill him, no matter what he’d done to her.”

“Why didn’t she just go to the police and have him arrested?”

“Look, I can see you don’t really understand. Not every criminal is caught. Not every victim is believed.”

“I know that, but I still don’t understand. It’s worth a try, right?”

“Your mother did file a report. And she had her body probed and scraped for evidence. She said it was nearly as humiliating as what he’d done to her. She even told me once that she felt the police and the doctors were almost an extension of her captor’s crimes. Their questions were like acid poured over her wounds. They didn’t think that she had been abused, raped, whatever. Our mother—your grandmother—didn’t believe her. Even I wondered about it.”

“But why didn’t anyone believe her?”

“Because she’d been captured once before.”

A pause.

“Or she said she was.”

Now I am confused. Completely.

“The year before she was raped,” she goes on, “your mom disappeared. She claimed she’d been kidnapped, well…” I can tell by the way she’s wringing her hands that this part is hard for her to disclose. The torture of my mother was, oddly, easier. “She’d run off to be with a boy. She had gone to the coast. She was afraid she would get in trouble, so she made up a story.”

My aunt catches the look on my face. She pounces. “Shewaskidnapped. She was brutalized by that monster who raped her. She wasn’t lying about any of that.”

Her explanation placates me only a little. “So, if she made a complaint to the police, why did he carry on stalking her? If it was all out in the open, he had to know that even if he wasn’t arrested that the police would be watching his every move.”

* * *

I go back to the kitchen table and fast forward through the last bit of the tape, the words that changed my life.

And made me do what I did.

Me: Aunt Ginger said the police didn’t believe her… past incident… might have been more to it…

Dr. A: …must have been painful… how could it be?

Me: …friends in the sheriff’s office… made evidence disappear…

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