Page 65 of Black Roses

Bruce cradles his right hand gingerly as hatred clouds his eyes. “Told you about it? What’s to tell, you were there. You were one of them.”

“One of them?” I look up at him, my heart pounding painfully hard. “As in one of the sick bastards who raped her? What are you talking about? I just met her a few months ago.”

“Are you calling our daughter a liar?” He looks like he wants to hit me instead of the door.

“No, sir.” I stand up and steady myself on the wall. “I just think she’s confused because we had, well, we tried to have . . . ” I shake the uneasiness from my voice. I need them to believe me. “I know about her nightmares, about the faces she sees, maybe after our encounter, she thought I was one of them.”

“Or maybeyou’rethe one who’s confused,” he barks. “My daughter is no liar, and neither is the picture.”

“Picture?” I look between them, frustration and worry bleeding from my eyes. “What picture?”

“Wait here,” Jan says. Then she turns to Piper’s dad. “Don’t hit the boy, Bruce. You’ll go and break your other hand.”

Bruce nods, heeding her request. He stares me down, pinning me to the wall with his wrathful eyes.

After what seems an eternity, Jan returns, handing me a photo. It’s a picture of Piper—young and confidant. Her long honey-brown hair is all one color, falling far longer than it does today. Beautiful.

Then I’m sure my eyes betray me when I see myself in the background. “I don’t understand,” I tell them, hoping they can read the despair in my eyes. “I never met Piper until March of this year. I’d never seen her before. Where was this taken?”

Jan’s eyes betray her, revealing sympathy I’m not sure she wants me to see. She grabs my elbow, escorting me into their home. She gives her husband a look of warning as she guides me into the kitchen. I put the photo on the table and accept the water she offers me, eager to quench the intense thirst spawned by oppressive anxiety.

“What do you know about that night?” she asks.

“Only what she told me, Jan. Please, tell me what’s going on here.” The bitter agony welling inside me is crippling. “Where is she?”

Bruce picks up a chair, turning it around backwards before he puts it down next to me, offensively straddling it and leaning his arms on the top rail. “Let me tell you a story,” he says, his voice deep and rough, edged with a deadly calm. “Once upon a time there was a sixteen-year-old girl. A beautiful, talented, outgoing sixteen-year-old girl who never knew a stranger. She doted on her nephew, helping her sister raise him when she was young and alone. She was a great daughter, a loyal friend and a gifted actress.”

His eyes go dark and distant. “Then one night, a few weeks before junior year, she went to a party with some drama friends. They weren’t her usual crowd, but she was determined to fit in with everyone—jocks, geeks, bookworms; she didn’t want to be labeled or belong to only one group. There were football players at the party and some of her friends were trying to impress them. On a bet, she took some shots of alcohol with the football players.” He pauses to push the photo closer to me. “Shots you and your friends gave her. Shots that were full of drugs so you could have your way with her.”

His uninjured fist pounds the table next to the picture.

I stare at it. And like a movie playing in slow motion, a night from high school floods my memories and my world is pulled out from under me like a cheap fucking rug.

That laugh. Her maniacal, eerily familiar laugh that sent chills down my spine a few weeks ago. It was fromthatnight. I remember it now as clearly as the terror on Jan’s ashen face. I was seventeen and I was drunk. Not wasted drunk, but I had a good buzz going. Coach Braden would have kicked my ass if he knew I was drinking so close to the start of the season. By then, almost a year and a half after my parents died, he was more than my coach. He was my father figure. My guardian. My savior.

My friends had talked me into going to what was touted to be an epic party. The best summer blowout ever. It was at some rich kid’s house in the city. The place was gigantic and I remember wandering long hallways searching for an unoccupied bathroom. I passed by a slightly open door, a bedroom based on the noises coming from inside it. Clapping, cheering, and groans of pleasure were seeping through the crack in the door. Sex oozed from the dimly-lit room. I was seventeen. Of course I looked. There were several guys surrounding a bed, none of whom I knew more than to thank them for pouring me a beer from the keg. A girl was squirming around on the bed, arching her hips and making all kinds of sexual noises that had my young mind fantasizing for days.“Everything good in here?”I asked. All heads turned to me. A few guys looked annoyed as if I were going to join in and take a piece of their pleasure. The girl on the bed, whose face was obscured by some guy’s bare ass, crooked a finger at me, inviting me over with the gesture.“No thanks,”I said, as I shut the door and went to find a bathroom. That’s when I heard it. Her crazy libidinous laugh.

It was Piper. She was the girl on that bed.

For the second time today, my head falls between my knees to keep the bile lining my throat from further rising. “It’s all my fault,” I choke out. I try to tell Bruce and Jan what happened that night. I barely get through it without getting sick on their kitchen floor. “I could have saved her. I didn’t know. Oh, God, I didn’t know. I was right there. Right there . . . ”

When I go silent, finding no more words to defend my actions, Jan stands up and wraps comforting arms around me. “Mason, thank God,” she cries, her tears falling in time with my own. “I knew it couldn’t have been you. Piper was confused. She said she never saw your face in her nightmares. But that picture. The boy next to you—he was one of them. So she assumed. We assumed.”

In a very motherly fashion, she rubs my back in slow easy circles with the palm of her hand. “I’m sorry I ever thought—” she clears the frog from her throat, “—I mean, you’re like family, Mason.”

“I should have known better,” I scold myself, still trying to comprehend how close I was to her. I could have easily barged in and stopped what was going on.

“You were just a boy yourself,” Bruce says. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know she was being raped.” He looks pained. “And from the way she’s explained it to us, neither did she.”

My heart clenches in my chest once more. My throat burns and my eyes sting. I look up at them to see their anger has turned to nothing but sympathy. I’m sure my face is a wreck; red and swollen from rubbing my hands over it; wet from all the tears that have fallen. “I love her,” I tell them. “Please tell me where she is.”

“We don’t exactly know, son,” Bruce says. “I’m not even sure she knew where she was going when she left yesterday. And her phone got . . . left behind.”

I shake my head, unwilling to accept it. “I have to find her,” I beg. “Please, you must have some idea.”

They share a look. And goddamn if it’s not another look that twists my insides. “Mason, this may have been a big misunderstanding, but you have to know, she may still never be capable of having a relationship with a man who has a child.”

My questioning eyes flit between them. “What does that have to do with anything? Hailey’s no bother. She’s a wonderful little girl.”

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