Page 101 of Trapper Road

Still, it’s difficult to believe she wouldn’t have confided in her best friends. Maybe she did and they kept her confidence. Though they had to have known an incident like that could have been relevant to the investigation.

Either there’s more to Juliette’s past than we realized, or Josiah is lying. Likely both. “Go on,” I tell him.

“I told her I would take her to the cops, but she refused. I said I’d take her home and help tell her parents. She said they’d kill her if they found out. She asked if she could use my shower and borrow a change of clothes, and I told her yes. She also asked to use my phone to call a friend to pick her up — I didn’t think anything of it. She showered, changed into an old gym shirt and shorts of mine, and a friend came by and picked her up. That was the last I saw her — she didn’t come to the next couple of youth group meetings.”

Something he says raises my suspicions. “Who picked her up?”

He frowns. “What do you mean?”

“You said a friend picked her up. I’m curious who. She was fourteen. NC has a graduated licensing system. The earliest age anyone can drive unsupervised at night is sixteen and a half. Which means whoever picked her up had to be older. I’m curious who it was.”

He seems caught off guard, like this is the first time he’s even considered the point. “I don’t know.”

“A girl comes to you after being assaulted, and you just let her get into a car with someone you didn’t know? You don’t think to walk her out? Talk to the driver? Get a name?”

He opens his mouth, then closes it. He stares down at his lap for a moment. “You want to know the truth?” he finally asks.

I raise an eyebrow. “You haven’t been telling the truth already?”

His eyes meet mine. “I was glad she was leaving. That’s why I didn’t ask who was picking her up or try to figure it out. I didn’t want to know. The moment she stepped into my apartment I was uncomfortable. I didn’t think it was appropriate for her to be there, and I started getting worried someone might see. I was afraid she was going to ask me to drive her home, and I knew I couldn’t say no if she did. But I also knew being out with her at night, with her looking the way she did and wearing my clothes — it could be trouble. So when she said she called a friend and that they were downstairs waiting, I didn’t ask any questions.”

His concern appears genuine. Given what I’ve seen of Josiah so far, he has a natural tendency toward suspicion and paranoia. Maybe it was misplaced when it comes to Juliette, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t feel real to him.

When I still don’t say anything, he seems to grow frustrated. “Look, haven’t you ever had a gut instinct about something? That’s what it was like with Juliette. Something just told me she was trouble and I decided to listen. It turns out that I was right to be worried.”

His comment about instincts hits home. “Why, what happened?”

He shifts again in his chair, suddenly hesitant. “Two weeks later Father Walker called me into his office. The chief of police was with him. They said that one of the teen parishioners had accused me of sexual assault and had proof. There were photos — taken with my phone and texted to Juliette.”

I’m taken aback by the turn his story has taken. Everything he’d described so far has been subtle, easily dismissed as a misunderstanding or the fruits of an overactive imagination. But this accusation is serious. He’s talking about being accused of a crime, and a very serious one at that.

I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but I still have to ask. “What kind of photos?”

“Very inappropriate ones of her in my shower.”

I nod. He doesn’t have to say more. I know J.B. has had a few cases that have involved child pornography, but I’m glad I’ve never been involved in any. I know enough though to understand that the penalties are incredibly steep, especially if it’s federal and there are production charges. If what Josiah was being accused of was true, he’d be facing decades in jail.

“Did they have the photos?” I ask.

He nods.

“Did you see them?”

He shifts, extremely uncomfortable. “Only one, but that was enough.”

“Enough for what?” I press.

I can see he doesn’t want to answer, but he does anyway. “Enough to see that they were of her, that they were inappropriate, and that they’d been taken in my bathroom.”

It’s a pretty damning admission.

“There’s more,” he says before I can respond.

I lift my eyebrows, waiting.

“The pictures were taken with my phone and texted to her along with some very lewd and suggestive messages.”

The whole thing just keeps getting worse. It’s hard not to let my personal feelings cloud my judgement. I just keep thinking of Lanny, of my sweet girl and what I would do if I found out something like that had happened to her. It takes a concerted effort to keep my disgust and anger from showing on my face. I’m not entirely sure I succeed. “Did you have an explanation?”

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