Like a little kid hanging out with girls who were growing up without me. And it just so happened that that following weekend one of my friends told me about a frat party that a group of college guys were having down by the lake a few miles outside of town. Her older brother was going. I’d been to the lake a hundred times, we all had. I saw this as an opportunity to show them all—most particularly my dad—that I was growing up, too. And so, pretending to be older than I was, I went to that party. Turns out there was only one other girl there and I don’t know how long she stayed.”
She cringed, even now, as she thought about the stupid young girl she’d been—so hell-bent on running her own life, she’d damaged it irrevocably.
Hers and many others.
“The paper said you’d been found there the next morning.”
“By my father.” Of all people. “All I can remember is having two bottles of some wine thing. And the next thing I know, my dad’s shaking me awake. I was already wrapped in his coat. And wearing little else.”
Ryan’s gaze fell momentarily. “The newspaper article didn’t mention that part.”
“There were empty beer bottles all over the ground.” Sara continued her recitation as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “And whiskey bottles, too.”
She’d do this once, and never again. For the child who’d been conceived that night.
“My father was determined to find the guy who’d taken advantage of me.”
“It was a lot more than that.” Ryan’s voice was stronger, coplike.
Arms around her waist, Sara shivered, in spite of the heat. “Maybe,” she allowed, and then nodded. “Probably, considering the fact that until that point I hadn’t even been kissed. Guys didn’t fool around with Sheriff Lindsay’s daughter.”
She’d been the quintessential virgin. She’d never even had her breasts touched through her clothes, and suddenly she’d been naked for all the world to see.
“There was a guy at the scene who I guess wasn’t as drunk as the rest. He apparently named the three guys and the hospital was able to confirm that all three of them had been…with…me.”
Problem was, she couldn’t remember if they’d simply had sex with her. Or raped her.
“I didn’t even have to testify,” she continued, lost in her thoughts with that young girl again, trying to make sense out of a world gone mad. “I couldn’t remember anything, but it didn’t matter to my father or the court. I was underage. It was rape. Statutory or otherwise.”
“The evidence was pretty clear that it’d been otherwise.”
She’d been badly bruised in places a girl should never be bruised.
“For all I knew, I got wild when I drank.”
“You’d never gotten drunk before?”
She shook her head. “And I’ve never been drunk since.”
“You don’t drink?”
“Socially.” One glass of wine, if a host was serving her. And only if the circumstances were completely controlled.
“According to what I read, none of the men convicted remembered much about what happened, either. Or at least, that was their defense.”
That’s what she’d been told. She hadn’t been present to hear any of the testimony.
“Based on the number of bottles found at the site and how sick we all were the next day, I’d guess we were all somewhat to blame.”
But she hadn’t lost her freedom for it. She hadn’t been sent to prison at eighteen, to be God-knew-what by the hardened and deranged prisoners who were spending their lives behind bars.
And if it had been only statutory rape, if she’d been a willing participant in the sexual antics that night, she was at least somewhat to blame for their incarceration. They’d been sent up on charges of having sex with a minor and she’d told them all she was twenty-one. Dressed as if she’d been twenty-one, with a bra that had pushed up her breasts and a low-cut blouse that showed more than it left to the imaginations of a bunch of horny college guys.
“Do you know if any of you were checked for drug use?” Ryan sounded all cop.
“Did the papers say we had been?”
“It wasn’t mentioned.”
“If we were, I wasn’t told about it. I sure didn’t see or hear anything about any drugs at the party. These guys were there to drink, but that’s all. Why do you ask?”
He shrugged. “PCP, for instance, is a dissociative street drug that’s been around since the fifties and it’s still used by about two and a half percent of high school seniors today. One of its side effects is loss of memory.”
He was well-trained. And seeing things that weren’t there because he knew too much?
“I’m sure if my father suspected drug use, we were tested,” she told her newfound son. “But passing out from an overdose of alcohol can also result in loss of memory, and I know for certain that there was an ample supply of that on hand.”
“So you think you passed out drunk, and then they had sex with you?”
Her body temperature rising from her feet to her ears, Sara concentrated on taking long, calming breaths. Distancing herself, as she’d been taught in her counseling sessions all those years ago.
“I try not to think about it at all,” she told her son honestly. “I woke up, spent the day vomiting and crying, and six weeks later I found out I was pregnant.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Afraid?”
He shrugged, looked down. “The papers, the trial transcript, said nothing about a pregnancy. I kind of hoped my conception was a separate incident.”
“I was sixteen.”
“I know. But you’d been to the hospital. They’d have taken precautions to prevent pregnancy.”
“There’s only so much they can do. It happens that way sometimes.”
“My folks said tests were never done to determine which of the three was my father.”
Since she had no memory of any of them, the three had kind of morphed into one in Sara’s mind.
“I’d say I was sorry, except that then I wouldn’t be here,” Ryan added.
“I’m definitely not sorry you’re here,” Sara told him, looking him straight in the eye. And she wasn’t. At all. She’d given life to a remarkable human being—given a son to a childless couple who’d clearly loved him well.
“You might be.”
That sounded ominous. “Why?”
“I haven’t told you what I’m doing here.”
He’d come out of a desire to finally meet her. Hadn’t he?
“So tell me.” Sara couldn’t imagine anything worse than what they’d just been through.
“First, I don’t think the story of that night ends with you having me and three young men going to prison.”
Of course it did. It was over, done.
“I think the whole rape thing was a cover-up.”
The idea was so ludicrous she couldn’t even consider it. Ryan was young. A rookie cop, overeager. Needing to put a different light on the night of his conception.
Because the facts as they were were unsatisfying—and ugly.
Because he felt the need to exonerate his birth mother? Or to pretend that he wasn’t the offspring