She senses my sympathy and pounces on it as some kind of common ground that will work some magic and somehow save her where her brother had failed.

“Yes. It was terrible.”

“And no one knew.”

“Not until I told my brother.”

While I’m an accomplished liar, I sometimes hate the game. This is one of those times. She’s young and out of her league. What she’ll tell me next, I think, will be a lie.

“Your mom didn’t know.”

She shakes her head.

“Really,” I say.

“Yes. She had no idea.”

“What happened to her in the hut that night, when the two of you went inside to find Joshua killing your father?”

She stays quiet for a long time. I’m hopeful that what she’ll say next will correct the record.

No such luck.

“My mother ran to help my dad, and Joshua went crazy. He hit her with the hammer. She went down to the floor. Blood everywhere.”

“Ellie told me another story.”

“Ellie wasn’t there.”

“You’re right. But she knows things, doesn’t she?”

“She couldn’t know anything, Detective. I was gone before she got there.”

“I said I believe you were molested. Don’t screw things up by lying to me, Sarah.”

She looks out the window. Tears flow from both eyes. She’s being pulled under again.

This time, for real.

“Okay. I’ll tell you.”

* * *

Sarah Wheaton promised herself that she’d been violated by her father for the last time. She lay still in her bed as he passed by her room. She prayed that he wouldn’t return for a second visit that night. Sometimes he did. Other times, weeks would pass, and she’d tried to convince herself that what he’d been doing to her since she was four was over. She told herself that, at sixteen, whatever had attracted him to her as a little girl, had finally outgrown him.

Wishful thinking, she found out, takes the mind on a journey to false hope.

What Sarah told Joshua the year before, though, had made it sound as if it had been only one time, and it hadn’t been full-on intercourse, but merely fondling her while she slept. Her story was sketchy on purpose. She wanted Joshua to draw more out of her, help her. False hope. He said that he’d stick around until she was eighteen and then both of them would get out of there.

Nothing happened.

She finally summoned the courage to tell her mother.

The two were outside planting bare root roses up against the house. Her brother and father had gone to town to the feedstore.

“Mom,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”

Ida looked up from the bundle of ruby rugosas they were planting.

“It’s bad, Mom. Really bad.”

“What is it?”

Sarah started crying. It was as if the words were caught in her throat.