CHAPTER TWO

Bill’s hands shook as he sat in the consultation room.

The space was small, confining. The papered walls were brown, earth tones, something meant to be soothing. The furniture felt stiff and unforgiving. Some well-meaning soul had placed a vase full of artificial flowers on the coffee table, an attempt to cheer the uncheerable. Bill stared at them, wishing his eyes were lasers that could destroy.

Hawkins sat down across from him. He looked to be in his early fifties, about ten years older than Bill. His salt-and-pepper hair was messy, as if he’d just come inside out of a stiff wind. He wore a sport coat and no tie, his graying chest hair reaching up from the open-neck shirt like spiders’ legs.

Bill tried to keep his voice steady, to not shout at or berate the public servant before him. “Tell me what’s going on, Detective. Tell me when I can see Summer. I want to see her.”

The room felt too familiar. Hell, it might have been the same one he sat in when Julia died. He feared he would be getting horrible news from Detective Hawkins.

“Summer is alive, but she’s critically injured. She’s been stabilized, and they’re moving her to Intensive Care. You can see her in a moment, once they have her settled in up there.”

“What happened to her? How was she injured? Wait a minute—where the hell was she? She’s been gone for almost two days. Where? Tell me something.”

“They were found in Dunlap Park.” Hawkins spoke with a soothing Kentucky accent, his words rolling out like a gentle stream. Bill tried to reconcile the awful message with the sweet sound of the messenger. “Early this morning, we received an anonymous call at the station. Not a nine-one-one call—just the general line. The caller told the officer who answered that two girls could be found in Dunlap Park.”

“Dunlap Park?” Bill looked down and saw the flowers again. He lifted his head.

“Did Summer hang out there?” Hawkins asked.

“No,” Bill said before the question was even finished. “I told her to stay away from that park. You know what it’s like there.”

“I do.”

When Bill and Julia moved to town eight years earlier, brought there by Bill’s job, the park was a notorious gay cruising ground. A math teacher from Jakesville High, a meek man with a wife and two children, was arrested in a park restroom after soliciting a male undercover cop. Just a few years earlier, a Jakesville town councilman was caught there having sex with a county auditor, a woman who was not his wife.

“All I hear about these days are the drugs out there. Heroin even,” Bill said. “Right?”

“There have been some problems with that, yes. Also a homeless issue. People living in tents and other makeshift shelters. I’m not saying they are responsible for all of the crime, but it doesn’t help.”

“Some problems? No, I told Summer to never go there. Never.” Bill shifted forward in his uncomfortable chair, moving his body closer to the edge so that he almost slid onto the floor. He felt control slipping away as the angry part of him asserted itself, almost like another man who lived inside of him and jumped out in situations like the one in the hospital. “Who made this call? Do you know?”

“We don’t. It was a man, speaking with a deep voice, possibly disguised. The call was too short to trace, and we don’t record the calls that come in on that line. But the tip proved to be accurate, so we’re going to do what we can to find out who called.”

“You haven’t told me what happened to her. What are her injuries? Hold it—are we talking about... Did somebody...”

“She’s being checked for everything, including sexual assault. There’s no obvious sign of sexual trauma, but some of her clothes were torn when she was found. We’re lucky it’s above freezing today, or exposure could have been an issue. She might have been out there for a number of hours.”

Bill folded his hands and lowered his head. He wanted to close his eyes and make the whole situation go away. And he understood he was one of a long line of people to sit in a room like this and wish more than anything they could be somewhere else.

“The problem right now is that Summer has been severely beaten. She has extensive wounds to her head and torso. And a lot of swelling. They’re doing X-rays and CAT scans and all of that to see how bad it is inside. But her injuries are quite severe, and you need to brace yourself for the likelihood that she’ll need surgery and possibly extensive rehabilitation. Whoever did this wanted to hurt her, and they did. Very badly.”

“I just want to see her. I don’t want her lying somewhere alone while she goes through this. Can you do that for me, please?”

Hawkins said, “Of course. I just wanted you to understand where we stood before you saw her.”

“She’s my daughter,” Bill said. “I can handle anything that has to do with her.”

He hoped he could. He had to do it alone.

The two men stood up. Hawkins was larger than Bill, barrel-chested, but with a gentle manner that seemed in contrast with the probing intensity of his blue-gray eyes. Bill wondered if the police assigned Hawkins to Summer’s case for a reason, if they believed that the detective’s soothing tones and intimidating size would somehow placate, or, short of that, corral Bill and keep him calm.

Before Hawkins opened the door, Bill grabbed the detective’s arm. It felt like taking hold of a tree trunk.

“Wait a minute,” Bill said. “Them. You said they were found. You mean Summer and Haley. I didn’t think to ask, but how is Haley doing?”

Hawkins hesitated for the briefest of seconds. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Bill, but Haley was deceased at the scene. She’d been beaten more severely than Summer. Her injuries were too extensive for anyone to survive.”

The room tilted. Bill reached out and braced himself against the wall. Hawkins placed his rocklike hand on Bill’s shoulder, steadying him.

“Are you going to pass out?” he asked. “Do you want some water?”

Bill stood still for a moment. Images of the ever-inseparable Haley and Summer flashed across his mind. The two skinny, blond girls running through a sprinkler on a summer day when they were ten. The two girls giggling over a silly movie when they were twelve. The two girls leaving his house together on Saturday afternoon...

“Her mother? She lives with her mother,” Bill said.

“She’s been informed.” Hawkins’s voice conveyed the pain of that conversation, the necessary but awful duty he probably performed himself. “Would you like to sit down?”

He felt sick. Physically sick. His body seemed to have turned to ice.

But he shook his head. He needed to go on.

His daughter needed him. Desperately.

But before he left the room, he needed to do one thing. He took two steps to the coffee table, took hold of the offending vase, and hurled it against the wall—screaming as he did so—where it shattered into hundreds of fragments.

Bill’s breathing was fast, his heart thumping.

He really didn’t feel any better. He turned to Hawkins, who wore an impassive look on his face.

“I’m okay,” Bill said. “I want to see Summer. Now.” +W0U3EOnpCmLxD1s14hvrsc2WELtpemAqa8UQF8ttCe0idX54ksBrMbJLk0WVpz5