“She was dead?” Olivia murmured.
“They all were. Her mother was on the stairs. Her head… He’d beaten her head in with a bat. Megan was in the middle of the living room floor.” He drew a shuddering breath. “He’d beaten her, too. She was lying on top of her brother, shielding him. There were clothes everywhere and an empty suitcase against the wall.”
“She’d been running away.”
“She tried,” he said hollowly. “He must have caught her. Flew into a rage. Killed them all, then shot himself.”
“What did the police do?”
“That day? They asked me what I knew. I said I didn’t know anything. I never told them she’d come to me the night before.”
There was hatred and contempt in his voice, all for himself. Her heart ached for him, even as she struggled for the right words to say. “And after that day?”
He shrugged listlessly. “Then it was old news. There was no mystery to solve, other than why the hell no one had stopped him before he killed three innocent people.”
“Did you ever tell anyone what happened?”
“No. I tried, a couple of times. I tried to tell my dad that summer, but I couldn’t stand to see how disgusted he’d be with me. Dad was already hurt by my brother Max who was playing pro ball by then. Max had a new set of friends and hadn’t been home in a while. He was living the high life and my folks were brokenhearted.”
He sighed. “I couldn’t even tell my priest. I went away to college that semester and failed miserably. I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing them, dead. I was losing my mind. I had to talk to someone, so I scraped my money together and bought a plane ticket to see my brother Max in LA. We’d always been so close and… I trusted Max not to hate me.”
Her heart cracked. “What did he say?”
“I never told him. When I got to his place there was a real party going on. I saw all the booze and women, and I guess I snapped. I was thinking about the party that night, how stupid I’d been. I threw all Max’s booze bottles out the window, told his guests to go home. Max thought I’d come to save him, make him go back home. I think he needed someone to set him straight and by accident, it was me. Max came home, reconciled with our dad, then that same night there was an accident. My dad died and Max was paralyzed. My mom was just devastated and Max couldn’t walk. He needed help with his physical therapy. He needed me.”
“Like Megan had needed you.”
“Yeah. So I threw myself into helping Max and some days there were blocks of hours I didn’t think about Megan. Everyone thought I was so noble. I was just trying to stay sane. I was just trying to make the pictures in my mind go away.”
“Like Lincoln. That’s what you understood. You pitied him.”
He drew a breath. “I keep thinking, ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’”
“It’s not the same at all,” she murmured. “But I can see how you drew the parallel. Somehow Lincoln knew you understood. Maybe you were his first real human connection in a long time.” Olivia laid her cheek against his arm. “That’s a helluva secret to have carried around for eighteen years.”
“Isn’t it, though?” he said wearily.
“But you didn’t kill Megan and her family. Her mother was the adult and she stayed with a dangerous man. Why didn’t Megan go to the police? Why did she come to you?”
“I guess in her mind, we were still friends. She probably still had a crush on me. I never shunned her and we’d sometimes talk in the hall, between classes. Like I said, I felt sorry for her. Looking back, I can see how isolated she’d become. How she walked around with her head down. I thought she was just sad because she wasn’t popular.”
“You were a teenager, David.”
“I know, but still.” He drew another breath and she realized there was more. “I went home after seeing her all… broken. I kept trying to remember what she’d said, wondering why she’d come to me. Then I remembered she’d rushed up to me between classes the day before the party, asked if I’d found the note she put in my literature book. I was busy so I said, ‘Sure.’ She asked if I’d do it. I had no idea what she was talking about and said, ‘Sure,’ without even stopping. I found the note the day she died.”
“What did it say?”
He pushed himself to his feet wearily to take his wallet from the pants he’d thrown over the chair and pulled out a worn, creased sheet of paper. Unfolding it with care, he silently handed it to her.
Olivia found it hard not to wince as she read the words of a girl who believed her old friend was still her best friend. “Her mother wouldn’t leave him and Megan didn’t know who else to trust,” she murmured. “She asked you to pick her up the next night.”
“That would have been the night of the party. She was taking her little brother and they were going to run. She just needed a ride to the bus station. I could have saved them if I had cracked the book to find her letter.”
She sighed. “Okay, you might have saved them. Then again, you might have shown up with your car and the stepdad might have shot you all. The truth is, there were resources for Megan and her mother. Her mother was the adult. She should have called the police. It was a tragedy, David, but you didn’t cause it.”
He refolded the letter, put it back in his wallet, then looked down at her, agony in his eyes. “I still see their faces.”
“Because you’ve got a soul. If you didn’t, it wouldn’t matter. You didn’t know how critical the situation was. If you had, you would have acted.”
He swallowed hard. “How do you know?”
“Because you didn’t ‘become’ the man you are now overnight. Those values were in you, or you wouldn’t have tortured yourself over this for eighteen years. David, you’ve helped so many. You turned a tragedy into a spirit of service. How long will you make that selfish boy pay?”
“I don’t know. But that’s why I worried about what I’d done that night with you.”
“You worried that you forced me? David, you didn’t force Megan, even then. When she said stop, you did. You weren’t civil about it, but you stopped. Didn’t you?”
He nodded. “Yes, I guess I did. But…”
“How many families did you help Dana save in her shelter?”
“Dozens, I suppose.”
“You support the work of the shelters all over town, so more families continue to be saved. Megan was a victim, but so many won’t be. That has to be enough,” she said, “because it never can be enough. There will always be wrongs in the world. We can’t right them all. We just have to do the best we can.”
He sat back down on the edge of the bed. “I know that.”
“But it’s still hard. It’s hard to see people in pain and not fix it. Thank you for telling me about Megan. I know it wasn’t easy.”
“Does it change anything?” he asked tightly.
“You mean about what I think of you? Yes and no. You’re a good person. That hasn’t changed. But about what happened between us?” She shrugged. “You said another woman’s name when you were with me, then you moved here and it was like you didn’t know I was alive. I wanted to hate you. Some part of me did.”
He didn’t look at her. “Do you still?”
“Hate you? No. I understand now what you were afraid you’d done. But I can’t ignore the fact that you loved Dana at one time. That she was still in your mind when you were with me. I think putting that out of my mind is going to take time.”
“And heart,” he murmured. “And trust.”
“Yes. You’re going to have to give me time to trust you. And I still don’t understand why you wasted two and half years of our lives. Why didn’t you just ask me?”
“I was afraid of what you’d say,” he confessed quietly. “I didn’t want to think I could be a monster. Again.”
Her heart squeezed. “You know, the night you had too much champagne you told me that you hated weddings because everyone else had someone and you were alone. I wondered how a man who looked like you could be lonely.”