Komal cocked her head, her eyes thoughtful. “Be quiet, Mr. Winterman. I’d like a moment to collect my thoughts.” She leaned forward, took the lid off her candy dish again. “Take one this time.”
He did after a moment, put it in his mouth automatically, sat back on the edge of the small chair and wished the ache in his chest wasn’t adding to the throbbing pain in all other areas of his body.
“Isn’t it funny how candy can ease a child’s pain for at least a moment through distraction but it’s so difficult to find anything to do the same for adults?” Komal spoke at last, when he’d about sucked the candy down to half its size. “As far as I can tell, Marguerite’s father was a normal, decent man up until she was eight years old.” Tyler straightened, his attention on her. “There are photographs,” she continued.
“Photos that were removed from the house that I got to see. There’s one of him carrying her on his shoulder, the lights of a carnival behind them. Everything was fine then. It’s in their faces, their eyes. But trauma can change people in unexpected ways, uncover weaknesses in character and exploit them to a terrifying degree.
“When Marguerite was seven years old, her paternal grandmother shot and killed her husband, Marguerite’s grandfather. No one knows exactly why. There was no hint of infidelity or other disturbance in their relationship. We will never know, because she placed the gun in her mouth and blew out the back of her skull. Our best guess is that perhaps she had early dementia and there was some interaction in the drugs she was taking. The problem was Marguerite’s father found them. Or more specifically, his mother called him to come over. She said she was worried about some things she wished to discuss with him. When he got there she was sitting in her favorite chair, knitting. She set her knitting aside when he saw his father lying on the floor in blood.
Then she pointed a finger at her son and said, ‘You never should have been born. I’m sorry.’ She picked up the gun on the side table and killed herself in front of him.”
“Good Christ.”
“We got this from him in prison. We assume it’s true. As you are likely aware, it is difficult to predict, even with all our empirical data and theories, what extreme stress will do to a person; it can act on them in some unexpected ways. Marguerite’s father had a complete breakdown of his moral foundation when the tragedy occurred. From eight to fourteen, Marguerite was forced to join him on his psychotic journey, a world where everything to him was violence and pain, punishment. For you see, Marguerite looked very much like her grandmother.”
She lifted a binder. It looked as if it had been removed from storage, traces of dust still on the edges of the pages. The spine had been labeled “Peninski”. Several folders were inserted in the front pocket but she went to the album pages first.
“Here she is, posing with her grandmother.”
Tyler blinked, looked closer. “She’s… Her hair and eyes. They’re brown.” He also noticed the resemblance between Marguerite and her grandmother was striking, even to the stance of their bodies. There was a dark-haired boy in the photo. From the sizes of the two children, Tyler made a swift deduction.
“They were twins?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to him?”
“Let me take the story in its proper progression, because you need to understand about David. It will make more sense that way. Here’s that picture of Marguerite and her father where he’s carrying her on his shoulders.”
“The brown hair again.”
“And you’ll notice she tanned easily. She and her father were alike in that regard.”
“She dyed her hair white?”
She shook her head, turned the page. “Her class picture at thirteen.” Marguerite had not smiled in this photo, half her face obscured by the fall of brown hair, her eyes already cultivating that distant look he recognized.
“Now, here she is six months later just before the police brought her to me. This was taken in the police station a day or so after her mother and brother committed suicide.”
Tyler looked at a teenager sitting in a wheelchair. In a short brown smock dress that had obviously been picked out of a police lost-and-found, she also wore a brace for a collarbone fracture. There was a sling on the affected arm and a cast on her leg. The hand that now bore the sunburst scar had been carefully bandaged. Her hair was snow white, loose on her shoulders.
“Eyes?”
“Blue as the summer sky. Skin pale as a vampire’s. I wouldn’t have thought it was the same girl except you can see the bone structure of the face. As I said, extreme trauma changes people in ways we still don’t totally understand, physically as well as mentally.”
“Her father.” Tyler ran a knuckle across the face of that young girl for whom hope wasn’t even a distant dream. He knew what was coming, had already seen the marks on her, but it didn’t make the vicious ache in his gut any less jagged. “She made a joke once. About being from rural Kentucky, so the only sex she’d had was with family members.”
He’d read once about a comic book character who gave his soul in exchange for the ability to go out and annihilate those who preyed on the innocent. He knew why a man would be willing to do such a thing if it meant saving only one child, one soul from having this look in her eyes.
“We don’t know when he began raping her. We suspect it was age eight, after they’d moved to Tampa to be near his parents and the incident with her grandmother happened. We know the mother knew nothing for a very long time. She’d begun to drink, unable to reach her husband and heal his pain, though to all appearances she continued to care functionally for the children and for him.”
“Do you think she was just kidding herself about not knowing?” Komal shook her head. “It’s hard to know. Again it depends on the person, their coping mechanisms. It’s one of the most unthinkable things for a wife to contemplate, that her husband is sexually preying on her children, their children. And she was a nurse who worked night shifts.”
“Which left Marguerite defenseless to him, night after night.” Tyler felt a headache pushing at his temples, a nauseous ache in his gut. “Her brother…”
“Knew. Not just because their bedrooms were side by side, but because of the twin connection.”
“Was he molested?”
“No. Not by the father,” she said cryptically. “Apparently, his focus was all on the replica of his mother, where somewhere in his twisted, broken mind raping and violating her night after night was her punishment. Oedipus gone psychotic. Every time he sodomized Marie, he placed a burn along her spine, like a mark on a bedpost.”
“Jesus. Fucking, bloody monster.” Tyler was up again, unable to breathe. He walked to stand at the window. “This bastard is in prison? Still alive?” Not for long, if he could arrange the proper interaction with the right inmate. And arrange to have him tortured to death.
“Yes.”
“How…how do you sodomize an eight-year-old and not have it show up in a medical history?”
“Marguerite’s father was a doctor. I assume he took care of any treatments she needed. And the horrifying fact is a man who knows what he’s doing can sodomize a child without endangering her life, though there will be repeated trauma to the tissues.
Through the rapes, she lost the ability to have children. And we don’t know at what age the sodomy began. Perhaps later in adolescence, when she would have been dressing herself without her mother’s participation. He only had hospital privileges up until the time she was twelve. Apparently at that time his mental makeup had deteriorated to the point that he stopped practicing, though the official word was a sabbatical.”
“So when did it all come to a head? What happened when she was fourteen?”
“Marguerite’s mother found out.” Komal looked down at another picture. Tyler came back to see a photo of a woman with some of Marguerite’s features. It was a wedding picture, Marguerite’s parents before Marguerite was part of their lives. They were obviously in love, likely looking forward to a normal life of ups and downs as a married couple.
“It’s odd how fate chooses when to intervene. She had a flu bug, not an unusual thing for a person who drinks too much and has a depressed immune system, though apparently much of her drinking occurred at home, during the day. She went home in the evening, when he was expecting her not to be home until dawn. She walked in on them in Marguerite’s bedroom.”
Tyler sat down next to her. “What happened then?”
“Marguerite’s mother was a good woman who’d tried to honor her wedding vows by standing by her husband through his grief and deterioration, even when he repeatedly refused help, even when she despaired so much she sought solace from a bottle. Finding out he was sexually assaulting their daughter called off all bets. And it was the first time in the story that I developed any sympathy for her.” Komal’s lips thinned. “She told him to get out, called him probably any name she could think of.
When he wouldn’t leave she went into her room, pulling both the children with her.” Komal shook her head. “We were able to keep this out of the paper, out of respect for the family. And I was assured all we spoke of would be in confidence.”
“It will be.”
She inclined her head. “The house got very quiet. She assumed he’d left but she kept packing, knowing she couldn’t stay. She had to get her daughter, both of her children, out of there.
“I imagined it, many times,” Komal added. At her tone, Tyler looked up from the photo of Marguerite at the police station. In Komal’s face he saw the love for the young girl clearly stamped on her features. “The day things could have turned in the right direction for the three of them. David, relieved at last that his mother knew, that his sister would be saved. Marguerite, seeing her mother step forward, be strong as a woman should be to take care of her children, become a warrior if need be to fight and take them to safety. I saw so many cases over the years, cried over them. But this one…