Pain exploded through my skull, then blackness enveloped me as if it was a soft, thick blanket.
There was no pain.
There was nothing. Not even Caleb.
1
Caleb
“You might as well admit it. I know you did it,” the Sheriff of Redburn, said in an almost kind tone.
We were in the interrogation room that was not much bigger than a broom closet. They had taken away my shoes and clothes as evidence ten hours ago, and I was barefoot and wearing some badly fitting clothes they had given me. I stared at the scarred surface of the wooden table and said nothing. I planned to say nothing at all.
“You’ve been a trouble-maker all your life, and I’ve always turned the other way, because of your background and because I thought you were a good kid underneath it all, but now you’ve gone and killed a man in cold-blood, and not just any man, a man of God.”
Calling that monster a man of God was an abomination, but I didn’t raise my head. I didn’t speak. I didn’t even ask for a lawyer. I was sticking to the script. I wouldn’t react. No matter what they said.
“Why, Caleb? What has he ever done to you? Why did you stab Father Jackson to death and burn down his house?”
Under the table my fists clenched and slowly unclenched. No reaction. No matter the provocation. They would not trick me.
Sheriff Winters suddenly slammed his palms on the table. So hard I felt the vibrations run through me. “You killed him because you wanted his niece, didn’t you?”
I looked up slowly and met his gaze scornfully. Was that the best he could do?
Instantly, his eyes flashed with triumph and I realized my mistake. I had reacted. Furious with myself, I looked away.
Like a terrier with a bone he changed his questioning tack. “She’s a pretty girl, that Willow,” he said slyly.
I said nothing. He would not trick me into responding again.
“I get why any boy would want her. If I was thirty years younger I would too. But if I was your age and I wanted a fine girl like that, I’d save up to buy her one of them big boxes of chocolates wrapped up with pink bows, turn up on her doorstep, and invite her to Berry Bear for an ice-cream sundae.”
He stopped suddenly and stared hard at me. I stared back expressionlessly. As if I would ever have taken Willow to Berry Bear. Willow hated crowds.
He continued. “I certainly wouldn’t have killed her only living relative, the man who was good enough to take her in when she lost her parents in a horrendous car crash, then burn his home and the house she lived in down to the ground. Do you know what’s going to happen to her now, Caleb? They are going to come and take her away. She will have to go and live with total strangers, who might not be very nice to her. Well, that is, after she leaves the hospital.”
I didn’t even try not to react. “Hospital?” I barked, a cold claw gripping my insides.
His eyes glittered with the first taste of victory. He knew he got me. “Yes, hospital. While she was running away from the fire you started, she fell and hit her head so badly, she was out cold for hours. My officers tried to question her when she came around, but she drew a blank about the fire … and everything that has happened to her. As a matter of fact, she remembers nothing of the last two years.”
He paused to let that sink in.
“Apparently, her last memory is from a couple of days before her parents died. She started crying and asking for her parents. She became hysterical when she was told they died two years ago.”
Even though I stared at him in disbelief, I could tell, this was no trick. He was telling the truth. Part of me was glad she wouldn’t have to tell a pack of lies to protect me, the other part of me felt horror that she would have to go through all the pain of losing her parents all over again. Only I knew how much she suffered when she first came to this town. She was so inconsolable she was mute. For a long time, nearly a year, we never exchanged a word. Just sat together in silence on the bridge, and watched the water rushing below us.
Until one day, she turned her pain-filled, big brown eyes in my direction and whispered, “I was in the car. I saw them dying. Papa went first. He tried to speak, but blood came out of his mouth. I was screaming. Mama held my hand and said, ‘don’t cry. I’ll be watching over you. Nothing bad will happen to you’. She lied.” That was the first day she cried. Horrible, racking sobs, that made her whole body shake. The water rushed underneath us as I had held her and told her, her mama had sent me to protect her.