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“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, Margue
rite’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.
