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“You told no one?”
“He was my father, it was my life.” Chas lifted his hands, let them fall. “Who was I to tell?”
Neither had she told anyone, Eve thought. Neither had she had anyone to tell.
“And for quite a while, I believed him when he said it was just.” Chas’s eyes flickered. “And I certainly believed him when he told me there would be terrible pain and terrible punishment if I said anything. I was thirteen when he sodomized me for the first time. It was a ritual, he told me, when he bound my hands and I wept. A rite of passage. Sex was life. It was necessary to take it. He would take me on the journey as was his duty and his right.”
He picked up the tea pot, poured, set it neatly aside. “I don’t know if it was rape. I didn’t struggle. I didn’t beg him to stop. I simply cried without sound and submitted.”
“It was rape,” Peabody said, and her voice was very quiet.
“Well…” He found he couldn’t drink the tea he’d just poured but lifted the cup, held it. “I told no one. Even years later when they had him in a cage, I didn’t tell the police. I didn’t believe they would hold him. I simply didn’t believe they could. He was too strong, too powerful, and all the blood on his hands seemed to add to it. Oddly enough, it was the sex that pushed my mother to run, and take me. Not the violence, not the little boy with broken bones or even the deaths I think she knew he’d caused. It was the sight of him kneeling over me on his altar, with the black candles lit. He didn’t see her, but I did. I saw her face when she stepped into the room. She left me there, let him finish with me, and that night when he went out, we ran.”
“And still she didn’t go to the police.”
“No.” He looked at Eve. “I know you believe if she had, lives might have been saved. But fear is a very personal emotion. Survival was her only goal. When they arrested him, I went to the trial, every day. I was sure he would stop it somehow. Even when they said they would lock him away, I still didn’t believe. I erased his name, and I tried to slip into normality. I took a job that interested me, that I had some talent for. And I allowed myself to get close to no one. There was a rage in me. I would look at a face and hate it because it was happy. Or it was sad. I hated them all for their unshadowed existence. And like my father, I didn’t stay in one place very long. And when I found myself considering suicide again with great calm and great seriousness, I was frightened enough to seek help.”
He was able to smile again. “It was, though I didn’t realize it at the time, the beginning for me, taking that step, allowing myself to speak the unspeakable. I learned to accept my own innocence, and to forgive my mother. But the rage was still there, this hard, secret knot inside me. Then I met Isis.”
“Through your interest in the occult,” Eve prompted.
“Through my study of it, as part of my therapy.” He drank his tea now, and his lips were curved. “I was angry and rude. Religion of any kind was an abomination to me, and I detested what she stood for. She was so beautiful, so full of light. I hated her for that. She challenged me to come to a ceremony, to observe much as you did last night. I preferred to think of myself as a scientist. I would go, I thought, to prove there was nothing in her faith but old words repeated by fools. Just as there had been nothing in my father’s creed but an excuse to hurt and dominate.
“I stood back, separate, cynical, and secretly enraged. I hated them for their simplicity and their devotion. Hadn’t I seen that same captured look on the faces of those who’d gathered to hear my father speak? I wanted nothing to do with it, with them, but I was drawn back. Three times I went back and watched, and though I didn’t know it, I had begun to heal. And one night, on Alban Eilir, the Spring Equinox, Isis asked me into her home. When we were alone, she told me that she had recognized me. I panicked. I’d tried so hard to bury all of that, all of him. She said she hadn’t meant from this life, though I could see in her eyes that she knew. She knew who I was, what I’d come from. She told me I had a great capacity for healing, and I would discover it once I had healed myself. Then she seduced me.”
He gave a short laugh, and in it was great warmth. “Imagine my surprise when this beautiful woman led me to her bed. I went along like a puppy, half eager, half terrified. She was the first woman I’d had, and the only one I’ve been with. And on the night of the Spring Equinox, that hard, secret knot inside me began to dissolve.
“She loves me. And the miracle of that made me believe in other miracles. I became Wiccan, I embraced and was embraced by the craft. I learned to heal myself and others. The only person I’ve ever harmed in my life has been myself. But I understand better than Isis with all her insights, the lure of violence, of selfishness, of bowing to another master.”
She believed him, yet too much of his past mirrored her own for her to trust her instincts. “You’ve gone to a great deal of effort to hide your connection with your father.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Did Alice know?”
“Alice was innocence. She was youth. There were no David Baines Conroys in her life. Until Selina Cross.”
“And Cross is an intelligent and vindictive woman. If she’d discovered your secret, she might have used Alice, and others, to blackmail you. Would the members of your cult trust you if they knew your history?”
“Since that’s never been tested, I don’t have the answer. I’d prefer, certainly, to keep my privacy.”
“And on the night Alice was killed, you were here. Alone with Isis.”
“Yes, and we were here, alone, on the night Lobar was killed. You know I was on hand at the last murder, again with Isis. And yes.” He smiled slightly. “I have no doubt she would lie for me. But while she would live with a murderer’s son, she would never live with a murderer. It’s against everything she is.”
“She loves you.”
“Yes.”
“And you love her.”
“Yes.” He blinked, and horror filled his eyes. “You can’t believe she’d have a part in any of this, beyond the fact that she loved Alice, cared for her as a mother would a sick child. She’s incapable of hurting anyone.”
“Mr. Forte, everyone is capable.”
“You don’t think he’s involved,” Peabody said as they started down the outside stairs.
“There’s history of aberrant behavior in his family. He has an expert knowledge of chemicals, including hallucinogens and herbals. He has no alibi for any of the incidents. He was associated with Alice, closely enough that she may have stumbled across the secret he’s been hiding for years, and that exposed, could destroy his cult.”
