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I tell him about the high school party. Keg, bonfire, music, the usual. I’d wandered off, bored, not drunk enough to think my way drunker friends were funny.
That’s when Denny abducted me. He was a few years older—a year out of high school. He sealed my mouth with his giant hand and dragged me into his trunk. To his hunting cabin. I woke up terrified, half naked, with Denny coming at me.
“Fuck,” Henry bites out. “I shoulda killed him in there.”
My fingers close over his arm. He believes me?
“Don’t worry, I won’t really kill him. Maybe. Then what?” He pulls me to him, more tightly.
“I always think it was my terror of him that made him ejaculate all over my shirt instead of getting to the final act. Like my terror turned him on.”
I feel him tense. I pause. “Keep going,” he says. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”
I tell him how Denny stormed off, and I thought for sure he was going to come back with an ax to chop me up.
“Left you there.”
“Yeah. And something in me kicked in, working at that knot. I freed myself even as his boots crunched the gravel outside. I grabbed my panties and my shoes and ran out the back, pounding feet over cutting branches. I barely felt it. I just had to get away.”
“In bare feet. Through the woods.”
“I hardly felt it until I fell into that well. It was deep, but I only sprained my right ankle and broke the toe of my left. It could’ve been worse, but the thing was filled with years of brush and leaves and dirt, and that cushioned my fall.”
I tell him about hiding myself under the leaves at the bottom of the well when Denny looked in with a flashlight. I hid even when the first wave of searchers came through. That was damning for me in the trial, that they looked in the well and saw nobody. Why hide? But I was scared. I thought it was Denny and his friends, come to get me.
When things got quiet, I really did try to climb out, but I couldn’t. Even without the pain of my injuries, I couldn’t. The sides were slimy and high, and there was nothing to hold on to. And it was so dark.
I tell him how I buried myself in the debris at the bottom and hid. Terrified.
“That’s why you stayed quiet.”
“Three days I was in there.” All the while I was becoming famous. Vonda O’Neil. Disappeared from a teen party in the woods, the stuff of fairy tales, but there were no bread crumbs. No bowls of porridge. No baby-bear beds.
I go on with my story. How I was in shock by the time they pulled me out—that’s what the nurse told me. Half out of my mind. I told my story to the cops. Denny tried to rape me but he didn’t, and I got away. After a quick visit to the hospital, I was released to my mom, with all my dirty clothes in a bag.
I was in such a state when they pulled me out, all I wanted was to be home, bundled up in bed with my things around me. I would’ve said anything to get warm and clean in my own bed.
“It was only later I remembered my shirt,” I tell him. “I opened up the bag and found the crusty stain and I realized he’d, you know, the shirt. Mom is the one who kept back the shirt. I was sixteen. I wasn’t thinking five moves ahead like she was.”
I pause, amazed he’s still with me, there on that dark stoop. The people of the Financial District file back and forth on the sidewalk a few yards in front of us.
They seem miles away.
“I thought we should bring it to the police, but she said we should keep it for the trial. She said we couldn’t trust the police, that we needed to keep the evidence. The Woodruffs tried to pay me off. A half a million dollars. Five hundred thousand.”
“That must’ve seemed like a lot of money to you. You passed up a lot of money.”
“I wanted to stand up for other girls. I had evidence…I felt so sure…”
I suck in a breath, determined to get through the story calmly.
“I was so sure I’d be able to prove it with that shirt, you know?” I continue. “When it came back as mayonnaise, I thought the police lab was lying. Like the Woodruffs paid off the lab, and I demanded an independent analysis. Mayo again. By that time, I was this monster. Months later, I found the bank statement from my mom’s account. Twenty thousand dollars deposited into it the day before we produced the shirt for testing.”
“The Woodruffs,” he says.
“It was a pretty common shirt from Savemart. I think they bought a duplicate and switched it. The mayo would’ve been the Woodruffs’ idea. My mother would never have thought of something so devious and damning. The mayo is what made me look like I deliberately tried to frame him. Like a teen without sophisticated knowledge of forensic techniques tried to frame this rich boy. Everybody hated me. The world was this wall of hate.”
“The betrayal you were talking about,” he says. “That was your mom selling the shirt.”
