Page 67 of What Happened to Lucy Vale

Nine

Rachel

R achel had dreaded going to the police.

Early on in her career, she’d covered a sexual abuse scandal at a tony private school in a small town, and she knew all too well the way these stories played out—the way that small systems under threat united in defense, the victim-shaming, the victim-blaming.

Lucy had been drunk. At times she’d blacked out.

Her memory of the evening was spotty. She’d been assaulted by an ex-boyfriend who subsequently drove her home, seemingly with Lucy’s consent.

Even Lucy seemed confused, uncertain about what had happened.

On the morning after the party, Rachel had watched the clock crawl past eleven o’clock and then past noon.

Finally she’d taken pity on her daughter for what she’d assumed was a hangover.

She’d mounted the stairs to the attic with orange juice and a Tylenol and found Lucy curled in the fetal position, staring at the wall, shivering despite the space heater.

“Lucy?” Rachel took a seat on her daughter’s bed. “Lucy? Are you feeling okay?”

For a second Lucy just lay there, trembling as if her body were trying to physically shake loose her words. Finally she said in a voice that barely scraped above a whisper, “I think—I think something happened last night.”

Instantly Rachel felt pricks in her spine like a touch of electricity. “What do you mean, something happened?”

“I mean with Noah.” Lucy’s voice was barely audible. Rachel had to lean closer just to hear her. “I think ...”

“You think what? What happened with Noah?”

Lucy reluctantly turned to look at her. Her eyes brightened with tears. “I think ... I think he raped me.”

Raped. An unfathomable word, like a scalpel that cleaved the breath from Rachel’s body.

Rachel knew the police would never believe Lucy’s story.

Even Lucy’s friends didn’t believe her story.

In the days that followed the party, Rachel had taken Lucy’s phone away as Lucy’s notifications turned cruel, thickening like dark snow across her accounts.

Bailey, Savannah, and Mia weren’t speaking to her.

One day, as if by silent agreement, they all unfollowed her at once.

Lucy seized hold of the idea that the police would hear her truth, that the police would make things right.

That they had to. She was terrified that JJ Hammill had filmed the entire event, that this, too, would end up online, forever memorializing her horrific night.

Lucy swore that JJ Hammill had been holding up a phone at one point, that she’d heard him tell Noah that he needed a better angle.

Rachel didn’t know what to believe. If there was a video, at least it might corroborate Lucy’s story. It might help them hold Noah Landry, the county’s golden boy, to account.

But she doubted it. She doubted anyone would look in the first place.

Still, what could she do? How could she explain to her daughter, still sixteen and inflamed with ideals about right and wrong, that not all victims were victims in the same way?

That people would say that Lucy had compromised her right to be taken seriously, first by drinking too much, by dressing the way she had, then by going into a closed bedroom with Ryan Hawthorne, and finally by accepting a ride home from Noah?

She couldn’t. Lucy, already paranoid, barely functional, had latched on to the idea that she would prove that she was telling the truth.

That Noah might be punished and Lucy redeemed.

Rachel didn’t dare shatter that slender hope.

So she promised Lucy that they would hold all the boys responsible. Doubly so if they’d been the ones to circulate Lucy’s old pictures.

But deep down, Rachel didn’t actually believe it could happen.

Still, she took Lucy to the county sheriff’s department to make her report.

She hoped, at least, that they could speak to Sheriff Horne, still the only woman, other than a dispatcher, in the office.

Instead they were directed to the sergeant who’d shoved past Rachel over the summer to announce that a body had been discovered along the river.

Will Erickson was his name. In the intervening months, he seemed to have grown in both height and arrogance—but Rachel wondered whether this was simply a trick of perspective, the way he seemed to expand to fill the interview room while Lucy shrank further and further into her clothing.

Rachel sat beside her daughter, gripping her hands tightly in her lap, letting all the usual questions fall on her Lucy like blows from a fist.

How much did you have to drink that night?

Do you remember saying no to your boyfriend? Sorry, to your ex-boyfriend?

Were you already in the bed when Noah arrived?

Do you think maybe he might have had the wrong impression?

Was this your first time being sexually active with your boyfriend?

Sorry. Ex-boyfriend.

Rachel wanted to stop it somehow. She wanted to scream. But it was as if she were paralyzed, frozen inside that room with her daughter, watching every question chip away at some facet of her story, whittle it all down to nothing.

They would speak to Noah Landry and the other boys who’d been there, Sergeant Erickson told her. But it would likely come down to a classic case of he said, she said.

At least, Rachel thought, Erickson sounded apologetic.

After the interview, Rachel waited while Lucy lingered in the restroom, dousing her face and hands in ice-cold water—a calming trick her old therapist had encouraged for when Lucy was in danger of dissociating.

The interview had ended with Lucy in tears, practically hysterical, demanding to know why the police were treating her as if she’d done something wrong.

He raped me, Lucy had choked out. I don’t care what he says. I don’t care what you think. He raped me, and his friends stood there and watched.

Coming out of the interview room, Rachel and Lucy had passed by a whiteboard hung with grainy photographs of Nina and Lydia Faraday.

Rachel could hardly stand to look at them.

For a second, she’d imagined Lucy’s image hanging next to theirs—her daughter reduced to a handful of pixels, shrunk down forever inside the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

She’d imagined Lydia Faraday’s voice like the whisper of paper in the wind.

I told you so.

For the first time since moving to Indiana, she dreaded going back to that house.

Rachel began to have dreams that she was hurting Noah Landry.

In one she was elbow-deep in his entrails, which were made of metal ducts and insulation like the walls of a house.

In another she was bludgeoning him with a shovel in the middle of a construction site she recognized, even in the dream, as lifted from photos of the first expansion of the Aquatics Center.

She kept swinging and swinging, and Noah’s head kept getting smaller, shrinking to the size of a fly until he was a fly and he buzzed off, and she turned to see an animal carcass baking in the sun.

She called Lucy’s old therapist and left a message. Lucy started sleeping in Rachel’s bed again. She began complaining about phantom symptoms—stomach aches, vision problems, numbness in her hands and feet. She begged to stay home from school.

Rachel didn’t argue. She felt helpless, even ashamed. She was sure that this was somehow her fault. She hadn’t protected Lucy in Michigan; now again, here in Indiana, she had failed to keep her safe. Once might be an accident. But twice was a pattern. Twice was negligence.

She was haunted anew by what her mother had told her after discovering Rachel was pregnant. You can’t take care of a child. You can barely take care of yourself.

Maybe her mother had been right all along. Rachel was too selfish, too career-focused, and her life was too unstable. She’d never even been married.

She called Alan from the parking lot of the local Kroger, practically hyperventilating after spotting Noah Landry’s mom in the produce aisle.

Rachel had turned around and walked out—abandoning her cart already half-full of food she was hoping to tempt Lucy to eat—to keep from walking right up to the bitch and punching her.

Alan sounded worried. His girlfriend was in the car; Rachel heard her kids in the background. He pulled the phone from his ear to conference with her briefly. Then he was back, volunteering to come down to Indiana for a night or two.

“I just have to be back by Wednesday,” he said. “Katie has knee surgery.”

Katie . The way Alan said her name cracked Rachel’s heart all over again.

She imagined the girlfriend, whom she’d seen only once and from a distance, graciously giving Alan consent.

Permitting him a short pit stop back in his old life, a quick tour of the damage he’d left behind.

Lucy had once twirled her fingers in Alan’s beard and called him Daddy Al.

Rachel had inched her fingers over his back, examining his moles one by one for signs of melanoma.

And now he could slide in and out of her life like a parenthetical remark. For the first time in a long while, Rachel realized she was about to lose it. Not just cry but lose it—scream, curse at him, drive her car into a lamppost, something.

“Don’t worry about it,” she heard herself say. “We’re fine.”

“Are you sure? I’d really like to see Lucy—”

“I said we’re fine.” Rachel was shouting without intending to. “Lucy doesn’t want to see you. She hates you, remember?”

Immediately she regretted it. She couldn’t breathe. She was sweating in her car while outside a winter darkness fell on the afternoon like judgment.

There was a long sluice of silence.

“Call me anytime, Rachel,” Alan said. He sounded sad. She hung up.

Once upon a time, he’d called her Rach.