Chapter 24

Emma glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. “Is it something I’m going to object to?” she asked carefully.

Lana shook her head. “I don’t think so, but it’s something ... delicate. I don’t know if he told you everything about what we did to him.”

“He didn’t go into a lot of detail about anything really. He mentioned that there was a party with a lot of sex, but that was because he’d only just found out and he was kind of out of his mind about it.”

“Yeah, he told me that he’d mentioned it to you. That’s kind of what I need help with, actually.”

“I think I’m going to object to this,” she warned her.

“Just hear me out?” she begged and Emma nodded. “There was a lot going on that weekend...” she trailed off, unable to find a way to say what she was thinking.

“Lana,” I said, getting her attention. “Do you want me to tell her everything that happened that weekend?” She nodded gratefully and I knew she was struggling. “Lana’s best friend and the Waterman boys organized this party. I don’t know if they did it to everyone, but they pumped Lana and Beck full of drugs, raped them and then passed them around to everyone else to be raped all weekend. Lana confessed that she didn’t remember most of that weekend clearly.”

Emma pulled the car over and stared at me in shock. “Seriously?!!?”

I nodded. “I only found out about it Monday. They barely remember the weekend that they asked the Waterman brothers to hospitalize me. They couldn’t legally have consented to the sex they had with any of those people. I didn’t ask any questions about specifics, but I assume that I’ll be horrified by the events if I find out.”

“I still have my list,” she said. “I locked it in the box like you told me so that Lilly can’t find it. I’ll bring it over later. That’s not why I’m bringing it up though.”

Emma put the car in Park and turned in her seat so the three of us could talk about it. “Then what’s up?”

“Some of the girls that were there are not doing well. I was hoping you’d let Matt help them.”

“Help them how?” I asked warily.

“Some of the girls there were virgins before they got to the party. They’ve never had anyone treat them nicely. They’ve never...”

“You want me to take those girls to bed and make love to them,” I said flatly, catching on. “There were twenty-four girls at that party. Beck, you, Marlene and twenty-one others. Were they all drugged like you were?”

She nodded. “Some of them were okay with that part, but a lot of them were really reluctant. There were more people at the party than the ones I was with though. I didn’t put them down if I wasn’t with them.”

I ran my hands through my hair. Two and two had just added up in my head. How could they afford to buy the drugs for a party that size? Prostitutes. They’d been paid for sharing the girls around.

“Most of the girls were way higher than the boys, weren’t they?” I asked softly. Emma looked at me and she knew. I could see it in her eyes.

“I guess,” Lana said and my heart broke all over again. I saw those names in a whole new light now. I wanted desperately to find everyone on that list and hurt them.

“How many girls are we talking about? Not how many you want help with, but how many were there?”

“Probably ten or twenty that weren’t on the list. Most of them are being treated pretty badly at school right now.”

“How many are you hoping I’ll help out?” I asked, very much afraid of the answer.

“I’m hoping you’ll at least talk to them all,” she said. “I can’t ask you to do more than that. It’ll be up to you and them to decide if you can help them.”

“I noticed a few of the cheerleaders were on your list. Were the rest of them there?” I asked and she looked down.

“Yes. Some of them are the worst-off.”

I opened the car door and leaned out, to throw up into the gutter. It was sickening. I pulled deep lungfuls of cold air into my lungs as I heaved my lunch onto the curb until I hurt. I spit the last of it out and pulled back into the car and tried to catch my breath. Emma looked like she was mad and Lana looked like she wanted to cry. I know I did. I liked those girls. They’d been nice to me since the lie had been exposed. They hadn’t done more than smile at me in the hall or say hello, but it was more than most of the other students.

“When the Waterman boys return to school, I’m personally going to make them suffer for the rest of their lives,” I declared. “Once that’s done, I’m going to find Marlene and she’ll wish she’d gotten off as easily as them.”

“Gonna kill her?” Emma asked angrily.

“Not right away,” I said. “I think I’ll need to do something outstanding to punish her adequately. When we’re done with her, we’ll decide what to do with what’s left over.”

“Lover,” Emma said and we looked into each others eyes. “When we find her, I want you to be done with medical school. I want you to keep her alive for a long time while we make her wish she was dead.” She said it coldly and she meant it. “What I said about Miranda, that one less like her was a good thing? This is the same thing.”

“I want in,” Lana said. “I’ll do anything you want, just please, let me at her?” she was crying now and Emma and I both reached for her hands. It was awkward, but we both reached back to hug her and the three of us shared a moment of bitter rage about the three masterminds behind this.

“Take us home,” I said to Emma. “We have a lot to talk about tonight.”

She nodded and got the car started and we were home fairly quickly. I helped Lana out of the car and steered her into the house. As soon as we were inside, I called next door and got Patty.

“Hi, Mamma,” I said. “I need you to do something for me. In a minute, I’m gonna ask you to give the phone to Beck. She’s coming over here. Lana and Emma are here already. What I need from you is to call me a couple of minutes before you send Lilly home. Can you do that?”

“Sure. What’s going on?” she asked, surprised and concerned.

“I’ve decided Marlene’s lived too long,” I said softly. “Tonight I’m going to start adding up everything that she’s done and start laying plans to fix the oversight her continued existence creates.”

“Don’t do this, Matt,” she said softly and I could hear her walking to another room and closing the door behind her. “Remember how much you suffered after Miranda.”

“There’s only one person going to suffer this time,” I promised her. “Marlene.”

“What could she possibly have done to deserve that much hate all of a sudden?” she asked and I wasn’t sure whether it was better to tell her or keep her out of it.

“Lana, your mother’s asking what happened. I think it’s time to tell her,” I said simply. She nodded and looked miserable.

“Alright, you’re in,” I said. “Get Beck and tell her to bring her box and Lana’s. I’ll see you both soon.”

Emma was already holding Lana and I went to them both. Both of us were enraged.

A few minutes later, Patty led a wide-eyed Beck into the house. They were each carrying one of the lock-boxes I’d purchased for the girls. Beck looked scared and paled further when she saw Lana in tears sandwiched between the two of us.

I got them seated and Patty wanted to know what had happened.

“I need to tell you about a party that the girls were invited to at Marlene’s,” I told her and Beck looked stricken. “But first, you need to know something else that Marlene did to your daughters. Marlene and the Waterman brothers got the girls into drugs. I don’t know what kind and I didn’t ask. As soon as I found out, I told them to get help and they’re doing that. The reason we’re having this conversation is because of that party.”

I paused to take a deep breath. Beck looked horrified, but she was about to look worse, feel worse when I laid out the rest of the cards for her to see. “Marlene and the Watermans put together a party on a weekend that her parents were out of town. They provided drugs and invited a rather large guest list. They got the girls high enough that they can’t remember the whole weekend clearly and that may be for the best because they then raped them and charged other people for the privilege of raping them for the next three days.”

I slid a bucket over to her. “I threw up when I put it all together,” I told her.

She looked as enraged as I felt and as sick as I’d been. “Oh my God!” she whispered and started to cry. I went to her and held her. I felt awful about delivering this news to her. I felt as bad for Beck and drew her into my arms too. She’d just been told she’d been used as a prostitute for days and she’d been too high to realize it. They both wept on my shoulders and Lana had long-since collapsed into Emma’s arms.

When we were all calmed down, I continued. “There were at least 40 girls at this party and they were all drugged, whether they took them voluntarily or were pressured into it, none of them signed up to be raped multiple times. Lana asked me to talk to them tonight. That’s when I realized how bad things had been and that the girls and probably the other ones had been violated to pay for the Watermans’ drugs. There’s no way those two pieces of shit had enough money lying around to pay for enough to get 40 girls high for three days. They’re just fucking lucky none of the girls overdosed.”

We talked it out for the next hour. I’d ordered pizzas and we talked while Lana, Emma and I ate since Patty and Beck had eaten next door. We all agreed that the events of that party had created enough damage that we were going to take matters into our own hands. The police would do little to nothing about it and they’d likely turn it back on the victims and mitigate the circumstances by pointing out all the victims were high.

This was a change in me. I was advocating murder. I wanted Marlene more than the Watermans and I told them that. “I have a plan for making sure they’re out of circulation for a long painful time. Marlene knew what they were and sold her best friend to them. I want her to scream for years while we beat her and nurse her back to health before we slit her throat and bleed her dry.”

“What’s your plan for those two,” Patty wanted to know.

“I intend to wait for them to come looking for me and then I’m going to cripple them. Maybe they’ll be paralyzed or maybe their bones will be so badly broken that they won’t be able to stand on their own ever again.”

“I don’t like that plan,” she said. “They sold my babies for money. They need to die too.”

“I don’t disagree,” I told her. “Crippling them will make them easier to track down later though.”

“Fair enough,” she said fiercely.

We were all in agreement. We were going to end those three. It would take years before we’d be able to put all our plans into practice and we knew it, but we’d do it, I had no doubt.

I sent Patty home to tell Dan and keep Lilly out of the way and we opened the boxes. I took out Beck’s lists and read them, seeing each line through the filter of considering drug involvement.

“Which drugs?” I asked as I read Beck’s proposal for forgiveness and then moved on to her diary of what she’d done to make things right.

“Coke,” Lana admitted. “some pills ... heroin.”

I winced. “Do either of you still have a supply available to you?” I asked as I moved on to Lana’s and read everything all the way through, my stomach twisting. Pizza? What a great idea! Sometimes I’m a fucking idiot.

“No,” Lana swore. “After you talked to me Monday, I flushed it all. You made it an order, so...”

“You felt like you had to,” I supplied the rest.

“I didn’t want to, but you ordered me to get clean. I won’t ever touch it again.”

“Me either,” Beck said quietly. “When Lana told me what you’d said, we got rid of it together. Afterwards we cried, but we did it.”

I nodded and closed Lana’s diary. I’d never forget the words on those pages. I gathered up everything and asked the three of them to come with me. We went out to the barbecue and took the grills off before I started it and fed each page into it while they watched. We burned it all. The books, the lists, their plans for forgiveness. When the last of the pages burned out and there was nothing but ash fluttering around the burners in the November breeze, I shut off the gas and replaced the grills.

“Why did you do that?” Lana asked. She’d watched me burn every page without complaint, but now she struggled to understand.

“Because you don’t need those lists any more,” I told them. Emma nodded in approval from behind them where they couldn’t see. “Between all of us, we now know the truth. We were ALL victims of this. I hadn’t realized how badly you’d been victimized and I’m deeply sorry for that. I consider those lists fulfilled. You two still have to go back for your final HIV screening in a few weeks, but everything else was negative, so I hope that is too. Then it’s done.”

“Not really,” Beck said. “It still doesn’t change what happened, just how you look at it.”

“It DOES change how I look at it. If you were high during most of those events, I can’t hold it against you. It wasn’t your choice to start getting high. Someone did that to you. The changes in your personality come with the territory.”

“You’re just forgetting about it?” Lana asked, stunned.

“Not forgetting,” I said gently. “I’m lifting blame for things that were done while you weren’t in control. I suspect they got you girls high early and often and kept you floating on weekends and on edge during the week.”

They nodded. “Yeah. By Friday, we were both pretty crazy,” Lana admitted.

I shrugged. “Then I have nothing to be angry at you for from those lists,” I said simply.

“What about the first thing?” Beck said miserably. “We weren’t high when we walked out on you. God, I wish we were.”

“Would you think I was wrong to believe you’ve suffered more than enough for that lapse in judgment?” I asked gently.

That got them both crying and I took them into my arms, looking at Emma over their shoulders. She nodded again and smiled at me. I held me hand out to her and she joined us, hugging the girls from behind. We hugged like that for a long time before we went back inside.

“So what does this mean?” Beck asked cautiously.

“For now, it means that you should go and get your homework and bring it back here. That should make Lilly’s head explode,” I said dryly. “Lana has hers and Emma has some stats homework that she needs a hand with. You might as well do it here.”

She looked like she’d been given a treasure and she was off like a shot. A moment later, Patty was on the phone. “What did you say to Becky?” she asked. “She threw open the door and bolted upstairs without a word to anyone.”

“I told her and Lana both that those lists were fulfilled. They’ve suffered more than enough for anything they might have done to me while they were in control of what they were doing and I didn’t blame them for the rest since they weren’t in control of their actions. She’s getting her homework and doing it over here.”

“I see,” she said. “Yes, she’s on her way out the door in a mad scramble again. So what does this mean overall?” she asked being careful with what she said in front of Lilly.

“It means that I understand what they’ve been through and not just what it’s put me through. I feel like they’ve been punished enough. I would never presume to tell you and Dan what to do about punishing the girls, but as a suggestion, I don’t think grounding them is going to serve any purpose compared to what they’ve been through.”

“I understand,” she said. “I think you’ll find yourself with a drive to school in the morning.”

“We have to go in a little earlier, now that you’ve reminded me of it. The cheerleading team quit tonight and we’re going into the office to speak to the principal about it.”

“Oh? What happened?”

“I’ll let Lana tell you when she gets home. Should I tell her about the morning or do you want to?”

“You’re the one that decided it, you tell her,” she chuckled and then lowered her voice. “Thank God this is over, Matt. We paid such a terrible price to get through it though.”

“We’re still getting through it, but we can see daylight through the trees now. The worst is behind us. Call me when Lilly’s about to come home and we’ll make sure we’re not talking about anything she shouldn’t know about.”