“I thought they said on the news that Tommy had the back of his head bashed in.” She tried to remember what she had seen on television. That’s what the reports had said. Only she knew that injury came second. She didn’t know if he was already dead by then or not.
“He did. But we don’t release all the critical information to the news. Like the hair we found.”
“Hair?” She hadn’t heard anything about hair, either.
“You’d think that after all these years that any evidence would be destroyed, and most of it was, but we were lucky. Tommy died with a few strands of long blond hair snagged on the ring he was wearing. Hair and bone are usually all that’s left after this length of time. It was as though he’d had a handful of a woman’s hair in his hand shortly before he died.”
“There are a lot of blondes in Cornwall.”
“That’s true, but Heath has already stated he saw Tommy on top of you, so that’s narrowing it down for me.”
“You said you didn’t believe his story.”
“I said it didn’t match the coroner’s report. And it doesn’t. So that made me think perhaps he was protecting you. That made a lot of the pieces click together in my mind. Why don’t you just save me the trouble and tell me the truth, Julianne. You don’t really want me to charge Heath with Tommy’s murder do you?”
“It wouldn’t be murder,” she argued. “It would be self-defense.”
“Not exactly. He wasn’t being threatened, just you. It might have been accidental, but his lawyers will need to prove it. There’s nothing that says he didn’t come up on Tommy in the woods and bludgeon him for no reason.”
Julianne swallowed the lump in her throat. She wouldn’t let Heath take the blame for this. She just couldn’t. He’d always told her it wouldn’t come to this, but if it did, he wouldn’t be charged because he was protecting her. The sadistic gleam in Sheriff Duke’s eyes made her think Heath might be wrong about that. Heath wouldn’t spend a single day in jail protecting her. This had all gone on far too long. Keeping him out of prison was far more important than protecting his ego.
“I’m the one that killed Tommy. He...” She fought for the words she’d only said aloud a few times in her therapist’s office. “He raped me,” she spat out.
Sheriff Duke’s eyes widened for a moment and he sat back into his chair. He didn’t speak, but he reached over to check his voice recorder to make sure it caught everything.
She took a moment trying to decide where to go from there. “I was doing my chores after school. Same as any other day. The next thing I knew, Tommy was there, watching me. I was startled at first, but I thought I would be okay. Until he pulled out a switchblade and started walking toward me. I ran, but he grabbed my ponytail and yanked me back. I fell onto the ground and he was on top of me in an instant.
“He was so large. Bigger than my brothers. I was only thirteen and smaller than other girls my age. There was no way to fight him off. He had the knife at my throat so I couldn’t scream. I kicked and fought at first, but he grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. He said if I didn’t keep still, he’d cut my throat and leave my body naked for my daddy to find me.”
Julianne’s hands started trembling. The metal of the handcuffs tapped against the tabletop, so she pulled her arms back to rest in her lap. Her eyes focused on the table instead of the man watching her.
“I knew in the pit of my stomach that I was dead. No matter what he said, he wasn’t going to let me run to my parents or the police. He would finish this and me before he was done. I tried to keep my focus and ignore the pain. It would’ve been so easy to tune everything out, but I knew that I couldn’t. I knew that eventually, he’d get distrac
ted and I would have my one and only chance to escape.
“I was able to slowly feel along the ground beside me. At first, there was nothing but pea gravel. I could’ve thrown that in his eyes, but it would have only made him angry. Then I found a rock. It was small but dense with a sharp edge I could feel with my fingertips. He still had the knife at my throat and if it wasn’t enough to knock him out, I knew it was all over, but I didn’t care. I had to do it. I brought the rock up and slammed it into the side of his head as hard as I could.”
Julianne had seen this image in her dreams a thousand times so it was easy to describe even after all this time. “His eyes rolled into his head and he collapsed onto me. I struggled as quickly as I could to push him up and off of me. When I was finally able to shove him off, his head flung back and struck a rock sticking up out of the ground. That’s when he started bleeding. I panicked. I kicked the knife away from him and started pulling my clothes back on. That’s when Heath found me.
“We kept waiting for Tommy to get up, but he didn’t. That’s when we realized that hitting his head on the rock must have killed him. There was so much blood on the ground. He told me to sit tight while he went for help. He came back with the other boys. The rest was a blur, but I heard him tell the others that he’d hit Tommy with the rock when he saw him attacking me. There were so many times that we should’ve stopped and gone to the house to call the police, but we were so scared. In the end, all they wanted to do was protect me. And they did. None of them deserve to get in trouble for that.”
“What about the note Tommy left? And all his things that were missing?”
“We did that,” she said, not mentioning one brother or another specifically. “We were running on adrenaline, reacting faster than we could think. We hid the body, destroyed all his stuff and tried to pretend like it never happened.”
“That didn’t exactly work out for you, did it?”
Julianne looked up at the sheriff. He didn’t seem even remotely moved by her story. He tasted blood and no matter what she said, she was certain he wasn’t going to just close the case based on her testimony. “It’s hard to pretend you haven’t been raped, Sheriff Duke.”
“And yet you waited all these years to come forward. It seems to me like you’re hiding something. I think—”
A loud rap on the one-way glass interrupted him. Duke’s jaw tightened and he closed the folder with his paperwork. “I’ll be back,” he said. He got up and left the room.
Julianne wasn’t certain what had happened, but she was relieved for the break. It took a lot out of her to tell that story. Whether or not he backed down and dismissed the charges as self-defense, she knew she would have to tell that story again. And again. A part of her was terrified, but another part of her felt liberated. This secret had been like a concrete block tied around her neck. She knew it had to feel the same way to the others.
Maybe, finally, they could all stop living with the dark cloud of Tommy’s death over their heads.
* * *