E is for Evidence

"That's when Olive was sent away to boarding school," I said.

Helen nodded.

"Who else knew about the incident?"

"No one. Just the five of us. Lance and Olive, Bass and Woody and me. Ebony was off in Europe. Ash knew some-thing dreadful had happened, but she never knew what it was."

There was a silence. Helen smoothed the frayed fabric on the arm of the rocker where she'd picked strands loose. She glanced at me. Her expression seemed tinged with guilt, like an old dog that's piddled somewhere you haven't discovered yet. There was more, something she didn't want to own up to.

"What's the rest?" I asked. "What else?"

She shook her head, her cheeks turning pink in patches.

"Just tell me, Helen. It can't matter now."

"Yes, it does," she whispered. She'd begun to weep. I could see her clamp down, forcing her feelings back into the box she'd kept them in all these years.

I waited so long that I didn't think she meant to finish. Her hands began to shake in a separate dance of their own, a jitterbug of anxiety.

Finally she spoke. "Lance was lying about the two of them. It had gone on for years. Woody never knew, but I suspected as much."

"You suspected Lance was abusing her and you never interfered?"

"What could I say? I had no proof. I kept them away from each other whenever I could. He'd go off to summer camp. She'd stay with friends of ours in Maine. I never left them alone in the house. I hoped it was a phase, something that would disappear of its own accord. I thought if I called attention to it… I don't know what I thought. It was so unspeakable. A mother doesn't sit a boy down and discuss such things. I didn't want to pry, and Olive denied the slightest suggestion that anything was amiss. If she'd come to me, I'd have stepped in. Of course I would, but she never said a word. She might have been the one who initiated the contact for all I knew."

"How long did this go on?" I was having a hard time keeping the judgment out of my voice, afraid if she sensed the full range of my outrage, she'd clam up.

"Lance was obsessed with her almost from infancy. He was five when she was born and I was so relieved, you see, that he didn't resent her. It was just him and Ebony until Olive came along. He'd been the baby so I was de-lighted he seemed taken with her. It must have started as childish curiosity and advanced to something else. It did end once they were discovered. They could hardly toler-ate each other's company these past few years, but by then the damage had been done. She had terrible problems."

"Sexual problems, I'd assume."

Helen nodded, cheeks coloring. "She also suffered deep depressions that would go on for months. All she did was run, run, run. Anything to escape the feelings. Play and spend. Spend and play. That's how she lived."

Rapidly I sorted through all the things I'd been told, processing the trivia I'd picked up in passing. "Olive said she and Bass had a falling-out when he was home for Thanksgiving. What was that about?"

"Something silly. I don't even remember now what the subject matter was. One of those ridiculous spats peo-ple get into when they've drunk too much. Bass was furi-ous and wanted to get back at her, but it wasn't about anything. Petty temper, that's all."

I watched her carefully, making my mind a blank, trying to let the sense of this filter in. It had started with Lance, with Wood/Warren, talk of a takeover, evidence of insurance fraud. Someone had set Lance up and I'd been caught in the same trap. When Olive died, I'd assumed it was business-related, an accident. It was meant to look like that, but it wasn't. I felt the answer leap at me, so obvious once I knew what had gone on. "Oh shit," I said. "Bass told Terry, didn't he?"

"I think so," she said, almost inaudibly. "I don't think Terry's like the rest of us. He's not a well man. He doesn't seem right to me. Even when they met, he seemed 'off' somehow, but he was crazy about Olive…"

" 'Obsessed' is the word I've heard applied," I broke in. "That he worshiped the ground she walked on."

"Oh, he adored her, there's no doubt of that. It was just what she needed and I thought it would all work out. She had such a low opinion of herself all her life. She couldn't seem to sustain a relationship until Terry came along. I thought she deserved a little happiness."

"You mean because she was 'damaged goods,' don't you? Tainted by what Lance had done."

"Well, she was tainted. Who knows what bestial appe-tites Lance had wakened in her?"