Betts

“YOU SAW HIM, Ginge?” Laney whispers. She hasn’t said a word since the Max-entering-press-exiting-poem-reading began. A fact I realize only as she speaks. Her dark cheeks and dark eyes are sunken. Her tone leaves no doubt that she’s had the image of Trey dead in the chair in mind ever since Ginger said she saw him. That her initial rush to comfort Ginger has given way to something else.

“Lordy, why didn’t you tell us?” she asks.

Ginger sets the envelope back in the poetry book and closes it. Stands staring at her mother’s desktop. Not the desktop from the Captain’s Library where Faith sat talking with me that Saturday morning after the rape. But similar. A large expanse of wood inlaid with leather. It’s bare but for the tiny peacock book where that earlier desktop was covered with papers. Whoever cleared her kitchen has tidied her life here, too.

“Ginge, we all know you didn’t …” Laney says. “None of us … How could any of us have done something like that and not told the rest of us?”

I finger a drawer pull on the desk as if I might slide it open to find a chewed pencil. Chewed reading glasses, too. “If I’d killed Trey, I wouldn’t have told you,” I say. “It would make you guys accessories after the fact. It would be asking you to go to jail for me.”

Was that what I’d made Faith by seeking her help? Or what she’d chosen to become?

Laney’s frown leaves me searching for the words of that poem Ginger mentioned. Something about silence and restraint.

“You think you were that calculating when you were twenty-five, Betts?” Laney says. “And isn’t that what y’all did for me, anyway? Make yourselves accessories after the fact by agreeing to keep quiet for my sake?”

“We made that decision together,” Mia says. “And we weren’t protecting you from the legal consequences of anything you did, Lane.”

“She didn’t tell us about being pregnant,” Ginger says. “Betts didn’t.” She thinks I’m plenty calculating. That’s what she’s saying. Or she means to offend us all in one easy weekend. Or both.

Mia picks up the framed “Curse of the Naked Women.” To get Ginger’s attention. To piss her off. If this foursome cracks in two, Mia is on my side.

“The only person protected by us remaining quiet was Trey Humphrey,” she says.

Which isn’t exactly true. Or I’m not exactly sure it is.

“Trey, who was already dead,” Ginger says.

“We didn’t know that,” I say. “Not when we made that decision.” And he wasn’t dead when we decided to bury the rape. That decision was made in the sometime-after-midnight hours of Friday. Trey didn’t die until late Saturday night. Or in the dark early hours of Sunday.

“We thought we were protecting each other,” Mia says. “Not just your reputation, Laney. All of our reputations. That’s why we kept quiet about what happened. Not to protect Trey. Not even just to protect you. To protect ourselves.”

“From something none of us did!” Ginger insists. “We aren’t guilty of anything.”

Mia studies the poetry book in Ginger’s hand as if there might be some answer in the title. Transformations. “Any one of us might have slipped out and killed Trey and slipped back in while the rest of us slept,” she says. “It only takes a minute to shoot someone.”

“You don’t believe that, Mi,” Ginger says.

“That’s not the point, what we believe,” I say. “The point is that’s the way it plays in the press. There’s a … a rape, right?” Even when the word was there on the Scrabble board none of us said it aloud. Not in Laney’s presence. “And then just coincidentally the guy turns up dead the very next night. The facts start coming out. Maybe Laney was in the room all night. But you two were—”

“But I wasn’t,” Laney says quietly. “I put the book back.”

“The book?” Mia runs her fingers through her hair at her cowlick.

“The peacock book,” Laney says. She nods at the miniature book on Faith’s desktop. “I slipped it into the Captain’s Library during the party.”

“Oh, shit,” Ginger says.

“But the doctor said it was all an accident,” Laney says. “Trey was drunk and he was cleaning his gun.”

“The doctor who was the best man at my parents’ damn wedding,” Ginger says. “Who was Daddy’s best friend from before they started lower school. Everyone already thinks Trey committed suicide. Everyone already assumes Dr. Pilgrim lied. It’s no great leap to conclude he lied to hide a murder rather than a suicide.”

“Well, maybe a little bit of a leap?” I suggest.

“But you’re off the hook, Betts,” Laney says. “You and Mia both. Why would y’all have shot Trey Humphrey?” She fingers a small turquoise button at the fitted waist of her blouse. “If I admit what happened, that clears your name, clears your way to the Court.”

“But what about Gemmy, Lane?” Ginger asks quietly. “How does a mom tell a daughter she’s been … been raped?” She gulps the word. Giving voice to the same thing I’ve been struggling with.

“None of us can keep ourselves safe all the time, Ginge,” I say.

Laney leans against the window as if to steady herself. “I could have, though,” she says. “That’s the thing. I chose to go drinking with Trey Humphrey. I chose to go skinny-dipping. I chose to go to the lighthouse.”

I touch her hair. The curls she’s finally set free. “You thought Mia was there,” I say. “It’s where Beau and Mia said they were going. Really, no one can fault you, Lane.”

“But they will,” Ginger says. “They will fault Laney. And now what does she do? Let Gemmy learn about it from the headlines? Tell her over a damned long-distance phone?”