go up to the inn, I’ll buy you a drink and we can talk things over. I have a half hour before I need to be home.”
Paul laughed, an irritating little sound. “You’re willing to share thirty minutes of your remaining existence with me? That’s very generous. But I think we’ll just stay here and see how long this takes. Maybe only twenty.”
“Suit yourself.”
Paul set his shoes on the dock, squaring them next to each other, unnecessary precision it would seem. His socks were bunched up inside. He looked out over the water for a minute, then said, “How do you think the people of Red Paint will react when they know that the editor of their beloved Register got away with rape?”
Simon noted the wording—when they know, not if. Paul intended to expose him. “I didn’t get away with anything.”
Paul walked past Simon, brushing arms, a purposeful touch. Perhaps a provocation. He would not respond.
“This is exactly where you did it to her, isn’t it?”
“Why are you asking me? You seem to know everything.”
“I don’t know how you could rape her.”
Simon grabbed Paul’s arms. “Stop saying that! I didn’t do that.”
“That?”
There was no communicating with this man, no use trying to reason with him. The only thing to do was get away from him as quickly as possible. “Look,” Simon said, “did you bring me out here just to make a point, or do you intend to do something?”
“What I’ll do I’ll do,” Paul said. “You’ll know then. And so will I.”
“That sounds like a threat. There are laws against threatening people.”
“There are laws against a lot of things. That doesn’t stop them from happening, does it?”
Simon couldn’t disagree. “What do you want me to say, that I’m sorry what happened upset her? I am sorry. Okay?” He listened to his words, an apology on the fly, and knew it wouldn’t be enough.
“Upset her?” Paul said. “You think being raped upset her?”
Simon looked out over the water for a moment, as if they were having a casual conversation and he could be distracted. “Substitute whatever word you want—devastated, shattered her. Teenagers have sex all the time and it doesn’t ruin their lives.”
When he looked back Paul was still staring, his eyes fixed on him. “Jean didn’t have sex all the time. She was a virgin.”
“I knew that,” Simon said. “She told me when we were talking about doing it.”
“You talked to her about raping her?”
“We talked about having sex, Paulie. It was my first time, too.”
“But you got the chance to decide when to do it. She didn’t. She was a sixteen-year-old virgin.”
The number jumped out at Simon—sixteen? That couldn’t be right. “No, she was just a year behind me, so she had to be at least—”
“Just turned sixteen,” Paul said firmly. “She skipped a grade before she moved to Red Paint. She was a barely sixteen-year-old junior who thought it was wonderful to be asked out by a senior, the captain of the wrestling team, from one of the best families in town.”
“I thought she was seventeen.”
“So seventeen, you wouldn’t have raped her?”
“Shut the hell up!” Simon felt the anger coursing through his veins, massing for some action.
“There are laws against an eighteen-year-old having sex with a sixteen-year-old,” Paul said. “It’s called statutory rape. So that means it was one kind of rape or another. And you got away with both. That’s a neat trick.”
Rape. Statutory rape. One or the other. “It wasn’t any trick,” Simon said. “I told you, she never went to the police. She didn’t even tell her cousin anything had happened.”
“Jean kept quiet because you threatened her. She was scared.”
“That’s ridiculous. I didn’t threaten her.”
“You kept calling her.”
“She was my date for graduation. I liked her. I called to find out why she wouldn’t see me. When she told me I apologized—”
“You apologized for raping her?”
“Stop saying that—I didn’t rape her.”
“What do you call having sex with a person who doesn’t want it?”
Simon threw up his hands, unable to fathom what else to say. “What do you want from me, that I go to jail for something that happened twenty-five years ago? You think you can start this whole thing up again and testify for her in court?”
“There’s only one kind of justice I’m interested in—for you to tell the truth.”
Simon felt better—Paul wasn’t trying to get him arrested. All he wanted was the truth. That sounded simple enough. “I already told you what happened. We had sex, that’s all.”
“You were drunk, and you