It only takes me a few hours to do what I have to do. By noon I am standing in the clearing behind Warden House, shivering in a light rain. I’d heard on the radio driving back from the police station that there’s a nor’easter heading for the coast this afternoon but I didn’t want to go home for a raincoat.
The ominous gray chill in the air feels suitable for the business at hand. If I had my students here I would point out that this is an excellent example of the pathetic fallacy—the literary device in which nature mirrors the internal emotional state of the narrator. I have set a storm in motion this morning; now I’m waiting for it to break over all our heads.
“I got your message.”
I turn to find Luther at the edge of the clearing. He’s dressed as he was last night in a white button-down shirt and jeans, no more prepared for the coming storm than I am. “I figured you’d be checking your Twitter notifications pretty often,” I say. Of all the strange things I’ve had to do this morning, tweeting at IceVirgin33 was perhaps the oddest. “It must be gratifying to watch your enemies fall.”
Luther can’t resist a rueful smile. “It is gratifying to see the truth come out. All these years Jean Shire has preened as this champion of the underprivileged and now it comes out that she was protecting a sexual predator.”
“The same sexual predator who protected you,” I say.
“Are we here to tell fairy tales?” he asks, spreading his arms wide to indicate the circle. “Let me guess, your story features a beastly ogre who imprisons an innocent princess. And yet as I recall”—he comes closer to me, entering the circle of stones where he would gather his class and tell his stories—“you weren’t all that reluctant to go with me.”
“I was seventeen,” I say.
“Yeah, yeah, so that makes me a ‘child molester.’” He crooks his fingers in air quotes. “But you were no child, Tess.”
“And what about Lila?” I say. “Was she grown-up enough for you?”
A muscle on the side of his jaw twitches. “I didn’t touch that girl. But no, actually, she wasn’t as grown-up as she thought she was. She was so sure she wanted to expose Woody Hull for the lecherous child-killer he was, but then she got scared.”
“Are you sure that’s why she was scared? Maybe you frightened her. Meeting a man here . . . alone . . . at night . . .”
Luther tilts his head and smiles. “Are you recording this, Tess?”
So he did know that I was recording him last time. No wonder he was so careful about what he said. I take out my phone and show him the screen. “It’s just us,” I say. “You can tell me everything. I know how you like a good story.”
He smiles, his face relaxed. This is why I brought him here. I knew it would be easier to get him to tell his story in this campfire circle. “Okay, so yeah, I did meet Lila here that night. I saw her and Rudy go out toward the Point after the play . . . don’t look at me like that. I was only waiting for an opportunity to talk to Rudy if she told him about me. I hung back here, though, and then I saw her coming back from the Point alone. She was upset—I think she’d had a fight with Rudy—and her hand was bleeding. I gave her a handkerchief and she said there was something she wanted to talk to me about. She asked me if I thought it was always better to expose the truth, even if it might hurt innocent people.”
It’s such a Lila thing to ask that I feel a physical pang. I can almost see her standing here, posing her earnest question.
“I assumed she was having second thoughts about going public with the paper she’d written, that she wasn’t sure she wanted to expose Woody Hull at the expense of Jean Shire. I told her that if a person hid another person’s crime, they weren’t so innocent anymore.”
“That’s a good answer,” I say. “And how did she respond?”
“She didn’t get a chance. We heard someone on the coastal path”—he nods toward the north side of the peninsula—“and she got spooked. She thought it was Rudy and she didn’t want him to see us together. We walked that way.” He points toward the south coastal