Authors: Allison Leotta
“I marched her into the police station. God help me. The whole city’s stacked in favor of Owen Fowler, the police most of all. I should have known better. Hayley wouldn’t talk, so I told them her story. The police said they’d look into it. Couple days later, I get a call. They’re declining the case. No evidence that the coach did anything to her.
“Those kids used her like she was a toy to be played with and thrown away. And then the coach came—and just took his own turn. The police helped him cover it up.”
Kathy’s face was hard as stone. She tipped back the second martini.
“Did she get a rape kit done?” Anna asked.
Kathy shook her head. “The police said too much time had passed. They made it sound like it was all Hayley’s fault, for not reporting earlier. For drinking. For wearing a tight top. For not fighting the coach harder. She became depressed. She didn’t want to go to school. I let her stay home for a week. Every day, she was sobbing. Then that stopped, and she was quiet. I thought that was a sign that things were getting better.
“I went back to work the next Saturday. I didn’t hear from her that day. When I came home, it was quiet in the house. I went from room to room, calling her name, the dread growing with each step. I found her in the tub. The water was bright red. And my baby was lying in it.”
Kathy stared straight ahead dry-eyed. She wore the expression of a woman who has already cried so many tears, she was out.
“Oh God, Kathy. I’m so sorry.” Anna’s words felt ridiculously insignificant.
“Hayley thought of the coach like a father. The football players were pricks and what they did hurt. But it was the coach who tore her heart out,” Kathy said. “That was my fault. I was always working, and coming home exhausted. I wasn’t there for her, not enough. If I’d been there more, she wouldn’t have needed another parent.”
“What choice did you have?” Cooper said. “You were working to support her. You were raising her on your own. You did everything for her. You were a great mother.”
“No, I wasn’t. I failed. There’s no question about that. I failed and now she’s gone.” She looked at her watch. “I have to go. My break’s only fifteen minutes.”
“Kathy,” Anna said. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
What could she do? Take over a casserole?
“Here’s what you can do,” Kathy said, standing. “Get your sister off. That son of a bitch deserved worse than he got.”
When a waiter came by, Anna ordered another dirty martini—for herself. It tasted like olive-flavored fire. Anna coughed and took another sip.
The alcohol burned a trail down to her stomach, sending up a sort of smoke that obscured the terrible images in her head. She began to understand why so many women in Holly Grove drank so much.
“So this is your life as a prosecutor,” he said. “Listening to everyone’s saddest story. And then you come home to Michigan and, just for a break, you do the same thing. Take a minute off. You need it. Dance with me.”
Anna glanced down at his missing leg.
“I used to have two left feet,” he said, “but now that I’ve only got one, I’m a great dancer.”
She smiled and nodded. The band was playing a cover of “Tracks of My Tears.” He took her hand and led her to the dance floor. His arms slipped easily around her. It felt good to lean against him.
“Who listens to
your
sad story?” he asked.
“Jody,” she said.
Cooper really was a good dancer, holding her close enough that her body skimmed his, but gently enough that she didn’t feel trapped. His movement was smooth; the prosthetic leg didn’t matter. His arms were strong and steady. It was a relief to hold someone, sway together, and let the music wash over them. The wall of glass encircled the dance floor, providing a view of the lights flickering in the dark city. She leaned into him and let her nose almost graze his neck, inhaling the clean, woodsy scent of him. Anna became electrically aware of Cooper’s hand on the small of her back. She could feel the warmth radiating from his skin.
The song changed to “Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Anna shifted backward, getting ready to leave the dance floor. But Coo
per kept his arm around her back and moved into the slightly faster rhythm. She relaxed and fell into step with him again.
He lifted her hand and looked at the bandage on her finger. “What happened here?”
“I cut myself opening a package.”
He lifted her finger to his mouth and kissed it. A flush of heat spread through her hand, up her arm, and down to her belly. She inhaled and looked up at his face. His lips curved into a smile. She imagined how his mouth would feel on hers. She remembered how Jack’s felt.
“Coop,” she said. “Here’s my sad story. I was engaged. We called it off. I’m . . . not over it. I’m no good for anybody right now.”
“Then just dance with me.”
Among all the flash and dazzle of the casino, his blue eyes shone steady and true. She nodded, fit her chin into the crook of his shoulder, and danced with him.
37
W
hen you came home for Christmas break in 2004, you asked me why I was so quiet. I never could tell you. I never told anyone at school, either. I didn’t want to. I just wanted things to be normal.
Of course, they weren’t. I quit the track team, although
quit
is too active a verb for what I did. I just stopped showing up to practice. I withdrew from my friends too. Everyone talked about hooking up and parties. I couldn’t stand that stuff anymore. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. It was years before I allowed myself to be alone with a man again.
The football team won the Division 1 Championship that year. The whole town celebrated, it seemed, except me. They were still celebrating at Christmas break, and you wanted me to come to some parties with you. I wouldn’t—and so you stayed home with me, eating Phish Food and watching
Law & Order
marathons. You were a good sister, so stop being so worried that I didn’t tell you. There was nothing you could’ve done anyhow.
I know you’re hurt that I never told you before. Please, Annie, know that it wasn’t about you—it was about me. And I’m sorry. I should have told you. Sisters are each other’s witnesses. You’re the one person who’s known me my entire life. You’ve seen me at my best and at my worst. You’re the one person I know I’ll still be telling my secrets to when I’m ninety—if I have any secrets worth telling at that point.
But that winter, I just wanted to forget it.
I tried to smile as much as I could when you were home but, I’m sorry to tell you this, it was a relief when you finally went back to college. I could just relax into my depression.
Things were never better for Coach Fowler, though! That was his third state championship; he was a mini Bo Schembechler. You remember that ad he did for Bronner’s?
And his summer sports camp went big-time. Parents from Bloomfield Hills to Gross Pointe were lining up to get their little quarterbacks into his Holly Grove football camp. His rates went through the roof, and still he had a waiting list. He made a fortune.
Despite the long waiting list, he always kept the charity part of his sports camp, the piece that served “underprivileged” children. He got so many kudos for that. But you know why he did it, right? Not because he was some great humanitarian. No. Poor kids are easy prey. The more vulnerable the girl, the less likely she was to tell her parents, and the less likely the police were to believe her. Predators have a well-honed radar for vulnerability, don’t they? Coach Fowler’s radar must’ve been screeching when he first saw me: lonely, dreamy, scarred.
Over the next few years, he bought that big summer house on Lake Huron, a Cadillac Escalade, a Ford Bronco, and a Jag. Wendy got to use the Corvette more and more.
I started cutting classes and spending more time with the smokers by the south wall. My grades slipped, then fell. By the end of my sophomore year, I was close to failing out.
Coach Fowler changed my life forever. I had been on track to go to college—maybe not on scholarship like you, Annie, but to some other life outside of Holly Grove. But after he raped me, I lost all momentum. I never made it out of here. You thought I was content to stay with our friends and family, having a job I didn’t take home with me every night, like yours. You assumed I wanted a simpler life than you. But that wasn’t it. I just gave up on everything for a while.
The only thing that kept me from officially dropping out of school was seeing Kathy. Life without a high school degree was miserable. She was always losing her job or pleading with the landlord to give them more time to make rent. Three-year-old Hayley was the one bright spot in her life.
One day, Hayley decided she wanted a goldfish. Kathy said the last thing she needed was another mouth to feed, but Hayley begged
so adorably, we eventually headed to Meijer. We picked out a fish bowl, purple marbles, and a fish with a big orange tail that made Hayley say, “Ooh!”
At the registers, I got in line behind a woman who was pushing her own baby. Unlike Hayley, this baby was an infant, buckled into a car seat attached to the cart.
The mother turned to coo at her baby, and I saw her profile. It was Wendy. I recognized the car seat as the one she was scanning when we saw her here, six months before. I peered over Wendy’s shoulder and I saw her tiny pink baby, which was making those cute squeaky monkey sounds infants make. In my mind, I saw the Coach’s other “baby,” his blue Corvette. I saw the yellow pill the nurse gave me to prevent a baby from growing inside me. And I started to cry.
I lowered my head so no one could see my face. My tears splashed onto the gray linoleum floor. I tried to keep quiet, but I guess I didn’t.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. At first, I thought it was Kathy, till I heard the voice. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Wendy said.
Wendy Fowler was the last person in the world I expected to offer comfort. I looked up to see if she was mocking me. She was wearing mirrored sunglasses, in which I saw a double reflection of my own crumpled face. The corner of her mouth went back a millimeter, into something between a smile and a grimace. She pushed the glasses up to the top of her head. She had a nasty black eye: deep purple fading to greenish yellow at the edges.
“Don’t cry,” Wendy said, handing me a tissue from her purse. “You got the better deal, in the end.”
I stared at her, needing a moment to comprehend the meaning packed into that sentence. Kathy got it faster than I did. She looked from Wendy’s brand-new baby to her brand-new black eye. And Kathy, who lived in a trailer, said to Wendy, who lived in a pink château: “You poor thing.”
38
D
esiree Williams’s office in the Holly Grove County DA’s office was eerily similar to Anna’s in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. Scuffed white walls, putty-colored filing cabinets, government-blue carpet. Anna wondered if a single carpet manufacturer supplied all the prosecutors’ offices around America. Sitting in the guest chair, she again had
the disconcerting sense of living on the other side of the looking glass.
“How can you go forward with the case against my sister when you know this?” Anna asked, tapping the police reports involving Coach Fowler. “This man was a serial pedophile. He should’ve been locked up years ago.”
“First of all, these are unsupported allegations,” Desiree said. “They were sealed for a reason. You never should’ve seen them. Second, whether or not they’re true, your sister can’t just go and kill the man.”
“He was a monster.”
“He was a person. His death leaves a grieving widow and a fatherless little girl.”
“There were dozens of people who could have wanted him dead.”
“Maybe. But there was only one person who slept with him the night he died, fought with him, and had his bloody clothes in her house.”
“A jury will cheer for whoever killed him.” Anna could hardly believe these words were coming from her mouth.
“No, it won’t, because a jury will never hear about unsubstantiated allegations offered to dirty up the victim. Those cases are
sealed, and the judge ordered them to stay sealed. Just because someone dropped them on your doorstep doesn’t mean you can introduce them in court.”
This was true.
“Why was this man never prosecuted?” Anna leaned forward, looking into the prosecutor’s eyes. “I know these are hard cases. But six cases over fifteen years. Decline after decline after decline. What the hell was going on here?”
“Don’t raise your voice at me.” Desiree leaned forward at exactly the same angle. “How can you sit there and tell me I should have brought a statutory rape case with a recanting, uncooperative victim and no physical evidence—that means no evidence of any kind—but now I should
drop
a murder case with strong evidence because you find the victim unsavory? It’s a crime to kill someone, whether they’re a bad person or not.”
“
Why
was there no evidence in the rape cases? Were sex kits done? If you had his semen and their birth certificates, you’d have a case.”
Desiree looked down. “Sex kits were performed in some of the cases. They weren’t processed.”
“Weren’t processed?” Anna stared at her. “You mean, they didn’t test the swabs for whether there was semen? Or run a DNA profile? Why not?”
“Look, it’s an ongoing problem. In Detroit alone, there are over ten thousand untested rape kits going back twenty-five years. Their prosecutor’s office is as overworked and underpaid as we are. They’re trying to go through the backlog, but nobody’s got the spare $15 million it will take to do it. Detroit is talking about selling off the paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts to pay its creditors. We have our share of untested kits in Holly Grove. Don’t look at me like that.”
“This is insane,” Anna said.
“If you’re upset, write an editorial in the
Free Press
. I applaud your concern. But it doesn’t have a thing to do with your sister’s case.”
“Of course it does. Every one of his rape victims, their fathers, their brothers, are potential killers, who you didn’t investigate.” Anna handed Desiree a letter. “I’m requesting that you test the rape kits from those six sealed cases and turn over the results. I’m also requesting any information you have regarding these girls—especially their current whereabouts. I want to talk to them.”