Cole in My Stocking (16 page)

“It wasn’t true,” I said. I was so tired of people believing lies about me. It was bad enough when it was my friends and their parents, but my own father? Tears sprang to my eyes. I refused to let them fall.

“If it’s any consolation, your dad knew the truth before he died.”

I took heart at that and swallowed the lump of hurt. Nodding, sniffling, I let Cole know I was ready for more.

“Atta girl,” he said, making me feel ridiculously proud. He left his hand on my arm while he continued. “Tooley’s accusation hit a sore spot for me. Probably because I actually did think about you that way, even if I never took it any further. The fact Gripper believed it hurt. It hurt bad. I lost a good job and a good friend all because of one shitty night. And to top it all off, I was still worried about you. But I was embarrassed too. Wasn’t about to show my face anywhere near here. Not with the whole town spreading rumors about us.”

I groaned. “The whole town?” Fabulous. My reputation was even worse than I thought. On the heels of that, I realized that while my reputation seemed to have gone from bad to worse, Cole’s reputation had been good until that night. “I’m really sorry,” I told him. “That must have been awful.”

He shrugged. “You moved away, and I moved on. I thought about trying to contact you, but didn’t want to go against your dad’s wishes or piss him off any more than he already was. Convinced myself you were fine, it was just my feelings for you making me see demons that weren’t there. Eventually, I found a job with the state patrol and started seeing a fellow officer, even though that’s not exactly Kosher. You met her. Stacey. She brought that WD-40 the other night.”

I flinched at the thought of Cole dating another woman. Hopefully, he didn’t notice. “I remember her,” I choked out.

“It didn’t last long,” he said with a gentle smile that told me he’d seen the flinch. “The whole time we were together, I was trying to convince myself I was normal, I wasn’t a perv who liked young girls. She could tell I wasn’t as into her as she wanted me to be, and she called me out on it. One thing you’ve got to know about Stace, she says whatever’s on her mind. Eventually, she dragged it out of me that I had feelings for someone else, someone I couldn’t have. I didn’t tell her it was you, but she figured it out.” He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“See, early on with me and Stace, things were good. I talked to her a lot. Since I was still pissed over Tooley firing me, and you were a part of that, you came up in conversation. I was still questioning what more I could have done, whether I let you down in the end to protect myself from more embarrassment. I never mentioned being attracted to you, but I guess I brought you up enough that Stace put two and two together.

“She wasn’t mad. Wasn’t even upset I had a thing for an eighteen-year-old. In fact, she’s the one who finally got me to believe I had nothing to be ashamed of. ‘Feelings are indicators, not dictators,’ she told me. Just because you feel something doesn’t mean you have to act on it. I never acted on what I felt for you, and even if I had, Stace reminded me you were legal. If you and I started anything, maybe it would have been weird because I was friends with your dad, but it wouldn’t have been illegal.

“Point is, Stace didn’t think any less of me, and that helped me get past my embarrassment. She still dumped my ass, though,” he said with a huff. “She wasn’t going to be second place to a fantasy girl.”

My neck and chest got hot at the thought of Cole fantasizing about me.

“But we stayed friends,” he went on. “We actually got along better after we broke up. Started working together more too. Stace is in the state patrol’s major crime unit. After I told her how Tooley treated you that night, she opened an investigation. She interviewed other kids Tooley had brought in and terrorized like he did you. Even got her hands on some video footage from the station’s files, proving he went way over the line a few times. That footage and those interviews eventually led to Tooley getting the boot. But that’s not all they led to.”

He leveled a hard gaze on me. “In interviewing kids from your school, she found out you left a party that night with three men no one at the party knew. Knowing that, and seeing footage of the main room from that night, she started to worry about the same things I’d been worried about. She opened a new investigation. One with you at the center.”

My heart plummeted into my stomach. “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

“I know, honey. But you need to. Can you hang in there with me?”

I thought about it a good minute before I nodded.

Cole sighed. He scooted his chair around to the end of the eating nook so he could be closer to me. Reaching for my hand, he linked our fingers. “Tell me to back off if you don’t want this, but know I’m not making moves on you here. I care about you, yeah, but I’m just offering support right now. You get that, right?”

I looked at his big pale hand holding mine, and I felt warm and soothed. Hearing a guy say what was going on in his head when he touched me was a novel experience. I liked not having to guess at his motives.

“Okay.” I’d take his support. I’d take more if he offered it, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t. Not tonight. Tonight, he was offering truth. Painful, horrible, necessary truth. “Go on. I can take it.” I might not want to hear all this, but I understood that I needed to. And Cole needed to get it off his chest. He could give me this burden. I was glad to lighten the load for him.

He squeezed my hand. “Stace combed the clinics and law-enforcement agencies, looking for you or a Jane Doe who fit your description. If you were assaulted, she wanted to find out who did it, and that started with knowing whether you reported it to anyone. When that led nowhere, she went to Gripper for your new address. She was appalled at the way Tooley treated you and thought no wonder if you never reported anything. All she wanted was to talk to you, but Gripper threatened her. Told her to leave you alone. His reaction was over the top protective, and it struck her as off.

“She went back to her interviewees and asked a few more questions about that party. Months had passed by this time, but she was able to get a description of the rusted out pick-up truck you left in. No plate, but a kid at the party remembered an emblem from the back of one of the men’s jackets. Eagle above a motorcycle. Stace tracked it to a motorcycle club out of Lowell, Mass. Call themselves Air Raid.”

I stiffened as a memory hit my gut with the force of a paintball round. I didn’t remember everything about my assault. I’d been very drunk. But I remembered the emblem Cole referred to. A bald eagle in profile standing on the seat of a bike, a banner with an American flag motif unfurled above. There had been words in Latin that I hadn’t recognized. All of it had been set against the background of faded denim.

Cole stroked over my skin with his thumb. “This is where it starts to get really messed up.” He listed in his chair, looking weary. The faint lines beside his eyes seemed etched a little deeper. “Stace finds the truck. It’s registered to an Air Raid member with a record. Illegal firearms and drug trafficking. Ex-con. That’s when she gets in touch with the Mass state patrol, looking for intel about the MC. They tell her to drop it. The Feds are involved.”

I felt my eyebrows go up, but I stayed quiet.

Cole’s gaze was distant. He was in the zone, and I didn’t want to interrupt him. “She backs off the investigation, like a good little statie. She has other fish to fry, anyway, like Tooley. That investigation was going on at the same time. But she never forgot about you. She kept bugging Mass state patrol for updates. They were pretty good about sharing intel with her. She found out the Feds had a guy inside Air Raid, which gave her some hope.

“Almost a year passes. Tooley finally gets fired thanks to Stace and the evidence she collected. One day out of the blue, she hears from her contact at the Mass state patrol. Feds brought down the MC for guns and drugs. But that’s not all. The inside agent uncovered an amateur fetish-porn side business. These assholes would rape women and make grainy videos and sell copies on the black market.”

I got sick to my stomach. I remembered how bright the back of that rusted out truck had been. It had felt like there was a spotlight on me. I’d always wondered if there had been more to those lights than the men wanting a good look at the horror they were committing. What if they’d been making a video? I didn’t remember seeing a camera, but there was a lot I didn’t remember about that night, a lot I never wanted to remember.

“I see you working it out.”

I looked sharply at Cole. He appeared as sick as I felt. “They had video of you, honey. I’m sorry. You were anonymous victim number six in the trial. There were thirteen women in all. The Feds were able to identify some of them. A few agreed to testify. They hadn’t been able to identify you. Stace gave them your name, but by then the trial was over.

“The men who assaulted you kept their faces out of the videos, but they were identified through body type, hair style, and markings. They’re in jail now. Each of them are serving life sentences for what they did to you and those other women, not to mention their involvement in the other crimes.”

He touched my face, and I realized he was wiping away my tears.

I couldn’t feel his touch. All I could feel was a ragged sort of relief. The men who had raped me were in jail. But it seemed an awkward mercy because I’d done nothing to help put them there.

I’d felt guilty for so long that I never reported the crime. I’d been haunted by the possibility that those men might have hurt other women. Now I knew they
had
hurt other women. I bore some of that responsibility. At the same time, I was relieved they couldn’t hurt anyone else. That was a gift Cole had just given me, a lightening of my guilt, an assurance that things had been set right, even if I’d been remiss in my responsibility.

Those men were in jail. I inhaled long and deep, and the air tasted pure.

I leaned into Cole, and he put his arm around me. “They’re locked up, honey, and the Feds rounded up all the documented copies of the videos. They were distributed in DVD format, and fortunately, the customer list was small. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee there aren’t pirated copies out there somewhere. I hate to tell you something like that, but it’ll always be a risk. There’s only so much damage control that can be done after something like this. You get what I’m saying?”

He was saying the videos could have made it onto the internet. I felt nauseous at the thought, but I nodded my understanding.

“I wish that was the end of it,” he went on. “But it’s not. The rest I have to tell you is stuff I only found out about last week.”

I craned my neck to meet his gaze.

He gulped and closed his eyes. “The MC wanted your dad to work for them.” His mouth got hard. So did his voice. “They needed a gunsmith to convert semi-automatics to fully-automatics. Gripper refused, but they’d heard he was the best, so they didn’t take no for an answer.” He opened his eyes and fixed them on me. Thunderheads churned in his steely gaze.

My stomach shriveled into a prune. I had a terrible feeling I was about to get struck by lightning.

“Your assault, it wasn’t a random attack, sweetheart. Those men knew who you were. They knew whose daughter you were. They sent that video to Grip.” His voice cracked, but he plowed on, relentlessly delivering truth. “Told him they’d do it again and make sure you didn’t walk away next time unless he did the work they needed. He did the work.”

He was quiet for a while. His arm was like a band of steel around my shoulders. “Honey, that’s why your dad didn’t keep in touch with you after you left. He wanted the MC to think you didn’t mean anything to him. He did the work for them, yeah, but he always worried if they wanted more from him, they’d go after you again. But if he made it seem like you two were estranged, he hoped they’d leave you alone.”

His words burned through my skin like acid. Dad had seen what happened to me. He hadn’t talked to me in six years because he was trying to protect me. So much for that pure, fresh air. Now I couldn’t get enough. Tears flowed, a steady, silent stream.

“I’ve got you.” Cole held me tight. Somehow, I ended up on his lap, both of us sharing one of Dad’s kitchen chairs. He stroked my hair in long, slow motions. His soothing touch was all that kept me from breaking down into racking sobs.

Dad had
seen
. He’d
known
. How horrifying that must have been for him! When he watched the video, had he been as drunk as I’d been the night it was made? I hoped so, so he didn’t have to feel the full brunt of the pain.

Oh, God, the pain. The PBR I’d had an hour ago did nothing to numb the fresh wave Cole’s words brought slamming over me.

“I’ve got you.”

I’m not sure how long we sat like that, but eventually, Cole carried me to Dad’s favorite recliner in the den where the bay window looked out on the driveway and garage. He sat back with me resting against him and wrapped us both in Grandma’s afghan.

“I think that’s the real reason your dad took a swing at me that day.” He spoke softly against my temple.

My tears had stopped, but the pain was just as intense. Hearing Cole talk helped. It gave me something else to focus on.

“That was right after they sent him the video. He was angry at the world. He felt trapped. And he was scared out of his mind for you. Maybe he believed Tooley. Maybe he didn’t. But I don’t blame him for acting out at me. Especially when he knew neither me or Tooley took proper care of you that night.” After a few quiet minutes, he asked, “How are you doing?”

Surprisingly, after I’d cried myself out all over his shirt, I felt okay. “Better. Thanks.” I looked down at our linked hands.

“Want me to let go?”

“No.” I snuggled deeper into him, turning my face to feel the heat of his shoulder on my cheek. Being in Cole’s arms felt amazing. It was a hundred thousand times better than I’d ever imagined.

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

I glanced at the clock Dad kept beside his TV remotes. 12:02. Despite everything Cole just told me, I felt a smile tug at my lips. “Merry Christmas,” I replied.