I Know Where You Live by Gregg Olsen

Author:Gregg Olsen [Olsen, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2022-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Yakima, Washington

Violet

The restaurant at the Maison Hotel is bustling with a horde of teachers attending a training conference. I wait for my second coffee while Maria reviews the itinerary for the morning. I hope that she doesn’t want to stay and network into the lunch hour. I want to get out of Yakima as fast as I can. I didn’t sleep at all. My eyes wouldn’t stay closed. I emptied the minibar of all the vodka, thinking that I could drink myself into slumber. Not even close. I was wired, oddly energized. I kept seeing Stone’s bewildered face, the horrified look in his eyes. Confusion too. Was it because I was a woman? Did he think I wouldn’t stop him when he got up from that chair? Or did he feel for the first time what his victims felt?

Inexplicable fear.

I told him I was there to avenge the boys he’d raped.

A lie.

It was my grandfather’s sagging face that I saw when the knife sliced into Stone’s sinewy chest. It was Papa’s gnarly hands that went after the blade as he fought me.

It was my mother’s voice, however, that found its way into my brain.

Violet, you must be mistaken, honey. Papa loves you. He’d never do anything like that to you. Don’t you know that?

As the hotel waitress fills my cup and Maria stays absorbed with her list of people to see, I think about how, for the longest time, I had wondered if I’d been wrong about what happened to me.

Mom insisted, stone-faced, that I’d been mistaken. She dropped toxic little excuses every now and then too.

Sometimes men get a little grabby when they drink too much. It doesn’t mean a thing.

I didn’t know any other girl who’d had the same experience, and there were plenty of daytime drinkers in Gig Harbor.

A medical condition? I don’t know. He’s old. He might have had a seizure. I’ll get Nana to take him to the doctor.

That one made me believe that I wasn’t a good person for not forgiving and forgetting something that hadn’t been his fault.

My young brain didn’t yet comprehend the concept of gaslighting. I had no idea that Mom’s denial and excuses were designed to confuse reality, bury what had happened. To deny and then question my own motives, driving me further and further away from what I knew to be true.

You might have dreamed it, honey. It happens sometimes.

“You okay?”

It’s Maria, snapping me away from my memories. “You seem distracted.”

I brush her off with a quick shrug. “Didn’t sleep well last night. Feel better now, but must have had a twenty-four-hour bug.”

She signals the waitress for the bill.

“That’s good. I promise to make the day a short one so you can get back home and rest. Tomorrow will be a bitch of a day with the work we have to do.”

I pick up my purse from where I hung it on the back of my chair. A smear of blood on a strap comes at me like a lightning strike, a jolt of what Stone’s living room had been like.

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