Baltimore 03 - Did You Miss Me?

with us.’
    ‘What?’ Ford exploded. ‘Why?’
    ‘Vivien was a wreck. Mama said she needed her family close. And it may have been guilt that Mama got her daughter back and Vivien didn’t. But that meant Beckett moved in too. I didn’t sleep, didn’t eat. I wouldn’t leave my mother’s side. I avoided my father because he kept trying to make me talk. He became almost desperate.’
    ‘Why?’ Agent Kerr asked. ‘Kelly was his niece by marriage. I would have thought the family pressure would be on your mother.’
    ‘There was tremendous pressure on my mother from her family. But my father wasn’t from around here. And Kelly had lived with us. Looking back, I think he was worried from the beginning that people would accuse him. I was oblivious to that then.
    ‘Everyone kept trying to get me to talk, but I just withdrew. We went on like that for a few weeks, through the holidays. Everywhere I turned, Beckett was there. He’d whispered, “Did you miss me?” Sometimes he’d whisper that I had to sleep sometime.’
    Joseph’s eyes were closed, his throat working as he tried to swallow.
    Beside her, Ford trembled with anger but kept his mouth closed.
    ‘They took me to a therapist who kept trying to get me to speak. She finally told me to draw the “bad man”. So I did.’
    ‘You drew a picture of Beckett?’ Joseph asked.
    ‘I tried to draw a picture of Vivien, Beckett, and Kelly – but I was eight years old and a very bad artist.’ She sighed, remembering the agony that had followed. ‘They thought I was drawing my own family. They thought I was accusing my father.’
    ‘Oh no.’
    She wasn’t sure who’d said it, because she’d closed her eyes, battling back tears. ‘I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face when the police came that night. The therapist had told them about my picture and they came to question him. He stared at me, so betrayed. And I couldn’t speak. I tried to scream, to tell them “No!”, that it wasn’t my father. They took him in for questioning and when he came home . . . he just looked at me. He was so damn hurt.
    ‘The news picked up on it. My mother’s family ganged up on him because they’d never really trusted him. He was a musician Mama had met in California. Beckett was a minister and he went on TV calling my father all sorts of names. It was a nightmare.’
    ‘What did your father do?’ Agent Kerr asked.
    ‘He and Mama had been fighting about me all along. My father had been saying they needed to make me talk. Mama protected me, saying I’d talk when I was ready. I remember hearing them fight that night – it would be the last time I heard my father’s voice. He accused Mama of believing the lie. She was crying so hard. So torn.’
    She opened her eyes, met Joseph’s sorrowful gaze. ‘I’ve seen this happen in my job,’ she said. ‘A child is abused and the father is blamed, maybe by the child or maybe by a social worker. There’s that one moment that the wife has to choose – do I protect my child or do I believe the man I love could never do such a hideous, heinous thing? Mama found herself in that moment and she stood by him. But my father had seen that flicker of doubt in her eyes and he confronted her with it when he came home from being questioned. She tried to tell him she was sorry, but he was so hurt . . .
    ‘He came into my room that night and stared at me. Just stared, saying nothing at all. He looked so sad and I wanted to yell at the top of my lungs that it was not true! That he didn’t do anything. But I couldn’t make my mouth speak. I don’t know if he was waiting for me to say something, to do something – I just don’t know. He looked . . . sorrowful, but so angry, all at once. The next day he went to work, and after work went straight to play with his band. After that, no one saw him again. He never came home.’ She swallowed hard. ‘The next morning I woke up and my mother was screaming. Someone had killed one of Fluffy’s kittens.’
    ‘Beckett,’ Ford said coldly and she patted his hand.
    ‘I knew that, of course. Mama thought it was somebody angry at my father. The community rose up against him, but my father was nowhere to be found. They assumed he was guilty, that he’d run before he could be arrested. It got bad, like pitchforks and burning torches bad. I withdrew even further.’ She sighed. ‘Seeing Beckett gloat over my father being the perpetrator was so hard. Vivien ripped into