AINF-Excerpt.pdf

(840 KB) Pobierz
ALL
IS NOT
FORGOTTEN
Wendy Walker
S T. M A R T I N ' S P R E S S
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this
novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
all is not forgotten. Copyright © 2016 by Wendy Walker. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. For information, address
St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (TK)
ISBN 978-1-250-09791-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-09794-1 (e-book)
Our books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use.
Please contact your local bookseller or the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales
Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at
MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.
First Edition: July 2016
10
9
8
7
6 5
4 3
2 1
Chapter One
He followed her
into the woods behind the house. The ground
there was littered with winter debris, dead leaves and twigs that had
fallen over the past six months and decayed beneath a blanket of
snow. She may have heard him approach. She may have turned and
seen him wearing the black wool mask whose fi bers were found be-
neath her nails. As she fell to her knees, what was left of the brittle
twigs snapped like old bones and scraped her bare skin. Her face and
chest pressed hard into the ground, likely with the outside of his fore-
arm, she would have felt the mist from the sprinklers blowing off the
lawn not twenty feet away. Her hair was wet when they found her.
When she was a younger girl, she would chase the sprinklers at
her own house, trying to catch them on a hot summer afternoon, or
dodge them on a crisp spring evening. Her baby brother would then
chase her, buck naked with his bulging belly and flailing arms that
were not quite able to coordinate with his little legs. Sometimes their
dog would join in, barking so voraciously, it would drown out their
laughter. An acre of green grass, slippery and wet. Big open skies with
2
We n dy Wa l ke r
puffy white clouds. Her mother inside watching them from the win-
dow and her father on his way home from places whose smells would
linger on his suit. The stale coffee from the showroom office, new
leather, tire rubber. Those memories were painful now, though she
had turned immediately to them when asked about the sprinklers,
and whether they had been on when she ran across the lawn to the
woods.
The rape lasted for close to an hour. It seems impossible that they
could know this. Something about the clotting of the blood at the
points of penetration, and the varied stages of bruising on her back,
arms, and neck where he’d changed his method of constraint. In
that hour, the party had continued the way she’d left it. She would
have seen it from where she lay, lights glaring from the windows,
fl ickering as bodies moved through the rooms. It was a big party,
with nearly all the tenth grade and handfuls of kids from ninth and
eleventh making appearances. Fairview High School was small by
most standards, even for suburban Connecticut, and the class divi-
sions that existed elsewhere were far looser here. Sports teams were
mixed, plays, concerts, and the like. Even some classes crossed grade
boundaries, with the smartest kids in math and foreign languages
moving up a level. Jenny Kramer had never made it into an advanced
class. But she believed herself to be smart, and endowed with a fierce
sense of humor. She was also a good athlete—swimming, field hockey,
tennis. But she felt none of those things had mattered until her body
matured.
The night of this party had felt better than any moment in her
life. I think she may even have said,
It was going to be the best night
of my life.
After years of what I have come to think of as adolescent
cocooning, she felt she had come into her own. The cruelty of braces
and lingering baby fat, breasts that were too small for a bra but
still protruding through her T-shirts, acne and unruly hair, had
Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin