AN: gotta say thanks again to all of you here at 'the-site-which-cannot-be-named' (cuz for some dumb reason the PTB here won't let you print the site's name)...anyway...thank you to all of you HERE for all the wonderful reviews you've been leaving!

Chapter 6

"There's more?" How could there possibly be anything worse than what he'd already been told had happened to the young woman whose sad green eyes stared up at him from the picture on the table? Being raped was bad enough, but then to have her assailant, a classmate she'd had a crush on, go free was even worse.

"Unfortunately," Willow mumbled softly. She rubbed a hand over her face, trying to gather the strength to continue the story about events she'd lived through with her best friend. "Buffy never really recovered from what happened. Well, not really. Physically she healed quickly, and I think things would have been okay after while, but..."

"But he got away with it," Angel completed her train of thought. He could already imagine how that would have affected her. First, she was viciously attacked, and then the bastard wasn't even punished.

"Yeah," Spike said with a nod. "But it's worse than even what you're thinking, though."

"Cameron Walker was like a hero in this town," Willow once again took the reigns of the conversation. "He was a star athlete, smart, likable, and he was the police chief's son. People didn't want to believe he'd done it. And add to that the police chief's best friend, our very own mayor, lending his support to Cameron."

"It got real ugly real quick," Spike supplied, shaking his head at the events from years ago. "Buffy had always been popular in school and in town. She was funny, friendly, and well, as you can see from the picture, no hardship to look at. But when going up against the power people of this town, she was nothing."

"Everyone pointed their self righteous fingers at her," Willow continued on. "The medical exam and DNA tests proved that she'd...well, Cameron's sperm was detected, but it was a pretty much a 'he said-she said' sort of deal on what happened between them. And everyone believed him."

"He said it was consensual, said she'd wanted it rough," Spike bit out, barely containing the rage he felt.

"It wasn't consensual," Willow stated adamantly. "Buffy had been a virgin, and she took sex seriously. She always said she wanted to wait until she was in a serious relationship."

Though he never knew Buffy, Angel felt his eyes watering at her pain. He felt for what she must have gone through. She'd been violently attacked by a class mate, and what was worse it was her first sexual experience. Not that that made it different than what another woman might have gone through, but he could imagine the scars that would leave on a young girl.

"Everyone rallied around Cameron, and they ostracized Buffy," she explained further, her hands twisting continuously in her lap. "They said she was a slut, or that she was getting back at him for having sex with her but not dating her. It was awful."

Spike placed a comforting hand on Willow's back. The memories of what had happened weren't easy for either of them. Dragging them up again and telling them to Angel wasn't helping, but they'd both felt it was better he get than answers to his questions from them rather than asking around town. They knew very well how people treated anything related to Buffy. If he'd kept asking, Angel would have put himself in a very bad position.

"She was harassed at school, on the streets. Anywhere she went she was a target," Spike went on.

"It took its toll on her. She tried to be strong, and she never gave up hope that people would eventually believe her." Willow shook her head, knowing they should have known better. But they'd been young and idealistic. "Any of her friends who stuck with her became enemies of the town, too," she said with a thin smile, remembering her own harassment. "Then things got worse."

Worse, Angel thought. How could this situation possibly get any worse? What more had this poor girl been subjected to?

"She started getting phone calls all the time. Sometimes they'd say nothing, sometimes they were obscene. And then the visits started," Spike explained while Willow again tried to compose herself. "She said she'd wake up in the middle of the night and there would be someone on her room. Her parents forced the police to investigate."

"But they never found anything," Angel assumed, guessing that the police were loyal to their chief, and by turn, the chief's son.

"Right," Spike nodded in agreement. "It kept on like that for two years after the rape, people following her, calling her. Just constant harassment."

"Buffy closed in on herself," Willow supplied, remembering how she'd seen her friend turn from a bright, cheery girl, to a quiet, fearful young woman. "She was afraid of everything. She stopped going to school and barely left the house. She was petrified of going out during the daytime." She shook her head, closing her eyes for a moment. "I know that sounds strange, but she seemed to associate the rape with daytime. If she went out then, people would be able to see her."

"The few times we could get her to go out, it would only be at night," Spike added in. "She thought it would allow her to blend in to the shadows better and that people wouldn't notice her."

The logic of that was weird, but Angel could understand it. He would have imagined that someone who'd be sexually assaulted would be afraid to go out at night because someone could sneak up on her easier, but in her situation he could see how she'd think she could hide when it was dark out.

"People started saying she was crazy, in a literal sense," Willow continued. "They said she was making it all up, or imagining things. It just never stopped."

Spike pulled Willow closer to him as she let loose a choked sob. He rubbed her back as he looked to Angel. "I suppose in the end, it did drive her a little crazy, but not like they say it did."

"She couldn't handle it all," Willow said with a sniffle. "And the people's opinion of her only got worse after she attacked a group of guys."

"Attacked?" Angel repeated in the form of a question.

Willow knew how it sounded. It would be hard for anyone, even someone who'd only ever seen a picture of Buffy to imagine her attacking anyone, so she explained. "We'd gotten her to go out for coffee one night. We'd just gone inside the café when she remembered she'd left her purse in the car." She paused, lifted her hands in a helpless gesture. "I offered to get it for her, but she said she'd do it. I think she was trying to prove she was strong and could handle it. Next thing we knew, people were screaming that there was a fight outside and that 'Buffy the psycho' was attacking people."

"She told us later that they'd said obscene things to her and cornered her by the car," she went on. "The guys, though, claimed they were just walking down the sidewalk when for no reason Buffy came at them." A mirthless laugh escaped.

"Everyone believed them," Angel posed what he was thinking.

"Yeah," Spike confirmed, his lips curling in a snarl. "Bloody awful it was. They pressed charges against her and they stuck. What no one bothered to pay attention to was that the guys were all Cameron's cronies. She got a police record and a hefty fine out of it. The worst was that everyone started saying she was insane and violent and that she should be put away somewhere before she really hurt someone."

"That was kinda the last straw for her," Willow said softly. "I don't think she ever left the house again."

There was a lapse in the conversation and Angel took the time to think about all he'd heard. He wondered what had happened to Buffy. They'd said she was dead. Had she killed herself? If she had, he couldn't blame her. He didn't think suicide was the answer to one's problems, but he could understand why she would have done it. There was only so much a person could take before they broke.

What kind of town was this, he questioned silently. Some poor girl is raped and everyone turns on her. It was the stuff nightmares were made out of. Only this wasn't some bad dream. This was reality. And Buffy, the pretty young girl's whose picture sat in front of him had lived it all, along with the two people on the other side of the table.

"Then..." Willow released a shuddering breath, her hand gripping Spike's so tight that he winced. "Then in July of 2000..."

July of 2000? Angel's ears perked up at that. He thought about the newspaper archives he'd been looking through when Willow's note had all but landed in his lap. Hadn't the first missing newspaper article he'd found been from that time? It only took him a moment to deduce that the articles that had been torn out related to Buffy. That was the obvious conclusion considering everything Spike and Willow had told him.

"The articles," Angel muttered under his breath.

"What?" asked Willow, giving him an odd stare.

"In the newspaper archives...a lot of articles were torn out and they were from that time," he clarified what he'd found.

"I'm not surprised," Spike mumbled to himself.

"What happened?" Angel demanded. It had to be pretty bad. He knew that somehow.

Willow opened her mouth as if to answer, but then closed it quickly. She shook her head, closing her eyes against the harsh reality of the events of that day. Slowly, her right hand reached up to tuck a few loose strands of hair behind her ear. Then, finally, after a few more seconds of silence, she told him.

"Her brother, sister, and mother were murdered," she spoke, barely audible.

Angel nearly fell out of his chair after straining to hear her words. Murdered? That was just completely unimaginable. Things like that didn't happen in small towns like Sunnydale. But hadn't what he'd already heard told him this town was anything but peaceful? He wanted to speak, to say something, but he couldn't. And from the looks Spike and Willow were sharing, he could tell that there was something else yet unsaid.

"Her father found the bodies when he got home from work." This time it was Spike who talked, turning his face away to hide his tears. "Buffy had been home that night, but...but they never found her."

"What-what do you mean they never found her?" Angel managed to utter, his mind a whirl of confusion and pain for the young girl.

"The bodies of her family were there, but Buffy just vanished," Willow elucidated, her voice raspy. "There was no trace of her."

Grimacing at the revelation, Angel tried to understand how a woman could just vanish. Why would her family be found and not her? What had happened to Buffy?

"Do they think she was killed too?" he asked, coming to what was to him the obvious conclusion.

Both Willow and Spike quickly averted their eyes, telling Angel that the answer wasn't that simple. He thought he heard Spike mutter 'if only.' But that only confused him more.

"What?" he demanded.

"The police...they investigated," Willow began, her voice harsh and bitter. "But they...they closed the case after only a few weeks. They...they concluded that Buffy had...had killed her family in a fit of insane rage."

Angel's mouth dropped open, thoroughly shocked at the newest turn of events. It was almost too much to believe. He felt like he was watching a suspense movie and not hearing the true story of the life of a beautiful young woman. Before he could object to the claim, Spike interrupted.

"We knew she could never do something like that," Spike stated, agreeing with Angel's internal thoughts. "But the town's people jumped on it. They already hated her, and said she was nuts. To them, it just proved they were right."

"They said she killed them," Willow continued. "And that afterwards, when she'd realized what she'd done, she'd killed herself by jumping off the cliffs by her house."

"You don't believe she did?" Angel asked He didn't know what to think. Looking at the picture of Buffy, he could never imagine her as having killed her own family. Of course, he'd never met her, but just from listening to the way her friends talked about her he could tell she was a good person who'd been dealt some horrible cards in life. If she hadn't done what people accused her of, though, then what had happened to her?

"No, none of us thought she killed them or herself, but," she shrugged, "she was never seen after that day."

"Except for the ghost," Angel said what they were all thinking.

Willow said nothing, but her eyes met Angel's. She didn't have to say what was on her mind. He knew instantly what she suspected. Something, though, kept any of them from actually voicing the train of thought.

"Right," Spike drawled out.

"In the four years since it happened, several people have claimed to have seen her. The locals say she haunts the area, waiting to take revenge on everyone," Willow practically spat, her disgust clearly evident. "But she's pretty much a taboo topic around here. People prefer to never have her mentioned at all."

"Which is why I got the cold shoulder this morning," assumed Angel.

"Got it in one," Spike laughed mirthlessly.

"So, what? People just ignore that it ever happened and go about their lives?" Angel bit out, angry that the residents of this town could be so callous.

"For the most part," said Willow. "None of us will ever forget it, but most people care not to think about it."

"So you're saying I should just forget what I saw?" Angel questioned in disbelief. How was he supposed to ignore that he had seen a ghost...or possibly something else entirely?

Again, Willow gave him a look, telling him with her eyes what she was unwilling to say with words. She didn't want him to forget it. She wanted to know what he'd seen. But more so, she wanted to know the truth. He could only imagine how the lies and horrors of her friend forever haunted her. So he nodded, accepting her unbidden request to keep his eyes open for anything he might see.

"All we're saying is to keep your mouth shut. If you don't want to make enemies here, you'll not talk about it in public," Spike requested, and Angel could tell that he, too, was more than curious about the so-called ghost that haunted the beach near his house.

"Right," he agreed. It made sense. As angry and disturbed as he was by all that he'd heard, Angel had no desire to actively stir up trouble. Still...if he saw something...well, he wouldn't exactly turn the other way.

"We have to go," Willow said, rising from her seat. "Here's our number...," she trailed off, leaving Angel to assume she wanted to know if he saw anything.

Angel rose, too, and accepted the piece of paper she had in her hand. "Thank you, for telling me."

"You're welcome." She nodded sadly at him before leaving with Spike.

TBC!