Underneath The Surface, Chapter 30

Shattering Honesty

"In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot."

Czeslaw Milosz

Author's Note: I have been building this scene for a while. I can honestly say I felt bad for Genesis. These characters are beginning to take up places in my heart.

Enjoy the chapter!

"Genesis, can you come down to the kitchen, please? Sheriff Stirling has some questions for you."

The teenager heard her mother's voice carry up the stairs. "Be right there!" She called back as she scrubbed her cheeks with the heel of her hands and took a few deep breaths. She didn't need the sheriff to see she'd been crying. After checking the mirror, she went down to the kitchen.

The room smelled of brewing coffee and cookies, and her stomach rumbled.

Sheriff Stirling stood as she approached the table. "I know you've been through a lot, Genesis, but I'd like to ask you a few things about your time out there, while it's still fresh in your mind, okay?"

Gen nodded and pulled out a chair.

Once he had sat as well, the sheriff pulled a small notebook and pen from his pocket. "A lot of my job involves reports, and usually the victim gives a report at the police station. But I thought you would find this easier at home. Can you tell me what happened?"

"I'm not a victim. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time." Genesis replied. "Mom and I had a fight and I took off to the ruins. I needed time to myself. I was sitting there when Turk found me. I didn't pay him much attention...I wasn't even sure he had seen me at first. But when he spotted me, he started to laugh and mumble to himself. Then suddenly, he had his rifle pointed at me...said we were going to go for a walk. I told him I wasn't going anywhere with him. He stormed over to me and slapped me once, told me if I didn't, he'd shoot me right there and no one would ever know what happened to me. I had no choice..." Genesis stopped to take a breath before her voice cracked.

Stirling nodded and wrote in the notebook for a minute. "Okay, so I can charge him with kidnapping, assault, and uttering death threats. Can you remember anything else?"

Olivia set a glass of pomegranate juice in front of her daughter and sat down with her hand resting on Genesis' forearm.

"I didn't know what to do, so I went along with him...I hoped he wouldn't watch so closely if he saw I wasn't going to put up a fight. When we stopped for the night, he told me to gather firewood and pile it. He started the fire while he kept the gun pointed at me. He tied me to a tree so I couldn't run away, but other than that, he didn't touch me."

Sheriff Stirling nodded and wrote in his notebook. "Forcible confinement as well. Did he feed you?"

"Neither of us were carrying food. He had a water bottle. He did give me a couple of drinks from it. I told him I had to pee and he undid the rope from around the tree..." Genesis' eyes filled with hot tears of shame. "He wouldn't turn around to give me any privacy. Said I'd probably try to take off. He didn't try anything weird...just watched...When I had my pants done up again, he told me to go back to the tree. He tied me up again and laid on the other side of the fire, facing me. I fell asleep that way. He slapped me the next morning to wake me up. I had to pee the way I did before, tied up. He stomped the fire out, pointed into the bush and told me to keep walking. When he let me stop to rest my feet, I threw a rock at his head. I hit him too. That's when Emma and Callie found us."

Stirling nodded slowly as he wrote her report. "Is there anything else you can tell me?"

Genesis shook her head slowly.

"I want to nail this guy with everything I can, so even the smallest detail might help me do that."

Genesis nodded, took a long drink of her juice and studied the table top. Idly she traced a finger over a gouge while she thought. Finally, she looked up at the sheriff again. "It's bear season, still, right?"

"For another few days, yes. Why?"

"It probably doesn't mean anything, but he just had his rifle slung across his back when he found me at the ruins...he didn't look like he was going hunting. No backpack, no food, no camouflage."

"That's good information." The sheriff wrote some more in his notebook. "He's been coming here hunting for years, I know how he equips himself...you're right, doesn't sound like he was going hunting at all. At least not legally."

"Can I ask a question?"

Stirling nodded.

"Why do you want to charge him with so much?"

"Besides the fact that it's my job, I have a vested interest in this case...I want to make sure this bastard doesn't get out of jail a few months after he's locked up."

"Why?"

Stirling sighed heavily as if he carried a great weight and slumped a little as he put the notebook and pen back into his pocket. He glanced across the table at Olivia and took a deep breath.

"When I was still a young man, in high school actually, I fell in love with a girl. She was the prettiest girl in school and a cheerleader. We dated, had some good times, got pretty serious, actually. I even gave her my high school jacket. Then, all of a sudden, she just up and disappeared. I went to her house and her mother said she'd moved away. Refused to tell me why." Stirling studied his hands laying on the table. "She returned my jacket to my parents while I was in school. Knocked on our door, and when the door was opened, handed my father the jacket and walked away. I didn't see my girlfriend for another ten years." He looked up to find Genesis watching him. "By then, I was a deputy on the police force. I was doing my rounds one day when I noticed a moving truck outside a house. I slowed the cruiser trying to figure out if the people were moving out or in, and I saw her. She looked a little older, obviously, but I knew who she was. I stopped the car and tried to talk to her, but she brushed me off. Every time I tried to talk to her after that, I got the cold shoulder. Finally, one day, I put a tire lock on her car and waited for her."

Genesis chuckled. "Smart."

"It was the only thing I could think of to force a conversation. When she showed up, I told her that I was going to leave it there until she gave me a straight answer." Stirling didn't raise his eyes from the tabletop. "Told me we couldn't be a couple, too much had changed, she had changed. She told me we weren't teenagers any more and that I should move on. Even though my heart was shattered, I took off the tire lock and let her drive away." Stirling watched as Olivia took cookies from a cooling rack and laid some on a plate. "I stayed away for as long as I could."

Olivia set the plate in front of Genesis and sat down, but laid her hand lightly on Stirling's arm. "Let me."

The sheriff nodded silently.

"Gen...Don and I were that couple. I was his high school sweetheart, it was my decision to raise my daughter alone. I regret never telling Don the baby was his." Olivia put her other hand on her daughter's arm, linking the three of them together as she continued in a hushed voice. "I regret never telling you that he's your father."

Genesis felt the air leave her lungs in a rush and her head swam for a moment. Her gaze flicked rapidly between the sheriff and her mother. "Why, Mom? Why did you let me wonder all those years? All the fights we had, all the lies you told me, all for nothing...Why not just tell me in the beginning?"

Olivia got up and poured two cups of coffee as she started to answer. "When I first found out, I was afraid. Afraid of being pregnant in a small town, afraid of being judged, of the rumors. So I left. I went somewhere else so I could be just another pregnant teenager. I didn't want strings attached and I was sure that help came with strings, I refused anyone's help. So I never told Don I was pregnant. I didn't want to be beholden to anyone." She placed a coffee cup in front of the sheriff. "After a while, I was caught up in providing you with a good home and a good life, but when a little girl was kidnapped, I decided it was time to come home and raise you somewhere safer. The irony is not lost on me that six years later you were forced to walk through the woods at gunpoint." Olivia shook her head at the thought. "Anyway, when I moved back, I told Don that we couldn't pick up our relationship, I was a different person, that I didn't have any feelings for him. I was still convinced that help came with judgement and strings. And I fell into the pattern of deflecting your questions."

Genesis regarded the sheriff quietly. "So how did you find out?"

"I put the pieces together. I went to your mother, told her I knew, but she didn't want me to be involved. I had to respect her wishes. I'm not the kind of guy who fights what a mother wants for her daughter. I wasn't raised that way." Stirling shrugged. "She would never take any money from me, wouldn't let me spend time with you for a long time. So I started coming around for coffee, telling her I wanted to spend time with her as an old friend. It was the only way I could watch you grow up. Over time, she relaxed a little."

The teenager shook her head and looked at her mother once more. "What was the big deal, Mom? What would it have hurt to let me grow up knowing my father?"

Olivia scrubbed at her face with her hands and frowned. "Gen...I was raised believing that a woman didn't need a man. Your grandmother went on about it all the time. I barely knew your grandfather before he died. I didn't grow up with a very present father. That was just the way the women in our family were. Right or wrong, that's the way things were done."

"Well, I'm sure as hell not going to carry on that family tradition!" Genesis shot out of her chair and stomped to the sink, where she looked out the window silently.

Olivia sighed helplessly behind her. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry you lied to me all those years? Sorry you put us all through hell for years, or sorry that you've finally had to face it all?" Genesis turned from the window and gestured to the sheriff. "I have no idea how to relate to this man as my father. I have been carrying all those questions for years, and I can ask them now ... but right now, I'm so angry, I can't think straight! ... You know what? I can't be here right now, I'm going to Callie's...probably to spend the night." The teenager stalked out of the room with her hands balled into fists.

"Genesis..." Olivia rose from her chair.

"Let her go." Stirling laid his hand over hers. "She has every right to be upset. At least we know where she's going this time." He turned his gaze to her then. "I'm sorry, Liv, but she's right in a lot of what she said. These lies have gone on for years, and I'm not going to judge you, but it's going to take time to fix this."

Genesis fumed all the way to the bed and breakfast. It wasn't a long walk, but it took even less time as her angry strides covered the distance quickly.

She had spent so much time here that she knew she didn't have to knock. It had been her habit to knock a couple of times anyway before opening the front door. This time, she knocked and met Callie's mom just inside the front hallway.

Patty took in the teenager's tear-streaked face, the angry set of her mouth and her heart melted. "Gen...are you okay?"

Genesis nodded. "Can I stay here tonight?" She vaguely noticed Callie coming down the stairs as Emma and another woman came out of the dining room.

"Of course, sweetheart. Does your Mom know you're here?"

The distraught teen nodded. "She's kinda why..." Genesis felt her friend put a hand on her shoulder, so she turned. "Callie...my mom..." Her breath hitched. "Sheriff Stirling is my father..." Then she crumpled to the floor in sobs.