Page 123 of Forever Dark
“He wouldn’t touch me.Wouldn’t look at me.Like I’d become something dirty.”Donna’s hands twisted in the blanket.“He said I’d sinned against what God had given me.Like I’d done it on purpose!”
Selena felt the final piece begin to slide into place.A torrent of emotions ran through her.Pain for Donna.Sadness for the tragedy.Yet, alongside it, excitement.Yes.Excitement that she was about to break the case wide open.
“Did Nolan ever seem violent or dangerous?”
Donna nodded and started crying harder, shoulders shaking now despite the effort to stay controlled.
“He hit me more than once.Then when that wasn’t enough… He just turned his back on me,” she said.“Just walked away.Wouldn’t answer calls.Wouldn’t talk.Nothing.It was just one mistake!”
Selena heard the phrase before she fully thought it.
One mistake.
She remembered what Arnold had said of Tara.What county talk had implied about Brenda and Lauren.The way Vicki in the diner had talked about people getting assigned reputations young and never shedding them.Promiscuous.Fallen.Wrong.Women the killer believed had made themselves impure.Women who were used and then tossed on the trash heap.Women who had made their own mistakes.Mistakes surrounding their sex lives.Something he no doubt believed should be kept for creating life.Mistakes that he believed should be fatal in the eyes of God.
And before the murders, before the staged bodies, before the Latin on the walls, therehadbeen a death.The one marked with a Roman numeral one.The first.
Not counted by anyone else.Not investigated.Not even necessarily criminal.
But to a man like this?
A baby lost in utero, carried by a woman with a history of addiction, then blamed on her by the father.
The first death.
Not a murder, but a death that could have cracked his mind so badly that twisted forms of scripture poured out between those cracks.
Selena sat back slowly.
Donna saw the change in her expression and looked frightened.“What is it?”
“Nothing,” Selena said, too quickly.
“That… that look wasn’t nothing.”
Selena measured her next words.Donna had given her something huge, but not because she owed law enforcement clarity.She had given it out of pain.Selena didn’t want to add any more to it.
“You may have helped me understand him,” Selena said.
Donna stared down at her hands.“You think… You think he killed those women on the news, don’t you?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“This is all my fault!If the baby had lived… Maybe he wouldn’t have been like this…”
The sentence came out like confession, not information.
Selena’s throat tightened.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Donna laughed once through tears, empty of humor.“You don’t know that.”
“Yes,” Selena said, firmer now.“I do.No one becomes a killer overnight.They may have tragedy in their lives, but they’re still responsible for how they behave.If Pruitt is what I think he is, he shouldn’t be giving anyone advice on what’s moral and good.You have to look after yourself, Donna.You weren’t in control.But now you’re doing the right thing.You should be proud.I know Jessie will be when she sees you walk out of here clean and sober.”
Donna looked at her then, really looked, and whatever she saw there seemed to settle her by a fraction.
Silence held for a few seconds.
