Page 11 of Den of Iniquity

“A couple of days ago,” he answered. “Wednesday afternoon after school.”

“Did you think they were only making out or were they going to have sex?”

“Making out, I guess,” Kyle muttered uncomfortably, “but if I hadn’t shown up right then...”

I couldn’t help wondering if my old-fashioned terminology translated understandably into the current vernacular.

“Anyway,” he continued finally. “I didn’t know what to do, so I stood there like I was frozen. Gabe saw me and pushed her away. When Caroline spotted me, she was angry. ‘What are you staring at?’ she demanded, like I was in the wrong, and she wasn’t.”

“What happened to Gabe?”

“He took off. He didn’t even go back down to the basement to say goodbye to the other guys.”

“Did you tell your dad about what had happened?”

Kyle shook his head. “I didn’t bother. As far as he’s concerned, Caroline can do no wrong. Anyway, it would have been my word against hers. He probably wouldn’t have believed me even if I had, and I doubt Gabe would’ve backed me up. He was too embarrassed.”

There it was. The old he said/she said dichotomy. “You may be right about that,” I conceded. “People might not have believed you.”

“I mean, like, you hear of this kind of thing happening with older men and young girls,” Kyle continued, “but I didn’t know it could happen to boys, too.”

“Believe me,” I said. “It happens.”

As a former cop, I know the statistics. In the course of their lifetimes, three out of ten girls will fall victim to a sexual assault of some kind. For boys it’s more like one out of ten. If Gabe was under sixteen, the kind of behavior Kyle was talking about constituted sexual assault.

“Exactly how old is Gabe?” I asked.

Kyle shrugged. “I’m not sure. Fifteen, maybe. He doesn’t have his driver’s license yet.”

“And Caroline?”

He shrugged again. “Twenty-five maybe? She’s a lot younger than Dad.”

“From what you’ve told me, it sounds as though Caroline might be a sexual predator, someone who preys on younger men. Those sorts of offenders seldom limit themselves to a single victim. Is this the first time she made any overtures to one of your friends?”

“As far as I know,” he said. “If she did, nobody ever mentioned it, at least not to me.”

“But they wouldn’t, now would they?”

Kyle thought about that for a moment. “Probably not,” he finally agreed. “But she’s always, like, you know, flirting with the guys when they’re at the house, and that’s where we usually practice—down in the basement.” He paused before adding regretfully, “At least that’s where we used to practice.”

“And that’s why you left—because of what happened to Gabe?”

Kyle sighed. “I thought if I was gone, he wouldn’t be hangingaround the house anymore, and that would make it harder for her to lay her hands on him.”

“What happened next, after you saw them together?”

“When I went to bed that night, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed awake worrying about it, thinking it was all my fault. And I kept wondering what I’d do if she came after me. That’s when I decided that the best thing for me to do was leave, but at first I didn’t have any idea about where I’d go. The next day at school I finally hit on the idea of coming here. I left in the middle of the night on Thursday while Dad and Caroline were asleep. I wanted to be sure I was across the state line before they woke up and called the cops.”

He needn’t have worried too much on that score. Ashland cops might have taken an immediate missing persons report on an eighteen-year-old runaway, but it was unlikely—if a report had even been called in, that is. As a local educator, Jeremy Cartwright might not have wanted to call outside attention to his somewhat unconventional living arrangements.

“Good thinking,” I said aloud.

“Are you going to tell Grandma Mel about all this?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Do you have to?”

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