Lacy Eye by Jessica Treadway Read Free Book Online Page B

district attorney had intimated that Dawn had been in touch with Rud Petty, but of course I knew better. “How’d you find out?” I asked.
    “Peter called.”
    I was glad she couldn’t see how I winced at the name. Peter Cifforelli had been Joe’s best friend from Buffalo; they’d gone to college together there, then both moved to Albany for graduate school, Joe in accounting and Peter in law. Peter and his wife, Wendy, became engaged within weeks of when Joe and I did, and the four of us all became friends. At least, that’s what I thought, until the day Peter invited everybody to his apartment to watch the Super Bowl and I overheard Peter ask Joe in the kitchen, when neither of them knew I was approaching, “You’re sure about Hanna, right? You’re sure she’s— enough ?” For a moment I thought I’d missed a word— smart enough? Good enough? Pretty enough? But then I realized he’d just said enough , which could have covered all three of those things and more. Instead of waiting to hear how Joe would answer him, I made a point of walking into the kitchen to refill a bowl of chips. From that day on, I both despised Peter and worried that he was right. But I vowed to myself I’d never show those feelings, and I never told Joe that I’d heard what his best friend asked him that day.
    Joe always referred to Peter and Wendy as “the Darlings,” but I couldn’t bring myself to do the same. Still, our families remained close all the time our children were growing up, celebrating birthdays and holidays and graduations together, and one year we shared a vacation rental in the Outer Banks during the kids’ spring break from school. (One of the things I had been shocked to learn, during Rud’s trial, was that Dawn apparently told her dorm mates at college that among the property she would inherit someday was a beachfront estate on the coast of North Carolina. It shocked me not only because of the lie itself, but because that vacation had been a disaster, and I couldn’t imagine she had any good memories of it; it rained almost every day, and the Cifforelli kids and Iris ganged up on Dawn in every game they played.)
    Peter was the first person Iris called after the police notified her, by phone, of the attack. He and Wendy arrived at the hospital—where I was in surgery and expected to die—before Iris and Archie could drive there from Boston. Later, Peter said he would serve as Dawn’s attorney, if she got indicted and her case went to trial. When he offered to do this, I didn’t know whether he believed she was guilty of helping to kill her father but also entitled to the best defense she could get, or whether he thought she was innocent. I was afraid of what it would mean about me if I even asked the question. In the end it didn’t matter, because she was never tried.
    You’d think the fact that he was willing to fight for Dawn in a courtroom would have erased my bitterness toward Peter, but it hadn’t.
    “They’re not letting him out, are they?” Dawn asked me. They were almost the exact words I had used when Ken Thornburgh informed me about Rud Petty’s appeal.
    “No,” I said. “I mean, they say not. Gail Nazarian came over last night to try to get me to testify.”
    “But you said no, right?” She spoke so emphatically into the phone that I had to hold the receiver away.
    “Right.” I reached down to work Abby’s hair with my fingers under the table, where she always sat when I talked on the phone. When she gave a little groan I knew I’d pulled too hard, and I apologized by rubbing the scar on the soft spot between her eyes. “But I changed my mind. I’m going to try.”
    It was one of those times you say something you hadn’t planned on, but the minute you hear it in your own voice, you know it’s true. I realized then that my mind had been working on the decision, even without my being aware. I believed Rud Petty was guilty, and I couldn’t take a chance on his being acquitted