Equal Access (4 page)

“Chewy?”

“No.”

“Oh, then it must be fuzzy.”

Charissa finally cracked a small grin. “Juice
isn’t fuzzy.”

“I’ve seen fuzzy juice.” Shad rested his arms
on the table and leaned forward slightly. “Of course it hadn’t been
in the refrigerator for a few days.”

The rest of snack time proceeded smoothly,
and when they returned to their seats in the passenger car Charissa
was ready to look through the items in her day pack. At first she
commented on the toys and booklets to Shad, but then became more
involved playing with a cloth doll and a stuffed penguin. Shad
initially paid attention to the antics she acted out with her toys
in case she revealed something about her family life, but when it
became obvious Charissa had the doll and bird staged as friends who
got along splendidly, he decided to read the newspaper he’d bought
earlier that day.

Shad had purchased the paper with the
intention of looking through it while he waited for Charissa to be
brought to him at the park. But Shad had been too uptight to follow
through with that plan, so he was glad to have the chance to look
through it at all. He wasn’t particularly interested in St. Louis
news, but interest had little to do with Shad’s perusal of the
written word. Reading had once been a form of escape for him. And
although Shad no longer needed to escape, he was still a compulsive
reader.

He skimmed over the usual doom and gloom of
the national and local news, and even more quickly flipped through
the business section since he doubted there would be any articles
of relevance there. Just as Shad started to scan as quickly through
the sports section he suddenly hesitated.

His memory stirred. It beckoned him to return
to the business section and take a closer look at the
photographs.

Shad turned carefully through the pages in
reverse order. He looked closely at each picture until one near the
bottom of a middle page caused a ripple in his memory again.

There were two men in the snapshot. They were
standing on either side of one of those old fashioned arcade-style
video games, leaning toward each other and smiling at the camera.
The man on the right was a middle-aged fellow that Shad didn’t
recognize, but the man on the left....

His memory was a funny thing. Shad could
recall names almost reflexively, but assigning them to faces was
another matter. Whenever he initially met people Shad always had
trouble remembering what they looked like, and all the mnemonic
devices he tried didn’t help much. But once Shad actually got to
know people, their faces were forever etched in his mind. The man
on the left looked like he might be a little younger than his
partner. His appearance was distinguished with blonde hair trimmed
quite short and a generally athletic build except for a bit of a
bulge in the belly. But his eyes, his nose, his mouth, the shape of
his face....

Not even the passage of over twenty years had
changed those features on this person.

A dull tingle began creeping through Shad as
he turned his attention to the accompanying article. It discussed
how a once local computer game business had evolved into a
successful St. Louis chain of technology stores. Now the stores
were going to begin popping up all over the state. One of the two
original founders was the man pictured on the left, and his name
was Walden Palmer.

Walden Palmer ... Walden ... Walden...

...
Wally
.

Complete numbness settled over Shad as he
stared at the man in the photograph. It had probably been around
seven years since he’d even bothered to think about Wally. Even
whenever he had to consider the subject of child molestation, Shad
managed to not recall those three youthful years Wally “took care”
of him.

Now, over the next couple of minutes,
memories flooded into and flashed through his mind like images from
a very disjointed dream. Then Shad caught himself and with a little
more effort than usual banished those recollections.

A sort of eerie sickness crept through him,
the sensation one felt when he knew trouble was about to land on
him with both feet and there was no way to escape. Shad focused all
his cogitation on the present. But contemplating the present was no
better than remembering the past.

The man he’d always known only as Wally was
still loose in the public and still living in St. Louis and was
currently a successful chain store owner. How many young boys
frequented that business? How many were granted special favors
around the premises in exchange for “special favors” in private
with Wally?

How many boys had been subject to Wally’s
attention over the past twenty years?

A wave of guilt washed through Shad. It was
true that nearly ten years ago, after he turned eighteen, Shad
tried to track down Wally. He had even gone so far as to make
contact with that woman who gave birth to him. The only information
Shad had on Wally was the mere nickname, and he'd hoped that woman
would be able to provide him with more clues. But all she could –
or would – tell him about Wally was about how self-centered the man
was, which sounded to Shad like a serious episode of projection.
After she changed the subject to monopolize the conversation about
how Shad shouldn’t be wasting his money and other people’s time to
go to college, he was glad to end the only meeting he’d had with
that woman ever since the Delaneys brought him into their home.

With the miserable failure of that attempt,
Shad had given up trying to find Wally. He counseled himself with
the hope that even though Shad would be unable to turn Wally in for
prosecution, perhaps somebody else would.

Except now he could make up for his earlier
failure – no, wait, he couldn’t. Over a couple of months ago, when
Shad turned twenty-eight, the statute of limitations ran out for
him to file criminal charges against Wally. A surge of guilt pulsed
through him again.

He should have kept trying to locate Wally.
Over the past several years, in connection with his work and his
proficiency with computers, Shad had been able to track down
several people with no more than a name and a last known address.
It was no excuse that he had even less information about Wally.
Shad should have done ... something more.

Then again, Wally wasn’t
that
bad.
Yes, there had been a price for his attention, but of all the
boyfriends that lived with Shad and that woman, Wally was the only
one who never ignored him or yelled or struck Shad in any way. Shad
had been young enough when Wally was living with them he’d come to
the conclusion Wally was actually his father. When Wally had been
gone for a few days and some other guy moved in with them, Shad had
asked that woman where his father was. Once she figured out he was
talking about Wally, that woman informed Shad how stupid he was for
believing such a thing. For nearly four years after that, Shad
occasionally inquired about Wally whenever the boyfriend of the
time became especially unbearable. And because of his situation in
those days, Shad didn’t even realize that what Wally had done with
him was wrong.

When, years later and under the care of Mam
and Pap, Shad did learn that such actions were deviant, he didn’t
tell them about Wally. He never told them about any of that woman’s
boyfriends. Talking about the boyfriends would only make him think
about them, and Shad was determined to ignore that part of his past
as much as possible. He didn’t even tell them about Brody, the
other boyfriend Shad had bothered to track down.

Shad immediately suppressed memories of Brody
that started to percolate to the surface of his conscious. Ten
years ago he discovered that Brody was already in jail on multiple
charges. Shad became determined never to waste even seconds of his
life to any thought of Brody again.

With Wally untraceable for him and Brody
already incarcerated, Shad had managed to maintain his silence
about that dark era of his childhood. There was only one interval
of a few months he ever broke it, and that was only with Dulsie.
Even then all he mentioned to her was about the other boyfriends,
and Shad was relieved that Dulsie didn’t obsess on encouraging him
to divulge more. She respected silence. Her father Karl didn’t say
much about certain aspects of his own childhood, either, so Dulsie
understood such reluctance.

Of course Shad knew how the field of
psychology encouraged one to speak up about such issues in order to
better grapple with them, but he dismissed it as a generalization
that didn’t apply to everybody. What could possibly be healing
about burdening the people he cared for with knowledge about
something they couldn’t do anything about? He had spoken about a
few episodes to Dulsie only because he was courting her at the time
and Shad knew he had to show willingness to share himself.

Discovering Wally now could mean Shad might
have to break his long-held silence. A sizable part of him wished
he’d unpacked his laptop computer and worked on another case or
played a few games of solitaire instead of reading this newspaper.
If only Shad had wound up throwing that paper away without ever
having looked at it.

But there was no such thing as
coincidence.

He had to turn Wally in, but how? With the
statute of limitations already passed, Shad had little legal
recourse. It was true victims had the option until the age of
thirty-one to file civil claims in order to recover damages for
either physical or psychological injury. But that didn’t do Shad
any good.

Wally had never physically hurt him. And
despite all the shortcomings that happened in his head, Shad had
worked too hard at presenting himself as a relatively balanced
individual to claim Wally had caused him psychological harm. There
was one problem he used to have that some theorized might be evoked
by past episodes of molestation, but Shad didn’t believe that
theory and it was no longer a problem for him anyway. Even if it
were, he would
never
divulge it to anyone besides Dulsie.
And thanks to the grace of God, he’d never had to tell even
her.

Although Shad did suspect it was that very
problem that had soured his relationship with Dulsie’s mother,
Jill.

The train began slowing for the second time
since they’d left St. Louis to come to a stop. Shad found himself
snapped back to the present as Charissa scrambled to her knees to
better peer out the window.

“Where are we?” Charissa’s nose rubbed on the
pane as she turned her head to the left and then the right.

“Hermann. Our next stop will be in Jeff.”

Charissa turned her attention from the broad
and shimmering Missouri River on their side to the brick depot on
the other side of the car. “Are there any more tunnels?”

“Not on this trip.”

Charissa plopped back down on the seat. “Why
do they make tunnels?”

“Sometimes it’s easier to go through the
mountain than around it.”

Charissa frowned slightly as she stared at
the wide river outside the window. “I don’t see any mountains.”

“Well, today we call them hills.” Shad
realized he was grateful for the distraction Charissa was bringing
him.

“What happened to the mountains?”

“They’re hills now. In this area they were
eroded down from mountains. And before that a lot of this area used
to be under water.”

She looked out the window again. “The river
was bigger?”

“It wasn’t the river.” Shad bent over to pick
up a plastic horse that had fallen to the floor. “It was the
ocean.”

Charissa’s face brightened. “The ocean is
near here?”

Shad smiled. “Not anymore. Not for a long,
long time.” He set the toy back beside her. “It was back around the
time of the dinosaurs.”

“Oh.” Charissa looked disappointed. “I wanted
to go to the ocean.”

“I’m sure you’ll get to someday.”

“I hope so.” Charissa turned her attention
back to the window and her tone became a bit somber. “Maybe if I’m
good I’ll get to go to the ocean. I want to go out on a boat.”

His analytical ego shifted back into gear as
Shad contemplated her recent remark for a few seconds. Verbal abuse
was a foundation for other forms of abuse. Although Monica
confirmed that Demetri had never attacked her or Charissa
physically, it could sometimes take months or years for abuse to
progress to other levels. And Shad’s recent discovery made him
contemplate yet another possible violation Demetri could commit
against his daughter. Shad took a few more seconds to decide how to
word his question.

“What do you have to do to be good?”

Charissa didn’t look at him as she picked up
the doll she’d dropped to the seat when the train stopped. “What
Dad tells me.” Her earlier enthusiasm had vanished.

“What does your dad tell you to do?”

“To be good.” Charissa looked at Shad a bit
earnestly. “Read me a story.”

This had to be payback for all those times
Mam and Pap had gently tried to question Shad about his life before
he moved in with them, and he always found a way to avoid
answering. If only they’d been able to hire a good lawyer, Wally
might already be in jail by now. Of course Shad probably wouldn’t
be
here
, then, but rather at a career in computer
technology.

That gut feeling haunted him again as
Charissa picked up one of the books pulled from the day pack and
handed it to him without even looking at which one it was. Her type
of case was exactly the sort of situation that made Shad accept the
incongruous idea of becoming an attorney. His practice in private
and family law usually involved mortgages, property, estates and
wills. Shad didn’t handle nearly the number of adoptions he would
have preferred, but since becoming a small town attorney in a
two-office partnership a year and a half ago, Shad knew that would
be the case. Plenty of people came through his door seeking a
divorce, but Shad would only take cases that involved protecting
the rights of the victimized.