Funeral for a Friend

10

“Ms. Jantzik?” Serena said when Andrea opened the door. “My name is—”

“I know who you are,” Andrea interrupted. Her blue eyes were hard, and her voice had all the ice of a Duluth January. “I’m not Ms. Jantzik anymore. I haven’t been for years. Jantzik was my name when I was married to my first husband. I’m Andrea Forseth now.”

“Of course.”

“I was also Andrea Stride for a while, but you know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You’ve got a fucking lot of nerve coming here,” she went on.

“I realize this is awkward—”

“Awkward? Is that what you call it? The bitch who stole my husband showing up at my door?”

“If I could just explain—”

“Does Jon know you’re here?” Andrea interrupted again. “He just left. Is this supposed to be some sort of good cop — bad cop routine? First him and now you?”

“He doesn’t know I’m here,” Serena said.

Stride’s ex-wife folded her arms across her chest. “Oh, so what, were you following him? Are you afraid he’s cheating on you? Sleeping with me? That would be pretty ironic, wouldn’t it?”

Serena felt slapped, but she hadn’t expected anything less. “I’m really not here to talk about me and Stride, Ms. Forseth.”

“Well, that’s too bad, because I want to talk about it. I’ve wanted to talk about it for six years.”

Serena nodded. “Okay. That’s fair. Say whatever you want.”

“I want to talk about you coming to Duluth and fucking my husband. Jon and I may not have had the best marriage, but that didn’t give you the right to spread your legs for him.”

“You’re right,” Serena admitted, doing her best to stay calm.

“You and your showgirl hair and big tits. Is that the way women get their men in Vegas? Because here in Minnesota, we call that being a whore and a slut.”

“I understand that you may feel that way, and I don’t blame you.”

“I know what happened between Stride and Maggie, by the way. I saw that one coming a mile away. How did it feel, him cheating on you?”

“Awful. It felt awful.”

“Good. Now you know how it was for me. Like I was dirt. Like I was worthless. And you married him anyway? Even after he slept with her? You’re brave, thinking he won’t do it again.”

Serena waited for Andrea to run out of venom. This wasn’t a time for explanations. She could have talked about the walls that she and Jonny had built for themselves, about the guilt and grief that had shadowed their attraction, about the many mistakes they’d both made on the way to realizing they were meant to be together. But none of that mattered. Not to this woman.

“I’m sorry,” Serena said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry. That’s all. I have no excuses. I’m six years late in apologizing. Jonny did that a long time ago, but I should have done it, too. In person. He and I made a terrible mistake back then. He felt that your marriage was over, and I think you felt the same way, but I was wrong to allow myself to get in the middle of it the way I did. I won’t tell you that I feel bad or that I would take it back, because the fact is, I found the love of my life and I married him. But I’m still sorry.”

“Do you think that changes anything?” Andrea asked.

“No. Not a thing.”

Andrea breathed loudly through her nose. Her face twitched. She was still angry, but she’d already fired both barrels, and she looked too tired to reload.

“So what do you want?” Andrea asked. “Why are you here?”

“Do you mind if I come in? Just for a minute?”

Andrea made no move to open the door wider. “We can talk right here. What is this about?”

“I assume Stride told you about the discovery of Ned Baer’s body.”

The other woman shrugged without replying, but her body language said yes. Andrea knew.

“Did he tell you that he’s been suspended from the department?” Serena asked. “He removed himself from the investigation, because he covered up facts seven years ago and lied about a meeting that he had with Baer shortly before he was killed.”

“So what?” Andrea said.

“I think you know what that meeting was really about.”

“Well, you’ll have to ask him, not me.”

Serena glanced at the quiet street behind her. She understood the dimensions of the challenge she faced. She needed Andrea to open up about the most wrenching personal experience of her life, and Serena was about the last person on earth this woman would ever choose to confide in.

“See, the thing is, Andrea,” Serena went on, allowing herself to use her first name. “You and I both know Stride. No one knows him better than the two of us. No matter what mistakes he’s made, he’s an honorable man. If he lied in an investigation seven years ago, he had a reason for it. And the only reason I can imagine is to protect someone he loved. In other words, you.”

Andrea shrugged. “I have nothing to say.”

“Of course. I understand. I don’t expect you to share your secrets with a stranger, particularly me. Except I did my research on Ned Baer. I know what he was doing in Duluth. I know he was here to identify the woman who made an anonymous allegation of rape against Devin Card. And I’m pretty sure that woman was you.”

She could see the pieces of Andrea’s composure breaking apart, and she didn’t blame her for that.

“You need to leave,” Andrea said.

“Please. Give me just another minute. I want to tell you a story.”

“I’m not interested in your stories.”

“Please,” Serena said again. “After that, if you want me to go, I’ll go.”

Andrea held the front door tightly, as if her instinct was to slam it shut. “One minute.”

“Thank you.” Serena had to swallow hard and summon her own courage to get the words out. “I don’t share this with many people, but I think you’ll understand when I tell you. I grew up in Phoenix, not Las Vegas. Vegas was where I ran away to. You see, when I was fifteen years old, my mother became a drug addict. Addiction runs in our genes. I’m an alcoholic. My mother’s drug problem destroyed our family. My father left. Ran away, left me alone with her. My mother blew through all the money, lost our house, lost her job, lost everything.”

“I really don’t see how—” Andrea began.

Serena held up a hand. “Wait. Please. Let me finish. After we were homeless, we moved in with her drug dealer. I was sixteen. My mother couldn’t pay to feed her habit, so I became the payment. I became his property. I’m sure you can guess what that meant. For months, he raped me every day, and my mother did nothing. I had no way out. It wasn’t until I got pregnant, and had an abortion, that I finally realized I had to run.”

Andrea’s face was pale and frozen. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because there is not a day of my life, not one, that I don’t carry the scars of what he did to me. For years, being raped as a teenager defined who I was. Even after I ran away to Vegas, I was always scared. I woke up angry every day. I still don’t need to dig very far to find that anger. It destroyed how I thought about men for years. It ruined my sexuality for years. It almost killed me. I was suicidal. So when I meet another woman who has experienced that kind of horror, all I can say is, I get it.”

Andrea was silent, but a single teardrop slipped from her eye. She wiped it away and nervously smoothed her bobbed hair. She opened the door without a word and waved Serena into the living room that faced the street. Serena took a seat in a stiff backed, uncomfortable armchair near the window, and Andrea sat opposite her on a claw-foot beige sofa. The furniture didn’t encourage guests to stay any longer than necessary.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Serena said softly. “You were the one who made the accusation. Devin Card raped you when you were a teenager.”

Andrea didn’t look at her, but her head nodded almost imperceptibly.

“I’m so sorry for what you went through,” Serena said.

Andrea shook her head with a kind of wonder. “Jon said it was probably going to come out. Did he tell you? Is that how you knew?”

“No. He kept your secret. I just know Stride.”

“I suppose you think I should have come forward years ago,” Andrea said.

“I don’t think that at all. I would never dream of judging a woman in your position.”

Andrea peered back in time through a haze of memory. “I was seventeen when it happened. Jesus, I can’t believe that was almost thirty years ago.”

“The amount of time doesn’t matter at all.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“I’m still that girl,” Serena said.

Andrea nodded. “Me, too.”

“I know it’s hard, but can you tell me what happened?”

Andrea hesitated, but her demeanor had changed. Her anger had washed away for the moment. Then she started talking.

“I was shy. Into science, which made me a little weird for a girl back then. I tried fitting in — hell, I was even a cheerleader for a while — but I kept crawling back into my shell. I dated a few times, but never even felt comfortable kissing boys. My sister, Denise, was the party girl. She kept telling me I should let loose a little.”

Serena waited. She watched Andrea gathering the emotional strength to go on.

“There was this party crawl one summer. It was sometime in August, I don’t remember exactly when. I went with Denise and a bunch of her friends to a concert, and then we started going from house to house. There must have been a couple dozen of us. I’d never had alcohol before, but I drank a lot. You get that’s why I didn’t want to tell anybody, right? I knew they’d say it was my fault.”

“I do,” Serena said.

“It was after midnight. We were at somebody’s house, but I really have no idea whose house it was. We’d been to so many. I was drunk. The lights were low. It was so crowded you could hardly move. The music was so loud you had to shout to the person next to you. And there were these two guys flirting with me. Older guys, college guys. One was Devin Card. The other was a friend of his, a rich kid, Peter Stanhope.”

Serena closed her eyes. That was a name she didn’t want to hear. “Peter Stanhope? Are you sure?”

“Yes, why?”

“Never mind. Go on, please.”

Andrea shook her head bitterly. “See, I knew that’s what everyone would ask me. Are you sure? Was it really them? Maybe you forgot. Maybe you made a mistake. How much did you have to drink? But I know it was those two. I knew Peter. Everybody did, because of his father. And I knew Devin, too.”

“What happened?” Serena asked softly.

“Devin was handsome. The coolest kid at the party. He’d been drinking, I’d been drinking, and the next thing I knew, we were making out on the sofa. I’d never even had a boyfriend, and there I was, with this stud telling me how pretty I was, how soft my lips were, all that bullshit. He asked if I wanted to go upstairs with him, and I said sure. Yes. Absolutely. We went upstairs and found the master bedroom and started kissing on the bed. He began to take off my clothes. That’s when I freaked. I was feeling sick from drinking, and suddenly I was lying on a bed with some guy I’d just met, and he was pulling off my shirt. So I told him no. I told him to stop. I said I didn’t want to do this, that I was a virgin, that he needed to leave. I remember saying the magic word: stop. And then I don’t remember exactly how it all happened after that. I think I passed out or something, but when I came to, I was naked, and he was on top of me. He was inside me. I was crying and saying no, no, no, but he kept going. And when he was finished, I just grabbed my clothes and ran out of there.”

“Did anyone see you?” Serena asked.

“No. There was a balcony outside the bedroom right over the garage. I left that way. I had to jump down from the garage. I couldn’t go back to the party. I didn’t want anyone to see me.”

Andrea got to her feet with a kind of proud stiffness. She went to the fireplace in the living room and rubbed a finger along the wooden mantel. There was no dust anywhere. Serena understood; everything had to be clean.

“Do you remember where the house was?” Serena asked.

“No.”

“Do you remember anything about it?”

“No.” Then Andrea blinked, as if a memory had come back like the flash of a camera. “There was a castle.”

“A castle? Like a children’s playhouse?”

She shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. I just remember running past a castle. It made me think of princesses locked away.”

“Wasn’t your sister worried when you disappeared from the party?” Serena asked.

“Denise? She probably didn’t even notice I was gone.”

“Where did you go?”

“I ran home. I just wanted to forget it. I wanted to pretend it had never happened. But you can’t wish things like that away. I was like you. Every day, every single day, it was there with me. It was with me when I married Robin. It was with me when I married Jon. I didn’t tell either of them. Nobody knew. It was my dirty little secret. As far as I was concerned, I was going to keep it forever. I probably would have, too, if Devin hadn’t run for Congress. It was hard enough seeing him as the Attorney General. Really? Him? The state’s top lawyer? But when he ran for Congress, I kept seeing his face on television, and I kept him hearing him pretend to be something he wasn’t. A defender of women’s rights. What a hypocrite. I had to do something. I couldn’t stay quiet. I had an attorney draft a letter telling my story. I really just wanted to scare him. I thought if he knew I was out there, if he knew the truth might come out, he’d drop out of the race and save himself the scandal. Instead, someone leaked the letter to the press. All of a sudden, everyone was looking for me. The only story in the whole world seemed to be about the anonymous woman accusing Devin Card of rape. And if they found me — do you have any idea what that would have been like?”

“I think I do,” Serena said.

“I was going to be crucified. They’d destroy me. If my name got out there, they’d tear open everything in my life. Believe me when I tell you I wasn’t strong enough to handle it. I spent that whole summer living in terror that some reporter would figure out it was me.”

Serena let the silence stretch out. “And Ned Baer did?”

Andrea nodded. “He came to see me. He had an old yearbook from my high school class. He said he was looking into a big party crawl that happened around the time of the allegations, and he had reason to think Peter Stanhope and Devin Card had been at some of the parties that night. He was interviewing girls from our high school yearbook to find out what they remembered. He had no idea I was the one, but I was panicked by his questions, and I think he could see that. I’m sure I gave it away. After that, he must have been looking for ways to confirm it was me. He began following me. I think he broke into my house, too. I kept waiting for him to come back, and a few weeks later, he did. That was late August. He said he knew it was me, that he wanted to interview me about the rape, but that he had enough evidence to print it one way or another. He was going to expose me. I was desperate, Serena.”

Serena could see the fragility in this woman’s face. Thirty years later, and she was still seventeen. She had never known this woman before; she’d only known the stories Stride had told, of her coldness, of her distance, of her obsession with her first husband. But suddenly Andrea Forseth was a real person. And they had something in common.

“What did you do?” Serena asked.

Andrea stared across the living room and said the last thing that Serena wanted to hear.

“I told Stride,” she said. “I finally told him everything about my past, and I told him what Ned Baer was going to do to me. I begged him for help. I said if he loved me, he would find a way to make sure Ned Baer didn’t print that story. I said he had to stop him.”