Through the Darkness

CHAPTER 23

Roger’s death was ruled a suicide. Cassandra was cleared.

Featured in the July issue of Spa magazine, Paradiso continued to thrive, but the same wasn’t true of the Shemansky marriage.

To be fair to my son-in-law, he was as clueless, I believe, as the rest of us. It took an article in the Sunday supplement of the Philadelphia Inquirer to clear up some of the mystery surrounding the Barnhorst case. While remaining mute for the cops, Joanna Barnhorst had spilled all for a reporter who showed up at the federal prison, serious cash inducements in hand.

Dante’s college relationship with Joanna had been common knowledge. No one disagreed with that. Then Dante had ended the affair and abandoned her-Barnhorst’s words, not Dante’s-for a life in Colorado with my daughter.

What nobody knew, except Joanna and her gynecologist, was that Joanna had been three months’ pregnant at the time.

Barnhorst claimed in the article that she’d informed Dante of the pregnancy, but he’d dropped out of school and fled, rather than face up to his responsibilities and a shotgun marriage to a woman he no longer loved.

She’d had no choice (the reporter wrote that Joanna sobbed uncontrollably for some twenty minutes at this point) but to terminate the pregnancy. Later, when Joanna Kerr married and became Joanna Barnhorst, she found she could no longer have children. When her husband divorced her for that, the article claimed, it had sent the poor girl reeling right over the edge.

“That’s bullshit!” Dante exploded when he learned about the pregnancy. “She never said a word to me, not a fucking word.” He shook his head, his ponytail flopping. “Besides, I always used a condom. Always.”

Emily glowered. “Condoms don’t always work, you bonehead.”

The Pennsylvania State Police, we learned from the article, had confirmed the surgical procedure, but she’d not named the child’s father at the time. After all these years, there was no way to prove whether the child Joanna aborted had been Dante’s.

“If she had only told me,” Dante continued, “all this, uh, unpleasantness might never have happened.”

Dante was making a good point. Why hadn’t Joanna told him about her pregnancy? I wondered. I thought back to my own college days, trying to put myself in Joanna’s shoes. Either the child wasn’t Dante’s, as he so clearly wanted to believe, or she had been afraid to tell him about the baby.

“What kind of man would abandon his pregnant girlfriend and elope with another woman?” Emily asked me during a quiet, and increasingly rare, mother-daughter moment as we worked side by side in her utility room, catching up on the laundry.

“You don’t know that he did, Emily.”

Emily seemed to have aged ten years in the past week. Worry lines had deepened on her brow, and not all of them, I thought, could be blamed on Timmy.

“How can I live with him now?”

“A marriage has to be based on trust,” I reminded my daughter as I added a scoop of soap powder to the washer. Then I gave her some advice my mother had given me when Paul and I had been going through a rough patch.

“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth. The only people who do are Joanna and Dante. You’ll have to make up your mind one way or the other: either he fathered and knowingly abandoned that child, or he didn’t. Then, you decide if you can live with that.”

“What do you think, Mom?” Emily asked, tears pooling in her eyes.

“What I think isn’t important. It’s what you think.”

“But Dad never cheated on you.”

“No, but I didn’t find that out, not for certain, until years later. What it all comes down to, Emily, is trust.” I gathered her hands in mine. “Do you trust your husband?”

The tears spilled over and rolled down her cheeks. “I don’t know, Mom. I just don’t know.”

Emily was wrestling with personal demons, too. “I helped hound a man to his death,” she confessed to me later that same afternoon. “Roger was guilty of pedophilia, that was true. But, I know now that he never would have harmed Timmy. Oh my God, Mother, I feel so terrible about that. Roger was a creep, but he didn’t deserve to die.”

“Nobody deserves to die,” I said. “But we all do. Some of us sooner, some of us later.”

“Mom,” Emily said with a sudden smirk and a reassuring sarcastic twinkle in her eye. “Sometimes you are so profound.”