Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [5]
“It must be easy to fall in love with an underage girl, they’re so sweet, but it must be very hard to find a safe way to express that love.”
“Bullshit. You don’t see grown women falling in love with underage boys.”
“There was that teacher in Seattle.”
“Looney tunes.”
“Why couldn’t I have had a teacher like that? Talk about learning something useful.”
“That was strange in the extreme. And she’s in prison for it, don’t forget.”
“Still, it happened. I think it happens a lot, but a real adult knows how to deal with it. A real adult knows how to sit and watch his impulses, watch them until they pass away, knows he don’t have to be controlled by them. Like Houser was.”
If I thought about it at all, I might agree, but on the subject of Charles T. Houser and Stacey all I could think about was they were the reason I was on this boring road instead of home in my own bed.
Maybe it was the night and the lonely road. I’d never heard Odd talk so much. I was already hoping it wouldn’t carry over to the long return trip during which he might try to get into the prisoner’s head, and I would have to say that we shouldn’t talk to him without a lawyer in the car.
“What’s Houser, thirty-two, thirty-three?” asked Odd.
Around that, as I recalled. Like Odd himself.
“A fourteen-year-old girl is impressed by the attentions of a man that age.” He waited for me to confirm, and when I didn’t, he said, “Isn’t she?”
“Well, it’s a new-found power. She’s either scared or euphoric, but mostly she’s embarrassed by the sheer inappropriateness of it.”
“That’s the way it was with you?”
“My father’s friends, teachers, dentists…in a word, icky.”
“Still, I think a lot of young girls are longing for someone to make them feel special.”
I asked him how he knew so much about young girls, and he said it was only logical. “But no matter what happens,” he said, “she’s innocent. You can’t blame her, no matter how enticing she was. The man is an adult, he’s my age. He has a responsibility, he can’t let anything happen, no matter how intense it gets or how natural it seems. He can’t let it go too far.”
Houser did, though, I pointed out. That’s why we were here…but where were we? Nowhere yet. Washington prairie.
I knew Odd Gunderson pretty well, as well as you know a guy you work with and see everyday. We buddied up a lot, I was drawn to him, in a non-sexual way. He was a good guy, and I liked him. At those times when you had to partner up, he would ask for me and I would ask for him. He was in the volley ball league, had great legs, was a ferocious spiker, a good competitor. He would have a beer with us after the game, some microbrew on tap, and sit quietly while the rest of us swapped war stories, but he’d cut out early and wind up later at The Box with that young civilian crowd, drinking cosmopolitans.
He was devoted to lawfulness, and that made him a good cop, but I always had the feeling he was not cut out for police work, and I never knew why he got into it. By the end of this detail, I would know. He couldn’t be anything else. Before that, though, as I said, I saw an okay cop, a good volleyball spiker, one of the guys, with a life apart from the badge, a guy who maybe just examined things a bit deeper than the rest of us, those of us who were afraid to look too closely for fear of falling in, which in the end I did, holding onto Odd’s sleeve, so to speak.
“What does he do to get this off him?” he asked.
What? Who?
“Houser, the grown-up. He’s going to jail…”
Yes, and us taking him there.
“Will that do it? Will that remove the stain? Or does he, I don’t know, have to do something? What would a person have to do to counterbalance letting his lust take him where it shouldn’t go?”
I recalled at that moment that Odd was a Lutheran, which is not a faith known for its proselytizing but for its love of guilt. I was half-waiting for him to suggest that Charles T.’s only hope now was to accept Jesus as his personal savior and commence a meaningful relationship. But that was other guys