Chapter 29 #2
It would be my word against his, and it was true that I’d found him attractive, even sexy. But I never meant for anything like that to happen. I told Dot it was my fault for being so stupid as to invite him to dinner. Maybe he misinterpreted the gesture.
“Maybe he did,” she replied. “But there’s no excuse for the rest of it.”
Nobody reading the story I wrote would imagine that my day with Mitch had ended the way it did. That afternoon I was going through the press basket at the police department when an officer informed me that Mitch needed to see me in his office immediately.
Oh God, I thought. No, no, no…!
“Do you know what he wants?” I asked as my mouth went dry.
“Only that he needs to see you. Pronto.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
Maybe he intended to apologize. Hopefully, he wanted us to get past this. Or he was going to make an excuse. Worse, he might pretend it didn’t happen as he told me how much he liked the story I’d written. And he did tell me that before assaulting me again inside his office with the door locked.
That was the last time I ever saw him except once or twice in my rearview mirror while he followed my car. I took it as a warning. I’d better keep my mouth shut. He was making sure I didn’t forget, and I suspect he enjoyed the rush it gave him to overpower another human being.
I didn’t tell Charlie what happened, and he didn’t ask.
It wasn’t until a week or so later that the truth came out.
Not long before my day with Mitch, he and I had appeared on a local TV show together discussing crime in Charlotte.
It was airing over the weekend and Charlie wanted to watch it.
The minute it came on, I started crying.
“Something happened with him, didn’t it?” Charlie asked, and it was then I knew he’d suspected it all along.
I told him the details, and that was the beginning of the end for us even if we didn’t know it yet.
Charlie was angry and hurt, the subject often coming up when we’d fight.
Eleven years later in March 1993, I referenced this in my journal.
I said that Charlie “continued to throw the rape in my face, saying I wanted it to happen.”
“No, I didn’t! You know I didn’t!” I would exclaim. “How can you not see what it did to me too?”
I thought about what detectives had told me about rape.
Often it ends with the victim getting a divorce.
Charlie and I tried to go on as usual, but now there was something between us.
He claimed I’d cheated on him. No matter what I said, that’s how he felt.
Mitch had taken away his power too, and Charlie didn’t know how to recover from that.
I blamed myself the same way I did when the patrolman molested me.
If I were stronger and braver, these things wouldn’t happen.
I didn’t talk about the assault publicly until some twenty years later.
In 2002, BBC did an hourlong show that aired on October 30.
The focus was my investigation into the Jack the Ripper case.
But during the interview I talked about past traumas that have shaped me.
“I think that I am a poster child for what the average victim feels like,” I said to producer Francis Whately.
“I was sexually assaulted when I worked at The Charlotte Observer. I don’t want to say by who because there was never a court case…
I think one of the reasons I have so much compassion for victims is because I know what it feels like to be one.
In my case part of the way I fight back is through my work and in defending those people who can’t defend themselves, even if they are dead. ”
I was asked about this in other interviews and would tell what I remembered without giving up the high-ranking official’s identity.
I echo what happened in my first published Scarpetta novel, Postmortem (1990), when reporter Abby Turnbull reveals that she was raped by the city’s commonwealth’s attorney Bill Boltz.
Fiction, yes. But what inspired it isn’t, although the offender wasn’t a local prosecutor.
People who know me well have heard the story, and that it’s one of the few traumas in my life that I would uncreate if possible.
I can see the good in most things no matter how unpleasant.
But not what that man did, and I wasn’t the only person he hurt.
Charlie couldn’t get past what happened.
If there was any chance of us surviving as a couple, the assault destroyed it.
It ruined my interest in journalism. I hated the police beat after that.
When I’d show up for my shift, I’d hope nothing would happen.
I didn’t want to cover it and took no initiative.
I’d ride around in the staff car feeling numb and totally lacking in motivation.
When I’d drive home at midnight, I’d stop for a beer that I’d guzzle while seeing how fast my old BMW would go.
The broken speedometer of course lied, but the RPMs didn’t.
A few weeks later, I gave notice at The Charlotte Observer.
My editors had known for several months that I was leaving because Charlie had resigned his tenured position at Davidson.
He’d decided to become a Presbyterian minister, much to my disappointment.
That wasn’t what I’d signed up for, but I wanted him to be happy, and we’d begun looking at seminaries.
He decided on Union Theological in Richmond, Virginia.
Instead of quitting the newspaper at the start of summer, I did it in mid-April because my heart wasn’t in the job anymore.
Also, I was scared that my rapist would have me conveniently eliminated.
How easy that would be as I rode around all hours of the night.
Risk-taker that I was, should I end up shot to death in my staff car or in a bad part of town, it wouldn’t have come as a huge surprise.
But before I walked out of the Observer newsroom for the last time, I had one final story I felt compelled to write.
I doubted I’d return to journalism ever again and needed to do this now no matter how awful I felt about myself.
The world didn’t know Ruth Graham and should.
It was selfish to keep her all to myself.
After what had just happened to me, I didn’t feel worthy of the task.
At the same time, I knew Ruth better than anyone.
In my own way I wanted to honor and thank her for all she’d done.
It seemed I’d not turned out well despite her unflagging efforts, but that was beside the point.
I called and asked if we could talk in person, and she said yes, sounding congested and groggy.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m fine, honey.”
Driving to her house, I discovered her in bed recovering from a cold. I remember she had a pot of her homemade vegetable soup simmering on the stove. Ruth smelled like Rose Milk when I hugged her. Moving a chair close to her bed, I pitched my idea of a big newspaper profile.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“I promise it will be good.”
“I don’t want it.”
“But people need to know you,” I argued.
“No, they don’t.”
“I’ll do a really good job and let you look at it first.”
“No way.”
“If you don’t let me, it will be the only selfish thing I’ve ever known you to do,” I then said to her surprise.
“Boy, that’s really hitting below the belt.”
“Not because you’d be denying me the privilege, Ruth. But you’d be denying the world your influence.”
“And it would be better off.”
I reminded her of what she’d done for me. I wouldn’t be the same person had she not come along. As far as I was concerned, she’d saved my life. I suggested that if she liked the profile I wrote, maybe she’d let me do her biography.
“I don’t want a biography,” she coughed, snatching another tissue out of the box.
“Well, someone will do it one of these days.”
“Not with my help.” Her eyes were glassy as she blew her nose.
“Consider the newspaper story an audition?” I suggested. “If you hate it, I won’t bug you about this ever again.”
“I’ll let you do the story,” she reluctantly decided at the end of our visit. “But you’re not doing my biography.”