The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel) by Loreth Anne White Page B

claimed this was technical error, and that the presence of other DNA did not clear Jeb. But based on this the judge threw out Jeb’s conviction, saying that had this evidence been presented by the defense counsel in the initial trial, it would have raised reasonable doubt.
    The judge did not rule, however, that Jeb was innocent.
    The result, claimed one newspaper columnist, was a violent man being set free. Another columnist argued that the police, the prosecutors, and the defense lawyers had all developed tunnel vision in an “overzealous” attempt to secure a conviction for a man they all believed was guilty of a heinous crime in a small community. In doing so, they’d shot themselves in the foot because a guilty man now walked free because of it.
    Jeb himself refused any interviews.
    I click on a photo and Jeb’s face fills my screen. Simmering, dark, sensual. A young Jeb. The way I knew and loved him. His father’s smiling Irish eyes, wickedly sensual at times, and at others, so full of deep mystery. One look from those eyes used to melt my stomach, give my skin tingles. I sip my drink and feel warmth spread through my chest—even now his eyes still do it for me, just in this photo. God, what am I going to do with myself? How am I going to rid myself of these twisted, conflicted memories? These feelings? It’s not easy to describe the depth of what I once felt for Jeb. I don’t think many people can understand what we had.
    When he first came to Snowy Creek Elementary, I was fascinated with him. He seemed apart from everyone else, mysterious. Special. He appealed to something in my imagination. He disappeared later that year, when his father died, but he returned to school the following spring. We became friends, kicking a ball on the bottom fields during lunch. Gradually he began to show me my own world through new eyes. It was the first time, I think, that I realized there were people in this world, like the First Nations community in the valley over, who thought and lived in a different way. It became an adventure, exciting. I started to meet him outside school, and while my girlfriends were hanging out in the village and shopping and going to movies, he and I went on adventures in the woods. He set the tomboy in me free. We played. We discovered. He allowed me to remain a kid inside my heart far longer than my peers. And slowly we grew into our respective sexuality. It was a thrilling sensation, to touch him, have him touch me. Jeb quite simply became part of me. Of who I was.
    And then he told me his deepest, darkest secret. He told me why he had disappeared that first winter.
    It was the ultimate confession. The ultimate bond of trust. And I betrayed that trust. In the trial. I used his deepest, most personal secret to help send him away. Guilt whispers through me.
    I click on another photo, this one taken outside the courthouse near the start of the first trial just over eight years ago. In this image the angle of the sun accentuates Jeb’s dusky skin, the flare of his cheekbones. His long black hair gleams. I can see his tattoo—the angry, masculine mouth of a coho swimming up his neck. Jeb told me once that the coho salmon possessed three traits he valued most: courage, tenacity, and a ferocity of purpose at the end game.
    I wonder, now, about his own end game.
    Gently, I brush the screen with my fingertips, touching his face. Familiar feelings of hurt and affection mushroom inside me. With them come the anger, hatred, and bitterness of betrayal, and it all swims like an oily cocktail in my gut. This man raped and left my schoolmate for dead. Quinn’s mother, Amy. Another schoolmate is still missing, presumed murdered. The judge has not said he was innocent of this. There is still no one else the police are looking at for the crime. That’s because the cops still believe he did it. It’s because there’s no one else they even suspect. Everything still points to Jeb.
    I curse and swallow the rest of