LITMIR.BIZ

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at eleven.”

       CHAPTER FIVE

      TONI GILLETTI WAS SURROUNDED BY WATER. Seawater. It was pitch-black and cold, and her saturated clothes stuck cold and clammy to her skin, like seaweed. Gradually it dawned on her. I’m in a cave. The water was rising, slowly but surely, each wave higher than the last.

      Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.

      Blind, clawing at the walls, Toni groped desperately for an opening, a way out. How had she gotten in here in the first place? Had someone brought her here, to punish her? She couldn’t remember. But if there was a way in, there must be a way out. She had to find it, fast.

      The water was at her shoulders.

      Her ears.

      HELP!

      Toni’s scream echoed off the cave walls. Unheard. Unanswered.

      Water was in her mouth, salty, choking. It flowed down into her lungs, robbing her of air, drowning her slowly. She couldn’t breathe!

      Please, somebody help me!

      “Miss Toni. Miss Toni! It’s all right.”

      Toni sat up in bed, gasping for breath. Wild-eyed and terrified … her nightdress soaked with sweat. “Carmen?”

      The Gillettis’ Spanish housekeeper nodded reassuringly. “Sí, Miss Toni. It’s okay. Only you are dreaming. It’s okay.”

      Toni slumped back against the pillows as reality reasserted itself.

      She wasn’t drowning.

      She wasn’t at Camp Williams.

      She was in her own bedroom, at home in New Jersey.

      But Carmen was wrong. Everything was not okay.

      Billy Hamlin was going to be tried for murder.

      The whole thing was ridiculous. So ridiculous that Toni had confidently expected to hear with each passing day that the charges were being dropped, that it was all a huge, horrible mistake. She’d had no chance to speak to Billy since his arrest, but she’d pieced together what had happened through the Camp Williams grapevine. Evidently Billy had told the cops that he had been in charge of Nicholas and the other boys when the accident happened, not Toni. He’d also admitted to having drugs in his system, presumably to deflect the heat from Toni, who he knew had prior convictions. That must have been what he meant when he told her he “wouldn’t let” the police throw the book at her.

      At first Toni was so relieved, she felt overwhelmed with gratitude. No one had ever stuck their neck out like that for her before, certainly not a boy. Boys all wanted to sleep with her, but none of them actually cared, not like Billy did. But it wasn’t long before the romantic gesture turned hideously sour. The Handemeyer family, furious over the drug allegations and in desperate need of someone to blame for their son’s death, insisted on pressing charges. Nicholas’s father was a senator and one of the richest men in Maine. Senator Handemeyer wanted Billy Hamlin’s head on a pike, and he was powerful enough to force the D.A.’s hand. Soon Billy’s little white lie to protect Toni had become national news, and Toni’s relief turned to constant, gut-wrenching fear.

      Parents all over America identified with the Handemeyer family’s grief. To lose a child was always horrific. But to lose an only son, at seven years old, and in such appalling circumstances; it was more than people could bear. And what did it say about modern society that a drug-addled teenager would be left in charge of a group of vulnerable children?

      Overnight Billy Hamlin’s handsome, nineteen-year-old face was on every news channel and in every paper as the poster child for a selfish, hedonistic generation. Of course he hadn’t actually murdered the Handemeyer boy. Everybody knew that the case would be thrown out once it got to court, that in his grief Senator Handemeyer had gone too far. Yet people were pleased that the post-Vietnam generation should be somehow called to account. Two weeks before the trial, Newsweek ran an article about the trial with a shot of Billy, long-haired and bare-chested, next to a picture of dear little Nicholas Handemeyer in his school uniform, complete with tie. Below the images ran the simple, two-word headline:

      WHAT HAPPENED?

      They weren’t asking what had happened on the beach that idyllic day at a children’s summer camp in Maine. They were asking what had happened to America’s youth. What happened to decency, to the nation’s moral fiber.

      Billy Hamlin’s trial was set for October. As it drew nearer, Toni Gilletti’s nerves stretched closer and closer to breaking point. She still didn’t know if she would be asked to testify, and had no idea what she would say if she were. She knew she ought to come forward, to tell the world that it was she, and not poor, blameless Billy, who had allowed Nicholas Handemeyer to die. But every time she picked up the telephone to dial the D.A.’s office and tell the truth, her nerve failed her. When it came down to the wire, Billy was the one who had the strength, not Toni. She simply couldn’t do it.

      Meanwhile, the dreams got worse.

      She longed to talk about them to someone, to unburden herself of the guilt and anguish, to talk openly about what had happened that fateful afternoon at the beach. But who could she talk to? Her girlfriends were all gossips and bitches. Charles Braemar Murphy hadn’t called once since the day she left Camp Williams. As for her parents, her father was too obsessed with how the negative publicity might affect his business to give a damn about his daughter’s emotional state. Walter Gilletti acted quickly to keep his Toni’s name out of the papers, issuing preemptive injunctions against a number of media outlets and TV networks, and had kept Toni under virtual house arrest since she got home. But that was as far as his paternal support went. As for Toni’s mother, Sandra, she was too busy shopping, playing bridge with her girlfriends, and self-medicating to question Toni about what had really happened on the beach that day, or how she might be feeling.

      Forcing herself out of bed, Toni walked into the bathroom. Splashing cold water on her face, she gazed at her reflection in the mirror.

      You left Nicholas Handemeyer to die, frightened and alone.

      You let Billy Hamlin take the rap for what YOU did.

      You’re a coward and a liar, and one day everybody will know it.

      The trial would begin in six days.

       CHAPTER SIX

      “HOW DO I LOOK?”

      Billy Hamlin turned to face his father. Standing in his sparse, six-by-eight-foot cell, his blond hair newly cut and wearing a dark wool Brooks Brothers suit and tie, Billy looked more like a young attorney than the accused in a major murder trial.

      “You look good, son. Smart. Serious. You’re gonna come through this.”

      The last three months had been a living hell for Jeff Hamlin. The carpenter from Queens could have coped with the malicious local gossip about his son. He could have dealt with the loss of half his customers and the judgmental glares of the women from his church, St. Luke’s Presbyterian, the same church he and Billy had attended for the last fifteen years. But having to sit back impotently while his adored son’s character was defiled on national television, torn to shreds by ignorant strangers who called Billy a monster and evil and a murderer? That broke Jeff Hamlin’s heart. The trial itself might be a travesty—no one, not even the Handemeyers, seriously doubted that Billy would be acquitted of the murder charge—but whether the boy was acquitted or not, the entire country would forever remember Jeff Hamlin’s son as the druggie who let an innocent boy drown.

      The worst of it was that Billy had done nothing of the kind. Unlike the police, Jeff Hamlin hadn’t swallowed Billy’s story for a second.

      “He wasn’t the one in charge of those kids,” Jeff told Billy’s

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