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“When was this exactly?”
“A month, maybe two before she told me she was pregnant. Hard to remember. But if an affair is supposed to lift a woman’s spirits, this was doing the opposite. It seemed to be crushing her.”
Myron didn’t know how to soften the blow, so he said it: “Did Cecelia ever tell you that she was raped?”
His head snapped as though someone had punched him in the jaw. For a few long moments, he didn’t say anything. He just stared at Myron. Tears filled his eyes. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft.
“Was she?”
“That’s what she told a friend.”
“Oh my God.” He closed his eyes and lifted his face toward the sky. “What friend?”
“Emily Downing.”
“Greg’s wife.”
“Yes.”
Ben Staples stood there, frozen, staring at the mound of dirt. “Does she know who…?”
“No,” Myron said.
It took some time for Ben Staples to process this. Myron gave him the space.
Then Ben asked, “Why wouldn’t Cecelia tell me?”
Myron figured that he was asking himself that more than he was asking Myron, but he still said, “I don’t know.”
“And Emily told you this?”
“Yes.”
“What else did she tell you?”
Myron filled him in as best he could. Ben’s expression moved from anguish to anger. There was a reckoning of some sort going on here or, at the very least, something dawning on him. When Myron finished telling what he knew, he didn’t give Ben Staples a chance to ruminate.
“You know who did it,” Myron said.
“I think so, yes.”
Myron waited.
“He kept talking to her about getting her a lead in a new Broadway play. I knew it was a come-on. I mean, so did she. Every male producer suddenly had the perfect role to launch her as a serious actress. But a lead in a Broadway play? Cecelia couldn’t act. I told her that once too. I’m like, ‘You get what’s going on here, right?’ I shouldn’t have said that. Even if it was true. I should have been more supportive.”
“Who raped her, Ben?”
“I’m not sure I should say.”
“Why not?”
“Because obviously she didn’t want the world to know. I don’t know if her death changes that.”
“This guy, this rapist, he may be connected to her murder.”
“He’s not.”
“How can you—?”
