What Has Mother Done?

by Barbara Petty

  A shrug. “He didn’t seem to care that I was sleeping in the nursery. He was just as happy that he didn’t have to get up in the middle of the night. By then he was an important businessman, a civic leader—he needed to get his beauty sleep.”

  Thea was aghast. “But didn’t he understand? Didn’t he suspect why you were sleeping there?”

  Annie gave her a mute shake of her head.

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  Silent for a moment, Annie lifted her head and gave Thea a sideways look. The corners of her eyes held reflections of moisture. “He wouldn’t have believed me.”

  “What!”

  She took a breath and let it out slowly. “I tried. But I couldn’t…” Her chin quivered and tears slid down her cheeks. “That’s just not something a mother can say about her child. You can never tell anybody else. Never.”

  Thea absorbed the enormity of this. “You mean…all these years? You never said anything to Dan?”

  A barely perceptible nod.

  Thea was shocked again. “Okay, I understand why you didn’t tell me…but Dan? He’s her father, Joe is his son. Wouldn’t he have wanted to protect him? Maybe you could have gotten help for Heather…”

  “No,” Annie broke in. “Dan would never have allowed that. She would have been labeled a sociopath, and there’s very little treatment that works.”

  “How do you know she’s a sociopath?”

  Annie gave her a scornful look. “After she killed her pets, I went to the library. I found books, hid them behind others so no one could see what I was reading, but I read up on sociopaths. They don’t know what causes it.” She shrugged. “It might be genetics or it might be environment. Or it could have been a blow to the head or a fall—but I don’t remember either of those happening to her.”

  “But you never got an actual diagnosis?”

  Another scornful look, but this one faded into pain. “I lived with her for all those years. I watched her. I knew.” Then she added, “There were ‘incidents’ with neighborhood children when she was growing up. After the little girl next door got her arm broken, her parents wouldn’t let her play with Heather. I was so relieved when we left that neighborhood and moved to this house because there weren’t as many children around here.

  “As for that night when Joe was a baby, I honestly didn’t want to believe it was possible…” The words trailed off as Annie’s voice seemed to fail her. Then her chest heaved with a noisy inhalation, and she continued, “Even now I can’t stand to think about it…I’ve never spoken about it...”

  “You don’t have to now,” Thea said, offering her a way out.

  Annie shook her off. “No, I do. I can’t live with it any longer.” She bowed her head. “It’s killing me inside.”

  After a few seconds she lifted her head, but her eyes were not focused on the here and now. “She had his baby blanket in her hands…when I turned the light on she jumped; she tried to pretend that she was covering him up, but I could see it on her face. I knew that look. I knew what she was doing.” Her jaw clenched. “I never left her alone with him after that. Never.”

  Thea sat silent for several moments, then rubbed her hands up her forehead, pushing her hair back. “I’m having a hard time with this,” she admitted. “I know I can’t understand what you’ve gone through, but it’s just so difficult to accept. How did you deal with it?”

  A bitter smile twisted Annie’s mouth. “You haven’t heard the worst part yet.”

  Thea dropped her hands. “I’m not sure I want to.”

  Annie’s brow puckered, then worked itself into deep furrows, either in pain or deep concentration. “Something happened when Heather was in high school.”

  A bell went off in the back of Thea’s mind. Wasn’t there something in the paper about an incident that Heather had been involved in when she was in high school? A girl had died. Drowned, if she remembered it correctly.

  Annie was saying something about a “class picnic.” At Lake Winnetonka. It was never very clear what happened. Most of the kids had started playing touch football. Heather said that she got tired of that, so she walked over to the pier, which was a bit away from the picnic grounds. When she was at the end, she spotted something floating in the water, then realized it was a body. She jumped in and paddled over to it and found a girl she knew. Her name was Kristy Manx. Heather didn’t think she was breathing, so she called for help and tried to swim with Kristy to the pier. Anyway, nothing could resuscitate Kristy. She was dead.”

  Annie kept her eyes downcast. “I tried not to suspect Heather, I really did. But Kristy Manx was her biggest rival—for both boyfriends and school honors—and with Kristy out of the way, Heather got to be on the Homecoming Court and went to the dance with Kristy’s former boyfriend.” She took a long breath, then gritted her teeth for a couple of seconds, as if girding herself for what was coming next.

  “Dan and I went to Kristy’s funeral with Heather,” she went on. “I watched her. When all the other kids were crying—including the boys—Heather never shed a tear. She saw me watching her and pretended to wipe some tears away, but that was just a show for my benefit. I knew what she had done—and she knew I knew. But she was my daughter and she knew I would never tell. Besides, I had no proof—only a mother’s instinct.”

  Thea remembered something else from the newspaper reports she had read of the incident. “And Dan kept Heather’s name out of the Register, didn’t he?”

  Annie’s look was sharp with surprise. “How do you know that?”

  Thea made a vague wave with her hand. “I googled Heather and saw her name in a throwaway paper in a story about Kristy Manx’s death. But then I looked up the stories about it in the Register, and Heather’s name wasn’t in any of them. It didn’t take much to figure out what Dan must have done.”

  Annie chewed at her lip. “Yeah, I always wondered why he did that. Did he do it because it might have reflected badly on him politically? Or did he have his suspicions about Heather, too?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never asked him…” Her voice trailed off.

  “But isn’t it possible that Kristy’s death was just a horrible accident?” Thea asked.

  Annie’s eyes went blank. “Sure. Anything’s possible. But I’ve run through it in my mind so many times and it always comes out wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, remember that this is back when I thought Heather was on drugs, so I was, shall we say, more observant of her than I ordinarily was. And I saw things, little signs that didn’t add up until after Kristy was dead—”

  “Like what?” Thea interjected.

  “Like Kristy became Heather’s new best friend, is what. This was a girl that Heather would barely speak to previously, but suddenly she was around our house all the time, eating meals with us, sleeping over—this was pretty unusual behavior for Heather. So I watched her with Kristy and tried to figure out what Heather was up to. I knew that whatever it was it was not going to be good for Kristy.”

  “That still doesn’t mean—”

  “But,” Annie burst out, “you don’t understand! It was Heather’s behavior toward me that really convinced me. She knew I was watching her so she really laid it on thick with Kristy. You know, all gushy and touchy-feely—which is something that Heather is definitely not. It was like she was taunting me. She was playing games with me, and she just bided her time with Kristy, waiting for the moment to strike. I don’t know, maybe she talked Kristy into going for a swim with her when no one else was around. But when Heather stopped playing games, a very sweet young girl who never knew what hit her was dead.” Her voice fell into a jarring, anguished tone. “Now do you understand?”

  Thea hesitated, then gave her a mute nod.

  Annie grabbed Thea’s left hand in both of her own and squeezed, hard. Her eyes bore into Thea’s. “I mean,” she said, the words rasped out as if her throat were closing up, “now do you understand why I’m so afraid she did the same thing to
George?”

  CHAPTER 40

  When Thea left Annie’s to go pick up Joe, it was a relief to get into the car and drive. She focused on the routine of the process, not allowing her auto-pilot to take over. Hands on the wheel, foot on the gas. Just drive. Don’t think, don’t feel. Don’t reflect on the painful conversation she’d just had with her best friend. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Mother in the backseat, munching happily on homemade chocolate-chip cookies that Annie had stuffed into a sandwich bag for her.

  Before the two of them walked out her door, Annie had pleaded with Thea. “Give me an hour—or at least forty-five minutes,” she said. “I want to ice my eyes and put on some makeup before I see Joe.” Then she smiled indulgently. “He’ll be hungry. Can you take him to McDonald’s, maybe hang out with him for a while?”

  Mother’s eyes had lit up at the mention of McDonald’s, and Thea realized she felt some gnawing hunger pangs in the pit of her own belly. But she wasn’t sure she could actually eat. She was too distracted, too emotionally exhausted to focus on food. And before she could think about satisfying her hunger she was going to have to deal with her friend’s son.

  Joe was alone, across the street from his red-brick middle school that looked as if it had been built in the same era as the Collins factory. Thea felt a scant second of nostalgia as she remembered that they’d all gone to this same school. She, Annie, Dan—even Whit had attended until he’d been shipped off to military school. She forgot all that as she drove toward the slumped, solitary figure sitting on the curb.

  Joe’s arms were tense as they tugged against his backpack straps, and his eyes squinted into a look of concern as Thea pulled up.

  He got into the front seat and turned immediately. “Hello, Mrs. Prentice,” he greeted Mother. “It’s very nice to see you.”

  She beamed at him. “We’re going to McDonald’s.”

  Joe grinned back at her. “Sounds good to me. I’m always hungry.” He straightened up in the seat and regarded Thea, a serious demeanor on his man-child face. “How are you, Auntie Thea?”

  “I’m fine.” She gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Your mother is fine, too.”

  His exhale was visible, but there were more questions in his eyes.

  “She and I had a long talk,” Thea said, pulling out into the street, driving extra carefully to avoid all the SUVs loaded with moms on their cell phones, and the kids who were jaywalking, barely registering where they were as they chatted to each other or texted away on their phones.

  Joe gave her a quizzical look. “What about?” He hesitated a moment before adding, “Was it about my dad?”

  Thea didn’t answer immediately. Obviously, Annie had managed to hide from Joe her fears about Heather, but Thea realized for the first time what an awkward position she herself was in now with Joe. She was going to have to hide those same fears about Heather from him, too. After all, she had promised Annie. And, on top of all that, Joe had his own fears that his dad might be connected to George’s death. What could she tell him? She didn’t want to mislead him, but she needed to reassure him at the same time.

  Thea took her eyes off Joe and directed them to the traffic outside. If she was going to have to lie to him she didn’t want to be gazing into those trusting brown eyes as she did it. “Uh huh,” she said, “some of what we talked about was your dad. The rest was, well, uh, your mom is kind of going through a midlife crisis.” She stole at glance at him. “Have you heard of those?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Like when my dad went out and bought that little Mazda Miata last year.” He gave a rueful shake to his head. “He ended up giving it to Heather.”

  “Okay,” Thea said, hoping she didn’t sound too relieved. “Something like that is going on with your mom, too.”

  Joe said nothing. His face was partially turned away from her so Thea couldn’t gauge his reaction.

  Mother leaned forward and announced, “I want a large fries and a Big Mac. And, uh, a-a…” her voice faded off.

  Thea hesitated as she looked at her mother’s befuddled face in the rearview mirror.

  “How about something to drink?” Joe said helpfully over his shoulder. “Maybe a shake?”

  “That’s it,” Mother pronounced as if trumpets were blaring. “I want a shake!”

  “What flavor?” Joe asked.

  Again, Mother’s voice revealed her confusion. “Uh, I want…”

  “How about chocolate?” Joe piped up. “That’s my favorite.”

  “Mine, too!” Mother declared, the trumpets ratcheting up a notch.

  “That sounds awesome!” Joe blurted out kid-like as they turned into the parking lot of the Golden Arches. Then he twisted in his seat to look at Mother and reverted back to his usual adult-speak. “I’m with you, Mrs. Prentice,” he said and gave her a big grin.

  Thea indulged herself with a tiny “dodged-a-bullet” smile that her front-seat passenger never saw.

  It wasn’t until much later that Thea had time to reflect on the day’s events. The one thing she felt certain of was that her friendship with Annie had been restored. The open, festering wound that it had become had been cauterized today. It had been painful for both of them, but Thea recognized that they had begun the healing process. It would take some time for them to get back to the easy familiarity they had always shared, but she was confident it would come.

  But what to think of Annie’s revelations about her daughter? Was it really possible that Heather was a sociopath? And not just a sociopath, but one who had already committed—and attempted—murder?

  Thea’s mind reeled from the question. What did she actually know about Heather? On her visits home over the years, she had seen Heather go from an unhappy infant to a tantrum-throwing toddler and then to a little girl with sullen, green eyes and a lower lip set in a nearly permanent pout. When the child saw that her wiles didn’t work on Thea, Heather had determinedly ignored her. Thea did the same. As a teenager, Heather had floated through Thea’s consciousness as an exemplar of the usual adolescent angst. Nothing memorable, except for the one summer she had tried Goth.

  When it came to her daughter, Annie nearly always seemed to Thea to have vacated her parental post. So most of Heather’s failings Thea had attributed to the spoiling and coddling coming from Dan. Naturally, there was bias on Thea’s part, she had to admit, being Annie’s friend. It wasn’t really by design, but, over the years, Thea had spent as little time in Heather’s presence as she could. In fact, once Heather went off to college, Thea remembered being relieved that she rarely encountered Heather on her visits here from California.

  She had never really taken an active dislike to the girl, just a barely tolerant indifference. Almost like Heather was a nonentity. She supposed she had taken her cue from Annie, who almost never talked about her daughter. Of course, after today, Thea understood the reason why. Did Annie have an overactive imagination where Heather was concerned? Or should Thea be taking the young woman seriously as a suspect in George’s death? And what about the murder of Bud Prentice? Could she possibly have been involved with that, too?

  Thea went to bed and lay awake mulling over those questions for a long while before she fell into a troubled sleep.

  That night Thea had a dream that, in the morning, left her feeling out-of-sorts and somewhat fearful. It had started off predictably enough: she had been wandering the halls of her junior high school. Alone, she had passed almost invisibly through hordes of students. She’d had a sense that she was searching for someone, but had no idea who it was.

  And then she had been standing at the doorway to the cafeteria, her eyes sifting through the crowd. The boys wore white shirts and dark pants, the girls white blouses and black, pleated skirts. The entire room was colorless, a black-and-white mass of moving bodies. Then, off in the corner, she saw the person she realized she’d been looking for. “Whit!” she called out. But he couldn’t hear her. “Whit!” she cried again. Still no response from him, but her sho
ut had alerted someone else, someone she hadn’t seen before: a tall, dark presence lurking in the shadows near Whit. This presence turned toward her, and Thea knew that she had to run. But she couldn’t. Her legs went weak and she felt herself falling, down, down....

  Thea started awake, her eyes wide, fear still enveloping her body. She couldn’t let it go. There was something there, something hidden in that shadowy presence. It reminded her of…what? She couldn’t remember. She lay there for a moment, letting herself relive the dream, but that dark, shadowy figure never became any clearer. Come on, subconscious, she felt like saying, give me a clue!

  Then, she heard Mother thumping around in her room, so she pushed back the bedclothes and got up.

  Mother was sitting on the floor in front of her closet, holding a mismatched pair of shoes in each hand. “Better put on your good shoes,” Thea said, trying to make it sound more like a suggestion than an order. “You’re going visiting today.”

  A blank response. “Don’ wanna.”

  Ignoring this intransigence, Thea bent down. “Oh, don’t say that. You’re going to have fun today, you’ll meet new people, play some games...” She switched the unmatched shoes and handed her mother a pair to put on.

  Mother’s look was skeptical, but all she said was, “Other ones.”

  “Fine.” Thea dropped her own preference in footwear and substituted the ones her parent had chosen. “Wear these then.”

  Grabbing the shoes out of Thea’s hand, Mother cast her daughter a sidelong glance. “What’s up, Dot?”

  Thea sniggered at the old name. She had realized a while ago that Mother sometimes called her that on purpose. It wasn’t her fading memory that prompted it; no, it was more like some kind of inside joke that only Mother appreciated, but Thea took comfort in the fact that her mother had managed to retain some sense of humor. However blighted it was.

  “Remember that nice lady who was here yesterday? Luanne, the one who smiled?” Thea added hastily, “Not that other one; not the one who made you nervous.”