Yesterday's News

by R. G. Belsky

  I ignored the implied threat.

  “But why take her?”

  “Like I said, it was the same reason as the others. It was a bad situation inside that house. She wouldn’t have survived it.”

  There it was. The truth I could never believe about Patrick Devlin. Anne Devlin had suspected something bad was happening between him and Lucy, but I assumed it was just her imagination. I’d slept with the guy, I thought I knew him—at least back then. But I thought now about the anger in his eyes when I’d first raised the accusation with him. The way he’d punched the wall of that construction shed. Had he punched Lucy that way, too, when he got mad or wanted his way with her?

  “I never thought Patrick Devlin was capable of something like that,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about Patrick,” Grayson said.

  “But you said she was abused in that house.”

  “She was.”

  “Then who—”

  “There were two people in that house with Lucy.”

  That’s when the horrible truth finally hit me.

  “I had to save Lucy from her mother,” Grayson said. “Anne Devlin.”

  CHAPTER 55

  “I WANT TO know about you and Anne and Lucy and what went on inside that house,” I said to Patrick Devlin. “Not the sugar-coated American dream version. Everyone—including me—has bought that story for a long time. But that’s not really the way it was, right? The dream didn’t just die the day Lucy disappeared; it was a nightmare long before that.”

  We were sitting in the den of his house in suburban Boston, a spacious two-story Cape Cod with gray shingles and a view of a big yard and swimming pool in the back.

  I’d flown up there right after my meeting with Grayson. Devlin didn’t seem surprised to see me this time. Or mad at me anymore. Maybe he’d been thinking about everything since our last conversation and realized it wasn’t over. Maybe he’d already decided he had held onto his secrets for too long.

  Devlin introduced me to his wife and children. The wife was a pleasant-looking blond woman of about my age, who offered me coffee and something to eat. I never knew if she realized what I was there for, or if it would have mattered if she did. The children were a young boy and a girl. They were blond-haired, too, and happily played video games on iPads while Devlin and his wife and I made small talk. Neither of them looked anything like Lucy. Devlin finally told his family that he and I had some business we needed to discuss in private.

  Then he led me into the den, closing the door on them as easily as he did on Anne and Lucy and his other life years ago.

  “How did you find out?” he asked after we sat down.

  “That’s not important. The only important thing is this: Why did it happen?”

  “Lucy was adopted. That’s when it all really started. Of course, you didn’t know that. No one ever knew about the adoption.”

  I acted as if this was the first time I’d learned this.

  “You and Anne couldn’t have children?” I asked.

  “We tried for a long time, but nothing happened. Then the doctor gave Anne the bad news that she could never have a baby. She was very upset and disappointed, almost suicidal for a while. I told her we could adopt, but she said that wasn’t the same. She said she needed her own child. Someone that came from her own flesh and blood, not some other woman’s. But eventually she changed her mind and we adopted Lucy.”

  “How come this never came out before?” I asked.

  It was a question that had always bothered me. When a child disappears—or is abducted—the person who gave the child up is part of the investigation. I always figured someone would track it down to me back then. But they never did.

  “The police asked at one point if there was any issue involving adoption or other parents that might want custody or anything like that,” Devlin said. “Anne said no. She said we were the only parents Lucy had ever had.”

  “Why didn’t she tell them the truth?”

  “Because she didn’t know the truth anymore. The only way Anne would accept adopting a baby was if she truly believed the baby was hers. She never told anyone about the adoption. She even made up a whole story about the birth and hospital and everything that happened, which she’d tell people. After a while, she began to believe it herself. When the police asked if there was any adoption or other custody issues, she wasn’t really lying when she said no. She just refused to acknowledge that the adoption had ever happened.”

  So far, it sounded bizarre, but not terrible.

  “The thing is that at some point the fantasy began to overtake the reality for Anne. Lucy became the focus of everything in Anne’s life, an extension of herself in a way. At first, she showed that by almost smothering Lucy in love. Lucy could do nothing wrong in her eyes, Lucy was the perfect little girl. But later, as Lucy got older, that all changed. Anne became obsessed with her in a different way. When she got really crazy, she’d tell me that Lucy was evil. That she wasn’t really our daughter. That she had the devil inside her.”

  “The devil,” I repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Why the devil?”

  “I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. The simplest answer I can give you is Anne had some emotional issues of her own that she took out on Lucy. As Lucy grew up and became a pretty and adorable girl, Anne became more and more jealous of her. That’s the only way I can describe it.

  “She also became convinced that I was more interested in Lucy than I was in her. When I would play with Lucy or hold her on my lap, Anne would get upset. She’d ask me why I wanted to pay attention to a little girl when I had her. Sometimes she would even call me a pervert or a sex addict or other horrible names. In her mind, she was in competition with Lucy for my attention.

  “Eventually she became consumed by jealousy over Lucy. The better Lucy did in school or the more people told her what a wonderful daughter she had, the angrier Anne got. Sometimes she’d take that anger out on me, which I could deal with. But most of the time she directed it against Lucy. That’s when things got out of control.”

  I tried to picture Anne Devlin like that. It seemed difficult to match with the woman I’d known over the years. But then I’d found out a long time ago that people aren’t always what they seem.

  “One day I came home early and found Lucy in tears,” Devlin said. “There were bruise marks and burns all over her body. Anne had tied her to a scalding radiator and beat her. I found out later it was because someone at the store had told Anne how beautiful her daughter was, but hadn’t complimented her. When they got home, Anne went on a jealous rampage against Lucy.

  “It began to happen more and more after that. Anything could set Anne off. If Lucy said the wrong thing or came home from school a few minutes late or even if she wanted to watch a TV program Anne didn’t like. Sometimes I’d be there to stop it. Too many times I wasn’t. I’d discover the evidence when I got home, the bruises and the scars and the blood in the house. Afterward, Anne would be terribly apologetic. She’d promise it would never happen again. She’d smother Lucy in love again for the rest of the night, sometimes for days afterward. Until the next time.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to turn. If I went to the police, I didn’t think they would believe me. Or they might think I did it. Lucy was in no emotional or mental condition to tell the truth. She was too confused about what was happening to her. She was constantly trying to please her mother. But the harder she tried, the worse everything got.

  “At one point, I went to an old friend I knew in law enforcement. Someone I’d known years before. I told him off the record what was happening. He agreed with me that the police wouldn’t believe me and probably think I was the one hurting her. Even if they did accept my story, they couldn’t protect Lucy. He said things like this happened all the time, all across America. He said they only took a child away from her mother temporarily anyway and sooner or later Anne would get her hands on her again. He s
aid all I could do was try to protect Lucy as best I could and hope for a miracle.”

  “Was it Elliott Grayson you talked to?”

  “Yes. I knew him from my days riding with motorcycle groups, and we’d kept in touch after that. He just told me to hang in there. He said maybe something would happen to change what seemed to be a hopeless situation.”

  Of course. That was how Grayson had found out about Lucy. Patrick Devlin didn’t know it, but he had alerted a self-proclaimed vigilante to his daughter’s plight.

  “That time with you was the worst,” Devlin said. “After Lucy walked in on us in bed, she told Anne about me and sex. Anne thought she was talking about me and Lucy having sex. I openly admitted to sleeping with someone else there that day—I never said it was you—but Anne wouldn’t believe me. She was convinced I’d been with Lucy. That night I had a late meeting. When I got home, I found Anne in Lucy’s bedroom. Lucy was screaming. Anne was beating her with a big strap. She said she wasn’t going to stop until all the evil was beaten out of her. She called it an exorcism. She said she was beating the devil out of our daughter. Well, I stopped her in time, but I knew it would happen again and again unless I did something. I was prepared to do anything to save my daughter. As it turned out, I never got the chance. Because Lucy disappeared.”

  Elliott Grayson, I thought.

  “Didn’t you ever imagine that Anne might have killed her and just gotten rid of the body?”

  “No, I knew it wasn’t Anne.”

  “How?”

  “Because her anguish was so real. It was almost like she had some kind of reverse guilt because of all the terrible things she’d done to her. After Lucy was gone, Lucy turned into the greatest little girl in the world. At least the way Anne remembered her. She dedicated her life to finding her. Who knows what would have happened if she did—I used to have nightmares about that. I wanted to know what happened to Lucy, but I was afraid about what Anne would do to her if she was found.

  “After Lucy disappeared, Anne and I stayed together for a while, but we weren’t really husband and wife anymore. All she cared about was this crusade to find Lucy. That consumed her. I don’t think she cared one way or the other about whether I stayed with her or not. Me, I tried to put the tragedy of our lost daughter behind me. I got married again, I had my children here—my life is pretty damn good. I’ve tried to pretend that Lucy never existed. I never quite succeeded, but I pretended to myself that I did. Until now. And that’s really the whole story.”

  Except it wasn’t.

  Of course, Devlin didn’t know that I was Lucy’s biological mother. He didn’t know that Lucy was still alive. And he didn’t know that Elliott Grayson, his old friend, had been the one who took Lucy away that day to try to save her from Anne’s jealous and irrational rages.

  But there was something else Patrick Devlin did know that he hadn’t told me yet.

  I could sense it from the expression on his face and the way he talked.

  “What else?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s more, isn’t there?”

  I had a feeling—a reporter’s instinct, I guess—what it was about.

  “What were you really doing in Mountainboro, New Hampshire, recently?” I asked.

  “I told you before … I was just curious after that mysterious e-mail about a Lucy sighting there.”

  “I think it was more than just curiosity. It’s time to tell the whole truth, Patrick. This is just you and me talking—I’m not a reporter here anymore. The reasons for that are kind of complicated. But the bottom line is I’m not going to be putting any of this on the air, at least for the time being. What happened in Mountainboro?”

  Patrick Devlin looked out the window of his house. Toward the swimming pool and the big yard and all the other things in his life now. Maybe he was thinking about how far he had come over the years. Or maybe he was thinking about Anne and Lucy and the life he had lived before this one.

  “I went back to the gravesite,” Devlin said. “Where those six kids had been buried. I decided to go back there after you called that day and told me Anne was dying. I wanted to see the spot again, but it’s a shopping mall now. Helluva thing, huh?”

  “I still don’t understand … why did you want to go back there?”

  He looked at me sadly.

  “I guess because I wanted to pray for mercy and forgiveness and some kind of peace after all this time.”

  “Who were you praying for?”

  “Those six dead kids. Lucy. Anne. And most of all, I guess, for myself.”

  “Why you?”

  “I’m the one who buried the bodies.”

  CHAPTER 56

  ANNE DEVLIN WAS back in the hospital again, and this time it looked as if she wasn’t getting out.

  The doctors said she probably had only a few days left.

  When I went into her room, she looked even frailer than before lying in the hospital bed. But I didn’t feel pity or sadness for her anymore. Just anger.

  It had taken me nearly five hours to get there. An hour’s ride to Logan Airport in Boston. An hour and a half in the air until we landed at LaGuardia. Another hour or so in a cab sitting in rush-hour traffic back to Manhattan. I spent much of that time thinking about what Patrick Devlin had told me.

  The answer was right there in front of me all the time. Someone should have seen it. Me. The cops. The families of the victims. But nobody ever did. Maybe because it was so unbelievable, so ludicrous, so hard to accept. Or maybe because it was so obvious that we all just blew past the warning signs.

  There were six bodies in that grave in New Hampshire. Six children whose parents had gone through the same kind of grief Anne Devlin had when she lost Lucy. I’d thought they were all victims.

  But Anne Devlin wasn’t a victim anymore.

  She was a killer.

  * * *

  “She told me how she killed those six children,” Patrick Devlin had said. “She picked out her victims by hanging out at schools and parks and shopping malls to watch other mothers with their children. She looked for ones that seemed particularly happy. She said that happiness was what set her off, that she wanted them to feel the same pain and experience the same loss as she did.

  “Afterward, she would follow them home and then stalk the children until she had an opportunity to approach them alone. It apparently wasn’t that hard to get them to go with her. She was a nonthreatening, friendly, pleasant-looking woman—not a rough motorcycle guy like Marston. Sometimes she even told them about losing Lucy to get their sympathy.

  “She brought them back to our town house. During the day when I was at work or while I was away on business trips, she said. She brought them up to Lucy’s room and pretended they were Lucy—letting them watch Lucy’s favorite TV shows, play her games, and even feeding them favorite foods like Oreos and Cheerios that Lucy loved. But, in the end, she said she had to kill them because ‘they weren’t the real Lucy.’

  “Some of them she strangled, some she beat to death—and one she even stabbed with a kitchen knife. She said it took her hours to clean up the blood that time before I got home. Afterward, she buried the bodies in the backyard of the town house. You remember how she had that big garden back there? It had a high wooden fence that prevented people from seeing into the yard. It wasn’t hard for her to plant those small corpses in the ground without anyone knowing.

  “Afterward, she would befriend the grieving parents and act as if she was comforting them—while all the time she was the cause of their children being gone. It gave her a kind of high, she claimed. Some sort of relief from the pain of losing Lucy.”

  I’d heard about cases like this before—when the victim becomes the predator. I remembered a murder case in New York a while back in which a Son of Sam–type gunman killed and wounded a dozen people in random attacks, then disappeared for a long time. When the shootings started up again a few years later, the shooter turned out to be one of the
original wounded victims—who had decided to do to others what the unknown shooter had done to him. There’s a fine line between sanity and insanity in all of us, I suppose. Anne Devlin had very obviously crossed over that line.

  “She was crying when she told me what she had done to the children,” Devlin said. “She talked about killing herself, about joining them in heaven, about being with Lucy again in another world. Most of all, she kept talking about how sorry she was. About how she would never do it again. About how she couldn’t go to jail because then she wouldn’t be home when Lucy came back and walked in the door. She pleaded with me to help her.”

  It was hard for him to explain what happened next.

  “I told her I wanted to see the bodies. I guess I needed to convince myself that it had really happened and wasn’t just another figment of her imagination,” Devlin said. “But it was all too real. She dug up all the places in the backyard where she’d put the bodies. They were there, just like she said.

  “I’m still not sure why I did what came next. Maybe it was because I still cared for her on some level and wanted to protect her. Maybe I was protecting myself because I was so deeply involved in it by this point. Or maybe I just wanted it all to go away, and the nightmare wouldn’t end until the bodies were gone. If they were never found, then no one would ever be sure that they were dead or be able to tie the deaths in any way to Anne. All I knew was I couldn’t leave those bodies lying there in the backyard of our house.

  “I remembered the remote area of New Hampshire around Mountainboro from the bike conventions there. I drove there with the bodies piled in my trunk. I had to put them all in plastic bags to make the trip. It was a horrible nightmare; many of the bodies were in very bad shape by then, of course. But I did it. I buried them as deeply as I could. All six of them. Well, five actually, at first. A few weeks later Anne remembered a sixth victim she hadn’t told me about. I had to go back and bury her, too. That was the toughest moment for me. After I drove hundreds of miles with those corpses in my trunk, I had to go back and bring one more.”