Child of Mine: a psychological thriller

by Chambers, V. J.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Child of Mine

  a psychological thriller

  by V. J. Chambers

  CHILD OF MINE

  © copyright 2017 by V. J. Chambers

  http://vjchambers.com

  Punk Rawk Books

  Please do not copy or post this book in its entirety or in parts anywhere. You may, however, share the entire book with a friend by forwarding the entire file to them. (And I won’t get mad.)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lorelei Taylor scrabbled for the phone on her bedside table. It was ringing, and it was getting gradually louder.

  At first, she had thought that it was just her alarm. She sometimes set an alarm—okay, well, she used to, back when Simon was little and needed her help to get himself up and off to school in the mornings. She remembered those days, hitting snooze five times before she realized what time it was and got up in a full-blown panic with only enough time to get the little guy into a set of clothes and send him off to catch the bus. She was lucky if she had time to comb his hair.

  Thank heaven for school breakfast.

  She would have cooked, of course. She was decent in the kitchen. No culinary genius or anything, but she knew her way around sauteing and chopping and broiling. She always made sure to cook Simon a decent dinner. And before he had to go to school at the ass crack of dawn, she used to cook him breakfast. Simon was always such an agreeable baby and toddler in the mornings. He never screamed or cried. She remembered that she’d wander into his room whenever she did wake up. Usually by eight. Okay, nine.

  Well, always by ten.

  Simon would be sitting there in his crib, playing with his stuffed animals, usually lining them up in rows from biggest to smallest. He really liked doing that.

  And she would pick him up and squeeze him and kiss him on both cheeks and say, “Good morning Simon-bimon.”

  He would gaze at her with huge, solemn baby eyes, as if he was wise beyond his years.

  But then came school, and the mad rush to get him out the door. She always felt awful about not combing his hair. She worried that it made it harder for him to make friends, and she always resolved to get up on time the next day. But when that alarm went off…

  This wasn’t an alarm, though. It was the phone ringing.

  Simon was sixteen now, and he got himself up in the mornings. He showered and made his own food. Fried himself an egg, toasted some bread, and poured himself some juice. She always found the dirty dishes in the sink when she did manage to get out of bed.

  Lorelei squinted at the phone. Who was calling?

  Simon.

  Panic rushed through her, an echo of the panic from Simon’s early school days, but this was a different kind of panic. She felt that stab of fear that all mothers fear when they get an unexpected call from their children. Is something wrong? she thought.

  “Simon?”

  “Hey, Mom,” he said on the other end of the phone. He sounded upset.

  Lorelei knew her son’s upset voice. Other people might not be able to pick up on it, because Simon’s upset voice was only a shade different from his regular voice, and to the untrained ear, it might even sound a bit monotone. But Lorelei knew. She could always tell. “What’s wrong, baby? What happened?” She threw her legs over the side of the bed and hurried over to her hamper, where she tugged out a pair of jeans and a shirt that she’d only worn a few times. The sudden movement made her head pound.

  Ugh. She was going to need some water. And coffee. Water first, though.

  “They took me out of class, Mom,” said Simon.

  “Who did, sweetie?”

  “And it was my math class.”

  “Oh, right, the one you have that quiz in?”

  “They made me miss the quiz.” Simon was not pleased about this, though his voice modulation barely changed. “Now, I have to make it up. I’ll probably have to go in at lunch or stay after school.”

  “Honey, I’m sure the teacher will help you work that out. Who took you out of class?”

  “The police.”

  “What?” She dropped the shirt she was holding and sat back down on the bed. “What do you mean? Why did the police take you out of class?”

  “I think they wanted me to say I killed that girl.”

  “What?” This was crazy. “What girl?”

  “The girl that they found,” said Simon. “Brittany Lewis.”

  Did Lorelei know about this? Maybe she’d heard something. She tried to keep away from the news for the most part, especially the stuff about crime. Murder was the worst. It triggered her, and then the nightmares would be so bad that there was no amount of drinking that would ward them off. She licked her lips. “Sweetie, I’m sure they don’t think you killed anyone. Did you know Brittany? Does she go to your school? They’re probably talking to everyone.”

  “She doesn’t go to our school,” said Simon. “She goes to Woodbury. And they acted like they already knew that I did it. They asked me where I got the stuff to tie up her body. It was Jeremy, and you know he never liked me.”

  Lorelei suddenly felt ill. This sounded just like the kind of stupid stunt that Jeremy Walsh would pull. That man spent too much time watching cop shows on TV. He had some vision of himself as a hotshot detective, even though he worked for a police force too small to have a homicide department. A police force so small that it served all the towns in the county, including Woodbury. And of course Jeremy would go after Simon. Of course he’d do something that petty and small and—

  The hand not holding the phone clenched into a fist. “You don’t worry another second about this, Simon,” she said into the phone, and she noticed her voice had gone cold. “I’ll take care of it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lorelei went through the drive-through at McDonald’s and got a big bottle of water and an even bigger coffee. She swallowed two ibuprofens with the water, and then gulped the rest of it down as she drove to the police station in town.

  This was a routine for her. />
  Not going to the police station. That wasn’t a routine. But the water, the pain pills, and the coffee. That was the way she woke up in the morning. Had been for the past seventeen years, ever since she quit her job at the FBI. Well, actually, ever since the nightmares started. The nightmares had come first, then the drinking—just to get to sleep—and then she’d quit the job. If she hadn’t quit, she probably would have been let go, though.

  It disgusted her to think that she was an alcoholic, because she didn’t like to think of herself as weak. But the nightmares were too tough to deal with any other way. She’d tried various sleeping pills, and the dreams got through or else the pills didn’t knock her out. Alcohol was the only thing that worked consistently.

  She pulled into the police station and parked her car. Slamming the door closed, she hurried over the sidewalk to the front door. There, in the glass, she caught sight of her reflection. Geez, she looked like shit. She got a hair tie out of her bag and smoothed her hair into a ponytail.

  Better, but still not great.

  It was hell seeing herself sometimes. Subconsciously, she still imagined herself looking the way she had in her twenties. But that Lorelei had disappeared a long time ago. She was a middle-aged woman aged by too much drinking and the stress of raising a child all on her own. She had wrinkles and a thick waist and stray gray hairs. Seeing that always surprised her, though, somehow, as if she never quite realized the truth about her current self, not deep down.

  “Lorelei,” said Pam Forrester, who was behind the front desk in her uniform. “Haven’t seen you down here in a while.”

  “Is he at his desk?” said Lorelei, not bothering to stop moving.

  “Uh, yeah, he just got back, but I don’t know if he…”

  Pam’s voice faded out as Lorelei hurried through the double doors and deeper into the station. The room was full of desks in rows, most of them set up back to back so that they were facing each other. Most desks had a computer and a smattering of personal items. Coffee mugs proclaiming Number One Dad or I’m Not a Morning Person. Pictures of smiling children.

  Jeremy’s desk was in the back in the corner. Lorelei headed there, dodging officers who were making their way through the rows of desks.

  When Jeremy saw her, he stood up. He was a tall man with broad shoulders and thick fingers. He’d once been attractive, or at least Lorelei used to find him attractive. Now, his hair was thin and going gray, and he’d put on a bit of weight. She wasn’t sure if it was the physical changes that made him unattractive or the fact that she couldn’t stand him anymore.

  He moved to intercept her. “You can’t be here right now.”

  She put a finger in his face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with my kid?”

  “My job, damn it, Lorelei,” he said.

  “You can’t hold him and ask him questions like that. He has a right to have his parent there.”

  “It was just a friendly chat.”

  “You pulled him out of class. You think a kid knows he can say no? He didn’t. He’s a wreck over missing his math quiz. If he’d though he had a choice in the matter, he would have stayed in class. You detained him, and then you didn’t offer him the option of having a parent present, and—”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  “I’m overreacting? My kid calls me and says that you’re using the Reid technique on him. He’s sixteen, Jeremy. He’s autistic. You can’t do that to him.” Simon had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, a form of high-functioning autism.

  Jeremy folded his arms over his chest. “There’s not a damned thing wrong with that kid’s brain, Lorelei. He’s just odd, always has been.”

  She dragged her hands over her face, frustrated. This was part of the problem with Jeremy. The man was not unintelligent. Some cops were dumb as a bag of rocks, but not Jeremy.

  He had a brain in his head. He just tended to refuse to use it most of the time. He was willfully blind. He had this idea that autistic people were all like Rain Man. “Borderline retarded,” he’d once said to her. And no amount of explanation of the spectrum or use of the word “high-functioning” seemed to ever get through his balding skull.

  She pointed at him. “You shouldn’t be allowed to question him anyway, because you have a bias.”

  Jeremy made a disbelieving face. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about what happened between you and me,” she said. “That means that someone else should talk to Jeremy.”

  “Someone else like who?” He gestured around the station. “You know that I’m the only person who can work this case. No one else on the force is qualified. And we got a grieving mother and father who have just lost their baby girl—”

  “It’s probably the father,” said Lorelei. “You know in most of these cases, it’s someone close to the victim. Father, boyfriend, uncle, teacher, next door neighbor? You looking at anyone like that?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “You can take the girl out of the FBI, but you can’t stop her from trying to do a police officer’s job, can you?”

  “Leave Simon out of this.”

  “I go where the investigation takes me,” said Jeremy. “And I think we’re done here. You going to leave, or am I going to have to have you escorted out?”

  Lorelei pressed her lips together. “My son didn’t kill anyone. Don’t let whatever went on between us cloud your judgment, Jeremy. Leave him out of this.”

  * * *

  “Where were you?” Simon said from the kitchen table.

  Lorelei hung her purse up on the rack next to the door. The apartment that she shared with Simon was designed for people who worked at the Woodlands Evergreen Resort, where she’d been employed for the past fifteen years. It wasn’t big, but it had everything they needed. A kitchen, a small living room, one bathroom, and two bedrooms.

  The living room was opposite the kitchen, and it was so small that the back of the couch protruded into the doorway. It wasn’t very feng shui, but it was the only way to have the couch actually face the television. But despite being crowed, it was cozy, or so she’d always thought.

  She had to admit, though, now that Simon was getting bigger, the place sometimes seemed crowded. Maybe it was because he was so tall. He towered over her now. Maybe it was because he was a slob, leaving all of this clothes and dirty plates everywhere. And there were a lot of dirty plates, because he was constantly eating. She couldn’t believe the appetite he had. She was lucky that she had access to leftover food from the kitchens here, or he’d be bankrupting her with the grocery bill.

  “I went to talk to Jeremy,” she said. “I told him to leave you alone.”

  Of course, maybe the place only seemed small because Jordan was here too.

  Jordan Dawson was Simon’s girlfriend. She was the daughter of Mia Dawson, who owned the resort, had inherited it from her family. Simon and Jordan had grown up together, best of friends as small children. Now, they were dating, but Lorelei personally didn’t see the two of them acting very romantic towards each other. She thought that it was more a case that the two felt some kind of pressure to be a couple since they were such close friends and of the opposite sex. Of course, Lorelei had to admit that there was a possibility that the kids kept their romantic behavior away from her watchful eye considering she was the mom.

  Lorelei and Jordan’s mother Mia were best friends, even though, on the surface, they didn’t seem to have much in common. Mia came from wealth and she had been groomed to take over the family business. She was always asking Lorelei about her past as an FBI profiler, which Mia found endlessly fascinating. She liked to hear all about serial killers. The two had bonded over the fact that they both had small children and were single mothers.

  “I told him you were with me,” Jordan said. She and Simon were at the kitchen table, eating chips and guacamole. The guac had come directly from the resort’s kitchen. Guac that wasn’t eaten at lunch was thrown out before dinner even though it was perfectly good.
Lorelei was always rescuing it.

  “Told who?” said Lorelei.

  “Detective Walsh,” said Jordan. She was wearing big hoop earrings and a lot of eyeshadow. The makeup and jewelry were relatively new. Jordan had never been much of a girly-girl before, even though Mia tended to dress her daughter in dresses and lace all the time. Up until recently, Jordan had spent all her time climbing trees and digging frogs out of mud puddles. Now, however, she looked like a boutique had exploded on her face. Lorelei thought the sudden surge in such things might be because Jordan had recently had a growth spurt. She was quite a tall girl now, taller even than Simon, who was six two.

  “Wait, when did you talk to Jeremy—Detective Walsh?” said Simon, his mouth full of chips.

  “Um, I went after you came back, and I said you were with me, because you’re always with me.” She turned to Lorelei. “He is, you know.”

  “Well, not always,” said Lorelei.

  “Most of the time,” said Jordan. “Anyway, I gave you an alibi.”

  Simon sniffed. “I don’t know if you should have done that. Maybe it made me look guilty.”

  “Didn’t he ask you for an alibi?” said Jordan.

  “No,” said Simon. “He just asked me if I transported her in the trunk of my mother’s car.”

  Lorelei’s nostrils flared. “He had no right to talk to you like that.”

  “What did you say?” said Jordan.

  “I said no,” said Simon. “And then he asked me if I borrowed someone else’s car. And I said no. He said, ‘How did you transport the body, then?’ I told him he was confused, because I hadn’t transported a body anywhere.”

  Lorelei sat down at the table with the two teens. “Listen to me, both of you. You don’t have to talk to the police without a parent present, do you understand? If they try to talk to you again, you ask if you can leave. Say, ‘Am I free to go?’ or ‘Am I being detained?’ If you’re free to go, leave. And if you aren’t, tell them you don’t want to talk unless they call your mother. Got it?”

  Simon turned his gaze to his mother. Even now, he still had huge, solemn eyes. His face was bigger and he had acne and a bit of facial hair, but there was still a hint of the babyish roundness of his infancy. He was still her little Simon-bimon. “Why did he ask me things like that, Mom? Why did he act like I told him I killed her?”