Child of Mine: a psychological thriller

by Chambers, V. J.

  “Oh, Simon.” She reached out to touch his face.

  He ducked away, wrinkling his nose. He didn’t like to be touched.

  “It’s an interrogation technique,” Lorelei said. “It’s supposed to throw you off balance and make you feel unsure of yourself. It’s designed to get people to confess. The problem is, a lot of times, when the police use it, it makes innocent people confess.”

  “Really?” said Jordan. “Why would you do that?”

  “I almost wanted to,” said Simon.

  “No,” said Lorelei.

  “Well, I didn’t, because I knew it would be a lie,” said Simon. “But I really wanted to get back to take my quiz, and I thought if I just told them what they wanted to hear, maybe they’d let me go.”

  “No!” said Lorelei, banging her hands on the table. “Never do that. If you feel uncomfortable with the police, don’t say anything at all. Just stay silent.”

  “Okay, Mom. Chill out.”

  “This is important.”

  “I know.” He rolled his eyes. “But geez, you don’t have to slam the table around.”

  Lorelei sighed, getting up. She went over to the refrigerator. “You guys want some lemonade?”

  “Sure,” said Jordan.

  Lorelei got out a pitcher. “Who is this girl, anyway? How do you know her?”

  “We don’t,” said Jordan.

  “Nope,” said Simon. “Don’t know her.”

  “So, why did Jeremy come to talk to you? Did he tell you?”

  “I think it’s because other girls were saying that Simon is weird and that they think he did it,” said Jordan.

  “What?” Lorelei whirled, pitcher in hand.

  “I tried to tell them that he’s not weird,” said Jordan, taking another chip out of the bag. “But they think I’m weird too, so it doesn’t matter what I say.”

  Simon spread his hands. “I am weird.”

  Lorelei came back over to the table and set down the lemonade forcefully. “Sweetie, you are not weird.”

  “I am,” he said, glaring at her. “I don’t mind, though. I figure it’s better to be right than to be popular.”

  Jordan laughed, nodding at him. “Totally.”

  “And don’t slam the lemonade around either,” said Simon, taking the pitcher. “Calm down, Mom. Calm down.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  But it was ridiculous to be calm when this was going on. Lorelei was worried.

  There had been a recent shooting that she’d heard about. Nothing too in depth, because she tried to stay away from the news stories. But sometimes a few things leaked through. A kid in New England had taken a gun to a mini-golf course and shot the place up, killing nearly ten people.

  He’d been categorized as having Asperger’s, and Lorelei had scanned a brief interview with the kid’s mother, who seemed completely broadsided by the fact that her son had done this awful thing. But there had been a few clues in the article. Apparently, the kid had acted out too. He’d had behavioral problems and he’d been too volatile to stay at public school. He’d been relegated to a homebound program because he had assaulted one of his teachers with a nail file.

  Lorelei was fairly sure it was a case of some hopeful psychologist labeling the kid autistic when he really had antisocial personality disorder. Or, in layman’s terms, he was a psychopath. Autistic kids often seemed to lack empathy, but their self-centered-ness was rarely cruel or violent, simply oblivious. No one wanted to label their child violent or dangerous. Lorelei could see why the child had been misdiagnosed.

  But the damage that the case had done was already having an effect on Simon’s life. People heard about the shooter, and all they remembered was that some autistic kid had killed a bunch of other kids. So, they were blaming Simon.

  Lorelei forced herself to look up what was happening with Brittany Lewis, even though she didn’t want to think about any of it. She sat outside her apartment, which happened to be next to the pool, and she scrolled through article after article on her phone. It was as if once she started, she couldn’t stop, even though she was sure that she would see Brittany in her dreams tonight. But the girl wouldn’t be the smiling blonde in the pictures but twisted and bloody and—

  She shuddered, too many crime scene photos welling up in her brain, obscuring her vision and her thoughts.

  With effort, Lorelei pushed it all away.

  Clinical, she thought. Detached.

  The facts were these. Sixteen-year-old Brittany had not come home two weeks ago. At first, she was only reported as missing, but within a week of her disappearance, her body was discovered in an old abandoned warehouse in Woodbury. She had been found tied up, and the article didn’t say more than that. Probably, the police were withholding information to the press in the hopes that the real killer would be the only one who could correctly fill in the pieces.

  Brittany had been an honor roll student who also participated in band and show choir. She seemed so alive in the pictures.

  They always did, though. It made Lorelei sick to think about the poor girl’s life being ended. She was horrified by it, just as she always had been. It seemed so appalling, so repulsive to think that someone could snuff out this bubbly young life.

  And yet…

  Lorelei hadn’t gone to work for the FBI because she was appalled by death and because she wanted to save lives. That was what she always told people, but the truth was that she possessed an ability to turn her revulsion and sympathy off. She could go cold and detached, and then Brittany became nothing more than a type or a character. She was like the victim in a bad TV mystery show, the token body that was only there for the fun of sleuthing.

  For the first ten years of her career as a profiler, that was all it ever was for her. A story. A puzzle. A game. She found it easy to slip into the heads of the murderers that she described and to figure out what drove them to do what they did. The killers didn’t think of their victims as people, not really. They thought of them as pawns in a game, and Lorelei could do that too. She could view as many bloody crime scenes as she needed and scrutinize them with the eyes of a critic, as if the murder was nothing more than the script for a movie.

  But then everything changed.

  She was shaking now, even just from the articles she’d read. She was the farthest thing from clinical and detached that a woman could be. Whoever she used to be when she was a profiler, she wasn’t that woman anymore. Now, she was broken and beaten.

  He’d won.

  The Undertaker had won.

  Damn him.

  “Whatcha doing there?”

  Lorelei jumped. She scrambled up out of her seat to come face to face with Mia. “Oh, holy crap!”

  Mia laughed. “Did I scare you?” Mia was technically her boss, but she was also Lorelei’s best friend.

  “You snuck up on me on purpose.” Lorelei glared.

  Mia was still laughing. “Is Jordan here?”

  Lorelei put a hand to her chest. “Jesus, Mia. Jesus.”

  “Jordan?”

  Lorelei shook her head. “She was here earlier, but I sent her home because Simon needed to do his homework.”

  “Damn,” said Mia. “She’s not at home. I hoped she was with you.”

  “Sorry,” said Lorelei.

  “I’ll just call her,” said Mia, digging out her phone.

  Lorelei sank back into her seat, her heart beating fast. She tried to take deep breaths. She wanted a drink. Not yet, she told herself. Not until this evening. There were rules about the drinking. If she followed them, she remained functional. And she had to remain functional for Simon. Her son needed his mother.

  “Where are you?” Mia was saying into the phone. She paused. “Well, get back in an hour for dinner, okay?” Another pause. “No, you cannot. I want you home for dinner tonight…. That’s a good girl. See you later.” Mia hung up. She sat down next to Lorelei and grinned. “So, whatcha doing?”

  “Oh, just reading about that girl that died,” sa
id Lorelei.

  Mia nodded. “Oh, I heard about that. Awful. Just awful, the way they found her all tied up like that. Creepy, if you ask me. Sounds like it’s a serial killer or something. You’d know. You know all about that kind of thing.”

  “What have you heard?” Nothing about the article had screamed serial killer to Lorelei, but she couldn’t be sure, of course.

  “Why? Didn’t you think that it was a serial killer?” said Mia.

  “There’s only one girl,” said Lorelei.

  “Yes, but she’s young, and she was tied up,” said Mia. “Isn’t that like, um, that one you told me about? The one with the sorority girls?”

  Lorelei’s mouth suddenly went dry.

  “Dylan Wayne Ross, that’s it.” Mia looked proud of herself. “Isn’t that it?”

  Lorelei nodded. “Sure.”

  “Well, it sounds like him. Tell me about him again.” Mia was intensely interested in Lorelei’s old job as a profiler. She always wanted to know the gory details about various killers.

  Lorelei shook her head. “I only talk about the serial killers when I’m drunk, Mia.”

  Mia made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Well, then just tell me if I get it wrong. He was staying overnight with his older sister at college in her sorority house. He woke up, and he got a rope, and then he went after girl after girl, wrapping the rope around each girl’s neck and tightening—”

  “Not now.” Lorelei was up and out of her seat again, feeling jittery. She knew that the only thing that would solve this feeling was a drink, but it was too early. Far, far too early. She shook her head. “I can’t talk about that now.”

  “Sorry,” said Mia. “I guess I should have figured that.”

  Lorelei looked down at her hands. “I should go.”

  “Oh, really?” Mia stuck out her lower lip. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “It’s not you.” I was already upset. She turned to go, and then turned back. “Was this Brittany girl strangled? Like the girls Ross killed?” Dylan Wayne Ross had tied up his victims, but he’d strangled them first.

  Mia shrugged. “You’re the one who’s been reading about the case. Was she?”

  “It didn’t say.” Lorelei tapped her bottom lip, thinking.

  * * *

  Nine o’clock, P.M. Finally time for a drink.

  Lorelei stood behind the bar in The Blue Spruce and sipped at a whiskey sour.

  Was it possible that the killing of this girl was all about Lorelei herself? She used to have nightmares about that, about one of the men who’d been put away by her profile escaping and coming after her. She’d always thought the killer would take the direct approach and come after her personally, though, not someone else. She’d also always thought that if anyone did it, it would be the Undertaker. Sometimes, it seemed impossible to think that a prison could contain someone like the Undertaker. He was larger than life in her memory, a behemoth.

  She tended bar here at The Blue Spruce five nights a week. On the weeknights, this tended to be the only bar that was open in the resort. During the busy summer months, all the bars in the resort were open. But it wasn’t summer, and this was it for those who were staying in the hotel if they wanted a nightcap. Some people from the community frequented the place too. It wasn’t the only bar in the area, but it was one of the classier places to snag a drink in Pineville.

  Lorelei had started bartending when Simon was four months old. That was when she went back to work. She spent the last trimester of her pregnancy and the first months of Simon’s life living with her parents because she had no other place to go and no one else to turn to. And she couldn’t have done it those first months without her parents’ help, there was no doubt of that. But moving back home in her thirties had its own challenges, the biggest of which was that her parents didn’t approve of her drinking. Fair enough.

  She’d managed not to drink during her pregnancy, but that was only because she’d been exhausted the whole time and the fear of the nightmares didn’t keep her up. She still had the nightmares, but if she woke up after one, she promptly fell right back to sleep.

  Not so after Simon was born.

  Sleeping through the night wasn’t really an option anyway, considering that Simon needed night feeds.

  But she found that she couldn’t handle being awake in the middle of the night after one of her nightmares if she didn’t have a drink. And her mother wouldn’t stop scolding her about it. Lorelei wasn’t proud of herself, but she was doing her best not to hurt Simon. She didn’t get wasted. She only drank a little. And she fed Simon formula instead of breast milk if she started to drink.

  She got the bartending job so that she would have money coming in and so she would be working during the first shift of Simon’s sleep. Plus, she figured that it was the best kind of job to get if one had a drinking problem. She could drink at work. What other job would allow her to do that?

  She bartended all through Simon’s infancy, saving her money and working towards her freedom, arguing constantly with her mother.

  And then?

  Tragedy struck, in the form of a car accident on icy roads. Her parents both died on impact, and she was suddenly alone in the world. That was when she met Mia, who was taking over her family’s hotel and resort and trying to put her own stamp on it. When Mia found out that Lorelei was a bartender, she insisted that Lorelei come and work for her, and the job saved her.

  Lorelei had to admit that her drinking was spiraling. In the wake of her parents’ death, she’d gotten worse and worse, and sometimes she passed out when she was supposed to be taking care of Simon. Sometimes she was so drunk that she couldn’t keep a spoon steady to get the baby food into his mouth. She was lucky that he learned to use utensils early and that he fed himself for the most part. She was so consumed in her grief and her addiction that she didn’t even see the signs that Simon wasn’t like other kids. She was drowning.

  Working here at the resort was a lifeline.

  Simon slept while she worked, and he slept in a crib at Mia’s place, right next to Jordan’s crib.

  Lorelei made herself rules, the ones she still stuck by to this day. No drinking until after nine. No more than six drinks in one evening. The rules saved her, and she was able to provide a stable home life for her son.

  Once she had her head on straight, it was easier to see that Simon needed help. He didn’t point or babble like other little kids. He was often absorbed in his own little world, and that world was hard to penetrate. With Mia’s help, Lorelei had been able to get Simon assistance.

  She knew she wasn’t a perfect mother. Far from it. But she loved her son, and she was doing the best that she could. Thanks to Mia and the community at the resort, she had been able to pull herself together enough not to completely fail Simon.

  He was a good boy. She wished that he didn’t have to go through the false accusations that were being leveled at him. She only hoped that they’d fizzle out and go away soon.

  They’d find Brittany’s killer, and all of this would be ancient history.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After a slow night—only four customers—Lorelei shut the bar down early. As she scrubbed down the counters, she poured herself one last drink. The sixth one. She liked it when she could close early and could have her final drink in peace. She tried to sip it slowly, but it was harder to sip once she was a little tipsy, and she found herself halfway through with it by the time she went to count down the drawer in her cash register.

  There wasn’t much cash to sort. Only one of her customers had paid cash. Lorelei filled out a slip, put the cash in a zip-up bank bag and took both the hundred dollars for the drawer and the profit to the safe.

  When she got back, she picked her drink up and finished it in one gulp.

  She sighed. Time to clean the glass she’d used and head home. Simon would be in bed by now, hopefully asleep. She needed to do the same.

  But instead, she found herself taking out
her phone and dialing a number she hadn’t dialed in quite some time. She wasn’t even sure if the number was right anymore. It was from an old cell phone and what were the odds that he—

  “Hello?”

  “Isaac? That you?” she said. “It’s Lorelei.”

  “Lorelei, geez. Are you kidding me? Wow.”

  “I know. Long time,” she said.

  “You, uh, you sound… Have you been drinking?”

  She sighed. “A little bit. But I’ve got it under control these days, you know? I have to have it under control for Simon.”

  “Look, if you’re drunk, I don’t know if I want to—”

  “I’m not drunk.” She was defensive. Then she yielded. “But I probably woke you up, didn’t I? You want to go back to sleep.”

  “Why’d you call me?”

  “I…” She sucked in a breath. “Would it be really crazy for someone to escape from prison and commit a murder to try to frame someone. As revenge?”

  “What?”

  “It sounds crazy.” She wrinkled up her nose. “It can’t be.” She needed to get off the phone. She shouldn’t even be giving voice to thoughts like this.

  “I guess it depends on who the person is that escaped,” said Isaac. “Some of the people I do profiles on are pretty wacko, you know?”

  “Have you…?” She licked her lips. “Have you heard anything about the Undertaker?” He was one of the most prolific serial killers she’d ever profiled—one of the most prolific ever, in fact. They’d called him the Undertaker because of the complex rituals he’d used in burying his victims.

  “He’s still locked up,” said Isaac. “Don’t worry.”

  She sucked in a breath. Good. That was good. “Okay, well, I guess I probably could have confirmed that myself. I didn’t need to call you. I don’t know why I called you. I’m sorry. I’ll go ahead and hang—”

  “What’s going on, Lor?” There was genuine concern in his voice.