Oh, damn it all to hell, why did he have to sound like that? She ran her finger around the rim of her empty glass. “It’s, um, it’s Simon. There’s some issues here. A murder. Some girl who was tied up and killed. The papers are sketchy on the details. Anyway, local law enforcement is circling on Simon.”
“They’re probably just interviewing everyone, trying to narrow things down.”
“He doesn’t even know her,” said Lorelei. “They’re picking on him because he’s got Asperger’s, and because some girls at his school are saying that he’s weird. And you should hear the kinds of questions they asked him, the way they’re going after him. He’s just a kid, and they’re treating him like a hardened criminal.”
“Aw, hell, that’s awful. Look, uh, you know, I’ve got vacation time piled up. I never take any. If you want, I could tell the Bureau I need some time off and I could come down there. Maybe there’s something I could do to help.”
“No, Isaac,” she said.
“What’s the harm? It’s been ages now. I get the picture—you don’t want anything to do with me. I’d only come to help, not to rekindle anything. Tell me where you are.”
“No,” she said.
“I could figure it out,” he said. “I’ve got resources. I doubt you buried yourself so deep that you didn’t leave a trail. I’ve only stayed out of it in respect to you, but it occurs to me that a lot of time has passed, and that I’ve never really had a chance to even meet Simon—”
“And there’s no reason you should.”
“Really? You’re going to say that?”
Lorelei clutched the phone tightly. And then she said something to Isaac that she’d never said before, even though all of her actions had implied it. “He’s not yours, you know.”
She hung up.
CHAPTER FIVE
The phone was ringing again.
Lorelei groaned, feeling blindly on the bedside table, toppling a glass of water she’d set there the night before. Luckily, the water missed the phone, but it still left a wet spot on the carpet.
“Hello?” her voice was a croak.
“Ms. Taylor?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” said Lorelei.
“This is Maggie Watts, the assistant principal at Pineville High.” That was Simon’s school.
Lorelei sat up straight. “Is Simon all right?”
“He won’t talk to the police without your presence. I’m calling to ask if you’ll come down to the school.”
Lorelei snorted. “You bet I’ll be there.” So Jeremy had deliberately ignored her request and was now badgering Simon again. She wished she was surprised, but she wasn’t. Jeremy was a dirt bag.
She dressed, stopped for water and coffee at McDonald’s again, and arrived at the school within fifteen minutes of the call. Once there, she was ushered into a room in the office complex. It was set up like a waiting room with several padded chairs and a potted plant. The chairs were surprisingly uncomfortable given how padded they were. Simon was already sitting there, and Jeremy was with him.
Jeremy looked up at her with a sneer. “Glad to see you’ve arrived, Lorelei, but it’s not necessary for you to be here.”
“My son’s being detained,” she said. “I have the right to be here with him. He knows his rights, and he’s exercising them. Don’t be an ass about following the law.”
“What did you just call me?” Jeremy narrowed his eyes. “You don’t want to be disrespecting me right now, Lorelei.”
“Are you threatening me?” she said.
He snorted. “Anyway, Simon’s not being detained.”
“Fine then.” She motioned for Simon to get up. “Simon, sweetie, you’re free to go. You can go back to class.”
“Now, hold on,” said Jeremy. “I’d like to talk to him.”
“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” she said, glaring at the detective. “So, unless you’re forcing him to stay, then he doesn’t have to.”
“You know that if he doesn’t cooperate with us, that’s only going to make us more suspicious.” Jeremy was on his feet now, striding across the room to stand nose to nose with her. “What do you know? Why are you trying so damned hard to protect him?”
“Because he’s my son. Because you’re accusing him of something he didn’t do—”
“You sure about that?”
“Positive.”
They both took a breath.
Simon looked confused. “Should I go back to class?”
“Yes,” said Lorelei.
“No,” said Jeremy.
Simon got up. He shuffled across the floor towards Lorelei.
Jeremy’s shoulders slumped. He turned to Simon, making his tone pleasant. “Look, I just want to talk. It’s nothing scary. You and me, huh? You don’t need your mother here.”
“Yes, he does,” said Lorelei.
“I’m missing history class,” said Simon, his voice not betraying any emotion. “I probably should be there.”
“He doesn’t like to miss class,” Lorelei said to Jeremy. “It’s very stressful for him.”
“Well, you know what was very stressful for Brittany Lewis?” said Jeremy. “Getting murdered. I really think that’s more important here.”
“Simon had nothing to do with that,” said Lorelei.
“Well, if you’d let me talk to him, then I could establish that,” said Jeremy. “I’m just trying to eliminate him.”
“Oh, like hell you are.” She put her hands on her hips. “This is personal. It’s all about me. You hate me, and that’s why you’re going after my son.”
“Hate you?” Jeremy considered. “Well, you are the one who kills little girls. Maybe I should be questioning you instead of him. Maybe I do hate you.”
“What?” said Simon.
Lorelei was shaking. How dare he say that in front of Simon? How dare he?
“What does he mean by that, Mom?”
“Nothing,” said Lorelei, still trembling. She wanted to hit Jeremy. Hard. But she didn’t move. She simply stood and shook.
“I’m following the case where it leads is all, Lorelei,” Jeremy said in a low voice. “The fact that it leads me to a way to hurt you? Well, that’s just icing on the cake.”
She let out a choked noise of disbelief. When her voice came out again, it was a whisper. “We’re leaving, Simon.” She held out her hand to him.
“Mom.” Simon rolled his eyes.
Right. Of course he wasn’t going to hold her hand. She pointed at the door. “Go.”
Simon went ahead of her.
She followed her son toward the door.
“Simon was in chess club with Brittany, Lorelei,” Jeremy called after her. “I’m not pulling this out of my ass.”
CHAPTER SIX
When Simon was a baby, he was very independent. He didn’t cry a lot, and he didn’t seem to need much. He could entertain himself for hours on end. At first, he would lie under mobiles, batting at the objects overhead, seemingly mesmerized by them. Once he was old enough to hold objects, nearly any household trinket would do the trick. He was especially enamored with a set of wooden coasters that interlocked. Lorelei remembered that he would hold those and shake them around in front of his face for hours on end.
Lorelei hadn’t been the most attentive mother in the wake of her parents’ death. She’d been drunk and sad and lost in a cocoon of confusion. It seemed to her that her life had gone over a cliff and she didn’t know how she was going to mend things. But things started to look up after she came to work at the resort. She stabilized, and she began to pay more attention to Simon.
Also, the fact that Jordan was around for Lorelei to compare Simon to made a difference. The two children were very close in age, but Jordan seemed more advanced than Simon in a lot of ways. Simon was very good at certain things. He had an affinity for patterns and puzzles. He also watched videos about shapes and numbers and the alphabet, and he knew all his numbers and letters at a very young age.
But he didn�
��t talk.
At first, Lorelei brushed it off. After all, the fact that Jordan was running around identifying all sorts of things at eighteen months while Simon was silent might only be because Jordan was a girl. Girls talked before boys, right?
But by the time that Simon was twenty months old, and he hadn’t said anything, not one word, Lorelei was definitely starting to get worried.
Mia came to her rescue. “You’ll have to take him to someone,” she’d said. “They have speech teachers who can come into your home.”
“I can’t afford that,” Lorelei had said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mia had responded. She’d paid for everything. Lorelei thought about refusing, but she didn’t see much point in being proud when it came to her son. She could refuse help all day long for herself, but not for her son. If Simon had an opportunity, Lorelei was going to take advantage of it for him. With Mia’s help, Simon had been tested and diagnosed with autism, and he’d been given specialized instruction in speech. Soon, he could speak just as well as Jordan.
There was a bit of a controversy over whether he was Asperger’s or not in the beginning. Asperger’s was supposed to not have a speech delay, and that meant Simon was simply HFA (high-functioning autistic). But as he got older, he was increasingly categorized as having Asperger’s as his behaviors fit better with that diagnosis.
At any rate, nowadays, Asperger’s had been taken off of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, so no one got officially diagnosed with it anymore. So, it was really six in one hand, half a dozen in the other. Using the term Asperger’s was ingrained in her now, though, so she still referred to it that way.
Simon was one of those poster children for early intervention. The specialists she’d worked with all said that he’d done brilliantly because he’d been helped so young. His Asperger’s wasn’t nearly the barrier that it could have been if left untreated.
However, that didn’t mean he was, well, normal. He was still an Aspie, as she often heard the condition affectionately referred to.
Simon was a slave to routine. He loved things to go the same way every day, and when they didn’t, it was very upsetting to him. He also became obsessively fascinated with subjects and studied them to the detriment of everything else for long periods of time. When he was little, he’d had a phase in which he was interested in trains. He learned all kinds of things about trains and could spout random facts at anyone who would listen. Then one day, as if a switch had been turned off, he was no longer interested in trains at all. Soon enough, he had another all-encompassing interest, however. Ninja Turtles.
Lorelei cringed just thinking about it. She was glad that one hadn’t lasted long.
He’d gone through all kinds of things, from typical little-boy interests like airplanes to more obscure things like greyhound racing.
Currently, he was gaga for photography. She’d gotten him a fancy digital camera for his birthday two months ago, and he seemed to take the thing with him everywhere, snapping photos, although he was shy about his work and rarely let her see anything he’d photographed.
One of the reasons for that was that he was exceedingly fragile when it came to criticism. He had a perfectionist streak in him, and he was so precise and dedicated that he really could approach perfection when he set his mind to it. But anything less wasn’t acceptable.
Most of that could possibly be brushed aside as quirks, she guessed. Maybe that was why people like Jeremy seemed to disbelieve that Simon could even have autism. “He’s just unique,” people would say, or some variation of that. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d heard someone express disbelief in Simon’s diagnosis.
When she felt frustrated, she’d sometimes lash out, telling them about how Simon had always been somewhat blank. How he never responded to hugs or kisses as a baby, but simply seemed to bear them as his burden. As he grew older, it was more obvious that he had an aversion to touch. And his emotions? He had them, but they made him nervous, and he didn’t respond well to people who were highly emotional. Likewise, he never lost control. And he never did anything like comfort someone in distress.
When Lorelei cried, he would either leave the room or go to a corner and stare at her, hugging himself.
He would always have a sort of glassy expression to his eyes in those moments, as if he was finding everything so confusing and stressful that he’d simply checked out of his body.
There was no getting around Simon’s diagnosis. He wasn’t simply unique. He was autistic.
Even so, that didn’t mean he was a bad kid.
And she’d never before thought of him as a liar.
* * *
Lorelei grabbed Simon by the arm and dragged him after her.
“Hey,” said Simon, trying to wiggle free. “I have to go back to class.”
“Oh, no,” said Lorelei. “You’re coming home with me. I’m signing you out.”
“You can’t.” Simon hated changes to his routine. “I need to stay at school. I’m supposed to be here. If you take me away—”
“Nothing bad will happen,” she insisted, and she yanked him down the hallway.
After a brief stop in the principal’s office to let them know she was taking Simon home, they were in the parking lot. She shoved him into the car, closed the door after him, and went over to the other side of the car.
The minute she sat down, she exploded. “She’s in your chess club?”
Simon fidgeted.
“Is she?”
“I guess.” He stared at his knuckles.
She slammed the driver’s side door closed. “You told me you didn’t know her. You lied to me. Why did you lie to me?”
“I didn’t.”
“You did,” she said.
“No, I didn’t. I don’t know her, not really. She’s not my friend. I mean, maybe I know her name and I know her by sight, but that’s not the same thing.”
Lorelei gaped at him. Was he playing dumb here, or did he not realize this was the kind of evasive sort of maneuver that could land him in serious trouble if he tried it with the police? He was far too close to being arrested to say stupid things like that. “You know that when I asked—”
“You didn’t ask,” he said. “I told you that I didn’t know her. Because I don’t. Not really. You know that I don’t really… notice people sometimes. I get focused on other stuff, and I don’t see anything at all.”
This was true enough. His ability to focus and tune everything out was incredible. She sighed. “So, she’s in chess club, but you don’t know her. You never talked to her or anything like that?”
Simon didn’t answer.
“Did you talk to her?”
“Maybe,” said Simon. “I don’t know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She sunk her hands into her hair. “Simon, if there is something about this girl that you are not telling me—”
“I just want to go back to class.” His voice was a little unsteady, the only indication of that he was very upset.
She didn’t have the patience for him right now. “You’re not going to class today. Just forget about that. Now, answer my question. When did you talk to Brittany? Why is it that they think that you’re involved in this?”
Simon shrugged.
“Answer me.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know when you talked to her, or you don’t know why they think you’re involved.”
“Both.”
She groaned.
Simon took a deep breath and then let it out. “I might have talked to her sometimes. She was nice.”
“Sometimes? More than once?”
“Maybe.”
“And other kids in the chess club. They saw you talking to her?”
Simon nodded. “She talked back. A lot of times when I try to talk to people, they don’t really talk back. But she… she was nice.”
Lorelei shook her head slowly. This was getting worse and worse. Si
mon knew the girl. It sounded like they were friends. Now, it wasn’t just a bunch of people pointing fingers at the weird kid on the spectrum. Now, there was ammunition. She didn’t like this at all.
“I wish she wasn’t dead,” Simon muttered. “She was nice.”
* * *
Lorelei didn’t have to work that night, and so she’d planned for a night in with Simon. She was hoping to convince him to watch movies with her. Simon was particular about movies, but sometimes they could find things they both liked if they compromised. Simon’s favorite kind of movies were action and mysteries. She couldn’t stand anything with too much violence. It triggered her, and then the nightmares were worse.
But tonight, she figured it didn’t matter, because the nightmares were already bad. Last night, even after six drinks, she’d still had vivid dreams about girls inside pictures coming to life and touching the wounds in their foreheads and the blood in their matted hair. They turned accusing eyes on her and demanded to know why she hadn’t stopped him sooner. If she had, their lives would have been saved.
More of that was in store for her tonight, regardless. So, if Simon wanted a mystery movie, she’d agree to it. She scrolled through the offerings on Netflix on her phone as she waited for the casserole in the oven to be done.
“Mom?”
She looked up.
Simon was standing in the door to the kitchen. He was wearing a plaid shirt and a pair of jeans. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I was wondering if I could take the car.”
“What?” she said. “When? Now?”
He nodded.
She gestured at the oven. “We haven’t even had dinner.”
“I’ll pick up something from a fast food restaurant.”
“It’s my night off,” she said. “I thought we could watch movies.”
“Nah.” He dismissed this, waving it away.
She made a sour face, wishing the boy had some measure of her feelings once in a while. “Well, where are you taking the car?”
“Jordan and me are going to hang out.”
“Ah.” She nodded. So, he wanted to take his girlfriend on a date. But, interestingly, he never called their outings dates. “Don’t you think Jordan would like it if you took her somewhere nicer than a fast food place?”
Child of Mine: a psychological thriller Page 3