The Rumor, page 24
Mom lays her phone on the floor. Marie kicks it out of reach and points to the chair again.
“Go on, Sally, take a pew.”
Mom does as she’s told. I stand in the doorway, my feet rooted to the threshold.
“Whatever you want to say to my mother, it’s got nothing to do with Alfie. He’s an innocent little boy. My little boy. Not hers. Just tell me where he is, Marie. I need to see him. I need to know he’s okay. You can’t do this.”
“My brother was an innocent little boy, too. Still got murdered, though, didn’t he?”
Mom leaps to her feet. “But I didn’t…”
“Shut up and sit down!” Marie snarls. “You want to see your grandson again, you shut the fuck up and listen! I mean it, Sally. You’re not in charge here. I am. The sooner you accept that, the better it will be for everyone. Especially Alfie.”
My stomach churns with dread and nausea as I turn my phone off and set it on the floor.
Mom lowers herself stiffly into the chair. “What do you want from me?” she asks Marie.
“A full confession, that’s what I want. A full confession on video for the world to see.” Marie glares at her. “This has destroyed our family for long enough. It ruined my mother’s life. It’s ruined mine, too. And my father’s. It’s consumed us.
“But first things first, eh, Sally? Tell your daughter what happened that day. Tell her why the jury got it wrong. Tell her why you should have gone down for murder, not manslaughter.” She fiddles with her phone, holds it up in front of her.
“Speak nice and clearly now, won’t you? And don’t leave anything out.”
A small germ of hope flutters somewhere deep inside me. “Does Karen know you’re doing this? Has she got Alfie somewhere?”
Marie laughs. “Karen doesn’t have a clue. Oh, she knows about her uncle Robbie, of course. She’s always known that. But as far as she’s concerned, I’ve given up on all that now. All that anger, all that hate.” She strokes what’s left of her hair. “The cancer, you know? Puts things in perspective.”
Her eyes seem to flash in the candlelight. “Except it doesn’t. When I saw her at the playground that time, I recognized her right away. I’ll never forget your face, Sally. Not in a million years.” She shakes her head. “You’ve forgotten mine, though, haven’t you? Guess that’s what cancer and a lifetime of smoking does to you.”
“So where’s Karen now?” My voice comes out thin and strangled. “I don’t understand. Where’s Alfie?”
“She’s on her way to the hospital with Hayley. The silly girl banged her head on the sink. Karen left Alfie with me because you were on your way to pick him up, she said. Forgot her phone, too, in the panic.”
She sighs and shakes her head. “Too bad my mother couldn’t have found her earlier, when you were just a kid. Too bad my mother went to her grave knowing she was still out there somewhere, living the life she’s never deserved to live. I’m doing it for her. For my poor dead mother. Your mother took little Robbie away from us and ruined our lives. And unless she tells the truth for once in her diabolical life, I’m going to ruin hers, and yours.” She narrows her eyes. “And Alfie’s. What did you think of that photo, by the way? Karen did it as a joke—she didn’t notice my little addition. Bet you did, though.”
My blood freezes.
“Now do as you’re told, Joanna. Sit down and listen to your mother’s confession. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll see your boy again.”
Mom looks ready to pounce. She grips the sides of her chair and leans forward. “You’ll never get away with this, Marie,” she hisses. “You’re insane if you think you will.”
Marie laughs. “I don’t care. By the time this comes to court I’ll probably be dead. I’ve got stage four metastatic breast cancer, in case you hadn’t noticed. Now come on, Sally. Camera’s rolling. We’re all ears, aren’t we, Jo?”
51
MOM HOLDS MY GAZE AS she speaks. Her face is bleak. Her voice bleaker.
“We were playing,” she says. “A whole bunch of us.” Her eyes slide toward Marie. “Marie was there, too. And Robbie. I was the one in charge. I was always the one in charge. Mainly because I thought up the games.”
My chest feels like it’s going to explode with fear. I have to make myself breathe in and out, will my lungs to expand and contract. It’s no longer something that just happens automatically. All I can think of is Alfie, frightened and alone. Where has she taken him? Is he here in this house, shut up in one of the rooms? Did we miss somewhere? What if there’s a cellar and he’s all alone down there in the dark? Why didn’t we think of that?
But all I can do is listen while my mother speaks.
“Scary games, they were. There was always something threatening us, something we had to escape from. A fiend of some sort, swooping at us through the rubble in the streets. An escaped convict, with chains on his feet. A gunslinging cowboy intent on revenge. And only I knew how to outwit him.”
She rocks as she speaks.
“All the others did what I said. I think they were a little bit scared of me. I’d had a good role model, you see. I knew how scary people acted. I knew the sorts of things they said. The way they looked at you and turned your insides to liquid. I was acting out the only thing I knew. What happened at home. What I’d seen. What I’d heard.
“We didn’t want Robbie joining us. He was too small and he couldn’t run fast enough, but Marie had to look after him so we didn’t have a choice. He kept whining and spoiling our game. Then I found an old knife in one of the houses we used to play in. I picked it up and started waving it around. All the other kids ran away, screaming. They knew it was just a game and they loved it, pretending to be scared. They knew I wouldn’t really hurt them.
“But little Robbie didn’t run away. He wanted a turn at being the bad guy. He wanted the knife and he tried to grab it out of my hands. I snatched it away and it sliced right into his fingers.”
She closes her eyes. “It was just an accident. I didn’t mean to do it. But then he started screaming and crying and saying he was going to tell his mom and dad and they’d send me to jail, and I just wanted him to shut up before all the others came back and saw what had happened. I just wanted to scare him a bit, to tell him to shut up because it was an accident.
“I pinned him against the wall, my hand on his collarbone.”
My hand flies instinctively to my neck.
“I’d seen my dad do this a million times to Mom and it always shut her up.” She takes a ragged breath. “I had the knife in my other hand, but I’d never have hurt him with it on purpose.” She looks straight at me, beseeching me with her eyes. “Never. But it’s hard holding a little kid still, and Robbie suddenly lunged forward. I didn’t know a little boy could be that strong, but he was so angry it was like he suddenly had the strength of a much older kid. The knife went right into him. Then Marie was standing next to me, screaming her head off, and then they all were.”
Marie shakes her head in disgust and stops filming.
Mom bows her head and starts to cry. “If I hadn’t been holding that knife, if I hadn’t been so determined to be the bad guy at all costs, it would never have happened. If I’d just let him be the villain for a little while, let him have his fun…He was only a little boy.”
“Nice story, but it’s not true, is it?” Marie jeers, her voice scornful. Anger has ground her features into sharp blades. She stabs a finger at Mom’s face. “Tell the truth, you murdering bitch!”
Mom ignores her and looks directly at me. Marie might as well not be in the room, for all the attention Mom’s giving her. Everything she’s just said has been to me.
“So why didn’t they believe you,” I ask, “when you told them what happened?”
“Because Marie told the police I’d been horrible to Robbie all day, as if it was just me. But we’d all been picking on him. She said I’d done it on purpose, that she’d come into the room and seen me lunge at him with the knife. I don’t know, maybe it was her guilt that made her say that. She was supposed to be looking after him and she hadn’t. She’d run off laughing and squealing with all the others. She’d left him on his own. Maybe she wanted someone to blame so she wouldn’t be in trouble.”
“Your mother’s always been a liar,” Marie says, a low, growling menace in her voice. “A liar and a bully and a manipulator. Oh, she can turn the charm on when she wants to. Do the old ‘poor little abused child’ act. But it’s all crap. So what you’re going to do now, Sally, is tell her the truth. Tell her what really happened. I’d hate for something bad to happen to Alfie, I really would. He’s such a lovely little boy.”
My chest heaves with sobs. I can barely speak for crying. “Where is he? What have you done with him?”
“You’ll find out where he is when your mother finally tells the truth.”
Mom stares at the floor and doesn’t speak. She’s holding her breath. I hold mine, too. At last, she releases it. She raises her head and looks at the phone in Marie’s hand. Tears flow unchecked down her face, and, even though a part of me hates her for keeping this secret for so many years, for lying to me day in, day out, for being the one who’s put us in this position in the first place simply by being who she is, I feel her pain almost as if it’s my own and I’m crying, too.
“There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think of Robbie. He haunts me. Every year that passes I try to picture what he’d look like now, what he might be doing if he was still alive. The life he might have led. Sometimes I see a little boy that looks like him and I can’t breathe.” Her voice falters. “I can’t breathe…
“Remorse isn’t a big enough word to describe what I feel. It doesn’t come close.” Her breath judders as she speaks. “Sometimes I think about how things might have turned out differently. If I hadn’t gone out to play that day. If I hadn’t thought up the monster game. If that house had been flattened like all the others in the row. If it hadn’t somehow missed the wrecking ball. If I hadn’t been nosy enough to open that drawer and find the knife, bold enough to pick it up. A whole list of ifs. All the significant moments in our life hinge on choices made in the blink of an eye. Choices that define us forever.”
She hangs her head over her knees. When she finally straightens, she looks right into Marie’s eyes for perhaps the first time.
“I know you want some kind of closure, Marie, and I’m sorry how your life turned out. I really am. I think of your mother every day, too. The grief that destroyed her, that stole away your childhood. You have to believe me.”
Her hands are still, in her lap. Her spine is straight. “I know you think I’ve had a life I didn’t deserve to have. A beautiful daughter. A grandson. I know you think I should have been punished for what happened, but I swear to you, Marie, it was an accident. I should never have pinned him against the wall. He was a little boy and I was being a bully and that was wrong. Whatever happened to me at home, it was wrong of me to do that. I knew it then just as I know it now.
“But if you think I haven’t been punished, you’re wrong.” She taps her temple. “What goes on in here is my punishment. This is my life sentence and it never stops, Marie. It never stops. I was responsible for killing a little boy. Your beautiful brother. The uncle Karen never met. But I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t. If you want me to say it’s my fault Robbie died, then I’ll say it. Because it’s true. It’s my fault your brother died. I was holding him by his neck against a wall and I had a knife in my hand. But I didn’t stab him on purpose, Marie. I wouldn’t. I didn’t. You have to believe me.”
A hard lump gathers at the back of my throat. My cheeks are wet with tears. This is my mother. The veil she’s been wearing all her life has slipped—the one I didn’t even know was a veil—and here she is, raw and exposed. An open wound. She looks at me, eyes imploring me to understand, to forgive, and I want to, but I’m wounded, too. I can’t respond. My muscles won’t work. My voice is gone.
“I always knew you’d never stop looking.” She turns her head to one side, addresses the wall. “I hated you for that. For never giving up the fight. But part of me admired you, too. Admired your tenacity. I often think that, if our roles had been reversed, I might have done the same thing. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so I don’t know what it feels like to lose one. But I know what it’s like to have a daughter and a grandchild.”
She turns to me now, her eyes brimming with tears. “And I’d willingly give up my freedom—give up my life—to save theirs.”
She inhales slowly through her nose and exhales through her mouth, her lips rounded so it looks like she’s blowing the air out.
“So if you want me to confess to something I didn’t do, so you can post your video on YouTube, or whatever it is you’re planning, then I’ll do it. I’ll do it willingly. If that’s what it takes for this to end now and for your family to move on, I’ll do it.”
“This isn’t right, Marie,” I say. “Whatever happens to my mother, it doesn’t change anything. Robbie’s dead. Nothing’s going to bring him back.”
Marie sits in her chair, her face ashen in the half-light. “I promised my mother I’d make it my business to get justice for Robbie, to make her pay for what she did.”
Mom turns to face the camera. Part of me wants to stop her, to shake her by the shoulders and tell her not to be so stupid. This lie she’s about to tell will be her undoing. Her face will be all over the internet in a matter of minutes and there’ll be nowhere for her to hide. She’s throwing her life away. But she’s doing it for me. And for Alfie. Telling lies to protect us. It’s what she’s always done, and I know I can’t stop her. Because the only thing that matters right now is Alfie, and getting him back. I know it and she knows it and this is the only way.
Her voice, when it comes, is devoid of emotion. Flat. Empty. It reminds me of something I saw on the news as a child, a group of traumatized hostages telling their loved ones they were being well looked after when anyone could see they were in fear for their lives.
“I, Sally Catherine McGowan, hereby confess to the intentional murder of Robbie Harris. It wasn’t an accident. I lied in court. I am the monster you all think I am.”
She closes her eyes. “Now please, for the love of God, tell us where Alfie is.”
52
A NOISE FROM DOWNSTAIRS—A loud bang—makes us all flinch. It’s the front door being flung against the wall.
“Mom? Are you in here?”
Karen’s voice echoes through the house and my knees give way. I grab on to the wall for support. Thank God! Karen will talk her mother around. She’ll make her tell us what she’s done with Alfie. She has to.
Marie drags her chair nearer the window and tries to scrabble up onto the windowsill. But as she does, she drops the phone. It skitters across the floor. Mom and I both make a grab for it at the same time, but Mom gets there first.
“You wouldn’t dare!” Marie screams, knocking the chair over in her haste to get the phone back. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Don’t delete it, Mom! Not until she tells us where he is.”
Mom holds the phone high so Marie can’t snatch it back. The three of us just stand there glaring at one another. A tableau of figures, frozen in shocked anticipation.
Then Marie rights the chair, clambers back onto it, and somehow manages to maneuver herself onto the sill. For one terrible moment I think she’s going to reel backward into the filthy glass and fall to her death before she’s told me where Alfie is.
“No!” I scream. “Don’t do it!”
Feet pound up the first staircase below. “Mom! Mommy! What are you doing?”
“We’re up here!” I shout. “I think she’s going to jump!”
The stairs up to the attic room groan under the weight of feet. Is someone else with her?
When I see not just Karen appear in the doorway but Michael, too, their faces etched with dread, it takes everything I have not to break down and weep.
“She’s got Alfie. She won’t tell us where he is!” The words spill out of me. An alien twang that reverberates in the frigid air of the room.
Michael edges in, his eyes trained on Marie.
“It’s okay,” he says. “Alfie’s safe.”
Mom’s eyes meet mine. Did we hear right? Did he say Alfie’s safe?
Tears are streaming down Karen’s face. Her eyes dart from Marie to Mom and then to me. “He’s with Kay,” she says. “I took him to Kay’s before I drove to the hospital.”
Instinctively, I fall into Mom’s arms and we cling to each other, sobbing in relief. Alfie is safe. He was never in danger. Marie tricked us. Then I hear Mom gasp, feel the change in her body. I turn to see Marie forcing the window open. The steady grumble of the ocean enters the room and, with it, a blast of icy, wet air.
Michael rushes toward her.
“Stay back or I’ll jump,” she says, her hands gripping the rotten window frame.
“No!” Karen shrieks. “Mom, please!”
“Marie, don’t do this.” Michael’s voice is soft and calm. “Come down from there and let’s talk.”
“Talk? What’s there to talk about? I’ve ruined my last chance of getting justice for Robbie. There’s nothing left for me. I’m dying anyway.”
“But your daughter!” cries Mom. “Your granddaughter. They need you, Marie. Don’t do this to them.” Mom’s face is stained with tears, her voice tight with emotion.
Karen is sobbing now. “Oh, Mom! I thought you’d finally come to terms with what happened, that you wanted to spend what time you’ve got left with me and Hayley. We were going to do nice things together, remember? Lay down some memories for her. Good memories. Why spoil all that for the sake of this…this obsession with McGowan. Vengeance solves nothing. It won’t bring Robbie back.”
