"Us?"
"When I made the deal with the prosecution, they agreed to keep my pregnancies out of the papers"
"Your pregnancies?"
"And yours"
Tina appeared mystified. "I didn't know you had a baby."
Bonnie's lips curled to a smile. "I had three "" There was more than a hint of pride in her voice.
"I don't understand. I never knew." Tina Esposito was a good actress, she'd been playing rich and happy for years. But even she couldn't suppress her surprise just then. Who could?
"Jesus, Bonnie," Tina said. "I don't know what to say. Except, why are you telling me this now? What does it have to do with me?"
"My babies are your daughter's brothers"
The look on Tina's face was shock, then horror. "Dylan?"
"Yes. When you left him, he took me on as his soul mate. It was the happiest time of my life. I was continuing on with something you started, bringing life and love to a world that needed it."
"What I did was not about life and love. It was about being foolish and desperate"
"Call it what you want." She took some breath mints out of her purse and extended her hand to Tina.
"No thanks," she said. "Now that you've ruined my day, my life, what do you want?"
Olga sat breathless, only just believing all that she heard. The idea that these women had conspired to have a murderer's babies was beyond comprehension, though she knew other women had done it. She recalled how serial killer poster boy Ted Bundy managed to get a woman pregnant while he was incarcerated in Florida. A California student nurse who'd been caring for Charles Manson made headlines when she revealed she'd had the Helter Skelter killer's boy/girl twins six years after he'd been sent away for life.
"What was her visit all about? What did she want?"
"At first I thought maybe she was lonely. Maybe she had a boring life and she read about me in one of those magazines and thought I had a more glamorous one and wanted to rekindle a friendship. You'd be surprised how many people read those stupid publications. But not Bonnie. She didn't want to look me up to be best pals. For Bonnie, it was always about Dylan. I guess she wanted to reconnect with me because Dylan had been our connection. And she wanted to tell me we were connected through his babies, too" Tina sighed. "She never saw through him. She'd been convinced that he'd been innocent of the murders of those girls in Meridian."
"Lorrie and Shelly," Olga said. "They had names, you know."
"Don't you think I know that?" said Tina, suddenly angry. "And I know Dylan Walker killed them, too. I know because he told me so"
The prison visiting room had been their sanctuary, a place where they could cement their love. Talking for hours, making plans that never really had to come to fruition. But in a very real sense, it had also been a tomb. There was no escaping it. It was in that vault that crying mothers, angry fathers, and deceived wives met with the men who had done humanity the greatest harm. It was a sad little play that repeated itself every week. Tina Winston never really saw herself as one of the foolish. The tricked. She viewed herself as woman enough to love a man she couldn't ever really have. It was a great and beautiful sacrifice.
But all of that changed one Saturday afternoon when he told her.
"I know people-reporters, cops, people-talk about me," Dylan said over a microwave-heated burrito that she bought with four quarters. "They don't always get it right, you understand "
"Certainly," Tina answered, "I know that"
"Do you?" His surprise was exaggerated.
She could barely take her eyes off his. It was that way whenever he spoke. She nodded and sipped her Coke from a paper cup.
"You are the only woman who really knows me to my soul, aren't you?"
"Of course" She adored how he leaned on her, confided his deepest feelings. He completely trusted her.
Dylan looked over at her pregnant belly. At four months, she was starting to show. "You've proven your love," he said. He couldn't touch her just then. Kissing and hugging were reserved solely for the hello greeting and the good-bye. He put his hands on the table, just a whisper from hers. She could almost feel the heat from his fingertips.
"I did it," his words coming to her like the soft, sexy talk of a lover. But the content didn't match the tone. Not at all. "I killed Lorrie and Shelley," he said. "Neither of them understood me. Not really. I mean, not the way that you do"
In a split second of clarity, Tina Winston understood for the first time that Dylan Daniel Walker was a monster. She said nothing more to him that day or any other day. She knew that whatever she carried inside her was the spawn of evil, a child she could never love. A mistake she could never obliterate.
Olga listened intently as the words tumbled from Tina's trembling lips. She stopped and blotted her eyes, careful not to smudge her makeup. "You know, that's the first time I've said his name in all these years. With Bonnie I just used `him' or Dash. I didn't want to give his name life, he was so dead to me after what he'd done"
"But that's not all," Tina went on. "He said there had been others. Others no one you, the police didn't know about"
"Did he say who?"
Tina shook her head. Droplets of her tears hit the shiny marble floor. "No. And I didn't ask. I just wanted to get out of there and throw up"
Olga waited for Tina to get a grip. It would take a while. Tina had gone from stunning and confident to haggard and limp like a wrung-out dishrag in about a half hour. Her eyes were puffy. Her nose was red. Every wrinkle on her face had suddenly etched itself deeper.
Something nagged at Olga. Something Tina had said before she had told her story. That's it. When she d asked why Bonnie had sought her out shed said `At first. At first I thought."
"Why did Bonnie come and find you?" she asked.
Tina took a deep breath and swallowed hard. Her eyes looked downward. "She said Dylan had gotten out of prison and was back in the Northwest. He was in Tacoma. She'd waited for him and he for her. She came to me to gloat, I guess. She was rather smug. As if we'd been in some competition and she'd finally had the upper hand. She'd been the chosen one. She'd been the one all along. You know what her last words to me were?"
Olga didn't have a clue and said so.
"Our son-that's what she said-our son and Dash and I are going to be a family."
"Anything else?"
"Yes, she used the phrase, `there are some flies in the ointment' and she said she was sorry."
Monday, exact time and place unknown
Jenna Kenyon had worked her hands free. The release of her wrists and arms sent a quake of pain through her body. She expected that she'd feel her pain diminish, but the opposite had been true. She let out a little, soft cry and called over to Nick.
"I think I can get loose now," she said. "Nick, how are you coming?"
When she didn't hear anything, she pulled herself up, and moved her feet like she was dolphin kicking at the Cherrystone community pool. At last the cords that held her ankles together slipped to the earthen floor. It was too dark to see, so Jenna crawled on her hands and knees to where she'd last heard Nick's voice. She touched the floor lightly, timidly. No broken glass. Thank God. She didn't want to allow the thought to take hold, but it managed to slip inside her brain: What if he's not asleep? What if he's not drugged? What if he's dead?
She wondered where her mother was, if she was looking for her at all. She found herself praying to God and Jesus that she'd be able to wake Nick up, and they'd get out of the cruel darkness and she'd find her mother. My mom will get us out of here. My mom won't let whoever is doing this get away with it. My mom is the toughest woman I know The thin line of light in the black, which she now assumed was a doorway, had been dimmed. It seemed so far away.
On her stomach, feeling the hard, muddy floor, she slithered in the direction where she had last heard Nick's voice. Groping. Reaching. She put her hands out, touching a damp, soiled blanket. Her fingers were extended like claws. She was Helen Keller, probing with her fingertips to find something. To find Nick.