“You never were wrong.”
She looked at him. “He told you why he killed Belinda?”
“Yeah.”
“What reason did he give?”
Colin shifted uneasily on the bench because he didn’t have an answer to her question, and he didn’t want her to realize that he had engaged her attention with a string of lies. He had been leading her on, trying to get her to say certain things that he wanted to have on the tape. She said some of them, but not all of them. He hoped to keep her confidence until he had everything he needed.
Fortunately, when he hesitated, Mrs. Borden answered the question for him. “It was jealousy, wasn’t it? He was jealous of my little girl because after she was born he knew he’d never really be one of us.”
“Yeah. That’s what he told me,” Colin said, though he wasn’t sure what she meant.
“It was a mistake,” she said. “We never should have adopted him.”
“Adopted?”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“Well … no.”
He’d blown it. She would wonder why Roy had revealed everything else, every ugly secret, but not this. Then she’d realize that Roy hadn’t told him anything about Belinda Jane, that he was lying, that he was playing a bizarre game with her.
But she surprised him. She was so deeply involved in her memories, and so focused on the fact that her son had admitted to premeditated sororicide, that she didn’t have the presence of mind to consider the curious gaps in Colin’s knowledge.
“We wanted a child more than anything in the world,” she said, looking out to sea once more. “A child of our own. But the doctors said we never could. My fault. There were… things wrong with me. Alex, my husband, was terribly upset. Terribly. He had counted so much on a child of his own. But the doctors said it just wasn’t possible. We went to half a dozen doctors, and they all said the same thing. Not remotely possible. Because of me. So I talked him into adoption. My fault again. Entirely my fault. It was the wrong thing to do. We don’t even know who Roy’s real parents were-or what they were. That bothers Alex. What kind of people did Roy come from? What was wrong with them? What flaws and sickness did they pass on to him? It was an awful mistake to take him in. By the time we’d had him a few months, I knew he was wrong for us. He was a good baby, but Alex didn’t take to him. I’d wanted so much for Alex to have his child, but what he wanted was a child with his own blood in its veins. That was quite important to Alex. You can’t imagine how important. An adopted child is different from your flesh, Alex says. He says you can’t ever feel as close to it as you can to your own blood. He says it’s like training a dangerous wild animal from the time it’s a cub and keeping it as a pet; you just never know when it might turn on you because deep down it isn’t at all like what you’ve tried to make it. And so that was another thing I’d done wrong: bringing someone else’s child into our home. A stranger. And he turned on us. I’m always doing something wrong. I’ve failed Alex. All he ever wanted was a child of his own.”
When Colin had been sitting on the bench, waiting for her to show up, he had expected to have trouble getting her to talk. But he had pushed the right button. She wouldn’t shut up. She droned on and on, as if she were an Ancient Mariner robot, a machine with a tale to tell. And it looked to him as if she were also a machine with very little time left; beneath the cool veneer of businesslike efficiency, serious instabilities were generating a lot of inner heat. As he listened to what she said, he also listened for the sound of gears stripping and mainsprings breaking and vacuum tubes popping.
“We’d had Roy two and a half years,” she said, “when I discovered that I was going to have a baby. The doctors were wrong about me. I almost died in labor, and there was no doubt afterward that she would be my first and last, but I did have her. They were wrong. In spite of all their complicated tests and consultations and sky-high fees, every one of them was wrong. She was a miracle child. God meant all along for us to have the impossible, the miracle child, that special blessing, and I was too impatient to wait. I didn’t have faith enough. Not nearly enough. I hate myself for that. I talked Alex into the adoption. Then along came Belinda, the one we were meant to have. I had no faith. So after just five years, she was taken away from us. Roy took her away from us. The child we were never meant to have took away the one that God sent us. You see?”
Colin’s fascination was changing to embarrassment. He didn’t need or want to hear every sordid detail. He looked around self-consciously to see if anyone could overhear, but there was no one near the bench.
She turned away from the sea and stared into his eyes. “Why did you come here, young man? Why did you tell me Roy’s secret?”
He shrugged. “I thought you ought to know.”
“Did you expect me to do something to him?”
“Aren’t you going to?”
“I wish I could,” she said with genuine malice. “But I can‘t, If I start telling them that he killed my little girl, it’ll be like before. They’ll send me away to the county hospital again.”
“Oh.” That was what he had figured even before he spoke to her.
“Nobody will ever believe me when it comes to Roy,” she said. “And who’s going to believe you? I understand from your mother that there’s some problem with drugs.”
“No. That’s not true.”
“Who’s going to believe either of us?”
“No one,” he said.
“What we need is proof.”
“Yeah.”
“Irrefutable proof.”
“Right.”
“Something tangible,” she said. “Maybe … if you could get him to tell you all about it again… about how he killed her on purpose … and maybe have a tape recorder hidden someplace…”
Colin winced at the mention of a recorder. “That’s a thought.”
“There must be a way,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll both think about it.”
“All right.”
“Think about a way to trap him.”
“Okay.”
“And we’ll meet again.”
“We will?”
“Here,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
“But-”
“It’s always been just me against him,” she said, leaning close to Colin. He could feel her breath against his face. And he could smell it, too: spearmint. “But now there’s you,” she said. “Two people know about him now. Together we ought to be able to think of a way to get him. I want to get him. I want everyone to know how he planned to kill my little girl. When they know the truth, how can they expect me to keep him in my house? We’ll send him back where he came from. The neighbors won’t talk. How can they, after they know what he did? I’ll be free of him. I want that more than anything.” Her voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “You’ll be my ally, won’t you?”
He had the insane thought that she was going to go through the blood-brother ritual with him.
“Won’t you?” she asked.
“Okay.” But he didn’t intend to meet with her again; she was almost as scary as Roy.
She put her hand on his cheek, and he started to pull away before he realized that she was only being affectionate. Her fingers were cold.
“You’re a good boy,” she said. “You did a good thing-coming to me like this.”
He wished she would take her hand away.
“I’ve always known the truth,” she said, “but what a relief it is to have someone else who knows. You be here tomorrow. Same time.”