Detective Warren was scowling at her partner, clearly agreeing with me. Or maybe not. Maybe this was just the latest episode of good cop, bad cop. But then I realized a couple of things: They didn’t need me to come down to HQ to talk about two twenty-year-old homicides from an entirely different state. Nor were they mentioning the Facebook page, or how to bait a killer in preparation for tomorrow evening’s murderous deadline. Instead, they had a single manila folder holding police reports from my childhood.
They wanted something from me. The question was what, and how much it would cost me.
“What do you remember?” Detective Warren asked me now. “About your childhood?”
I shrugged, gaze still on the closed file. “Not much. I can’t…I don’t…” I had to clear my throat, try again. “I don’t even remember a baby brother. Not a smile, not a whimper…Just, his body. His perfect little form, so still, like a statue.” I paused, cleared my throat again. Still wasn’t working. I looked away from both detectives, stared at the carpet. “I’m sorry.”
“Might be that you never saw him alive,” D.D. suggested. “ME’s office consulted a forensic anthropologist on the remains. Based on the size of the skeleton, the baby boy was approximately full term, but could’ve been born a few weeks premature, maybe even died in utero. Either way, let’s just say he didn’t make it long in this world.”
“Boys are icky,” I heard myself say. “Boys just grow up to be men who want only one thing from girls.”
Not my words, but the memory of an audio fragment, playing back. I caught myself, shook my head slightly, as if to clear the words from my brain. “When was he born?”
“Don’t know. No birth certificate.”
“His name was Carter. I know that, even if I don’t know how I know that.”
“It was written on the outside of the Tupperware container.”
I winced. “She killed him. Gave birth, killed him, that’s what you think.”
The older detective shrugged. “Technically, your mother was charged with abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child. Given the skeletal remains, there’s no way to prove if the baby was stillborn, or was killed after birth. Logic would dictate, however…”
“What do you think?” Detective O spoke up, her voice more demanding. “You lived with the woman. You tell us what might have happened.”
“I don’t remember a baby boy. Just his name. Maybe she told it to me. Maybe I found the container. I don’t know. I saw the body. I remember the name Carter. I took it, made it part of mine. My own way of honoring him.”
“But you just said you didn’t remember him.”
I looked up at Detective O. “It’s possible to lie to yourself, you know. It’s possible to both know and not know things. People do it all the time. It’s called coping.”
“Tell us about Rosalind,” the younger detective demanded.
“I loved her. She would cry, and I would try…I loved her.”
“Was she born first?” D.D. asked.
“I don’t know. But she lived longer. Right?”
“Probably a year,” the detective said quietly.
I resumed staring at the floor. Carpet wouldn’t come into focus. My eyes were swimming, turning the blue-gray Berber into a moving sea of regret.
“I was in the ER,” I heard myself whisper. “My mother had fed me a crushed lightbulb. I was in the ER, vomiting blood and there was this nurse, this kind-looking nurse. And I remember thinking I needed to tell her. If I could just tell her about the baby. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. My mother trained me well.”
The detectives didn’t say anything.
“I don’t understand,” I said after another moment. “My aunt is nice, my aunt is normal. I’m really fond of puppies and kitties and I’ve never played with matches. And yet my mom, my own mother…She did such horrible things to me just to get attention. And that still made me the lucky kid.”
“Is that how you view yourself?” Detective O pounced. “As lucky?”
I looked up at her. “What are you, fucking nuts?”
The young detective’s eyes widened in shock, then D.D. stepped between us, placing a hand on her colleague’s shoulder.