“It must have been really intrusive for you.”
“At first, I thought it might be okay, you know. Having a kid. You’re right, I did want children, but I had a problem there and couldn’t. But I wasn’t sure this was the right way.”
“But you still took her in. That was good of you.”
“At first Joe thought it was so great. See, he was the one who really wanted her. A frilly little daughter to dote on. But six months after she came into our lives, it was like I didn’t exist. All Joe saw was cute little Becky,” she added in a derisive tone. “He totally ignored me. And then she grew up. That cute little puppy turned into a wolf. A monster!”
“That all must have been difficult to accept,” said Blum in a supportive tone.
Atkins exclaimed, “It was impossible. Who was this stranger? What right did she have to come into our lives and take my husband away from me? What right? Oh she was so cute, so pretty. And I was what, a lump of coal?”
“Yes, I see that.”
“Well, Joe didn’t. Made me so mad. I wanted to kill him. And her!”
“But you talked to Mercy? You learned things about her?”
Atkins smiled slyly at Pine. “I knew that was her name. She told me it was. But then I spent years wiping that out of her memory, out of her life.”
“How did you do that?” asked Blum, keeping her gaze on Atkins. “It must have been difficult.”
“I had my ways,” said Atkins with a wicked grin. She mimicked a little girl’s voice again. “ ‘Don’t, Mommy, don’t do that. Don’t burn me. Don’t cut me.’ ‘Your name is Becky,’ I would say. ‘Becky. Only Becky. Mercy is dead, do you understand? Mercy is dead.’ Over and over and over. It finally got through. Finally. No more Mercy.” She smiled. “See, I won. I beat the little brat. She thought she was so smart. Well, I was smarter.”
“Did you have to make her forget anything else?” asked Blum.
Atkins’s features calmed and she looked down again. “There was one thing I could never make her forget,” she said.
Pine tensed and said, “What was that?”
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” She glanced up at Pine. “Stupid nursery rhyme. She read it in a book we had. She went ballistic. She tore the book apart. She was screaming. Joe had to come in and hold her down. And she was only seven or eight at the time. I had no idea what the hell that was about. Crazy, stupid kid. Worst mistake of my life taking her in.”
Blum glanced at Pine, who had closed her eyes and looked away. Blum turned back to Atkins. “So the night Mercy escaped . . . ?”
“Idiot Joe forgot to lock the damn door. Before we knew it here she comes, running past the house. Joe had seen it on his TV screen. He went after her. But the moron didn’t take the gun. I remembered it, though. I went after her with it.”
“Because you couldn’t let her get away?”
“Of course not. We’d go to prison if she did.”
“But I don’t understand. If you had the gun, why didn’t you stop her?”
“Joe grabbed her but she slugged him, and he fell and hit his head on a rock. Blood was everywhere. He tried to get up but I think he had a concussion. He fell back to the ground and didn’t move. Mercy saw the blood and him lying there not moving, and she ran like a damn racehorse. I don’t think her feet touched the dirt.”
“What happened next?”
“I fired twice at her, both barrels. But she was already into the trees. I was going to go after her and finish her off. But then Joe came to, got up, and tried to stop me. He tried to take the gun away.”
“Why?” said Blum. “He must have known what would happen if Mercy got away.”
“He was soft,” Atkins said in a disgusted tone. “He didn’t want to kill her. He wanted to let her get away instead, if you can believe that. Said enough was enough. The idiot!”
“That must have upset you.”
She smiled maliciously. “So I told him, ‘Look, Joe, there she is, she’s coming back.’ When he turned, I picked up the stone and hit him in the head. Knocked him cold. I wanted to shoot him, but the shotgun was empty. So I ran into the house, got a knife and . . .”
“ . . . finished the job?” said Blum.
“When it was done, I wiped my prints off the knife and called Wanda. I told her Becky had killed Joe. And then I grabbed my stuff and they helped me disappear.”
Pine swallowed nervously and asked in a tentative voice, “And Mercy got away? She was alive?”
“Yes, the bitch damn well did.”
Pine gripped the bed post hard, her eyes shut, her heart soaring with hope.
Atkins suddenly looked alarmed, as though she had just come out of a trance. She stared at them stonily. “But I’ll deny everything I just said, and you can’t prove otherwise.”
“Oh, I think we can,” said Pine, opening her eyes. She held up her phone and then hit the Play button on the recorder function. Atkins’s voice came through loud and clear.
Realization of what had just happened spread over Atkins’s features, and then her face hardened. “You can’t do that. You . . . you tricked me. It’s illegal.”
Pine shook her head. “Technically, I’m not the arresting officer. You’ve been read your rights, including the right to remain silent. If you choose to spill your guts that’s up to you. And you haven’t engaged counsel yet nor stated that you wanted one. This wasn’t an interrogation. You just spoke of your own free will. And I just happened to have my recorder on.”
“I’ll get that thrown out, you bitch!”
“Well, you can try,” Pine said. “I’m sure the Georgia police will be in touch. Particularly since you made their job of convicting you so much easier.”
Pine stepped forward and leaned down so she was eye to eye with Atkins.
“And just keep in mind that Mercy took the best you had and still kicked your ass. And she’s out there somewhere free and living her life. And you’re going to spend the rest of your sorry life in a place a lot worse than this. And I wish you many, many more years of living.”
Pine called the jailer, and she and Blum left.
As they were walking down the corridor Pine said, “Great job on getting her to open up.”
Blum unexpectedly sighed. “I still wish you could have kicked her butt.”
Pine put her arm around her friend’s shoulders. “Oh, we did better than that. Way better.”
CHAPTER
34
CAIN PULLED HER CAR UP TO THE CURB and looked over the modest rancher in a working class neighborhood outside of Huntsville, Alabama. It was a place where Cain could have grown up. Playing with dolls and riding bikes and kicking soccer balls in the backyard, having barbeques and running under the sprinkler in the summer, roasting marshmallows and building snowmen in the winter, although she doubted it snowed all that much this far south.
Normal.
She snorted at the thought.