The truth always matters. You can’t trust people who lie, but I don’t have a choice.
“I have no clue how I’d get that kind of money in cash, but let’s just say for a second that I could—how do I know you’re going to follow through with things on your side? That everything goes away? What’s my assurance?” I can’t believe I’m even considering this. You can’t negotiate with a madman, but I’m not sure there’s another option. “You could just skip town. Leave me hanging with Simon lurking around. Never knowing if he’s going to decide he wants to bash my head in like he did Annabelle’s. And what about the video? How do I know you’ve deleted it? Or that you didn’t send it to someone else before you did?”
“You’re just going to have to trust me.”
I burst out laughing. “Are you serious? You can’t be serious.” Look what happened to the last criminal I blindly trusted. Fool me once . . . we all know that ditty. “How stupid do you think I am?”
“Stupid enough to pay someone like Simon to do all your dirty work.”
“Annabelle was never supposed to die, and you know that.” None of this would be happening if he’d just done what he was supposed to. Taken care of things the right way.
“Well, Mrs. Hill. I don’t know what you want me to tell you about that. Sometimes criminals go rogue. They can be a hard bunch to control.”
“Exactly!” I shriek. “How do I know that this is where it ends? How do I have any insurance everything disappears and I don’t have to run around looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life?”
“Like I said, you’re just going to have to take my word for it.”
“Your word isn’t good enough,” I snap. “I need more than that. I mean, how does this work? You think you’re just going to tell Simon to leave me alone and he’s going to go away? Do what he’s told?” This time I’m the one to laugh. “Look how well he takes directions.”
“I’m not worried about Simon. He knows the consequences of what happens if he goes against me.”
“I want him dead.” It comes out of me without thought, but I don’t take it back. I let my words hang in the air. Waiting to see if he’ll catch them. What he’ll do with them. The seconds drag and blur together. The silence is maddening. I can’t take it. “It’s the only way I’ll know I’m safe.”
“That’s not in my line of work.”
“Really? I’m having a hard time believing that’s true.”
“I already told you the truth doesn’t matter.”
“And I told you what I want. I want some kind of insurance that this is over if I give you the money. No Simon. No video.” What part of that doesn’t he understand? He’s got nothing to lose, and I have everything.
“This isn’t up for negotiation, Mrs. Hill. You can either pay and trust me to make all this go away, or I’ll send Simon down to the station to tell them everything. And when I say everything, I mean all the people’s lives you’ve destroyed.”
“What kind of a threat is that? You don’t know anything about me. Who do you think you are? I—”
He cuts me off. “This isn’t up for discussion. There are only two choices. Pick one.”
The call ends.
TWENTY-FIVE
CASEY WALKER
I’ve spent the last twenty minutes digging into my french toast and listening to Savannah describe a boy very different from the one in all those reports and the one who sat across from me a few days ago in my office. She tells stories about a boy who loved playing sports and digging in the sandbox with his trucks. One who liked to paint and loved to read. The reading part blew me away. Mason hadn’t been able to do anything close to reading during our testing session.
“And you can’t think of anything that happened that might have triggered his regression? Did he ever fall? Have an accident where he hit his head?” This is the second time I’ve asked her, but I can’t let it go. Kids don’t just go from fine to impaired overnight.
“He did get really sick once, and I’m pretty sure it was around that time, but I could be wrong. Everything’s filtered through my little-girl memory, so it’s hard to say, but I remember him getting really sick. Like, one of those god-awful stomach bugs where it’s coming out both ends?” She wrinkles her nose at the memory. “So gross, and it lasted for days. Or maybe it just seemed like it lasted for days because I was so young and wanted it to be over?” She shrugs, trying hard to give me something to explain his symptoms.
Her descriptions about him having normal development and suddenly crashing backward sound like childhood disintegrative disorder, but there’s no mention of it in Mason’s chart. It’s not even listed as a rule-out by any of his doctors. Childhood disintegrative disorder is a heartbreaking disorder for parents, because their children experience normal development for years and then, out of the blue and very drastically, start regressing. They stop growing forward and grow backward, some of them all the way back to infancy. They stop talking. Eating. Toileting. All of it.
Nobody knows why. Occasionally, the parents can point to a trigger, and head injuries always throw a wild card into any diagnostic picture, but most of the time there’s no identifiable cause. It’s all very similar to what Savannah is describing, and if that was the case, then Genevieve would’ve brought it up to the pediatrician as soon as she noticed it happening. It would be the most alarming symptom and the first thing out of any mother’s mouth—My child was developing normally, and then he took a nosedive. But that’s not anywhere. All Genevieve describes is a child who’s been impaired since birth. She describes all the symptoms, behaviors, and signs of autism spectrum disorder. Mason is a textbook case.