The Perfect Child(71)
FORTY-THREE
CHRISTOPHER BAUER
“Send her away. Please send her to Allison’s. She’ll take her for a while. Or my mom. She can go to my mom’s. Please, I just can’t have her here. Not right now.” Hannah was sobbing so hard it was difficult to make out her words.
I hugged her tightly. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s not. How can you even say that? She’s evil. She killed an animal. Killed an animal.” She kept saying it over and over again.
My brain reeled. I never would’ve believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself, but I had. I was the one who had put Blue’s body in a plastic bag and laid her in a cardboard box. Janie had sat on the outside steps by the back door observing it all like she was watching a movie. I had sat down next to her after I’d finished.
“Did you hurt Blue?” I had asked. I’d still been hoping it had been a weird accident, like maybe Blue had had a seizure and died. Or a stroke. It was possible. Maybe Janie had just happened to be there when it had happened, so she had thought she’d done it.
“Yep. I hurt her real bad,” she’d said without an ounce of emotion in her voice.
“How?” The question had come out without thought.
“I put my pillow on her and sat on her head. She really meowed. She didn’t scratch me though, because I had the pillow, so she couldn’t get me.” She said it like she was proud that she’d thought it through.
I didn’t ask any more questions after that.
Hannah hid in our bedroom with Cole until after I put Janie to bed. “I want you to put a lock on her door,” she said when I came into the bedroom. “She has to be locked in there at night.”
I grimaced. “A lock on her door? We can’t just lock her in her room.”
“What if she gets up in the night while we’re sleeping and kills us?” Her voice was hysterical. Her arms shook as she held Cole close to her chest.
“She’s not going to kill us,” I said with more calm than I felt.
“How do you know that? She killed Blue.” She started sobbing all over again.
Killing an animal was one thing. Killing people was another—sociopathic. Sociopaths didn’t have any feelings toward anyone, animals or otherwise, so Janie couldn’t be one because she had feelings. I’d seen them. She cried when she was afraid and laughed when she was happy. She was proud when she did something right, like the first time she’d learned how to swing without a push or had gone down the slide by herself. She was just a damaged girl—a severely disturbed girl, too, but she wasn’t a sociopath.
Hannah wasn’t going to rest unless I did something, though. I went out to the garage and dug through my tools until I found rope. I brought it back inside and started wrapping it around her doorknob.
What would we do if there was a fire? How could I get her out of her room quickly if there was an emergency? Or what if she got sick and needed to wake us in the middle of the night and couldn’t get out of her room? I unwound what I’d done and headed back to our bedroom.
“I can’t tie her in there. Something might happen, and we wouldn’t be able to get her out in time. Even if it’s for one night, I don’t feel right about it. I’ll just sleep on her floor.”
Hannah’s face crumpled. “Why? Why do you always pick her?”
“I’m not picking her. I would be responsible if something happened to her, and I’m not taking that chance. It’s not right,” I snapped. “I’ll get an alarm system for her room tomorrow. A proper system that we can set and program so that if anything goes wrong or there’s an emergency, she can easily get out.”
“Fine,” she huffed.
But nothing was fine. We both knew that.
FORTY-FOUR
HANNAH BAUER
I hadn’t been able to sleep since it had happened. I saw Blue’s face every time I dozed off, the way her eyes bulged out, and Janie sitting on top of her with that stupid grin on her face. I’d made Christopher tell me how she had killed her. He’d tried to pretend like he didn’t know, but he wasn’t a good liar. I could tell by the look in his eyes that she’d told him, so I had forced him to tell me. Afterward, I’d wished I hadn’t.
A sense of impending doom filled every room in our house. The smell of urine hung in the air no matter how much I cleaned because Janie peed everywhere like a dog that wasn’t housebroken. I couldn’t even be in the same room with her, and just the sound of her voice made my skin crawl. Waves of fear pummeled me. As soon as my heart sped up, so did my breathing. It was only a matter of seconds before I was gasping for air. It didn’t matter that I was a nurse and knew I was hyperventilating; I still felt like I was going to die.
I was putting away the leftovers, trying to keep it together, when Janie came into the kitchen.
“Can I have a cookie?” she asked.
I took one look at her and started sobbing. Christopher ran into the kitchen. I gripped the counter with both hands.
“What’s going on, Janie?” he asked.
“I want a cookie,” she said, unsure of herself or what she’d done to upset me.
He grabbed a cookie and handed it to her. “Why don’t you go eat this in the living room while I talk to Mommy?”