Mother May I(29)

The second I joined them, Marshall and Gabrielle began asking questions, talking over each other. I talked loudest. The words pushed out of me, silencing them.

“I killed him.” Or the mother had, with my help. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t even sure there was a difference. I didn’t care right now, though surely there would be a reckoning for this. One day. Now all I could care about was Robert.

Whatever Marshall and Gabrielle had been expecting me to say, this wasn’t it. Marshall’s whole body jerked, as if I’d given him a small electric shock.

She asked, “You did what?” her disbelief writ large.

“I killed Spencer Shaw,” I said, to be completely clear. Once that was out, the rest came fast, as if I had a million rancid words trapped in me and my admission released them. I started from the moment I’d first seen her, dreaming that a witch was peering in our bedroom window.

When I got to the part where she took Robert, Marshall’s eyes widened, as if it had just occurred to him to wonder where my baby was. Or perhaps he was realizing he’d been in the building when my boy was taken. Gabrielle’s hand came up to cover her mouth, pressing hard. She looked to Marshall, but he was staring at me, his lips gone white. When our eyes met, his were so, so sorry.

I kept on, telling them about the gift bag, the pills, my fraught phone conversations with the mother. We’d settled around the breakfast table, but as I talked, Marshall got up and began banging about in my cabinets searching for all the things he needed to make coffee. Gabrielle got out her phone and began rapid-fire thumb-typing into it. I wasn’t sure if she was texting or taking notes, but it was clear that she was listening intensely, even though she didn’t look up from her screen. It was easier without their eyes on me.

As the coffeepot burbled, Marshall gathered all the objects I’d told them about, first dumping the phone, the charging cord, the empty pill bottle, and the dosed flask out of my purse.

When I got to the part where I found Spence trapping Gabrielle in the Orchid Center, his hand on her hip, Marshall and Gabrielle exchanged a speaking glance. I pressed on as Marshall picked up the drifts of colored tissue paper, still scattered on the floor by my built-in desk, and tucked them back into the gaudy gift bag. He returned all this to the table as well. I plucked the Bluetooth from my ear, then set it beside the phone.

Now all the things the mother had given me were clustered in the center of the table. Marshall sat down on my other side, and the three of us huddled around the pile as I spoke, as if it were a tiny campfire on the coldest, darkest night of the year. I reached out and powered down the Bluetooth, then made sure the ringer was on. If she called, I’d want her on the speaker.

If. That word almost cracked the icy quiet that had come over me in the car. I didn’t let it. My whole life was hinged on that short word. If she called, I needed to be clear and calm and perfect.

And if she didn’t? That was an abyss that made me put the word away.

Even thinking it might be a cosmic betrayal. Not just of Robert or my hope in his small heartbeat. It felt like a betrayal of the mother herself, as if my doubt could reverberate through the universe and make her call her daughter back and throw away her own burner phone.

The phones were our only concrete connection, but there was another, stranger cord. Our sick intimacy echoed still, and even though I understood now how much she’d lied, I still believed in it. Perhaps because it was the only hope I had.

She’d promised to call in the morning, and it wasn’t even midnight. I would not break yet.

I’d come to the place in the story where Gabrielle had found Marshall and me on the path to the Botanical Garden’s exit. “And the rest you know. You saw what those capsules did to him.”

Gabrielle looked up from her screen, the set of her pretty face so very serious. “How do you know it was the pills? Maybe it was a seizure.”

Marshall shook his head. “That would be one hell of a coincidence.”

I agreed with him. “Whatever she gave me, it wasn’t roofies. It was meant to kill him.”

Marshall glanced at the silver flask. “We’ll find out. The cops can test the bourbon.”

Instantly and urgently, my hand was on his arm. “We’re not calling the cops.”

He looked surprised. “We have to. This is way above my pay grade. Unless you think we should go straight to the FBI?”

“No!” My only chance was to wait for the call. Either the phone would ring or it was already too late for the police or the FBI or any force on earth to help me. I sat inside the black calm that had come over me in the car, waiting to know which way to tip.

“She’s right,” Gabrielle told Marshall. “No police until we talk to a criminal lawyer. I have a friend, Leticia Marks. She’s excellent. I should call her.”

“No point,” I said. She still didn’t understand, or she wouldn’t be talking about these things that mattered not at all.

“Of course there’s a point. It’s to protect you!” Gabrielle’s phone buzzed softly in her hands, and she glanced down at it. Her lips compressed, and when she looked up, she was close to crying. “I just heard from Rick Janeway. He followed the ambulance, and I’ve been texting with him. I didn’t tell him anything about you, of course. Just asking for updates. He’s with Spencer’s brother. Bree, he’s dead. Spence is dead.”