A Mother's Secret

by T J Stimson

  ‘Because I need to talk to Lucas on my own.’

  ‘Why can’t Manga look after us, then?’

  ‘Because she can’t,’ Maddie snapped.

  Emily kicked the back of her seat. ‘It’s not fair. Manga was making us spaghetti. I’m hungry. When are we going to have something to eat?’

  ‘Bitsy will make you something. Pizza, maybe. Please stop kicking my seat, Emily.’

  ‘Pizza!’ Jacob yelled joyfully from his car seat.

  ‘Bitsy smells of horses,’ Emily muttered. ‘She makes everything smell like horses, too. I don’t want pizza if she’s cooking it.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Maddie shouted, crashing gears as she reversed jerkily onto the street. ‘I don’t want to hear another word!’

  Both children were shocked into silence. She never usually shouted at them; it was one of her rules. Instantly, she was suffused with guilt. Emily and Jacob had both been through enough without having their mother go off the deep end. Another black mark in the ledger of good mothering.

  Abruptly, she pulled over to the kerb. She couldn’t do much about everything else, but she could do this one small thing for her daughter.

  ‘If I take you with me, you need to be good,’ she warned, twisting around in her seat. ‘I have to go to Auntie Candace’s house to get Daddy, but I need you and Jacob to sit quietly in the car and wait while I talk to him, OK?’

  Emily nodded quickly. ‘OK.’

  There was an adult resignation about her daughter these days that worried Maddie more than the tantrums and seat-kicking. She knew she needed to spend more time with her. She’d been so consumed by her own grief, she hadn’t given Emily the attention she deserved. She’d make it up to her. Somehow. The first step was to find Lucas, to apologise, and put their family back together. It wasn’t too late. Lucas would understand. He’d forgive her. She still had time to put things right.

  But then she arrived at Candace’s house and saw the flashing blue lights of an ambulance on the drive.

  Chapter 33

  Thursday 8.00 p.m.

  Maddie screeched to an uneven halt in front of Candace’s house, hitting the kerb and bouncing up onto the pavement and then back into the road with a jarring thud. She was already unbuckling her seat belt before the car had stopped moving.

  ‘I need you to stay here, Emily,’ she said in panic. ‘I’m going to go and find Lucas. You can’t get out of the car. Promise me, Emily. No matter what happens. Stay here until I come back and look after your brother.’

  Emily nodded, white-faced.

  Maddie scrambled out of the car and ran towards the house. Her heart stopped as two paramedics emerged with a loaded stretcher, protective blankets preventing her from seeing who it was. Her entire body vibrated with a single thought: please God, not Lucas. The paramedics stopped briefly to talk to two police officers waiting outside, adjusted their patient’s IV line, and then moved swiftly towards the waiting doors of the ambulance parked on the drive and loaded the stretcher inside.

  She nearly collapsed with relief when Lucas appeared on Candace’s doorstep.

  ‘She locked herself in her bedroom and drank an entire bottle of vodka,’ he said tersely, before she could get a word out. ‘God knows what else she’s taken. There’s no question that it was deliberate.’

  ‘Is she going to be OK?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only got back from work twenty minutes ago. We’ve no idea how long she’s been unconscious.’ He walked swiftly towards his Honda, parked neatly on the road. ‘I was supposed to be at a work dinner tonight with all the partners. Candace knew I wouldn’t be back till gone ten. She must have planned it like this deliberately. Another hour, and I’d have been too late. The only reason I came back early was because the police phoned to tell me about your mother—’

  He broke off awkwardly. The two of them watched the police officers get back into their patrol car and leave.

  ‘Is it true?’ Lucas said finally.

  Maddie nodded dumbly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said stiffly. ‘I can’t imagine how you must be feeling.’

  ‘I’m numb. I don’t know what I feel.’

  The paramedics slammed the ambulance doors.

  ‘I have to go,’ Lucas said. ‘I need to follow them to the hospital.’

  ‘Will you call me? Tell me how she is?’

  ‘Of course.’ He paused suddenly, one hand resting on top of his car door. ‘Why are you here, Maddie?’

  She hesitated, suddenly unsure of her ground. Her first instinct had been to turn to Lucas for help and support, automatically trusting that he’d be there for her, as always. Patient, dependable Lucas. But she’d said some terrible things to him; unforgivable things.

  She swallowed. ‘I came to ask you to come home.’

  ‘You threw me out, remember?’

  ‘I was wrong, Lucas. I’m so sorry. Please, can you forgive me?’

  ‘You didn’t even give me a chance to explain,’ he said, sounding more hurt than angry. ‘It’s like six years of marriage counted for nothing.’

  ‘I know you’re angry. I’m not trying to defend myself,’ she pleaded, realising wearily that’s exactly what she was doing. ‘Lucas, I love you. You’re my husband. But you and Candace went behind my back. You lied about that loan to my face. I’ve always trusted you, but that turned everything I knew about you on its head. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘It’s a long way from there to thinking I’d condone the death of my own child, Maddie.’

  He was right, of course. ‘It wasn’t just that,’ she said miserably. ‘Then I found out you weren’t who you said you were, and there was the life insurance, and then I thought you’d brought in Calkins to try to get me shut away so I wouldn’t find out about Candace—’

  ‘I was trying to help you,’ he sighed. ‘It’s all I’ve ever tried to do.’

  ‘I realise that now, but I wasn’t thinking straight. My baby had just died—’

  ‘Our baby,’ Lucas said. ‘Our baby, Maddie.’

  She was shamed into sudden silence.

  ‘You think you’re the only one hurting?’ he said painfully. ‘I’m hurting, Emily’s hurting, we’re all hurting, Maddie. But your grief, it sucks all the oxygen from the room. It doesn’t leave any space for me. You’re not the only one in pain.’

  ‘Lucas, I’m so sorry—’

  He exhaled tiredly. ‘Maddie, I love you too. But I’m overwhelmed right now. I don’t know which end is up.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I can’t talk about this here. I need to get to Candace.’

  ‘Will you come home later? Once you’re sure she’s OK?’

  ‘I don’t know. Everything’s such a mess. Maybe we both need some time apart to think through what we do next.’

  She watched him get into his car and drive away, shaken to the core. Lucas had always been the reasonable one, the forgiving one, the first to say sorry when they had an argument, no matter who was in the wrong. It was his sense of justice and fair play that had first drawn her to him, all those years ago in the jury room. She’d taken his tolerance for granted, she realised suddenly. She’d always known Lucas would never let things escalate or get out of hand. They never went to bed on their anger because Lucas always made the first move to heal the breach.

  But what if, this time, he didn’t? It would take a lot to push him over the edge, but if he gave up on their marriage, she knew there would be no changing his mind.

  A chill settled inside her. She hadn’t grasped how much she’d been relying on Lucas’s absorbent forgiveness. The thought that he might have reached his limit had never even occurred to her.

  ‘Is it Auntie Candace?’ Emily asked, as Maddie climbed wearily into the car. Her whole body ached as if she’d been hit by a bus. Shock was so physical, she thought to herself.

  She glanced over her shoulder at the children. Jacob had fallen asleep in his car seat, tears drying on his ruddy cheeks. Her poor little boy. He might not understand what
was going on, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t affecting him. And Emily looked so anxious and scared, her small face pinched and grey. An old woman in a little girl’s body.

  ‘Auntie Candace isn’t very well,’ Maddie said, buckling her seat belt. She felt light-headed and oddly removed from her own body. She looked at her hands on the steering wheel, chapped and reddened, the nails bitten down to the quick, and felt no connection to them whatsoever.

  Emily was still talking, but her voice sounded strangely muffled, as if it was coming to her underwater.

  ‘Mummy,’ Emily said. ‘Mummy! Is she going to die?’

  That odd metallic taste in her mouth again. ‘No, she’s not going to die,’ Maddie said, swallowing with an effort. ‘But she has to go to the hospital, so they can make her better.’

  ‘But she still might die, mightn’t she? Noah went to hospital, and he died.’

  Maddie winced with pain. Children spoke such bald truths. ‘Emily, please. She’s not going to die.’

  In her rear-view mirror, she saw her daughter close her eyes and press her small hands together in prayer. She was whispering something over and over again, but Maddie couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  Emily was fixated on death these days. Losing Noah had prematurely catapulted her into an adult world of grief and bereavement she wasn’t equipped to face. Children were supposed to learn about death incrementally, in stages, Maddie thought unhappily. A goldfish, flushed down the toilet, or a gerbil buried with solemn reverence in an old shoebox by the rhododendrons. Then grandparents, loved and missed but old, in a child’s mind, their deaths natural and understandable. By the time they lost their parents, they would, with luck, be adults themselves, fortified and able to cope. But for Emily, as for Maddie herself, the natural order of things had been abruptly turned on its head. If a little baby with his whole life ahead of him could die, asleep in his own bed, then death could strike anyone, at any time. No one was safe.

  What would it do to Emily, to learn who her grandmother really was? How would it affect her sense of self? Her daughter had always been so close to Sarah. To Lydia, Maddie corrected herself bitterly. Emily might not grasp the full implications now, at nine, but in a few years, she’d start to wonder the same things as Maddie herself. Was there something bad, some kind of wickedness, running through their family? Did that mean bad things would happen to her, too?

  There had to be more to Lydia’s story, she thought desperately. Sarah was right: the mother who’d raised her wasn’t wicked or depraved. She wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. And yet the same neat, capable hands that had stroked Maddie’s forehead when she had a headache and put plasters on her skinned knees had also squeezed the life out of an innocent four-year-old little girl.

  Maddie had to know why. It was the only way she could silence the voice inside her now asking if those gentle hands had also killed her son.

  Chapter 34

  Friday 2.00 a.m.

  Maddie didn’t sleep. As soon as she’d fed the children and put them to bed, she went online, feverishly pulling up anything and everything she could find out about the Lydia Slaughter case. The harsh irony of her mother’s real name wasn’t lost on her.

  There were dozens of press articles from the late nineties onward, most of them detailing the various court injunctions that prevented the media from revealing Lydia’s new identity and location, or citing her story in coverage of more recent cases like the death of Jamie Bulger. She was surprised how little hard information about the Slaughter case there actually was, but of course the contemporary coverage had been in a pre-internet age. Lydia was infamous, her name a literal byword for juvenile depravity, and yet there were almost no details about her beyond the stark facts of her crime and incarceration. Nothing that answered why.

  Maddie made herself a pot of strong coffee and turned back to her computer. There had to be more to Lydia’s story than the scant biographical details on her Wikipedia page, which mentioned only her mother, Mae Slaughter, and a brother who’d been killed in a car crash around the time of Lydia’s release. Something that explained why she’d done something so wicked. A history of abuse, mental illness in the family, something.

  Sometime around midnight, she had managed to find the names of the detective who’d worked the Julia Taylor case, and a journalist who’d covered the story for The Times and attended every day of the trial, but when she tried to follow the online breadcrumbs, she discovered both men were now dead. According to one opinion piece she’d found, the journalist had tried to write a book about the case in the late eighties, but it’d been shut down when it emerged he’d paid Lydia to co-operate, since it was illegal for prisoners to profit from their crimes. For all her digging, by the time it started to get light outside her office window, Maddie knew little more than when she’d started. She’d found no mention of what had happened to Lydia’s mother, Mae, after her daughter’s incarceration, or if she was still alive. What kind of woman had Mae been, to raise a child who could have done something so terrible?

  She shoved back her chair and went to get more coffee. If a crime like this happened now, there’d be a mountain of stuff online, more than she’d ever have time to read. Hand-wringing pieces from liberal writers examining Lydia’s upbringing, ‘expert’ opinions from armchair psychiatrists and criminologists, op-eds about nature versus nurture, articles in the Guardian about genetic predisposition to violence; so-called experts weighing in on all sides.

  But Lydia’s case had been more than forty years ago. It’d made headline news in 1976, even knocking the famous drought off the front pages, but all she could find online now was a blurry black-and-white photograph of the eleven-year-old Lydia that bore little resemblance to her mother and a montage of headlines that had had a field day with her bitterly apt last name: Lamb to the Slaughter, Slaughter of the Innocent. The original articles themselves were presumably buried in filing cabinets in newspaper basements or on library microfiche somewhere. If she really wanted to know more about Lydia, she would have to trawl through archives, and even then, she might still end up empty-handed.

  She must have finally fallen asleep at her desk, because she awoke stiff and cold when Lucas phoned around seven. The hospital had pumped Candace’s stomach and she was conscious and lucid, which he said was a good sign, but the doctors still didn’t know if she’d done lasting damage to her liver. All they could do now was wait and see.

  ‘Vodka and Xanax,’ Lucas said grimly. ‘It’s not a good mix.’

  Maddie didn’t know whether to be relieved or not that Candace was OK. There was only one reason she could think of for Candace to attempt suicide: guilt. Despite what she’d learned about her mother, Sarah couldn’t have been the one to hurt Noah. As soon as Maddie had sat down and thought about it, she’d realised the timeline simply didn’t fit; Sarah hadn’t seen Noah for more than a week before he’d died. Lucas might not be covering up for Candace, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t done it.

  ‘I should have seen this coming,’ Lucas sighed. ‘She hasn’t been herself for weeks, she’s been depressed and anxious. If anyone should’ve recognised the signs, it’s me.’

  ‘Did you get a chance to talk to her?’

  ‘Briefly.’

  ‘And did she say why she did it?’

  He sighed. ‘Please don’t start with your witch hunt again. This has nothing to do with Noah. She has demons, Maddie. She always has.’ He sounded distracted and exhausted. ‘Look, I have to go. I’ll call you when I can.’

  She got up from her desk, wincing as she straightened her back.

  Even in her darkest hour, she’d never come close to attempting suicide, though she’d have been lying if she said she hadn’t thought about it when things had seemed at their bleakest. But she’d always had Lucas and the children to bring her back from the brink. Candace was alone.

  Her phone beeped again, and she picked it up, assuming it was Lucas calling back. She flinched when she saw the name on the screen. />
  She had so many questions that only her mother could answer. Tell me how it happened, Mum. Was it an accident? A game that went wrong? Did you really mean to kill her? Did you know what you were doing, or did you lose your temper, lash out? Tell me how one little girl could murder another, Mum, because for the life of me, I can’t begin to understand.

  She let the call go to voicemail. She was tempted to delete it without listening. But her mother had been right about one thing: at some point, she would have to talk to her.

  She braced herself and played the message back.

  ‘I’m here,’ Sarah said simply. ‘I’m here when you’re ready to talk.’

  Vomit rose in her throat at the mere sound of her mother’s voice. She ran to the bathroom, unable to stop picturing her mother’s neat hands – the same hands that had cradled Emily and Noah and Jacob when they were born – tightening around the throat of that poor little girl. It wasn’t just the thought of what her mother had done that sickened her so much. It was what it might mean. There was a reason, Maddie realised, that she needed so badly to believe Candace was responsible for Noah’s death.

  The dark fear that’d stalked her since Noah’s death now had shape. For weeks, she’d been trying to convince herself that her memory blackouts had had nothing to do with what’d happened to her baby. That they didn’t matter, because she would never hurt her son, whether she remembered what had happened in those lost blocks of time or not. It simply wasn’t in her nature.

  But nor was taking a can of red paint and savagely destroying her baby’s nursery. It was so out of character she’d refused to believe it was true – and yet it’d happened. Both Lucas and Emily bore witness to that. It was hard to admit it now, but she hadn’t wanted Noah, much as she’d adored him after he was born. What if that resentful, secret part of her had found its outlet during one of her blackouts?

  Like mother, like daughter.

  What if violence was in her nature, after all?