Child of Mine: a psychological thriller

by Chambers, V. J.

  She rubbed her forehead. Maybe he was right. “That’s not what this conversation is about.”

  “Why don’t you trust me? What have I ever done that would make you think I could hurt anyone?”

  She spread her hands. “I don’t think that.”

  Simon just gave her an even stare.

  “Why are you different at chess club?”

  “What?”

  She looked at her shoes. “I might have followed you there once too.”

  “Mom, seriously?”

  She raised her gaze to his. “You were like a different kid. You were so… excited and talkative. I’ve never seen you so animated in my life.”

  “Yeah,” Simon said in a very dry voice, “because I like chess. I get excited about stuff I like.”

  Lorelei let all her air out in a huff. Was that really all it was?

  It was quiet for several moments.

  “About Jordan?” Simon’s shoulders sagged. “It’s not like what you said. Jordan’s not ‘dressing up.’”

  “I saw her. She was wearing boys’ clothes. She looked like a boy.”

  “That’s because…” Simon licked his lips. “She is a boy. He’s a boy. He’s never been a girl.”

  Lorelei stared at him. What?

  “Look, you can’t tell his mom that he’s doing this,” said Simon. “Promise me you won’t tell.”

  Lorelei came around the couch and sat down heavily. “I’m confused, Simon. This is… what? One of those transgender type things? I saw that episode of Oprah about that boy who was really a girl and how her parents were trying to help her get surgery. It’s like that?”

  “There’s no surgery,” said Simon.

  “Okay,” said Lorelei. “So, she doesn’t want to have anything changed about her body.” Honestly, she had thought the surgery was a bridge too far. Lorelei didn’t so much get it. She thought that most things a person would want to do could be done, regardless of gender. She didn’t understand why people couldn’t accept the equipment between their legs and move on.

  But she had to admit that the girl on the Oprah show had really seemed like a boy. It had seemed as if somehow, some wires had gotten switched and that girl—boy—had gotten the wrong parts between his legs.

  But surgery? Really?

  “He,” said Simon. “Jordan’s a ‘he.’”

  “He,” said Lorelei, trying to wrap her brain around it. “And Mia doesn’t know.”

  Simon didn’t say anything. He picked up his pizza pocket and took a bite, chewing furiously.

  “You can’t really expect me to keep this from my best friend.”

  “It’s…” Simon set down his food again. “Okay, look. Maybe, um, he did try to talk to his mom about it. Maybe he knows he can’t talk to her about it.”

  Lorelei sank back into the couch. Mia had never been good at accepting Jordan the way she was. (The way he was? Lorelei couldn’t think of Jordan as male.) Mia had always been angry when Jordan had torn dresses climbing over fences or gotten patent leather shoes spattered with mud. Mia had always wanted Jordan to be, well, feminine. Now that Lorelei thought about it, she could see it all, and it all made sense. Jordan had rebelled against her mother’s image of a little girl in lace and ribbons, and all because she didn’t feel like a girl. “But… but if Mia understood—”

  “No.”

  “If I explained it to her—”

  “No.” Simon grabbed both of her hands. “Promise me you’ll keep this to yourself.”

  Lorelei was stunned at the fact he was touching her. He didn’t do that voluntarily very often. This was important to him.

  Simon let go of her and picked up his pizza pocket again. “When Jordan was little, it didn’t matter so much. He could do what he wanted, and no one cared, because he was a little kid. But when he got older, it got harder. And his mom is really awful about it. Trust me on this.”

  Lorelei was reeling. “But recently, Jordan’s been wearing all that makeup and jewelry—”

  “That’s for his mom,” said Simon. “If he keeps his mom happy, then she’s less suspicious, and that’s how he likes it.”

  Lorelei shook her head. “How long have you known? Did you find this out before she became your girlfriend?”

  Simon rolled his eyes, taking a bite of the pizza pocket and chewing.

  Lorelei waited.

  He swallowed. “It was never like that with us. I just said that so that Mia would think that Jordan was, you know, really being a girl. That’s what Mia wants. You aren’t going to say anything to Mia, are you?”

  “So, there’s nothing romantic between you and Jordan, then?”

  “We’re just friends,” said Simon. “We’re best friends. And we like to hang out like… friends. That’s all.”

  Lorelei blinked.

  “Mom, come on. You have to promise me.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, Simon. I was keeping a lot of things from Mia, and I just came clean to her about everything from my past. Now, you want me to start hiding things from her again? I don’t think it’s healthy. I think Mia needs to confront what’s going on. She needs to learn how to love the daughter that she has, not the one she wants to have.”

  “The son she has,” Simon corrected darkly. “And trust me, Mia is incapable of that. If you tell Mia, you could ruin Jordan’s life. You could screw things up for him very, very badly.”

  “I think you’re overreacting.”

  “I swear to you I’m not. Now, please, you won’t say anything, will you?”

  Lorelei hesitated. Mia could be, well, dramatic. Lorelei thought that Mia deserved to know, but maybe…

  Ah, hell. Maybe Lorelei didn’t actually want to deal with the fallout of telling Mia. It would be such an emotional ordeal. And it wasn’t as though Lorelei wasn’t dealing with enough already.

  And what was the harm in Jordan wearing men’s clothes anyway in the grand scheme of things? It didn’t hurt anyone at all.

  She nodded at Simon. “Okay, I won’t say anything.”

  “Thank you.” Simon’s relief was palpable.

  “For now,” she amended. “Right now everything’s crazy. But when things calm down… Jordan can’t keep this from her mother forever.”

  “His mother,” Simon said.

  Lorelei made a face.

  * * *

  Lorelei went back to work the next day, but she was preoccupied at the bar the entire time. She was trying to make sense of everything. When Simon had said that he had a friend that helped him take the pictures, he had meant Jordan. When he said that he had an alibi for the time of the murders, but that it wasn’t verifiable, it was because he would have to reveal Jordan’s secret to claim the alibi.

  So, her son was innocent.

  Unless… unless Jordan was involved somehow. If Jordan was twisted enough not to understand her own gender, then—

  But that was bullshit, and Lorelei didn’t think things like that. She was a forward-thinking person who didn’t discriminate. Being transgender didn’t mean anything. Transgender people weren’t murderers.

  But…

  Well, if Jordan were transgender, that must mean she was gay, right? Or… well, Jordan was attracted to women. That was the important thing. And if she was attracted to women, then she might have some sort of motive to murder women.

  Or maybe she simply hated the female form. Maybe she felt that she was imprisoned by her female body, and it made her murderous towards other women.

  No, no, no. Lorelei wouldn’t let herself think this kind of stuff. She had to stop.

  However, it was true what Simon had said, that following him and not seeing him do anything didn’t actually prove his innocence. It proved that he hadn’t hurt Tiffany Ripley, but it didn’t shed any light on what had happened to the other girls. And, hell, how could it not be related somehow? How could it be a coincidence that he’d taken pictures of girls on two different occasions, and the girls had ended up dead?

  The bar door ope
ned, and in walked Jeremy Walsh.

  She groaned. She meant to do it inwardly, but it came out of her throat. The last thing she needed right now was Jeremy.

  He sat down at the bar in front of her.

  She didn’t have too many customers that night, but the bar wasn’t empty either. There were probably fifteen people out at tables in the bar that night. If Jeremy was planning on making a scene, he’d have an audience.

  “I’d like a shot of whiskey,” said Jeremy.

  “Why are you here?” she said.

  “They took me off the case,” said Jeremy. “They said that I couldn’t be objective.”

  She eyed him. “You’ve already been drinking.”

  “This case is the biggest thing to happen in this county in twenty years. And I’m the only homicide detective on the force. So, by all rights, it should be mine. But you ruined it for me.”

  She folded her arms over her chest. “Why don’t you go somewhere else, then?”

  “You refusing to serve me?” said Jeremy.

  She glared at him. She probably was within her rights to deny him service, but that would just make him angrier, and he’d throw a fit. Maybe she could placate him with a few shots. Maybe he’d get sloppy and pass out on the bar. Honestly, that would be better than having to deal with him in any other capacity. She slammed a glass in front of him and poured whiskey in it.

  He picked up the glass and knocked it back. “You’re probably the killer. You’re twisted enough to do it. You’ve done it before.”

  “God damn it, Jeremy,” she said. “You know that wasn’t the same thing. You know I didn’t have a choice.”

  He stuck out his chin. “I want another shot.”

  And she found she’d lost her nerve. “I want you to get out of my bar.”

  Jeremy stood up at the bar and slammed his hands down. “Shot of whiskey. Please.”

  “No!” she roared.

  Now, everyone was looking at them.

  Jeremy turned to face the people in the bar. “She killed my daughter.”

  “Jeremy, stop.”

  “She killed our baby before it was even born,” he bellowed. “She had an abortion, and she didn’t even tell me she was pregnant until after it was all over.”

  “Jeremy—”

  “You bitch,” he said, whipping around to look at her. There were tears in his eyes. “You fucking bitch. My life was better before you were in it.”

  She pointed to the door. “Out,” she said in a deadly whisper.

  He flipped her off. But he left.

  She watched the door shut after him, and she struggled not to start crying herself.

  * * *

  When Lorelei was pregnant with Simon, she hadn’t been a young mother. She hadn’t been old exactly either. She’d been in her early thirties. When she got pregnant again, when she was with Jeremy, she was nearly forty. Because of that, she was informed that there were more risks associated with her pregnancy, and the doctors urged her to get a test for chromosome abnormalities.

  She got it right about the twelfth week of pregnancy, which she thought was kind of ironic. (That is, if she knew what that word really meant.) The twelfth week was the week when people tended to announce their pregnancies, because most miscarriages happened before then. If you made it twelve weeks, then you were more than likely going to have a baby. No guarantees, of course, but—in general—twelve weeks meant safe.

  With Simon, she hadn’t bothered the take the test. She’d been certain that she was going to have the baby. Sure, when she found out that she was pregnant with the child of a serial killer, she’d considered having an abortion. She thought that Simon would always be a reminder of the way that Crispin Barker had manipulated her and she worried that she wouldn’t be able to handle being a mother.

  But she’d stopped drinking the minute she found out she was pregnant, and she was already imagining what it would be like to have a little one in her arms and…

  Well, there was never really any question. She was having Simon. The end. So, when confronted with the chromosome test the first time around, she told herself that it didn’t matter. She was going to have the baby regardless of whether it had Down’s Syndrome. And she said that same thing to the doctor the second time around.

  But the doctor told her it was just a matter of course for women her age. And that anyway, the test didn’t just look for markers of Down’s Syndrome, but for a very serious disorder that would leave a child severely mentally retarded and unlikely to live past its first birthday. A very sick baby who would suffer and then die anyway.

  So, she got the test.

  And the results weren’t good. She had to have another test after that, one that confirmed that her child most probably had a dangerous abnormality and would live a short life full of suffering if born.

  When she got the news, she’d started crying, and she thought she might never stop. Simon had been young, then. He hadn’t known what was wrong with her. And she hadn’t even told Jeremy that she was pregnant yet. They weren’t married or even living together. Their relationship was very casual, and she didn’t want to add pressure to it. She was waiting until she got past twelve weeks to tell him.

  But then the test.

  It wasn’t an easy decision. There was a chance the doctors were wrong. They said that maybe the baby wouldn’t be badly affected, maybe she would live a long life after all. (The test had also confirmed the baby’s gender as female, a twist of the knife that made the decision even more difficult, because it was next to impossible to think of what was growing in her as a fetus or tissue. It was a baby. It was a girl. It was damaged.)

  Lorelei could roll the dice, and maybe she’d luck out.

  But she already had a son with special needs, and she was a single mother. She didn’t know how Jeremy would react to the news that he was going to be a father. From what she knew of him, she didn’t think he’d be a particularly great father to a child with severe mental problems. And she herself was far from a shining example of womanhood. While she’d been able to stop drinking while pregnant with Simon, she had persisted during this pregnancy. She’d slowed, and she was down to only one drink a night, but she hadn’t been able to stop entirely. What if she couldn’t stop drinking? What if she damaged her little girl even worse than she already was?

  She got the abortion.

  And then she really cried. It was like the world caved in. She didn’t think she’d ever been so sad in her entire life. Her drinking worsened. She had a hard time taking care of Simon.

  Jeremy wanted to know what was going on, and she’d blurted it all out to him, screaming at him, no thought of his feelings, just wanting to get it out, to ease her own pain.

  He was devastated.

  And what was more, he latched on to the part of it all where the tests were fallible. He was angry with Lorelei, because she didn’t know, not really, if the baby was going to be born with problems. For all she knew, that baby could have been born perfectly healthy. In Jeremy’s mind, she was a murderer.

  Looking back, she realized that she should have involved him in the decision. She had cut him out of it, and that wasn’t fair.

  Maybe he had a right to be angry, but that didn’t excuse all his behavior. In the end, no matter what he had wanted, it would have been her decision. And knowing what she now knew about Jeremy, she couldn’t see him being a patient and loving father.

  She still wished like hell she’d never had to make a choice like that. She wished that she’d never gotten pregnant. She wished that the test had come out differently. Sometimes, she would go into dark reveries in which she’d think about how old her little girl would have been if she’d been born, if she’d been normal. She’d think of pink dresses and silver tiaras and girlish laughter, and she’d sob and sob.

  But she knew that she’d been in an impossible situation.

  Maybe she could have chosen differently, but she had done what she thought was best.

  In the end,
she couldn’t ask more from herself than that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  She closed the bar down early and went home. It was nearly two in the morning, and the apartment was dark. She opened the door to Simon’s room and peered inside, which was her habit.

  But his bed was empty.

  Where was he? She’d had several drinks, and she was a little sluggish, but the fact that Simon wasn’t there alarmed her. She searched the apartment, but he wasn’t there.

  Not knowing what to do, she went outside to her car. She couldn’t drive, or at least, she shouldn’t. She’d be over the legal limit for sure, and it wouldn’t be safe. And there was no point in driving if she didn’t know where he was, anyway.

  But it turned out that it didn’t matter, because Simon was out at the car, getting something out of the back seat.

  Jordan was with him. At first Lorelei didn’t recognize her because she was wearing an oversized hoodie up over her head, obscuring her features. But then the girl turned.

  She was chortling over something that Simon had said, and she didn’t sound like a girl. She sounded like a boy, even though her voice was higher in pitch than Simon’s. Somehow, it wasn’t quite… feminine.

  Lorelei stopped short, hugging herself. “What are you two doing?”

  Simon straightened and closed the door to the back seat. “Hey, Mom.”

  God, when had he gotten so tall? And Jordan was even taller. The two loomed over her.

  Lorelei took a step back. “You should both be in bed,” she said, her voice shrill.

  Simon stepped closer to her. “Geez, what’s the big deal? We’re usually up this late anyway. Besides, there’s no school tomorrow.”

  She stepped back again. She couldn’t help but feel intimidated. “Doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be up. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “You’re always at work,” said Simon.

  She hugged herself tighter. “Jordan, does your mother know where you are?”

  “He’s got to stay here, okay?” said Simon. “Things with his mom are not good right now.”

  He. He, he, he. Lorelei peered at Jordan, trying to make it make sense.