Born Evil

by Julia Derek

  He gave it to me.

  I punched in the numbers and the screen opened. “I’m in. What should I be looking for again?”

  “Go to the Notes app and find the paragraph I wrote about China. It’s called ‘China’. Then email it to me. You should be able to email it to me directly from the app.”

  “Okay, hang on.” I put my own phone down and got to work. I wasn’t a technical whizz and Shane had an iPhone while I had a Samsung one, but I still managed to not only find what he’d wanted, but also to email it to him. I grabbed my phone when I was done.

  “Okay, done,” I told him. “Check your email and see if you got it.”

  “I’m checking right now.” A moment of silence ensued, then, “Okay, I got it. Thanks, Mom. Want me to buy you some sour patches on my way home from school?”

  I laughed. “No, honey, I’m good. I really need to watch my weight.”

  “Okay. See you later.”

  I disconnected the call and put my own phone down next to Shane’s. I wasn’t sure what compelled me to pick up his again and go through it; all I know was that, a minute later, I had forgotten all about making myself lunch and was deeply immersed in my son’s cellular life. In particular, I was fascinated by all the amazing pics he’d taken using his phone. He really was an incredible photographer. Many of them were of things up in the Catskills, like of a tree or a rock with moss growing on it. Landscapes in the woods. A few were of the old buildings and the lake there. Each seemed better, more interesting than the last. I was already mentally picking out which ones we could blow up and frame. My parents would love to have some of them in their house.

  It was when I got to the pics of Alice that I nearly dropped the phone.

  At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, as the first pics were close-ups of her body. It took me a few and when I did, I gasped out loud.

  I stared at a shot of Alice lying on the ground, spread-eagled. There was an unevenly edged blood halo around her head and shoulders on the light gray stone underneath her. The long, blond ponytail stuck out from under her head, part of it smeared with the dark red blood. There were a couple of close-ups of the bloodied ponytail, of her face. Her clear blue eyes stared heavenward, fear and confusion imprinted in them.

  As if possessed, I kept swiping the screen and discovered more disturbing pics of Alice lying face-up on the stony ground, taken from different angles. Each photo seemed more brutal than the next.

  I felt faint as I paged through the pics of the dead girl, maybe fifteen in total. When I’d reached the last, I went back to the beginning, going through all of them again as if that would make them less conspicuous. What were these pics doing in my son’s phone? I couldn’t think of another explanation than him having taken them himself. That meant he must have been present the day Alice had fallen from the cliff in the woods, fallen to her death, shattering her skull.

  Why hadn’t he told me that he’d been there? We would have found Alice much sooner had he told me and everyone else. The authorities estimated that she had been dead for at least 24 hours by the time she’d been found by the search teams.

  What had Shane been doing out in the woods with Alice? He had told me he’d spent the day with the neighbor’s kids where they had played a card game.

  So he had lied to me then? He must have. He never lied to me. I put down his phone next to my computer and rested my head in my hand, closing my eyes and inhaling deeply through my nostrils. Nausea was building inside me. Oh God. Oh God. This was so not what I’d needed to see. But I had. The pics were for real.

  What the hell should I do?

  11

  I had yet to get a hold of Jacob Gardner when Shane got home from school a few hours later. I had called his parents, Lisa and Eric, twice since I’d discovered those disturbing pics in my son’s phone. Lisa hadn’t been around, so I left her a voicemail, telling her I really needed to speak to her and Jacob as well as to his older sister Zelda as soon as possible. Eric had picked up, but he had been late for a meeting and had not had time to talk to me; he promised to call back when he got home, though.

  Never before had time passed as slowly as it did that day, every minute feeling like an hour. I was dying to pace the apartment, but it was too difficult with the crutches; I had to make do shifting around in my chair instead. That didn’t relieve all the nervous energy inside me, but it was better than nothing.

  I needed to know if Shane had been with Jacob and Zelda the day of Alice’s death, and if they had been at home all day.

  It had dawned on me that someone might have forwarded the pics to my son’s phone. I couldn’t tell if he himself had taken the pics; trust me, I’d already checked. Why someone would forward such pics was a mystery, of course, not to mention still extremely weird, but I liked that explanation better than Shane himself being the photographer.

  When the front door opened in the hallway and Shane called out, “Hi, Mom! I’m home,” I was a nervous wreck. My nails were chewed down to the quick. No matter how I twisted and turned this situation around in my head, I couldn’t come up with a reason for Shane having all those pics in his phone that didn’t upset me. Even him just having spotted her and decided to take pics was a major problem. I mean, who did that? Wouldn’t he at least tell me about having seen her when he was back home? But he hadn’t. There was no explanation for that.

  As I heard him approach the study, I no longer thought someone having forwarded him the pics was a real possibility. That was just wishful thinking. It really didn’t look like that at all. He, or someone using his phone, had taken them. The pics fell well within the timeframe the medical examiner had estimated Alice’s time of death to be, yet her body hadn’t been discovered until the following afternoon. Shane had clearly known she was dead. Why hadn’t he told anyone about it? Why had a search team been forced to find her, wasting hours, when Shane had known where she’d been all along?

  My son stuck his head into my home office where I sat behind the computer, trying to edit a manuscript. Ever since I’d spotted those photos, I had been useless, though. I kept reading and rereading the same page, the words and letters flowing together, becoming indecipherable. But I didn’t know what else to do but to keep trying to make sense of it, so I’d kept going.

  “Hi, what are you doing?” he asked, peering at me, his light brown hair messy.

  I managed a weak smile. “I’m trying to work. Editing this historical romance. It’s not going so well.”

  He kept looking at me, narrowing his eyes. “Are you okay?”

  I ran a hand through my long, blond hair in an attempt to shield my face; I worried the anxiety I was filled with showed. “Yeah, I’m just a little tired. I may be coming down with something. How was school?”

  Shane rolled his eyes. “Boring as usual. I’m already done with this semester’s math and science classes.”

  “That’s great, honey! Are you hungry?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  I pushed myself out of my chair and grabbed my crutches. “Okay, let’s go make something to eat then. What are you in the mood for?”

  “Pizza.”

  I chuckled stiffly. “Why did I even have to ask? Well, we won’t be having pizza right now. We’ve been eating far too much pizza lately. What about some pasta with meat sauce and a salad? That’s almost as good as pizza, isn’t it? I think so. Yes, it’s definitely better than pizza.”

  Stop rambling, Jennifer, I silently ordered myself. I inhaled deeply through my nose in an attempt to settle down. You’ll only make things worse for both of you if he realizes how upset you are. Surely, there will turn out to be a perfectly understandable explanation as to why those pics are in Shane’s phone. Just like there had been one to explain the cat incident. Something you haven’t even thought of.

  “Not really,” Shane commented and made a grimace. “But it’s fine. Where’s my phone?”

  “Right there.” I nodded with my head at the shiny device next to my laptop. Shane
reached his arm out and snatched it up, scrolling through it.

  Fear shot through me when he paused and a deep furrow formed between his eyebrows.

  Had he noticed that I had been in his phone and seen the pics of dead Alice?

  What would he do if he did?

  As suddenly as he had paused and scowled, his face relaxed and he let out a loud guffaw.

  “Mom, you’ve got to see this,” he said and held the phone before my eyes. A video from Facebook was displayed on the screen. It showed a kitten and a huge dog fighting each other, the kitten clearly dominating the dog. “It’s so funny!”

  I had to admit that it was pretty funny, so I, too, found myself laughing despite my dark mood. Which helped me relax a little.

  He turned around and walked out to the kitchen. I ambled after him on my crutches as best I could. I had nearly entered the kitchen when my phone rang. It was in my pocket.

  Shane grabbed the phone out of my pants before I could stop him. He checked the screen and then answered.

  “Hi, Mrs. Gardner, how are you?” he said, looking at me with a big grin. He knew I really didn’t like it when he answered my phone for me. Today it bothered me more than ever when I heard who was calling.

  “Give me the phone right away, Shane,” I ordered him. But he didn’t; instead, he stepped away so I couldn’t reach him, making me furious.

  “No, I don’t know what was so important, but you can ask her yourself,” he said into the phone. “She’s right here. Hang on.”

  Finally, he handed me the phone and I snatched it from him with a huff, my heart pounding faster. As I leaned against a counter and placed the phone to my ear, I glared at him. He answered by giggling delightfully. He could be such a pain.

  “Hi, Lisa,” I said into the phone. “Thanks for calling me back.”

  “It sounded very important. Is everything okay?”

  “Oh yes, there was just something I wanted to discuss with you.” My eye caught Shane then. He had stopped giggling and was staring at me instead, his face watchful. Overly curious. Now was not the time to talk to Lisa about where my son had been the day Alice had died. “But Shane and I were just about to eat something. Would it be okay if I called you back later?”

  “Sure. I should be around the rest of the evening. Just give me a shout when you get the chance.”

  “Great, thanks. Bye.”

  I extended the phone to Shane. “Can you please put that on the kitchen table for me? My charger is on the floor. I need to charge my phone. And stop answering my calls. You know that it really annoys me.”

  He looked surprisingly sheepish as he squatted to pick up the charger cord. “Sorry. It’s just so much fun when you get annoyed.”

  I glared at him. “Keep that up and you’ll see me get real annoyed. I don’t think you’ll like that as much.”

  He didn’t answer and just stuck the charger into my phone. I walked up to the stove to get the frying pan out from where I kept it in the oven. Doing so was a chore given the crutches, which was why we had ordered pizza more than usual recently. The crutches were really getting on my nerves, but we needed to eat some regular food now.

  Shane hurried up to me and helped me get the pan out and onto the right cooking plate.

  “Thanks,” I muttered. “Now please get me the meat sauce from the freezer. It should be in the second drawer. In one of the blue plastic containers.”

  While he got that, I switched on the plate and poured a few drops of olive oil into the pan. Without a word, he handed me the container with the frozen meat sauce. I filled a pot with water for the pasta and put it on another plate, adding salt.

  “Please set the table now,” I said. “It won’t take long before the food’s ready.”

  He did as I wanted while I waited for the frying pan to heat up sufficiently. A minute later, it had and I poured the container’s contents into the pan. Using a wooden fork, I mixed it around, trying to chop it up with the fork so that it thawed sooner.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” Shane suddenly asked. He had set the table and also gotten the lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers out for the salad. I turned to him and he gazed at me with a face so filled with worry I felt a pang of guilt in my chest. Maybe I had been too harsh with him, snapping like that. He was just a twelve-year-old boy, full of energy. So he liked to be mischievous and pull pranks on me. It wasn’t the end of the world.

  I smiled at him. I wanted to ruffle his hair, but I couldn’t or I’d risk falling to the floor. My other hand was busy thawing the meat sauce. “Yes. Like I said earlier, I’m just not feeling great today. I’m sorry that I snapped at you earlier.”

  “It’s okay. I know I’m a handful.” He grinned big at me, and I couldn’t help returning it.

  I sighed. “Yes, God knows you aren’t always easy to deal with.”

  12

  I made sure that Shane was busy editing photos on his computer when I returned Lisa’s phone call a few hours later.

  “Hi, Jennifer,” Lisa said by way of answering.

  “Hi, Lisa. Thanks for calling me back earlier. Are you busy?”

  “Not at all. I was just watching a boring movie. I can use a break from it. What’s up?”

  “Do you remember the day when Alice Tate was found dead in the woods upstate back in May? Or, rather, the day before?”

  “Oh, yeah. It’s hard to forget. That was such an awful day. I feel so bad for Chris and Lana. I don’t know what I would do if one of my kids fell off a cliff and died. I don’t think I would ever get over it.”

  No, you wouldn’t. It’s almost as bad as your only child shooting your husband to death, I thought. You definitely don’t get over stuff like that. You pretend you do, but you don’t. We had only known Lisa and her family since they bought their upstate country house near ours a couple of years ago. As far as I knew, neither she nor her husband was aware of what Shane and I had been through, and that was a good thing. So all I said was, “I know, it’s awful what happened. Truly incomprehensible. So you remember that day then?”

  “Yes, of course. How could I forget? Why do you ask?”

  I had thought long and hard what reason I would give Lisa here. I couldn’t just come out and tell her straight out that I feared my son might be connected to Alice’s death. Worse, that he might be the one who’d pushed her. At last I came up with something I considered decent enough to tell her, which was this: “Shane spent the day playing cards with Jacob the day before Alice was found. He says that he brought a copy of The Count of Monte Christo for Zelda to read when he went over to your house. I’ve been looking for that book. Do you know if Zelda still has it?”

  “I have absolutely no idea. Do you want me to ask her? I can do that right now. She’s sitting right here beside me.”

  “Yeah, sure. That would be great.”

  I already knew what the answer would be—Zelda couldn’t remember Shane having brought over such a book to lend her that day. Squeezing my cheek to my neck to keep the phone in place, I massaged cream into my hands while I waited for Lisa to get back to me. They tended to get dry all the time lately.

  “Hey,” she said about fifteen seconds later. “Zelda said he didn’t bring over any book for her that day. Are you sure it was that day?”

  “Yes, because Shane told me it was the day before they found Alice in the woods that he brought it over. He spent the day playing cards with Jacob and Zelda then.”

  “Hang on,” Lisa said and there was some rustling as she moved the phone. “Are you sure Shane didn’t bring you a book that day, Zelda?”

  I could hear Zelda talking animatedly in the background, but not what she was saying.

  “He did?” Lisa asked.

  I assumed she’d meant the question for Zelda, not me. Zelda said something else that I couldn’t make out.

  “Jen?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She told me she’s absolutely sure, and that I can ask Jacob for verification. It sounds like Jacob and Shane got
into a fight over something with the card game; apparently, Shane stormed out of the house a few minutes later. I remember that part myself now that I think about it. I had just finished baking an apple pie and asked Shane if he wanted some. He told me he wasn’t hungry and that he was going home. Then he strode to the front door and got out without saying goodbye. It was a bit rude, actually.”

  A chill went through me. All I could think of was that Shane had not been with Jacob and Zelda that entire day like he’d claimed. “You’re saying that Shane left your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what time? Approximately?”

  “Hmm. I think it was around noon. Yes, it was right before noon because that’s when I take that yoga class at the club in town. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have time to go that day. I had totally misjudged how long it would take me to bake the pie.”

  “Did Shane come back later?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Let me ask Zelda to be sure. Hold on. Zelda, did Shane come back to play cards with you guys again that day?”

  Zelda responded something unintelligible.

  “Zelda says she and Jacob didn’t talk to him until the next day, when we all went in the search party for poor Alice.”

  So he had definitely lied to me then. Oh God. This was so not good. Oh God.

  “Jen? Are you still there?”

  “Oh, I’m such an idiot,” I exclaimed, realizing that I had been silent for too long. “I mixed up the days.”

  “What do you mean?” Lisa sounded confused.

  I made myself chuckle lightly. “You’re right, Shane was home with me that day. And now that I think about it, I don’t think he meant your Zelda.”

  “My Zelda?”

  “Yes. I think he was referring to a Zelda in his class. I’m sorry. I’m completely out on a limb. Forget I even called. I need to call someone else to get that book back. Your Zelda doesn’t have it. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

  “No worries.”

  We exchanged a few more words, then I said goodbye, feeling lightheaded, nervous. This was so not the way I had hoped this conversation would go. A tiny part of me had clung to the possibility that Shane had been with Jacob and Zelda all day, and that someone had taken his phone and used it to take pics of dead Alice. The real killer, someone who wanted to set up my son. Someone who knew that he was the perfect target given his genetics. Someone who had found out that he had shot his father when he was only six.