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Flowering Judas(138)

By:Jane Haddam


“We never begrudged our children money,” Stew Morton said. Nobody had seen him come up. Gregor was startled. “We gave them all they wanted. We gave them jobs and let them earn even more.”

“You couldn’t possibly give Chester as much as he wanted, because Chester gambled,” Gregor said. “He also took drugs and drank and did a lot of things you didn’t want him to do. And when you tried to cut him off, he just stole. So the situation got worse and worse, and you threw him out.”

“Charlene would never have thrown him out,” Stew said. “She would never throw any of our children out. She’s not that kind of mother.”

“You did throw him out,” Gregor said. “That’s what happened. And he rented that trailer, and then the two of you started a fight that lasted for months over the way he was living and the way he was behaving. You weren’t going to back down unless he cleaned up his act, and Chester was willing to do anything but clean up his act. That’s when Chester started looking for a way to get what he wanted without having to give up the liquor or the gambling Especially the gambling, I think. That’s when he came up with the idea that he should get married and give you grandchildren.”

“I didn’t want grandchildren from that little tramp,” Charlene said.

“Oh, come on now,” Gregor said. “You had nothing against Darvelle Haymes. Under other circumstances, you’d have liked her. She’s hard working. She’s conscientious. She’s frugal. She’s all the things you probably would have wanted in a daughter-in-law, if you’d thought she was capable of turning Chester around. But she wasn’t capable, because Chester wasn’t really in love with her. She was just convenient. Unfortunatly, she wasn’t convenient enough. She refused to get pregnant.

“And that’s where the real trouble started. Chester was obsessed with his plan to give you a grandchild and get you to come around that way, and when Darvelle wouldn’t help he found another way to get a baby. He was living right next door to a woman who had sold every one of her children but one. Sold them as infants. Sold them to get money for liquor and drugs and just fooling around. She was pregnant. She made Chester an offer. Chester took it. He needed some money. My guess is between five and ten thousand dollars. He needed it, and he knew where to get it. He could get it from you.”

“If I’d really thrown him out of the house,” Charlene said, “do you think I’d have given him even five thousand dollars, never mind ten, to buy a baby to pretend was my grandchild?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I think he stole it. He still had access to your house. He still had access to your business. It wouldn’t have been all that hard. Of course, doing it right, so that he got away with it, would have been harder, but I doubt if he even tried. He got hold of the money. He got the baby. Then he was going to bring the baby to you and say it was your grandchild, when you figured out he had taken the cash.

“So, instead of going home, here, to talk to you about it all, he suddenly found you on his own doorstep, loaded for bear. You were furious. You weren’t going to put up with it. You knew the baby wasn’t his and you weren’t going to have any part of it. But the baby was there, and it was crying. And you picked it up by the feet and smashed it against the trailer wall, and then it was dead.”

“You can’t possibly know that,” Charlene said, “never mind prove it.”

“I don’t have to prove everything, Mrs. Morton, I really don’t. A lot of these things are details and they’re not going to matter in court. But I’d stake my life that you killed that infant, and that you then convinced Chester that nobody would believe you’d killed it. They’d all think he had. You convinced him that he had to go away and stay away. And he didn’t mind that, at first, at any rate. You were going back to supporting him. He could go on living the way he was living. Why not?”

“Why would I bother?” Charlene asked. “Nobody cared about that baby. Nobody even realized it was gone. If we’d really done what you think we’d done, nothing would have happened to us because of it.”

“You couldn’t be sure of that,” Gregor said. “Especially not at the time. You had no reason to think that nobody would miss the baby. And over all these years, that missing baby, the possible pregnancy, the baby-connected-to-Chester hasn’t ever completely gone away. It’s been here, always, waiting for somebody to pay attention to it. People were wrong about whose baby it was. The general idea was that it was Darvelle Haymes who had had a child—for those people who accepted that she was pregnant at the time Chester disappeared and was lying when she said she wasn’t—and you encouraged that, just like you encouraged stories about Chester’s love for the outdoors and lifelong ambition to live in Wyoming or Montana or one of those places, safely in the wrong direction from where he really was and safely in the wrong kind of venue. He went to Atlantic City. You enabled the hell out of all of his problems.”