‘Stop overthinking it,’ said Will gently. ‘It’s OK to be scared.’
‘I’m not scared,’ said Sarah, and to her horror she began once again to cry. ‘I’m pregnant.’
24
Anne
The visit to the Egans’ family home changed the dynamic between Ed Kowalsky and me. You might expect such a shared experience to bring us closer together, but in fact the opposite was true. It was as if we’d both participated in something shameful so that, once back in our own world, we couldn’t quite meet each other’s eyes. What we’d witnessed downstairs in that basement made us somehow complicit and we avoided talking about it as much as we could. For the first time since we’d started working together I began to wish Ed had picked someone else to help him with the assessment.
I knew this case was still my ticket to a different life. But in my weaker moments, lying awake trying to summon up sleep, when images of that pulley and hook would roll backwards and forwards across my mind, I’d find myself longing to go back in time to before we set foot in that house, before I even heard of Child L. Let someone else have the glory – and the nightmares.
We knew from the police and child welfare reports that Laurie had been actively involved in both the feeding of and the punishment of her brother, but we had no idea to what extent she’d been forced into these chores, or whether indeed she just considered them to be a normal part of life.
Laurie’s parents were being kept in separate jails on different sides of town. When Ed first told me Noelle Egan had agreed to see us, I felt utterly conflicted. Professional curiosity made me thankful for the opportunity to get up close to a woman who had dissociated herself so completely from one child while retaining a maternal connection to a second. But another part of me kept remembering that dank basement that smelled like something had died in it, and the hook on the end of the rope, and the hand sanitizer on the way out. The media called her a monster and while I didn’t believe in monsters, I obviously had an issue with mothers.
‘She’ll only meet with us once. That’s her condition for seeing us,’ said Ed when he first told me the news, his eyes sliding off me as if I was coated in oil. ‘Which is a pity because the rules only allow two visitors at a time. I had to make an executive decision whether to bring you or Dan Oppenheimer, but I decided that as Laurie is the one who has a chance of a new life, I would bring you with me today. It’s a great opportunity for us to contextualize Laurie.’
Contextualize her. That’s how he talked.
‘Plus she also said she didn’t want to discuss the boy.’ He threw this in like an afterthought, rather than the deciding factor I guessed it to be.
The correctional facility where Noelle was being kept pending her trial was fifty kilometres out of town to the north. Once again we drove there in Ed’s station wagon but this time he’d removed the child seats from the back. I wanted to ask him if it was to make sure he reacted to Laurie’s mother as a psychiatrist rather than a parent, but it seemed too personal.
The facility itself was small. There was too much interest in the case for the authorities to risk placing her in a larger jail where corruption was rife and staff morale rock bottom, and where gangs of inmates ran the show. Women who harm children don’t fare well in jail. Women who harm their own children fare the worst.
After we’d gone through the two sets of gates, topped by whorls of barbed wire, we pulled up in front of a low-slung modern building.
‘Looks like the kind of place you go to get your accounts audited,’ I said.
We were thoroughly searched before we were allowed inside. Ed became agitated when the uniformed woman searching his briefcase pulled out his notebook and, holding it by the spine, shook it to see if anything was hidden within the pages.
‘Be careful with that. There’s important research in there.’
After crossing a small, empty yard, a guard unlocked a door which led to a cramped vestibule and a second locked door, which only opened once the one behind us had clanked shut.
Finally we were shown into a room containing a beige Formica table and four hard wooden chairs. The bars on the window blocked the sun so the room felt gloomy and noticeably cooler than the corridor we’d just exited. Ed and I arranged ourselves behind the table facing the door and sat side by side in silence. I’d been so taken up with the technicalities of getting into the prison that I hadn’t given much thought to meeting Noelle herself, but now I found myself growing nervous.
Ed retrieved his notebook from his briefcase and dug around in the side pocket for a pen. He opened the book on a fresh page and wrote Noelle Egan, interview with today’s date. Then he underlined it. Twice. We waited some more. By the time the door swung open, I had a dent in the pad of my right thumb where I’d been digging the nail of my index finger into the skin.