First through the door was a heavyset female guard wearing a uniform in different shades of brown polyester that made a loud rustling noise when she moved. Attached to her left wrist, so tight the skin was puckered around it, was a metal handcuff. And attached to that handcuff was Noelle Egan.
She bore no resemblance to the wedding photos the newspapers kept printing, nor to the framed family portrait I’d seen in her living room.
This Noelle had lank hair that hung from her head in solid clumps. Free from the heavy foundation she favoured in the photos, her skin was sallow, even yellowish in places, and lumpy with spots. Her eyebrows, which in the pictures were plucked into two perfect thin arches, had grown out and were sparse and unkempt, like randomly planted seedlings. The prissy blouse had been replaced by a regulation khaki prison uniform. Only the eyes, with that lifeless stare, were the same.
Ed stood up to shake hands before remembering her right hand was shackled. He froze, half standing, half sitting.
‘Hi, Noelle. I’m Professor Ed Kowalsky and this is my assistant, Dr Anne Cater.’
I bristled at that word, assistant, though I had no illusions I was anything but the junior partner in this team.
‘As I’m sure has been explained to you, the state has charged me with evaluating the um . . . well-being of your children so we can get a better understanding of the impact recent events have had on them, and work out the best long-term plan of action. As Dr Cater and I have been working with Laurie, we’re going to focus on her and we’re hoping you’ll be able to . . .’
I stiffened in my chair. Please let him not be about to say ‘contextualize’ again.
‘. . . fill in some of the background details so we can get a fuller picture.’
Noelle, who’d been uncuffed from her guard, sat down in one of the chairs opposite us and stared at him from her strange dead-fish eyes.
‘There’s no need to evaluate Laurie,’ she said eventually. Her voice was as flat as her gaze. ‘She’s a perfectly normal little girl. She’s never wanted for anything.’
Ed swallowed loudly enough for all of us to hear it.
‘Yeah, well, that’s why we’re here. So that you can give us a bit more insight into her life at home and we can start to build up a picture that will help us work out how best to support her. I’m sure we all want what’s best for her.’
The guard, who was standing against the wall behind Noelle, made a pff noise, blowing air out through her mouth as if to demonstrate what she thought about this statement. This was a woman who’d kept her son in a cage. Did we seriously believe she had her children’s best interests at heart?
‘You don’t need to worry about Laurie, she’s perfectly happy. She’s always perfectly happy.’
I looked for any signs that she was aware how glib that sounded, any fidgeting of the fingers, or darting of the eyes in one direction or another. But there was nothing. Noelle Egan genuinely seemed to believe happiness was possible, even inevitable, despite what Laurie had experienced in the basement of her house every day of her life.
‘Can you give us some kind of background, Noelle, to how this all started – the circumstances in which your son, David, was born?’
Noelle recoiled as if she’d been hit when Ed said the word ‘David’, and I wondered if this was his intention. For the three weeks after a pizza delivery boy who turned up at the Egan house by mistake heard a noise and pressed his eye up to the vent in the brick at ground level, the authorities had struggled to find a name for the child known to his family only as ‘It’ or ‘Thing’. Noelle and Peter Egan refused to give up the name, perhaps because by naming him, they’d be humanizing him. And it seemed it had never occurred to Laurie that the Thing in the basement might have a name. Only when police investigators finally discovered Noelle’s maiden name and traced her back to Missouri, where she’d first lived with Peter, did they find the birth records listing the boy as David Egan.
‘I didn’t have a very happy childhood.’ I blinked at Noelle in surprise when she started speaking. I’d expected her to be unforthcoming, even though I knew she’d been told that helping us could improve her chances of avoiding a life sentence for child abuse and neglect, particularly if she could claim to have been unduly influenced or coerced by her husband.
‘My parents were religious and very strict. I always knew my father had wanted a son, and he made it clear I was nothing but a disappointment to him right from the start. He avoided me wherever possible, and my mom, who was totally dominated by him, resented me for making him upset with her. So I got the message real early that I was a screw-up. It didn’t help that something went wrong when she had me and she had to have a hysterectomy so they couldn’t have any more children. By the time I was ten I was cutting myself with anything I could get my hands on. At twelve I was drinking hard liquor. By fifteen I was sleeping with guys twice my age. Sometimes two at a time. Until I met Peter, my life was one long spiral downwards.’