Page 43 of Girl, Remembered

‘Ma’am, I know. Okay? I know. And I think you do too.’

Terrance’s wife tightened her grip. It briefly closed an inch, but after another cautionary glance down the hallway, she resigned her efforts and slowly pulled the door open.

‘He’s in the garden. Please. Go easy on him.’

Ella’s sense of domestic geography took her into a living room with too much silver, and from there she saw the back Terrance of Dever’s head through the double doors leading outside. He was sitting upright on a patio chair, and didn’t look at all like a man working.

She nodded a gesture of thanks at Dever’s wife, then stepped out onto the patio area. It was an elevated deck with two chairs, a table and a row of plants. It overlooked a small garden with a low wall, and beyond that wall was a huge, circular pond. Historical reflection told her that this was not a public pond. It must have been a private installment for the houses in this area.

‘Do you want a drink?’ Dever asked as he brandished a bottle of vodka beside him. He hadn’t turned around, and now Ella could see him blankly staring at the distant water. There was no phone in his hand.

‘Terrance. It’s me. Not your wife.’

‘I know. I knew you’d come.’ Dever gestured to the seat next to him. ‘Please, sit.’

‘I’d rather stand.’

‘Your problem, Ella, is that you’re so dramatic about everything.’

For a fleeting second, Ella forgot why she was there. The last thing she’d expected was criticism of her character. ‘I think this warrants being dramatic, don’t you?’

Dever gestured to the chair again. ‘Please. Do this for me. I assure you, I’m not armed. There’s no one else in this house other than me and Anne. We don’t have children, and I knew that one day, you’d find out why.’

Ella kept one hand on her Glock while she obliged Dever. She sat down beside him, looked out at the pond, and tried to settle into this odd environment. Dever somehow knew what she’d discovered, and judging by his body language, had accepted his defeat.

Was there a chance Doyle was here right now?

Common sense said yes. But her instinctive attunement to this strange situation said no.

‘Okay. I’m sitting. Talk.’

Dever picked up the bottle of vodka and took a long, neat mouthful. ‘Are you sure you don’t want one?’

‘No.’

He wiped his mouth, stared at the label and tapped it with his fingernail. ‘This is where it started. Right here.’

‘What? Alcohol?’

‘No. Skol Vodka. They make it in Kentucky. Back in the nineties, every alcoholic south of Indiana had gallons of this stuff lying around.’

Ella failed to see the correlation between his comment and the topic at hand, but she waited for him to continue regardless. When it came to confessions, people tended to take the long route.

‘When I got to that house, the first thing I saw was a trash can full of these bottles. I knocked on the door, and this young girl opened it up. She was twelve, but looked a lot younger. Her hair was so dirty it had started to knot up. Her teeth were brown. She struggled to talk. I knew she hadn’t been to school in a year at that point, so I thought maybe she was just delayed, developmentally. Nope, it turned out the only thing her mom had to drink in the house was liquor. The girl was drunk.’

Ella struggled to articulate her thoughts. Reconciling this young, abused girl with the woman responsible for mass killings was almost impossible. The two extremes did not overlap in any way she knew how to emotionally process.

Thankfully, Dever didn’t need prompting to continue.

‘I went inside, and I found Caroline Blanchard passed out on the sofa. The two girls were eating moldy bread. They had marks all over their bodies. Cuts from where their dad had lashed them. One of them even had burn marks. I didn’t know which one was Lindsey and which one was Tracy, but they were both as brutalized as each other. They didn’t seem to bat an eyelid that a strange man was walking through their house, either.’

Ella considered the implication. Lindsey and Tracy were most likely used to there being strange, older men around. Those men probably disappeared with their mom for an hour before leaving a wad of notes on the kitchen table.

‘The whole place was a mess. Both girls slept together on a mattress in the living room with just a sheet over it. I asked one of them how they got the burn marks on their arms, and she said the iron fell on her. I remember thinking that these girls barely had clothes, let alone an iron. And I don’t know any irons in the shape of cigarettes.’

If Dever’s job was to make Ella feel sympathy for the woman who’d murdered her friends, he was doing an admirable job. But in this game, it was the bite size snippets of wisdom that kept you sane, and Ella had to remind herself that millions of people were abused and didn’t become serial killers. Doyle clearly didn’t deserve the childhood she endured and she grew up to be an unhinged, homicidal killer. Both things could be true.

‘Then, the girls asked me if I wanted to see what they’d made in the garden, and I foolishly said yes.’