Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Diana
“I can’t,” Mrs. Locke says. “I can’t relive it.”
I wave the Ben Franklin in front of her. “I’m not trying to get you to relive a horrible experience, Mrs. Locke. I’m not throwing this money around to hurt you.” I kneel in front of her, force her to look me in the eyes. “But let me be honest with you about something. I’m in love with your son. He doesn’t know it, and if he did, he’d probably go running. Because of what you did to him”—I poke her in her shoulder—“he doesn’t think he’s worthy of love. Out of guilt for everything, he’s trying so hard to find his little sister. Find out what happened to her. At least give him that. You gave him away all those years ago. Put him through hell. Please… If you truly loved your children the way you say you did at one time, help him now.”
She takes another sip of her coffee and then clears her throat. “Someone got in through the window of Griffin’s room. That’s how it happened the first time too.”
“So you acknowledge that. You acknowledge that it wasn’t Dragon’s fault.”
She busts out an exasperated sigh. “What would you have thought? What would you have thought when you came into your daughter’s room and heard her screaming, blood running down her cheek, soaking her pajamas, and the only clue as to what happened is your son holding a knife from your own kitchen? What would you have thought?”
“Wasn’t the window open?”
She closes her eyes, runs her hands over her weathered face. “I don’t know. Maybe it was. But what would you have thought, Ms. Steel?”
I draw a breath. I try to keep calm. Because if I attack this woman, she won’t give me what I need. “He was crying. He said he didn’t do it.”
“But he was holding a bloody knife. A bloody knife from our own kitchen.”
“Had Dragon ever shown any aggression toward his sister before that night?”
She doesn’t answer.
It doesn’t matter. I already know the answer.
“What precautions did you take after that night?” I want to add, “Other than sending your son away,” but I tamp the impulse down.
“We put a lock on her window.”
“Why didn’t you move?”
“We couldn’t afford to move.”
“All right. So you put a lock on her window. How much longer until she was taken?”
“It was less than a year later.” She takes another sip of coffee. Then she grabs a Kleenex from the box on the coffee table and dabs at her eyes.
Is she truly feeling sadness? Remorse? Or is she just trying to get me to pity her? Make me so uncomfortable that I leave her in peace?
“Do you see why I try not to talk about this? Even think about it?” She buries her face in her hands. “And now that Felix is gone, what do I have left? I can’t think about my daughter. Or even about my son.”
“Why not? You can still have a relationship with your son.”
Dragon will never allow that, but she doesn’t have to know.
Besides, she treated him like a piece of shit last night.
“All right.” I return to the chair I was sitting in. “Now tell me about the night Griffin was taken. You say you put a lock on her window. And I assume the doors were locked.”
“Yes.”
“When did you find out she was missing?”
“The next morning when we went into her room.”
“How was she that night when she went to bed?”
“She had only been back in her room for a few nights at that point. She used to cry herself to sleep, scared. And she…”
“She what?”
She inhales slowly. “She missed her brother, if you must know. There was this set of pajamas she would wear—they were her favorite, a Christmas gift from Dragon. Pink with rainbows. From the moment he left, they were the only pair of pajamas she would wear to bed.”
She missed her brother.
So many things I could say to that, but I hold myself in check.
“So she had finally gone back to her own room.”
“Yes. Felix and I tried to get her to move into Dragon’s room, but she wouldn’t. She kept saying it was Dragon’s room, and she wanted him to come back.”
“Did you think about going to get Dragon?”
She frowns. “Not at that point, no. We still thought he had attacked his sister.”
I draw a breath again, holding my temper. “I see. What did you find the next morning, after Griffin disappeared?”
“The window was open, as it was the first time.”
“What about the lock?”
She closes her eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Is it possible you forgot to lock the window?”
She snaps her head toward me. “Of course not!”
But she’s lying. She looks at her lap, slides her fingers over the rim of her coffee cup.
She’s lying because she didn’t think she had to lock the window. At that point, she still thought Dragon was the one who had hurt Griffin.
“Was there any blood on the sheets?”
“Not that time, no.”
“So the first time, whoever came in cut Griffin on the face and the abdomen, correct?”
“Yes.” Her lip trembles. “That beautiful face of hers had a scar.”
“But the next time, she wasn’t cut?”
She shrugs. “We didn’t find any blood. Neither did the forensic investigators.” Her face darkens. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t cut.”
I nod. “That’s true enough. What did you do then?”
“We called the police. And they interrogated us, as if we were the criminals.”
“Did you tell them that you had another child?”
“They found out. They used it as an excuse to bludgeon us with questions. If we got rid of one child, why wouldn’t we get rid of another?”
“I see.”
I keep my fists from clenching. Dealing with this woman is more difficult than I anticipated. She’s distant. But I can understand that.
But the way she speaks about how the police officers treated her… Of course they had questions about what happened to Dragon.
“Did you call the police the first time Griffin was attacked?”
“No.”
“Because you assumed Dragon had done it.”
She blinks. “Yes.”
“What did you do that time?”
“We took Griffin to the hospital, of course, and the people at the ER wanted to call the police. We wouldn’t allow it. We said our son was responsible.”
“And where was Dragon when you took Griffin to the hospital?”
“I don’t know,” she scoffs. “How am I supposed to remember all of this? It was over twenty years ago.”
I shake my head. How can this woman not remember the day her child was attacked? How can she not remember what she did with her other child?
“Did you leave Dragon at home alone?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Maybe one of you stayed home with Dragon while the other took Griffin to the ER?”
She presses her lips together. “No. We both went to the ER.”
“And no one asked you where your other child was?”
“We had to sit and talk to a social worker. The hospital insisted on that if we weren’t going to call the police.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“Her. It was a woman. We told her what happened. That Dragon had gotten a knife from the kitchen and had attacked his sister. She’s the one who suggested Dragon be removed from the home.”
I cock my head. “It wasn’t your idea?”
“No, it wasn’t. But after we had a few days to think about it, we agreed with her.”
“Do you remember that person’s name?”
“No. I barely remember her face.” She frowns, gazing out the window of the mobile home. “That time of my life is such a blur.”
I can’t help wondering if Dragon’s parents were on drugs at that point. The mother is obviously a chain smoker—I can tell from the yellow tint on every surface of the trailer, as well as from the crackly tone of her voice. Perhaps she and Dragon’s father were taking something harder during this time in their lives—something that would have impaired their judgment. Make them think that their sweet little boy who had done nothing but love his baby sister could do something so terrible to her. And then be so easily swayed by a single social worker’s suggestion to remove their son from their lives entirely, despite mountains of evidence that it was someone else’s doing.
But I don’t have all the details, so my feelings for this woman are ambivalent. Part of me wants to offer comfort—comfort for the loss of not one but two children.
The bigger part of me wants to punch her into next week. Take out a gun and shoot her even.
“All right.”
“You could find all these records,” she says. “About Dragon. About Griffin.”
“Juvenile records are usually sealed,” I say. “Don’t you think Dragon would’ve found them before now if he could have?”
“I don’t know what Dragon would do.” She sighs. “I don’t even know the man.”
I shake my head. “The man? You mean your son.”
“Only biologically. I gave up my rights as his mother. Felix gave up his rights as his father.” Her face twists slightly, but she doesn’t shed a tear. “At the time, we thought it was the best thing.”
“Let me ask you this, Mrs. Locke. If a social worker had not suggested that Dragon be removed from your home, would you have given him up?”
She doesn’t answer.
At this point, I’m not sure I would trust anything she says anyway. I believe her when she says that time in her life was a blur. Especially if she and her husband were on drugs. It couldn’t have been easy to give up her son. But she did it. I suppose the question is whether she and Dragon’s father gave him up willingly or if they were coerced into doing so by a social worker.
But at this point? None of that even matters. It won’t change anything about Dragon’s past. It won’t bring Griffin back.
But it might help Dragon to know it.
“Can you answer that question for me?”
“I don’t really remember, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Did you ever have any regrets about giving Dragon away?”
She closes her eyes, breathing in deeply. “After Griffin was taken, Felix had a lot of regrets. He wanted to go back and get Dragon.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because I just couldn’t. What kind of mother gives up her child and then changes her mind?” She folds her arms across her chest. “I didn’t really miss him. He was never my baby after Griffin came along. He would have just reminded me of her.”
I jump to my feet then, my hands curling into fists. I walk toward her, stand right in front of her as she sits on the sofa. “Look at me, Mrs. Locke.”
Reluctantly, she tilts her chin upward and meets my gaze.
“You are the worst kind of human being on the planet,” I say to her. “And you deserve to live in this hellhole. You deserve everything you fucking get.”
I leave the trailer, slamming the door. I walk down the rickety wooden steps and?—
“Oh!”
I cry out as the wood splinters beneath me fall. My ankle hits the hard ground, and a sharp pain shoots up my leg. I reach my hand out instinctively and cut it on the wood.
My ankle is throbbing as I attempt to get up.
I try to walk on it, and pain slices through me as if a knife is cutting into my left ankle.
“Mrs. Locke!” I yell.
A moment later the door opens. Her eyes are wide. “What happened to you?”
“Your rickety old stairs broke under my weight,” I say. “My ankle is killing me. It hurts to walk.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
Is this woman for real?
“Nothing, I guess. I’ll just stay here until an ambulance arrives.” I wrangle my phone out of my purse and call 9-1-1.
“Shit. Are you going to sue me?”
It would serve her right, but she doesn’t have a pot to piss in, and I have health insurance in addition to my trust fund.
“No,” I say.
“Good. Then you still owe me a hundred bucks for the information I gave you.”
And I can’t help myself.
In spite of the pain, the blood dripping from my hand, the ache in my heart for Dragon and his little sister, I burst out laughing.