“Whatever works.”
I hit the entry button and then quickly texted Kelly to let her know what was going on, imagining the look on her face when she read it. Justin knocked on the door just as I hit the icon.
I tightened my robe. The tank top I wore beneath it had a built in bra, but it was made for women with little on top. At least the robe went to my knees.
Taking a deep breath and bracing myself for defensive maneuvers, I opened the door.
“Thanks for seeing me.” He’d gotten a haircut. He still slouched.
“Come in.” I motioned for him to sit, making sure not to turn my back. Justin looked around and chewed his nails. Finally, he sat down only to jump back up again.
“You’ve been in the storage unit.”
“I have.” I stayed by the door. “You’re a very talented artist.”
“I hate her.” Justin’s expression mirrored his angry tone.
“She’s the one, isn’t she? The one who hurt you.”
“She did more than hurt me. She ruined my life!” He closed his eyes, pressing his fingertips to his forehead. His body shook for a moment, and then he took a deep breath. “You said you wanted to understand. Did you mean that?”
“Yes.” I stepped forward without thinking, half reaching for him. “Tell me what happened.”
Justin pulled up the right sleeve of his navy sweatshirt to reveal a faded, thin scar along his inner forearm, on the sensitive skin on the underside of the wrist. “She did this to me when I was eight. Said I was a whiney, pretty boy. A baby.”
I’d heard more stories like this than I wanted to admit, but every one still felt like a punch in the stomach. “Is that the first time she hurt you?”
“No. She disciplined me, as she liked to call it, since I was little. And the verbal abuse goes back as long as I can remember. But this,” he touched the scar, “this is when things changed.”
“What did your father do? And Todd? He was a teenager. Old enough to help.”
“Todd lived with his own mother most of the time. And my dad was a drunk. She controlled the house. And me. Never let me have any friends.”
“I remember your being alone,” I said. Anger surged through me. It’s gender bias, but hearing about a mother abusing her child is worse than salt in a wound. How could a woman who shared her body with her child, who brought his life into this world, turn on him like that? It’s despicable. And unforgivable. “I am so sorry I didn’t help you.”
“There was no physical proof,” Justin said. “Because the beatings were reserved to my ass most of the time. The mental abuse was worse. She resented me, wanted to control me. And when I got a little older and started getting interested in girls…” His voice caught.
“You were eleven,” I said. “That’s still pretty young. And Layla was only ten.”
“We were just playing around.” Justin sat back down on my couch and dropped his head to his hands. “Layla saw her parents having sex the night before. She knew she wasn’t allowed at my house, but she saw my mother leave for the store and snuck over. Layla told me what she saw, and then she decided to show me. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what she told me to. I laid down, she climbed on top of me. She started bouncing around, and my body reacted. She wanted to see it, and I showed her. I knew it was wrong, but I was so curious. And she was the only thing close to a friend I had. Which is why my mother hated her.”
He finally looked up. “She caught us.”
“And then what?” My throat had gone dry. I sat down on the coach.
“My mom started screaming. Layla tried to run, but Mom knocked her down. Smacked Layla’s head on the coffee table, and it started bleeding. Layla said she was going to tell her parents and my mom would go to jail.” Justin’s skin was gray. “Mom went ballistic. She grabbed Layla by the hair and started hitting her. The whole time screaming at me that this was my fault. She took off her belt and snapped it at me. I hated that belt. She blistered my ass with it once so bad I couldn’t sit for days.”
“She made you hit Layla.”
Tears squeezed out of his eyes. “It was my punch that knocked her out. I’ll never forget the look on her face when my fist came towards her. She was so scared and then shocked. Like she couldn’t believe I would really do it. Then it got worse.” He gulped air, his chest wheezing.
“My pants were still down. My mother grabbed me and squeezed so hard I dropped. She told me if I wanted to know what boys did to girls with that thing, she’d show me. I was rolling in pain, but I tried to get to the door while she went to the kitchen. She came back with a spoon. And she…” he swallowed and looked sick. He rubbed his face until it glowed red.
“Jesus Christ.” I thought I might throw up myself. The police report had said Layla was abused with an object, and the theory had been because Justin couldn’t get an erection, he’d used the object. Never in my darkest nightmares had I expected to hear this.
“When she was finished, she slammed Layla’s head on the floor. Hard. There was blood everywhere. She wiped her hands on my clothes. I couldn’t speak. I remember feeling like I was outside of my body. Like this was some dream I’d wake up from.” His words came fast, his breath faster, practically on the verge of hyperventilating. I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water.
“Stop, take a drink. Catch your breath. Whatever happened is in the past, and you have however long you need to tell me the story.”
He nodded, sucking down the water with such force the bottle made a sharp, popping noise as the sides caved in. Justin breathed deeply and then rolled his shoulders back. “When it happened, the whole time she was smearing me with blood, she kept telling me I’d done this. Because I let the little whore stain me. I was the one who’d hurt her. My mother did what she had to do. It wasn’t her fault. After my shirt was all bloodied, she yanked it off me and smothered Layla. Then she cleaned herself off and called the police.”
Justin fell back against the couch, gangly body limp.
I stared. Anger and disgust and shame coursed through me, some targeted at Martha Beckett, the rest at myself. If I ever had the chance, I’d make her pay for the lives she ruined. “You never said anything. Why on earth didn’t you speak up?”
“She told me she’d kill me if I did. And I believed her,” Justin said. “I’d just witnessed her rape and kill my friend. And I’d spent years with her mental abuse. I was eleven. Do you really think it’s such a stretch that I didn’t say anything?”
I thought back to the days after Layla’s murder. Justin had been catatonic for the first three. And then he’d simply said, ‘Yes, I did it. I wanted to touch her, and she wouldn’t let me. I got angry.” He’d never answered any more questions. And from what I knew, the intense therapy he’d undergone during his time in juvenile detention revolved around his anger issues. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I think my mother took Kailey. And it’s my fault.”
I suppose I should have seen his words coming, but after the horror I’d just listened to, my brain took a few seconds to catch up. Justin waited, as if he knew I needed to process. Silent and pale, with his haunting eyes, he reminded me of the little boy I’d visited in the detention facility almost a decade ago. I remembered everything about that day. I hadn’t been able to eat. The juvenile facility smelled like cleaning chemicals and hormones. A group of older boys played basketball in the courtyard, watched over by a dutiful, if not bored, guard. One of them stopped and stared as I walked past. He was cute. And then I felt like Mrs. Robinson and hurried inside.
Justin was under strict observation. A psychologist kept trying to get him to talk, and he did nothing but stare vacantly. Staff shook their heads and whispered about how impossible something like this was, that children don’t kill children that someone should have seen this all coming and done something to stop it.
At the time, I believed that someone should have been me. I slunk into the room and tried to get through to the little boy who’d seemed to like me just a few short weeks ago. He never spoke.
But his mother did.
Anger reverberated through me. I’d nearly forgotten how that woman had yelled at me. She’d charged toward me, her stride and ferocity so reminiscent of one of my childhood bullies I actually shrank back.
“Your mother blamed me.” My voice sounded froggish.
“What?”
“I came to see you the day after you were arrested. You weren’t speaking, and I wasn’t sure you even knew I was there.”
“I don’t remember. But I don’t remember much about those days.”
“She came at me in the hallway. Said I should have seen the evil in you.”
“She was a great actress,” he said. “Sometimes I think she believed her own lies.”
If anyone deserved my kind of justice, it was Martha Beckett. Just like Chris said. A woman looking the other way or putting her own visceral needs before her child is crime enough, but what Martha did was unspeakable. Unimaginable. Unforgivable. The parallels between Justin and Chris’s early lives were painful and sadly ironic.
“She took Kailey.” Justin repeated.
I trained my eyes on him. Vengeance could wait. “Why do you say that? And why are you telling me instead of your brother?”
“I have told him. He thinks I’m reaching, my version of acting out. I thought you might listen because Todd said you felt bad about suspecting me, and I don’t have anyone else to go to. You said you want to help find her…”
“I’m listening,” I said. “Tell me why you think your mother’s involved.”
“When you started following me–at least, I thought it was you–I got really pissed. It was bad enough you believed I was a monster, but to know you were checking up on me just ignited the hate. So I paid my mom a visit.”
“How did you find her?”
“She’s not exactly hiding. I hadn’t seen her since I was twelve or so. She gave me up as a ward to the state, you know. Anyway, the look on her face when she opened the door to find me standing there…she was stunned. And pissed.”
“Chris was right,” I said. “That picture…”
“Yeah. I went right to the unit and drew it.”
“Why did you do all that in the storage unit?”
“I have home visits with a court-appointed therapist.” Justin shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t want her to see that shit.”
I could get behind that. “I suppose you guys still talk about your anger issues? Did you ever tell the therapist? Why didn’t you ever speak out as you got older?”
“You think they’d believe me?” Justin’s bitter laugh rang through the apartment. “Martha runs a popular business. She bakes, for Christ’s sake. Everyone felt sorry for her. Do you know what that’s like, to see the person responsible for all the shittiness in your life make herself the victim?”
If he only knew. At my sister’s funeral, my grieving mother threw herself over the pink casket, asking how Lily could do this to her. I walked outside and dry heaved.
“So you suffered in silence.”
“Todd knows. He’s been pushing me to tell the truth, expose her for what she is. But I kept thinking the damage was done. And it was my fault, in a way. I should have made my friend go home. I knew better.” He dragged his hands through his short hair, digging his fingers into his scalp until they turned white.
“Spoken like a person who’s been expertly manipulated his whole life. So you sought her out because you thought I was following you?”
“Yeah. It was like being thrown to the dogs all over again. And I wasn’t going to take it.” He glared past me, eyes hazy. Probably caught in the memory of his own injustice.
I tried not to let the idea that I’d somehow set all of this in motion take over. Chris had been the one following him. And this had to stop being about me. “What did Martha do when you showed up?”
“I hoped she’d have a heart attack. But she just glared like a constipated bulldog.” He sneered. “I thought she wouldn’t seem like such a giant, but she’s still bigger than me.”
“She let you inside.”
“She had no reason to be afraid.”
Apparently aging had done nothing to weaken Martha’s confidence. Then again, she’d managed to keep Justin silent without speaking to him for years. Truly impressive to maintain control with no contact. My own mother would be jealous.
“What did you tell her?”
“That I was through with her messing up my life. Told her I’d been given a second chance, and I was going to make the best of it. She laughed.” Justin’s teeth dug into his lower lip until he drew blood. “And I said to laugh while she could, because I was going to tell the world what she did. Even if no one but my brother believed me, at least the truth would be out there. And she wouldn’t be able to pity trip her way through. No one would look at her the same again.”
“You woke the sleeping beast,” I said. “You think she took Kailey to discredit you before you could say anything?”
He nodded.
I crossed my legs and then remembered my robe. “It’s possible, but that’s a big stretch. If she did those things and got away with them, I’m not sure she’d believe your threat. She’s been in power for so long, she may have assumed you were all talk.”
Justin was already shaking his head before I finished my sentence. “My mother drove by my place two days before Kailey disappeared. Kailey and those two older girls who ignore her most of the time were hanging out front while I was painting. The older ones wanted to see my drawings. I told them no, to get home. I had my box of pencils sitting on the porch railing and knocked them off.” He banged his fist to his forehead hard enough it had to hurt. “She saw Kailey pick them up and hand them to me with this big, shy smile on her face. That’s when I saw the red car slow down.”
“You’re absolutely sure it was Martha?”
“She smiled and waved. Kailey disappeared the next day.”
I wanted to bang my own head against the coffee table. “And you’ve told Todd all of this?”
“Yes, but he’s been on my ass about my obsession with her. He thinks my going to her was a mistake. That I let her get in my head again. Thinks I imagined it. He said he’d check into her whereabouts, but he’s already got a good suspect.”
“Chris Hale. Speaking of which, why did you have newspaper articles on the Lancaster killings?”