At eleven-thirty Sunday morning, Colin went down to the harbor and sat on a bench on the boardwalk, where he could see every approach to a store called Treasured Things. It was a gift shop that survived off the tourists. In Treasured Things you could buy postcards, lamps made out of seashells, belts made out of seashells, paperweights made out of seashells, seashells made out of chocolate, T-shirts bearing supposedly funny slogans, books about Santa Leona, candles shaped like the famous bell tower of Santa Leona Mission, china plates painted with scenes of Santa Leona, and a wide variety of other useless junk. Roy Borden’s mother worked in the shop five afternoons a week, including Sundays.
Colin was carrying a folded nylon windbreaker. The new tape recorder was concealed in it. Even with the stiff breeze coming in off the ocean, the day was much too warm for a jacket, but Colin didn’t think Mrs. Borden would notice it. After all, there was no reason for her to be suspicious of him.
A lot of people were strolling along the boardwalk, talking and laughing and window-shopping and eating chocolate-covered bananas; and a number of them were good-looking, leggy young girls in shorts and bikinis. Colin forced himself not to stare at them. He didn’t want to be distracted, to miss Helen Borden, and then have to approach her in the busy gift shop.
He spotted her at ten minutes of twelve. She was a thin, birdlike woman. She walked briskly, head up, shoulders back, very businesslike.
He reached into the folded windbreaker and switched on the recorder, then got up and hurried across the wide boardwalk. He intercepted her before she reached Treasured Things.
“Mrs. Borden?”
She stopped abruptly at the sound of her name and turned to him. She was clearly perplexed. She didn’t recognize him.
“We’ve met twice,” he said, “but only for a minute or two each time. I’m Colin Jacobs. Roy’s friend.”
“Oh. Oh yes.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“I’m on my way to work.”
“It’s important.”
She looked at her watch.
“Very, very important,” he said.
She hesitated, glanced at the gift shop.
“It’s about your daughter,” he said.
Her head snapped around.
“It’s about Belinda Jane,” he said.
Helen Borden’s face was well tanned. At the mention of her dead daughter’s name, the tan remained but the blood drained out of the skin beneath it. She looked suddenly old and sick.
“I know how she died,” Colin said.
Mrs. Borden said nothing.
“Roy told me about it,” he lied.
The woman appeared to be frozen. Her eyes were cold.
“We talked for hours about Belinda,” Colin said.
When she spoke her thin lips barely moved. “This is none of your business.”
“Roy made it my business,” Colin said. “I didn’t want to hear about it. But he told me secrets.”
She glared at him.
“Awful secrets,” he said. “About how Belinda died.”
“That’s no secret. I know how she died. I saw. It was… an accident. A horrible accident.”
“Was it? Are you absolutely sure?”
“What are you saying?”
“He told me these secrets, made me swear never to tell anyone. But I can’t keep it in. It’s too awful.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Why he killed her.”
“It was an accident.”
“He’d been planning it for months,” Colin lied.
She suddenly took him by one arm and led him across the boardwalk to an isolated bench by the railing. He was holding the windbreaker in that same arm, and he was afraid that she would discover the tape recorder. She didn’t. They sat side by side with the sea at their backs.
“He told you he murdered her?”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head. “No. It had to be an accident. It had to be. He was only eight years old.”
“I think maybe some kids are born bad,” Colin said. “I mean, you know, not many. Just a few. But every once in a while, you know, you read about it in the papers, about how some young kid committed cold-blooded murder. I think maybe, you know, like one in a hundred thousand is bom twisted. You know? Born evil. And whatever a kid like that does, you can’t blame it on the way he was raised or the things he was taught because, you know, he was bom to be the way he is.”
She stared intently at him as he rambled on, but he wasn’t sure that she heard a word he said. When he finally stopped, she was silent for a while, and then she said, “What does he want from me?”
Colin blinked. “Who?”
“Roy. Why did he put you up to this?”
“He didn‘t,” Colin protested. “Please, don’t tell him I talked to you. Please, Mrs. Borden. If he knew I was here, telling you this, he’d kill me.”
“Belinda’s death was an accident,” she said. But she didn’t sound convinced of that.
“You didn’t always think it was accidental,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“That’s why you beat Roy.”
“I didn’t.”
“He told me.”
“He lied.”
“That’s where he got the scars.”
She was nervous, fidgety.
“It was one year after Belinda died.”
“What did he tell you?” she asked.
“That you beat him because you knew he killed her on purpose.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”
She turned slightly on the bench so that she could look out to sea. “I’d just finished cleaning and waxing the kitchen floor. It was clean as a whistle. Perfect. Absolutely spotless. You could have eaten off that floor. Then he came in with muddy shoes. He was mocking me. He didn’t say a word, but when I saw him walking across that floor in his muddy shoes, I knew he was mocking me. He had killed Belinda, and now he was mocking me, and in some way one thing seemed as bad as the other. I wanted to kill him.”
Colin almost sighed with relief. He hadn’t been sure that Mrs. Borden had put the scars on her son’s back. He had been operating on a hunch, and now that it had proved true, he felt more secure about the rest of his theory.
“I knew he’d killed her on purpose. But they wouldn’t believe me,” she said.
“I know.”
“I always knew it. There was never a time I didn’t know it. He killed his baby sister.” She was talking to herself now, looking out to sea and into the past as well. “When I hit him, I was just trying to make him admit the truth. She deserved that much, didn’t she? She was dead, and she deserved to have her killer punished. But they didn’t believe me.”
Her voice trailed away, and she was silent for so long that Colin finally tried to get her talking again. “Roy laughed about that. He thought it was funny that no one took you seriously.”
She didn’t need much coaxing. “They said I had a nervous breakdown. Sent me away to the county hospital. I had therapy. They called it that. Therapy. As if I was the crazy one. An expensive psychiatrist. He treated me as if I were a child. A foolish man. I was there a long time-until I realized that all I had to do was pretend that I’d been wrong about Roy.”
“You never were wrong.”
She looked at him. “He told you why he killed Belinda?”
“Yeah.”
“What reason did he give?”
Colin shifted uneasily on the bench because he didn’t have an answer to her question, and he didn’t want her to realize that he had engaged her attention with a string of lies. He had been leading her on, trying to get her to say certain things that he wanted to have on the tape. She said some of them, but not all of them. He hoped to keep her confidence until he had everything he needed.
Fortunately, when he hesitated, Mrs. Borden answered the question for him. “It was jealousy, wasn’t it? He was jealous of my little girl because after she was born he knew he’d never really be one of us.”
“Yeah. That’s what he told me,” Colin said, though he wasn’t sure what she meant.
“It was a mistake,” she said. “We never should have adopted him.”
“Adopted?”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“Well … no.”
He’d blown it. She would wonder why Roy had revealed everything else, every ugly secret, but not this. Then she’d realize that Roy hadn’t told him anything about Belinda Jane, that he was lying, that he was playing a bizarre game with her.
But she surprised him. She was so deeply involved in her memories, and so focused on the fact that her son had admitted to premeditated sororicide, that she didn’t have the presence of mind to consider the curious gaps in Colin’s knowledge.
“We wanted a child more than anything in the world,” she said, looking out to sea once more. “A child of our own. But the doctors said we never could. My fault. There were… things wrong with me. Alex, my husband, was terribly upset. Terribly. He had counted so much on a child of his own. But the doctors said it just wasn’t possible. We went to half a dozen doctors, and they all said the same thing. Not remotely possible. Because of me. So I talked him into adoption. My fault again. Entirely my fault. It was the wrong thing to do. We don’t even know who Roy’s real parents were-or what they were. That bothers Alex. What kind of people did Roy come from? What was wrong with them? What flaws and sickness did they pass on to him? It was an awful mistake to take him in. By the time we’d had him a few months, I knew he was wrong for us. He was a good baby, but Alex didn’t take to him. I’d wanted so much for Alex to have his child, but what he wanted was a child with his own blood in its veins. That was quite important to Alex. You can’t imagine how important. An adopted child is different from your flesh, Alex says. He says you can’t ever feel as close to it as you can to your own blood. He says it’s like training a dangerous wild animal from the time it’s a cub and keeping it as a pet; you just never know when it might turn on you because deep down it isn’t at all like what you’ve tried to make it. And so that was another thing I’d done wrong: bringing someone else’s child into our home. A stranger. And he turned on us. I’m always doing something wrong. I’ve failed Alex. All he ever wanted was a child of his own.”
When Colin had been sitting on the bench, waiting for her to show up, he had expected to have trouble getting her to talk. But he had pushed the right button. She wouldn’t shut up. She droned on and on, as if she were an Ancient Mariner robot, a machine with a tale to tell. And it looked to him as if she were also a machine with very little time left; beneath the cool veneer of businesslike efficiency, serious instabilities were generating a lot of inner heat. As he listened to what she said, he also listened for the sound of gears stripping and mainsprings breaking and vacuum tubes popping.
“We’d had Roy two and a half years,” she said, “when I discovered that I was going to have a baby. The doctors were wrong about me. I almost died in labor, and there was no doubt afterward that she would be my first and last, but I did have her. They were wrong. In spite of all their complicated tests and consultations and sky-high fees, every one of them was wrong. She was a miracle child. God meant all along for us to have the impossible, the miracle child, that special blessing, and I was too impatient to wait. I didn’t have faith enough. Not nearly enough. I hate myself for that. I talked Alex into the adoption. Then along came Belinda, the one we were meant to have. I had no faith. So after just five years, she was taken away from us. Roy took her away from us. The child we were never meant to have took away the one that God sent us. You see?”
Colin’s fascination was changing to embarrassment. He didn’t need or want to hear every sordid detail. He looked around self-consciously to see if anyone could overhear, but there was no one near the bench.
She turned away from the sea and stared into his eyes. “Why did you come here, young man? Why did you tell me Roy’s secret?”
He shrugged. “I thought you ought to know.”
“Did you expect me to do something to him?”
“Aren’t you going to?”
“I wish I could,” she said with genuine malice. “But I can‘t, If I start telling them that he killed my little girl, it’ll be like before. They’ll send me away to the county hospital again.”
“Oh.” That was what he had figured even before he spoke to her.
“Nobody will ever believe me when it comes to Roy,” she said. “And who’s going to believe you? I understand from your mother that there’s some problem with drugs.”
“No. That’s not true.”
“Who’s going to believe either of us?”
“No one,” he said.
“What we need is proof.”
“Yeah.”
“Irrefutable proof.”
“Right.”
“Something tangible,” she said. “Maybe … if you could get him to tell you all about it again… about how he killed her on purpose … and maybe have a tape recorder hidden someplace…”
Colin winced at the mention of a recorder. “That’s a thought.”
“There must be a way,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll both think about it.”
“All right.”
“Think about a way to trap him.”
“Okay.”
“And we’ll meet again.”
“We will?”
“Here,” she said. “Tomorrow.”
“But-”
“It’s always been just me against him,” she said, leaning close to Colin. He could feel her breath against his face. And he could smell it, too: spearmint. “But now there’s you,” she said. “Two people know about him now. Together we ought to be able to think of a way to get him. I want to get him. I want everyone to know how he planned to kill my little girl. When they know the truth, how can they expect me to keep him in my house? We’ll send him back where he came from. The neighbors won’t talk. How can they, after they know what he did? I’ll be free of him. I want that more than anything.” Her voice fell to a conspiratorial whisper. “You’ll be my ally, won’t you?”
He had the insane thought that she was going to go through the blood-brother ritual with him.
“Won’t you?” she asked.
“Okay.” But he didn’t intend to meet with her again; she was almost as scary as Roy.
She put her hand on his cheek, and he started to pull away before he realized that she was only being affectionate. Her fingers were cold.
“You’re a good boy,” she said. “You did a good thing-coming to me like this.”
He wished she would take her hand away.
“I’ve always known the truth,” she said, “but what a relief it is to have someone else who knows. You be here tomorrow. Same time.”
Just to get rid of her, he said, “Sure.”
She got up abruptly and walked away, toward Treasured Things.
As Colin watched her go, he thought that she was far more terrifying than any of the monsters he’d feared throughout his childhood and adolescence. Christopher Lee, Peter Gushing, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi-none of them had ever portrayed a character quite as chilling as Helen Borden. She was worse than a ghoul or a vampire, doubly dangerous because she was so well disguised. She looked rather ordinary, even drab, unremarkable in every respect, but inside she was an awful creature. He could still feel where her icy fingers had pressed against his face.
He took the recorder out of the windbreaker and switched it off.
Incredibly, he was ashamed of himself for some of the things he had said about Roy, and for the way he had so eagerly played to her hatred of her son. It was true that Roy was sick; it was also true that he was a killer; but it was not true that he had always been that way. He wasn‘t, as Colin had said, “born evil.” Fundamentally, he was not less of a human being than anyone else. He had not murdered his sister in cold blood, Judging from all the evidence that Colin had seen, Belinda Jane’s death had been an accident. Roy’s sickness had developed in the aftermath of that tragedy.
Depressed, Colin got off the bench and went out to the parking lot. He unchained his bike from the security rack.
He no longer wanted revenge against Roy. He just wanted to put a stop to the violence. He wanted to get the evidence so the proper authorities would believe and act. He was weary.
Although it was pointless to tell them, although they would never understand, Mr. and Mrs. Borden were killers, too. They had turned Roy into one of the living dead.