THE BANDIT QUEEN - Chapter 3 continued

Deakin compressed his lips together and pulled out the owner’s manual for Eden’s car. Then he climbed out of the car, pasted a smile on his face and waited patiently for Eden to join him on the sidewalk. The two young people walked calmly up the walk and rang the doorbell. After a minute or so, Eden rang the bell again and Deakin beat on the door with his fist.
A tired, middle-aged woman opened the front door a few inches and spoke through the screen door. “If you’re selling something, you might as well leave right now. I don’t have any money. If you’re from some church, I’m not interested in that either. So, just go away.”
She backed her face out of the crack. Eden whipped open the screen door and stuck her foot between the door and the frame. Deakin moved out of the shadow and leaned his shoulder against the door. The woman frantically tried to shut the door but Deakin shoved it open. They stepped inside the little house and Eden shut the door behind them. The woman ran toward the back of the house but Deakin grabbed her arm and swung her onto the sagging couch against the wall of the living room.
“What do you want? I already told you I didn’t have any money. Please, don’t hurt me.”
Eden jerked her head toward the rest of the house and Deakin obediently searched the other rooms. Eden stared down at the scared woman and waited for Deakin to return. She didn’t know what to do next. Deakin stepped into the room and joined Eden in her scrutiny of the pathetic figure lying on the couch. He reached out and pulled the woman into a sitting position. Then he knelt in front of her and asked,
“Is Jeannette Murphy your real name or is Barbara Williams your real name?”
The woman stopped crying immediately and said in a flat, toneless voice, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My name is Jeannette Murphy. I’ve never heard of that other name.”
She stared defiantly at Eden and dropped her eyes to the ground. She didn’t look at Deakin at all. He angrily shook her arms and then grabbed her hair to make her look at his face. Her eyes widened in recognition and then dropped to her lap.
Deakin tried to peer up into her face from his position on the carpet but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Please, please, you have to tell me why. I have to know. What happened to my parents? Why did you pretend to be my mother? What was so important about me? You have to tell me. YOU HAVE TO TELL ME!”
Deakin grabbed her arms again and shook her as he yelled into her face. She didn’t even try to resist. She only mumbled over and over, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
Deakin pulled his hand back and swung at her face but Eden pulled him away from the woman. She crouched down next to him and held him while he cried out years of frustration and uncertainty. Then she leaned him against a chair and stepped directly in front of the woman. Her hair had fallen into her face and she continued mumbling but Eden could see that she was faking her collapse. Eden stomped down on the woman’s foot as hard as she could and was rewarded with a truly venomous glance through the hanks of hair. The woman tried to cry in pain but she’d waited too long for believability.
“Now, listen to me, you bitch. Deakin is still too nice a person to hurt you, even after what’s been done to him, but I’m not. You’re part of some scheme to screw up this boy’s life and I want to know what you know. I want names and reasons. Do you understand what I’m saying? I am prepared to hurt you to find out what I want to know.”
She lifted up the woman’s hair to get a glance at her face but the woman leapt off the couch and reached out with both hands to shove Eden out of her way. Eden dropped under the woman’s arms and leaned in toward her. The woman tripped over Eden’s right knee and Eden slammed her elbow into the woman’s back, connecting with her kidney. The woman screamed and fell back on the couch, writhing in pain. Deakin leaned forward with interest and then, following the Eden’s pointing finger, he turned on the television set and cranked up the volume.
Eden grabbed the front of the woman’s shirt and pulled her face up to her own. “Now, do you understand what I mean? I can hurt you a lot worse than that so you’d better start talking right now.”
The woman’s eyes glanced furtively around the room and then flitted across Eden’s face. What she saw in the girl’s face did not comfort her in any way. To stave off the inevitable, she began to cry. Eden pushed her back on the couch and held her with a hand on her chest.
“When I swing my fist, turn the television up louder.”
Deakin nodded even though Eden couldn’t see him but the woman saw him and words poured out of her mouth. “Why are you letting her hurt me? I was nice to you when you lived with us. I was nicer to you than I was to the other boys. I talked them into letting us all live together like a family. I thought it was the best to find out what they wanted to know but you didn’t know anything. They wouldn’t believe me and that’s why we lived together for so long. They kept hoping you’d remember but you never did. You never did. I even made them give you the computer. I thought that might jog your memory but it didn’t because there was nothing for you to remember. You were just too little to remember anything. They even hypnotized you but that didn’t work either. That was before I came into the picture so I wasn’t there but I heard all you remembered were a few little kid rhymes, like the spider one. I’m sorry I wasn’t your real mother but I tried. I tried to be good to you but I just really didn’t know how. Please don’t let her hit me.”
“Who hypnotized Deakin? Was it someone here in Dallas or was it back in California? Exactly what rhymes did he remember?”
“All I know is that it was before me. I don’t think it was here in Dallas. We were already moved into the house and I got the feeling they brought the boy directly to us as soon as they hit town. He was a crying little mess but he got over it real quick. That part about the rhymes was just something I heard but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I know for sure about the spider one ‘cos he would say it to his stuffed animals. I just thought he’d heard two others before because he learned them right off when I read them to him. The one about birds in a pie and the counting one, you know, buckle my shoe and the rest of them. That’s all I know.”
Eden stared in disgust at the writhing woman and spoke over her shoulder to Deakin. “Does any of this make sense to you? What else can we ask her?”
Deakin appeared soundlessly at her shoulder and spoke in her ear. “Ask her who ‘they’ are and what they were hoping to find out.”
“Tell us about the person in charge. Everything you can remember, okay?” Eden knelt in front of the couch and leaned her elbow in the woman’s stomach. “Now, Jeannette, it’s time to answer our questions. Who paid you to be Deakin’s mother? Who paid for the whole fake life? Tell us now and we’ll go away and never come back.”
Jeannette Murphy glared at Eden and said through clenched teeth. “Sure, sure. I tell you all my secrets and you’ll go away. Then, what happens to me later? I’ll lose my job, I’ll lose my house, and I’ll probably lose my life. Go ahead, hurt me. I’ll still be alive when you’re through. That’s a lot better than telling you everything and then getting killed. Why don’t you just go away and leave me alone? I know very little about this boy. Someone, somewhere, thought he might remember something from his life with his real parents but he didn’t. We tried everything we could but there was nothing there. That’s why we never called the police when he disappeared. We all just moved away and nobody cared. Go away. I can’t help you.”
She turned her head away from the two people in her living room and hid her face in a pillow. Eden backed away from the couch and joined Deakin at the front window. They peered out at the traffic on the small street and saw nothing to scare them. Without a word they grabbed their props and left the house. Jeannette Murphy stayed on the couch for twenty or thirty minutes before she dragged herself to the bathroom to clean up. Then she approached the phone with trepidation. She stood with her hand on the phone for several minutes until she quickly made her decision. She dialed a long distance number from memory and waited impatiently for it to be answered.
“Jeannette Murphy, here in Dallas, Texas. I’ve just had a visit from the boy Deakin and a friend of his. I don’t know how he tracked me down but they asked a lot of questions. I didn’t tell them anything.”
Then she carefully put the phone down on the table and wandered around her small house. She touched the furniture in the living room as she passed by it. She picked up each small china figurine on the mantel and then set it carefully back into place. She opened her closet door and ran her hands along the clothes hanging from the rod. She slowly opened each cabinet door in the kitchen and looked at all the dishes stored inside. As she returned to the living room from her circuit of the house, she realized she’d just said goodbye to everything she owned. Tears poured down her cheeks but she did nothing to stop them. They dripped onto her clothes and spotted the carpet as she walked. She leaned in the doorway as her body shook with sobs. After a time, she pushed herself to move and walked in the bathroom to wash her face. She knew someone would come to see her soon and they also wouldn’t believe she didn’t know anything about Deakin and his friend. Best case scenario – they would let her pack up her stuff and move to some other town. Worst case scenario – they would kill her and bury her body somewhere it would never be found. She hoped for the best, but her experience with life had led her to expect the worst.