Undone (56 page)

Or maybe not.

Pauline asked, “How far along are you?”

“Ten weeks,” Faith answered. She had been at the edge of insanity when the paramedics arrived at Tom Coldfield’s house. All she could think about was her baby, whether or not it was still safe. Even when the heartbeat had bleated through the fetal monitor, Faith had kept sobbing, begging the EMTs to take her to the hospital. She’d been sure they were all wrong, that something horrible had happened. Oddly, the only person who could convince her otherwise had been Sara Linton.

On the plus side, her whole family knew she was pregnant now, thanks to the Grady nurses referring to Faith as “that hysterical pregnant cop” her entire stay in the ER.

Pauline stroked back Felix’s hair. “I got so fat with him. It was disgusting.”

“It’s hard,” Faith admitted. “It’s worth it, though.”

“I guess.” She brushed her torn lips across her son’s head. “He’s the only thing good about me.”

Faith had often said the same thing about Jeremy, but now, facing Pauline McGhee, she saw how lucky she was. Faith had her mother, who loved her despite all Faith’s faults. She had Zeke, even though he had moved to Germany to get away from her. She had Will, and for better or worse, she had Amanda. Pauline had no one — just a small boy who desperately needed her.

Pauline said, “When I had Felix, it just made me think about her. Judith. How could she hate me so much?” She looked up at Faith, expecting an answer.

Faith said, “I don’t know. I can’t imagine how anyone could hate their own child. Any child, for that matter.”

“Well, some kids just suck, but your own kid…”

Pauline went quiet again for such a long time that Faith wondered if they were back to square one again.

Will spoke. “We need to know why all of this happened, Pauline. I need to know.”

She was staring back out the window, her son held close to her heart. She spoke so quietly that Faith had to strain to hear her. “My uncle raped me.”

Faith and Will were both silent, giving the woman space.

Pauline confided, “I was three years old, then four, then coming up on five. I finally told my grandmother what was happening. I thought the bitch would save me, but she turned it around like I was some devil child.” Her lips twisted into a bitter sneer. “My mother believed them, not me. She chose their side. Like always.”

“What happened?”

“We moved away. We always moved when things got bad. Dad put in for a transfer at work, we sold the house and then we started all over again. Different town, different school, same fucking situation.”

Will asked, “When did it get bad with Tom?”

“I was fifteen.” Pauline shrugged again. “I had this friend, Alexandra McGhee — that’s where I got my name when I changed it. We lived in Oregon a couple of years before we moved to Ann Arbor. That’s when it really started with Tom — when everything got bad.” Her tone had turned to a dull narrative, as if she was giving a secondhand account of something mundane instead of revealing the most horrible moments of her life. “He was obsessed with me. Like, in love with me. He followed me around, and he would smell my clothes and try to touch my hair and…”

Faith tried to hide her revulsion, but her stomach clenched at the image the other woman’s words conjured.

Pauline said, “Suddenly, Alex stopped coming over. We were best friends. I wanted to know if I’d said something, or done something…” Her voice trailed off. “Tom was hurting her. I don’t know how. At least, I didn’t know how in the beginning. I found out soon enough.”

“What happened?”

“She was writing this sentence everywhere, over and over again. On her books, on the soles of her shoes, the back of her hand.”

“I will not deny myself,”
Will guessed.

Pauline nodded. “It was this exercise one of the doctors at the hospital gave me. I was supposed to write the sentence, convince myself not to binge and purge, like writing a fucking sentence a zillion times would make it all go away.”

“Did you know Tom was making Alex write the sentence?”

“She looked like me,” Pauline admitted. “That’s why he liked her so much. She was like a substitution for me — same color hair, same height, about the same weight but she looked fatter than me.”

The same qualities that had drawn Tom to all the recent victims: Each woman resembled his sister.

Pauline told them, “I asked him about it — why he was making her write the sentence. I mean, I was pissed, right? And I yelled at him, and he just hit me. Not like a slap, but with his fist. And when I fell down, he started beating me.”

Faith asked, “What happened next?”

Pauline stared blankly out the window, as if she was alone in the room. “Alex and I were in the woods. We’d go out there to smoke after school. The day that Tom beat me, I met her out there. At first, she wouldn’t say anything, but then she just broke down. She finally told me that Tom had been taking her into the basement of our house and doing things to her. Bad things.” She closed her eyes. “Alex took it because Tom said if she didn’t, then he would start doing it to me. She was protecting me.”

She opened her eyes, staring at Faith with startling intensity. “Alex and I were talking about what to do. I told her it was useless telling my parents, that nothing would happen. So we decided to go to the police. There was this cop I knew. Only, I guess Tom followed us out to the woods. He was always watching us. He had this baby monitor he hid in my room. He’d listen to us and…” She shrugged, and Faith could very easily guess what Tom had been doing while he listened to his sister and her friend.

Pauline continued, “Anyway, Tom found us in the woods. He hit me in the back of the head with a rock. I don’t know what he did to Alex. I didn’t see her for a while. I think he was working on her, trying to break her. That was the hardest part. Was she dead? Was he beating her? Torturing her? Or maybe he’d let her go and she was keeping quiet because she was scared of him.” She swallowed. “But it wasn’t that.”

“What was it?”

“He was keeping her in the basement again. Priming her for the really bad stuff.”

“No one heard her down there?”

Pauline shook her head. “Dad was gone, and Mom…” She shook her head again. Faith was convinced they would never really know what Judith Coldfield knew about her son’s sadistic ways.

Pauline said, “I don’t know how long it lasted, but eventually, Alex ended up in the same place as me.”

“Where was that?”

“In the ground,” she said. “It was dark. We were blindfolded. He put cotton in our ears, but we could still hear each other. We were tied up. Still… we knew we were underground. There’s a taste, right? Kind of like a wet, dirty taste you get in your mouth. He had dug a cave. It must’ve taken him weeks. He always liked to plan everything, to control every last detail.”

“Was Tom with you all the time after that?”

“Not at first. I guess he was still working on his alibi. He just left us there for a few days — tied up so we couldn’t move, couldn’t see, could barely hear anything. We screamed at first, but…” She shook her head as if she could shake away the memory. “He brought us water, but not food. I guess a week went by. I was okay — I’d gone longer than that without eating. But Alex… She broke. She kept crying all the time, begging me to do something to help her. Then Tom would come, and I’d beg him to shut her up, to make it so I didn’t have to hear it.” She went silent again, lost in her memories. “And then one day, something changed. He started in on us.”

“What did he do?”

“At first, he just talked. He was all into biblical stuff — stuff my mom put into his head about him being a replacement for Judas, who betrayed Jesus. She was always saying how I had betrayed her, how she had carried me to be a good kid, but I had turned out rotten, made her family hate her with my lies.”

Faith quoted the last sentence she had heard Tom Coldfield utter. “‘O Absalom, I am risen.’”

Pauline shivered, as if the words cut through her. “It’s from the Bible. Ammon raped his own sister, and once he was finished with her, he cast her out for being a whore.” Her torn lips twisted into an approximation of a smile. “Absalom was Ammon’s brother. He killed him for raping their sister.” She gave a harsh laugh. “Too bad I didn’t have another brother.”

“Was Tom always obsessed with religion?”

“Not a regular religion. Not normal. He twisted the Bible to suit whatever he wanted to do. That’s why he was keeping me and Alex underground — so that we would have a chance to be reborn like Jesus.” She looked up at Faith. “Crazy shit, right? He’d go on and on for hours, telling us how bad we were, talking about how he was going to redeem us. He’d touch me sometimes, but I couldn’t see…” She shuddered again, her whole body shaking from the movement. Felix stirred, and she soothed him back to sleep.

Faith felt her heart thumping in her chest. She could remember her own struggle with Tom, the feel of his hot breath in her ear when he told her, “Fight.”

Will asked, “What did Tom do when he stopped talking to you and Alex?”

“What do you think he did?” she asked sarcastically. “He didn’t know what he was doing, but he knew he liked it when he hurt us.” She swallowed, her eyes tearing up. “It was our first time — both of us. We were only fifteen. Girls didn’t sleep around a lot back then. We weren’t angels or anything, but we weren’t sluts, either.”

“Did he do anything else?”

“He starved us. Not like what he did to the other women, but bad enough.”

“The trash bags?”

She gave a single, tight nod. “We were trash to him. Nothing but trash.”

Tom had said as much in the hallway. “No one missed you or Alex when Tom had you in the cave?”

“They thought we’d run away. Girls do that, right? They just run away from home, and if the parents are there to say that the girls are bad, that they lie all the time and can’t be trusted, then it’s no big deal, right?” She didn’t let them answer. “I bet Tom got a hard-on lying to the cops, telling them he had no idea where we’d gone.”

“How old was Tom when this happened?”

“Three years younger than me.”

“Twelve,” Will said.

“No,” Pauline corrected. “He hadn’t had his birthday yet. He was only eleven when it happened. He turned twelve a month later. Mom had a party. The little freak was out on bail and she threw him a birthday party.”

“How did you get out of the cave?”

“He let us go. He said he was going to kill us if we told anybody, but Alex told her parents anyway, and they believed her.” She snorted a laugh. “Fuck me if they didn’t believe her.”

“What happened to Tom?”

“He was arrested. The cops called, and Mom took him down to the station. They didn’t come get him. They didn’t arrest him. They just called us on the phone and said to bring him in.” She paused, collecting herself. “Tom had a psychiatric evaluation. There was all this talk about sending him to adult prison, but he was only a kid, and the shrinks were screaming about how he needed help. Tom could look younger when he wanted — much younger than he actually was. Bewildered, like he didn’t understand why people were saying all these bad things about him.”

“What did the courts decide to do?”

“He was diagnosed with something. I don’t know. Psychopath, probably.”

“We have his Air Force records. Did you know he served?” Pauline shook her head, and Faith told her, “Six years. He was discharged in lieu of court-martial.”

“What does that mean?”

“Reading between the lines, I’d guess that the Air Force didn’t want — or know how — to treat his disorder, so they offered him an honorable discharge and he took it.” Tom Coldfield’s military records were written in the sort of departmental code only a seasoned vet could decipher. As a doctor, Faith’s brother, Zeke, had recognized all the clues. The nail in the coffin was the fact that Tom had never been called back up to serve in Iraq, even at the height of the war when enlistment standards had dropped to almost nonexistent.

Will asked, “What happened to Tom in Oregon?”

Pauline answered in a measured tone. “He was supposed to go to the state hospital, but Mom talked to the judge, said we had family back east and could we take him back and put him in a hospital there so he could be close to the people who cared about him. The judge said okay. I guess they were glad to get rid of us. Sort of like with the Air Force, huh? Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Did your mother get him treatment?”

“Hell no,” she laughed. “My mother did the same fucking thing all over again. She said Alex and I were lying, that we had run away and gotten hurt by a stranger, and we were trying to pin it on Tom because we hated him and we wanted people to feel sorry for us.”

Faith felt a sickness in the pit of her stomach, wondering how a mother could be so blind to her child’s suffering.

Will asked, “Is that when you changed your names to Coldfield?”

“We changed them to Seward after what happened to Tom. It wasn’t easy. There were bank accounts, all sorts of documents to file to make it legal. My dad started asking questions. He wasn’t happy, because he actually had to
do
something, you know? Go down to the courthouse, get copies of birth certificates, fill out forms. They were in the middle of changing everything over to Seward when I ran away. I guess when they left Michigan, they changed it back to Coldfield. It’s not like Oregon was following up on Tom. As far as they were concerned, his case was closed.”

“Did you ever hear from Alex McGhee?”

“She killed herself.” Pauline’s voice was so cold it sent a chill down Faith’s spine. “I guess she couldn’t take it. Some women are like that.”

Will asked, “You’re sure your father didn’t know what was going on?”

“He didn’t want to know,” Pauline answered. But there was no way of confirming this. Henry Coldfield had suffered a massive coronary upon hearing what had happened to his wife and son. He’d died en route to the hospital.

Will kept pressing. “Your father never noticed—”

“He traveled all the time. He was gone for weeks, sometimes as much as a whole month. And even when he was home, he was never really home. He was flying his plane or off hunting or playing golf or just doing whatever the hell he wanted to do.” Pauline’s tone got angrier with every word. “They had this kind of bargain, you know? She kept the house running, didn’t ask him to help with anything, and he got to do whatever he wanted so long as he handed over his paycheck and didn’t ask any questions. Nice life, huh?”