When She Was Bad (18 page)

‘She’ll only meet with us once. That’s her condition for seeing us,’ said Ed when he first told me the news, his eyes sliding off me as if I was coated in oil. ‘Which is a pity because the rules only allow two visitors at a time. I had to make an executive decision whether to bring you or Dan Oppenheimer, but I decided that as Laurie is the one who has a chance of a new life, I would bring you with me today. It’s a great opportunity for us to contextualize Laurie.’

Contextualize her. That’s how he talked.

‘Plus she also said she didn’t want to discuss the boy.’ He threw this in like an afterthought, rather than the deciding factor I guessed it to be.

The correctional facility where Noelle was being kept pending her trial was fifty kilometres out of town to the north. Once again we drove there in Ed’s station wagon but this time he’d removed the child seats from the back. I wanted to ask him if it was to make sure he reacted to Laurie’s mother as a psychiatrist rather than a parent, but it seemed too personal.

The facility itself was small. There was too much interest in the case for the authorities to risk placing her in a larger jail where corruption was rife and staff morale rock bottom, and where gangs of inmates ran the show. Women who harm children don’t fare well in jail. Women who harm their own children fare the worst.

After we’d gone through the two sets of gates, topped by whorls of barbed wire, we pulled up in front of a low-slung modern building.

‘Looks like the kind of place you go to get your accounts audited,’ I said.

We were thoroughly searched before we were allowed inside. Ed became agitated when the uniformed woman searching his briefcase pulled out his notebook and, holding it by the spine, shook it to see if anything was hidden within the pages.

‘Be careful with that. There’s important research in there.’

After crossing a small, empty yard, a guard unlocked a door which led to a cramped vestibule and a second locked door, which only opened once the one behind us had clanked shut.

Finally we were shown into a room containing a beige Formica table and four hard wooden chairs. The bars on the window blocked the sun so the room felt gloomy and noticeably cooler than the corridor we’d just exited. Ed and I arranged ourselves behind the table facing the door and sat side by side in silence. I’d been so taken up with the technicalities of getting into the prison that I hadn’t given much thought to meeting Noelle herself, but now I found myself growing nervous.

Ed retrieved his notebook from his briefcase and dug around in the side pocket for a pen. He opened the book on a fresh page and wrote
Noelle Egan, interview
with today’s date. Then he underlined it. Twice. We waited some more. By the time the door swung open, I had a dent in the pad of my right thumb where I’d been digging the nail of my index finger into the skin.

First through the door was a heavyset female guard wearing a uniform in different shades of brown polyester that made a loud rustling noise when she moved. Attached to her left wrist, so tight the skin was puckered around it, was a metal handcuff. And attached to that handcuff was Noelle Egan.

She bore no resemblance to the wedding photos the newspapers kept printing, nor to the framed family portrait I’d seen in her living room.

This Noelle had lank hair that hung from her head in solid clumps. Free from the heavy foundation she favoured in the photos, her skin was sallow, even yellowish in places, and lumpy with spots. Her eyebrows, which in the pictures were plucked into two perfect thin arches, had grown out and were sparse and unkempt, like randomly planted seedlings. The prissy blouse had been replaced by a regulation khaki prison uniform. Only the eyes, with that lifeless stare, were the same.

Ed stood up to shake hands before remembering her right hand was shackled. He froze, half standing, half sitting.

‘Hi, Noelle. I’m Professor Ed Kowalsky and this is my assistant, Dr Anne Cater.’

I bristled at that word, assistant, though I had no illusions I was anything but the junior partner in this team.

‘As I’m sure has been explained to you, the state has charged me with evaluating the um . . .
well-being
of your children so we can get a better understanding of the impact recent events have had on them, and work out the best long-term plan of action. As Dr Cater and I have been working with Laurie, we’re going to focus on her and we’re hoping you’ll be able to . . .’

I stiffened in my chair. Please let him not be about to say ‘contextualize’ again.

‘. . . fill in some of the background details so we can get a fuller picture.’

Noelle, who’d been uncuffed from her guard, sat down in one of the chairs opposite us and stared at him from her strange dead-fish eyes.

‘There’s no need to
evaluate
Laurie,’ she said eventually. Her voice was as flat as her gaze. ‘She’s a perfectly normal little girl. She’s never wanted for anything.’

Ed swallowed loudly enough for all of us to hear it.

‘Yeah, well, that’s why we’re here. So that you can give us a bit more insight into her life at home and we can start to build up a picture that will help us work out how best to support her. I’m sure we all want what’s best for her.’

The guard, who was standing against the wall behind Noelle, made a
pff
noise, blowing air out through her mouth as if to demonstrate what she thought about this statement. This was a woman who’d kept her son in a cage. Did we seriously believe she had her children’s best interests at heart?

‘You don’t need to worry about Laurie, she’s perfectly happy. She’s always perfectly happy.’

I looked for any signs that she was aware how glib that sounded, any fidgeting of the fingers, or darting of the eyes in one direction or another. But there was nothing. Noelle Egan genuinely seemed to believe happiness was possible, even inevitable, despite what Laurie had experienced in the basement of her house every day of her life.

‘Can you give us some kind of background, Noelle, to how this all started – the circumstances in which your son, David, was born?’

Noelle recoiled as if she’d been hit when Ed said the word ‘David’, and I wondered if this was his intention. For the three weeks after a pizza delivery boy who turned up at the Egan house by mistake heard a noise and pressed his eye up to the vent in the brick at ground level, the authorities had struggled to find a name for the child known to his family only as ‘It’ or ‘Thing’. Noelle and Peter Egan refused to give up the name, perhaps because by naming him, they’d be humanizing him. And it seemed it had never occurred to Laurie that the Thing in the basement might have a name. Only when police investigators finally discovered Noelle’s maiden name and traced her back to Missouri, where she’d first lived with Peter, did they find the birth records listing the boy as David Egan.

‘I didn’t have a very happy childhood.’ I blinked at Noelle in surprise when she started speaking. I’d expected her to be unforthcoming, even though I knew she’d been told that helping us could improve her chances of avoiding a life sentence for child abuse and neglect, particularly if she could claim to have been unduly influenced or coerced by her husband.

‘My parents were religious and very strict. I always knew my father had wanted a son, and he made it clear I was nothing but a disappointment to him right from the start. He avoided me wherever possible, and my mom, who was totally dominated by him, resented me for making him upset with her. So I got the message real early that I was a screw-up. It didn’t help that something went wrong when she had me and she had to have a hysterectomy so they couldn’t have any more children. By the time I was ten I was cutting myself with anything I could get my hands on. At twelve I was drinking hard liquor. By fifteen I was sleeping with guys twice my age. Sometimes two at a time. Until I met Peter, my life was one long spiral downwards.’

The words gushed out of her as if she’d been swilling them around her mouth just waiting for a chance to release them. She glanced up and caught my eye and I got the impression she was checking to see how they’d gone down. We’d already heard that Noelle’s legal team was going to claim she was mentally unfit to stand trial, that her upbringing and early experiences had left her too damaged to be accountable. Maybe I should have felt sorry for her. There was no doubt life had dealt her a cruddy hand, but I couldn’t get past the idea that she was practising for her eventual appearance in front of a jury. There was a throbbing in my temple when I thought of that cage in the basement and the possibility of Noelle avoiding jail, but I reminded myself she wasn’t my concern. It wasn’t her we were charged with assessing.

‘Peter saved me from all that. I met him at a bar. I was out of it. I’d taken something – pills or I don’t know what. He sat next to me and started talking to me and I thought he was just one more guy hitting on me, but he wasn’t. He was from Missouri. He worked for a huge firm of accountants there who had clients in lots of different states, so he was in town doing a huge audit.’

‘We get it. He was a big shot. You fell for him.’ I wanted to hear her say it. I wanted her to take responsibility for this at least, for allowing Peter Egan into her life.

‘I was overwhelmed by him.’ When Noelle turned her empty eyes to mine, I had to repress a shudder. It was like looking into a void.

‘He was the first and only man to tell me I was beautiful – or he said I could be beautiful if I took more pride in myself. He bought me nice clothes, make-up, gave me money to get my hair done. No one had ever paid that kind of attention to me before. I was totally under his spell. He loved that I was so vulnerable. So alone.’

Now Noelle turned her flat gaze to Ed and it occurred to me that she wanted him to feel sorry for her, for what she’d been through. The woman had so little self-awareness, it was textbook narcissism. And of course as soon as that thought occurred to me I wondered if that was exactly what this was, an off-the-peg personality disorder she’d researched and adopted to help her case.

‘And you were in love with him?’ asked Ed.

‘I was besotted with him. I thought he would save me from the hell my life had become. Isn’t that a psychological condition? Don’t you call that “rescue fantasy”?’

You had to hand it to her, she’d done her research.

‘So you moved to Missouri with him. Got married. Tell me about Laurie’s birth,’ I asked, wanting to move the conversation on.

‘Oh my. Never has there been a child more wanted or loved. I doted on her. We both did. Right from the first scan where I knew she was a girl I bought her clothes – the cutest, tiniest little pink dresses – and we both talked to her. Through my belly, ya know? Pete used to call us his two princesses – “how’ve my two princesses been today?” he’d ask when he came home. And for a few weeks after she was born, he was just euphoric. He couldn’t do enough for me. Back then.’

She looked up. To make sure we’d registered that past tense.

‘So what changed?’ asked Ed, conscious of the time, the disapproving guard, the allotted visiting hour ticking away.

‘He changed. Pete. He started getting jealous. I’d never made a secret of my past, but suddenly it was like he was obsessed by it. He kept thinking men were hitting on me, or I was hitting on them. Asking me, again and again. How many men did I sleep with? What did I do with them? You know, sex stuff. Now I know he was sick. All the time I knew him, he’d been on meds. I didn’t know it then but it turns out it’s seriously heavy shit. Then, around the time Laurie was born, he stopped taking them.’

‘Allegedly,’ I said, at the exact same moment that Ed said, ‘That’s all for his defence team to prove.’

Noelle’s expression didn’t change.

‘How old was Laurie when you became pregnant again?’

‘Around seven months. I was so happy when I got the positive test. I thought it would make Pete forget about all that other stuff, but instead it made him worse. He was convinced the baby wasn’t his. Kept asking me again and again who I’d slept with, whose baby it was. He said the dates didn’t match up. But they did!’

‘So the baby
was
his?’ I asked.

For the first time there was a flicker of something in Noelle’s black eyes when she looked at me. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

‘Of course. But he wouldn’t believe it. He kept on and on about the baby. He said everything about it was different to Laurie – from the shape of my bump to the way I was so sick every morning. When we had the first scan, he didn’t say a word. On the way home he told me the baby was clearly deformed. He said it was obvious from the screen but the radiographer just didn’t want to tell me. That’s how he was for the whole pregnancy, telling me the baby wasn’t his, that it was mutant, that it was bad.’

‘Bad?’ Ed asked.

‘You know. Evil. And the thing was, I felt it too – that there was something wrong with the baby, some kind of bad energy. Do you know what I’m talking about?’ She looked at both of us, as if waiting for us to agree with her.

‘How was it when the baby was born?’ I asked her. ‘Did Peter come round?’

Noelle shook her head.

‘Not at all. He wouldn’t even stay with me in the hospital. Said he couldn’t bear to see what was going to come out of me. I was so scared on my own in that hospital room. The labour was horrible. Thirty-six hours of agony. It was like my body was fighting against the baby, trying to stop it being born. When it came out, I couldn’t look at it for fear that it would be some sort of monster.’

‘He,’ I said before I could stop myself. ‘Your baby was a he, Noelle. And he was perfect, wasn’t he, despite what Peter had said?’

‘Some deformities aren’t on the outside,’ she said. ‘The doctor gave the baby to me and tried to get me to put it on the breast but I didn’t want it near me. I used a bottle, right from the start. Not like with Laurie. I breastfed her until she was three years old.’

Looking around as if she wanted a medal or something.

‘How was Peter’s relationship with the baby when you got home?’

‘Relationship? I don’t think you could call it that. Pete couldn’t bear the noise it made. It was a real demanding baby. All the time screaming. Crying. No matter what I did. He made it sleep downstairs in the utility room so we couldn’t hear it.’