Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn #6)- Lisa Regan Page 0,111
are you? Kind of like Tessa.”
Josie let the barb go. “Well, I know you moved around a lot. Camped out in the woods. Stayed at the mill for a while. Also smart—to keep moving.”
He didn’t respond.
“Gideon, what did you do with Lucy?”
He still didn’t speak.
Josie said, “Lucy doesn’t deserve this, you know. She’s innocent.”
“So was I,” he muttered.
“Yes, you were. It must have been very traumatic, what happened to you.”
“You don’t know a goddamn thing,” he growled.
“I know that you were taken from your father when you were nine years old. I also know that your father told child services that Tessa had given you all those scars. But if that were the case, they wouldn’t have taken you from him, would they?”
He didn’t answer. A vein bulged in his forehead.
“They never reunited you with your father. All those years and they never sent you back to him. We can’t view your foster care file, but I’m guessing the reason they never sent you home is because you were violent, just like your father.”
“I’m nothing like that bastard,” he snarled.
“Well, you’re not like your mother,” Josie replied. “She’s gentle and kind.”
He pushed back in his chair a little, the legs screeching on the tile. “That’s an act.”
“How do you know?” Josie asked.
“Because any bitch who leaves her kid with someone like my father can’t be kind. Any bitch who abandons her child without so much as batting an eyelash is not gentle or kind. Whatever she said to you to make you believe that, it’s all an act.”
Josie softened her tone. “How old were you when she left? Do you even remember her?”
“I remember enough. I remember waking up hungry and looking for her, and she was gone. My father told me she left us. He said she didn’t love us. That she was a liar, and she wasn’t coming back for me. I waited. She never came back.”
“Your father put those marks on you,” Josie said. “Didn’t he?”
He dropped his gaze for a moment. “She might as well have. If she’d stayed, he would have taken his anger out on her, not me. She could have taken me with her, but she didn’t. She went on to live some great, fancy life and left me there in that shithole where my father beat the piss out of me for no other reason than I reminded him of her. The welts, cigarette burns, yeah, those are from him.”
“The others came from foster care?” Josie guessed.
“I wouldn’t have been in foster care if it weren’t for her. You don’t get it, do you? I was tortured. My life was an unending hell. All because she left me behind. She left me there, and she never looked back.”
Josie thought of one of the conversations she had had with Amy when she had told Amy she didn’t care if Amy had killed someone, she just wanted the truth. Amy had said, that’s not the worst thing. Because she had abandoned her own child, effectively sentencing him to a fate worse than death.
“How did you find her?” Josie asked. “How did you even know she was alive?”
“My dad. A couple of years ago, I went back to see him. I stayed away from him mostly after I aged out, but I found out from someone who used to live around us that he was sick, real sick. So I went to see him. The fight had gone out of him by then. He was harmless.”
“He had cancer,” Josie said.
“Bone cancer. Yeah. Real painful. He was at the end. I knew he was going to die, so I asked him about her. I wanted a picture. Something. We never had any photos of her or anything. It was almost like she had never existed, but I knew. I knew she had been there.”
“Did he have any answers for you?” Josie prompted.
“The same ones he always had. She was a lying bitch who abandoned us. I asked him if she was still alive. He said for years he thought she was dead, that’s why he never went looking for her. But then he was at chemo one day, flipping through magazines and stuff, and there was this newsletter thing one of those pharmacy reps had left, all about Quarmark and their groundbreaking new cancer drugs. He was interested in it because they had just released a drug that was supposed to stop bone cancer from spreading or stop bone mets or something. Stop cancer from metastasizing