Page 6 of Guilty Mothers

She reached Kim and paused.

‘Take just three seconds to make eye contact with the judges, smile brightly and exit stage left,’ she said, turning and swishing the ballgown behind her.

The officers looked Kim’s way for guidance, but she shook her head, telling them to do nothing. Katie was cuffed in a room full of officers and was going nowhere. Kim wanted to see how this played out and was busy looking for signs of deception.

Katie sashayed to the far end of the corridor and turned again. This time her smile was childlike, hopeful.

‘Did I win? Was I perfect?’

Kim tried not to let the shock register on her face.

‘Katie, do you understand where you are?’ she asked.

Instantly the light in her eyes vanished. She looked down at herself and a small cry of surprise sounded from her lips. She looked around at all the faces staring at her. Her expression contorted in horror.

‘No, no, no, no, no,’ she cried as she started to claw at the fabric of the dress. Sequins flew and seams ripped as she fought to get the material away from her skin as though it was scalding her. In the process, she’d exposed most of the upper half of her body, including a flesh-coloured bra that was now in disarray and very revealing.

Kim rushed to her side and pulled the dress back around her, shielding her from view with her own body.

‘Somebody, get me some clothes,’ she shouted over her shoulder. ‘And the rest of you piss off.’

‘On it, marm,’ one of the voices called back as Katie leaned against the wall and slid to the ground.

Kim followed her down and kept her covered.

‘What have I done?’ Katie whispered against her arm.

Kim met her gaze, but the woman’s eyes had returned to staring mode.

‘Someone buzz the on-call doc,’ Kim instructed. The only emotion resting on Katie’s face was despair, and Kim needed no further convincing.

This woman was not putting on an act.

FIVE

‘Okay, I didn’t have that on my bingo card,’ Stacey said, once the boss had left the room after updating them.

Kim was now on her way back to the crime scene, having left strict instructions to be informed once the doctor had examined Katie Hawne.

‘I mean, surely there’s got to be something wrong to kill your own mother,’ Penn said, sitting back in his seat. He let out a long breath as his eyes glazed over for just a few seconds. He and his brother, Jasper, had been forced to face the loss of their mother not so long ago, and Stacey knew the woman had been very much loved by both her sons.

‘There are many examples going way back,’ Stacey offered. ‘Cleopatra the third of Egypt was assassinated in 101BCby order of her son. In 2005, an eighteen-year-old girl in Memphis stabbed her mom fifty times. Not everybody had the cookie-cutter childhood with a warm and nurturing mother.’

‘But even so,’ he said, bringing himself back into the room. ‘Didn’t Freud have a lot to say on the subject?’

‘He was mother obsessed though, wasn’t he?’ Stacey asked.

‘I think he believed in a pre-Oedipal phase existence which determines mother/daughter relationships, made up of ambivalent feelings between love and hate from the girl to her mother, which mostly culminates in hatred.’

‘Okay, Wikipenn, translated that means?’

‘He’s kind of saying that there’s a period of time before the Oedipus complex, between the ages of three to five, when attachment to the mother predominates in both sexes. It’s also generally felt that two major contributors to difficult relationships between mother and daughter are jealousy and expectation.’

‘Isn’t there a new term called “mother-blaming”?’ Stacey asked, remembering something she’d read recently. ‘Where every problem is blamed on something the mother did or didn’t do during childhood?’

Penn shrugged. ‘Not sure we’re the right folks to be talking about this, Stace.’

Yeah, Stacey was with him on that one. She knew Penn had been close to his mother and that they’d shared a special bond through their devotion to Jasper. In her own case, there had never been a time in her life when Stacey had not been able to count on her mom. The woman had always represented comfort and safety, with a good measure of honesty. When Stacey made a mistake, her mom had no qualms in calling her out. As she had done when Stacey had finally confided all the events surrounding her ordeal with Terence Birch.

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