Page 27 of Bad Mother

“Not enough caffeine, that’s for sure. There better be coffee ready. My point is, I needed to clear my mind, and classical genius does that. Anyway”—she waved her hand around—“the criminalists found a bag under the floorboards of the upstairs closet, and one of them is on the way here now so we can check it out.”

“You’re kidding,” Ingrid said, her chair squeaking as she sat back. “What’s the point of toying with us? Because I doubt it’s to get caught.”

“We don’t know.” They went through some of the theories they’d discussed the night before, and Ingrid agreed with their assessment.

“Have you had a chance to call Armando Vitucci and find out if he’s available to give us a profile?” Kat asked, obviously referencing the profiler she’d mentioned.

“Yes,” Ingrid said. “I have a call in to him.”

Kat’s phone buzzed, and she looked down at it, standing. “The criminalist is here. I’ll go meet her at the front if you want to clear the meeting room table.”

Sienna and Ingrid walked the short distance to the meeting room, where they’d begun hanging the photos, copies of the writings, and other case-specific items on the board at the front of the room. Sienna had just finished tidying up the random notepads and pens on the table when Kat walked in with a pretty young woman who had been at the first crime scene Sienna had gone to, holding an evidence bag.

“Sienna, remember Gina Marr? She’s the criminalist who found the items under the floorboard.”

“Yes, of course. Hi.” They all greeted one another, and Gina stepped forward, placed the evidence bag on the table, and removed a box of gloves from the bag on her shoulder. They all donned the blue plastic hand coverings, and then Gina opened the evidence bag and removed what appeared to be a gold metal bee and a bottle with a piece of paper rolled up inside.

“He left us quite a bit at that house,” Sienna noted. Their reward for unraveling the various clues that led to the address?

Gina tipped the bottle and used her fingertips to unroll the note. It was filled with the same concise writing. The story continued.

Kat used her phone to take a photograph of the letter, and then Gina rolled it up again and placed it and the bottle back into evidence bags. Sienna and Ingrid studied the metal bee, turning it this way and that, but it seemed like nothing more than exactly what it appeared to be.A jewelry charm?Sienna took several pictures of it from different angles, finishing just as Kat returned with three printouts of the note.

Gina packed everything back up and headed off to the lab to add the items to the list of things to be processed. Sienna wasn’t overly hopeful.

Then Sienna, Ingrid, and Kat sat down to read.

Mother had always been a force to be reckoned with, but after she put my father to permanent rest, she was unstoppable. It’s like killing him had breathed an extra breath of life into her. She didn’t allow anyone to cross her, nor did she allow anyone to cross me. If something unfortunatedidhappen, she’d make it right, my mother. “Don’t give them an inch, Danny Boy,” she’d say, a glint in her sky-blue eyes. “Not one single inch.” And then she’d smile, a melodic hum on her lips as she went back to baking a cake or folding our laundry or some other task that went toward creating a beautiful, comfortable home for us to enjoy.

Things were calm for a while, and for the first time, I felt the happiness of a life without the constant anxiety of knowing Father would walk back through our door any day. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake up and hear a car stop in frontof our house and panic that it was Father. The whole bloody scene in the kitchen with Mother hadn’t really happened at all. No, he was just away like he’d been so often, and now he was back.

Back to hit me and kick me and tell me how useless I was.

It didn’t matter where I tried to hide.

He’dfindme.

Somehow, Mother would always sense when this happened, and she would come to my room, shushing me softly and leading me back to bed, where she tucked me in again, stroking my hair as she sang to me softly until I fell back to sleep.

After a while, I began to trust that Father couldn’t hurt me anymore—couldn’t hurt anyone or anything—and I no longer listened for him to return.

Mother and I played games in the evening, her complimenting my new level of skill at Texas Hold’m, Omaha, and 2-7 Triple Draw. I’d also improved at checkers, chess, and Monopoly. Now that half of my mind wasn’t focused on my fear of Father, I was able to turn my intellect toward cards, and it made quite the difference.

Unfortunately, that peaceful time would be short lived. My next tormenter showed up in a pair of khakis, a button-down shirt, and a sports coat with patches on the elbows. He appeared harmless enough upon first meeting, but I soon found out that first impressions can be deceiving.

Very, very deceiving.

I often come up with names for people before I’ve learned their actual one, and I had immediately calledhim Mr.Patches because of his attire, and in my head, the name stuck.

Mr.Patches.

He needed a lot of patches when Mother got through with him.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

Let me backtrack.

Mr.Patches was my science teacher.

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