GROUT SHOOK HIS head, noting that Larkin was doing the same. Both were in disbelief at what Betty Malroy was saying.
“I thought my son was dead,” she kept saying. “I thought Martin was dead.”
“Tell me again, more slowly,” Grout said. “So Officer Larkin here can get it all.”
Betty Malroy nodded, her body wilting, a defeated woman. A woman at the end of her days, with nothing left to do but confess it all.
“I was a nurse living in squalor for all my good labor and godly deeds, and that rich, filthy Marianne King, she came to me and waved fistfuls of dirty dollars in my face, believing me, a good woman, a godly woman, would succumb to it, give up her God for money, and cut a child from her, a child six months in the womb.
“I couldn’t have a child. But, I had prayed to God to provide. And God blessed me. You understand that, don’t you? So. Instead of performing the evil she asked of me, I put her under and induced her, and I delivered my child. It was not easy. Mind you. It took great will. And. That baby. My son. He was not . . . ready. Things back then. Well. They were. Crude. I was forced to use forceps. And suction. I’m afraid it did not do him well. Physically. And believe me, it took a great deal to keep him alive. It took a lot of praying. A lot of God’s graces. And I believed then that if God wanted him to live, he would live. And he did. God granted me a miracle. Or so I thought.”
Grout rubbed his eyes and pinched his nose, disbelieving.
“Shortly after,” Betty Malroy said, “I moved and got a nursing job in another hospital, and I faked a pregnancy.
“I kept him alive. As my own. Nursed and nurtured him, as any loving mother would. And he blossomed. Oh he did.
“I made one mistake. I was young. I was bitter and strident and so self-righteous. I told him.”
“You told him what?” Grout said, prodding her, even though he’d heard her spew it earlier, in a state of foaming lunacy. He needed to hear it again, when she was calm, if in a stupor.
“I told him about her. His so-called biological mother. It was a mistake. He was too young to process it. Just thirteen, but so slight. So frail. Ill. He’s always been ill. Weak. He was thirteen, but anyone who saw him would say he was an eight-year-old, a sickly eight-year-old at that. And. Well. He couldn’t take it. And when I read in the papers about her on Halloween. I knew.”
“So you sent him away soon after?” Larkin said, writing in his notepad.
“January of ’87, yes, as soon as I was able. He had some surgeries over there. Hormonal therapy, to help him grow. Plastic surgery to try to . . . correct his face. I—”
“You blackmailed Renstrom,” Grout said, his anger steeping. His disgust.
“That was business. Renstrom sinned. Had an affair. The way you put it, it lacks decorum.”
“Decorum?” Grout said, his voice echoing in the bared room. “You talk to me about decorum—”
“I’m a mother. Renstrom helped me and my son. But then. Well. Martin became . . . He was unmanageable. And we lost touch after he turned eighteen.”
“Until?” Grout said.
“Until he wrote me from London, saying he’d become someone else, someone better than me, and if I did not give him—” She adjusted the chopsticks in her hair, patted the bun gently with the pads of her fingers “An allowance. A significant allowance to be deposited regularly into an account. He would make it known. What I’d done.”
“And you could not have that?” Grout said, stepping toward her.
The old woman shrunk into herself.
“No. I could not have that.”
“You’re coming with us,” Grout said. He grabbed the woman’s pale, fragile wrist and squeezed.
“Sir,” Larkin said. “We have no jurisdiction, you can’t just—”
“Get up,” Grout ordered. He yanked on her arm, and her face fell slack, her eyes grew wide and vacant, and she began to shake.
“Sir,” Larkin said.
The old woman slumped in the chair, eyes rolling up in her head.
“Sir,” Larkin said, “something’s wrong with her.”
Spittle frothed out of the old woman’s mouth, and a single thread of blood trickled from her nostril.