While Verna accompanies Anna to the hospital and Roderick gives everyone their assignments, I step inside to speak with Keith and Christopher.
They are in the parlor with Derinda, who is comforting them.
Keith is half propped on the left arm of the couch, one foot on the floor. Christopher is sitting on that end, next to and below Keith. Derinda is next to Christopher.
They are sniffling as tears trickle down their cheeks, and not only are they sitting as closely as they can to each other but they are continually touching and patting each other in comfort and consolation.
I’m surprised the FDLE crime scene unit has allowed them to remain in the house, but they have—with the understanding that they will confine themselves to the parlor and dining room.
“I guess some part of me was holding out hope that she could still be alive and we’d get her back somehow,” Christopher says. “It’s so much more real now—in a way it never was before. And for your little Taylor to be taken too. It’s . . . just . . . too, too . . .”
“I just wanted to say again how sorry I am that this has happened,” Keith says. “For it to happen once in our home is . . . But twice . . . I just feel so bad.”
Derinda says, “It just doesn’t seem real. I just can’t . . . It’s like my mind can’t accept that . . . ”
“And to find Magdalene . . .” Christopher says. “Our sweet little Magdalene . . . dead . . . and displayed like that. Who would . . .”
“I’m gonna do my best to find out who did that to Magdalene, who has Taylor,” I say. “What they’ve done, they’ve done to both of our families. And I need to ask you a few more questions to clear a few things up.”
Keith nods. “Of course,” he says. “Anything.”
“During our search of the house for Taylor . . . we noticed quite a lot of sleeping medication—both prescription and over the counter and for adults and children.”
“I’ve always had a hard time sleeping,” Keith says. “I used to take sleep aids all the time. Didn’t help much, but enough to keep me trying. I don’t take them like I used to. I bet if you look at the expiration dates of most of them they’ll be expired. We need to throw them out, but . . . there’s a lot we need to do that we haven’t gotten to yet.”
“He doesn’t use it like he used to,” Christopher repeats. “Made him do some strange and dangerous things in his sleep.”
“After what happened to Magdalene,” Keith says, “I just gave up on sleeping.”
“Ironically, that’s when so many friends and family brought us the stuff,” Christopher says. “That’s why there’s so much of it—and why most of it isn’t opened.”
“Some of it is for adults and some for children,” I say. “Did Magdalene ever take it?”
I ask did Magdalene ever take it instead of did you ever give it to her to try to sound less accusatory.
“Not often, no,” Keith says. “Maybe a few times during the entire time we had her. And that was mostly at the very beginning when she was getting adjusted. You’ll notice the packages say ‘for children and sensitive adults.’ Those were mostly for Christopher. He’s very sensitive to medication.”
“Did Magdalene take any the night of the solstice party when she went missing?”
Christopher shrugs and says, “I don’t think so.”
“No,” Keith says. “She absolutely did not.” He looks at Christopher. “She definitely didn’t. How can you shrug and say you don’t think so?”
“I’m just not sure anymore,” he says.
“Well, I am.”
“Okay,” Christopher says, as if trying to placate a bully.
“Sorry,” Keith says, “but one of the crazy conspiracy theories out there is that we overdosed her on sleeping pills and this whole thing is just some elaborate cover-up. It just . . . it’s gets me going. Sorry.”
I decide to leave this for now, but plan to come back to it at some point.
“I noticed you have a lot of pet paraphernalia,” I say, “but I haven’t seen any pets since we’ve been here.”
“We tried both a dog and a cat for Magdalene,” Keith says, “but neither worked out.”
“The poor dear was allergic,” Derinda says.
“She wasn’t the only one,” Christopher says. “Between the two of us I bet we went through a gallon of Benadryl while we had the damned things.”
“See,” Keith says, “when you say things like that some people might take you literally and then it gives credence to the theory that we somehow overdosed our daughter.”
“I just meant—I wasn’t being literal.”
Keith looks at me. “But we also have all the supplies because some of our guests bring pets. They’re not allowed in the rooms, so we offer a sort of kennel service for them—take care of them overnight while their owners are staying with us.”
“Did Magdalene still have a pet on the night she was abducted?”
“I still can’t believe she’s dead,” Christopher says, more tears streaming down his cheeks. “And left like that in her bed for us to find.”
Keith and Derinda both pat him and wipe at tears of their own.
Keith says, “She still had the cat. Sammy Socks. We finally got rid of him shortly after . . . after . . . that night. Henrique took him.”
“Which made no sense,” Christopher says. “He left right after that for three months. He had to know he was about to leave when he took him from us.”
I start to ask them about the freezer, but decide to wait to see what FDLE finds out about it first. Instead I broach a subject that I had wanted to talk to Keith and Christopher about individually, but now don’t feel like I have the time to wait to get them alone.
“I’ve got one more question for you guys,” I say, “and it may be sensitive, but my goal is only to find Magdalene’s killer and get my daughter back. The clock is ticking, which means I have to be more blunt than I usually am, use less finesse.”
Keith sits up a little straighter and seems to set himself in a defensive posture, as Christopher’s eyebrows raise up.
“In Christopher’s journal . . .” I say.
“I knew this was going to happen,” Keith says. “I told him he was insane for including his journal in the casebook. They’re just his ramblings, his random, vulnerable thoughts.”
“Go ahead,” Christopher says to me. “I stand by everything I wrote.”
“You talk about guilt you feel about what y’all did that night,” I say. “You speak about being so angry at Keith you weren’t sure you could ever forgive him or be intimate with him again.”
“For fuck sake,” Keith says. “You put that in your journal?”
“I need to know why that is,” I say. “What that’s about. What happened that night that made you feel that way? What do you feel so guilty about? Because several of the others who were there that night noticed you guys disappeared for a while during the party.”
Christopher looks up at Keith.
Keith shakes his head and says, “We really gonna do this?”
“We have to.”
“Unbelievable,” he says, still shaking his head and looking disgusted, then to his mother, “Could you excuse us for a few minutes?”
“No,” Christopher says. “No one has been more supportive of us than Derinda. I feel almost like she’s as much my mother as yours. I want her to stay. She should know too.”
“Still looking for ways to punish me, aren’t you?” Keith says. “Okay. Fine. Take your best shot. Humiliate and embarrass me in front of my own mother. I don’t care anymore.”
“Let me start by saying I have forgiven Keith,” Christopher says. “Despite what he might think. And I’m not doing this to embarrass or punish anyone. I just want absolutely everything out in the open.”
He reaches up and takes Keith’s hand.
“At a certain point in our relationship,” Christopher says, “the point where everything else was as good as it could be—our family, our child, our business, our relationships with friends and family, which is probably not a coincidence—Keith decided he was a little bored with our sex life.”
“Not bored,” Keith says. “That’s unfair.”
“A little restless,” Christopher says. “Anyway. He decided he wanted to shake things up a little bit. And this was about the time—probably also not a coincidence—that Scott Haskew expressed interest in having a threesome with us.”
Keith is looking down now, avoiding eye contact with anyone, especially his mother.
“So after a while of talking and planning and negotiating and preparing . . .” Christopher says, “we decided that the three of us would sneak into the escape room during the party for a quick little ménage à trois. That’s it. That’s what we did—that’s where we were when our friends said we disappeared. And I wasn’t mad at Keith for wanting to try it. I was mad at him and I feel guilty about the fact that while our little girl was being kidnapped and murdered, instead of protecting her we were in the escape room with our dicks out acting like much younger men with much less responsibility.”
Keith begins to cry. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “If my . . . If I’m the reason she was killed.”
His mom hops up from the couch and goes around to him and hugs him.
“You are most certainly not the reason she was—that what happened to her happened. Neither of you are.”
“We’d never done anything like that before,” Keith says.
“Oh, my sweet boy,” she says. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Y’all are not the reason she was taken. What you were doing didn’t cause her to get taken. Do you think if you had been in the parlor with the rest of them instead of the escape room that she wouldn’t have been taken?”
“She’s right,” I say. “What happened to Magdalene isn’t your fault and it isn’t because of what you were doing. And if you don’t believe me, just think about this . . . Anna and I weren’t in the escape room. Anna was in the bed with Taylor and I was in the parlor where you would’ve been if you hadn’t gone into the escape room that night, and Taylor was still taken.”
That seems to make an impact. A slight change in posture and their breathing seems to convey a certain lifting of the burden of guilt they had been carrying since that night.
All three of them are crying now, but the tears seem more like tears of release, of loss and sorrow instead of guilt and recrimination.
For a few moments no one says anything. I wait as the three of them cry and comfort and console one another, thinking about Anna, Taylor, and Johanna and longing for us all to be together as I do.
Eventually, Derinda says, “Can we ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Who could do such a thing?” she asks. “What kind of criminal could take a precious little girl like Magdalene, kill her, then put her back in her bed like that for the boys to find? What kind of sick psychopath does something so cruel and unusual and dramatic like that?”
“A very specific one,” I say. “With some unique fantasies and proclivities that will actually help us catch him. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.”