made out of seashells, seashells made out of chocolate, T-shirts bearing supposedly funny slogans, books about Santa Leona, candles shaped like the famous bell tower of Santa Leona Mission, china plates painted with scenes of Santa Leona, and a wide variety of other useless junk. Roy Borden’s mother worked in the shop five afternoons a week, including Sundays.
Colin was carrying a folded nylon windbreaker. The new tape recorder was concealed in it. Even with the stiff breeze coming in off the ocean, the day was much too warm for a jacket, but Colin didn’t think Mrs. Borden would notice it. After all, there was no reason for her to be suspicious of him.
A lot of people were strolling along the boardwalk, talking and laughing and window-shopping and eating chocolate-covered bananas; and a number of them were good-looking, leggy young girls in shorts and bikinis. Colin forced himself not to stare at them. He didn’t want to be distracted, to miss Helen Borden, and then have to approach her in the busy gift shop.
He spotted her at ten minutes of twelve. She was a thin, birdlike woman. She walked briskly, head up, shoulders back, very businesslike.
He reached into the folded windbreaker and switched on the recorder, then got up and hurried across the wide boardwalk. He intercepted her before she reached Treasured Things.
“Mrs. Borden?”
She stopped abruptly at the sound of her name and turned to him. She was clearly perplexed. She didn’t recognize him.
“We’ve met twice,” he said, “but only for a minute or two each time. I’m Colin Jacobs. Roy’s friend.”
“Oh. Oh yes.”
“I have to talk to you.”
“I’m on my way to work.”
“It’s important.”
She looked at her watch.
“Very, very important,” he said.
She hesitated, glanced at the gift shop.
“It’s about your daughter,” he said.
Her head snapped around.
“It’s about Belinda Jane,” he said.
Helen Borden’s face was well tanned. At the mention of her dead daughter’s name, the tan remained but the blood drained out of the skin beneath it. She looked suddenly old and sick.
“I know how she died,” Colin said.
Mrs. Borden said nothing.
“Roy told me about it,” he lied.
The woman appeared to be frozen. Her eyes were cold.
“We talked for hours about Belinda,” Colin said.
When she spoke her thin lips barely moved. “This is none of your business.”
“Roy made it my business,” Colin said. “I didn’t want to hear about it. But he told me secrets.”
She glared at him.
“Awful secrets,” he said. “About how Belinda died.”
“That’s no secret. I know how she died. I
“Was it? Are you absolutely sure?”
“What are you saying?”
“He told me these secrets, made me swear never to tell anyone. But I can’t keep it in. It’s too awful.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Why he killed her.”
“It was an accident.”
“He’d been planning it for months,” Colin lied.
She suddenly took him by one arm and led him across the boardwalk to an isolated bench by the railing. He was holding the windbreaker in that same arm, and he was afraid that she would discover the tape recorder. She didn’t. They sat side by side with the sea at their backs.
“He told you he murdered her?”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head. “No. It had to be an accident. It had to be. He was only eight years old.”
“I think maybe some kids are born bad,” Colin said. “I mean, you know, not many. Just a few. But every once in a while, you know, you read about it in the papers, about how some young kid committed cold-blooded murder. I think maybe, you know, like one in a hundred thousand is bom twisted. You know? Born evil. And whatever a kid like that does, you can’t blame it on the way he was raised or the things he was taught because, you know, he was bom to be the way he is.”
She stared intently at him as he rambled on, but he wasn’t sure that she heard a word he said. When he finally stopped, she was silent for a while, and then she said, “What does he want from me?”
Colin blinked. “Who?”
“Roy. Why did he put you up to this?”
“He didn‘t,” Colin protested. “Please, don’t tell him I talked to you. Please, Mrs. Borden. If he knew I was here, telling you this, he’d kill me.”
“Belinda’s death was an accident,” she said. But she didn’t sound convinced of that.
“You didn’t always think it was accidental,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“That’s why you beat Roy.”
“I didn’t.”
“He told me.”
“He lied.”
“That’s where he got the scars.”
She was nervous, fidgety.
“It was one year after Belinda died.”
“What did he tell you?” she asked.
“That you beat him because you knew he killed her on purpose.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”
She turned slightly on the bench so that she could look out to sea. “I’d just finished cleaning and waxing the kitchen floor. It was clean as a whistle. Perfect. Absolutely spotless. You could have eaten off that floor. Then he came in with muddy shoes. He was mocking me. He didn’t say a word, but when I saw him walking across that floor in his muddy shoes, I knew he was mocking me. He had killed Belinda, and now he was mocking me, and in some way one thing seemed as bad as the other. I wanted to kill him.”
Colin almost sighed with relief. He hadn’t been sure that Mrs. Borden had put the scars on her son’s back. He had been operating on a hunch, and now that it had proved true, he felt more secure about the rest of his theory.
“I knew he’d killed her on purpose. But they wouldn’t believe me,” she said.
“I know.”
“I always knew it. There was never a time I didn’t know it. He killed his baby sister.” She was talking to herself now, looking out to sea and into the past as well. “When I hit him, I was just trying to make him admit the truth. She deserved that much, didn’t she? She was dead, and she deserved to have her killer punished. But they didn’t believe me.”
Her voice trailed away, and she was silent for so long that Colin finally tried to get her talking again. “Roy laughed about that. He thought it was funny that no one took you seriously.”
She didn’t need much coaxing. “They said I had a nervous breakdown. Sent me away to the county hospital. I had therapy. They called it that. Therapy. As if I was the crazy one. An expensive psychiatrist. He treated me as if I were a child. A foolish man. I was there a long time-until I realized that all I had to do was pretend that I’d been
