“You curried his favor. You built yourself up in his eyes so that he was so in love with you and so fascinated by who you were and what you were doing. He was on fire to do anything for you.”
“I didn’t even know him,” she said.
Just then the gun leveled at her.
“What?” Maggie asked in a super-quiet voice.
Instantly Charlotte realized she’d made a mistake. “I didn’t know him personally,” she said. “I had no correspondence with him.”
“Lies,” she said with a wave of her hand. “All lies.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“I checked your emails. There were several from him. You couldn’t even be bothered to answer. The poor kid was completely awestruck with you, and you wouldn’t even give him the time of day.”
How did that even work in terms of having a relationship if she hadn’t even responded? Didn’t that mean she didn’t have a relationship? But she knew there was no such thing as logic anymore with this woman in front of her. “I don’t remember seeing any emails,” she said. “I even searched to see if there were any.”
“Well, there weren’t,” Maggie said. “I forwarded them to myself and then deleted them forever. There are ways to recover all kinds of stuff, but I made sure you wouldn’t recover these.”
“So I didn’t even find these emails,” she said in disbelief. “But you’re still blaming me for his death?”
“Well, you’re responsible,” the woman said in a very reasonable tone.
It was that tone that scared Charlotte more than anything. The look in Maggie’s eyes and the tone of her voice were such complete opposites that it was obvious Maggie had lost whatever little bit of sanity she had. “I’m sorry that you lost him as a child.”
Maggie’s face twisted with fear. “Just because we were teenagers,” she spat, “everybody else fought us. They took my son away and made it very clear that we were not old enough to raise him.”
“And they gave him to somebody else?” Charlotte asked. She looked at the other men, but they were all sitting frozen, completely motionless. But she wasn’t fooled either. They might not be moving, but their brains were as they tried to figure a way out of this. If all three of them jumped Maggie, they would definitely overpower her. But somebody would get shot in the process. And Charlotte definitely didn’t want any more killings on her hands.
The woman sneered. “They gave him to friends! Family friends who had always wanted to have a child but couldn’t.” Her voice broke again. “I bawled and cried and screamed and went to the police. It was pretty nasty, but the police sided with my parents.”
“How old were you?” Charlotte asked. “Surely they wouldn’t have taken the child from the mother.”
“But I was no longer allowed to stay at home,” Maggie said. “And, if the child is deemed to be better off with an adopted family who would give him more of a life than I could, then everybody was against me.”
“And what about the father?” Charlotte asked.
“He was screaming along with me,” Maggie admitted. “But he was just a teenager, like me. We didn’t have jobs. We hadn’t finished school, and we were a mess. But we really, really wanted our son.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t have family who supported you,” Charlotte said.
“They were embarrassed and horrified that I’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock.”
“Which was also very common in those days,” Charlotte said with a nod. “You might have gotten a different reception at this day and age.”
“Maybe. I made a stink for as long and as hard as I could, until the adopting parents picked up and moved away, and I lost track of them. It broke my heart, and I never forgave my parents.”
“Did you have to kill them though?” Nico asked quietly beside her.
Charlotte looked at him in horror and then back at Maggie. “Please tell me that you didn’t kill your parents.”
“Why not?” she asked. “I was glad to. They killed the most important thing in my life, which was the relationship with my son. They shouldn’t have had any relationship with each other either. The world is a much better place without them. So basically you should be thanking me.”
“What did you do?” Nico asked. “I never did see any reports as to how they died.”
“Accidental asphyxiation,” she said. “Funny how the gas overcame them.”
Charlotte stared at her in shock. “You gassed them?”
“Well, I fixed their tea and knocked them out, then put them in the kitchen and just let the gas run.” She smiled. “It’s really easy to kill somebody, you know.”
“Are they the only ones you killed?”
She shrugged. “It does get easier.”
“And what about your son’s adoptive parents? You didn’t kill them?”
“I really wanted to,” she said. “I really, really wanted to. I saw them with my son several times, and, as much as I hated to admit it, they were really good with him. And he really loved them. And I found that I couldn’t do anything that would hurt my son. I wasn’t allowed to have anything to do with him until he was an adult, and I knew, at that point in time, everything that they had done wrong, I would hear about. And anything they got right, I would also hear about because my son would tell me everything.”
Charlotte couldn’t imagine being eighteen and telling a woman who hadn’t been part of his life since his birth any of that. But maybe Charlotte was wrong. Maybe that was something that adopted kids immediately did when they were found. “Didn’t you have contact with him when he turned eighteen?”
Maggie waved a hand and said, “Yes, I did, and he didn’t know what he was talking about. He was just shocked.”
“You mean, he didn’t want to have a relationship with
