Gwen narrowed her gaze at the pretty young woman. An affair had been a stupid suggestion. “I see,” she said.
“I just have a feeling that he’s trying to deal with all that happened to him, and if I knew, I’d be able to help.”
Gwen looked over at the file. She tapped her opalescent nails on a yellowed folder she retrieved from a side table. “What little I have is right here.”
“Do you keep copies of all the stories you write?” Olivia asked.
“Heavens, no.” Gwen swished the spoon in her drink to loosen the frozen concoction. “Only what interests me.”
There was something foreboding in the former reporter’s tone and Olivia let it pass.
Gwen opened the file and spread out the clippings on the coffee table. The one on top was the one that Michael had kept.
“I wasn’t sure there would be more than the one I’d already seen,” Olivia said. “May I?”
Gwen watched as Olivia reached over to pick up the brittle stack of clippings, preserved like pressed flowers from a young girl’s high school prom.
“Help yourself. I won an award for it. Best spot news reporting for a paper in the lowest circulation category for a daily newspaper.” She laughed. “Back then, I was young enough to think that you could actually get somewhere in the newspaper business by being good. What a joke.”
There were three stories, including the original with the photo. The headline on the second clipping almost made her gasp.
Disney Kids Mother Found?
The article detailed how the body of a woman had been found in a bed at the Igloo Motel on Katella Avenue, across from Disneyland three days after Michael and Sarah Barton had been found.
“I don’t understand,” Olivia said, looking up. “What happened to her?”
A gray tabby cat jumped up into Gwen’s lap and she inattentively started to rub its ears.
“Good question. We really don’t know. There were no signs of a struggle. There were no obvious injuries. Mrs. Barton checked into the motel the same day that her children spent in the park. She paid for three days in advance. It was all she had.”
She added: “I thought the headline was irresponsible. We didn’t have any connection to those kids.”
“What do you mean?”
“All we had was a dead woman. No drugs. No signs of violence. Nothing.”
“Who was she?”
“Who knows? Coroner said she’d given birth to at least one child, maybe more. We never made an ID. No one could. She paid cash. No purse. Nothing. They even showed a ghoulishly retouched photo of her to the boy, but he couldn’t ID her. “
Olivia looked back down at the clipping. “Then how did she die?”
“The coroner thought she died, possibly, of asphyxiation. But I think that a mom who would dump her kids like that maybe died of a broken heart.”
Olivia could scarcely think of any reason a mother would leave her children. She would die before she allowed anything to happen to her own. She knew most mothers were that way. But not, it seemed, Michael’s mother.
“What has your husband told you about his family?” Gwen asked.
Olivia felt a flush of defensiveness take over and it bothered her. It was as if the reporter was challenging her on the closeness of her marriage to Michael. She wanted to tell her that she knew everything, but it would be an obvious lie. The reason she’d come up to Acton was for a little piece of the puzzle, a piece that would bring her closer to the man that she loved.
“I don’t mean to be too nosy,” Gwen asked. “Would you mind answering some questions?”
“That seems a little formal. You’re not writing about it, are you?”
“Of course not. Like I said, I’ve often wondered about your husband and his sister.”
“Well, all right. What?”
“The articles don’t mention it, but your husband had been severely abused by someone.”
“What do you mean, abused?”
“Physically abused.” Gwen searched the younger woman’s eyes. “Does he still have the scars on his neck? The little round scars?”
Olivia remembered seeing them for the first time. She was helping him put on a tie for one of those awful company events he had to attend. It was an almost perfect row of small circular scars faded by time, hidden by the hair that brushed against his collar.
“What’s this?” She asked, looking at his face in the bathroom mirror.
“What?”
“These little scars, Michael. What are they?”
His eyes narrowed and he shrugged off her inquiry. “Oh, those. Bad acne. I scarred up pretty bad on my shoulders and neck.”
“Scars from acne, he told me,” Olivia said.
Gwen set her cat on the floor. She touched her fingertips to her lips and shook her head.
“That wasn’t from acne. When we found Michael and Sarah, the back of his neck was still scabbed over from the burns. On his hand, too. Some, it seemed, had been quite recent.”
Olivia felt her stomach turn. Burns? What she was hearing was beyond anything she could have imagined. Who burns the neck of a child? “You mean, burned flesh?”
The horror of the scenario welled up in the younger woman’s pretty dark eyes.
“Yes,” Gwen said, softly, taking her questioning tone down a notch. “It appeared to us at the time that he’d been tortured with a cigarette.”
Olivia couldn’t help herself. She started to cry. She had come there for answers, not tears.
“Look, I know this is hard.” Gwen got up and looked for a tissue, finally producing one from a crocheted dispenser on the top of her upright piano. “I’d never seen a kid more abused than Michael. He could barely speak to us. He was a wreck. His sister, being younger, I always felt had a fighting chance. But Michael….” her voice trailed off as she handed the tissue box to Olivia. “Well, you brought me a bit of a miracle today.”
Olivia dabbed at her eyes and looked up. “What? How?”
“He has you. He has two children. That poor little boy has survived and made a life out of what was handed to him. I thought for sure he’d end up in the system somewhere, giving back to the world what his mother and father had given to him.”
As she got up to leave, she offered to take the empty glass into the kitchen, but Gwen waved her away.
“Ms. Trexler,” Olivia said her voice slightly tentative, “one thing I don’t understand.”
The older woman put her hand on Olivia’s shoulder, a gesture meant to comfort. It did.
“What is it?” she asked.
“How come you thought the woman was Michael and Sarah’s mother? Did she look like them?”
Gwen looked out the window. “It wasn’t that. I mean, there was a resemblance, of course. It was something else.”
“What?”
She returned her gaze to Olivia. Her face was full of regret and worry. “She’d been burned on the nape of her neck, too. She had a row of scars that matched what he had.”
Olivia felt sick. It was more than the smoothie and she knew it. “Sarah?” she asked.
“None there. Her neck was flawless.”
“Was the body ever claimed?”
“No. Buried in the Potters Field behind the old Westward Ho Motel and Casino.”
“Thank you,” she said, tears running down her face. Olivia turned on her heels and headed for the door.
“I wish I could have been more helpful. I’m glad to know your husband’s a survivor. The girl, too?”
“We don’t know,” Olivia said, without looking back. “They’ve lost touch.”
As Olivia drove, the Etta James song that had been playing in the background when she called Gwen Trexler kicked back into her consciousness.