The Boy by Tami Hoag

Author:Tami Hoag
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-12-30T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

She killed a baby.”

Hands tightening on the steering wheel, Annie relived the sickening jolt of shock that had gone through her when Nick greeted her with those words in Remy’s driveway. More than an hour had passed since the revelation. They had tucked their son into bed and then sat down to share a rushed dinner of takeout Thai food in Remy’s kitchen, Nick filling in the details of the story.

Dixon had dug into Genevieve’s juvenile record and then cross-referenced with news stories from the archives of the local Houma papers. The murder of an infant by her teenaged mother had been big news thirteen years past.

The story was one that happened more than most people would ever care to know. A scared teenager had managed to keep her pregnancy a secret until it was too late. She had given birth in the bathroom at school. Two months later, the baby was dead. SIDS, the teenage mother had claimed. The coroner had disagreed strongly enough that charges had been brought. Fourteen-year-old Genevieve Gauthier had been found guilty of suffocating her baby daughter and had been sentenced to eighteen months in the Terrebonne Parish Juvenile Justice Complex on a negotiated plea of involuntary manslaughter.

Fourteen. Just two years older than Lola Troiano and Nora Florette, little girls who traded friendship bracelets and kept stuffed animals on their beds. Barely old enough to know how babies were made, Genevieve had given birth to one alone in a bathroom stall.

Everything about her story was upsetting and tragic. Annie had a thousand questions she wanted answered. Who was the father? What had been the circumstances of the conception? Was the pregnancy the result of kids having consensual sex, or had this been a case of rape or incest?

“It doesn’t matter,” Nick said. “It matters that a baby is dead. She killed her own child.”

“You can’t say it doesn’t matter,” Annie argued, twirling her fork in her pad thai. “The truth goes to motive.”

“Don’t talk like a defense attorney to me, ’Toinette,” he said, stabbing a shrimp. “It doesn’t matter to me why she did it. It matters to me that she did it. Now I know she’s capable of murdering a child. She has murdered a child—her own child. And here we are, investigating the murder of another child—a child with problems, a child she’s already told us wouldn’t settle down last night while she was fighting a migraine headache. She’s alone, she’s frustrated, she’s poor—”

“Is there a higher rate of stabbing deaths among children of the poor that I don’t know about?” Annie asked snappishly. “’Cause this would be the first stabbing-because-I’m-poor case I’ve come across. But you’ve been at this longer than me, so—”

“Her circumstances had her backed into a corner,” Nick pressed on. “There she is, stuck living in that shit hole, wanting a better life. What’s holding her back? That child. She can’t get ahead, she can’t get away, she can’t get a man. She blames the boy. She’s already crossed the line to kill once.

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