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Sterling drags a hand down his face, messing with the scruff on his cheeks. I study that way too long, and almost miss the look he shoots towards Gabe. “We’d like to chat with you about Victim 6, but I’d also like to talk to you about Porscha again, Jo. If there’s something wrong with the victimology then we’ve misunderstood each other over the last weeks.”
“You didn’t misunderstand,” I say with a frown, glancing at Vinny. He has his mask on, and I know him well enough to see the concern in his eyes but I’m not sure anyone else can. “I didn’t think she would be considered a master of disguise because she knew how to act like other people.” I snort. “I thought of it like… impersonating. Or pretending. She liked to pretend she was happier than she was. She hated how we lived.”
Sterling nods, gesturing back towards the kitchen. “Let’s chat, Jo. I think there’s a few things we should go over.”
~~~
“Tell me exactly how Porscha would pretend.”
I glare at Sterling, my legs tucked up beneath me as we sit together in the front room. Vinny is still upstairs speaking with Gabe. Somewhere between Sterling heading upstairs and us coming back down, he managed to tell Gabe about another body. At first, I thought it had just turned up, but after pressing him for a bit, he gave me the bare minimum. They found her yesterday with no ID, and there’s no telling how long it’ll take tofigure out who she was. Which means there’s not only a Victim 6, but a Victim 7 too.
A mix of fear and apprehension lingers over me as I think about the body. Did my mother kill her, or Alastair? Or are they tag teaming the victims, creating a new version of the CGS altogether?
“Jo.”
I blink, forgetting what he just asked me. The furniture downstairs is closer together than upstairs, and sitting next to me on a different chair still leaves me within touching distance. When I stare blankly at him he hesitates before reaching out to rest a hand over mine. “Jo, feel free to take your time. But I really need you to hear more about Porscha’s interest in impersonating people. That’s not something that was ever investigated in the initial case since she was presumed to be deceased.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I don’t need the reminder that everyone thought my mom was dead. I remember her struggling with Alastair in the cellar, but now the pieces in my head don’t fit together like they did before.
Swallowing, I pull my hand from his and open my eyes again. “I told you she liked to copy people.”
He nods, holding up a finger and taps at a tablet. I’ve seen him input plenty of things into the device since we first arrived in Florida. After a moment he speaks. “You said… and I quote,Mom liked to pretend we were better off than we were. She worked crazy hours, taking all sorts of jobs. When she’d come home she would tell me about the people she worked with. How they acted and what she liked or didn’t like. It sounded judgmental, and sometimes she’d want us to make up a scene where she was whoever she liked the best. It was more fun when I was a kid and she wanted to play dress-up and act things out. When I got older it just felt like jealousy, and whenI didn’t want to play along she would throw stuff around and leave the room.”
As if to prove the point, he turns the tablet and lets me see it. Those do sound like my words from a few weeks ago, and there’s tons of notes beneath that but we moved on from the weird skits. She stopped it when I was a teenager anyway and I stopped encouraging her. “And that led you to the master of disguise thing?”
Sterling shrugs, turning the tablet away to set it on the couch beside him as he leans back. “She’s made great efforts to conceal her identity so no one recognized her since her supposed death. She’s gone out of her way to become someone else too. You don’t call that a master of something?”
“Psychopath,” I supply instead, meeting his gaze. “I’d call her a psychopath. Who lets the world think they died after their daughter is tortured and almost killed, just to run off and play pretend?”
He nods slowly, cocking his head as he watches me. “She just wanted you to act things out?”
I shrug. As far as I’m concerned this is a huge waste of time when there are so many other things to think about. “Yeah.”
“And what age did that start?”
I frown. “I don’t know. Probably when I was seven or eight. Mom worked for a cleaning company mostly up to that point and then branched out to self employment and maintenance work around that time. Beforehand she didn’t really ever want to do stuff like that. She’d complain about people, sure, but she was still making art so she would just go down to our basement and hide out there.”
He nods. “That sounds lonely for you.”
“Yeah, it was a real crapfest,” I snap. “She was disinterested in me most of the time, but when she would want to pretend and act out things she was actually excited to spendtime with me. It was weird but I loved it when I was a kid. Then as I got older I realized it was kind of weird, and when I mentioned it to her once when I was thirteen she never had us act things out again. It’s like me asking a question killed the experience for her.”
“So was she looking for something specific from you when you acted out these skits of hers?”
“I guess so. At first she’d just tell me I was doing something wrong, you know? Then she’d start complaining that I needed to get into their head and understand what it was like to be them. But like, I was just a kid so I didn't get what she was saying. I thought they were games, not real experience like she seemed to. Eventually when we stopped playing, she started talking to herself a little more. She would carry around this notebook and write down things in it about people, but I don’t know what. She didn’t let me read it or anything.”
His eyes flash. “I don’t suppose you have that notebook?”
“No. I sold everything and got the fuck out of here, remember? I’m pretty sure I threw the notebook out because it was with some of her junk. She’d make notes on how people acted, their expressions, how they would react to questions and stuff. I just thought maybe she wanted to be an actress or something. I didn’t think it meant anything.”
Sterling nods, gesturing for me to continue.
“She’s not clever enough to be a true master of disguise,” I reason, unwilling to believe my mother could just naturally fall into a role like that. “Maybe it’s different now since she lied for fifteen years. But she used to do this thing where she would talk to herself in the mirror, rehearse how she needed to act. She wanted to be able to perfectly emulate people. It was weird, like acting class except she started pretending like she was the person she was playing, and she even ignored me when I called her mom. She’d get totally into the role and act like nothingelse mattered. If she thought she was messing up something, she’d go mental and have to try and figure out how that person might act. She did it for all sorts of people. Married couples, lawyers, teachers, doctors, anyone we met that she thought was interesting. She’d pretend to be them and be totally engrossed in the role. She’d check her notes constantly until she gave up the role, then days or weeks later something else would come along and draw her attention.”
He nods again, and I can almost see the gears in his head spinning. Fifteen years ago, this information might have meant something to his father, and the notebook and all of mom’s other junk would still be here. But my mom was dead as far as the world knew, and I was just a kid who was hurting so I threw everything out.
“Did she ever do that in public?” he asks. “Did you see her trying to mirror the behavior she would study at home?”
“Sometimes,” I say, looking up towards the ceiling as I think. “She loved doing it if we went out of town for supplies. She’d act like a totally different person during those runs and it was annoying. Sometimes she’d pretend to be clueless to get the guy at the home improvement store to do all the work, and she’d really lay it on thick. She’d have a whole backstory. Or she’d do the opposite when we went to get paint or wallpaper or art supplies and there was a woman working. Suddenly, Mom knew everything about everything again. I just always thought it was an insecurity thing.”