He murdered his parents to get that “normal” life. In a perverse sense, this seemed to bother cops more than the murder.
Wanted to go to school? Play hockey? Ride a fucking skateboard?
Spoiled little brat didn’t know what he had, how good his life was. Born with the proverbial silver spoon, and he spat it out.
Yet this I understand. When you have money, people think that solves all your problems and you have no cause for complaint. While it does grant you enormous privilege and opens doors, that doesn’t mean it’s a perfect life. Not if you’re an
eleven-year-old boy, being whisked around the world, when all you want is an afternoon in a park and neighbors who know who the hell you are.
That does not justify what Bastion did. Does not even make it comprehensible. At eleven years old, he murdered both his parents in cold blood, and the only crime they were guilty of was self-absorption. If you make that an executable crime, we’d have a massacre of Fortune 500 parents. What happened here was the collision of problematic parenting with an even more problematic child. A boy with a broken psyche. A fledgling sociopath.
Bastion’s official diagnosis was borderline personality disorder. Bastion wanted something his parents would not give him, something he deemed essential for his life, and so he got rid of them. Problem solved.
A week ago I met a girl who murdered her grandmother and two other settlers because they wouldn’t give her what she wanted. To her, it was a simple and obvious solution. Now, in our town, do we have a young man who has committed an equally horrifying and unthinkable crime?
I can’t pull up a photograph and see whether our Sebastian is really Bastion Fowler. He was eleven. I only know his name being in law enforcement.
Bastion was tried as a juvenile and sentenced to a psychiatric facility until his eighteenth birthday. That came a year ago, which would make him two years younger than Sebastian. Ours could easily be nineteen, though.
When he was released, reporters had tried tracking him down. At eighteen, he was fair game. Technically, given that he was tried as a minor, his name was excluded from public records. But he was the only child of a high-profile couple who died in a high-profile murder … committed by their son. The papers knew Bastion’s name.
Reporters found out when he was being released from prison. I find three photos of him supposedly getting out. I say “supposedly” because it’s three photos of three different young men, as if decoys had been used to throw off reporters. Two are very clearly not the young man I know. But the third … It’s the worst one, taken from too far away, a blurred shot of a guy in a hoodie hightailing it to a car. He’s slightly built and average height, like Sebastian. Hair hangs over part of his face. Light brown hair. I see that, and I remember the young man who sat across from me last night, hair hanging in his face.
It’s you. In my gut, I know. In my gut, this makes sense.
I read more. According to the articles, Bastion Fowler wasn’t the charming, manipulative sort of sociopath. He didn’t have that magnetic personality. Instead, he was polite. Calm. Deferential, even. Like the young man I’d spoken to last night.
Unnaturally calm. Unnaturally mature. Highly intelligent. Highly creative.
A boy who intellectually understood the difference between right and wrong. He’d tried to cover his crime, after all. He had also accepted his punishment.
I tried. I failed. You got me.
I’m digging for more when a voice at my shoulder says, “May I join you?,” and it’s a testament to how deep I am in my research that I look up with an automatic smile, presuming it’s Dalton. It is not Dalton. It’s a guy about forty, holding a coffee and a muffin. He has a too-white smile and blond-tipped hair, spiked in a style that would have better suited him twenty years ago … when it was in vogue. When I smile, he puffs up in a way that makes me internally smack myself upside the head.
“Uh…” I begin. “My—”
“Sorry,” he says. “You’re hard at work, and I don’t mean to disturb you. I just hoped to use the Wi-Fi to check in with my kids and…”
He jerks his chin around the patio. Every table is filled.
“My husband will be joining me,” I say, “but you can certainly use that seat until he does.”
He sits, and I type in more search terms. I don’t even get my results before he says, “My ex is home with the kids. I promised I’d send them photos.”
I nod and keep my gaze on my screen, hoping his haste to clarify his marital status means nothing. I pull up an article on Bastion’s release.
“So you’re here with your husband?” he says.
I glance up just enough to see his gaze fixed on my empty ring finger. “Yes. We were out panning this morning. I took my band off before it fell in, and someone thought they struck gold.” I smile, but it’s a tight one that should warn him off. Instead, he inches his chair toward mine.
“What kind of laptop is that?” he asks.
“No idea,” I lie. “It’s my husband’s.”
“Looks state of the art. He’s a tech geek, I take it?”
I can’t help laughing at that. “No.”