Page 32 of Hard Heart

“My sister has a pet chinchilla, so…”

“I’m more of a cat person.”

“Did you have a cat growing up?”

He shook his head. “Dad didn’t like animals, and I would have pitied any poor creature my mom got her hands on. No, the cat was Ruby’s. Shadow.”

For the first time, Sykes’s voice hitched, and I realised his composure wasn’t absolute.

“You okay?”

“Talking about the past is something I usually avoid, but I guess I’ll have to get used to it.”

“Why would you have pitied a pet your mum owned?”

“Did you ever hear of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy? They call it by another name now, Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, but I think that sounds more clinical.”

My spine stiffened. Was he saying what I thought he was saying? Because that had never cropped up anywhere in the case history, not in the transcript and not even in the online rumour factory.

“Are you saying your mum had Munchausen’s?”

“I’ll never be able to prove it, and back then, living in the middle of that shit, I couldn’t even see it. But Ruby thought she did. She switched her major to psychology, did you know that?”

Honestly, I’d been so focused on Ruby’s death that I’d neglected to look deeply into her life.

“I didn’t.”

“Major in psychology, minor in environmental science. She started out taking economics with psychology, then realised she hated capitalism.”

Didn’t we all?

“And you also studied environmental science?”

“Environmental engineering and chemistry. I wanted to become an artist; my father wanted me to follow him into the political hellscape. Science was a compromise. He figured there was money in it somewhere.”

“You seemed to be pretty good at the science, though. I mean, you were twenty-three and working on a PhD?”

“Twenty-two. I celebrated my twenty-third birthday by getting arraigned. And studying gave me an excuse to stay out of the house. AP classes, summer school, evening activities—I signed up for everything.” A shrug. “I read stuff and remember it, at least, I do when I’m not drugged up to the eyeballs.”

“We’re not talking illegal substances here, are we?”

“That would’ve been more fun. But no, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t on a cocktail of prescription medication. Every week, I’d be sitting in the doctor’s office with Mom, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.”

I recalled the trial transcript I’d been studying. “Depression, bipolar disorder, insomnia, generalised anxiety, epilepsy, lactose intolerance, a gluten allergy, and recurrent UTIs. Did I miss anything?”

“Don’t forget asthma and some blood-clotting thing I never fully understood.” He pointed to his coffee. “Regular old cow’s milk. I don’t recall having any breathing difficulties, I could pee just fine, and conveniently, the only person who ever saw me have a seizure was my mother. As for the rest… You know what happens when you have a psychiatric disorder? Chemicals are out of whack in your brain. So what do they do? They give you drugs. But what happens if that imbalance was never there in the first place?”

The cogs turned in my head. “It creates one?”

“Bingo. During the trial, Mom’s pet doctor was giving me more pills than I’d ever had before. I can’t even remember half of the shit they said. Then when I got to Redding’s Gap, the staff kept forgetting my medication, and I started to feel better.”

I realised my mouth had dropped open. Levi Sykes had been suffering from abuse for years, since he was just a child, and nobody knew. Nobody figured it out except… Oh, hell.

“Did Ruby know? She worked it out, didn’t she?”

“As I said, she’d begun to suspect. We talked about it, what to do, whether I should try quitting the pills.” Sykes closed his eyes for a long moment. “But I was scared to go cold turkey in case there was a grain of truth in my medical records. I altered some of the doses. And on the day she died… Fuck, I’ve asked myself a thousand times whether I could have done something I didn’t remember, but I don’t think I did. There would have been blood. Ruby would have fought back. All I had was a couple of scratches from yard work, and the prosecution said they could have come from her nails.”

The control was gone, anguish in its place. He must have been torturing himself over this for years. Nowhere in the trial records did they mention fingernail scrapings, so I had to assume he was right about the origin of the scratches. And I’d seen the yard at Blackstone House—the housemates had certainly put some effort into caring for it before nature took over.