Tami Hoag - Secrets to the Grave

“Star would talk about getting rid of the baby, having an abortion. Then she would decide she wanted the baby, and she would talk all this crazy talk about how she would raise the baby and have a really nice apartment and buy the baby everything. But she didn’t have any money. I mean, get real. She was a homeless drug-addicted prostitute. She didn’t have any way to support herself, let alone a baby.

“It bothered Marissa a lot. She was afraid of what Star would do to the baby, how she might have it and throw it in a Dumpster, or have it and drown it in a toilet. Or maybe she would sell it. Marissa said she had read about people selling babies to pedophiles and sick stuff like that. I didn’t even want to know that could happen!”

“So Marissa came up with a plan?” Vince said.

“She said, what if she got the baby and told Bruce Bordain it was his. The timing worked. He has tons of money. What would it be to him to pay for raising a baby? Nothing. And he should have been doing it anyway, for Marissa’s baby.

“The baby would be taken care of and so would Marissa. She would be able to concentrate on her art. She would have the child she always wanted. It would be good for everyone.”

“Except Bruce Bordain,” Mendez pointed out.

“Well ... neither one of us felt very sorry for him.”

“So Star had the baby and what? Marissa just took her?” Hicks asked.

“No, no. It wasn’t like that,” Gina said. “They made a deal. Marissa would pay for Star’s drug rehab and prenatal care for the baby. There would be one payoff when the baby was born, and Star would have the birth certificate made out the way Marissa wanted.”

“So it was like a private adoption,” Vince said.

“Basically. Marissa sold everything she owned and took a second job to do it. She couldn’t let Bordain see her because of course she wasn’t pregnant. So she had to quit her job at Morton’s. She told her boss she was quitting because she was pregnant, knowing Bruce would ask when she wasn’t there. She got a job at a seafood place in Santa Monica and worked days at a boutique.

“She waited until right before Haley was born to call Bordain and tell him she was having the baby. He sent another check, but he told her he didn’t want to hear from her again.”

“So she moved to Oak Knoll,” Mendez said.

“She knew his wife lived here part-time. It was the only place the Bordains had a home that we could afford to move to.”

“And what was your part in it, Gina?” Dixon asked.

“It was an adventure, Marissa told me,” she said, rolling her eyes at the ultimate understatement. “I thought, why not? We decided we would take some of the money Bordain had given her and money that I had saved, and start the boutique.”

“And this is when Marissa changed her name?” Mendez asked. “About the time you moved up here?”

“Right before. She didn’t trust Star not to change her mind and show up one day and want Haley back. So we made up the whole story about her being from Rhode Island, and being cut off from her family—like a heroine from a Sidney Sheldon novel or something. It was kind of exciting.”

“So, you both moved up here,” Dixon said. “Bruce Bordain couldn’t ignore Marissa if she was here right under his wife’s nose. Did he ever question that he was the baby’s father?”

“No,” Gina said. “I thought he would. I thought he’d want some kind of blood test or something, and then we’d be sunk. But the money mattered less to him than if Marissa would have made a big public stink about it—or I guess I should say it mattered more to Mrs. Bordain. The whole support-the-artist thing was her idea.”

“Let me get this straight,” Mendez said. “Marissa went to blackmail Bruce Bordain, and his wife came up with a plan that kept her in their lives?”

“Creepy, huh?” Gina said. “But I guess in a weird way it was a control thing over her husband, you know? And she really got into it.

“She treated Marissa and Haley like they were her pretend family or something, like they were life-size dolls or something. Even though Marissa was an artist, Milo decorated their house the way she wanted it. She designed the art studio—how crazy is that? She would tell Marissa what to wear to events, and if Marissa didn’t do it Mrs. Bordain would have a fit.”

“How did Marissa feel about that?” Vince asked.

“She said that was a small price to pay, and so what if Milo wanted to dress her up? She kind of liked the game playing, seeing what she could get away with—the people she had as friends, the men she chose to date. She would only let Milo have just so much control and no more.

“That had gotten worse lately,” she said. “They had started arguing a lot. The more independent Marissa tried to be, the more controlling Milo was.”

Which would have made a free spirit like Marissa only try harder to slip free of her owner’s hold, Vince thought. It would have been a vicious downward spiral in their relationship that would only have exacerbated Bordain’s need for control

In her own way Milo Bordain wasn’t so different in her need for order than Zander Zahn had been. The difference was Zahn had exercised his need for order over inanimate objects. Milo Bordain needed to control the people in her life like pieces on a chessboard.

“I told Marissa to put an end to it,” Gina said. “Why live like that? It was so sick and twisted. She needed to get away from the Bordains. Her career as an artist had taken off. She was making good money. The boutique is doing well. She didn’t need them anymore.”

And that, Vince knew, was what had gotten Marissa Fordham killed.

Milo Bordain would never have been able to tolerate Marissa—the daughter she never had—taking Haley—her make-believe grandchild—out of her life. Her real-life dolls were going to walk away from her real-life playhouse, and she would control them no more.

“And was Marissa going to do that?” Mendez asked. “Tell Milo Bordain it was over?”

“She was going to tell the truth, and that should have been the end of it.”

“And it was,” Dixon said.

“I can’t believe Milo was the one who did that to her,” Gina said, the tears rising again. “How could one woman do that to another woman? And how could she do that to Haley?”

“She couldn’t leave a witness,” Mendez said.

“But she loved Haley! How could she hurt her like that?”

“People like Milo Bordain don’t love the way the rest of us love, Gina,” Vince explained. “They are the center of their universe, and everyone else is just an object that revolves around them. They might think the object is beautiful and that they have to possess it, but in the end it’s just a thing to them.”

The emotion came over Gina then like a wave she couldn’t hold back, and she started to sob, and Vince suspected she was seeing that crime-scene Polaroid he had shown her of her best friend butchered on the kitchen floor.

He wondered if Milo Bordain would replay that same scene in her memory. Probably, but with very different emotions attached.

She was sitting in jail now. ADA Kathryn Worth had made sure there would be no bail. Milo had been caught with knife in hand going after Anne and Haley. No judge was going to dare risk it—no matter how much money the Bordains could throw around.

Milo Bordain would go to prison where she would be the state’s doll, where she would be told what to wear and where to sleep and when to eat. Vince wondered if she would even see the irony in that.

103

“Milo Bordain,” Mendez said as they walked out of the hospital into the sunshine. “Nobody saw that coming.”

“No,” Vince admitted. “The brutality of that murder ... That’s usually something women reserve for unfaithful husbands, not each other. In hindsight, all the pieces fit. She felt like Marissa was hers, bought and paid for, literally. And like any spoiled child, if she couldn’t keep her toy, nobody else could have it either.”