The Child's Plan by Audrey Walker (books to improve english txt) 📕

screaming, but she doesn’t understand. She will realize soon, though. I will show her I love her. I will show her she is meant to be mine, and then everything will be great.

That wench. Why won’t she love me? Why? Why doesn’t she love me back? She only begs me to let her go. She just wants to be freed! She doesn’t see how our destinies are intertwined. She doesn’t see how much we are meant to be. My beautiful flower, don’t leave me! Don’t!”

From here on, the entries were vague and barely made sense, but Robin managed to get the gist of it. He kept the woman a prisoner for eight years and then decided that there was no hope for her before killing her. Then he started his spree of kidnapping and torturing women before killing them. By this point, the entries were all just ramblings of a diseased mind. It was evident to Robin that the Butcher had been pushed past the point of sanity, where nothing was clear to him anymore.

She looked down at some of the other papers lying there, and she saw something that made her freeze – a piece of evidence that finally solved everything. This piece of evidence answered the question that had been nagging her all along. She knew who that child was.

Chapter Five

Robin looked at the child greedily drinking up the bowl of gruel the Butcher had left for her. She was starving since the Butcher had decided to limit her meals to once a day. It didn’t matter to her, though. The poor kid was so malnourished she could see his ribs under his skin. No child deserved to be treated like this. Her heart went out to the poor kid, so starved for love and affection. He would sit with Robin for hours, listen to her stories, or help her in whatever way he could. She could see that the Butcher’s cruelty was affecting him, so she tried harder to love him and remove the effects of the Butcher’s torture on the innocent boy.

“Who taught you how to speak?” Robin asked.

“Mama,” he said, gulping his food down. “She taught me to read and write too. She said I was a genius. That I wrote better than an adult even, and I was quick at picking everything up. She said once she got me back to the free world, she was going to put me in school, and I was going to do great things.”

So, he was the child of one of the victims the Butcher had captured? Robin mused to herself.

“Where did Mama go?” Robin asked softly.

It had been the wrong question, though, because the child’s face darkened, and he instantly clammed up.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Robin said quickly. “How about we play a game instead? How about we solve puzzles?”

“Mama loved me,” the child said softly. “Mama is gone.”

Robin looked down at the birth certificate in her hands, the memory flashing through her mind. The child was the Butcher’s. It was the Butcher’s son who was with her in the basement. He must have been born after the Butcher assaulted his very first victim, the woman he loved, but he didn’t want the child. After all, in his sick plan, a child had no place. The child was raised by the captive mother, the only source of love and warmth he had. This love and warmth had been contaminated by the hatred and abuse of the Butcher.

Robin shivered with horror as she realized that the child probably saw his mother getting killed. He must have been there, watching from that corner under the stairs as the Butcher killed his mother. The horror that child must have faced seeing the only source of love and warmth taken away from him.

Her heart panged with sympathy. No wonder the child was so traumatized by the terror he lived with all the time. No wonder he thought giving her a dead animal was a gift. This was all he had seen and learned. The vicious cycle continued. The Butcher’s mother abused him, and the Butcher became a killer. And now, the child might be the killer she was looking for. He was ruined as a result of the pain inflicted by his father.

The birth certificate had the child’s name, and the mother's name cut out. Clearly, the Butcher wanted nothing to do with either of them. But this also meant that there was a record of this somewhere. The Butcher must have had to take his victim to the hospital perhaps, and was forced to make out the birth certificate. Whatever the reason, this meant that there were legal records somewhere, records she had to find.

She scoured through the rest of the evidence, desperate for any leads of the child's identity. “Could this kid be the killer? Is it possible that he is doing all this? Had the Butcher’s twisted mentality darkened the child, too, sending him down the same path as his father?”

Robin closed her eyes and forced herself to remember. “What had happened to the child? Where had he been when she had escaped?” Her head started to throb and ache again as she forced herself to remember, and her eyes began to hurt. Her memory was still not back. There were still gaps she couldn’t fill in. “If the child had grown up to be the killer, then why was he so obsessed with Robin? Why did he want to ruin her? What had happened down there?”

With her head throbbing, Robin closed the diaries littered around her. Her mind was racing, and her heart was thumping in her chest. She needed answers. If this child was her killer, then his identity must be here somewhere. If only she had all her memories back so she could understand what he wanted from her. If only she knew why he was doing all this, she could stop him. Knowing the motive was crucial when dealing with serial