Читать книгу Murder In The Heartland - M. William Phelps - Страница 35

Heading northbound on U.S. 75 from Melvern, Topeka was a forty-minute drive. The plan was for Rebecca and Ryan to drive Lisa’s Toyota back to Melvern, while Lisa, Kevin, and the baby followed in Kevin’s pickup. Kevin was excited. He was a father again. After so many complications and failed attempts at having a child over the past four years, here it was: time to hand out the cigars.

It’s a girl!

When Kevin, Rebecca, and Ryan pulled into the parking lot of Long John Silver’s, Lisa was sitting in her car, a baby in her arms.

“When we got up there, Mom was in the car with the baby,” Ryan said later. “We had the truck. If I felt anything, it was happiness, but it wasn’t very strong. Kevin was happy. Very happy.”

Lisa got out and stepped toward Kevin’s truck. “Get her things,” Kevin said to one of the kids as he took Lisa by the arm. “You okay?” he asked her.

She moaned and put her hands around her stomach. “I’ll be all right.”

“Aren’t you supposed to still be in the hospital?” Rebecca asked. Rebecca had taken parenting classes in school. She knew about the birthing process and the recovery time involved.

Lisa continued holding herself, acting as if she were in serious pain.

“Why aren’t you still in bed, Mother?” Rebecca continued. Rebecca, like her younger sister Kayla, spoke fast: her words ran all together and came out quickly. Whether she was talking to her mother or anyone else, she was hard to follow at times. “My theory,” she said later, “is that, because Mom was always reading a book or on the computer, growing up we had very little time to talk to her. You had to talk fast to get out what you wanted to say to her.”

“They made me drink a bunch of apple juice,” Lisa said as Kevin helped her get comfortable in the truck. “They made me go to the bathroom before I could leave.”

When the truth was later known, it must have been doubly devastating for Kevin to accept. Years ago, Kevin and his first wife had lost a child, a girl, at birth. Some claimed Kevin had never recovered from the loss and that Lisa wanted to give him a girl to help ease his pain.

Ryan and Rebecca, however, were bewildered, to say the least. Could it be possible? Maybe their mom hadn’t been lying about being pregnant, after all. The kids believed Lisa, but they always had misgivings. “My son had serious doubts,” Carl Boman said later. “You have to believe Kevin had to have doubts himself.”

One day, it seemed, Lisa was parading around Melvern, her stomach as flat as a fitness instructor’s, telling everyone she was in her last trimester; and the next, she was sitting in her car at the Long John Silver’s in downtown Topeka holding an infant she claimed she had just delivered.

Kevin and Lisa’s two children pulled out of downtown Topeka on the evening of December 16, with Lisa and her new baby. According to Lisa’s story, she had given birth to the child only hours ago. If that story were true, authorities later wondered, why was she in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant waiting for a ride home? Why wasn’t she at the hospital, which was just blocks away from Long John Silver’s? Or, better yet, at the Birth and Women’s Center, about fifty feet from the parking lot where Kevin and the kids met Lisa, the place where, she claimed, she’d given birth?