“What is your interest in Tina?” she asked.
Regina’s first question threw me because she had not asked it during the initial communication. Now she wanted to know what I was doing and I knew that if I answered it fully and honestly it would probably end the interview before it got started.
“Well, first of all, I am very sorry for your loss,” I said. “I can’t imagine what you are going through and I hate so much to be an intruder. But what the police on this case told me makes it different and makes what happened to Tina something that the public should possibly know about.”
“I don’t understand. Are you talking about what happened to her neck?”
“Oh, no.”
I was mortified that my clumsy answer to her first question had conjured in her mind the horrible manner in which her daughter had been killed. In many ways I would have preferred a backhand across the face, the diamond of an engagement ring raking across my skin and leaving another scar.
“Uh … ,” I stammered. “What I meant was … the police, they told me that she might have been the victim of cyberstalking, and so far, as far as I know, there is no evidence that the two are connected but …”
“They didn’t tell me that,” Regina said. “They said they didn’t have any leads.”
“Well, I don’t want to speak for them and maybe they don’t want to tell you anything until they’re sure. But I understand that she told friends—like Lisa Hill—that she felt she was being stalked. And to be honest, that is what is of interest to me. That is a consumer thing—it’s about privacy—and if there is a … problem then that’s what I’m going to write about.”
“How was she stalked? This is all news to me.”
I knew I was in trouble here. I was telling her things she didn’t know, so the first thing she was going to do after I left was call Mattson about it. Then Mattson would learn that I was still actively pursuing the case, and Regina would in turn learn that my reporter’s interest in Tina and her death was compromised by my having known her briefly but intimately. This meant that this was the one and only time I would get to talk to Tina’s mother. She would be turned against me in the same way Lisa Hill had been.
“I don’t know exactly how she was stalked,” I said. “That is only what the police said. I talked to her friend Lisa and she said Tina apparently met a man in a bar but that it felt like he was there waiting for her or something. That it wasn’t a random encounter.”
“I told her to stay out of the bars,” Regina said. “But she couldn’t keep away—even after the arrests and rehab.”
It was an incongruous response. I was talking about her daughter being stalked and she fixated on her daughter’s drug and alcohol issues.
“I am not saying one thing had anything to do with the other,” I said. “I don’t think the police know yet either. But I know she had arrests and had been to rehab. Is that what you mean about her going to bars?”
“She was always going out, meeting strangers … ,” Regina said. “All the way back to high school. Her father told her it could end this way—he warned her—but she didn’t listen. She didn’t seem to care. She was boy crazy from the start.”
Regina seemed to stare off into the distance when she spoke. Boy crazy seemed like an innocent term but, clearly, she was seeing a memory of her daughter as a young woman. An unpleasant memory in which there was upset and rancor.
“Was Tina ever married?” I asked.
“No, never,” Regina said. “She said she never wanted to be tied down by one man. My husband used to joke that she saved him a bundle by never getting married. But she was our only child and I always wished I had gotten to plan her wedding. It never happened. She was always looking for something she felt no man she met could provide… . What that was, I never knew.”
I remembered the post I had seen on Tina’s social media.
“I saw on her Instagram that she said she found her sister,” I said. “A half sister. But she’s not your daughter?”
Regina’s face changed and I knew I had hit on something bad in her life.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Regina said.
“I’m sorry, did I say something wrong?” I asked. “What happened?”
“All these people, they are so interested in that stuff. Where they come from. Are they Swedish, are they Indian. They don’t know what they’re playing with. It’s like that privacy thing you mentioned. Some secrets are meant to stay secret.”
“The half sister was a secret?”
“Tina sent her DNA in and then next thing she does is tell us she’s got a half sister out in Naperville. She … I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“You can tell me off the record. It will never go into a story but if it helps me understand your daughter and what she was interested in, it could be important. Do you know why she sent her DNA in for analysis? Was she look—”
“Who knows? That’s what people do, right? It’s quick. It’s cheap. She had friends that were doing it, finding their heritage.”
I had not submitted my DNA to any of the genetic-analytics sites but I knew people who had and therefore knew generally how it worked. Your DNA went through a genetic data bank that returned matches to other customers of the site, along with the percentage of shared DNA. Higher percentages meant a closer relationship—from distant cousins to direct siblings.
“She found her half sister. I saw the photo of them. Naperville—that’s near Chicago, right?”
I needed to keep her talking about something she didn’t want to talk about. Easy questions got easy answers and kept the words coming.
“Yes,” Regina said. “I grew up there. Went to high school there.”
She paused and looked at me and I realized she needed me to tell the story. It was always amazing to me when people opened up. I was a stranger but they knew I was a reporter, a recorder of history. I had found many times when reporting tragedies that those left behind wanted to reach out through their grief to talk and set down some sort of record of the lost loved one. Women more than men. They had a sense of duty to the lost one. Sometimes they needed only a little prodding.
“You had a baby,” I said.
She nodded.
“And Tina didn’t know,” I said.
“Nobody knew,” she said. “It was a girl. I gave her up. I was too young. And then later I met my husband and we started a family. Tina. And then she grew up and sent her DNA in to one of those places. And she had done it, too. The girl. She knew she was adopted and was looking for connections. They connected through the DNA site and that’s what destroyed our family.”
“Tina’s father didn’t know …”
“I didn’t tell him at first and then it was too late. It was supposed to be my secret. But then the world changes and your own DNA can unlock everything and secrets aren’t secrets anymore.”
I once had an editor named Foley who said that sometimes the best question is the one not asked. I waited. I didn’t feel I had to ask the next question.
“My husband left,” Regina said. “It wasn’t that I’d had the baby. It was that I didn’t tell him. He said our marriage was built on a lie. That was four months ago. Christina didn’t know. Her father and I agreed not to put that guilt on her. She would have blamed herself.”