54.

~ "Boy does this feel familiar." Norma said with an easy and relaxed smile. Alex closed the window in the living room just in time for a heavy rain storm to hit. The island seeming to catch the most impressive storms this time of year.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "When were we ever in Oahu?"

Norma couldn't stop smiling as she looked around the small house that was bare except a queen sized mattress. The couple had moved the mattress into the living room so that they, along with Lucy, could sleep together till the rest of their furniture arrived.

"You remember when we were at the old house on Pearl Street?" she asked.

Alex nodded and smiled.

"Yeah." he said. "We had the mattress on the floor back then to."

"The house was so cold that winter. I was always freezing." Norma told him.

"We managed to stay warm." Alex reminded her with a coy smile. He knelt down onto the mattress and watched Lucy sleeping peacefully beside her mother. She'd taken the sudden move to Hawaii much better than expected. Maybe it was the drastically different location that had lifted her sprits. The ocean, sun and even a new house. Although the company housing was much smaller than their home back in White Pine Bay. It was cozy and they could easily picture living here.
"You spoke to Mr. Tanner today?" Norma asked nervously.
"Yeah." Alex nodded with a smile. "We talked about catching fly fish in Oregon. For the owner of a five star resort he's pretty laid back. Wore board shorts and a Jimmy Buffet T-shirt to the nicest restaurant in town."

"So what exactly will you do as head of security for this world class resort?" Norma asked curiously.

The rain was coming down harder now. The little house they had been assigned to as apart of Alex's employment contract didn't even shutter at the storm.

"Tanner told me that the resort is to be treated like it's own country." Alex admitted. "We even have a small jail if needed. Above all we have to maintain the safety of the guests here and keep up the reputation of the resort. I'm going to take that to mean he want's to call on me to toss out the trouble makers but to do it without causing a scene. I think it means I'll be on call all the time to. So if I'm not hear, I'll be somewhere on the grounds."

"You have your own staff and everything?" Norma asked. Alex smiled.

"You know, I had over thirty deputies under me back home." he said. "Here I only have ten and only five of them live in the company barracks with us."
"Just in case there's and emergency?" Norma asked. "Drunken party guests trying to skinny dip in the swimming pool?"
"Exactly." Alex nodded in relief. "No more DEA, no more backlash from the families and no more dead call girls."

"I think you made a great Sheriff." Norma admitted when she saw a scowl cross her husband's face.
"I think I'll be a happier head of security." Alex told her. "I spoke to my predecessor, Will Cook, he said that all he ever had to do was keep the wedding parties from causing too much damage and everything else will work itself out."

"It's going to be a nice change." Norma added.

Her fingers went nervously to a strand of colorful beads around her neck. Her eyes taking in the sheer emptiness of their new home. She was thankful that they had decent housing so quickly. Emma and Dylan were going to ship some of their things, but Norma and Alex decided it was best to buy new furniture for the house. The store had promised delivery of everything today, but so far had only brought in a queen sized mattress and a dresser.

"Don't worry." Alex said. "They'll deliver the furniture soon. Until then, we're going to be fine here. It'll be like camping."

Norma glanced at Lucy still sleeping in the middle of the bed. Aside from the occasional nightmare and a bedwetting incident a few days after leaving the hospital, the little girl seemed to have no memory of her time with Norman. Maybe she thought it had been a bad dream. Something too odd to ever be real.

Soon she was back to her happy self as if nothing had happened to her at all. Her parents deciding not to pursue therapy in case Lucy had managed to totally forget the horrors she'd endured.
"I'm glad we could move here." Norma whispered. "That we didn't have to change our first names and hide forever."

"I like the name Richards." Alex added and Norma smiled.

"Mr. Tanner knows." he reminded her. "The agency that relocated us had to tell him so I could get this job. Otherwise, who we tell is our business. I don't think Tanner cared too much about these sensationalized crime stories. He seemed sympathetic to what happened."

"Does he know I'm Norman's mother?" she asked.
"He knows you're Lucy's mother." Alex said sternly. "That's all he needs to know."

"You think anyone investigating Norman will find us?" Norma asked. She had been afraid to go outside since the story broke two weeks ago.

"Dylan called me today. He said they still haven't come knocking on his door yet." Alex shrugged. "Hopefully they won't try and track us down."

"Norman's all over the news." Norma sighed. "What he did to those poor women. He cut one girl's head off while she was in the shower."

Alex looked back at the still sleeping Lucy and then at his wife in annoyance.

"I thought we agreed not to look at the news." he reminded her.

"I know." Norma agreed quickly. Her fingers running over the little beads on her necklace.

"Lucy was really happy you liked your birthday present." he nodded to her now favorite piece of jewelry.
"I love it!" Norma said honestly. She pulled the long strand of carefully arranged beads up to see them better and liked all the colors and crystals that played on the light.
"You know, I was with Lucy when she picked all of that out at the hobby store yesterday." Alex said. "It took forever and it wasn't exactly fun for me."

"Poor thing." Norma sighed with a smile.
"I think it would have been cheaper to buy you diamonds than to have Lucy make you a present." he added.

"I don't want diamonds." Norma told him honestly. "Our daughter has fantastic jewelry making skills for a six year old."

"Don't encourage her." Alex sighed. "I can't go back into that hobby place again. It was like being in Martha Stewart hell."

Norma had to bite her lip to stop from laughing.

"Thank you for doing all of this." she said at last.
"For doing what?" he asked.

"For relocating. For leaving your home town and your career behind. I know it was asking a lot." she said. "It was asking a lot to start over for me."

"Norma." he said. "You're my wife. Lucy is our daughter. The two of you are more important that staying in the same town as Sheriff forever."

"What about your career?" she asked. "You were a cop for thirty years. You're okay with just giving that up?"

"I only became Sheriff to piss my dad off." he said dryly. He gave a slight shrug of indifference. "Well that, and the women." he said as an afterthought.

"Alex!" she giggled and her husband raised a finger to his lips when Lucy moaned and rolled over in her sleep.
"It worked didn't it?" he said sneakily.

"Yes, it did." Norma agreed. "How could I resist a man in uniform?"

"I don't know, you did a pretty good job for a while there." he grumbled.

"Wasted time." she sighed.

Her eyes fell on the dozen pink roses he'd gotten her for her birthday. With barely any furniture in the house, Norma had to keep them on the kitchen counter next to Norman's now empty urn.

"Thank you for today." she said and nodded to the urn that they would have to wrap up and hide soon. It had Norman's name and dates boldly engraved on the front. It couldn't be out for people to see.

"You're welcome." Alex said soberly.

"I'm glad you wanted to have a small service for him." Norma sighed. "That we could scatter his ashes someplace nice. With his family there to say goodbye. I'm glad I didn't have to do it alone."

"I wouldn't have let you do something that hard alone." Alex told her. "No matter what he became, he was still your son. You're always going to be his mother."

She nodded.

"We shouldn't talk about him anymore." she said quickly. Her hand going to the necklace Lucy had made her. She climbed back in bed and curled next to her sleeping child. Her husband quickly following her example. Their daughter sleeping peacefully between them and untroubled by memories of what had happened to her.

"We need to concentrate on our new lives. It's not everyday we get to live in paradise." Norma admitted.

"I think we earned it, Mrs. Romero." Alex whispered.

~ 30 years later ~

~ Lucy Anne Richards always wore the beaded necklace she'd made her mother when they first moved to the island. She'd been only six years old, but she remembered it vividly. Remembered how they had to sleep on a mattress as a family for a week. Remembered always feeling safe and protected there.

The furniture that her parents had bought new took forever to be delivered to the little house. She was sure that neither one of them planned to be in this small, but cozy house for thirty years, but here they were.

"Your father turned your old bedroom into his office I see." Dylan grumbled. He sat down another box of carefully alphabetized files on the kitchen table.

Lucy sighed and looked at paperwork from cases that dated back to his days as Sheriff in a small town in Oregon.

"We need to find dad's will, Dylan." she said running a finger across the intricate and still vibrant beads that magically seemed to match every outfit her mother wore.

"Why didn't Romero give his will to a lawyer like a normal person?" Dylan sighed. "It's what I did."

"You know dad." Lucy smiled. "He had trust issues."

"No, the KGB has trust issues." Dylan pointed out. "I don't know what that man had."

Her half brother looked through a stack of old yellowed files with the name Blair Watson stamped on them. He quickly shut them and closed the box.

"What's all that?" Lucy asked.

"Old junk." Dylan said. "I'll toss it out."

"No, leave it." Lucy snapped. She felt disloyal to her father's memory if she threw out his papers.

"Lu." Dylan sighed. "Your dad wouldn't want your to go through his paperwork from before you were even born. He was a Sheriff and I don't think he should have even had these files here. They're stamped 'Original' all over the place."

"I know. I'll look through them and decide what's best." Lucy said.

"A lot of these are sensitive. Criminals and murders." Dylan told her.

She looked up at the half brother she always called her uncle. He looked good for a man in his early sixties. His wife Emma having passed away when Lucy was nineteen and he'd never remarried. Instead, he'd come to the island and opened a small bar with his son, Elliot. The two of them running it together all these years later.

"Dylan." she said calmly. "I'm a criminal phycologist with a doctorate in applied psychotherapy from Berkley. I work with the FBI to create profiles for horrific killers. I think I can handle forty year old murder investigations."

Dylan looked hesitant.
"You know mom and Romero always thought you had a nice little family practice in San Fransisco." he said. "That you counseled couples who were having marriage troubles. Kids acting up in class."

"Out." Lucy corrected. She took the Blair Watson file from him.
"What?"

"Acting out." Lucy corrected. "Kids acting out in class."

"Pardon me." Dylan said.

She looked over the names in her father's blocky handwriting. Her fingers tracing over the paper he had once touched and written on.

"Norman Bates?" she asked. Her gaze fixing curiously on Dylan.

Her half brother shook his head.

"Come one, Dylan." Lucy laughed. "I've known since I was six who and what he was."

"We all promised we wouldn't tell you." Dylan said uncomfortably.

"I know." Lucy admitted coldly. "I understand why."

"You remember?" he asked suspiciously.

"Somethings." Lucy shrugged. "I thought I had dreamed it at first. Then, when I was twelve I saw that American Horror Story: Psycho. They had a Norman Bates character. I'm watching it at a friend's house and I suddenly realized I was that little girl in the pink room. Daddy was the tall dark and handsome Sheriff trying to save me. Mom was the stunning blond with a perfect body who's devastated to find out her son is a cross dressing serial killer."

"I didn't like the guy playing me." Dylan said bitterly. "He was kinda fat."

Lucy grinned a little. It was her mother's smile. Her father had always said so.

"Well, the guy who played Norman Bates was pretty scary." Lucy said. "I don't remember it being like that. I don't remember there being possessed stuffed animals and devil worship."

"Yeah, that was freaky." Dylan agreed sadly. "Ratings."

Her half brother looked at her carefully.

"What do you remember?" he asked. "I know we've never talked about it till now."

Lucy shrugged.

"It's hard to identify what's a memory and what I read in school. Norman Bates killed half a dozen women in less than a year. He might never have been caught if he hadn't taken me. Criminologists love him because of all the detailed journals he left behind. Entries as both Norman and 'Mother'." She said that last part in a whisper. Careful not to invoke a bad sprit just by calling it's name.
"Did anyone at school ever know you were Norman Bates' sister?" Dylan asked.

Lucy shook her head.
"When I was on spring break at Berkley, I made a point of driving to White Pine Bay. I took the tour of the house, saw the pink room, stayed in the Bates Motel. Kinda a tacky tourist trap for the murder porn crowd." she decided. "It didn't have any power over me. Not with the tour guide dressed up like Bette Davis from that old movie."

"Whatever happened to Baby Jane?" Dylan laughed. "Yeah, I saw the web sight. They charge three hundred a night to stay in the old motel. Mom would never have believed it when she owned the place."

Lucy looked at the school picture of Blair Watson. An attractive teacher that her father suspected was murdered by Norman Bates. At the time of course, Norman was a teenager and her parents were hardly even friends, let alone a couple. It would always be an unsolvable variable in her life. How the mother of one of the most infamous serial killers had suddenly married the town's Sheriff.

By all accounts, the then Sheriff Romero suspected Norman Bates long before he'd married Norma at City Hall. There was always a lack of evidence but her father's notes were convinced Norman had done this. So why did they tie the knot?

"Just promise you won't write a book about Norman." Dylan said. "Those case files… Romero took them from the Sheriff's department for a reason. So that no one would get curious and go looking for material on a new angle of the Norman Bates case."

"Daddy knew what Norman was for a long time." Lucy said instead of answering her half brother. "So did mom. Why didn't they turn him in? Stopped him?"

"Because mom thought she could help him." Dylan said plainly. "A parent's love is blind."

"Why didn't daddy arrest Norman? After he tried to kill mom that night." Lucy asked. "He just had him recommitted."

Dylan looked sad and shook his head.

"Romero was in love with mom for a very long time, Lu." he said. "He would have done anything for her. He was willing to protect her son after what he did. I can only imagine how hard that was for him."

Lucy quickly stuffed the file back into it's box.

"No, I'm not writing a book." she said tersely. "Norman Bates has been done to death anyway. You know I read that they're making another God awful movie?"

"Yeah, it's the fourth one. Norman Bates comes back as a cross dressing zombie to battle a cross dressing zombie Donald Trump." Dylan said skeptically. "Made for TV movie I think."

"It must have been awful for mom to know that her son's life had been turned into such an exploited freak show." Lucy said.

"It was." Dylan admitted. "But she had your dad. He loved her more than anyone ever did. I was surprised when she told me they'd gotten married. Gotta admit I didn't see it coming."

Lucy nodded and smiled at her half brother.

"They were in love, weren't they?" she grinned.
"Yes." Dylan nodded. "They were always proud of you. Always wanted to keep you safe."

"Towards the end, daddy kept asking where mom was." she said sadly. "The senility…"
"I know." Dylan said. "Mom had him spoiled. She died so suddenly of a heart attack and I don't think Romero could stand to be without her. They were married almost forty years after all. Kind of romantic he followed her a month later."

"Romantic?" Lucy questioned. "Is that why you never remarried after Aunt Emma died?"

Dylan looked sad and he shrugged.

"Emma was always living on borrowed time anyway. I knew that going in. She was so special and amazing. My time with her, no matter how short was worth the loss. I had my wife, Lu. I had my happiness. It's not fair to think I deserve more." he said.

She noticed he was staring at her.

"What?" she laughed.

"You look just just like your mother, Lucy." Dylan told her gently.

"That's what daddy always said. Towards the end." she admitted. "He would tell me how happy he was I came to see him, that I looked like mom. Then he would ask where she was. That he felt like he hadn't seen her in a long time. That he was worried about her."

"It's going to be okay, Lu." Dylan reminded her. "They had a good life together. Even after what happened to Norman. They got a happy ending I think."

Lucy boxed up her father's files and decided not to go prying anymore into Norman Bates' legacy. Her parents wouldn't have wanted that.

"Yeah." she admitted sadly. "They did."

~ END ~

It was hard to write this last chapter. I actually wanted Lucy to discover she was Norman Bates' little sister after her parents died and be stunned and horrified. I planned to write a whole thing about going to WPB and staying at the motel. Seeing the house and the murder fans that don't know who she really is. Eventually having her meet Tommy Brennan again and they fall in love.

But what's a Normero story without Normero? At least they got their happy ending. They lived a long time together and Lucy turned out okay.