Hunting Michael Underwood

by L V Gaudet

  Kathy blinks back tears as she replaces the receiver and returns to sitting on the couch in the darkness.

  Part Three

  Discovery

  12It’s All About the Kids

  Lawrence Hawkworth has an uncanny ability to dig up the un-findable. He seems to have a sixth sense for evil. It is an ability that makes him a great investigative reporter.

  The tall lanky reporter who resembles a buzzard would have been a cop if he had not been turned down flat. He could not pass the basic requirements. Among other things; he is color blind.

  He can sit in the scene of a crime and play it out in his head, imagining what he thinks could have happened, playing out the most probable to the impossible, getting a sense of a line that usually crosses somewhere down the middle between the two.

  Clues overlooked because they were too obvious or unlikely stand out to him. Leads that went nowhere are rediscovered. And sometimes the impossible would quite literally fall in his lap.

  Lawrence is sitting moodily staring into the amber liquid in his glass on the worn table before him in the dimly lit pub. He can still taste the unpleasant burn of the last sip and has no interest in touching it again.

  It is there as a reminder.

  He scowls at the glass, his wide mouth in a sour downturn.

  The more I dig into the McAllister’s past, the more elderly people I interview who were here when the McAllisters lived on the farm, the stranger it all becomes.

  The town was plagued briefly by a serial killer when Jason McAllister was just a boy. Before that, murders and disappearances were conspicuously absent. At least, they were absent when the McAllisters lived at the farm. Somehow the area had bucked the national trend and was an unusually safe place to live.

  William McAllister was the prime suspect in the murders and disappearances of young women and teenage girls. The only reason anyone had to suspect him was his eccentric ways, his aloofness, and complete separation from the community.

  The McAllister family vanished and the killer was identified in the same day. It was not William McAllister, but the people I interviewed all refuse to believe William McAllister is not guilty.

  I poured over the transcripts from the trial and there was undeniable irrefutable proof the sheriff had the right man.

  “So why did they run?” Lawrence asks his glass. “If William McAllister was innocent, then why did he pack up his family and abandon the farm?

  The attention on the family must have been unbearable, but enough to make a man just up and run? Not even selling the property?”

  He can feel the papers in his pocket like a physical presence without moving to touch them. It is a copy of the land title for the McAllister Farm.

  The name on the title is William McAllister.

  “William McAllister is still alive,” Lawrence mutters. “He has to be, or his name would not still be on the title for the McAllister Farm.”

  “Where are you William?” he asks as if the ghost from the past might actually answer. “Where did you go when you left?”

  Lawrence grits his teeth, clears his throat, and makes himself take another swallow of the amber liquor. It burns unpleasantly as it slides down his throat and he bares his teeth at the unpleasant taste, making him look predatory.

  He runs through the interviews and the old news clippings in his mind.

  Anecdotal stories are not proof, but they often prove to hold the seed of truth.

  Lawrence picks up the glass again, tosses the rest of the liquor down his throat, coughs on it, and hurries out, leaving money on the table to pay his tab.

  He gets into his car and drives. It doesn’t take long to find himself heading out a lonely road leading away from the small city.

  He drives on, turning down a gravel road that eventually turns to mud. If it rains he will be stranded, the mud road turned to slop his car could not possibly make it through without getting stuck.

  “How do farmers do it?”

  Finally, Lawrence turns into an overgrown trail through a tall-grassed field that was once the long driveway leading into the McAllister farm.

  His car rocks and bounces over the rough terrain, long grass swooshing against the undercarriage.

  He stops in front of the old farmhouse and turns the engine off, just sitting there.

  He can hear the hissing clicking of insects somewhere.

  Lawrence looks around, taking in the scene.

  He plays it out in his head, the townspeople trespassing with their guns, searching the place, a lynch mob. Marjory McAllister and her kids alone on the farm against a mob, frightened.

  No, Marjory wasn’t as frightened as she seemed. She had an inner strength in her. She would have bravely stood up to them, shielding her children.

  But the boy, Jason, was a kid with an attitude bigger than his size. He got into fights and got into trouble. He would have tried to act the man of the house in his father’s absence.

  Together, woman and boy would have stood their ground, looking at each other from across the yard, full of the strain of fear and either one ready to snap.

  The townspeople were bent on tearing the place apart to prove William McAllister’s guilt. Their daughters were going missing and turning up dead and they were afraid and they needed a monster. They chose William.

  But William showed up. After that the stories became sketchier.

  Lawrence jumps with a yelp at a sudden explosion of sound and motion next to him, in the car with him, flailing his arms instinctively to protect his head.

  He looks around wide-eyed, taking a few moments for the fluttering at his window to register.

  He was startled by a bird that suddenly flew by very close, its wings brushing the window in a brown blur with the loud fluttering of its wings and voicing its complaint over his presence.

  Lawrence shakes his head and looks down at his trembling hands, feeling the fear that still clings inside him and the fast pounding of his heart in his rib cage.

  “Just a bird,” he mutters and silently wonders, what happened to the chickens and other farm animals after William McAllister and his family abandoned them.

  After sitting there for a while longer, Lawrence gets out and starts slowly roaming the yard.

  He wanders to the edge of the trees and tries the shed door. The latch that once allowed it to be padlocked had been pulled out on one end and dangles loosely with the rusting padlock still locked.

  Lawrence tries the door and it has a little give but is stuck because of the rotting wood of the door sagging on the nails holding it to the hinges. He pulls up on the door, lifting it to swing it open enough to peek inside. The dark interior is filled with dusty cobwebs. He spies a large fat wolf spider sitting in one and feels a pang of sickness in his stomach.

  Lawrence lets the door sag back down, its corner resting on the ground and leaving it open, turning away. He moves off across the yard, passing the remains of what had once been a chicken coop, the wire fence torn and sagging, half of it lying tangled in the long grass. He passes the now empty goat pen, its fence boards mostly eaten by rot, many fallen to the ground to be claimed by the grass and weeds. He moves on towards the barn.

  The whole barn sags towards one side, matching the trees that grow as if perpetually blown in that direction. The roof sags in the middle as if it were slowly melting into itself. The windows are cracked and mostly broken out, and there is little peeling paint left to suggest what color it had once been.

  Lawrence hesitates before going inside the barn, pushing back a fear that it will collapse on him.

  “If it stood this long, it’ll stand another hour.”

  The inside of the barn is musty with dust and mould. Even after all these years you can still detect the faint odour of manure and moulding straw.

  The small tractor parked inside the barn would have made a valuable addition to an antique collection if it had not been left to rust when William McAllister abandoned the farm.

  Lawrence
pulls up the memory of the interviews, cracked old voices whispering and angrily charging William McAllister with the most heinous of crimes.

  The barn is the only building on the lot where a man with a family might have had some privacy to do foul deeds without being interrupted.

  He tries to picture it in his mind, the farmer with a young woman tied up, probably gagged, while he mercilessly mutilates his victim. She would stare at him with terror-filled eyes, pleading for her life, haunted with her pain. His wife would be in the house, perhaps baking bread. The kids would be in school.

  Lawrence’s head is filling with cotton. It turns to water, too heavy, freezing to ice, sending blinding hot agony through the center of his head.

  He feels like a scarecrow, hollowed out and stuffed with sawdust and straw, his skin pulled too tight, overstuffed to the point he might burst.

  The barn darkens and Lawrence swoons. He staggers.

  The image of William McAllister torturing young women will not come.

  Lawrence staggers across the barn to a worn and stained workbench.

  Pain-filled eyes stare up at him from behind a dirty bloodied gag, desperately pleading. She is not a young woman, but a child.

  “The boy,” her voice whispers in his head, almost too softly to hear.

  He shakes his head hard.

  “No, this isn’t right,” he mutters.

  The smell of old manure and mouldy hay becomes marginally stronger. Stronger yet is the smell of a freshly oiled tractor. Then the other stench engulfs him, the air reeking of blood and fear.

  Lawrence has to focus. This is about the McAllisters, William and Jason, and coming up with an idea that might lead to finding Michael Underwood, or whoever he really is.

  “Whatever William McAllister was, he was not a monster. He was not guilty of the mutilation and murders the townspeople had been so convinced he was guilty of. I feel it in my very core.”

  Lawrence leaves the barn and wanders the yard, picturing William McAllister and his family. His wife, Marjory, is hanging laundry on a clothes line. The little girl, Sophie, is playing in the yard with a dog. The boy, Jason, is walking across the yard to whatever chores a boy on a farm does. The girl’s laughter dances in the air as William drives his tractor in a distant field.

  Chickens cluck and scratch at the dirt and goats stare at him through the fence of their pen. A cat suns itself lazily, its ear twitching to show that it is paying attention to the sound of a mouse rustling in the straw of the goat pen.

  Lawrence wanders into the house, tearing off one side of the police tape blocking the unlocked door and leaving it to flutter in the breeze. He moves from room to room, the life of the family surrounding him in the tidy home filled with furniture that was already old when they lived here.

  He pauses in the doorway to the small storage room, the trapdoor to the dirt-floored cellar laying flipped open, the blackness below yawning up at him.

  He stares at that square hole. He senses desperation and fear down there, terror and hopelessness. Many invisible hands clawing at the light above that they can never reach.

  A dread chill shivers through him with a sick feeling and he turns away, wandering back outside to the yard.

  The yard goes sullenly silent and still, empty between scenes of the McAllister generations living here.

  Lawrence pictures Jason McAllister, now the young man whose face stared back at him in a grainy photo in an old newspaper, going about puttering around the farm he came back to reclaim.

  The laughter of a child trickles into the scene, a little girl. The ghost of a boy’s voice echoes, barely heard.

  “Don’t do that, you’ll make him mad.” He can hear the anxiety in the voice, the pleading warning.

  He has a sense they are not Sophie and Jason McAllister.

  Lawrence blinks, looking around and feeling stunned, although none of it comes as a surprise to him. It is what he already knows from the interviews.

  There is no doubt in his mind. Jason McAllister, the man who never married or had kids, had two children, a boy and a girl.

  “Where did he get them?”

  13Cleaning House

  Jason McAllister stands in the open doorway looking in at his handiwork. The tiny room that is to be his home still looks depressingly uncared for, but at least it is now clean.

  He had rearranged the narrow cot, dresser, and single chair in an effort to make the most of what little room he has and sunlight now dazzles in through the once grimy window, brightening the previously gloomy room. The crack in the window is a bright slash of refracted light.

  The mould stains are gone from the wall, though the paint is permanently discoloured. The dresser and chair have fewer stains, what remains are too ingrained into the warped wood to scrub out.

  The floor is scrubbed and polished, and all traces of rodent feces are gone.

  “I don’t think I will ever get the unpleasant smell out of the room.”

  Finally, Jason carefully sets and places a couple of mousetraps and roach traps against the wall where the pests prefer to travel, one of each under the bed and by the dresser.

  This is only the beginning of the job. There is still the rest of the house. The whole place is infested with the grime of tenants who think they don’t have to care because they live in poverty. Their individual rooms are their domain, and they don’t care what happens outside their door. It isn’t their problem.

  “It’s just my luck to get roomed with people whose lives of poverty have beaten them into uncaring slobs,” Jason mutters, taking his bucket of cleaning supplies.

  He moves on to the second floor bathroom, scouring the tub and sink. The ever-present strains of country music come from The Cowboy’s closed door. Chunks of grout break off between the tiles on the wall surrounding the tub with the effort of scrubbing them. He picks the chunks up and tosses them on the bathroom floor.

  When he finishes cleaning the bathroom, Jason descends the stairs to the stink of burnt food and rotting garbage.

  Moving down the short hall, he enters the kitchen where the smell is the most powerful.

  The light coming in the kitchen and back door windows is softened by the layer of grime coating the windows.

  It’s a cockroach’s paradise. The sparse counter space is filthy with remnants of past meal attempts and littered with food wrappers and packaging. The stove is so thick with grease and food spatters that he wonders how anyone can cook on it without it catching fire. Someone left a communal pot tossed into the dirty sink. Jason walks over to it and peeks inside. The pot is ruined with what appears to be burnt-on macaroni and powdered cheese product. A large plastic trash pail in the corner is missing its lid, allowing flies and roaches full access to the decomposing trash overflowing it.

  The back door with its smudged six-pane window beckons him.

  With a frown at the filth and stench, Jason unlocks the back door and tries to open it. The door refuses to budge at first, but pops open with a good tug.

  The fresh air is a welcome relief.

  Jason breathes in the fresh air and looks outside. At that moment a neighbour comes out of her house into her back yard. The line of yards all back onto an alley where the driveways and the occasional garage are.

  He watches the woman. She partially disappears from view as she turns back to lock her door, reappearing when she walks through her yard to the cracked concrete of her driveway.

  The all too familiar heat burns in his stomach as he watches her.

  Not now, Jason silently chastises himself. You’ve been good this long. Don’t ruin things now.

  He pushes down the desire to see her eyes staring back at him, so expressive with the fear and pain filling them, begging him to save her even as he torments her; the feel of her warm blood caressing his hands.

  She gets in her car and drives away out of sight to his relief.

  Haven’t done that in four years, Jason reminds himself silently. A few more will be easy. You have to s
tay low, behave.

  He turns his attention to the filthy kitchen.

  Two hours later the kitchen is clean, the open door still airing it out and the sun flows in through the clean clear windows. The strong lemon scent of the disinfectant cuts through the foul smell of rot that still lingers.

  Jason is just coming in from taking the garbage out when he hears the noise of the toilet upstairs flushing, followed by the shower running.

  “Must be The Cowboy,” he mutters with a glance at the ceiling.

  The couple from the hallway earlier come banging in the front door. He hears the man grunt and the woman giggle idiotically.

  He can smell their approach. The stench of skunkweed and other intoxicants cling heavily to them along with body odour and her cheap perfume.

  Jason steps to the kitchen doorway and peers out, watching them stagger to the stairs. The woman hangs off her companion to keep herself from falling off her feet.

  They stumble and stagger up the stairs, one of them falling near the top with a thump. The floor above creaks with their weight and their shoes clomp noisily. There is a thud, presumably one of them falling against the wall, the rattle of the loose doorknob as it is unlocked, and the door banging open heavily against the wall when someone falls into the room.

  The door slams shut and muted thuds can be heard then silence.

  Jason packs up his cleaning supplies. He is beat.

  “The rest can wait,” he mutters, thinking of the living room.

  A door upstairs opens the moment Jason puts his foot on the first step.

  He is halfway up the stairs when he hears the muffled sounds of gagging and moans of disgust.

  “Seriously?” the woman’s voice is slurred and dismayed.

  She is pounding on The Cowboy’s door by the time Jason reaches the top of the stairs.

  The Cowboy’s door opens, releasing the country music, and he pokes his head out. Even after showering, his hair still looks greasy. He has done a sloppy job of shaving his sparsely bearded face. His chin and Adams apple jut out at her and he stares at her groggily as if he is either half asleep or pretending to be in an attempt at looking cool and casual.