by L V Gaudet
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she shrieks at him.
“What?” He seems totally oblivious to her problem.
Her bracelet bobbles jangle on her wrist as she points at the offending bathroom.
“The bathroom!” Her voice is shrill, annoying. “Gross!”
“So?”
She huffs in exasperation at him. “Well, I ain’t cleaning it up,” she complains.
Jason pauses at the top of the stairs, observing this exchange.
They’re like a couple of bloody teenagers.
He comes down the hall towards them, seeing more of The Cowboy when he gets to his door. He is shirtless and wearing worn jeans that are overdue for the laundry. He is scrawny, his limbs seeming longer for it, probably eating at most once a day. Jason suspects he is behind the burnt pot left tossed carelessly in the sink. Behind him, his room is tossed like a salad of clothes and litter. A pair of worn cowboy boots lay carelessly on the floor and a misshapen cowboy hat sits on the dresser.
He has every hallmark of a wannabe a cowboy of the worst kind; the kind who uses it as an excuse for being a useless jerk, a pretence of being too tough to care.
Hell, that old goat we had would eat him up and spit him out. Jason thinks back to that cranky old animal he had the misfortune as a boy of having to care for and try to milk every day.
He moves past the scene in the hallway and reaches the bathroom. He smells it before he reaches it. Jason stops at the bathroom doorway, halted by what he sees.
The man exploded on the toilet. The foul spray spewed backwards, splattering the toilet, floor, and wall behind it with sickly brown liquid feces. Fouled toilet paper drapes one side of the toilet seat and the brown sludge sits mockingly in the bowl.
He hadn’t even bothered to flush.
The Cowboy made no effort to clean his mess other than to shower his feces off his own backside. The shower curtain and wall is smudged with a few brown smears. The smell of rotting intestines and shower steam still fills the bathroom.
The woman is screeching at The Cowboy to go clean up his mess, swearing at him and calling him insulting names.
The Cowboy is just standing in his doorway, smirking that lazy sleepy half smirk as if she is describing some incredibly boring event in her life to him.
Jason’s stomach twists at the revolting scene in the bathroom.
“Go clean it up!” she screeches again.
“Not my problem,” The Cowboy drawls, his voice sounding as fake sleepy as he looks.
He moves backwards as he closes the door.
Jason’s hand firmly on the door stops it.
“What?” The Cowboy sneers, somehow looking annoyed, casual, sleepy, and alarmed all at once. He looks at Jason.
The woman steps back; unfortunately not far enough to take her unpleasant odour out of Jason’s nose.
Jason stares The Cowboy down, his eyes hard and face expressionless.
“It’s not my problem, man,” The Cowboy mutters in his defence.
“Clean it up,” Jason says, his voice low and level with just the barest edge of warning behind it.
The woman stands back, looking smug.
The Cowboy stares at him defiantly, looking a little less sleepy.
“Not my problem,” he repeats and attempts to step back and close the door again.
Jason steps forward into The Cowboy’s space, straddling the doorway and pushing the door open against the scrawny man’s attempts to close it.
Alarm flashes across The Cowboy’s face.
“Hey, get outta here man,” he squeaks, trying to sound tough. “What’s your problem?”
“Clean. It. Up.” Jason’s voice is low and clipped.
“Bugger off,” The Cowboy squeaks. “You clean it. It’s not my problem.”
He quickly changes tactic at the flash of anger in Jason’s eyes.
“They got someone that comes in to do that stuff,” he complains.
Before The Cowboy knows what hit him, Jason’s hands punch forward, grabbing him roughly and tearing him from the safety of his room. Jason spins them both around, using his momentum to keep The Cowboy off balance, and slams him into the wall across from the doorway hard enough to make the scrawny man wheeze for air.
The Cowboy tries to shrink down, but is held in place by his attacker.
The woman stares in shock, trembling with excitement and fear at the sudden unexpected burst of violence.
“Clean. It. Up.” Jason repeats softly. He releases The Cowboy and turns away, walking past the soiled bathroom to his own room.
The pair in the hallway stare at him mutely while he unlocks his door, goes in, and closes it behind him.
Minutes later Jason hears the muffled sounds of The Cowboy gagging on his own filth as he fights back tears while he scrubs his feces from the bathroom.
The stinky woman retreats to use the bathroom downstairs, hoping to sneak back into her room without having to see either man.
The Cowboy disgusts her. The other man sent a sharp cold dread through her.
Jim dials a number and waits through a few rings before a voice answers on the other end. It’s a bad connection and it’s impossible to tell what gender the recipient of the call is.
“Hey, it’s Jim. What’s he doing?”
“Cleaning,” the voice says, followed by a chuckle.
“He sick?”
“You bet. They don’t screen these places or the tenants. Hey, how long do I have to stay here and watch him? This place is disgusting.”
“It won’t take long. I’m going to put the pressure on, force him to make a move. When he moves, I’ll be on him. He’s going to lead us to Michael Underwood, or whoever the hell he really is.”
“Make it fast. I’m going to have to be deloused when I leave here.”
“Couple days, that’s all,” Jim says and hangs up.
14Only More Questions
Lawrence Hawkworth is sitting on the couch in his apartment. The large coffee table in front of him is covered with copies of news clippings, reports, and his notes. He is staring intently at the mess before him as if the answer will somehow seep from the pile of papers into him.
The only thing he is getting is more questions.
Who is Michael Underwood and what does he have to do with Jason McAllister?
Where did the McAllisters go when William took his family and vanished? Where are the rest of the McAllisters now? William is alive, but his wife Marjory could be dead by now. They could be locked up in some seniors’ home. What happened to the daughter, Sophie?
There have been no attempts by any of the McAllisters to contact or visit Jason McAllister after his arrest. None showed up to the trial.
It’s as if none of them exist, or if they do, they are either unaware of what happened or for whatever reason chose to stay far away. The world knows about the women, the graves, and the trial. Have they disowned Jason for some reason? Completely blocked him from their lives?
Lawrence’s thoughts keep coming back to one thing, the kids.
More than one witness claimed that Jason McAllister returned to the McAllister Farm as a young man some years after their family abandoned it. No one knew how long he was there before anyone noticed. That was agreed on.
The next question is not so simple. They didn’t know when the rumour started or who started it, but whispers began spreading in town. There were two children living at the farm with Jason McAllister.
The old sheriff, Rick Dalton, visited the McAllister Farm to find out. Apparently he found no children, but the rumours persisted for years.
If Jason did have two kids living on that farm, nobody has actually seen them that I could find, and they did not exist legally.
The young Jason McAllister was just as reclusive and protective of his privacy as his father had been. No one dared go down that stretch of road towards the McAllister Farm.
It would not have been hard to keep two children secret. But why? Where did they com
e from?
They were real. They were there. Every way I play it out in my mind, every imagined possibility to explain why he returned and what he was doing there, every vision I run through my head of the adult Jason McAllister living on the farm, those two kids are like ghosts haunting my thoughts. A boy and a girl; just like the McAllister children.
They were there. It feels right.
“Who are they and where did he get them?” Lawrence asks the papers spread before him.
He has a thought. “Were they his?”
The thought starts to grow. On a hunch, he gets up and goes to the coat closet by the apartment door.
Opening the closet door, he studies its contents. It is filled with banker boxes. The boxes are filled with copies of reports, statements, newspaper clippings, and interview notes; a treasure trove of saved research from a lifetime spent as an investigative reporter.
These are files Lawrence inherited.
He studies the boxes thoughtfully.
“I have the feeling that somewhere hidden in the past is the answer. There is no better place to start.”
15Proof William is Alive
Lawrence has spent hours searching through the boxes of old files looking for any references to missing children and feels drained and wrung out, his head in a fog of names and dates and dated photos.
The buzzing of the door buzzer interrupts him like a rude alarm clock. Not expecting it, Lawrence looks up with a startled expression to stare at the door.
He gets up stiffly and goes to the intercom on the wall, pressing and holding the button.
“Hello,” he says into the intercom, then releases the button.
“It’s Jim,” a voice crackles at him through the poor intercom feed.
Lawrence presses and holds the button down. “Come up.” He presses the other button and holds it for a few moments. Downstairs, the inner door at the main entrance unlocks while a buzzer bleats.
Minutes later Jim is knocking on Lawrence’s door.
Lawrence peeks out through the peephole even though he knows who is on the other side before opening the door.
It takes him a few moments to unlock and remove the assortment of locks, bars, and anti-home invasion devices.
Jim eyes the security features as he closes the door behind him.
“You’ve gotten more paranoid since the last time I’ve been here,” he says. “You added a few more.”
Lawrence shrugs. “Some people don’t like the questions I ask.”
Being an investigative reporter, Lawrence gets the odd threat against his well-being. Being an investigative reporter who has a tendency to dig a little too deep, take his investigations a little too far, and write stories without bias or consideration for whether it’s moral, he sometimes gets more than the average number of threats. This is probably not a good thing, since Lawrence is also a coward.
Jim nods to the mess. “Research?”
Lawrence nods. “I’m sure Jason McAllister had two kids. They would be adults now. Coffee?”
Lawrence is already moving towards the small kitchen.
“If you don’t have anything stronger,” Jim says.
“There’s no record of him ever having kids,” Jim says doubtfully.
“I’m trying to find out where he got them,” Lawrence calls out from the kitchen. “More than one interviewee told me about a rumour that started some months after he came back to the farm the first time. A rumour he had a couple kids there.”
“So where do you think they came from?”
Lawrence refills his cup and pours another for Jim. The coffee in the pot is hours old and will taste burnt from sitting on the warming element too long.
“They could be his or a girlfriend’s kids. I can’t find any record of his ever having any, but that doesn’t rule out a girlfriend.”
Lawrence returns to the living room, handing Jim a coffee. Jim scowls at it before he even takes a sip.
“My best guess is he kidnapped them or got stuck with them unintentionally and didn’t know what to do with them,” Lawrence continues. “I just don’t know why. It doesn’t seem to fit the man.”
Jim raises an eyebrow. “He doesn’t seem the daddy type to me. Do you have any theories why he would kidnap a couple of kids?”
“I doubt it would have been on purpose. Do you remember the murders and disappearances of young women in the area when Jason McAllister was just a kid? The townspeople were convinced his father William McAllister was guilty. The McAllisters fled and the sheriff caught the killer. It was not McAllister.”
“Okay, so?” Jim’s curiosity is piqued now.
“Check that file there,” Lawrence points to a stapled set of papers. They are crisp white against the age-yellowed papers around them.
Jim picks it up and starts skimming through it.
“What’s this?” he asks, although it is all too clear what it is.
“An autopsy report,” Lawrence says.
Jim skims through the report with a puzzled frown.
“The body is described as being so decomposed there was little more than a few bits of bones and hair fibres. The body was carefully wrapped; almost lovingly. The report describes the remaining shreds of cloth wrapping it. To their joy there had been remnants of hand and foot bones with nails still intact. That joy quickly faded when bacterial analysis and microscopic study failed to find any viable evidence under the nails. They had resorted to testing the soil itself. No cause of death could be discerned.”
“So what’s your take from this?” Jim asks. “Why this report? This girl?” The girl is a young woman, barely out of her teens.
“That’s one of your graveyard bodies from the woods.” Lawrence points at the report in Jim’s hand. “She is one of the missing women from back then who was never found.”
He pauses. “I guess someone has to break the news to her family.”
“How did you get this?” Jim looks up at Lawrence. The other victims of the decades old serial killer case had been exhumed from their family plots after the discovery of the graveyard in the woods to be re-tested for whatever traces the magic of modern science can discover.
Lawrence shrugs. “I have my sources.”
Jim humphs. Someone leaked the report to the reporter against department policy. This is a new question for Jim now.
“Another man killed the women who disappeared around town back then. There was no connection between him or his victims to the McAllisters, except for unfounded suspicions. Jason McAllister was a child then. The killer dumped the bodies carelessly, sloppily. So why is this one body different? Why was only this one body so carefully buried in the massive hidden graveyard in the woods beyond the McAllister farm?”
“Could he have left the body too close to the farm, forcing William McAllister to dispose of it? What was he hiding up there besides that graveyard? Odds are, if the body was left dumped in those woods, the graveyard would never have been found and the body scavenged by animals until there was nothing left.”
“Where are you going with this?” Jim asks.
“I was looking for another body; one that has not been found yet.”
“Who?”
“Amy Dodds, the only child that vanished around that time.”
“The profilers didn’t think the kid was a victim of the same killer as the women.”
“Neither do I.”
“What are you thinking?”
“What’s the difference between that woman in your hand and the others who local to the area?”
Jim thinks about it, sifting through notes in his mind, trying to pull up the memory of those cases from well before his time. He had pulled the files and gone over them after the discovery of the graves in the woods. The first thing he did was investigate any disappearances and murders in the area going back decades.
Jim looks up at Lawrence.
“They were sloppy,” he says. “Every one of them, the bodies, the dump sites, the burials even, were sloppy. The
killer made some efforts to cover his tracks and lead investigators in the wrong directions, but it was done so haphazardly that a child could have done better. He left clues and evidence all over the body dump sites and the bodies themselves.
The very first notes on the case by Sheriff Rick Dalton are his opinion the killer was a man with a low IQ.”
“This one,” he waves the report in his hand, “is different. The body was buried in the hidden graveyard. The disposal was expert, like the rest of the graves.”
“Exactly!” Lawrence squawks excitedly, his hand snapping out to point at Jim. “Someone covered up this one killing, but only this one. Why?”
Jim shrugs. “We know Jason McAllister has to have some connection to the graves. We just can’t prove it. Most of the graves were dug before his time. Before his father’s time even.”
He thinks it out, shifting pieces of the puzzle around in his head, rearranging them.
Jim meets Lawrence’s eyes again.
“He learned it from the master. This woman vanished when Jason McAllister was just a child. She was expertly buried. There’s no way a child could have done that.”
“Exactly!” Lawrence crows. “His father!”
Jim nods, “So William McAllister was connected to the graves long before his son. We suspected that.”
Further understanding dawns in a natural sequence of events.
“The bodies were dumped randomly around the area. I’m willing to bet this body was dumped too close to the McAllister farm. William McAllister could not risk the police searching the area with the secret graveyard beyond his farm and who knows what could be hidden on his property, so he disposed of the body where he assumed it would never be found again.”
He frowns.
“But none of the bodies exhumed could be linked to either McAllister. They were apparently burying the bodies, but they were not killing them.”
“Except one.” Lawrence pauses to give it time to sink in. “Amy Dodds.”
“You think William McAllister killed Amy Dodds?” Jim asks doubtfully. “It’s possible, but why her? Why only her?”
“Jason McAllister,” Lawrence says with a wolfish grin. “His father may have only buried the bodies, but I think Jason is a killer. I think the Dodds girl was his first. That’s why the McAllisters ran.”