Raven Hills- Unraveling Evil

by Tamara Rokicki

  Toward the last pages, she found a picture of Jane Dearing. She knew the woman in the picture was Jane because her name had been scribbled on the page, together with the date: 1933. The black and white photo showed a much younger Jane than the one she’d learned about while researching the death of Virginia Kyle. As a young girl, Jane had pretty curls neatly tucked in a low hanging bun. Her eyes were wide and round, and her smile seemed warm and particularly friendly. Usually, as it was confirmed in many pictures in the album, older generations seemed somber and stiff in their depictions, perhaps a common practice not to smile in photographs.

  But not Jane. Jane’s beaming face appeared bright and welcoming as a crocheted scarf wrapped loosely over her shoulders. Lacey shuddered, wondering what had happened to the poor woman that fateful night in 1953, when she had been kidnapped, and little Virginia murdered.

  Lacey tore herself from the page, reluctantly taking her eyes off Jane’s picture. She flipped to the album’s last page, where she found a large photograph of a town picnic.

  It seemed like a charming afternoon where townspeople gathered together on the lawn. Under the photograph, another year was recorded: 1988.

  Lacey examined each face in the picture, the quality of the print a bit blurry and smudged. She half smiled to herself, finally gazing at a happy and gentle memory in Raven Hills’ history.

  But something in the photograph stuck her as odd. She brought the photo album closer to her eyes, squinting at a figure appearing at the right side of the picture. A woman in her late thirties, maybe early forties, sat by herself on the lawn. Her face was shadowed, a large picnic hat shielding her from the sun—and from view. What appeared odd about her was the peculiar folding of her body as she sat on the grass. Her neck bent at an uncomfortable angle, and her legs stiffly sprawled out before her like a Barbie doll. The woman’s shoulders drooped forward and that’s when Lacey noticed her wrists. Restrained together by some type of rope, they perched on her lap.

  Lacey placed the book back on the table, disturbed by the image. Deputy Morris walked out of the record room, catching her eye.

  “Deputy, do you have a moment?” she called across the library. Under normal circumstances she would’ve never shattered the silent sanctity of a library, but given the three of them were the only ones there, she broke the rule.

  Dutifully, and now snacking on beef jerky, Deputy Morris met her at the table.

  “I wonder if you can tell me who she is,” Lacey asked, pointing to the restrained woman in the photograph.

  Deputy Morris appraised it for a few seconds. “Oh, yes, I remember stories about her. She had some marbles missing, if you catch my drift.”

  “Why is she tied up?” Lacey pressed on.

  “I don’t remember all the details, considering I was very little at that time. But everyone in Raven Hills remembers Libby. She suffered with some type of mental illness and caused trouble wherever she went. More than likely they kept her restrained for her own safety.”

  Lacey closed the photo album and opened her own leather journal. “You said her name was Libby?”

  “That’s correct, miss,” he affirmed. “Libby Kline.”

  “Is she still around?”

  Deputy Morris took a bite of his jerky and mumbled with a mouth full. “Yeah, she’s around, alright. Kicking and screaming and giving the folks at Hope Sanitarium a hell of a time.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  CASE #4 - A DESCENT INTO MADNESS

  1986 - 1988

  Libby Evans was born and raised in the small town of Raven Hills. Her parents and their parents before them had done the same. Pictures of Libby growing up always show her with a smile of perfectly straight white teeth, long shining auburn hair, and sparkling blue eyes. She had a light smattering of freckles on her cheeks which added to the charm and innocence exuding from her image. In most of these photos she is surrounded by friends, happy, active, and blissfully unaware of what the future would hold for her.

  She graduated high school in 1972 and chose to stay in Raven Hills, where she married her high school sweetheart, Paul Kline. He worked as a mechanic for his father at Kline Autobody, and after they got married Libby began working there at the counter. They weren’t wealthy, but in a few years after saving and living with Paul’s parents, they were able to buy their own home. They bought a modest but pretty place in town, with the Derbys on one side of them and the Loughtons on the other. It wasn’t anything grand, but it had a third bedroom everyone assumed would become a nursery.

  Time passed by, but no baby came, and Libby used the extra room as an art studio. She often invited guests inside to see the paintings she had done, gave them as gifts, and even sold them on occasion at town events. Most of these works of art were lovely and showed nature scenes and wildlife. The change in her art would be the first time people began to really see something disturbing in sweet Libby.

  Just a few years after purchasing their new home, Libby would meet with the realtor, Benny Shie, and ask him if they would be able to put the house on the market. Mr. Shie said she’d explained that after living there for a time, she just didn’t feel it was the right place anymore. He asked her to be more specific, but she evaded his question and instead asked him again if it would be possible to relist the house.

  “I told her of course we could, but they would be taking quite a hit financially, and it was really more of a buyer’s market at the time. I think her husband talked her out of it in the end. She didn’t contact me again after that,” Mr. Shie reported.

  Slowly the majestic mountain scapes and serene forests Libby had painted in the past gave way to toothy black demons and orange fires. Scenes of children playing in fields of flowers became gruesome depictions of terrible deaths. Those who loved her asked what had prompted the change in her, but Libby remained cryptic, once stating to her friend Rita Hodges, “Evil surrounds us all, hidden behind friendly eyes. The wolf disguised in sheepskin.”

  Her husband confided in his coworkers that he believed something had happened to Libby and she was afraid to talk about it. According to Bryan Lippert, who also worked at Kline Autobody, “Paul said one day he came home, and she was in the tub with steaming hot water, scrubbing her skin raw, insisting that she had been tainted by somethin’. He said he had to drag her out of the scaldin’ water while she was screamin’ at him to help her get ‘cleansed’.”

  Libby left her house less and less, no longer working with her husband. When she did venture out, her neighbors expressed concern for her. Her auburn hair would be matted from neglect and her clothing had clearly been worn for days. On more than one occasion she showed up at Kline Autobody frantic and asking for her husband.

  Mr. Lippert remembers one incident very clearly. “She came here lookin’ like she came out of some horror movie! She had no shoes on, wearin’ just a long T-shirt and a robe. Her ears were bleedin’ and she was screaming about a demon whisperin’ to her, givin’ her evil thoughts. I thought she fell and busted her head at first. I found out the next day from Paul she had stuck paintbrushes in her ears! Can you believe it? Just went plum crazy, that’s what happened to Libby Kline. Shame, too. Growin’ up she sure was a pretty one, and sweetest girl you ever met. Damn shame, it’s a damn shame.”

  It was clear after this incident that Libby could no longer be left to her own devices, and someone always needed to be with her. Paul was reluctant to send her away and held out hope that things would improve. The Klines were well loved, and the community rallied around them. A rotating schedule was created where friends and neighbors would come and spend the day with Libby so Paul would be able to keep working. This seemed to work well until Mrs. Lewis showed up with her four-year-old son, Tobias. Libby answered the door, and upon seeing Tobias flew into a manic episode, screaming at Mrs. Lewis and her son to, “Get the hell out of here!”

  Mrs. Lewis was stunned, Libby having previously been affectionate toward Tobias. She stood frozen, looking at Libby, not quite knowing what
she should say or do. Finally, apparently losing patience, Libby picked the boy up by his arm and carried him out to the sidewalk, dropped him there and ran back to her house, locking herself inside. Those with children to look after took themselves off the schedule.

  Paul Kline looked as if he was fading away along with his wife’s sanity. He became thin, his eyes sinking back deep into his face. He took his wife to see doctors, certain she could be cured of whatever afflicted her. He didn’t want to believe the diagnosis they insisted upon: paranoid schizophrenia.

  As Libby progressed deeper into her delusions, the people so eager to help them became too scared to stay with her. Paul took a leave of absence from Kline Autobody and stayed home with Libby full time.

  Several weeks passed from the time Paul took his leave of absence to the day that Libby ran screaming and crying from the house. Too frightened to approach her, the neighbors called the police. Detective Cliff Bennett responded and found Mrs. Kline outside the fence of her front yard, sobbing into her hands. As he approached her, she looked up at him with eyes filled with sorrow. “It was me, but it wasn’t me. It was the whispers. They wouldn’t stop, I tried…they wouldn’t stop.”

  Detective Bennett then waited with Mrs. Kline for backup and an ambulance to arrive. He tried to ask her more questions but she would only repeat, “The whispers, whispers…” and offered no coherent responses.

  When Libby was finally in the care of the responding EMTs, Detective Bennett entered the Kline residence, his officers behind him. He had responded to violent crimes in the past and he felt he had prepared himself for what he would find. He would later reveal that this assumption of readiness was wrong.

  “What we found in that house, it shook me to my core. She had scrawled over all the walls—crazy occult nonsense. She had at some point become obsessively frightened of her neighbors, the Derbys. All the windows of the residence were painted black and nailed shut. She had several sketches on the walls of some kind of monster. We tried to make sense of it all but, you know, there’s no explaining crazy,” he would report.

  However, there was more to find in the house. As Detective Bennett went farther into the home, he began to wonder, where was Mr. Kline? As they neared the kitchen, the lawmen encountered the fetid, distinctive smell of rot. They found the refrigerator and freezer open, the food having all gone bad, maggots squirming in the old meat, and flies swarming around them as they walked through the room, careful to avoid the trash and broken dishes on the floor.

  They ultimately found Paul Kline in his bed, his body propped up with pillows so he appeared to be sitting. He was wearing a T-shirt and blue sweatpants. While the rest of the house was an homage to Libby’s unstable mental state, this room was immaculate, and so were Paul’s state of dress and body. He appeared to have been dead for some time, and the medical examiner would confirm later that he had indeed been dead since the first week of his leave of absence. From what was found at the scene, it appeared that Libby had used rat poison and killed her husband. After his death she had bathed him, dressed him, and put him to bed. She would later say that she was trying to protect and take care of him. That the whispering she heard was threatening Paul and she had seen a man-shaped black cloud following him.

  No one had any doubt that Libby Kline was not fit to stand trial. The entire town knew that she had been mentally ill. Doctor Tucker recommended she be committed to Hope Sanitarium, and the district attorney agreed. Libby Kline remains a patient there to this day, and though she has at times gained some brief clarity—during which she wallows in the grief of what she has done—even with the heavy medications she has not fully recovered her mind.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The sun hung low in the horizon, casting a reddish hue over the town of Raven Hills. Lacey observed the irregular comings and goings from the porch wrapping around Saddle Inn. Sitting in a rocking chair, a glass of cold iced tea in hand, she thought of Libby Kline, the poor woman who had gone off the deep end.

  She couldn’t shake the warning sensation in the humid air. The hair at the base of her neck curled in a damp sheen, the temperature rising each day as summer neared. She wondered what she’d do once back home in the city. Lacey imagined herself poring over files to be archived at Crestwater Press, while every other journalist continued to climb the career ladder of success. Maybe after covering this story on Raven Hills, she’d get a real shot. Mr. Pert could be amazed at her journalistic skills, finally realizing what a gem he had under his nose all this time. Surely, a bizarre town like Raven Hills had all the makings of a good story. Coverage on the peculiar and gruesome murder of Virginia Kyle on Halloween night of 1953; the burning down of a church by the town’s hooligans; a little orphan girl abandoned in the woods; and now the grotesque murder of Mister Kline at the hands of his wife Libby—all made a spectacular stage to write the finest magazine article ever.

  Still, Lacey wallowed in a strange sense of disappointment. Although being a journalist had been her dream since she was a little girl, somehow Raven Hills had become more than a springboard to success. Too many things seemed odd about this place, and as these cases came to the surface, she couldn’t shake off the looming dread.

  She thought it was time to call Mister Pert, and to find out exactly whom he had talked to when booking Brian a room at the Saddle Inn. Although no one in town would admit to knowing about Brian, she started to believe that notion less and less. The chances of a different reporter coming to Raven Hills, owning and dropping the pen with Crestwater Press logo on the road were less than slim. Brian had been here, alright, but where was he now? Had something terrible happened to him?

  A sudden chill wrapped around her despite the muggy late afternoon heat. Goosebumps trailed the length of her body and she felt watched. She looked around, starting to the left and down the road as far as she could see from the porch. No one there. Her gaze trailed slowly to her right, taking in the quiet calmness of the day. Only a lonely tumbleweed rolled down the road, dirt whirling upward as the wind gently blew. The sway of a pine tree in front of the Smythe home across the street…and two dark eyes.

  Lacey nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “Jeez, kid!” she shouted, her heart lodged in her throat.

  The little girl she had seen at breakfast on the first morning here stood nearly three feet from her. Lacey relaxed her hands, noting her knuckles turning white from clutching the chair’s armrest so tightly.

  “You scared me,” Lacey said, attempting a smile.

  The girl’s somber face simply looked back at her, blinking slowly and unapologetically.

  “What are you doing here?” Lacey asked, once again giving the little girl a once-over. She still wore her play dress, the black lace overlay showing dirty and crumpled. It reminded her how she, too, wore her favorite dress for days at a time when she was little.

  “I was waiting for you,” the girl replied. “I want to show you something.”

  Lacey bit her lip, considering she had little time to entertain the girl, but feeling a strange pull to her. Why did the girl seem so lonely?

  “Will you tell me your name?” Lacey attempted again, remembering the girl had not revealed it during their first meeting.

  “Ginny,” the girl answered.

  Thankful the girl was starting to warm up to her, Lacey stood from the rocking chair. “Okay, Ginny, what do you want to show me?”

  The girl stood there for a long moment, as if considering where to start. Finally, she began walking down the porch, glancing over her shoulder at Lacey.

  Dutifully following her, Lacey walked behind Ginny. As they walked down the road, Lacey observed the setting sun, now a bright orange orb disappearing into oblivion.

  Minutes later, they both stood in front of Derby’s Soap Shop. The store sign dangled on the glass door, big red letters spelling: Closed.

  “Have you been here before?” Ginny asked, her melodic voice soft but cryptic.

  Lacey looked over at her and smil
ed, remembering Mister Derby’s fervent need to discover her favorite scent. When she had told him the smell of freshly popped popcorn delighted her, a warm smiled had tugged on his face. “I have. Mister Derby is nice, isn’t he?”

  The girl didn’t reply but continued to gaze ahead at the shop door.

  “Is this what you wanted to show me? The soap shop?” Lacey’s brows furrowed.

  The girl simply nodded and Lacey wondered why Ginny would want to go in there. Then, taking in the girl’s less than squeaky clean condition, she wondered if maybe her family couldn’t afford everyday cleaning needs. The notion seemed odd, however. Raven Hills very much gave her the vibe of “we take care of our own”—maybe a bit too much. Why wouldn’t someone look after the little girl if she truly was neglected? No, that didn’t seem right. Ginny was a little grimy, like most kids her age playing outside, but parental neglect didn’t seem fitting. So she tried a different approach.

  “Have you been in there with your mom or dad before? It’s nice in the shop, right? With all those sweet scents…”

  Ginny nodded and it gave Lacey the reassurance the girl had parents looking after her. With that in mind, she realized the hour was growing late.

  “Ginny, I have to go,” Lacey explained with a frown. She didn’t really want to leave the child, not when her brown eyes looked up at her with hidden emotions. “I want to go to Hope Sanitarium. Do you know where that is?”

  Ginny nodded.

  “Great, maybe you can point me in that direction?”

  Ginny looked down at her feet and kicked a little pebble. “Pass the church, cut through the clearing in the woods, and you’ll find it.”

  Lacey leaned over the girl, her gaze leveling hers. “Thanks, kiddo. And I promise, tomorrow I will take you to Mister Derby’s shop.” She nodded at the store. “Maybe we can find your favorite scent, too.”