“We need to have a talk.”
“Whatever it was, I didn’t do it. And a dog ate my homework.”
Apathy’s mother fidgeted with her wine glass.
“What is it, mum?”
“You never wonder why I called you Apathy?” Emily said suddenly.
“Eh? I know why.” The teenager replied, mystified. “You thought it sounded pretty and you didn’t know what it meant at the time.”
“You really think I’m that dumb?”
“It’s what you’ve always told me. And Amazon is after my grandmother because she terrified people.”
Emily Walton took another drink and screwed her eyes shut. She rubbed her temple. Tucked the loose strand of hair behind her ear. Her daughter waited.
“I don’t know what to say except… none of that’s true. I called you Apathy Amazon because of a joke your father made.”
“What?” Where had this revelation come from? Emily Walton never talked about Apathy’s father. Apart from his name, she knew virtually nothing about her dad. A dozen questions formed in the teenager’s mind but, of course, the dumbest one came out first.
“You named me after a joke? You know how much crap I get at school about what I’m called?”
“Not very funny, huh?” Emily took another swig of wine. Her glass was nearly empty again. “I thought I had a good reason at the time. I’ve had years to dwell on that particular mistake”
“Eh… You’re rambling a bit.”
“I called you Apathy to make it easier for your dad to find you.” Emily’s voice was almost a whisper. “Can’t be two people in the world with that handle.”
“Mum. He ran out on you when you were pregnant and you haven’t seen him since.” Despite the taste, Apathy took another sip of wine. “If he hasn’t turned up by now, I don’t see that he ever will.”
“I used to pray that he would.” Emily stubbed her cigarette out with an angry jab.
“But now that thought scares the shit out of me.”
13
Edinburgh 2000
A white van drew up outside the tower block where Apathy lived. On either side, in bright orange letters, it bore the logo.
BuG: Pest Control
The driver got out and stared up at the multi-storey. Night was falling and yellow squares had begun to stud the concrete façade, as people arrived home from work.
A short man climbed from the back of the van, pulling on a baseball cap as he alighted. On his back was a tank with a hose and nozzle attached. He lit a cigarette, the glow of the struck match illuminating a round, jolly face that matched his physique. He stared up at the tower block.
“Bit of a crappy place to live, Mr Bundy.”
The van driver did a double take.
“Take off the fake beard, Mr Gacy,” he sighed.
“Have you seen how many CCTV cameras are in this area?”
“The caps will hide our faces.”
“Plenty people about too.”
“We’re wearing overalls and driving a van.” Mr Bundy tilted his own cap over his eyes. “Nobody is going to look twice.”
He was right. People were scurrying home, without glancing left or right, carrying shopping bags or bent almost double to combat the biting wind. Even so, Mr Gacy put on a pronounced limp to throw any observers off track.
“They’re not going to notice your face,” Mr Bundy said pointedly as they headed towards the multi-story “But they’ll sure as hell look twice at someone who walks like Long John Silver,”.
“Right. And calling ourselves by the surnames of two famous serial killers isn’t conspicuous?”
“I thought it was funny.”
Mr Bundy switched on a flashlight and played it in front of him. They began to circle the building, Mr Bundy lighting the ground, while Mr Gacy squirted the grass with a foul smelling liquid from the tank on his back.
“How did it go up in Aberdeen, by the way?” Mr Bundy asked.
“Fine,” Mr Gacy replied curtly. “Did my psychic mumbo jumbo. Got a couple of hundred quid.”
“That’s a long way to travel for a small job.”
“I like the sea air.” Mr Gacy gave the ground another squirt, shuddering with revulsion. “Crap! There are ants everywhere, Mr Bundy. I hate ants.”
“This stuff’ll make short work of them.” Mr Bundy wiped both hands on his coveralls, and sniffed his fingers in distaste. “That tank’s leaking, though. Bet it’s all over the back of the van.”
“Don’t worry.” Mr Gacy switched off the bug spray. “I mopped it up with your newspaper.”
“Hey. I hadn’t read it yet.”
“What are you two doing?”
The pair spun round. A woman in a quilted jacket was standing behind them. Underneath, she wore track suit bottoms and slippers.
“Hey there, love,” Mr Bundy replied cheerily. “You the caretaker?”
“He’s not here. I’m his wife.”
“Good enough for me, darling.” Mr Bundy waved a blue form at her. “Pest control. Council sent us over. Some of the residents been complaining about an ant manifestation.”
He indicated the ground.
“Right enough, they’re all over the shop.”
“That was quick.” The woman sounded uncertain. “They only started appearing a couple of days ago.”
Mr Gacy and Mr Bundy glanced at each other.
“And I didn’t know the council worked at night.” The woman narrowed her eyes.
“Contracted the job out to us.” Mr Bundy patted the tank on his companion’s back. “We don’t want to be spraying this nasty stuff around when there are kids out playing.”
“Can you do the laundry room too?” The woman pulled her coat tighter and shivered. “Place is full of the little buggers.”
“Sure thing.” Bundy thrust the form out. “Sign here? Show that we’ve been?”
The caretaker’s wife scribbled her signature at the bottom of the paper and hurried back inside.
“Ants everywhere.” Mr Gacy shook his head in admiration. “You were right.”
“Ain’t I always?” Mr Bundy crumpled up the form and threw it away.
“I just wish to God that, this time, I’d been wrong.”
14
Edinburgh 2000
Emily Walton got up and went to the window. It was night outside now and spatters of rain began to click against the pane and slalom down the dark surface.
“We’re having this conversation because I made a promise to myself,” she said without looking round. “I swore I’d tell you about your father when you reached sixteen. Against my better judgement, I’ll admit.”
She peered into the darkness again.
“But it’s kind of a tradition in my family to drop bombshells on their offspring at that age.”
Apathy held her breath. Her mother had always refused to talk about her dad and, eventually, the teenager had given up asking. But that didn’t mean she didn’t want to know what he was like. She very much wanted to know.
“I’ll make a deal with you.” Emily was still staring into the sodden night. “I’ll tell you as much as I know and I’ll answer your questions as best I can. But you have to accept that you might not like what you hear.
She clutched at the sill, head bowed.
“That includes what I’m about to tell you about myself.”
“Oh, I’m sure I’ll still love you.” Apathy leaned over the back of the couch. “Unless you didn’t get the Nikes I wanted for my birthday.”
Emily pulled the curtains shut and came back to the couch, resting her work worn hands on either side of her daughter’s upturned face.
“Just remember. Your dad’s part of my past. For me, that’s where he stays.”
Apathy put her hand gently over her mother’s.
“You know, you don’t have to tell me if it’s too painful.”
But she didn’t mean what she said and Emily knew it.
“God, I need more wine.” The w
oman pulled her hand away and darted into the kitchen, emerging, seconds later, with another opened bottle. Apathy looked uneasily at her.
“You’re drinking awful fast.”
“I know. And I had a couple of vodkas before I got home.” Emily gave a lopsided smile that turned into a flinch. “I just… I just…”
“Do you hate my dad because he stuck you with me?”
“No, honey!” Apathy’s mother sounded shocked. “I can’t dislike him for that.”
“No. You’d rather forget him for it.”
Emily set the bottle determinedly on the coffee table and blurted out the next sentence before she had another chance to reconsider.
“I’ve always said your father was called Alan Parker and that he was a computer programmer I met when I was living in Manchester.” The words tumbled over each other.
“I know all that. You fell in love. You got pregnant. He dumped you. You moved and never saw him again.”
Emily poured herself more wine. Her hands were shaking so badly now that most of it splashed across the table.
“Mum, this is embarrassing.” Apathy rose to fetch a cloth from the kitchen. Emily grabbed her t-shirt and pulled her daughter back onto the couch.
“Let me tell the truth. While I still have the nerve.”
Apathy nodded silently, not daring to move.
“I made up the story about Alan Parker.” Her mother licked her lips uncertainly. “Your father was actually called Daniel Boone Salty.”
“And I thought I had a daft name.” It was an inane comment but Apathy was too shocked to come up with a witty rejoinder.
“We grew up together. When I met him, I was living in a little town called Rattray. In New Mexico.”
“New Mexico? But that’s in the United States.”
“Yes, it is.”
“I didn’t know you’d even been to America.”
“I lived there all my life… until just before you were born, that is.”
“But… you’re not American.” Apathy tried to get her mind round this next revelation. “You’ve got a Scottish accent.”
“It’s fake.” Emily reached out and gently touched her daughter’s face. “Baby, everything about me is fake.”
“Mum, what are you telling me?”
“Oh God, this was a mistake.” To Apathy’s horror her mother began to cry. “I can’t do this, honey. I thought I could, but I can’t.”
She struggled up from the couch and wine sloshed over the rim of her glass, dribbling down her hand.
“You’re scaring me!” the girl pleaded. “What are you trying to say?”
“I should have done this sober.”
Emily set the wine glass down on the bookcase beside a picture of her infant daughter, misjudging the distance and knocking it over.
“Dammit all to hell! Dammit, dammit!”
“Just talk to me.”
“I need to take a shower. Clear my head.”
Emily paced up and down the living room, a lost look on her face. Tears ran down her cheeks, streaking them with mascara.
“Just give me a few minutes. Please?”
“OK. All right mum.” Apathy was genuinely frightened now.
“Ten minutes.” Emily Walton whirled and almost ran into the bathroom. “And don’t answer the door if anyone knocks.”
Apathy sat rigid on the couch, trying to make sense of what she had heard. Surely this had to be a cruel joke? Only she knew her mother - and Emily wouldn’t do that. Not the night before her birthday.
And, despite the turmoil in her heart, something about the name Daniel Salty nagged at her.
She had heard it before.
Apathy waited until she heard the hiss of the shower then got up, padded quietly into her bedroom and switched on the computer. Connecting with the internet, she Googled the name Daniel Boone Salty. A whole scree of entries came up.
She clicked on the first one and began to read.
Her face drained of all colour and her throat went dry
The Houdini Killer
D.B. Salty is one of America’s most notorious mass murderers. In 1978, at the age of 13, he butchered his mother and father - Alex and Wilma Salty. He killed his mother in the kitchen of their suburban home in Granby, Colorado with a carving knife. Witnesses then saw him chase his father into the street and blast the man in the back with a shotgun. Though police responded within minutes, the teenager was never caught.
In 1995, now aged 30, Salty was identified as the perpetrator of the infamous ‘Diamondback Massacre’. He used a semi-automatic rifle to kill all thirteen inhabitants of the Diamondback Trailer Park in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains – including the family he had been living with. Despite a massive manhunt he, once again, vanished without trace.
These miraculous escapes earned him the nickname the ‘Houdini Killer’
He is still at large to this day.
15
Edinburgh 2000
Apathy sat on the couch, hardly knowing where she was. Finding out her mother had lied about her past was a big enough blow. Discovering her dad was a mass killer. Now, that was a bit much.
She looked up several other web pages before she heard the shower stop and Emily pad into her own bedroom. All the entries told more or less the same story. Then she dashed back to the living room before her mother realised what she was up to.
Emily Walton emerged from her room, transformed. She had put on a plain black dress, reapplied her makeup and tied her hair back. Under one arm she carried a small wooden box. She looked beautiful.
Apathy was ready to let fly with a torrent of angry accusations, but the expression on her mother’s face stopped her. Emily wore a look of sorrowful resignation that both alarmed and moved her daughter.
The teenager held her tongue. Her mother had begun this. She would give her a chance to finish.
“I have a story to tell you,” Emily sat down next to her daughter, curling up bare legs. “It’s a terrible story.”
She opened the box and took out a small, square Polaroid.
“This is my mother. Her name was Louise.”
The picture showed a pretty, broad faced woman with thick black hair, streaked with grey, and a gap between her front teeth. She was standing in front of a trailer, one arm leaning casually against the door. There was a rifle on the ground beside her.
“It’s the only picture she ever let me take of her. She even put the gun down for it.”
“That was good of her.”
Apathy didn’t know what else to say. She had never seen her gran before. Louise had died before Apathy was born and her mother had claimed not to have any images of the woman.
Emily reluctantly handed over the picture, as if she couldn’t bear to part from it, after having hidden it for so long.
“How come she only let you take one snapshot? She’s pretty enough.”
“Photographs were… eh… discouraged in our family.”
Apathy nodded. It was a secretive trait Emily had continued. And she had never seen a photograph of her mother. Emily absolutely would not allow her picture to be taken.
“What’s that behind her?”
Apathy pointed to a dark smudge by the door of the trailer. The mark was too blurred to identify, but its shape reminded the girl of a crouching figure.
“It looks like someone watching her.”
“It’s just a flaw in the developing.” Emily quickly took another photograph from the box and handed it over. This picture was of a group of people enjoying a barbecue. On the far right was a pretty young woman, half turned towards the camera.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Apathy’s mother gave a bashful smile. “From when your dad and I lived in Texas. Didn’t know the picture was going to be taken. Then I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it ‘cause he was in it too.”
She pointed to a young man at the front of the group, looking somewhat startled at being caught by the camera. He had a thin, good looking face and a mass
of wavy hair. Despite his solemn countenance, his eyes were wide and expressive.
“That’s D.B. Salty. The only photograph I have of him. Probably the only photograph anyone has of him.” Her mother reached out to take the picture, and then hesitantly drew her hand back.
“I was ten years old the day I met him,” she said.
“First thing he did was save my life.”
16
Rattray, California
1980
Ten year old Emily Martin stood by the unlit stove, confused and afraid. The kitchen was a place for sandy footprints, lemonade and the hot smell of nearly ready meals. Now the cupboards were open wide, her mother was loading provisions into a cardboard box and a hunting rifle was propped against the fridge. Two hastily packed suitcases were already in the back of their old Buick Station wagon.
“No sense in letting good food go to waste.” Her mother dropped five tins of refried beans into the box.
“Why did you pull me out of school?” Emily demanded for the third time. “Where are we going?”
Louise wished she knew.
“On a trip, babe! I told you.” She tried to sound like it was going to be some big adventure, but the girl could detect a nervy tremor in her mom’s voice. “It won’t be for long.”
“But I was supposed to stay at Alice’s house tonight.”
Alice was a neighbour who looked after Emily when her mother was away, working three day shifts.
“She doesn’t even know you’re home.”
“We’ll call when we get to where we’re going.” Louise said gaily, hating herself for the lie. Her daughter was never going to see her friends and neighbours again.
“I’ll fetch our coats. You put this box in the car.”
She gave Emily a kiss on the head and went upstairs. She pulled weatherproof jackets for them both from the closet and was looking around for anything sentimental she’d forgotten, when she heard a car draw up outside.
Louise dashed to the window and looked out.
Four soldiers in a jeep were parked next to her daughter. One was staring straight up at the window. She saw him glance down at a sheaf of papers in his hand and guessed, immediately, it was her security file.
The Kirkfallen Stopwatch Page 5