by Rod Kackley
That new reality was the sound of footsteps coming down the wooden stairs. The hard, slow steps of the animal who had imprisoned her, who raped her, who beat her and then left her chained in the corner to await his next visit.
He gave her food. After the third day, she began to eat. It is not that she wanted to, but whatever it was that drove her soul, that filled the vessel that was her body, wouldn’t let her not eat. Even as bad as it had become, the woman still was a human being, and that meant she still had a survival instinct. Her DNA knew there was no way she could live without eating. It would not let her die, at least not that way.
She ate the cold table scraps that were left twice a day. She drank the dirty water set beside the metal plates of what passed for food, and then she peed and shit in the bucket that was set close enough for her to get on top of while chained.
Other than that, she sat and drifted in her mind. She went back to the time when the sun was shining. The days when she was playing in the backyard with her older brothers, who she hated at the time but now loved with all her heart. She walked to school with the other kids, St. Isidore Elementary.
Laughter and smiles, happy voices; kids like her were everywhere, the products of the lust of their baby boomer parents. It seemed they never stopped laughing, smiling, just enjoying life, loving life.
But she could only remain in that state of mind when her hands covered her eyes. If she heard a scurrying sound in the basement or a toilet flushing upstairs, she lost the fantasy. And she was back.
And she would cry.
Other times when she was left alone and opened her eyes, the woman set to the one task which occupied her time in what she realized had to be a basement in one of the houses in St. Isidore; she began again scratching her name into the cinder block with a sharp stone.
This one was the fourth cutting stone she had used. The others had broken in her fingers, cutting her as they shattered. The blood that flowed from her fingertips dried on her hands, just as the blood had dried on her forehead after she banged her skull against the basement prison wall in a failed attempts to escape by suicide or at least the bliss of unconsciousness.
With this fourth stone, she went back to work scratching her name into the cinder block. She finished.
Janice.
Ten
Tim couldn’t help pumping his chest out as he drove to school. He looked out the driver’s side and passenger windows of his Chevy Lumina not to check out the young girls and their moms driving to class like he usually did.
This time, Tim wanted them to check him out.
Tim was as proud as any middle-aged high school biology teacher could be. He had done it. He had followed through on the kind of internet fantasy game that losers played and made it real.
Janice was in his basement, chained to the wall, living out her fantasy, too. It was just the kind of scene they had chatted about online for what seemed like forever to Tim.
The first couple of nights, Tim was almost afraid he had gone too far. She cried. Janice screamed. She fought against the restraints that held her first on her back spread-eagled, and then over the padded whipping and spanking bench that Tim had built for him by the St. Isidore High School woodworking class.
Tim didn’t hear Janice use the safe word they had agreed to use online, so he just kept going. And this morning, he was glad he did. The previous night had been rough. But last night, he could tell she was getting into it. Janice was enjoying it.
Tim was a happy man, today. He was so far above the losers he chatted with online; the dreamers, the posers, the stupid guys who could only fantasize about what he was doing.
What I should do is bring the computer downstairs, set up the video cam, and give those Bozos a real treat, Tim thought to himself as he waited on South DeVos Avenue for the traffic light to go green.
That would be so hot, and I know Janice would get into it, too. Down the road, maybe we could make some money at this. We could sell subscriptions, or do some pay-per-view. We'd build on her business. I'm sure she'd be into that.
Of course, I would wear a hood. Wouldn’t be right for a St. Isidore High School teacher to get caught doing porn for cash. But then again, if we made enough, I could buy the fucking high school or, at least, get out of the town.
Horns honking behind Tim snapped him out of his dream about becoming an internet porn tycoon just before the light went back to red.
He punched it, got the light on yellow, and left everyone behind him, fuming and pounding their steering wheels, stuck at another red light.
Assholes.
While he drove, Tim slid back into his memories of last night, so much better than his fantasies and proudly tented his khakis, as he pulled into the Swinging Izzy High School parking lot.
Winter holding St. Isidore in a snowy, icy grip, but the bravest of the girls had already gone for tank tops, shorts, and flip-flops.
“God I love this,” Tim muttered to his dashboard as he parked the Lumina and just sat behind the wheel, sipping on a Starbucks, watching the pedestrian traffic.
So many little butts, so little time, Tim thought to himself. But he had grown tired of the teeny twat as he and his best friend, Paul described the high school girls.
Every time they got one of the girls to go out with them, in exchange for the booze Tim could buy for them, or the weed Officer Paul Desmond would swipe from the St. Isidore Police Department evidence room, the scene had turned into a disaster.
“I don’t think these girls have the internet at home,” Paul said as he and Tim were hanging another dead, naked girl up on a tree branch in the St. Isidore Forest.
“You could be right, buddy,” Tim said. “None of them seem to have a clue.”
“But this is okay,” said Paul as he and Tim hopped out of the tree, and on the ground stared up at the bare feet of their latest date.
“Oh yeah,” Tim said. “This is even better than okay.”
Tim spent the day with half his brain wrapped behind his back, and it went gloriously. Nothing those stupid kids can do now to piss me off, he realized; not with Janice waiting for me in the basement, my one true love.
It’s not like the kids didn’t try. The usual note-passing, laughing, back-talking shit that all teachers put up with, at least, all of the teachers at St. Isidore High. The smoke-filled teachers' lounge, where old man Watson, the principal let them ignore the district’s new anti-tobacco policy, was filled with men and women counting down the days to their retirement, dreaming up ways to kill these stupid kids if only they had the guts.
Tim couldn’t help but smile at their infantile murder schemes. A couple of them mentioned hanging the bodies up in St. Isidore Forest. But whichever teacher brought it up did so with a sheepish smile and a forced laugh, praying no one took him seriously enough to call the cops.
Tim lifted his eyebrows and gave one teacher a wink when she gulped nervously after making a comment about teenagers’ bodies swinging in trees.
“I would love to take her into the forest and teach her a couple of lessons about dealing with these kids,” Tim said to his dashboard on the way home.
He was lost in thought thinking about the two of them stripping a couple of the girls in his class naked and then fucking their brains out under the dangling bodies.
I need to get Janice to bring some of her friends over to our dungeon in the basement, Tim thought. We could make this fantasy come true. I need to give that some more thought.
Of course, that led him to another daydream about what he could do with Janice tonight. Just as Tim was jamming his hard cock into her mouth—in his mind's eye—while she knelt naked and bound before him, horns starting honking.
Fuck, Tim thought as he glanced up at a telephone pole beside the light he just missed.
"What the hell?"
A piece of paper stuck on the pole set off alarms in Tim's head that were louder than any idiot's car horn.
Fuck and double fuck. Janice’s picture was stapled t
o the pole. It was no fantasy. It was real life And it was not good.
“Who the fuck would put her picture up on a telephone pole?” he asked the dashboard.
The answer came to him quickly, as soon he saw the word “MISSING” typed in big, bold letters on his woman’s face.
Tim had not had to deal with people searching for his girls before this. Every other time Tim murdered the girls, he had done it before anyone noticed the girls were gone. This time, he was hiding his girl, and it would take a whole new skill set to keep her hidden.
It was a part of the fantasy Janice and Tim had not discussed online. They had not seen this coming.
A smartphone call from Paul broke his train of thought.
“Fuck,” Tim said as he punched the icon to talk to his best friend. “Speak.”
“We have trouble, Tim, a big problem. Her parents showed up at the HQ. Screaming, crying, demanding we find their little girl. It is wrong Tim. It is awful.”
“Oh Jesus, like I don’t know it. I am sitting here looking at the bitch’s picture on a fucking telephone pole right now.”
“It’s on Facebook too. It could go fucking national.”
“Who the fuck did that?”
“Her friends, I don’t know, they’re all on Facebook.”
“Well, if they don't find her in the next day or two, maybe this will all blow over.”
“Be real. As hot as Janice is, everyone will be looking for her. She’s not just any bitch. People in this town know here. She's lived here forever. And you think we're the only ones who've jerked off to her online?
The world knows Janice."
“Okay relax. We just need a plan.”
“Tim, can’t we just let her go? This was her idea too, right?”
“I think so.”
“Oh fuck. You think so. Fuck. Janice is just another one.”
“Another what?”
“Another...You know what I mean. Another one we will have to take care of.”
“Not yet. Not if we can stop the people who are trying to find her.”
“Her parents?”
“Yeah, her parents. But first, we need to stop this Facebook, social media horse shit. We cut that off first, and then the parents.”
“Fuck We’ll need more rope.”
Eleven
Joy felt like the Artful Dodger the way she talked her way into the home of Evelyn Richardson’s mother. Once she and Amanda were inside, Joy felt like they were stuck in a museum of the 1970s in St. Isidore.
The poor woman still had photos of JFK on the wall, along with the Pope, whichever one was in the Vatican back then, and of course, pictures of her daughter, Evelyn.
Evelyn Richardson was one of the first two dead girls discovered hanging from the trees in St. Isidore Park
“Even though she and the other girl were found more than 40 years ago, we need to start here,” Joy repeated once again as she looked into Amanda’s doubting eyes.
They were sitting in one of the official St. Isidore Chronicle news cars, on an assignment that went directly against their orders from headquarters.
Now that there were a new, fresh, body found in the trees, Esther had made it clear if only with the power of her raised eyebrows that Amanda and Joy should be working on the story of the missing girl, Janice, not the dead girl, Evelyn, or Cheryl, or any of the others.
“Esther didn’t say we absolutely could not do this.”
“No, but she implied...”
Joy sighed and looked straight ahead over the steering wheel of the black Chevy HHR crossover vehicle.
“She said to use our best judgment.”
“And this is that?” Amanda said as she nodded toward the house with a tip of her head.
“Absolutely,” Joy affirmed as she got out of the Chevy and slammed the door shut, locking it behind her.
Amanda got the keys out of the ignition switch, raised her eyebrows and theatrically dumped them in her purse.
“Thanks.”
Now, waiting for Emily Richardson to return with a plate of homemade cookies and fresh brewed Folger’s coffee, Joy was wondering if maybe Amanda and Esther had been right.
This was going to be tough.
“I know why you are here,” Emily said, returning with the coffee and cookies.
She sat both on the table in front of Joy and Amanda.
“I heard the Chronicle was going to reopen all these old cases,” Emily said nervously smoothing out her skirt, declining to look Joy in the eye, until she added, “I don’t know why you are bothering.”
“Don’t you want to find out what happened and why?” Joy said.
“We know what happened. I am not sure the why matters all that much anymore,” Emily said, trying to put a tear on her cheek back where it came from.
Joy and Amanda looked at each other. One of them was wondering how to beat a quick retreat, while the other vowed to press forward.
“Mrs. Richardson...”
“We know our girls...took their own lives...what else is there to know?”
“But what if that isn’t true?”
Emily smashed her cookie plate down on the coffee table in front of her hard enough to break it in three pieces.
Amanda jumped and spilled hot Folger’s.
Joy gulped.
“Goddamn it,” Emily said through clenched teeth. “We know what happened. We talk about it every month in our support group.”
“You have a support group?”
“Yes, I guess you don’t know everything, do you? All of us who lost our children in that goddamn forest talk once a month, we support each other. Don’t bother asking if you can come.”
Joy sipped her coffee before saying, “If any of you do decide to talk,” and sliding her business card toward Emily.
Without bothering to say good bye, since it didn’t really need saying, Joy and Amanda rose to leave.
They were almost to the front door when Emily said,
“Evelyn was out there with her boyfriend, Roy. He said Evelyn thought she saw Cheryl’s boyfriend hitting her. Cheryl was Evelyn’s best friend, oh my God!”
Emily dropped the piece of broken coffee plate and sank back in her chair.
Joy and Amanda walked slowly to her side, knelt beside her and listened.
“Cheryl was the other girl they found,” Emily sniffed. “Roy said he and Evelyn were parked in a car at the park, doing, well, you know. Cheryl and some boy were in another vehicle, and Evelyn said the boy was hitting her.”
Amanda handed Emily a tissue.
“Roy didn’t believe it. He knew the boy and said he would never hit Cheryl He said he loved her. Evelyn didn’t think it was true. She made Roy stop the car. They argued. She went back to check on Cheryl. Roy drove home, goddamn him to hell, anyway.”
Joy and Amanda looked at each other. They felt for this woman. Who wouldn’t? But they also knew she had just given them their first story.
“The next day, a cop out walking his dog found their...found them,” Emily said. “John Sheldon, Officer John Sheldon. He doesn’t live around here anymore.”
“Emily,” Joy said. “Do you remember the boy’s name, the boy who was with Cheryl?”
Emily just shook her head and sobbed.
Amanda took Joy’s hand and led her to the door, which they opened and closed as quietly as possible.
Amanda, since she had the keys, walked with Joy to the driver’s side door opened it and walked back to her side.
Emily was on the porch. Amanda walked back up their steps.
“Tim, I think his name was, Tim,” Emily whispered into Amanda’s ear.
Amanda squeezed her shoulder to express her gratitude, and waited until Emily went back into her home, her museum devoted to Evelyn, before going to the car.
“What did she want?”
“She just said, ‘Tim,’” Amanda said with a shoulder shrug. “She said the boy’s name was Tim.”
“We need to find some more of thes
e mothers,” Joy said as she and Amanda pulled away from Emily Richardson’s house, and life.
Amanda’s blue eyes flipped to the left. She almost said it, but she didn’t
Amanda stomach churned just a little bit. As they worked their way through the girls who died, Amanda knew they would get closer to the ones that Amanda knew.
That was one advantage she had over Joy. Amanda was born and raised in St. Isidore.
But sometimes it didn’t seem like such an advantage; not when it was your friends who were dying, leaving you to wonder “Why?”
Opening these old wounds, however gently was not going to be pretty. And know that Emily Richardson had said it out loud, Amanda couldn’t help but wonder about the high school rumors concerning “Tim.”
Twelve
Joy was pretty sure the windows in the St. Isidore Police Headquarters building hadn’t been cleaned since the shag carpeting was put down on the floor. She and Amanda wrinkled their noses as they walked into the lobby of Chief Lumpy Doolan’s office.
The smell of old cigarettes had overwhelmed both women as they opened the double glass front door of the building, and it was only getting worse.
Amanda was the first to notice the yellow ring of tobacco stains on the white drop ceiling tiles of the hallway. Joy was the one who spotted the empty donut bags in the wastebaskets.
“This is all so cliche,” Amanda whispered, while she tried to scribble notes in her Moleskine notebook and keep up with Joy who couldn’t wait to confront Chief Doolan.
“Yeah, well make sure you are getting all of this down,” Joy said. “We will need this for the story.”
She had already written it in her head. Joy was absolutely sure this would be the story of an old, small town police department that completely blew its chance in the 1970s to stop a serial killer.
And she, Joy Ellis, was going to be the reporter who would show them all how to do their jobs.
Chief Doolan’s secretary, who Joy decided was as behind the times as the clock radio on her desk that was running 12 minutes slow, asked them to be seated.