Daddy Soda (A New Hampshire Mystery Book 1)

by Mira Gibson

  When she reached the bottom of the stairs she felt around the wall for a switch. It was dim and she could use the extra light. But she didn’t find one so she traversed what appeared to be a disheveled office.

  There were stacks of boxes and tables holding papers, books, and miscellaneous items. Finding a desk, she perused its contents, realizing from the corner of her eye there was another door. She spotted a light switch panel beside it.

  Cautiously, she approached and inched the door open.

  Another room she determined and it was quiet so she swept her gun through before turning on the light.

  Her heart skipped a beat when she took in the totality of the room. In a word, it was sterile. A shiny, stainless steel table that had nylon straps dangling down sat in the center of the room. At the far end was another table, smaller with racks beneath, hosting a plethora of surgical tools.

  Hannah found herself gasping and rushing towards the tools, eyeing blades of all shapes and sizes, in disbelief.

  “Jesus Christ,” she muttered under her breath.

  Sensing something was off, she whipped around, gun aiming for the door, but she was alone. She lowered the weapon and as she did, Hannah saw another door next to the one she’d come through. She fast approached it and when she drew it open she saw a mannequin donning in a black jumpsuit. Over its head lay a black hooded mask with some kind of metal box where the mouth should be.

  She jumped when her cell phone started ringing in her back pocket.

  “Shit,” she whispered, fumbling to silence the blaring thing, as its piercing, tinny ringtone chimed. It was Cody’s landline. She kept her voice to a whisper. “Yes?”

  “Hannah, it’s Mary.” She sounded choked up, panicking.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Candice!”

  “What’s wrong with Candice-”

  “I can’t find her! I went to take a shower and when I got out, I- I- She was nowhere! I couldn’t find her! I looked everywhere, every room, outside. Down the road. She’s gone, Hannah!”

  “Okay, calm down," she said quietly. "I’m on my way.”

  “Seriously, what the fuck, Hannah? Mom’s dead now Candice has gone missing?”

  “We don’t know she’s gone missing. I can’t drive to you if I’m talking-" Her cell sounded odd. "Hello?" She checked the screen and realized it was dead, muttering, "Shit."

  Hannah returned her cell to her pocket and turned for the door.

  But Walter Warfield was standing in her path, his dark, soulless eyes staring at her with a hint of amusement.

  She aimed fast.

  “You're not going to shoot me,” he said in a slippery tone, quickly adding, “We've only just started to get to know each other.”

  “What is this place?”

  “Why did you break into my home?” He was so calm it made her blood run cold.

  “I’ll ask the questions.” Her voice was a leaf in the wind. “Did you blackmail those kids? Mutilate Kendra and leave her for dead?”

  Cracking a smile at her, he asked, “Is that what you think?”

  “Why did you do it? Because you were trying to rid the devil from her? Is that how your demented mind works?”

  “You don't know what you're talking about,” he said calmly. “Now leave my home.”

  “No.” She didn’t like being two feet from him. If he wanted, he could swipe for her weapon and if he did, squeezing the trigger would be no guarantee she'd get a good shot.

  Stepping cautiously, she inched away from the closet, GLOCK ever trained on his head. “You incriminated yourself, Warfield.”

  His expression changed as though he found that interesting.

  “When I left here last night you said it was brutal how Kendra was butchered, a detail the police haven’t released. How could you know that if you hadn’t used those tools over there to torture her?”

  “We all have a God we worship,” he said, vaguely dancing so far beyond her question it made her head spin. “We all have a vision of heaven, our just rewards we’re striving for.”

  “Start making sense or I’ll have no use for you and if you’re useless to me Walter, you are dead.”

  “You wouldn't understand.”

  “Try me."

  “You can’t stand in our way. Don’t you see that, Hannah?”

  “Tell me everything, now, or I’ll shoot you in the leg and work my way up to your head.”

  From behind the back wall came a low, murmuring groan.

  Her heart pounded hard against her chest cavity, as she tried to make sense of it, but her mind was reeling.

  Tone cracking, laced with fear, she asked, “Who’s that?” Then her heart leapt into her throat when she realized, “Candice?”

  Moving quickly, keeping her gun aimed at him, she neared the wall and pressed her ear to it. A deep voice groaned as if in excruciating pain and her panic loosened when she realized it sounded male.

  “Not all things go as planned,” he explained.

  Nearly distracted by her effort to find a seam in the wall, she whipped her gaze on Walter, realizing he'd advanced on her. “Get him out.” Then she called out, “Travis Danbury? Get him out now or I'll shoot!"

  She could’ve sworn she heard him groan, “Help.”

  In a fast sweeping motion, Hannah aimed her weapon at his thigh, as she counted loudly, “Three. Two. One-”

  He didn't move only stared at her then gradually began laughing.

  She hadn't been able to do it. She couldn't look someone in the eye, no matter who they were, and shoot them, and realizing that sent a terrible quake of despair roiling through her.

  Amused, Walter took his time getting around her as though this was a game he enjoyed. When he reached the wall and pressed hard, it swung slowly inward by a few feet, revealing darkness beyond.

  “Travis, I’m with the Gilford Police,” she said, voice quavering badly as though she'd been stripped of what little courage she had. “You’re safe to come out.”

  Soon, a kid hobbled into view, shoulders hunched, eyes big and black - vulture-like, as he peered out with wide-eyed terror. Hannah’s gaze darted to his forearm where she saw a snake tattoo roiled broadly from his wrist to his elbow.

  “Come on out,” she said on a breath, seeing the pain in his face that mirrored her own.

  But as soon as he saw Walter the kid dove back into the wall and slammed it shut.

  “We’ve already won, Hannah,” said Walter, filling her with ice-cold panic. “Good has beaten evil.”

  Wrestling with herself to be strong, fight, she was so close to waking up from this nightmare she could taste it, Hannah mustered every last shred of courage she had and raised her weapon, aiming at his head, but became suddenly petrified the instant she saw her youngest sister through the doorway. “Candice!”

  A fresh wave of determination surged through her when it registered Candice hadn't been harmed and Hannah, desperate to protect her, extinguish all risk in an instant, and end this before her sister could be murdered, pulled the trigger.

  The shot was deafening and sliced through her, as Walter fell to the concrete, grasping his thigh and gritting his teeth through the pain.

  “Shut up!” She told him, rushing through the torture chamber for Candice, but when her younger sister's eyes turned strange, Hannah’s steps shortened. “Candice?”

  Staring down at Walter as he writhed and groaned on the floor, her eyes turned misty.

  Tears?

  “Sweetheart, let’s get out of here,” she said, stepping towards her.

  Ignoring her, she knelt beside him and pressed her finger into his bullet wound, shoving deep and twisting. Walter took to panting through his torment, gritting his teeth, then he uttered, “We won,” as Candice tried desperately to fish the bullet out.

  "I can't get it," she said, frantic.

  His words came gently, "It's okay," as he took hold of her bloody hand and offered her a grim smile. "No one can take this away from us."


  All of a sudden, Hannah was reeling, disturbing demented revelations taking hold, bending her mind to its breaking point.

  Candice had been the one with Kendra when she’d been abducted into that van. Candice had been the one in those photos used to blackmail the kids. Candice had been the one feeding Judy St. Clair information. She’d been the only one who’d seen anything. Had she pretended to be rendered mute? She was close enough to Mary to have known the power her sister had over men. And Candice was the only one who Hannah had told about Kendra being alive.

  The girl straightened up to her feet, quaking with rage, tears streaming down her eyes though her expression hardened to stone. She angled her darkening eyes on Hannah.

  But Hannah couldn't see her only the onslaught of jarring facts, which assaulted her.

  It felt like the room was spinning all around her. She couldn’t steady her racing mind or fathom the incomprehensibility of it all.

  Tone guttural, blackening, Candice asked, "How could you hurt him?"

  But her words were a foreign language in Hannah’s scrambling brain, as she drifted into a lake of darkness. She didn't see Candice pull one of Dale's guns from her pants. She didn't see her aim it at Hannah's head, didn't see her tears or her anguish or hear her screaming wails. When Cody rushed in and Candice turned her weapon on him, firing again and again Hannah was deep beneath the surface, wet ice swallowing her whole.

  Though Hannah sensed the mind-bending magnitude, glorious yet agonizing, crashing down all around her, she didn't know that it was finally, completely, devastatingly over.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Track & Field practice was her favorite activity at the Sununu Youth Services Center. Of course her youth counselor didn’t refer to it as track practice. She liked to stand at the sidelines, fiddling with the zipper on her tracksuit, an eggplant number made of coated nylon that swished when she walked and boasted the juvenile detention center’s convoluted logo, a lion’s mouth roaring out Sununu, which to Candice looked like a mangled vagina.

  She always seemed to be holding a clipboard, but never looked at it or wrote a word down, as she’d squint through the winter glare and shout at the girls when they arched around her end of the loop.

  The Sununu Center, all its juvenile service officers and coordinators referred to this hour as fitness, but it was too small a word in Candice’s opinion. In her head it was Track & Field, plain and simple, same as her practice at Sanbornton Elementary, replete with a quarter mile loop, long jump pit and high jump apparatus, and all the necessary equipment - mats for the high jump pit, batons for passing when the juvies were made to sprint one hundred meter dash relays. They even had shot put balls. She didn’t mind it was winter and snow had drifted over the track. She didn’t care she’d be locked up for twelve months, didn’t feel as though she were locked up in the first place. It was damned perfect.

  She kept her knees up and her strides long, arms pumping in rhythm with her hard exhales - shoo, shoo, shoo, as she hooked around the final stretch of the corner before it spanned out into a straight four hundred meters. She was well ahead of the fray, the lot of girls huffing and puffing, wincing through stitches in their sides, far behind her.

  Youth Counselor Driscoll started hollering at her, waving her clipboard and stomping her foot like the overzealous lesbian she looked like, as Candice ran past and took to arching around the loop’s curved side.

  “Push yourself, Candy!” She boomed in her deep, guttural tone that reminded Candice of a truck growling its way up a steep incline. “See if you can’t catch up to the stragglers!”

  Coming from anyone else she would’ve despised the nickname, but Driscoll could call her any damned thing she pleased as far as Candice was concerned. She just loved being out here, breathing in the sting of crisp winter air, looking at the gnarly fingers of dead trees dressed up in snow, feeling her muscles grow strong. This was her insurance she’d never look plump and jiggle like her sister, like her mother, like the devil’s plaything.

  She missed Walter.

  His purity - mild mannered, pious, chaste, were qualities her own father should’ve possessed. She missed how he used to read to her, those mystical bible verses she’d have to interpret for him, explain the word of God, and of course he’d offer his own take and they’d engage in stimulating debate. Walter couldn’t always see how the Lord intended an eye to be carved out of the sinner who’d harmed the eye of another, but with Candice’s patient encouragement he soon got on board.

  Most of all, she missed his warm hands, the care he took washing her in his bath during their weekly baptismal, a symbolic ritual he’d suggested. He liked to steal away to his bedroom after, while she dried off then he’d fix her milk and cookies, and listen to her unload about the degradation at home.

  He was a good man.

  He'd helped her execute God’s will. He shouldn’t be in prison. Neither of them should.

  Candice hooked around the curve of the loop again and the sight of a few juvies walking out of breath pushed her to pick up her pace. Oh, she’d catch up all right and Driscoll would be proud.

  As she did, the image of tongues came to the forefront of her mind. The first time Walter had handed her a container, the gift of his commitment to her cause, she’d stared down at the slimy lump, black with blood and full of veins that reminded her of spider's webs. Those heathens should’ve never tried to run her down with the van that night. It hadn’t been part of the plan. But she’d made them pay. She’d made all of them pay.

  An eye for an eye.

  Closing in on the stragglers, she whipped a fast glance at Driscoll and noted she was waving and hollering at the herd of girls passing her by so Candice locked her gaze on the back of the slower girl’s head. She quickened her pace until the toes of her sneakers threatened to clip the girl’s heels. It was all about luck and timing. She’d get her. The thought of the girl spilling into the dirty snow brought a grin to her face.

  “Hey!” She squeaked the second Candice made contact. Glancing over her shoulder, expression twisting into a frown, as she registered Candice had done it on purpose, she shouted, “Ms. Driscoll!”

  But she was already sprinting off in front of her, kicking up dirt and snow with each punched stride.

  That’s how it was at times when the anger swelled up inside her. It was these people around her. She could see the devil in them. These weak people who let the devil in, doing terrible things to each other then spouting that the other should forget. Remember to forget was a phrase she’d heard from Dale so many time it turned her stomach. Those ignorant cops, when the junkies had communicated the phrase, the one thing they’d been permitted to convey, the police should’ve linked it to Dale. Candice realized she’d been naive to bet on their intelligence. The Sanbornton Police were anything but.

  “Candy!” Driscoll started flagging her over and Candice spotted Judy St. Clair by her side. “Visitor!”

  Awe, hell. What did the birdbrain want now?

  ***

  Staring out the window and barely listening to Judy detail the upcoming hearing, which was scheduled with the Youth Diversion & Restorative Justice board to take place at the Laconia District Court, Candice thought about the foolish headline her stupid town had given to the revolution her and Walter had attempted - The Hermit Lake Tragedy.

  The only tragedy she could gander was that people like Dale, Kendra, and Mary were allowed to go on living.

  “Candice?” Judy asked, garnishing her attention. She’d managed to wrangle her frizzy hair under an off kilter beret, which sat at an unflattering angle on her head, but her eyes were as lit up as ever, locked on Candice as though she was an enigma wrapped in a riddle Judy might be smart enough to unravel. Judy wasn’t. “You’re family will be there.”

  “So?" she said, making a point to let her eyes glaze over so Judy wouldn’t misread her sentiment.

  She drew in a frustrated breath, studying her. “Candice,” she began, “the board is ha
ving a hard time with Warfield’s statement. It’s damning. But at the same time they’ve had consistent difficulty believing you could’ve pulled off a crime of this magnitude. We can make a strong case for your immediate release, but you have to participate. This time is valuable, do you understand?”

  Candice had stopped listening after she mentioned Walter. The man she’d known and the man he turned out to be once behind bars didn’t add up, but every time Judy had brought it up Candice refused to believe it. Walter would never utter a word against her. He just wouldn’t.

  “I can repeat myself if you don’t understand,” she offered.

  “I understand.”

  “Then let’s go over a few things,” she suggested. “From my perspective, you grappled with severe dissociation, night terrors, and classic symptoms of having survived trauma.”

  “That’s not a question,” she pointed out dryly.

  “Do you mean for us to believe you faked those symptoms?”

  To demonstrate, Candice let her gaze go soft, her mouth slowly drifted into a gape, and she suppressed her breathing. Judy glanced nervously around the visitor’s center, looking for the guards, Candice presumed, and then leaned across the table, staring at her in disbelief.

  Snapping out of it, she said, “Night terrors are way easier.”

  It took Judy a moment to recover from the performance then she asked, “How did you find Walter?”

  “It’s a small town.”

  “We need to establish he coerced you,” she countered.

  “He didn’t. He listened and agreed. That’s all.”

  “Candice.” She needed to gather her thoughts before continuing. “Walter treated Kendra very badly during their marriage and it would seem he’d intended to subject her to the same treatment perhaps as a means to punish her for escaping in the first place. That’s the argument we’re going with to get you out of here. Can you tell me about how you two met?”

  Candice didn’t know if she wanted to get out of here, but she explained anyway. “At the church.”

  “The Church of God in Sanbornton?”