by Megyn Ward
Logan
The Kings of Brighton
Megyn Ward
Ardor Press
The Kings of Brighton: LOGAN © 2020 by Megyn Ward. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner, whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from the author, except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
FIRST EDITION 2020
Book design by MW Designs
Cover design by MW Designs
Cover photo by Depositphoto
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Warning: This book deals with issues of severe child abuse and neglect. If you’re sensitive to these subject matters, please read with caution.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. If you’ve downloaded or “borrowed” this book from any site other than Amazon or without the express permission of the author, you are breaking the law and subject to these penalties.
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Contents
1. Logan
2. Jane
3. Logan
4. Jane
5. Logan
6. Jane
7. Logan
8. Jane
9. Logan
10. Jane
11. Logan
12. Logan
13. Jane
14. Logan
15. Jane
16. Logan
17. Jane
18. Logan
19. Jane
20. Logan
21. Jane
22. Logan
23. Jane
24. Logan
25. Jane
26. Logan
27. Jane
28. Logan
29. Jane
30. Logan
31. Jane
32. Logan
33. Jane
34. Logan
35. Jane
36. Logan
37. Jane
38. Logan
39. Jane
40. Logan
41. Jane
42. Logan
43. Jane
44. Logan
45. Jane
46. Logan
47. Jane
48. Logan
49. Jane
Epilogue
Ellenore
Lex
Ellenore
Also by Megyn Ward
One
Logan
Brighton Home for Boys, Brighton, Massachusetts 2006
November 25th, 2006
Dear Matthew ~
I know it’s been a long time, and I know that you’re probably still upset with me over what happened with your mother, but I need you to understand that none of this is my fault. I’d like the opportunity to explain it to you in person, but my attorney tells me that the authorities have made that impossible.
I can only imagine how difficult the past five years have been for you without your mother and me. Just know that I think of you every day, and no matter what you hear or may have come to believe about me, I am still and will always be your father.
I often think of our many camping and fishing trips and long for the day when we can walk the wildness together again. I’m confident that we’ll see each other again someday, and it’s that knowledge that keeps me going.
Until then ~
Your Father
I look up from the letter and into the expectant faces of the trio of adults sitting on the other side of the table. The FBI agent who was the one who finally caught my father. The federal prosecutor who built the case against him. The Guardian ad Litem who, even though she’s never met me before in her life, seems desperate to do her job, which is to protect me.
She’s pretty. Light brown hair swept away from her face and caught up in a low knot against the nape of her neck. Large, gray green eyes set it a heart-shaped face. Minimal make-up. Severe navy blouse and gray wool skirt. She’s clear-eyed and eager. She wants to be taken seriously. Wants people to look at her and see someone who is competent and capable because she’s new and idealistic enough to think that what she does here today matters. That she can actually protect me.
I hate her for it, because even though it’s completely irrational—I mean, she didn’t even know I existed five years ago—I can’t help but look at her and think, where were you? Why weren’t you there to protect me? Protect us? Not now—not from these clowns. Then. Where were you then—when I really needed you?
Looking at her, I wonder if she has children. If she has someone to help her raise them.
If my father would like her.
If he would’ve picked her and followed her home.
If he would’ve killed her.
Making a decidedly miserable effort at ignoring her, I drop the letter on the table, flipping it script-side down, so I don’t have to look at his handwriting, before focusing my attention on the lawyer sitting directly across from me. “You’re wasting your time,” I tell him with a shrug, meaning to push the letter toward him across the table. I don’t. For some reason, I can’t seem to make myself move. Can’t make myself let it go.
“Excuse me?” The FBI agent snorts, drawing my attention from the lawyer. “You want to try that again, kid?”
“Sure.” I give him a disinterested shrug, the corner of my mouth kicking up in a fuck you smirk. I’m anything but disinterested, but this incompetent fuck is here because he thinks I know something. Thinks I’ve been keeping secrets for my father—maybe even participated in what he did—and that bothers me more than it should. “You’re letting my father waste your time for you? Is that better?”
FBI agent comes out of his chair so fast it tips over, letting out a muffled thump when it hits the carpeted conference room floor. “You think this is funny?” He bellows at me like I’m some punk kid he caught tagging in an alley or jumping the turnstile for the BART. “Is this some kinda sick joke to you, you little shit?”
“Take it down a notch, detective,” my GAL warns him with more steel in her tone than I would’ve expected. “He’s a minor, not a murder suspect.” She doesn’t say it, but we all know what she means.
I’m not my father.
I didn’t do anything wrong.
Neither the FBI agent or the lawyer look too sure of that.
“Fuck that—he knows something,” FBI agent shouts back at her, shoving the lawyer’s hand off his arm when he tries to reason with him. “He’s a fucking psycho, just like his dad and everyone knows it—his own grandfather won’t even take him.” Turning toward me, he aims a glare in my direction while the GAL talks over him, telling me to get up, that the interview is over and that she has every intention of filing some sort of injunction against FBI agent to keep him from further contact with me. Unhampered by any of it, FBI agent leans over the table between us and shoves his finger in my face. “Your father killed eleven women—eleven—and no one knows where he put them. They were mothers—they had families for fuck’s sake—and it’s like they’ve just disappeared into thin air. Shit like that doesn’t just happen. Mothers don’t just vanish.” Knowing he’s not getting anywhere with me, The Fed drops his finger and looks at the woman trying to protect me. “He was there, Ms. Halstead. He saw what his father did to those women—that means your client knows something.”
“Twelve.”
Just like that, everyone freezes. Everyone shuts the fuck up. Everyone stares at me like I just pulled a gun and stuck it in their faces.
“My father killed twelve women,” I say quietly, looking each of them in the eye. “But I guess my mother doesn’t count since we know where she is.”
“Matthew—”
“Don’t call me that,” I say, pinning my GAL with a sharp look. “That’s not my name. Not anymore.”
“Okay…” She gives me a choppy head nod and tries again. “Logan—”
“I don’t know anything.” I focus on her, ignoring both The Fed and the lawyer because, even though I don’t know why, it’s suddenly very important that she believes me.
“You know something,” The Fed cuts in, unwilling or maybe unable to let it go.
“I know he never took me camping,” I tell him, pressing the flat of my hand against the letter beneath it like it’s a living, breathing thing I’m trying to smother. “Never took me fishing—I know he’s messing with you. Wasting your time.”
“Why would he do that?” This from the lawyer who so far has me wondering how the hell he closed twelve first-degree murder convictions on my father on what basically amounted to circumstantial evidence. “What would he have to gain by lying about a few camping trips?”
“Access to me.” I can feel the loops and slashes of my father’s handwriting, the ink of it pushed so deep into the paper that I can feel it, raised and livid, on the other side. No matter how caring or concerned he made the words he wrote sound, I know the truth. He was angry when he wrote it. I don’t have to wonder who he was angry with. I already know. “He knew the only way he’d get a letter to me would be to make you think I might know where he buried those women, so he throws in some bullshit about camping trips to get you to bring it to me—and here you all are. Exactly where he wanted you to be.”
I let it sink in.
The fact that they were manipulated by my father. A man who lives in a hole and is lucky if he feels the sun on his face for more than an hour a week. They shouldn’t feel bad about it—he’s also a diagnosed sociopath. Lying and manipulation are as easy as breathing to him and probably just as necessary.
“Son of a bitch.” Defeated, the agent’s shoulders sag, and he suddenly looks like he’s a thousand years old.
“I’m sorry.” Standing up slowly, I move to push in my chair. It’s the truth. I am sorry. “If I knew where they were, I’d tell you.”
That’s the truth too.
“Can I go now?” Tob and Gray are long gone—both aged out of the system and sent packing years ago. Tob fell into a pile of money on his eighteenth birthday, and Gray enlisted at seventeen to get the fuck out of here—but Jase is still here, at least for now, and I know he’s worried about me. He’ll want to know why a couple of suits and a social worker showed up, wanting to talk to me and I’ll have to lie to him about it.
Because no one knows who I really am.
Not even my brothers.
I’m halfway to the door before I turn around to look at them. None of them have moved. None of them have said a word. I can practically hear my father laughing in his prison cell.
“I’m not my father.” I say it out loud, the same thing I tell myself every day, over and over. “I’m nothing like him—and the only thing I know is that I can’t help you, because I’m the last person he’d tell where he buried those women.”
No one says anything. No one disputes it. No one agrees. But I can tell by the way they’re looking at me.
None of them believe me.
It’s okay. I don’t blame them.
I’m not even sure I believe it myself.
Two
Jane
Subject: Collins, Matthew, Emmett Jr.
DOB: 3/27/91
AXIS I: 309.81
AXIS II: Z03.89, Undetermined
AXIS III: Subject is near-sighted and requires glasses.
Underweight but in good physical health.
AXIS IV: Problems with primary support group.
Problems related to social environment.
Housing problems.
Problems related to interaction with legal system/crime.
AXIS V: 80
4/23/01
After witnessing the homicide of his mother, Cynthia Lynn Collins, at the hands of his father, Matthew Emmett Collins Sr. on 2/12/01, Subject was abducted by father and held captive for approximately 55 days. During those 55 days, Subject’s father allegedly abducted and murdered eleven women before being apprehended. The whereabouts of their remains are unknown, but authorities believe that Subject has knowledge of their location but refuses to cooperate, either out of fear or possible loyalty to his father. As the father has been remanded into federal custody and there are no other living relatives willing to take him, Subject was admitted to The Brighton Home for Boys in Brighton, Massachusetts on 4/22/01 for long-term residential care.
My gaze jogs up to the corner of the file where there’s a polaroid photograph—the kind that takes a picture instantly and you have to shake it to develop—paper-clipped to the top of the page. The picture shows a boy in what looks like a pair of pajamas, sitting in a large chair in someone’s office. He’s painfully thin and pale, like he hasn’t seen the sun in months, with a shock of dark, unruly hair standing up in spikes and tufts all over his head. A pair of intense, ice blue eyes stare out at me over a straight, narrow nose and a strong, slightly clefted chin.
Underneath it is another picture, this one more recent. It shows the same boy, only older. His arms and the chest they’re crossed over are thicker. His complexion healthier. But it’s the same shock of dark, unruly hair. Same intense, ice-blue eyes staring back at me.
I read what’s written on the thick, white border at the bottom of the picture:
Matthew E. Collins
DOB: 3/27/91
Date of admission: 4/22/01
He was barely ten years old when the first picture was taken, which makes him fifteen now.
A year older than me.
From the back of the apartment, I hear the water cut out in the bathroom, signaling that my mom is finished with her shower. Instead of closing the file and stuffing it back into my mom’s work bag, I flip through it to the last page.
10/29/06
While Subject continues to exhibit signs of antisocial personality disorder, direct-care staff and Subject’s clinical team report that he has formed strong bonds with a select group of his residential peers and often refers to them as “my brothers”, the majority of whom have been discharged from residential housing due to aging out of the system. Subject has made repeated requests to start emancipation proceedings, siting that he can “go live with my rich brother” but it is this writer’s belief that subject’s emancipation and subsequent freedom would not be in the community’s best interests.
Due to his age and the trauma that he has suffered, and while it is the likeliest of diagnosis given his genetic background, clinical staff at Brighton are still reluctant to assign an AXIS II diagnosis of 301.7, rather keeping the AXIS II open with an unspecified diagnosis. Subject continues to suffer night terrors, headaches, and other psychosomatic symptoms which include—
“Jane Austen Halstead, what do you think you’re doing?”
Busted.
“Oh, hey, Mom,” I say, lifting my gaze for a second to find her standing next to the kitchen table I’m sitting at, wearing the bathrobe I bought her for her birthday. Refocusing on the file in front of me, I keep reading. “How was your shower?”
“Glorious.” Sarcasm drips from her one-word answer. “What are you doing?”
“Reading.” Without looking up, I start skimming the file instead of actually reading it because now
that she’s caught me snooping and I show no signs of stopping, she’s about five seconds away from snatching the file and probably smacking me over the head with it. “Did you write this?” I don’t know why but thinking that she might have bothers me. “Is he one of your clients?”
“Dammit, Jane—” Her shadow falls over the page I’m skimming. “you know those files are confidential.”
“Shouldn’t have insisted that I learn how to read then,” I tell her, sitting back in my chair to move the file into the light and hopefully out of her reach. No such luck—she moves with me and a second later the file is lifted from my grasp and slapped closed before she uses it to deliver a half-hearted tap to the top of my head. Looking up at her again, I give her a grin. “I was looking for a pen—” I wave my hands over the pile of textbooks and papers spread out in front of me on the kitchen table like I’m performing a magic trick. “for the homework.”
“Really?” She shakes her head at me before cocking it to the side. “And you thought you’d find one inside one of my work files?”
She’s not mad at me. Not really—she can’t be, because it’s just us. Just Mom and me. Always has been. I’m an only child, and my father—whoever he was—took off a long time ago. “I’m naturally curious—you love that about me.”