“It’s too late,” a hoarse voice whispers from inside the room. “No one was supposed to find out, and now I must do as I’m told.”
The snap of metal crashing against wood peals down the hallway like a piercing scream. I look down at the stool still unused in my hands. The crash came from inside the room.
“Logan, stay with me!”
On the other side of the door, the person in distress lets out three gasps, wet and sticky and struggling for one last precious breath. Then there is a swishing sound of fabric furiously rubbing together like a runner trying to sprint mid-air. The movement stops abruptly and a door bangs shut inside the room.
And then all goes horribly silent.
I smash the metal legs of the stool against the door over and over until it gives. The lock breaks and the door opens slowly with a bested creak.
I brush past the splinters and run blindly inside, tripping over a ladder that has fallen on its side like a dead horse. I start to pick myself up when something sways back and forth over my head and three drops of something moist and warm land on my arm. I recoil toward the wall and look up at Kim. A stream of blood drips down from her forehead as she swings from a wooden beam. Her lifeless blue eyes bulge from their sockets and stare directly into mine.
CHAPTER 16
I make myself look away from Kim’s dangling body and search for Logan, but there is no trace of my son or anyone else in the room. I right the ladder and scramble up until I’m directly in front of Kim and work on severing the thick rope coiled around her neck with my pocketknife. The jerking motion makes Kim bounce back and forth as if she is swaying to the rhythm of a song on the radio.
“Don’t die on me,” I plead and try to keep my shaking hands steady so I can get Kim down before she suffocates. But from the unnatural way Kim’s head is listing to the side, I know it is too late. Kim’s neck is broken.
The tears come silently as I work through the last few pieces of the noose. When it finally tears away, Kim’s body makes a sudden, sharp drop. Her blond bob poofs up like a parachute on the descent until she lands with a hard smack on the hardwood floor. I loosen the rope from around her neck and then feel for a pulse. Nothing.
An adjoining door that leads to a guest bedroom bangs open, and I prepare for the battle of my life against my sister. But instead of Sarah, the narrow view into the room yields just the back of a small child who is slumped, wearing only a diaper, and sitting on a blanket facing the wall as if he is being punished. White blond hair. Jesus, it’s Will.
“Mom is here!” I cry.
The sound of my voice snaps Will out of his trance, and he starts running straight toward me, red faced and screaming all the way with his mouth wide open and his arms outstretched. I race to pick up my little boy when a sharp pain slices into my back and explodes a bolt of white-hot electricity through my body as if I’ve been struck by lightning. The room starts to go from white to black, and I realize I am seconds away from losing consciousness when the excruciating sensation stops. I fold to the floor and land immobilized on my right side.
“Go back in the corner!” a female voice shrieks.
Will ignores the command, his screams now desperate howls, as his bare feet pound against the floor to reach me.
I can’t move. I watch in horror with my face frozen against the floor as someone scoops up Will, tosses him roughly back in the corner of the adjacent room, and then slams the door.
Jesus Mother Mary Joseph. I try and come up with any kind of prayer I can remember from when my childhood friends took me to church with them after a Saturday night sleepover. The door to the room where Will is being kept opens again, and the answer to my prayer is a pair of shapely legs in hot-pink Dr. Martens walking straight toward me. My eyes are the only part of my body I can move. I scan up to see the owner of the hot-pink Dr. Martens. Hovering directly above me is Leslie. Her thin hip juts out to the side, and she is posed in a provocative Rambo-like combat stance holding a Taser gun.
I try and reach for my pocketknife, but my arm is dead.
“Hello, Julia,” Leslie says in her little-girl voice.
She picks up her electric-pink boot and slams it into my back, right in the spot where the Taser gun hit. A scream of agony starts to build from inside my core but stays trapped inside my useless body.
“Aren’t you just a little surprise showing up like this,” Leslie says, sounding like a haughty brat who didn’t get her way.
She rears her shiny boot back for a second time and connects another blow against my back. A wave of nausea washes over me, and I feel like I am going to throw up. I breathe through the pain and concentrate on a single speck of dust on the floor until the feeling stops.
“Let me see my baby,” I demand through chattering teeth.
“Shut up,” Leslie answers. “The baby is just fine. He wet the bed and made a big mess for me to clean up so he’s getting his punishment. You do wrong, you get punished.”
“You murdered Kim.”
“She stuck her nose in where she shouldn’t have. So I had to do as I was told.”
Footsteps, angry and determined, stomp down the long hallway in my direction until a pair of black, orthopedic old-lady shoes stands an inch away from my face.
“Horrible, selfish little bitch. Dirty little selfish whore.”
I recognize the voice.
“Alice,” I say.
“What’s she doing here?” Alice asks Leslie.
“I found her in the room right after I killed Kim, like you told me.”
One of Alice’s black shoes stamps down hard on the floor in front of my face.
“And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood,” Alice bellows, her voice quaking like a Pentecostal preacher at a Sunday morning tent revival meeting.
“Where’s Logan? Let my children go. They haven’t done anything to you,” I beg as Will continues to scream for me in the next room.
“When I snuff you out, I will cover the heavens and darken their stars. I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon will not give its light,” Alice moans.
“Jesus. Who the hell are you people?”
“The true believers. Cut from the cloth of God the almighty, who will return only when we truly repent and offer him a sacrifice,” Alice answers.
“You’re with Cahill,” I realize.
Alice settles down on her haunches, tilts her head, and looms sideways, taking me in. Her grey eyes glow bright and manic, and she shoots the tip of her pointed tongue out at me like a venomous snake about to bite.
“Hand me my bag,” Alice commands.
Leslie scurries to the hallway and returns with Alice’s knitting bag.
“Get it out, but be careful.”
“I ain’t touching that thing,” Leslie answers.
“Give it here then, girl.”
Leslie pinches the ends of the knitting bag carefully between her thumbs and index fingers and places it at Alice’s feet.
“Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy,” Alice whispers excitedly. She quickly moves to the closet and extracts a wire hanger that she uncoils but leaves its curved neck intact and dips it inside her bag.
“Come on out now, I declare, you incarnation of the devil!”
Alice eases the hanger from the knitting bag and pulls along with it a thick, brown snake with coral pinstripes spooled in three wide loops around the center of the erect wire.
“Jesus. Tell me who you people really are,” I say.
Leslie sidles next to Alice and points the stun gun an inch away from my head.
“Her name is Alice. We didn’t lie about that. She’s my aunt.”
Alice begins to wave the snake around in a fluid figure eight through the air as she chants in gibberish.
“Satanica berufa miorci, Jesus lantico animon.”
“She’s pissed because you took her pastor away,” Leslie explains. “You wouldn’t like Auntie when she’s pissed.”
“Cahill told you to do this?”
The mention of Cahill’s name seems to snap Alice to attention. She shoos the snake back inside the bag and squats back down on the floor and studies me for a moment. She stands back up slowly and walks to the window, where she looks out at the evening dusk beginning to settle across Kim’s remote property.
“I went to Reverend Cahill’s Pentecostal services every Sunday. The morning services were full of praise and devotion, but the night worships were when things really heated up. Reverend Cahill brought the snakes out then, just like he said his daddy did when he did the tent revival meetings,” Alice says and her plump body trembles with an orgasmic shudder. “I could never get the reverend’s attention. Too many people at the services. They came as far as Indiana to hear his Word, and I could never get close enough. But one time, he looked out at the crowd, his hands raised to the heavens, and I swear he smiled at me. I used to watch his syndicated television show every night, but Reverend Cahill really caught fire when he went high heaven Pentecostal after his accident.”
“What do you want with me and my family?”
“I saw you the first time outside of the courthouse when my reverend was on trial. I was picketing with the other brothers and sisters from the congregation, protesting the dirty lies you wrote. But you didn’t see me. You looked right over us like we were trash. It’s your fault he went to jail. You’ve got evil around your soul. It lashes at you like flames, and I know you know it too.”
“Your problem is with me, not my children. Let them go.”
“Let them go,” Alice mimics in a singsong voice. “Reverend Cahill spoke to me on the radio. It was his own personal message for his Alice, just like when he smiled at me that one time in church. Reverend Cahill said sacrifices needed to be made. ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.’”
“That stupid jailhouse radio interview.”
Leslie pulls out a pack of pink bubblegum from her back pocket and stuffs two pieces in her mouth.
“We were planning to kill you, but once Alice heard Reverend Cahill on the radio, we had a change of plans. We’d been tracking you for a while now. Auntie told me to get inside, to get you to trust us,” Leslie says. “I started researching you on the computer. It was a little hard to get to you at first. Besides your articles, you don’t have any personal pages on the Internet, not even Facebook. But your friend Kim did. She had plenty. Kim put tons of personal information on her page, including pictures of you and your sons. We found out where you lived and what your boy Will looked like. Kim had a family tree page and with a little snooping, I found a distant cousin named Alice. Kim wrote a comment next to her cousin’s name, saying she hadn’t seen her in thirty years. The cousin and my aunt had the same name, so we knew it was a sign. I sent your friend a Facebook message and we started corresponding. We got on real friendly terms pretty quick, and I baited her. I told Kim that Alice and I would be in Michigan looking at boarding schools for me, and she bit. Even invited us to stay with her. She believed everything. Your friend was real nice but real stupid. She should know you should never trust strangers, especially people you meet on social media. I’m a kid and I even know that.”
I look over at Kim and try not to scream.
“Kim was a kind and trusting person.”
“Like I said, nice but stupid. I made her write the note I left on the bed before I strung her up,” Leslie says, sounding pleased with herself.
“Kim had the audacity to threaten me. She and your Logan boy showed up unannounced. I don’t like surprise visitors. Kim was going to call the police. So we had to make it look like she committed suicide after she murdered your boy,” Alice says.
“You killed Logan!”
“Not yet. He ran off when Kim started screaming. We’ll find him though. I’m a very good hunter,” Leslie says.
I still have a chance to save my sons. Unless I can regain the ability to move my body, I need to buy time until the police arrive.
“You two kidnapped Will last night.”
“Alice found your home security code in Kim’s bedroom,” Leslie explains. “We knew she had it written down somewhere. Kim said she checked on your house while you were away this summer. She made everything so easy for us, the stupid bitch.”
“Watch that dirty mouth of yours!” Alice warns.
Will’s cries have ebbed into a jagged whimper. Before Leslie goes to retrieve him, she sticks the Taser gun against my stomach and turns on the juice. My body writhes on the floor like a live wire until she finally lets up.
My heart leaps sporadically in my chest until I am convinced I am going to die next to Kim. But the pain finally stops and I breathe in and out until my heart begins to beat normally again. I command my body to fight, but all I can muster is a slight twitch in my right arm. The tiny movement shoots a surge of searing pain down my side.
Leslie returns from the other room with Will, who is now lying docile in her arms.
“Will, I’m here,” I say.
“Mama,” Will moans.
I move forward inch by inch and drag my dead weight toward the wall. Although I’ve barely moved, I feel like I am in the last throes of a triathlon as sweat begins to stick to the back of my shirt and forehead. I finally reach the wall and collapse against it.
In my new vantage point, I get a full panorama of the hell that is standing before me. Alice has changed out of her faded hippy attire and now wears a shapeless and worn grey dress. Her waist-length hair is tied tightly into a braid that coils down her back.
“My mama,” Will cries.
Alice jerks around and covers Will’s face with a baby blanket.
“Do not speak to the child again,” Alice says. “We’ve lost our way and must come back to God through sacrifice. There is no greater sacrifice than the blood of a child on an altar before the most holy. Reverend Cahill will find out what I did, and then he will know who I am. He’ll thank me personally. That’s what he’ll do.”
“I’m going to kill you,” I say.
“Leslie, take the baby back to the guesthouse.”
“He better not mess himself again or he’s really going to get it this time,” Leslie says.
Will continues to scream for me under the blanket.
“My mama!” he begs. Will’s anguished cries continue until his small voice disappears down the staircase.
“It’s going to be all right,” I promise him.
“Now shush your mouth,” Alice whispers.
“Cahill is in jail for what he did, not because of any article I wrote. He raped little girls in his congregation and stole the church’s money.”
Alice bends down, grabs a fistful of my hair, and yanks me up so I can see her cold grey eyes.
“Now you listen to me!” Alice yells savagely as spit flies out of the corners of her mouth. “Those girls were treasured by the reverend. I only wish he’d chosen Leslie.”
“Jesus Christ. You’re either crazy or completely brainwashed by that son of a bitch.”
Alice releases my hair and my head smacks against the wooden floor.
“You just shut your mouth or I’ll have Leslie carve it out of your face.”
Leslie rushes back into the room, her alabaster skin glistening with sweat.
“I took the baby to the guesthouse and put him in the crib just like you wanted,” Leslie pants.
“You need to go find the boy Logan and take care of him. Kill him and bring the body back here.”
Logan is smart. He will keep running until he finds help.
“I like Logan. I wish we could take him with us,” Leslie says.
“Shut up. You follow my direction, girl. Now go on and change back into your regular clothes. You look like a whore dressed like t
hat.”
“I like these clothes.”
“Those are devil clothes. You get out of them and put on something godly, you hear?”
Leslie lifts up her index finger and thumb, like she is holding a gun, and points it in Alice’s direction.
“Boom, boom!” Leslie says.
“You get out of here now, little girl, or I will get a real gun and shoot you dead with one shot,” Alice says.
The threat brings Leslie back in line, and she hustles out of the room to do Alice’s bidding.
“Something’s never been quite right about that girl,” Alice mutters as she watches Leslie disappear down the hallway.
“You wrote those letters to Cahill,” I say.
Alice nods and begins to run her finger along the windowsill, like a dutiful Stepford wife dusting before her husband comes home after a hard day’s work.
“The letters were key, because they would throw the police off track and then I wouldn’t be looked at as a suspect.”
“How did you know about my brother?”
“Old newspaper stories. Google is a gift from God. You do a quick search, and you can find out anything about a person. I found out about the Indian arrowhead in a Detroit Free Press online article and had Leslie plant one under your baby’s crib. Ordered it on eBay, I did. The Lord helped me craft a perfect plan. No one was supposed to find out, but then Kim figured it out, and you and your brat Logan showed up here. You’ll all be dead soon enough and the Lord will have his offering.”
“I heard that radio interview with Cahill. He wasn’t talking about a human sacrifice. Cahill is a deranged pervert, but he’s no killer.”
“Get behind me, Satan. I will not listen to your trickery. You’re nothing but a miniscule ant in God’s eyes.”
Alice slams her foot against the back of my head, shooting bands of white stars that explode in front of my eyes. I close them tight until the pain in my head reduces to a dull throb.
“I told you to change out of that sinful outfit,” Alice says to Leslie, who has returned in her tank top and shorts.
The Last Time She Saw Him Page 22