by Paige Dearth
Gracie lifted her shirt. Her bare back looked like a highway that had split off in a million directions—leaving the imprint of the plug belonging to the extension cord Pepper had beat her with. Emma picked up a jar of honey and took Gracie upstairs to tend to her cuts, just as Mrs. Tisdale had done for her.
After she had nursed her sister as best she could, she went downstairs and turned her attention to the kitchen. She began cleaning it up as quickly as possible, aware that the fucking bastard would be home any minute.
By the time Pepper came through the door shortly after two in the morning and fell asleep on the sofa, Gracie was in her bed, sleeping, and Emma was sitting next to her, feeding the hate she nursed in her heart for their father. She was increasingly firm in her conviction that one day she would escape him. No one, not even Brianna, understood the nature of the untamed beasts lurking in Emma’s soul. Before she went to sleep each night, she prayed to God to kill her father. But He seemed deaf to her prayers and she knew it was ultimately up to her to ensure that her father paid for all the pain he had caused them.
The next day was just like any other in the house of horrors. Down in the kitchen that morning, while Emma was making breakfast for the beast, a rat scurried across the floor just in front of her feet. The girls were accustomed to small mice and bugs; it came with the territory, the neighborhood. However, this particular rat was as big as a cat. Emma screamed when she saw it and jumped up on a kitchen chair.
Pepper came thudding into the kitchen with Valerie following, infuriated that his sleep had been disturbed. When he saw the rat, which didn’t seem scared of them at all, he grumbled, “Holy Christ! Where the fuck did that thing come from?” Grabbing the broom, he swung at it. The rat shuffled off under the kitchen door from where it had originally appeared.
Pepper now turned on Emma, his favorite scapegoat. “If you weren’t such a fucking pig and knew how to clean like a real woman, we wouldn’t have this problem!” he yelled. “Now make my breakfast, will you? And when you’re done, I want this place spotless. Then take your fat ass down to the grocery store and buy some rat poison, you fucking idiot!” He looked at Gracie, then back at Emma. “You two are useless! Now get moving!” he screamed sharply, making them both jump.
After breakfast, Emma scrubbed every inch of the kitchen. She emptied drawers and cabinets and rewashed clean bowls and dishes. She knew Pepper would inspect her work when she was done and also knew the consequences that awaited her if he found even a speck of dirt anywhere. While her father looked over her work, Valerie handed Emma a five-dollar bill and told her to run down to the grocery store for rat poison.
Emma knew she was leaving Gracie in a vulnerable situation alone upstairs in their room. She went upstairs to see her before she left and instructed her to stay in the bedroom and not to come out until she was back. She ran to the store as quickly as her feet would carry her. Pepper was impossible to satisfy and always found something to complain about. Emma was anxious to get back home in case he went after Gracie again. Her sister was so broken from the night before that Emma believed another beating might kill her. If it didn’t kill her, it would most certainly leave permanent scars on her already swollen and bruised body. Having made it to the store, she quickly found the rat poison and hurried to the cashier to make her purchase. Then she sprinted back to the house.
She had been gone less than twenty minutes, but the moment Emma stepped through the front door she knew violence had erupted in her absence. The stillness in the house, combined with the smell of fear and anger, gripped all of her senses. She hurried into the kitchen and found Gracie unconscious on the floor. Blood oozed from her nose and mouth. Her eyes had fresh bruises, in addition to the ones inflicted on her the night before.
After checking for her sister’s pulse and finding one, Emma went to see where the son of a bitch was. Unable to find him in the house, she went back to her sister. After cleaning the blood from Gracie’s face, she brought her to the sofa and placed a bag of frozen peas over her swollen eyes.
“Stay here,” Emma told the battered child. “Don’t move. I’ll take care of everything. I won’t leave you again.”
The kitchen was a wreck. All the work she had just finished had been undone in ten minutes of unchecked rage. From habit, Emma proceeded to do her normal clean-up. When she was through, she sat at the kitchen table and reaffirmed her deep hatred for her father. Noticing the rat poison on the kitchen counter, she got up and took it out of the bag. If she didn’t use it, Pepper would subject either Gracie or her to another beating for not doing what he had ordered. As she removed the container from the bag, she noticed the skull and crossbones that accompanied the warning on the label. Underneath the image was the word, “TOXIC.”
For the first time in her life, Emma felt a surge of pure power sweep over her. She read through all of the warnings on the label and grew more delighted by the minute. She knew then that God was finally answering her prayers. The information on the container warned that if ingested by humans, the poison could be fatal. Emma did a happy dance in her head for her newfound secret. She knew she had to be careful and not get ahead of herself; if she got caught by Pepper he would surely kill her. It was difficult for her to contain her excitement and even more difficult not to tell Gracie or Brianna.
Hours later, Pepper came home, drunk and smelling of cheap whiskey. He demanded to know when dinner would be ready. In less than fifteen minutes, Emma told him. He grabbed her by the hair at the base of her neck, pulling her face close to his. “Did you take care of the rat poison like I told you to?” he growled.
Afraid that he would go after Gracie again, she answered, “Yes, Daddy. I placed the poison on both sides of the door so the rat doesn’t come back.”
He looked down to check and was satisfied at the sight of the thin line of white powder on the floor. Still grasping her hair in his hand, he snarled into her face, “If I see that thing in here again, you’re going to be really sorry. Do you understand me?”
Emma nodded.
Just then Valerie walked in and slithered up to the beast. “Dinner is almost ready, Pepper,” she crooned. “Let’s get you washed up.”
He turned and staggered out of the kitchen with Valerie following him. Emma took out four bowls. She filled three with the stew she had cooked and placed them on the table where she, Valerie, and Gracie sat. Then she filled her father’s bowl. Emma set the bowl down on the counter, picked up the rat poison, and stirred in a heaping tablespoon of the lethal ingredients.
As she watched him eat his stew laced with the tasteless, odorless poison, Emma rejoiced in what was to come. She had never felt so good in her life. Adrenaline raced through her veins. She almost felt high. She was euphoric. Paybacks are a bitch, she thought to herself.
Chapter Twelve
Over the next week, Emma fed her father large doses of rat poison every day. Slowly, he started showing signs that the poison was taking an effect on his body. It began with uncontrollable nosebleeds. Halfway into the second week, and to add to his horror, his gums began to bleed. By the end of the second week, Valerie mentioned her concern over his condition to Emma. Her mother had seen blood in his stool and was worried he might be really sick. When Valerie mumbled something about taking him to the doctor, Emma assured her that it was probably nothing more than a bad bug he had caught from somewhere. Valerie, always content to put herself first, relented. She didn’t want to lose a day of pay to take him to the doctor, and Emma gave her the perfect reason to put up with her husband’s “temporary” health condition.
During the first two weeks of Pepper’s “illness,” he rarely raised a hand to her; a few lame slaps was about all he could muster. He was lethargic and weak from bouts of dizziness and nausea. All the while, Emma quietly gloated over his misery, knowing that the stupid motherfucker hadn’t suspected a thing. By the end of the third week, Pepper could no longer get out of bed. His body was shutting down, bit by painful bit. Considering how gravely ill the man was, anyone
would have felt bad for him, particularly a daughter. But Emma didn’t. He deserved everything he was getting and she wasn’t going to stop until he was dead. The truth was, if she could have physically tortured him even more, she would have. But she didn’t want to arouse any suspicions when they came to remove his dead body from the house.
After five weeks of ingesting the rat poison Emma’s father died. That night was the happiest moment of her life. She and Brianna took two of his beers out onto the front porch to celebrate.
Emma raised her beer in the air. “Here’s to people getting what they deserve!”
Brianna smiled brightly and they clanged beer cans and took a long swig.
The ambulance workers and the police who came to the house to take Pepper’s body away didn’t suspect any foul play. The police were unconcerned at his death. People in their neighborhood died all the time. The authorities had better things to worry about than the untimely death of a notorious drunk. Just to be certain that no doubts remained about the nature of her father’s death, Emma pretended to console Gracie in the presence of the policeman who had been sent to their home. “We always knew that all the alcohol he drank would catch up to him some day,” she said mournfully.
Her younger sister played along. In bed that night, Gracie asked her sister, “Why did Dad hate us? We never did anything to him.”
Emma took her hand. “Dad hated himself because he was a total loser and he took it out on us. Dad was a dick.”
The night of Pepper’s funeral, Emma lay on her bed and relived the moments leading up to his slow and horrible death. She smiled broadly, remembering how good she had felt lacing his food with that amazing powder. Even toward the end, she had been slipping large doses of poison into his soup. She was truly proud of having killed her father. In her mind, she had killed her father to save herself and her sister from his sadistic behavior. She was finally free of the son of a bitch. He had beaten her unmercifully and now he was finally dead.
Valerie was sad and pitiful, which annoyed Emma. It made her sick that her mother was so self-centered that she had allowed him to do all those horrible things to Gracie and her, always blaming it on something that the girls did or didn’t do. In her mind, Valerie was as much to blame for all the brutality in their life as Pepper.
With Pepper gone, Emma and Gracie began to lead a normal life. Emma spent most of her free time with her younger sister and Brianna, while Valerie hung out with the women from her workplace. Emma still hated her mother, but decided she could always be disposed of as easily as Pepper had been, if she tried to give her or Gracie any shit. The next year was peaceful for the sisters. Gracie even managed to make a couple of her own friends at school. The girls had become closer in the year after Pepper died. Mainly because Emma had more freedom to come and go as she pleased.
The year Emma and Brianna turned sixteen was exciting. They threw themselves a joint birthday party at Brianna’s house. They invited Gracie and Pam. Valerie was excluded since she hadn’t celebrated her daughter’s birthday before. The party turned out to be a lot of fun and Pam bought two six-packs of beer and let the girls drink them until they threw up.
Brianna had grown into an attractive sixteen-year-old. She had a small face that suited her small, thin body well. Her brown hair hung in loose curls, which made her look exotic. Her brown eyes still had a mischievous glint to them, which Emma loved. She had a sweet smile, offset by her brazen personality.
Emma was five feet eight inches tall. She was thin, with full breasts. Her silky blond hair set off her emerald-green eyes and she had a perfect set of straight white teeth. Stunningly beautiful though she was, Emma remained blind to her own looks. The other kids in high school had tormented her so much that when she looked in the mirror, all she could see was ugly. Regardless of how they were treated by their peers in school, the girls loved the freedom they shared and enjoyed being teenagers. Gracie was now thirteen years old and quite the little social butterfly. It pleased Emma to see her so happy, and she felt vindicated for having committed murder to remove the thorn in their lives. She had done the right thing by killing her father.
Everything seemed perfect—until a quiet Saturday night, when Valerie brought home a man she’d been secretly dating for six months. A man named Jake.
Chapter Thirteen
Jake was a dick from the start. When introduced to Emma, he took her hand on the pretext of shaking it and squeezed it a bit too tightly for her comfort, yammering all the while about how nice it was to finally meet “Valerie’s girls.” But it was the way he shook Gracie’s hand, holding on to it for an uncomfortably long time, that made the little hairs on the back of Emma’s neck stand on end. The moment her younger sister turned away to get Jack a beer at Valerie’s insistence, Emma noticed the pervert checking out the thirteen-year-old. She suspected that Valerie had seen how he looked at Gracie with longing, but her mother gave no indication that she had caught on. Emma shot her a scornful look as Valerie nervously moved closer to Jake and put her arm through his.
Later that night, as the girls lay in bed, Emma told Gracie firmly, “You stay the fuck away from that asshole Jake. I didn’t like the way he looked at you. Do you understand?”
Alarmed by her sister’s gruff tone, Gracie immediately agreed to steer clear. “Emma, why does Mom have to let him sleep here tonight?” she inquired. “We just met him. What’s wrong with her? When I grow up, I’ll make sure I don’t turn out like her. I’m going to be like you.”
Emma rolled over and gathered her sister in her arms, holding her close. She couldn’t sleep for most of the night, sensing that something bad was looming. Anger welled in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t like Jake and intended telling her mother about her feelings in the morning. If Valerie wanted to date him, then fine. But Emma didn’t want her bringing him home again.
The next morning, after Jake had left, she confronted her mother. “Why did you let Jake sleep here?” she asked. “This is our house! Haven’t you put us through enough already?”
“Listen, Emma,” Valerie retorted, “this is my house, not yours. I like Jake. He thinks I’m beautiful and sweet. He’s also good to me. Do you have to be so mean about him? This is exactly why you always made your father angry. It’s your bad attitude. You want everyone to feel sorry for you.”
Emma shot back, aghast, her temper flaring. “You saw the way he checked out Gracie last night. Don’t pretend you didn’t! Get your fucking head out of the sand, Mom! You’re a selfish woman. You helped Dad torture us. I’m sick of you!”
Valerie gasped. “What the hell are you saying, Emma? What does that mean? You know I had nothing to do with how your father treated you girls!” she argued.
Emma retorted, “Yeah, sure. You had nothing to do with it! That’s why you locked yourself in your bedroom while your husband was hurting us! You’re as much to blame as he is!”
Beyond irritated, Emma stormed out of the house and made her way across the street to find Brianna. She couldn’t wait to tell Brianna about Jake. The two girls got into Pam’s car and drove off so that they would have privacy.
“He’s not even good-looking like my asshole father!” Emma snorted contemptuously. “Bri, you should have seen the way he checked out Gracie! I wanted to rip his fucking eyes out of his head! The problem is, my moron of a mother does whatever men want and just pretends everything is normal. She’s always told me the shit my father did to me was my fault. God, I hate her!”
The negative energy emanating from Emma fueled her friend’s anger. “Well, fuck him, Emma!” Brianna said. “If he dares try anything with Gracie, he’ll wind up just like Pepper!”
Emma gaped at her friend in shock. She had never confided in Brianna about her role in Pepper’s death.
Brianna broke the momentary silence. “I’m not an idiot, Em,” she said quietly. “You told me what Pepper was doing to you. I also know how much you hated him for it. What I haven’t figured out is how you did it. Doesn’t matter, though,
I’m just happy he’s gone.” She quickly added, “You need to do whatever it takes to be happy. And don’t worry, I’ll never tell anyone.”
Emma believed her wholeheartedly, because she knew Brianna meant every word she uttered.
Within a week, Jake had moved in with them and taken over the house as though it belonged to him. A familiar pattern emerged. Within the first couple of weeks, he came home and asked Gracie when dinner would be ready the moment he walked through the door. Unluckily for him, Emma still cooked dinner for the family and she wasn’t about to let her sister fall into the same trap as she had with Pepper. Jake was less demanding of Emma, because, she believed, he knew better than to fuck with her.
Despite how cautious he was with Emma, his pure dislike for Gracie led him to bully the young girl. There was something about her monotonous voice and her dreary, sluggish manner that just pissed him off. She lacked the spirit, the fire he saw in girls her age and Jake thought he could fix that right from the start. Pathetic as he found her, he also thought she had the potential to be an attractive little thing, if only she knew how to make the most of her charms. All he figured he had to do was get Emma on his side, like he had with Valerie. Then all these women would be his to command. Jake liked the idea—of being the man of the house.
Chapter Fourteen
Almost two months to the day that Jake had moved in, he beat Gracie for the first time. Emma wasn’t home, having stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts on her way back from school to have a cup of coffee with Brianna. When she entered the house almost an hour behind schedule, Jake’s voice reached her from upstairs.
“You’re such a stupid girl!” she heard him yell. “When I tell you to come into the bathroom and do something for me, I expect you to do it promptly! Do you understand me?” There was the distinct sound of a slap, followed by another and yet another.