by Ania Ahlborn
Jack exhaled a breath. He didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know where to begin. But he shook his head anyway.
“I’m not mad,” he told her, crouched on the leaf-covered ground. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
Charlie smiled, and at first Jack managed a weak smile in return. But her smile kept growing, inching up her face until his heart fluttered to a stop. It was the jagged grin that had haunted him for so long, the smile he saw in the darkness of his bedroom, perched at the edge of his mattress, watching him sleep. Before Jack could react, a burst of air pushed through his lips as though he’d been punched in the gut. He pinched his eyebrows together and his gaze trickled down to his abdomen. Charlie’s hand was wrapped around the handle of the butcher’s knife, its blade buried in Jack’s belly up to the hilt.
A cold sensation bloomed outward into his arms and legs. He swayed a little, away from Charlie at first, and eventually toward her. Instead of pushing her away, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close; and as the pain began to slither from the blade and into muscles that were beginning to spasm with shock, he let out a cry that made the leaves of the surrounding trees shiver. It wasn’t a moan of pain, and it wasn’t the cry of a father coming to grips with the loss of his children—one hanging above him, the other sneering into his chest. It was the cry of a child, frightened and tormented, scared by the eyes he saw in the secret graveyard behind his house.
Holding Charlotte close, Jack wept for the things he hadn’t allowed himself to weep for until now. Now he understood why he hadn’t been allowed to remember the horrors he’d inflicted upon his mother and father. He understood why he had run away from Rosewood despite not knowing what happened. With pain flaring from the center of his body, hot as the sun, and the soft pitter-patter of blood pooling around his knees, he finally came to terms with why Charlie had been so perfect—why she had seemed like an extension of his soul.
She had been made for him; made for this.
Like a villain putting on a disguise, that wickedness had waited in the shadows, its eye on the finishing move.
This was checkmate.
Jack never had a chance.
When the knife twisted, a gasp escaped his throat. He looked into his baby girl’s eyes as she pulled the blade from his belly. The slow drip of blood was replaced by a thin, steady stream. The pain that shot through his head was enough to sway his attention from the cold ache of his stomach.
He felt himself slipping. His knees gave out. He collapsed onto his side in the rotting leaves. Struggling to right himself, all he managed to do was cover his hands in his own blood, leaving his palms slick and warm with the assurance that this was really the end. The hot iron pressed against his brain, blinding him with pain, but not before he spotted the headstones that surrounded him—the rusted wrought-iron fence that caged him in as he died. In a final moment of clarity, Jack looked up to the six-year-old standing above him, that knife held tight in her right hand, and he asked her the first thing that came to mind.
“Why?”
It seemed so stupid, so cliché, but Jack suddenly understood why all of the dying characters in all the movies asked that very thing. It was the last grasp for an answer, the last chance for understanding. Everyone, it seemed, whether they were a hardened criminal or a father of two, wanted to find some semblance of peace before they exhaled their final breath. Jack was no different. He closed his eyes as Charlotte leaned in to him, her lips brushing the shell of her ear, and heard her whisper, “Because I love you,” before that blade plunged into his heart.
But Jack had been mistaken. She hadn’t whispered, “Because I love you.”
She had whispered, “Because I can.”
The next morning, Louisiana State Troopers came across a grizzly scene during their second sweep of the area. They gathered around the crumpled body of an adult male, early to mid-thirties, who had been stabbed eighty to ninety times around the face and chest. The wounds had been caused by a serrated knife, but they came up empty on the murder weapon. It was only after they called the coroner that one of the troopers stumbled backward, nearly falling ass-first into the victim’s minced body. Overhead, they found Abigail Winter. Officer Marvin recognized her from the tiny photograph tucked in the front pocket of his shirt.
Officer Marvin found himself standing on the front porch of that quaint Southern home for a good ten minutes before putting his knuckles to the door. There was no answer. He knocked again but received no reply. After a third attempt he started for his cruiser, but something made him pause. Squinting at the glare cast by the front room window, he cupped his hands around his face and looked inside. Nothing seemed out of place.
“There’s nobody home here,” he reported through his walkie, trudging back to his patrol car. “I’m swinging by the in-laws to see if the wife is there.”
In a few more hours, the blood that had pooled on the kitchen floor would crawl across the threshold into the hallway. The police would spot it through the window on their second trip back. They’d kick the door in, and with their guns drawn they’d hug the walls of the hallway until they made it to the kitchen. That’s where they’d find Aimee Winter face down on the floor. Except she wouldn’t really be face down, because they’d find her head in the sink, staring blankly, her wide eyes asking what took them so long.
By then, Charlie would be out of Louisiana. Less than half a mile from home, a rusty red pickup would pull up along the side of the road, and a bearded man would push the passenger door open for the scrawny barefoot girl.
“You need a lift?” he’d ask her, and rather than replying, she’d crawl up onto that bench seat and stare forward through a dirty windshield.
“What’s your name, kid?” he’d ask, and when he didn’t get a reply, he’d exhale a gruff laugh and nod. “That’s okay,” he’d say. “How about I just call ya chief?”