Garage Sale Stalker (Garage Sale Mysteries)

by Weinert, Suzi

  Processing this improbable development, Adam made a decision. “Thank you for any help you can offer.” He handed the ski mask to the man, who waved it near the dog’s nose. Ears forward, the dog appeared energized by the scent.

  “Find!” Wilford addressed the animal in a normal soft-spoken voice, quite different, Adam thought, from the harsh tone most owners used with their pets. And, for that matter, with their children! The two men waited and watched as the dog raced into the woods.

  “And how do you happen to be out at this hour?” Adam inquired with caution.

  “Back where you parked in my neighborhood, that very old man with the very old dog out at this very late hour was my father with his companion, Maddie. Counting in dog years, they’re about the same age. Neither sleeps well so they’re often restless at night. I try to keep an eye on Dad but don’t always succeed. I’m sorry his arrival interrupted your stake-out.”

  Three sharp barks drifted through the air. “Ah,” said Wilford quietly, “Jackie has your man.”

  From his own interface with the effective police K-9 unit, Adam respected the uncanny skills of handlers and their well-trained dogs, but he’d never heard of this unprecedented contribution from a volunteering citizen. Still, he and the animal’s owner stumbled through the woods until they spotted Jackie looking expectantly up into a large shade tree.

  “He’ll be up there,” Wilford pointed toward the branches.

  “Don’t go any closer!” Adam warned. “He may be armed. I’ll call for backup. Where are we?”

  “When you get them on the phone, I’ll give you precise directions.”

  Twenty minutes later, as backup cops pushed a cuffed Ralph Forbes into the back seat of their cruiser, Adam turned to Wilford. “Thank you, Sir, for your invaluable help tonight. Jackie’s a remarkable dog, but I don’t recognize her breed.”

  “Perhaps that’s because she’s a mixture, as most of us are. And we thank you, Detective Iverson, and the other police who protect our communities. Here’s my contact information if I can be of further service to you.” He gave Adam a business card and the two men shook hands before Adam climbed into the waiting police car that would drive him to his own vehicle near the stake-out.

  “Can we give you a lift back to your house?” Adam asked.

  “No, thanks,” Wilford replied in his quiet voice, “Jackie and I will enjoy the walk back.”

  The next day’s newspaper headline read, “Prominent Vienna Attorney Helps Solve Crime,” and pictured a pleasantly smiling Edward Wilford standing beside Jackie. The caption below the picture read, “Attorney Says Dog Deserves Credit.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Five months earlier

  Exhausted by the long drive from Texas and despite his determination to force this place to fit his plans, Ruger Yates dreaded spending that first night in his mother’s old house. Finally, he brought his dog inside and instructed it to lie down on the bedroom floor near him. He willed himself to stretch fully-clothed atop one of the uncomfortable twin beds in the room he’d shared with Mathis when they were young boys. At least the heat and electricity worked and the toilets flushed.

  As the nighttime temperature dropped, a bitter February wind howled fiercely across the property, buffeting every cranny of the aged farmhouse and intensifying unfamiliar creaks in the structure’s old wood. The wind’s shrieks added eeriness to Ruger’s anxiety and he tossed fitfully for an hour before finally falling into a deep sleep. Then the awful dreams began…

  Aching hunger was Ruger Yates’ earliest memory. With no idea of his age, how long he’d been there or anything other than his immediate bleak surroundings, he lay in a cage with bars all around. The boy in the cage with him didn’t hurt him. Sometimes the nice girl and the mean man came. Then blackness and fear and thirst and hunger.

  His child’s remembrance differed only in detail from what actually happened. Ten months younger than the brother sharing his fate, Ruger was four years old when he and Mathis curled on the filthy crib mattress, their emaciated bodies weak from meager food and intermittent beatings. They stared listlessly into black space of the windowless cellar as they lay naked in a feces-strewn enclosure constructed from a baby crib topped with a wooden lid. Wire hinged the lid firmly along one side and a padlock secured the hasp on the other. The acrid stench of human urine filled the immediate area, but the small boys no longer smelled it.

  Sometimes the dim overhead light bulbs glowed for days at a time, contrasting with total darkness for other long stretches. The boys had no concept of day or night and thought only of food, despite their knowledge that this yearned-for commodity came with pain, before or after.

  When the door opened at the top of the cellar stairs, the crack of light stabbing the darkness should have encouraged hope of rescue from their pitiful plight. Instead, the boys dreaded this moment, for what came next was another installment of the miserable treatment they knew well.

  They stared toward the light, unmoving and nearly breathless, as they heard double footfalls on the stairs, one heavy and one very light.

  “Are we going to feed them now, Daddy?” asked a little girl’s voice.

  “We’ll see, Miriam. Don’t ask so damn many questions,” rasped a hoarse, nasty reply.

  “Yes, Daddy. I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up, girl. Damn it, you talk too much.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Look at those disgusting excuses for human beings.” The father indicated the crib. “Animals!”

  “Animals!” The three-year-old girl mimicked her father’s disgusted tone of voice as they reached the bottom of the stairs and approached the boys’ cage.

  “And why do we keep animals around?”

  Miriam recited the memorized litany. “To work for us and do exactly what we teach them.”

  The father grunted assent. “If they do that, we feed them. What happens if they don’t work for us and don’t do what we teach them?”

  “Then we…” Miriam stared at the cage where her brothers averted their eyes, praying she wouldn’t name a punishment he would mete out immediately. Miriam knew the way to avoid being forced into that cage herself meant giving the expected answers, but the boys looked really bad today. With a hesitant sideways look up at her father she said, “We feed them anyway?”

  An ominous silence charged the still air. The three children knew their father’s wrathful temper when displeased with their responses. He grabbed her tightly, clamping his hands so hard on her small arms that she cried out, her head bobbling as he shook her violently. She screamed, “Feed them so they are strong enough to work!”

  Hearing this, he dropped her roughly to the concrete floor. Struggling, she got to her feet.

  With a mean sneer the father snarled, “Three times those boys had the chance to work with me in the field but they wouldn’t keep up. They didn’t do what I taught them. They knew they’d get it if they didn’t obey and they made their own choice. Tomorrow I’ll give them another chance and if they don’t make it then, they’re not coming out of the cage again except for discipline. I’ve done my best to train them but they’re too lazy and too stupid to learn.”

  This monologue kindled for the boys vague recall of working in the hot sun to pick vegetables while dragging along impossibly heavy buckets, of pushing hay bales until their bone-tired small arms and legs stopped functioning, of working so many consecutive hours they fell into exhausted sleep in the field. And all for a man they could never please.

  The sound of a dog’s bark from outside filtered into the cellar. This happened only when strangers visited the farm. All three children focused nervously on their father’s reaction.

  “Damn, that’s the hay customer. Here, you feed them.” He handed Miriam the wedge of bread and some bologna slices.

  “Daddy,” she fingered the food in her hands, food on which the boys’ eyes riveted, “don’t leave me down here, please.”

  “Hell, I’ll lock you down here if you don’t do
what I say. And don’t fill their water pan,” he shouted angrily from the top of the stairs before slamming the door.

  The boys waved their arms through the cage bars. “Miriam, please… food.”

  She handed the morsels to Mathis, who deftly tore them apart and handed Ruger half. The food disappeared in a matter of seconds, eaten noisily as fast as they could devour it. Afterward, they licked their fingers for remaining traces of moisture and salt until their tongues were dry.

  “Water, please,” Ruger begged Miriam. “We thirsty! Pan empty! He not find out.”

  Glancing furtively toward the stairway, she pushed the watering can spout through the crib bars and poured a stream into the pie pan water dish. They took turns tipping the dish and slurping the welcome liquid. “More water, please,” Mathis asked and she filled the pan a second time.

  “Bring more food when nobody sees,” Mathis pleaded.

  Miriam shook her head emphatically. “He’d catch me sure and you know what that means for all of us. And Mommy, too. I want to but…” she winced at her brothers’ pitiful condition before anguish twisted her little face in fear, “but… I just can’t!

  CHAPTER 19

  The February wind rattled with increasing ferocity against the farm house as Ruger Yates sat up abruptly mid-dream. He breathed heavily, the nightmare of the cellar cage profound in his mind. He stared around the farmhouse bedroom and listened to the wind whistling just beyond its walls. Although the dream had ended, a cascade of unwanted memories burst through repression’s protective gate and flooded across his mind.

  When the man and little girl stopped coming to their basement prison, Ruger remembered the woman descending the basement stairs. She unlocked their cage, dragged the filthy, cringing boys upstairs and rushed them down the hall to a room with tightly drawn window shades. There she prodded them up a ladder into a small, poorly-lit attic space before forcing a flashlight into the frightened older boy’s hand and showing him how a button turned it on and off.

  “You’re out of that cage and you’ll have enough food and water up here now but you must be absolutely quiet,” she said. “If you make any noise, I’ll take it all away and leave you hungry in the dark. Find the food with the flashlight, but then turn the light off or it will stop working. Do you understand?” In response to their terrified silence, she shouted, “Do you understand me?”

  Apparently she accepted their muffled grunts as agreement because seconds later their space turned black as she stood on the ladder and pushed the door shut above her. They heard the scratch of a lock and the scrape of the ladder being dragged away.

  With no concept of time, the boys awaited the woman bringing food and water often enough to relieve the earlier desperation for nourishment endured in the cage. And when one flashlight died, she gave them another.

  After what seemed a long time in the attic, one day the trapdoor opened and they were jerked out and dragged down the ladder. Terrified and spooked, like the semi-feral children they’d become, they winced at the dazzling, unfamiliar brightness of daylight in the room. Their mouths gaped open as the woman propelled them through all-but-forgotten parts of the house, its scenes streaking past their disbelieving eyes as she whisked them down the corridor to their next destination.

  “After your time out in the sheds and three months in that cellar cage before they took your father away, you were quiet for the month in the attic while the detectives searched,” she said. “Now you’re going to have another chance.”

  “Detective” had no meaning for them nor did they understand “months.” Their imprisonments spanned their entire conscious memories. They’d heard “another chance” before, but another chance at what? Something worse?

  They stared, dumbstruck, as their mother turned a knob to fill the tub and they shrank against the wall at the noisy splash of water against porcelain. They balked at climbing into the bath until she raised threatening fists. As they cowered in the warm water, fearful of new heinous twists at any moment, she roughly demonstrated the use of soap and washcloth, warned them not to splash any water onto the floor and instructed them to clean themselves.

  Despite their anxiety at these unknowns, wonder filled the boys with this remarkable unveiling of these parts of the house. Afterward, their mouths hung open in awe when she brought them home-sewn clothes of incorrect but wearable sizes, showed them how to dress themselves and ushered them into a room with twin beds, a shared night table, a lamp and a dresser on which lay a brush and comb. She demonstrated how to use them.

  “You’ll stay here now. Keep your clothes there.” She opened and closed the bureau drawers. “You dress yourselves each day in here and you sleep in these beds at night. You stay in this room except when you do chores, eat or study. In the bathroom, you wash up and use the toilet.”

  No longer potty trained, the brothers exchanged such puzzled looks that she angrily described to “two very stupid boys” the toilet’s exact purpose and threatened punishment for any accidents.

  “Now, about the rules…”

  “Rules?” Mathis stumbled over the unknown word.

  “Yes, rules! You do exactly what I tell you. You get food if you do. You get punished if you don’t. Those are the rules. Now, come to the kitchen for lunch.”

  When she dragged the wary but clean and dressed boys to the kitchen table and slammed half-full plates in front of them, they fell upon the food with both hands.

  “Oh, no you don’t. You use these or you get nothing to eat.” They stared uncomprehendingly at the silverware she pushed toward them. “Watch me,” she said, using her fork, then her spoon.

  Ravenous from the food aromas, the hungry boys picked up the awkward utensils and tried to imitate what they saw. They spilled at first but started to get the hang of it. Mercifully, she focused on her own meal, ignoring their initial clumsy efforts. They also imitated the way she drank from a glass, but when she turned her back they licked their plates clean.

  “We start school tomorrow. I am your teacher. You’ll learn your numbers and letters and to read and write.”

  She might as well speak Chinese. They stared at her, hoping “school” wouldn’t hurt.

  Within a week, “two very stupid boys” morphed into surprisingly normal-appearing children. Their mother tamed their scruffy, shoulder-length hair using an inverted bowl as a cutting guide. Though still clumsy with silverware, they drank from glasses and ate three regular meals a day. They had no idea how they’d learned to talk.

  From household chores indoors, they graduated to simple outdoor tasks such as feeding chickens, gathering eggs and picking vegetables from the garden. Their mother warned, “When you’re outdoors you never, ever talk to strangers. Strangers want to kill little boys and eat them. They’re always hunting for a tasty meal. They might pretend to be friendly, waiting for their chance to grab you and sink their teeth into you. Always run and hide if you see a stranger.” Then she played her trump card. “And if you ever speak to a stranger, I’ll know about it…and it’s back to the cellar forever.”

  Any back-to-the-cellar threat resulted in instant obedience.

  After awhile, the boys realized their hated father was no longer around, but neither was their small sister who’d often shown them kindness, at her own peril. Despite the risk of consequences, one day Mathis dared to ask his mother, “The man… and the little girl?”

  Her composure vanished. An angry voice hissed from her clenched teeth. “Your father’s in an insane asylum where that evil fiend always belonged.” But then, before their eyes, her face transformed into tragedy. She moaned in a high-pitched wail, “But my little girl… my sweet little Miriam is gone forever. Oh, Miriam, why did he do it?” she sobbed pitifully. “Why did he squeeze you until you couldn’t breathe?”

  The boys understood tears, for they’d cried together in pain and despair, but didn’t know adults could do it, too. Ruger shyly put his hand on her shoulder the way Mathis had comforted him so many times. At his touch s
he leaped to her feet and shrieked, “Don’t you put your hands on me – ever!” She shrank back, her hands groping along the wall behind her and her eyes staring wildly at her sons before she rushed from the kitchen, ran down the hall and slammed her bedroom door behind her.

  The boys exchanged panicky looks and Ruger clutched his brother’s arm. Although she inflicted pain, she also provided food and saved them from the ravenous strangers outdoors. “She’ll be all right, won’t she?” He searched his older brother’s confused face and his voice lifted several octaves as his anxiety increased. He grasped his brother’s arm even harder. “Won’t she?”

  “Yes…” Mathis calmed his brother, but he had no idea what to expect next or how much longer they could survive with or without her. “Yes,” he repeated until Ruger’s fingers, gouging deep into his arm, finally relaxed.

  CHAPTER 20

  Each day Ruger and Mathis feared their mother’s whims, which controlled their lives and their food. Despite her indifference, the little boys craved any scrap of kindness or positive recognition of their efforts to please her. But as weeks passed, her unpredictability escalated. Neurotic and periodically teetering on the edge of sanity, her increasingly irrational tirades found the boys ready targets for her verbal and physical abuse.

  Although her schooling wakened the boys’ sleeping minds, her harsh punishments for academic mistakes underscored performing well or paying dearly. In their efforts to learn, they made inevitable mistakes. Reprisals hinged on the nearest object transformed into a disciplinary tool: the stinging broom handle, the prodding meat fork or the hot iron skillet.

  But the scariest incident happened at the kitchen table when their raving mother shouted to Mathis, “Snake. S-n-a-k-e. I showed it to you, I spelled it for you, I made you repeat it and still you wrote it wrong. When you make a mistake you know you must be punished. Why do you make me do this to you?” She cast about for any instrument to drive home the lesson and, grabbing a nearby meat cleaver, she bent back all of the boy’s fingers except one which lay flat on the table. Paralyzed with fear, the boys stared at the finger, powerless to defend themselves even if they’d known what came next. “You’ll never forget how to spell snake again,” she cried and, with a vicious stroke, chopped off Mathis’ little finger.