I practically ran into Sadie’s arms and we hugged each other like we never hugged before.
“You can leave,” said the guy with the hairy knuckles. “If you tell anyone where you were—if you tell anyone what you’ve seen—we’ll kill you.”
“Yeah,” said the other guy. “Not only will we kill you, we’ll kill your families. We know who you are. We know where you live.”
Sadie’s tears continued pouring out of her, but somehow mine stopped. Mostly it was because I saw one of the hooded figures light a torch and hold it high, causing the little blond to start shrieking like he was already being burned by the flames.
“But . . . but . . . why?” I asked. I wanted to know. I needed to know.
The guy in the robe, the one with the hairy knuckles, chuckled again like he did before. He pointed at Sadie and said, “Wrong genotype.” Then he looked at me and glanced back at the twinkie blond who was about to be burned at the stake for God knows what reason. “And you?” he said. “Wrong phenotype.”
E is for Emmett
Who’s Always Behind
FIRST THERE WAS Wyatt and then came Emmett. They were always together for as long as memory would allow. Wyatt was the outgoing one. Emmett was reserved.
Wyatt liked comic books, animals, and riding his bicycle along rocky trails on his grandfather’s farm. Emmett favored the solitude of the barn, where he could curl up in the hay with one of the old medical journals that his grandfather kept in the library, staring at the diagrams and pictures for hours.
Wyatt was always in front. Emmett was always behind.
“Why do you have to always be in charge?” Emmett asked Wyatt one morning while they both looked at themselves in the mirror in the upstairs bathroom.
“Because that’s how we are,” said Wyatt. “I was born first. Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not stupid,” Emmett whispered under his breath. “You are. And you’re barely older.”
Wyatt and Emmett’s parents had been killed in a car accident before the boys had reached their first birthday. Their maternal grandparents had already passed and their paternal grandmother was in their parents’ car at the time of the accident.
Three funerals in one week would have set anyone’s teeth on edge, but not Grandpa Morris. He solemnly buried all three in the Erving town cemetery then took to raising Wyatt and Emmett on his own when he should have been long retired and watching sunsets from a rocking chair on his front porch.
Life, however, is cruel. Old Doc Morris did the best he could. Still, not too many seasons passed before he became feeble in the head and started calling the boys by the names of people who had already moved on to a better place. Wyatt and Emmett soon began raising themselves.
They kept their secret well. As far as the outside world knew, their grandfather was doing a bang-up job of being a parent. After all, they didn’t want to be sent away to someplace they didn’t know like that school up near Brattleboro.
That wouldn’t do at all.
Their studies at Jefferson Elementary were a group effort for the boys. As they took all of the same classes, anything Wyatt didn’t grasp because he was too busy staring at red-haired, green-eyed Bridgette McDonald was dutifully absorbed by the more studious Emmett then patiently regurgitated to ensure high marks all around.
For his part, Wyatt killed at four-square in the playground, pulling Emmett with him all the way, along with softball, soccer and climbing the rope in the gymnasium on rain-days.
They were a team of sorts, but eventually all teams find themselves on the losing side. Wyatt and Emmett were no different. Their loss came at the hands of a potato-headed boy named Michael Lavery. Michael started getting a little too close to Bridgette McDonald in the last marking period of sixth grade. First, Michael and Bridgette sat at the same long table during lunch. Then they sat across from each other. Finally, when Michael Lavery gave Bridgette McDonald his chocolate milk on Hamburger Wednesday, Emmett knew Wyatt had lost her completely, even though he never had her to begin with.
“It’s all your fault,” grumbled Wyatt as they walked down the long driveway to their grandfather’s farm that day after school.
“It’s not either,” said Emmett. “If you wanted to ask her out you should have just asked her out.”
“Shut up,” Wyatt grumbled some more. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m not,” said Emmett. “I’m just trying to be helpful.”
“Well you’re not being helpful,” snapped Wyatt. “You’re being dumb.”
Emmett didn’t say anything, but something inside his brain clicked and for the first time he questioned why Wyatt was always first. So what if Wyatt had decreed that was just how they were? Things change. Positions alter. Power struggles are an inevitable part of life.
Emmett was quiet for the rest of the afternoon, ignoring Wyatt the whole time even when he was forced to go hunting for pollywogs along the shallow edges of the pond at the back of the field. He would have much rather been poring over one of his grandfather’s medical books, but he didn’t want to upset Wyatt.
He didn’t like Wyatt when he was upset.
That following Monday there was a rumor at school that Bridgett McDonald and Michael Lavery had played Seven Minutes in Heaven at Darcy Butler’s house over the weekend. Supposedly, it started out as a simple game of Spin the Bottle that quickly devolved into something else.
Mr. and Mrs. Butler had been playing their own version of Seven Minutes in Heaven upstairs, so there was very little supervision in Darcy’s basement where the alleged incident took place.
In fact, there was no supervision at all.
Wyatt and Emmett were in the bathroom at school, standing in front of the white urinals and each wondering what a blue urinal cake was for and why it was there in the first place, when Michael Lavery and a big kid who everyone called ‘Whale’ came in.
Whale leaned up against one of the sinks. “Really? Second base?”
“It’s no big deal,” grinned Michael Lavery as he stood in the vacant urinal next to Wyatt and Emmett and drained himself into the dingy porcelain.
“If you say so,” giggled Whale. “I think it’s a big deal, and I bet half of the sixth grade thinks it’s a big deal, too.”
Wyatt’s eyes burned with jealousy. Emmett felt sorry for Wyatt but knew it wouldn’t do any good to say so. Instead he let Wyatt brood.
Later that day, the sky opened and spring rains came down in a waterfall. Instead of going outside for recess, the sixth grade class was organized into a game of bombardment in the gym. Wyatt’s jealousy fueled his athleticism, and he took great pleasure in making Michael Lavery’s face all shades of purple when he hit him way harder than he should have with the red rubber ball that made that doink sound when it connected with his potato head.
“That was mean,” whispered Emmett as they sat on the bus on the way home. “You made Michael Lavery cry.”
“So what?” whispered Wyatt. “Maybe I am mean.”
Emmett didn’t say anything, but his brain clicked a second time. Something had to be done.
That day after school, Wyatt and Emmett ate a bowl of cereal and checked in on Grandpa Morris, then went into their grandfather’s library, stood on a chair, and pulled out one of his old medical journals.
Emmett quickly flipped to a section on cancer and how its insidious nature was to grow inside its host until it had to be cut out. As he devoured the oncological information, understanding every bit of it, Wyatt closed his eyes and slept.
In his dreams, he was a spider on the wall inside Darcy Butler’s Seven Minutes in Heaven closet. As he gently pulled silk out of his abdomen, he watched potato-headed Michael Lavery amateurishly run the bases with Bridgette McDonald. With his eight legs and as many eyes, fractured images of groping hands and hurried breathes made him want to sink his venomous fangs into Michael Lavery’s throat.
After dinner, which Wyatt and Emmett made like they always did, Emmett tentatively t
ried to talk to Wyatt. “You have to stop obsessing about her,” he said. “If you don’t she’s going to think you’re weird,”
“I’m not weird,” Wyatt hissed. “You are.” It was getting to be a typical response.
That night, when the lights were supposed to be out and Wyatt and Emmett were meant to be asleep, they tiptoed down to the library and pulled out the cancer book once more. They weren’t sure why, and Wyatt didn’t understand most of it, but Emmett certainly did.
His brain went click, click, click a few more times but he remained silent and resolute.
By Friday of that week, it was evident to everyone in the sixth grade class at Jefferson Elementary that potato-headed Michael Lavery and Bridgette McDonald were indeed a ‘thing’. They even held hands at recess which made Wyatt burn with rage. Emmett knew better than to try and console Wyatt by telling him there would be other girls, or that Michael Lavery was sniffing around someone who was way out of his league. His words would have fallen on deaf ears.
After school, while on a bike ride on the stony trails behind Grandpa Morris’s house, Wyatt said, “Why don’t we just cut him out like a cancer.”
“You can’t do that,” said Emmett. “That’s not right.”
Wyatt sneered. “I’m the one who says if something is right or not. You can’t tell me what to do.”
Wyatt was right. For the present, Emmett couldn’t tell him what to do, but the very idea that Wyatt would think to cut away potato-headed Michael Lavery all because of a stupid girl was cause for concern. Not only was it a reckless, stupid idea, it was a little psychotic and Emmett knew it.
Still, against Emmett’s better judgment, the following Monday Wyatt invited the sixth grade second-base king over after school to shoot BB guns at rats inside the barn, and maybe even to sample some of Grandpa Morris’s moonshine that had been aging in the basement for years.
Potato-headed Michael Lavery didn’t say no.
That morning before school, Wyatt went through his grandfather’s old medical supplies and easily found the brown leather roll that contained all of Grandpa Morris’s scalpels and blades from when he was still practicing as a country doctor.
“Put them back,” Emmett urged Wyatt. “You can’t do this.”
“How many times do I have to tell you to shut up?” he bellowed at Emmett and punched him in the side of the head several times. Emmett’s brain rattled around inside his skull. Wyatt had never hit him before, but now that he had, Emmett knew he would never stop there. He would keep hitting, and punching, and bullying him until the balance of power between the two of them was absolute.
Emmett couldn’t allow that. What’s more, he couldn’t allow potato-headed Michael Lavery anywhere near Grandpa Morris’s farm, or Wyatt, or the leather roll of deadly tools. Wyatt meant to use them and that surely spelled disaster for everyone.
While in the middle of art class, cutting out linoleum block prints with metal scoops as equally sharp as the scalpels Grandpa Morris had at home, Emmett purposely let his tool slip, expertly aiming for the part of his thumb that would bleed the most but hurt the least. As blood was an almost ritualistic and necessary part of digging out linoleum block prints, their teacher, Mrs. Block, with the oddly coincidental name, wrapped Emmett’s thumb in her ready supply of paper towels and sent him to the school nurse.
While there, Mrs. Kornfelder, who had known Wyatt and Emmett since they were boys, asked Emmett why the side of his face was bruised and why he had a little bit of dried blood around his ear. Emmett didn’t want to tell her that Wyatt had hit him. That would have brought a whole host of ugliness down on top of them. Instead, he told her he fell down the stairs at home.
“Do you want me to call your grandfather?” she asked him.
“No,” said Emmett almost too quickly. “He used to be a doctor. He’ll say I’m fine.”
When he got back to class, Emmett told potato-headed Michael Lavery that his grandfather had to take him to get his thumb looked at after school so he couldn’t come over to hang out with them.
Wyatt was livid. “You did that on purpose,” he challenged Emmett.
“I can’t let you hurt Michael Lavery because of a stupid girl,” he said. “That’s sick.”
“I’ll get you for this,” Wyatt threatened, and Emmett got scared. For the first time in their entire lives, he actually believed that Wyatt meant it.
That afternoon, as they rode the school bus home in silence, Emmett made a decision. It wasn’t something he wanted to do, but it was something he had to do. He couldn’t allow Wyatt to keep growing and evolving into something dark and bitter. He couldn’t allow him to become dangerous. Very simply, Wyatt was going to have to be cut out like a cancer just like Wyatt had planned to do to potato-headed Michael Lavery. Emmett knew it was a sad decision but things simply had to change.
The next day, Wyatt and Emmett didn’t show up at Jefferson Elementary. Neither were they in attendance the day after that, or the day after that.
Almost a week went by. Finally, the principal, Mr. Rosen, dutifully called old Doc Morris to inquire about the boys, but he never received a return call. With no other choice, Billy Duke, one of the junior officers in town, whose grandmother drove a school bus up in the hill towns, was sent out to the Morris farm to see exactly what was going on.
What Billy Duke found was horrific enough to rattle any officer to the core. Still, he didn’t quit the police force like some would. The entire situation only made him harder, and tougher, and a little bit of an alcoholic like most men of the law.
Old Doc Morris was dead. He had been dead for at least a year, but was still propped up in bed with a tray of food on his lap that seemed just about a week old. He probably died of old age, but that would be for the coroner to discern.
The upstairs bathroom, however, was much, much worse.
Dr. Morris’ grandson, the one who had lost his parents and grandmother in a car accident, lay on the tiled linoleum in a congealed pool of blood. The doc’s old medical tools were spread out on the floor, as was a bottle of disinfectant and a pile of bloody towels. A medical text was found as well, open to a page on removing cancerous tumors. There were droplets of blood splattered across the vellum.
The boy had taken a scalpel to himself with expert precision. There were surgical cuts above his brow almost to his ear on both sides. The cuts were deep but precise.
In his report, Officer Duke stated that it looked as though the boy was trying to excise a tumor in his brain all on his own, but bled out before he had a chance to complete the process.
He would never know how right he was.
F is for Fern
Who Has Murder in Mind
KILLING IS QUIET.
Murder doesn’t have a soundtrack.
Knitting needles sliding neatly into someone’s chest or drowning after being held under water for just a little too long are both whispered affairs.
Hanging? You can hear the horsehairs of the rope as it swings and strains, but nothing more.
Ultimately the methods of murder are myriad. Fern Baker was intimately familiar with them all.
At thirteen she was already an old hand at killing. Of course, all outward appearances suggested a bright and cheery eighth grader with a trail of puppy-dog boys at her heels, but the truth was far more sinister.
Fern was a cold, thoughtful, and calculating killer, and although death had swirled around her since anyone could remember, no one ever added two and two together to come up with a sum that pointed in her direction.
Most in the small town of Ziff Point, Massachusetts assumed Fern Eloise Baker lived under a dark cloud of tragedy along with her family. After all, her parents had buried three children, two elders, the family poodle, and a verbose cockatoo named Goobie, who should have lived a very long life had he not broken his neck in a mysterious accident inside his wrought-iron cage.
Truth be told, the old poodle was on her way out anyway on account of kidney disease, and Goobie was j
ust plain annoying. Besides, the first time he uttered the words, “No, Fern, no,” was also the last time he uttered them.
If nothing else, Fern was a thorough killer.
Fern discovered her ‘hobby’ at the tender age of eight during a sun-kissed afternoon at Y Country Day Camp in Hampton Fields, just two towns away from Ziff Point. Her counselor, an insufferably perky college freshman who bounced when she walked, had told Fern that her macaroni and Elmer’s elephant that she made during craft-time was nice.
Nice?
Just nice?
In Fern’s estimation, her artistic endeavors had produced a masterpiece of elbows and shells that rivaled anything hanging in the Louvre. Therefore, ‘nice’ just didn’t cut it.
Not by a longshot.
That afternoon, after she and her eight-year-old compatriots enjoyed Dixie Cups filled with lemonade accompanied by chocolate chip cookies, Fern’s counselor tragically died during a benign game of softball.
The children, it seems, were never taught not to throw their bats after swinging for the ball and running to first base.
When Fern took her turn at bat, a dull-witted calf of a girl named Katrina Beekman lobbed a pitch at her while Fern stood ready at home plate. Fern used the millisecond it took for the ball to sail through the air to calculate just how hard and fast she would have to chuck the bat so that it connected with her counselor’s head as she crouched low in the catcher’s position.
The bubbly college freshman was dead before she hit the ground.
Of course, no one blamed eight-year-old Fern for the tragic accident. Instead, she was gifted with several sessions of quiet discussion with a brilliantly stupid therapist who was charged with helping her work through such a difficult ordeal.
Accident? Sure, let’s go with that.
The cloying taste for murder that all young serial killers experience after their first human kill was better than the best chocolate ever, and Fern wanted more.
Grandma Fanny, her father’s mother, who no longer used her legs and spent her days farting in her Depends while knitting endless amounts of ugly scarves and Christmas sweaters, was the next to go.
Little Killer A to Z Page 4