Grandma Fanny and Grampa Lou had lived with Fern’s family for as long as she could remember.
A then nine-year-old Fern feigned ill on Fourth of July morning right before the entire family, including Grampa Lou, packed themselves off to Cobble Mountain for a holiday picnic. Grandma Fanny volunteered to stay at home and watch her sick granddaughter, which proved to be a fatal error on her part.
The brilliantly acted call from little Fern Baker, alerting Ziff Point’s finest to her grandmother’s death, was worthy of an Emmy, as was the crime scene for set design.
A tipped-over glass of water sat on a folding table just out of reach of the old woman. A skein of acrylic yarn that Grandma Fanny had been slowly transforming into a horrific sweater-vest was partially unraveled on the floor, and the knitting needles that she obviously fell on while reaching for said glass of water were both stuck deep into her heart.
Obviously, little Fern was inconsolable. What an awful thing for a young girl to witness. Grampa Lou, who had cherished his bride for over fifty years, was equally inconsolable. It seemed the only thing that brought him any sort of solace was a special brew of tea that his granddaughter made for him each night after dinner.
If anyone bothered to check, they would have found that the tea consisted of a mixture of Raspberry and Lemon Zinger, along with a variety of Grandma Fanny’s old medications that should have been wasted by proper professionals as soon as they were found in her medicine chest.
Oh, and a touch of bleach.
The deadly combination knocked the old man out in minutes and let the Liquid Plumber do its work.
Grampa Lou died that October and was planted in the ground next to his beloved at the Ziff Point Memorial Cemetery. His funeral was attended by a bevy of townies who had known the elder Bakers their entire lives.
It was a sad day.
Fern was tickled pink.
In the spring of her tenth year, her older sister, Margaret Baker, whom everyone called Peg, made the mistake of winning too many rounds of the slap game, leaving Fern’s palms angry and red. They were in their older brother’s treehouse at the time, as he was away at a scouting event.
They found a girlie magazine up there, which they thought was absolutely disgusting, and a pack of cigarettes which they both knew he would get walloped for if their father ever found out. They also found a secret stash of candy and gorged themselves on fireballs, dots, and wax bottles until they were both buzzing with sugar.
It was then that Fern came up with the seemingly innocuous idea of playing the slap game, but it was Peg who readily agreed.
Round after round, Peg’s flat palms fell on her sister’s hands until Fern could no longer accept the fact that Peg, only a year and a half her senior, could possibly be better than her at anything.
Needless to say, Margaret ‘Peg’ Baker died almost instantly when she was impaled on the picket fence along one side of the big oak tree where the old treehouse was nestled in the leaves. Her death was deemed a horrible accident. Somehow she had fallen backwards out of the treehouse window to the horror of her younger sister.
Right after her eleventh birthday, in the heat of the summer, in their above-ground swimming pool, Fern drowned her younger brother, Billy, because he said she had a big butt. Fern knew he was a liar in every way, because she was perfect, but to teach him a lesson, she held him under water until the bubbles stopped breaking the surface and his body sank to the bottom of the pool.
Also in her eleventh year, another brother, Decland, who was always getting into mischief, was found in the family’s garage, swinging from a rope. That was a murder that Fern could hardly even claim. Her father had been making Halloween decorations for the family’s front lawn. The noose and the rope were already tied and hanging in the garage. It was a simple matter for Fern to dare her brother to climb a stepstool and stick his head through the knotted rope.
In short order he lost his balance, causing the step stool to fall sideways, breaking little Decland’s neck almost instantly. Still, Fern waited a full five minutes after Decland took his plunge to scream in mock terror then faint on cue when her family came running.
As a bright moment that year, Fern’s baby sister, Zoey, was born. She was both a salve for the family and a complete wonder to Fern. For some inexplicable reason, she loved the little pink bundle of joy more than she loved anything, almost including murder.
Every day after school, she would rush home to take care of the living doll, hardly letting anyone near her for fear that something dire might happen.
Although Mr. and Mrs. Baker thought it was slightly unhealthy for Fern to have such a strong attachment to her little sister, they reasoned that after so much tragedy and so many unfortunate events, she deserved something good in her life.
Zoey was a brilliant little thing. By six months old she was using words and by nine months old she was walking. Right around Fern’s thirteenth birthday, Zoey announced in a tiny voice that she could go to the bathroom on the potty now.
It was a momentous occasion for the entire family. That night, any Baker who was left alive was allowed two glasses of soda with dinner, and a home-made ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce and whipped cream for dessert.
To celebrate in her own way, Fern took little Zoey out in her stroller for a walk around the neighborhood. In truth, Fern just needed an excuse to venture near ancient Mrs. Emerzion’s house. She was a smelly old broad who kept two billy goats in her back yard to eat leaves.
While little Zoey watched, Fern slipped on her mother’s gardening gloves to mask any fingerprints, stuffed a rag into an old bottle filled with gasoline, quietly opened up the shallow basement window on the left-hand side of Mrs. Emerzion’s house, lit the rag, and dropped the bottle inside.
Fern and Zoey were home for twenty minutes before the wail of fire engines pierced the early evening. The resulting fire was spectacular. The neighborhood gathered, including the Baker family sans Grandma Fanny, Grampa Lou, Peg, Billy and Decland. Baby Zoey clapped her hands together while the flames devoured everything, including Old Mrs. Emerzion, who never made it out of her bedroom because of all the smoke.
Thankfully for animal lovers everywhere, her two billy goats escaped unharmed, although they did push over Mrs. Prosser from two doors down, then unceremoniously peed on her because it was rutting season and Mrs. Prosser did sort of look like a nanny goat.
That weekend, with an impressive list of kills behind her, Fern was asked to accompany Georgie Roberts, the alpha male of Ziff Point’s eighth grade class, to a school dance. She was excited, nervous, and dead inside, all at the same time. Part of her brain went through endless catalogs filled with ways she could dispatch Georgie while still enjoying some of the dance. Another part of her brain thought she might keep him around for a while. After all, he was very cute, and they were an absolutely adorable couple together.
Fern reasoned that having a decoration like Georgie might be good for her image. She was sure she would eventually tire of him, and when she did, he would fall in front of a car, drink lye, shoot himself in the soft part of his head with a BB gun, or something equally as silent and deadly.
Fern hummed to a new song on the radio while she got ready for the dance. Little Zoey sat at her feet in the bathroom as Fern pushed and prodded at her face, plucked her eyebrows, turned on the water in the shower, then gingerly stepped inside to scrub herself.
While the scented soap glided across Fern’s body, foaming and cleaning at the same time, baby Zoey picked up the corded radio in her toddler hands, stepped over to the shower, opened the curtain, and dropped the noisy gadget in the water at Fern’s feet.
And while Fern fried, with electric currents running through her body in wave after wave, all she had time to think was that her little sister, Zoey, was obviously just like her.
She was a little killer, too.
G is for Gil
All Alone and Unhappy
I WAS FOURTEEN and tall for my age.
I was alone.
I had no bed to call my own. I had no cash in my pockets. My stomach was empty.
I watched other city kids—the ones who had parents—eat fast food, wear Goodwill clothing, just be happy. I didn’t have that luxury. My life was made up of bite-sized fractions of time in which each one had a goal. Eat. Stay warm. Sleep. Repeat.
I never had a dad. My mom died at the shelter. She was covered in purple sores the same way a lot of moms like her looked. After she was taken away draped in a dirty sheet, I disappeared.
No one even noticed. Besides, the shelter was a bad place. Kids like me got hurt, especially when no one was left to care. So yeah, I was alone.
I was angry, too.
I had to survive and that meant sometimes doing a lot of messed up things. I even stabbed another kid once because he tried to take my hoodie. Cutting him seemed like the right thing to do at the time. No one missed him, anyway. Street trash disappeared every day.
The Connecticut River was probably lousy with bodies.
Everything changed the night I met Mossy Green.
“Hi,” slithered a whisper from the shadows as I stood on a milk crate and picked through the dumpster in the dark parking lot behind The Red Rose. They threw their pizza out after eleven, just like Mickey D’s and Dippity Doughnuts. It seems like I was the only one in the whole city who knew about that, except for about a dozen cats.
Startled, I lost my footing. The milk crate tipped sideways and I fell back, landing hard on my butt.
“Ow.”
“Shit. Sorry,” the whisper said. Then a small figure limped out into a shaft of light from a single lamp above The Red Rose kitchen door.
“What the hell . . . ,” I snapped, tensing for a fight because fighting was something that you sometimes had to do. Then I got a good look at him. The kid wasn’t someone who fought. He was more like someone who got beaten—a lot. He was a mess. His dark brown skin was sallow, if you could even see sallow on him. He was younger than me, maybe eleven or twelve, and his arms and legs were stick thin. His black fuzz-hair needed a comb, or a pick, or whatever kids with afros use. His striped sweater was grimy and there were holes in his jeans that weren’t there on purpose.
He had sores on his face. They weren’t like my mom’s sores, but they were still familiar.
And he wouldn’t stop grinning like he was touched in the head.
“Sorry,” he said again and took another step forward.
“Get lost,” I told him, my butt still aching. “I don’t have any smack, and I don’t hang with junkies.”
“Me neither,” he said still grinning. He bent down to pet one of the cats waiting for food. It arched its back, hissed, and danced away like it needed to be somewhere else.
“Now there’s a good judge of character,” I said as I watched the cat’s white boots fade into the dark.
“I’m Mossy,” he said. “Mossy Green.”
I snorted. “I bet you are.” He sort of didn’t get it because he just kept grinning. “Beat it,” I told him. “I’m not in the mood.”
“In the mood for what?” The kid looked dimwitted. It only took a few seconds more for me to realize that he was completely harmless—harmless and a little sad.
I rolled my eyes. “Gil,” I said, standing up and wiping my hands on jeans that weren’t much cleaner than his. “Just . . . just Gil.”
“Gil means happiness,” he said. Invisible fingers tickled the back of my neck. A memory flashed through my mind of my mother telling me why she named me what she did. She wanted me to be happy.
I was still waiting for that.
“Whatever,” I muttered, then turned my attention to more urgent matters. I tilted my head toward the dumpster. “There’s fresh pizza in there, Mossy. It’s not gross or anything. They toss them out every night.”
“Okay,” he said, still staring, still grinning.
I reached down, righted the milk-crate and stood on the hard plastic again. Then I tipped open the dumpster lid and reached down inside for a small box that just barely grazed my fingertips. I had to jump a little, just to stretch one or two extra inches. A minute later I had a full pizza in my hand. Someone probably ordered it then decided on Chinese instead because they had the money to do that sort of thing.
As I gingerly lifted the cover, I hoped for plain cheese. Shit. This one was covered in black olives which made me gag. It didn’t matter. They could be picked off.
It must have been midnight by then. With the discarded pizza in hand, I pushed past Mossy Green with his jaundiced eyes and grinning, sore-covered face, and settled down on a couple of wood pallets that were slowly growing a pile in the back corner of the parking lot.
He followed me and sat down.
I put the box between us, opened it, flicked off two dozen black olives and shoved half a square into my mouth. This was Springfield, Massachusetts, and all pizza here was cut into squares. The stringy cheese was cool but still pliable.
I pushed the box toward him but he shook his head no.
“So what do you want, Mossy Green?” I asked him after I had a chance to swallow. It’s not like I had cash, and I certainly didn’t have any of what he really needed. I could only imagine that beneath the thread-bare sweater he wore, there were dozens of little pock-marks on his skin, each one tearing a hole—each one leading to a vein.
“I just want to sit down,” he said.
“Free country.”
“Used to not be,” he murmured, then leaned back. He pulled a needle out of his pocket, cooked some shit on a spoon with a faded, yellow lighter, and floated away on a cloud like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Freaking junkies. They were the worst of the worst. If my mom taught me anything it was that junkies would do anything for a fix. She did. She literally did anything that would give her wings.
Somehow though, Mossy seemed different. I know he was just a kid, but he was old in the head or something. There just seemed to be a ‘knowing’ about him. That’s why that first night, in the space of time while I ate dumpster pizza and he nodded off, I turned protective of Mossy Green. Protective, like if anyone even got close to him, there would be blood. After a time, I fell asleep, too. I shouldn’t have. Horrible things happen to street kids when we’re not watching, but sleep just takes you away sometimes, like death or Mossy’s needle.
When I woke up the next morning there were pigeons crapping on what was left of the pizza and Mossy Green was staring at me.
“What?” I said.
“You looked happy.”
“Yeah, well,” I snorted and shooed the flying rats away. “I’m not.”
“I can make you happy,” he said and pulled some more stuff out of his pocket. He rolled the syringe around between his fingers and his thumb.
“I don’t do that.” I told him.
“It’s special,” he said. “You can see dragons with this.”
“Dragons aren’t real,” I told him. “Put it away.”
“Okay,” he said. “Want to go explore the empty buildings over on Lyman Street?”
And just like that, Mossy Green and I became friends.
It was fall, and Massachusetts cools off quickly. As the days grew shorter we busied ourselves with simply existing. Mossy seemed to have an endless supply of junk in his pocket. I scavenged dumpsters at night because food was food, and Mossy never complained. Besides, he never seemed to want to eat, and when he did, it was as though he was eating for show, and whatever was being mashed between his teeth was nothing more than cardboard.
Every once in a while, once the sun went down, we’d come across a street-kid-party in one of the empty buildings just outside the north end. There would be others there, laughing and joking around bonfires. The hustlers hung with the hustlers. The thieves hung with the thieves. The pimps, one or two, circled everyone like lions looking for the sick and the weak. They mostly left me alone because they knew better, and they always ignored Mossy. I don’t know why
. Maybe he looked beyond help.
Then right about the beginning of November, shortly after Halloween, Mossy and I found ourselves out by the railroad tracks, sitting just inside a huge drainage pipe. It was obvious we weren’t the first ones to hang there. There were spent needles and empty candy wrappers mixed in with the dead leaves.
It was in the mouth of that drainage pipe that Mossy pulled out his fixings, grinned, and held out his hand.
“Here,” he said.
I shook my head, but I shook it less than I had shaken it in the past. “No,” I said. “I don’t do that.”
Mossy held his fingers out still, watching my eyes as I stared at the little needle in his hand. There was so much promise there. So much healing.
“You say no, but I don’t think you mean it.”
Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. I wasn’t sure. “What’s it like?” I asked him.
Mossy pulled the syringe back from me and held it in his bony hands. “This is special stuff,” he said. “Not like what you get in Forest Park.”
“But what’s it like?” I asked again.
“It’s like Heaven,” he told me. “It’s like Steve’s Ice Cream up in Northampton when they smoosh in Oreos and Thin Mints.” I stared at him as he talked. “It’s like kissing someone who wants to kiss you back.”
“That good?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s special. It’s like when you used to hug your mom.”
He didn’t have to say anything else. I watched as he pulled a little bag out of the endless supply in his pocket, along with his yellow lighter and his spoon. Then he showed me how, and it was like the world slipped away and I was lifted higher and higher, almost to the edge of night, itself.
I loved it. It was more than special. It was a Godsend and I wanted to do it again and again.
Mossy didn’t disappoint.
Two weeks later the first snow came. It fell early. Springfield never turned white until December. Maybe I had lost track of the calendar because I didn’t bother to care anymore. All I cared about was my next fix and the dirty, little brown boy who gave me as much as I wanted.
Little Killer A to Z Page 5