After moving on from Patrick, Clara asked about Kyle. Was Mike going to be bringing him to her house on Friday? She never said that she and Kyle had made plans already to get together.
Katie said Mike didn’t have enough gas money. Clara needed to talk with Kyle and tell him to start carrying his load and come up with some money for carting him around. Mike was like Kyle’s personal taxi service, and Mike was too bashful and scared to speak up for himself.
I can meet you guys and give you gas money, Clara told Katie. Clara didn’t want anything to stand in the way of this weekend.
Mike and Katie were going over to Mike’s dad’s house on Friday, anyway, Katie said, so they might be able to pick up Kyle and drop him off.
Katie asked what time would work for Clara.
Clara suggested noon.
Katie said Kyle needed to find a place to stay for that weekend because he wasn’t going to be staying with them.
It’s a little cramped [with Kyle there] plus nobody ... likes him but us and [they] don’t want him here.
Well, he can’t stay at my place, Clara said, adding how her siblings were home for the holiday.
Katie needed to get some rest, she said, and had to sign off so she could prepare her mind for the coming holiday with her family—all of whom she clearly did not get along with.
Mike took over the keyboard. First he explained that the people in his house were tired of Kyle. If any of them found out that Kyle had stayed in the house once in a while, they’d want money from Mike and Katie. Kyle was a handful. He was manic, wired, loud, and always telling people what was on his mind—which wasn’t always what people wanted to hear. Aside from that, Kyle had overstayed his welcome with the group itself. Mike was sick of him. He was tired of driving Kyle everywhere: to his lawyer’s, to court, to Clara’s. It was getting to be too much. Even Mike’s grandmother didn’t want Kyle around.
Mike typed to Clara: [My grandmother] makes me feel stupid, criminal and subhuman for having Kyle in the house.
Why?
She thinks Kyle is taking advantage of me, particularly when it comes to money and rides.
Clara encouraged Mike to think for himself and tell people to leave him alone.
They next talked about family; Mike dissed just about everyone in his, especially his mother. He referred to her as the “bitch,” who was “really good at arm-twisting” and “psychological torture.”
Clara brought the conversation back to Kyle. She needed him at the house that weekend, making her plea obvious in the questions she asked Mike. Yet, when Mike turned the tables and suggested that Kyle stay at her house, Clara said that because of “the obvious,” meaning the OG, there just wasn’t any way.
Mike thought about having him stay at his house—again. He could sense that’s where Clara was leaning. But, he pointed out, having Kyle around: [It’s] akin to keeping nitroglycerine in the back of your pickup truck—chances are an explosion will occur.
They discussed where else Kyle could stay. Then Mike had a thought, saying how they should never “underestimate” Kyle’s versatility. He’d be “quite happy to camp” in the woods near Clara’s farmhouse.
Clara never shared that she and Kyle had already decided on this.
PATRICK AND CLARA had made plans long ago to spend that Thanksgiving weekend together. Clara hadn’t told the others, but she was still holding on to Patrick, thinking that perhaps he was a possible Plan B. Their relationship wasn’t what Patrick had in mind, however; over the past month, Clara had stepped away from asking him directly to kill her father, or since she’d picked up her rhetoric with Kyle. But there was still that itch in the back of Clara’s throat to see if Patrick showed any interest in doing the job.
Patrick still wanted to give the relationship one more shot, so he called Clara at some point that Thanksgiving weekend.
They talked. It felt shallow to Patrick. They chatted about family and friends. There just didn’t seem to be much there between them anymore.
Then Clara said: “You know, Path, that number of times you need to meet the OG as equal to him trying to kill me will come up over this Thanksgiving weekend and Christmas, if you met both times.”
Clara obviously hadn’t forgotten that deal they’d made some time ago.
Patrick didn’t respond. He’d heard enough.
CHAPTER 40
“THANKS FOR THE ride, Mike,” Kyle said. They were on their way to Clara’s house. Katie was right beside Mike in the front; Kyle was in the back, with his tent, backpack, and twenty-seven-inch steel friend in the trunk. Mike had insisted on it.
“In case we get stopped,” Mike explained.
Kyle wasn’t going to argue.
There was a patch of woods near the farmhouse where Kyle could pitch his tent, and the OG would not see him.
“It was very overgrown at the time,” Katie said later.
Katie had called Clara before she and Mike picked up Kyle. They said they were bringing him over, making sure that he could stay at Clara’s house in the woods. The last thing they wanted was to get out there and realize Kyle couldn’t stay. They’d be stuck with him.
Clara said, “Drop Kyle off, up near the power lines.”
Kyle brought his camping gear. That section of the woods around the Schwartz farmhouse had become a popular place for Kyle. He felt safe out there. It was far off the beaten path—nowhere near anything. The OG would never suspect a thing. Never see him. To boot, he could keep tabs on Clara.
“Right there,” Kyle said. There was a fork in the road some distance before Clara’s house. Kyle pointed to the right. “Take that way. . . .”
It had just rained. The road was “very muddy,” Katie recalled. The area where Kyle pointed out was in a position where you could just make out the Schwartz home from inside the woods.
“I’ll camp here,” Kyle said.
“Cool,” Mike answered. They shook hands. Kyle grabbed his stuff and got out of the vehicle.
“CJ’s gonna bring me up to your place tomorrow,” Kyle said.
Katie and Mike looked at each other. They didn’t want him there, but Mike couldn’t back down. “Sounds good,” he said. “See you then.”
At this point, Mike and Katie had no idea Kyle was the chosen one to kill Robert Schwartz. For them, any talk of killing the OG was part of Clara’s Underworld game fantasies. Both claimed later that the more they heard about it from Clara, the less they believed in its validity.
CHAPTER 41
KYLE WAS MADE for spending time alone in the woods. He enjoyed the absolute silence of his surroundings. With so many voices whispering inside his head, the tranquility and stillness of the forest made Kyle feel as though he just might be able to manage the demons keeping him company.
It was Friday night. After Kyle pitched his tent, he and Clara hung out inside and talked about the same things they had discussed for the past several weeks: the OG, the abuse, and the rough spot Clara said she was in. Their relationship and topic of conversation revolved around Robert Schwartz. For Clara, there was nothing else to talk about as long as her father was still alive.
“Let’s get something to eat,” Clara suggested. They were sitting inside Kyle’s tent. Clara said she had enough gas in her car, an old beat-up Mazda Protegé, to head into town.
“McDonald’s?” Clara asked.
“Sounds good.”
They took off. Kyle brought his backpack with him, including his twenty-seven-inch sword.
“This is nice,” he said. It was just the two of them. Kyle found Clara intriguing and intellectually stimulating. To be in her presence was different from being around the others. Clara understood the deepness Kyle felt. She knew how he saw the world and the things in it.
As they drove, Clara kept looking in her rearview mirror.
“What’s going on?” Kyle asked at one point when it seemed Clara became nervous.
“Nothing,” she said, pulling into the McDonald’s parking lot.
“You sure?”
Clara parked.
“Look, I think we’re being followed by a blue SUV,” Clara said.
Kyle searched the parking lot with his eyes.
No blue SUV.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I saw him as we drove here.”
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “I thought the same thing.” He gripped his sword.
“I’m thinking it’s someone from an old Underworld alliance,” Clara explained. Then she drove around to the other side of the parking lot. Luckily, there was an SUV parked there. Not so much blue, but it would do.
“See?”
“Yup,” Kyle said.
Clara gunned it and drove as fast as she could out of the McDonald’s parking lot. She kept looking back in her mirror.
“He’s not following us.”
“You lost him,” Kyle said.
Kyle had no idea Clara was making up this entire episode, and that she was further messing with Kyle’s head. For Kyle, every moment of an experience like this was real to him.
“You have to understand my mind-set at the time,” Kyle explained later. He had a hard time recalling this particular incident; but after thinking about it, he remembered that Clara was so “determined” to get him to think they were being followed. “I am already experiencing delusions and hallucinations, to begin with. You start telling me people are following us and I am gonna believe you.”
Clara drove back to the house. She said she had some things to do at home. Mainly, it was to feed her horse. The OG was around the property, she told Kyle, who was ready and armed. Anytime Clara wanted to put a bullet in the chamber and give the order to pull the trigger, he was prepared. But Clara did not indicate it was time for that just yet.
At some point that day, Kyle and the OG met. Clara was in the barn with Dr. Schwartz; they were tending to the horses. Michelle, Clara’s sister, later recalled the meeting between the two of them—Kyle and Dr. Schwartz—as “casual.” There was nothing in particular strange about it beyond Kyle’s “goth” look and dark nature.
That night, Kyle packed up his tent. Clara drove him back to Brandy’s.
“You going to be okay?” Kyle asked before getting out of the car.
“I’ll be in touch,” Clara said.
Kyle stepped out.
“Wait,” Clara said as Kyle turned to walk into the house.
“Yeah?” Kyle said, leaning into her open window.
“Can you come back to the house tonight?”
“I’ll get Mike to bring me.”
Kyle walked into Brandy’s and called Mike.
“I guess . . . ,” Mike said reluctantly.
Mike showed up hours later. He and Kyle took off. They drove to Mike’s parents’ house first, where Katie was waiting for them.
There was a car in back of Mike’s along a stretch of road near Mike’s parents’ house.
“You see that?” Kyle said.
“What?”
“That car has been following us.”
Mike looked. It was just another car on the road. Common traffic.
“We’re being followed . . . ,” Kyle said.
Mike got scared.
When they pulled into Mike’s parents’ house, the car went another way.
“You see, this incident was residual from what I had experienced with Clara before,” Kyle said later. “The idea that she put in my head that people were following me, it began to fester and build. By this point, I am degraded. I’m literally falling apart at the seams. My medication is entirely out of my system and all of the old psychoses are slowly, every day, reinserting themselves into my life.”
Beyond that, Kyle said, he had what he called a “constant stressor” of Clara telling him about her father, “over and over again, every day, every day, every day.” With all of that, Kyle said, his “mind started to take off.” Clara had implanted in his mind that they were being followed that day on their way to McDonald’s: “Okay, I am constantly looking over my shoulder now, wherever I go. I now believe I’m being followed because I am helping her.”
After talking about it, Mike, Katie, and Kyle decided to hang out with Clara for the night. When they pulled up to Clara’s, it appeared as if she had been waiting for them, because Clara walked out of the house in a hurry as soon as Mike parked in front of the door. She appeared wired and nervous, frantic, desperately wanting to say something.
As she approached the backseat of Mike’s car, where Kyle was sitting, Clara pulled something out of her pocket.
“What the hell?” Kyle said.
It was a piece of a pork chop wrapped in a napkin. Clara had it in her hand as she sat down in the backseat next to Kyle.
“Take this,” she said. “Give it a taste!”
“What?” Kyle responded, taking the pork chop.
“Taste it,” Clara said again as the others looked on.
Kyle bit into it. Then he opened his door and spit out what was a mouthful of meat onto the Schwartz driveway.
“What the hell?” He said it tasted sour, bitter, and spoiled.
“It actually stung my tongue,” Kyle later claimed. “It was really terrible. Not just bad, but rancid bad. I tasted it for quite a while afterward.”
“Yeah, well, the OG cooked that one separately from the other pork chops,” Clara said angrily. The indication was that the OG had tried to poison her. Clara ranted and raved as Mike pulled out of her driveway. She said sooner or later the OG was going to make good on his attempts to kill her.
Mike hadn’t gotten completely out of the driveway yet, and Kyle yelled for Mike to move so he could get out. With a two-door car, Mike would have to get out and lift the seat forward so Kyle could step out. Kyle was fuming. “Sit up, man, get out of my way. Let me out. . . .”
Katie didn’t say much. She stared back at Kyle and Clara as if dumbfounded and shocked.
“You are not getting out of my car, Kyle,” Mike said. He knew what Kyle wanted to do: Run into Clara’s house and have words with the OG. Get to the bottom of what he was doing to his daughter. “Look, I cannot believe the OG did that, but you are not getting out of this car.” Mike started the vehicle and peeled out of the driveway to save them all some trouble.
Kyle punched the back of the seat. “Damn it.”
“You have to protect me,” Clara uttered quietly to Kyle.
They left Clara’s house and went to JMU.
When they got to JMU, Clara and Kyle sat and talked. Mike and Katie had taken off to visit a friend Mike knew at the school. It was getting to the point, Clara explained, where she was afraid to sleep in her own bed. There was no telling what the OG was going to do next, or when he was going to do it.
“Here,” she said to Kyle after reaching into a drawer and taking out a slip of paper. Later, Kyle would explain Clara’s demeanor at the time she handed him this list as “unnaturally subdued.” It was though she was “deliberately not making a big deal of it because that would, of course, bring more attention to it. So, actually doing that made a big deal of this list. ‘Here, take a look, it doesn’t matter to me at all.’ Obviously, if she approaches me with that attitude, which she did, I am going to pay more attention to it than I normally would.”
Reverse psychology—Clara was a master manipulator. She had become an expert, especially where Kyle Hulbert was concerned, at mimicking his behavior and mirroring him so as to build a rapport.
“What’s this?” Kyle asked.
“It’s part of the list you told me to make.”
By that point, Kyle had given a lot of advice to Clara; he couldn’t recall right away what she was referring to. But after looking down at the paper and seeing what Clara had written, he realized it was a list of times her father had hurt her. She had each section of incidents labeled: PA stood for physical abuse, EA for emotional abuse, and MA for mental abuse. The list was extremely anal. It looked as if she had taken her time and put a lot of thought into it.
Clara d
idn’t need to sell Kyle on this any longer.
“That’s for you,” she said, gesturing toward the list.
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
Kyle looked at it. “Crazy,” he said later. “There was so much shit on that second list, I could not believe it.”
Clara had written everything down in order.
Kyle folded the piece of paper and tucked it inside his wallet. “Thanks!”
One of the reasons he kept it in his wallet, Kyle later explained, was because he never went anywhere without his wallet. In fact, he called his wallet and backpack his “mobile-ready” kit—he could always, wherever he was, pick up and leave. Secondly: “At one point, I thought it might be useful to have the list as evidence ... and yet the more I thought about it then, I didn’t have any proof. All I had was her words and this piece of paper she had written.”
CHAPTER 42
KYLE WAS AT Brandy’s hanging around on December 1. By now, he was getting a bit overwhelmed by Clara’s calls, the pork chop, the lists, and the incessant badgering—all built around the OG trying to kill her. It encompassed much of Kyle’s fragile mind. He understood she was in a tight spot. But these calls on top of everything else? They were coming three to five times per day, sometimes in the middle of the night. Every time Clara called, she’d be hemming and hawing, hysterical over something the OG had just done or said to her. She could not stand it anymore, Kyle heard over and over. The OG had to go.
“You have to do something, Kyle” was a common phrase Clara would use. The indication being: If her life had been a hell leading up to this day, the way Clara described it now was as though she was caught inside Satan’s web and soon there would not be any chance of escape—if Kyle didn’t come to her rescue soon.
“Distraught, stressed-out, and fucking scared,” Kyle said later. “That was how Clara sounded when she called during that first week of December.”
“I just had a huge fight with the OG,” Clara said. It was now December 2, about “three o’clock in the morning, when she called,” Kyle remembered. Clara knew Kyle would still be up because he never slept. Clara was frantic and out of breath: “He said ... He said ... Kyle, you are not going to believe this, but he said that when we went to the Virgin Islands for Christmas, he was going to ‘make sure’ that I didn’t come back.”
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