When We Were 8

by catt dahman

  Some of the girls swore they couldn’t stand margaritas because of the last time they drank them, so Cassie made gallon jugs of strong, spicy bloody Marys and stashed them in the refrigerator.

  As soon as they could, they retreated to safe tasks such as cleaning up, cooking, and making drinks. One woman baked potatoes, one sautéed asparagus, and another made a green salad while Whitney roasted corn and Jill grilled steaks, still remembering how each liked hers cooked.

  “Is that done enough, Sammie?” Jill asked.

  “Perfect. I like it almost charred,” she smiled. “How can you and Cassie eat yours raw?”

  “It’s not raw. It’s rare. And perfect, I might add,” Jill chewed the meat and then dug into her salad. “Tomorrow night hotdogs and s’mores at the campfire?”

  “Yum,” Nelwynn said, “and remember when we had them that time and then found out Mike was listening to our plans? Why didn’t he stop us?”

  “Maybe he was curious to see what we’d do. If we’d go through with everything.”

  “He gave me the knife. What if I hadn’t had it?” Jill asked.

  “I’d be dead,” Nelwynn said. “It was a dumb plan anyway. We were stupid kids, and Mike should have stopped us. Jill and I were injured, but what really could have happened? To be honest, one of us could have been killed anyway. Why wouldn’t an adult stop us?”

  “He should have. He had to know we could get hurt,” Cassie said.

  “He could have done something,” Tiffany said as she chewed a bite of her steak.

  “But he didn’t. And then he told us about people he took care of. Do you think he knew all those years? I mean what we were doing? When my aunt died, he was at the funeral and told me clearly that I had done the right thing. He knew.” Jill wiped her mouth and speared a tomato.

  “He said that?” Cassie asked. She rubbed her arms where chill bumps appeared.

  “He sure did. He said it, and well, I felt as if I had done something to make him proud. Later, that bothered me a lot.”

  “I can imagine,” Tiffany told Jill.

  Whitney waved a fork as she talked, “He said there were three he gave payback to: a pervert that was Ed’s brother, a man who beat his wife, and a woman who was abusive to her children. Anyway, before everything, the cellar was stinky. Mike claimed the smell was fungus, but it wasn’t. What if there are more than three down there? I mean, four, counting Jenny. I bet he did more than he admitted.”

  “Jenny is there?” Jill asked Whitney.

  “Yeah, you knew that, I thought.”

  “Maybe I did, but I tried to forget. I think I never asked after everything happened with Ed and that last time we were here,” Jill said, rubbing her head.

  Whitney continued to use her fork to accent what she said, “That was a bad time, anyway. I don’t know how we did any of that. It was crazy, but we did. I think we got out of control. But anyway, what I mean is that I wonder if there are more down there.”

  “You aren’t saying we need to…to dig, right? Because how else would we know? I’m not sure I want to know.”

  Whitney shrugged and said, “He said to come here and find the truth. What else would that mean?”

  “And we just ate. I may puke,” Samantha said. “Why do we have to know? Why would he want us to know?”

  Jill thought before speaking, “Even Mr. Delany thought the will was weird. He doesn’t know the details, but it was pretty clear that Mike blackmailed us to get us to return here after we were adults. For all Mike knew, we might have families, but it was important to him that we return, important enough to force us to come back.”

  “He wasn’t finished with us. He had more to do. Let’s be honest. He pretty well screwed us over emotionally. He abused us,” Tiffany said.

  “Hey,” Angel frowned, “that’s not fair. Look at what he gave us.”

  Tiffany nodded and said, “Yes, look, his careful grooming molded us to be like him. Jill is right. He wasn’t finished and didn’t want us to walk away from all this.”

  “Bread crumbs,” said Jill who saw confused looks, “and he blackmailed us to get us here, and he left bread crumbs all of our lives. He wanted us to find something, some great secret that might explain everything. The whys. I think he left us the answers we never had for twenty years.”

  “He could have left that in a letter,” Angel said.

  “Yes, but he never told us anything, did he? He let us find our ways, and wasn’t that the best way to make us like him? We were kids. Had he told us what to do, we’d have questioned it and fought it,” Nelwynn said. Her eyes were dark and bitter.

  “We’re here to find out all the secrets and decide who we truly are, aren’t we?” Tiffany asked.

  “I think so. Anyway, we want to know. Let’s dig,” Cassie said.

  As soon as the kitchen was clean and they had a few more drinks, they felt braver and could no longer put off their curiosity. Angel sat on the bottom step in the cellar and said she would watch and help with organization.

  “You’re a bitch,” Meg said.

  Angel smiled, ”Yep.”

  Whitney stuck an old tent stake in the earth floor and told them, “We don’t need to dig here, okay? I know who’s here. We can skip this part.”

  “I remember when she vanished and I told you in the cafeteria. You could have told me back then,” Jill said.

  “You didn’t need to know and have to live with that,” Whitney said.

  “Jenny Jacobs. I hated her for fooling around with my boyfriend, and I hated her for embarrassing me with the fight. I hated her for causing me to have VD,” Meg said as she yanked her flame-colored hair back into a ponytail.

  Jill swallowed hard. “I know. She was terrible. I don’t think she deserved this, though.” She wondered if Meg would argue.

  Meg nodded and replied, “Yeah, I guess I over-reacted a lot. She didn’t deserve it. I know that, now. I had VD like five more times in college. It got to be a regular thing, I guess.”

  “You sure got around,” Angel said.

  Jill cringed and met Cassie’s eyes. Cassie sighed.

  “Yeah, so? Maybe I did. I’m still the one getting married next month, though. I did better than you and your skinny ass,” Meg said as she smirked. It was like old times when they teased one another, but Meg set her jaw and glared at Angel.

  “Small town nobody. I like being called the skinny one anyway. It feels nice,” said Angel as she stretched, showing off her beautiful body that was dressed in a tank top and short-shorts. “Everyone looks at me.”

  “Yeah, it was difficult to miss seeing you in that men’s magazine. I still think your thighs are a little chunky,” Cassie said. She grinned at Jill.

  Jill laughed as Angel immediately felt of her legs.

  They worked for hours, only stopping for more drinks, and despite the grim task, they found themselves laughing and teasing one another as they had eight years before. The cellar smelled rank, of rot and decay, but they dug, using rakes, shovels, and spades. It was morbid to laugh as they dug up bodies.

  Their task was disgusting and disturbing, but as terrible as it was, each section revealed was akin to uncovering the truth. If nothing else, the women never had lost their quests for facts; they each wanted to reveal whatever it was that Mike Orinston wanted known.

  At three a.m., Cassie called for a break. She was filthy and knew that after all of this, the remains they found would have to be buried again, which was more work. They didn’t need to dig up the entire cellar to get the answers they craved. Following Meg’s advice, they lined up skulls and counted the deceased.

  “This is surreal. How can eight, educated, decent women be in a cellar digging up bones?” Jill asked.

  “I ain’t educated,” Cassie laughed. “I work at a diner, remember?”

  “Shut up. You’re just as smart as anyone else,” Jill told her with a smile.

  “Okay, besides, we’ve done far worse than uncover bones, right?” Cassie said. “It’s
not anything I would recommend, but it’s just not the worst we’ve ever had to do. It’s for a reason. I hope.”

  The women reviewed their memories. Mike indicated he had taken the lives of three very bad people, two men and woman. The young women knew that Jenny was also buried there, something that haunted each of them. They were under the influence of alcoholic courage. Instead of four skulls, they had found seven and had not dug deeply nor gone over more than a quarter of the cellar.

  “Seven?”

  “What does that mean, Cassie? I mean I get it means that there are four I didn’t know were here.” Jill held up her hand and raised fingers. “Ed. That was on you guys; I had no part. Is this him? Reggie. Andre? Julie? Is this them?”

  Whitney swallowed hard and said, “I swear, and Cassie, Nelwynn, Meg, and Angel are witnesses that we did not put Ed here. We were angry and crazy. Drunk. Some of him went into the river and some into the woods for the animals. Some we buried in the trees in a clearing. We scattered him, so this is not him.”

  “Besides, none have the marks of having a head chopped off,” Angel reminded them. “Ed isn’t here.”

  “Reggie, either. He’s somewhere in the deep part of the river where we always liked to swim and dive. Julie is in the woods. Andre, in the woods,” Cassie said and sighed.

  “Why there? What happened?” Jill asked.

  “Don’t….” Tiffany warned.

  “I want to know.”

  Cassie faced Jill. “We gave them a chance. Three on three. Hey, Reggie and Andre were athletes. They had a chance. We gave them a two- minute advantage.”

  Jill cocked her head. “Advantage? What? My God, Cassie.”

  “You wanna know? Fine. We got them here. We pretended to be friendly and said we wanted drugs. You knew Reggie was the biggest drug dealer in school, right? He sold to little kids. Bastard. The motherfucker deserved what he got. They had a chance. We put us all in danger of being caught, but we did it. We hunted them down and got them,” said Cassie while sitting in the dirt, exhausted.

  “Hunted them?” Jill asked, her mouth dry as cotton.

  “Yeah, I was great with a bow and arrows, but you never noticed,” Angel said. “He was on the cliff. Cornered and pow, he didn’t really suffer. It was a clean shot. I was good.”

  “I was better,” said Cassie as she rolled her eyes. “You were okay at best.”

  Tiffany exhaled loudly. “I never knew….”

  “We handled it. Nelwynn and Angel were hardly speaking, blaming each other for the embarrassment…stupid shit,” Cassie said. “I got Julie, knife in the heart. Quick and easy. Buried her myself. She was a thief, too, just so you know, bitch. I was blamed for stealing the English teacher’s lunch that time in ninth grade and had detention. It was her, but no one believed me.”

  “I believed you didn’t do it,” Jill said, “and we knew you didn’t.”

  Cassie shrugged and said, “The teacher didn’t. I was a trash girl who had to be a thief, at least in her mind.”

  Jill felt as if she were hearing a story unrelated to her. “And Andre?”

  Angel made a choking noise. Nelwynn shoved her spade into the soil with anger and irritation.

  “What?” Tiffany asked.

  “I was angry, yes. But I would have gotten over it. I mean, being gay is fine; Sammie, you and Cindy are fine. We would have been fine. I was mad, but I loved Angel. I really loved her,” Nelwynn said.

  “I loved you, then,” Angel said. “I was drunk again, and I messed up; it was a crazy idea. I was a fat, ugly chick, and no man wanted me except Rex who was a rapist, right? And I had a girlfriend, but it was you, Nelwynn, and you were needy. Damn, I wanted to feel something else.”

  “What am I missing?” Samantha asked.

  “She hunted him down, and then she…she…,” Nelwynn sputtered.

  Cassie broke in, “He was all pumped up with adrenalin and in survival mode. Angel got naked and was playing around, you know. Power thing. She screwed him.”

  “You what?” Jill yelled, “oh, my God, Angel.”

  “I did. I admit it. I was excited, and it happened. He was dark and slick with sweat. He was so damned hot looking even if I hated him. I lost my virginity,” Angel said as she pushed her light blonde hair off her face.

  Nelwynn began crying.

  Shocked, Jill turned her head back and forth from Nelwynn to Angel.

  Had she really thought that the surprises were over? “Angel, tell me you didn’t….”

  Cassie shook her head but affirmed it. “She did. It was repulsive. And hurtful.”

  “We walked up and saw the big finish. Nelwynn ran over and got him in the throat, and damned if he didn’t…well…Angel loved it.” Meg made a motion as if she were gagging.

  “Nelwynn never forgave me for being with a boy,” Angel remarked.

  “How could I? We hated him, and you were my girlfriend.”

  “Look, I never told any of you, but I paid for that shit. I had to pay big time. You think I didn’t pay for that screw up? I had to get an abortion because of that one little incident. And not at a nice clean clinic. I got an infection from the abortion, and I can’t have kids because of that. How do you think I felt being knocked up by a dead boy? A black dead boy,” said Angel as she began to weep tears harder than anyone had ever seen from her. “Can’t you imagine? What would have been said about me for having a black baby?”

  “Why would you care? You act like Nelwynn is to blame,” Jill said, ignoring how much Angel was crying.

  “And that was it. They were enemies after that I guess,” Cassie said. “They were already broken up, but that was the final straw when Angel got with Andre.”

  Jill was over whelmed. There was so much she never knew. She felt horror, sorrow, sickness, and regret.

  “Then, who are these people?” she asked as she spread her arms. “How many more are there?”

  “What does it matter? We know Mike was a busy man,” Meg said.

  “Really? Some of the skulls and bodies sure seem fresh to me,” Jill replied. She wrinkled her nose at the odor and wished to feel clean again.

  “He kept up his hobby,” Meg said.

  “Hobby,” Nelwynn repeated, “that’s sick. He used us, didn’t he?”

  “No, not really. It’s not like we fought anything or that he told us to do things. He only made it possible and gave us the all-so-important paternal acceptance,” Tiffany said. It was something Jill’s husband might have told her.

  The next day, they decided to bury the remains again. Already, there was almost more truth than some could handle. It was strange how the more they learned, the more ghastly everything felt. She would have preferred never to have known about Angel and Andre.

  She could have hated Angel, she could have pitied her, but Jill felt nothing either way. In a way, the numbness was worse.

  “Where’s my sweater?” Tiffany asked. She wiped grime across her face and looked in the kitchen for her blue cashmere sweater. It wasn’t in the living area or her room. She wondered if one of the women had stolen it and narrowed her eyes. Only Angel would like cashmere or do it justice, and as small as Tiffany was, the sweater was too large for Angel.

  “It was a ghost,” Cassie laughed. She closed the back door that stood open a crack. “We need to close doors. It’s cold outside.”

  “None of us have been out there since dinner,” Jill said. “Lock it. That’s creepy.”

  Cassie peered outside and shrugged. They showered and went to bed. Cassie paused before she turned in. “I have the weirdest feeling, like I’m being watched.”

  “Ghosts. Like you said,” Whitney said.

  “Maybe. Maybe it wasn’t closed well,” Whitney said.

  Jill wondered if the dirty handprints had been on the door before but only nodded and said, “Ghosts.”

  Chapter 3

  “Why didn’t someone wake me?” Jill asked. It was half past noon.

  “If I could sleep away these seven days, I
would,” Cassie said. She told Jill there were cold cuts for a sandwiches and a pitcher of bloody Marys for lunch.

  Jill found Nelwynn at a desk bent over papers that resided in a cubbyhole that Mike called an office. Books lined shelves, and the tweed chairs were worn but comfortable. Beside her, Tiffany was shuffling papers and had a frown across her pretty face.

  “Something interesting?” Jill asked.

  “Depends. Scary is more like it. These are folders with information. Mike sold the land right over there,” Nelwynn pointed. “I tried Internet searches and couldn’t get a cell phone signal anyway, as usual. But these papers. Okay, these guys. Jered and Randy Watkins.”

  “What about them?”

  “Meg already looked over some of this. These are their criminal records. Peeping. Sexual assault. Battery. Exposing themselves. Real winners.”

  “Why would Mike sell to them?”

  “Indeed. And the price was about a tenth of the value. So why? Mike was far too weak by this time to do anything to these pervs. The other land was bought by another pair of nuts.”

  “What kind?”

  “Mike has notes about a still, meth, and wrote in margin: child(?) bones hanging as wind chimes? There is also a note that the man and woman--Terry and Jolene Brice--have a shotgun, and he added exclamation points,” Nelwynn said as she chewed her pen.

  “He had that just lying out for anyone to find?” Jill asked.

  Tiffany grimaced and said, “For us to find. Why would he put us in a bad situation like this? What was he after?”

  “Legacy. That’s what his letter meant,” Nelwynn said. “What if…I can’t say it, but what if Mike wasn’t….”

  “One of the good guys? A manipulator? A man who gave a girl a knife, knowing what her plans were? A man who brought us here and groomed us?” Jill demanded. “Yeah. That’s it. I want everyone to hear this.”

  All of the women listened intently. Angel wore a flannel shirt she borrowed from Tiffany and had it unbuttoned low enough for her to show off the cleavage of her breast implants. She raised and lowed a leg that she tossed over the arm of a chair and asked, “So what do we do?”