The night was quiet, other than the squish of our wet boots against the rocky path; she blew a stream of smoke skyward. “Not all along, but most of the time. He was never very discreet about his … exploits.”
“Plural? Like a lot of women?”
“Women?” she scoffed. “They were all babies.”
“There were others besides Michelle?” I asked.
“Ha,” she laughed mockingly. “So many I lost count.”
“Were they all as young as Michelle and Char?”
Her hand started twitching nervously, making the flashlight jitter on the path ahead. She glanced over her shoulder at me and took another long draw on her cigarette.
“He was good to me when we first married, fawning over me like I was the most beautiful thing in the world.” She looked up at the stars, lost in her memories. “Did you also find out we had to get married? Rusty was born seven months after our wedding. Stillborn. I couldn’t conceive after that. I was twenty-three and childless. Except for Eddie, of course. He’s nothing but a child in a man’s body.”
She laughed, then, but choked on the smoke of her cigarette. She dried her weepy eyes with the sleeve of the sweatshirt before continuing. “I think that was about the time he started becoming interested in other ‘women,’ as you so delicately call them. When we learned I couldn’t bear him any children.”
She trudged up the path, a path that clearly was leading to the big rock, not to the haul road, and not doubling back on Nemo Road as promised. I dropped back a few paces, not so many that the recorder couldn’t pick up her words, but enough to give me a head start if I bolted over the barbed wire. I realized why she felt the need to wear so much makeup, why she found it difficult to see her own natural beauty. I realized that when I had seen her earlier today it wasn’t the harshness of daylight that illuminated her sour disposition, but rather her disgust in him.
“The first one was nineteen, old enough to know better. But quickly he went to younger and younger girls. Too young to argue with him.” I could hear the intake as she drew hard on her cigarette. “The last time was two years ago. We were on a road trip with his volleyball team. I went out to shop for a bit and forgot my purse. Eddie wouldn’t let me in our hotel room. I forced my way in. There was a girl hiding in our closet. Naked. She was fourteen.”
What a monster!
Poor Michelle, to have to live with that burden for all this time. Plus the guilt of not turning him into authorities years ago, possibly sparing others from his treacherous hand and lecherous heart.
I heard her sniffle. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Samantha, also a victim in all this, along with loathing her for allowing her husband to abuse so many girls and then taking the life of one of his victims.
“I tried everything I could to stop him. He is a very sick bastard. I threatened to leave him, to expose him, to have him arrested. I even threatened to kill him.”
These last words were accompanied by the twitching of her hand again, the arc of the flashlight jerking about in the path ahead. I understood that she was not as tough as she would have liked me to believe.
“Only thing I can’t seem to do is stop loving him.” She wiped her nose again with her sleeve, took a drag on the cigarette, and blew out a long stream of smoke. “God knows I’ve tried. So, what does that say about the sick person I am?”
“Tell me about Michelle,” I encouraged her. I looked up ahead to my left, and in the pale moonlight, I could make out the shape of the big rock. She was taking me back to where she had killed Michelle. The loader was about ten yards farther beyond the rock to the right. And I was running short of time for her to finish the story.
“Michelle was a handful, not stupid like so many other bimbos Eddie picked. The volunteers, I call them,” Samantha said glancing around at the woods, her eyes settling on the creek bank to our left.
I’d heard stories of Mr. Schilling’s coaching abilities, his wins, his teams’ successes, but never in my years of knowing him had I heard he had lost a child. I could see why Samantha had resented Mr. Schilling’s applause taking precedent over their family tragedy. But that wasn’t reason enough to kill.
“Sunday night was the first time I had seen her in years,” she said, lighting a new cigarette after crushing out the old with the toe of her hiking boot. “She marched right up to the door that night, pounding until I answered. It was nearly midnight. Eddie was supposedly at the campground, and I was left at home in Rapid City, alone as usual.”
“But Mr. Schilling said he wasn’t here Sunday night,” I stammered, wondering what I was missing.
“He was supposed to be at the campground. But lucky for me, he was out cruising for chicks as usual. I didn’t find that out until later. Until Michelle told me about finding Eddie parked up on Dinosaur Hill with her little sister.” She made air quotes on the last words, her cigarette and bobbing flashlight like sparklers in the night.
She tapped the ashes onto the ground, the amber glow coming to life quickly before going out. I stepped on the embers as I passed, just to make sure we weren’t aiding and abetting the pine beetles devastation. “Anyway, Michelle came to our house. I tried to close the door on Michelle so she’d go away. Really, I did. But she was persistent. She demanded to know where Eddie was and if he was with some girl named Char. I had no idea who Char was and I told her so.”
After a long pause, Samantha Schilling—idolized kindergarten teacher, former cheerleader, and wife of a renowned coach—continued her sordid story. “That really pissed her off. She was in my face, shouting at me, telling me what a coward I was for hiding my husband’s weakness for little girls. That pissed me off. I told her she should leave, but she refused, insisted she be allowed inside to wait for his return. So I decided to take her to him. Arrange for a front row seat to her ripping my husband’s head off right.”
Samantha’s footsteps were starting to slow, and I could tell we were within a yard or two of where she had killed Michelle. She hadn’t turned around yet, but I still kept my distance, praying she’d finish telling me the story of what happened to Michelle before she killed me, which I had no doubt she was planning to do.
“Eddie had been through counseling. He promised there would be no more young girls. I believed him. When Michelle told me about Eddie and the newest volunteer, their child, something snapped. I wanted Eddie dead.”
The conviction with which she delivered this admission made my skin crawl. The sound of wet boots against the rocks was like fingernails on a chalkboard, sending chills along my spine. Her voice broke into the dead of night.
“We couldn’t have children. But this annoying bitch carried his baby? And he was off scoring with his own child, for God’s sake. A child he didn’t even know he had. Do you know how that made me feel?”
“I can’t imagine.” The lifelessness in my own voice startled me.
“No, of course you can’t.”
“So you drove with her in her car?”
Samantha shook her head. “No. I told her I would take her to Eddie under one condition and it was that I would drive her there. At first, she refused. But she was so desperate, the poor fool. She told me it was time to end all of this, once and for all. I figured, after hearing about how Michelle had caught Eddie with Char, that he’d hightail it back to the campground, not home. So that’s where I took Michelle.”
“So Michelle suggested she drive her car back to the grocery store where she worked and you two would leave from there?”
“No, I told her she couldn’t leave her car at my house in case Eddie showed up. She told me she’d leave her car at work, and I followed.”
“What happened once you got to the campground?”
Finally turning to face me, as if facing her accuser eye to eye, she answered, “It’s all Michelle’s fault, you know. If she hadn’t told me Char was her daughter, was Eddie’s daughter from when he raped her at thirteen, I probably would have let it all go. I always have. Like water off a duck’s
back. Men will be men, right?”
The night was still again. I could hear my own ragged breaths.
“I had a change of heart when I realized he wasn’t here to deal with the problem. I thought about how this transgression of Eddie’s, above all others, would ruin my reputation. It wouldn’t be fair to me after everything I’d been through. Michelle was threatening to go to the authorities with her story unless she found out where her sister—her daughter—Char had run away to and was hiding. I believed her. She was ready to face the consequences no matter what the outcome. I could tell from her cold eyes, her determined tone. She had crossed over.”
“Crossed over?” I asked, gauging in my peripheral vision where to jump the fence and calculating how long it would take me to reach the loader.
“Eddie had been lucky up until Sunday night,” Samantha explained, pacing back and forth along the creek bank. “I was never willing to cross over and suffer the consequences by leaving him. None of the girls he molested or seduced were willing to cross over and turn his sorry ass in to the authorities, even after years of being convinced, or forced, to have sex with him. We were all willing to keep silent, our secrets safe, allowing him the freedom to continue his prowling.
“I was the biggest idiot of all, though, believing it was all in his past. If Michelle hadn’t come along, I would probably still be in denial. She had crossed over, which gave me the courage to cross over. I was suddenly willing to take matters into my own hands.”
She stopped pacing and made her way back toward me, a move I hadn’t anticipated. I should be running, but she was so close to telling me the truth. “I killed her. Just as you said. Eddie didn’t know anything about his illegitimate daughter. Until you spoke up tonight. No one did except me and Michelle. And now you.”
In the thin moonlight, I could see her eyes wildly fixed on me, her mind working on this last revelation. I knew this would seal my fate. I prepared to spring into action, to launch myself over the fence and dart toward the loader for the gun.
“Eddie really believes Mully killed Michelle,” she added softly.
She turned and smoked the last of her second cigarette, anxious to finish her story. I watched as she once again began to pace back and forth, back and forth, along the creek. “Eddie’s too weak. He’ll probably puke his guts out if he ever hears about this,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Anyway, my plan worked perfectly. With Eddie gone and knowing Mully and his crew would be at the rally, I had the Lazy S to myself. No one would see me there. I grabbed a flashlight that one the bikers left behind in the building, and told Michelle that Eddie and Char had been hiding in the woods this whole time, camping.”
She sucked hard on her cigarette, her lips trembling.
“She was so trusting. What a fool. A bigger fool than me. She followed me into the woods. I know them well because I hike the area all summer long. I knew exactly where to take her, where someone would find her body and start poking around at the Lazy S.”
Her hands trembled as she flicked the lighter on and off, on and off.
“You wanted them to arrest you?”
She barked a laugh. “Not me. I wanted Eddie to shit bricks. And I wanted Mully and his filth gone. If Mully was arrested for Michelle’s murder, so what? He deserved it. If Eddie was arrested, I would be free. Either way, I would win.”
I stood perfectly still so the recorder would pick up on every single incriminating word.
She stood staring in the darkness at the creek bed below. “It was easy, you know. I told her to cross the creek and look up the meadow and she’d see the light in their tent. When she stepped to the other side of the bank, I followed. She bent down to get a better view, and I hit her on the back of her head with the flashlight. Unfortunately, the light broke when I did that. I couldn’t see a thing. I felt for her body and undressed her. She wasn’t dead yet, but the pulse was so light I knew she’d be dead by morning.”
“I grabbed the pieces of the flashlight I could find and crept back to the office. I drew a map of where her body could be found. I walked over to one of the biker bitches’ campers and threw the flashlight and Michelle’s clothes in the back of a small compartment. A little insurance policy, I suppose. If the police found it, they’d believe me over the Lucifer’s Lot, right?
“I pinned a note I had hurriedly scribbled, along with the map, to the inside of one of the Lucifer’s Lot tents, the one I’d seen a prospect using. I was thinking the prospect would be tempted to violate the dead body, leave DNA that would point to them. I had signed the note “Eddie” so I had a little insurance against him as well. But as I was in the tent, I found an FTW pin, decided against leaving the note, and returned to the creek to put the pin in Michelle’s hand.
“Eddie collects little trinkets left behind in the garbage of those slimy bikers. And I made sure to tell one of the prospects earlier this week that Eddie had found an FTW pin. A lie, but I considered it a little insurance I’d keep tucked away in the back of my mind for someday when I needed to have Eddie walk the line. If Mully ever found out, he might just find a reason to kill him. Of course, I’m in complete control of all that. And for now, I think I’ll keep all that to myself. Eddie enjoys the fact that these bikers are bad. He’s bad and gets away with it, just like them. Or so he thinks. I let him think that all those years. Then, when Michelle came knocking, it was over. I wanted him to pay. I crossed over.”
“You shouldn’t have killed Michelle. She was innocent in all this,” I growled.
Samantha stopped pacing and approached me, standing within an arm’s length of me. Sweat slid down my sides, back, and arms. I met her eyes in the pale moonlight, her back to the creek where Michelle was killed only two nights earlier. By this woman. This poor, pathetic excuse for a woman. Michelle didn’t deserve this. And neither did I.
“Innocent?” Samantha Schilling repeated. “Don’t you get it? All these years I thought Eddie was the reason I couldn’t have a child. I thought it was his sperm that was deficient. After all, none of the hundreds of girls he bedded over the years had ever gotten pregnant. Never.”
She took a step closer to me. I held my breath and my position.
“Then Michelle storms up here and tells me Eddie has a daughter. He fathered a child.” She leaned in and shrieked, “Do you know how that made me feel? The one thing I could cling to, the only reason I didn’t get washed down the storm drains of my gutter life, was that he was impotent. Not me. Not me!”
A twisted grin spread across her face just before she whipped the flashlight above her head with lightning speed.
I bolted to my right to avoid the crushing blow meant for my skull, feeling the wind rush against my face and neck as the flashlight narrowly missed its mark. After a few steps, I leapt over the barbed wire fence, snagging my jeans and crashing hard to the ground on the other side. I felt Samantha’s strong hand on my boot, hung up on the top wire, and my pant leg rip as she smashed the flashlight against my leg. An animalistic noise escaped my mouth and I kicked at her, yanking my foot hard and ripping my jeans free of the barbs as I scrabbled away on my hands and knees.
I heard the wires creak as Samantha squeezed the top wires with her strong hands and stepped over the fence.
She would close the distance in no time, her being in such good shape and me with a bruised calf.
I pushed myself off the ground and began taking awkward steps toward the loader as quickly as I could. I tripped on a rock and ended up in a heap instead. Hearing my adversary’s footsteps pounding into a dead run, I pushed myself up a second time and crabbed across the rocky ground on my hands and knees until I was running again toward the loader, thankful I would have the advantage if I retrieved the loaded Browning before she reached me. My mind raced back in time to earlier that day, and I tried to recall if I’d clicked the safety back into place before dropping the pistol near the levers, knowing every millisecond would count. Samantha clearly didn’t have a gun of her own or I’d have been shot in th
e back already, an easy target in the thin but adequate starlight.
Just as I pulled my way up the loader ladder and hurled my heavy feet onto the platform, I felt this evil woman’s hand reach around the heel of my boot. I yanked the door open and dove across the seat, my fingertips landing on the butt of the gun just as she gripped my ankle. I wrapped my fingers tight around the gun as she pulled me off the seat and back again onto the platform, my elbows and legs scraping across the metal grids.
I tried to ignore the searing pain that shot through me as she tugged at my limbs from her purchase on the ladder.
I knew if I didn’t hold tight to the gun, I was dead.
I flipped over onto my back, my legs twisting awkwardly as she gripped my ankles tight, and I leveled my gun at her. She gave a swift yank and we both dropped like rocks off the platform onto the rocky ground below, the breath knocked completely from me and the pistol knocked from my hand.
She regained control more quickly than I had, but I flopped over onto my belly and crawled to within reach of the gun. When I turned over onto my back, her twisted face was directly above me, the flashlight gripped in her raised arm, ready to strike.
I tried to level the pistol on her stomach in time to protect myself. I heard gunfire and felt the flashlight glance against my skull before Samantha’s body landed on top of me.
And then my world dimmed.
I WAS REALLY STARTING to hate the sounds of emergency vehicles.
The steady wail of sirens, the beeps of monitors alerting emergency response teams, and the squawking radios.
My head felt like a little minion was inside my skull working overtime with a jackhammer, lighting off an occasional stick of dynamite just for variety. My mind raced to find the cause, and I saw De Milo’s face as he knelt over me, sticking me with a needle, filling my veins and brain with something wicked. Then I smelled the barroom floor—spilled beer and dirty feet—as my head banged against a table pedestal, legs wriggling around me like undulating bars in a twisted Stephen King jail. Finally, I landed on an image of Samantha Schilling’s contorted face just before she clocked me with a flashlight.
Lot’s return to Sodom Page 33