by K N Mings
“Do you feel better?” she asked.
Ayanna nodded, wiping her cheeks with her fingers.
“Good, we have work to do.” Grandma Cici removed a pair of glasses from the skirt pocket of her dress, handing them to Ayanna. “Wash your face and meet me in my bedroom. We have a body to dispose of.” With that said she left the room.
Ten minutes later, grandmother and granddaughter stood over the dead body of Reginald De Wolfe. This was the first time Ayanna had ever seen a dead body; even though she had attended Grandpa Donald’s funeral, she had refused to view his body.
“Should we bury it up in the hills?” the teen asked.
“I suppose…. I already have a few bodies up there, but what’s another body? There is a lot of space for an extra body,” the old woman said, thoughtfully.
“What bodies, Granny?” Ayanna asked, turning to look at the old woman.
“It doesn’t matter, all that matters is that we have to get rid of this body,” Grandma Cici said. “He’s still warm and pliable. We are going to have to work fast before rigor sets in.” She walked over to the vanity and removed two pairs of latex gloves from the back of the top drawer. “Put these on.” She handed her granddaughter a pair.
Ayanna stared at the gloves.
“Look, it was you who brought this man to my house, so it’s only fair that you help with the dirty work,” Grandma said, crossing her arms. “What? You prefer I had let him rape you?”
Ayanna shook her head, then reached out for the gloves her grandmother slapped into her hand. Wordlessly, the teen helped the older woman move the body to the bathroom. Once it was situated in the shower stall, Cecilia Gomes, with the precision of a surgeon, dismembered the body of Reginald De Wolfe. Body parts were handed to Ayanna who placed them into black, plastic bags.
By the time their gruesome task was completed, the sun had set and darkness had descended on the village of Old Road. As Grandma Cici rinsed the last of the blood down the drain, she instructed Ayanna to place De Wolfe’s clothing in a bag and the bed linen in another.
As she placed the last pillow case in the bag, Ayanna heard the phone ring. A minute or two later, she heard her grandmother’s voice.
“Oh, hello Ingrid… Oh dear, I should have called you. Something came up and I needed Ayanna’s help. I’m going to need her to stay until tomorrow….. It could not be helped…… You had plans to see Harold? … Well, you can see him another time… Look, Ingrid, I have to go, I’ll talk to you in the morning.”
Even from the other room, Ayanna could hear her mother ranting before Grandma Cici hung up the phone with a decisive click. With a sigh, she gathered up the bags of bed linen and De Wolfe’s belongings and went into the hallway. Her grandmother was carrying a package wrapped in black plastic and duct tape.
“What is that, granny?” she asked.
“This is the answer to the questions you are afraid to ask me,” was the answer. Grandma Cici motioned for Ayanna to follow her.
She lead her granddaughter into the kitchen where she placed the package on a stack of similarly wrapped packages sitting in the middle of the dining table. She sat down at the dining table and indicated to Ayanna to sit down across from her.
“This is why I have a gun, more like twenty,” Grandma Cici began pointing at the stack. “This is why there are bodies in the hills.” She removed a hunting knife from her pocket and sliced into one of the packages. She then removed dried leaves from the hole.
“Marijuana,” Ayanna whispered, barely audible.
“Not your everyday marijuana, this is Premium Marijuana. The best of the best and I am the only one who grows it. This is a dangerous business, especially if you grow a product like this. The guns are my protection and the bodies up in the hills were people who meant to do me harm and take over my little business.” As the old woman spoke her eyes never left the eyes of her granddaughter.
It was a while before Ayanna spoke, the ramifications of what the old woman said sinking in.
“How long have you been in business?”
“Long enough to know that it’s a good business and long enough to know the rewards outweigh the risks,” Cecilia Gomes answered. “The only reason I’m telling you this is to avoid you walking around with questions in your mind. Before long your curiosity would get the best of you and you will ask the wrong people the questions you should be asking me.”
“Grandma Cici, you know I would not do that. I would ask you,” Ayanna exclaimed.
The old woman shrugged, then said, “The Ayanna I knew would ask me, but that Ayanna has never been sexually assaulted. That Ayanna never saw her grandmother kill a man and dismember him. I can’t vouch for the Ayanna sitting in front of me who has gone through all of that.”
Once again, Grandma Cici rendered her granddaughter speechless.
“Can I trust you, Ayanna? Things have changed, your perception of me has changed, but apart from what you’ve seen and heard today, I’m still your Grandma Cici. And from what you saw, I love you and I will never let anyone harm you,” the old woman reached across the table and took the teen’s hand. “Can I trust you to keep my secrets? Can I trust you to keep our secret?”
Ayanna looked down at their hands. This hand had taught her how to turn cornmeal. This hand had comforted her and disciplined her. This hand killed a man who tried to hurt her. She tightened her grip on the hand that was always present in her life.
“You can trust me. You trusted me in the past, you can trust me now and you can trust me long into the future. Our secrets are between us and there they will stay.” The teen looked up at her grandmother, a resolve glimmering in the depths of her dark brown eyes. “So, where are we going to bury De Wolfe?”
A smile of relief spread across the old woman’s face.
“The same place all bad men go, to the dark side of the hills,” Grandma Cici said darkly with a twinkle in her eye. “There is a wheelbarrow with a couple shovels in the back. We will load it up with the remains and I will lead the way to where we will bury them. Go get the wheelbarrow and bring it to the back door. I’ll start bringing out the bags.”
Ayanna followed her grandmother’s instructions and in short time the wheelbarrow was loaded. By the light of an old kerosene lamp, Grandma Cici led Ayanna to the secret burial ground. The journey took the better part of two hours; every now and then the teen had to take a break from pushing the full wheelbarrow up an incline far beyond where human traffic ever ventured.
At last, they entered a clearing and Ayanna was surprised to see in the weak moonlight four graves marked by wooden crosses. She came to a stop next to her grandmother.
“Even though they came to do me harm, it doesn’t mean I should disrespect them by not giving them a decent burial,” Mrs. Gomes answered the question not yet asked. “It is not my place to judge these men, I leave it to God. And when it is my turn to be judged, I can only hope that my sins can be forgiven as I have already forgiven these men of their sins against me.”
As their time was limited, the old woman and her granddaughter went to work, digging the grave for De Wolfe. After hours of backbreaking work, the remains of Ayanna’s would-be rapist were disposed of. The hole was not six feet deep but it was deep enough to ensure that stray dogs, though there were unlikely to be any this far up, were not drawn to the fresh grave.
After replacing the displaced earth, Grandma Cici fashioned a cross from broken branches and stuck it into the top of the newest grave. She said a prayer, hoping that the young man’s good deeds outweighed his bad, and that he entered heaven a forgiven man.
“We are done here,” the old woman said after a long silence. She turned to Ayanna, “Time to go home, time to forget what happened.”
“What if I don’t want to forget?” Ayanna asked.
The old woman shrugged, collecting the shovels. “It could go anyway. This experience can make you timid and weak, afraid of your shadow. Or it could make you hard, sucking out all of your innocence. Then ag
ain, you may find yourself in that happy medium where you are no longer naive and you are open to whatever life brings your way.” With that said, she started to make her way back to her house.
Ayanna turned to the graves. Here lay five men who had made decisions that cost them their lives. They had not thought twice about acting on their decisions, expecting everything to go their way. But in time, they crossed the wrong person. It was a macabre way to learn this lesson, but it was a lesson she had to learn: every decision counted, no matter the size.
As she swung the wheelbarrow around and followed her grandmother, the teen decided she would not leave her temperament to fate. She decided that she would reside in the happy middle. In her heart, she knew she would not be alone in that space. She caught up to her grandmother who looked across at her and winked. No, she would never be alone.
The journey back to Grandma Cici’s house was shorter as it was all downhill. Without saying a word to each other, grandmother and granddaughter entered the house and collapsed into the couch and arm chair in the living room, both incapable of making it to the beds in the rooms to the back.
It was a little after noon when Ayanna was awaken by her grandmother shaking her.
“Time to get up, Ayanna,” the older woman said, standing over her. “Your mother has been calling every hour on the hour.”
“Wha? Oh, okay,” the teen mumbled wiping sleep from her eyes. Stretching, she got up and went in search of her bag. As she hitched her bag onto her shoulder, she entered the kitchen where Grandma Cici was taking out the forgotten fried chicken out of the microwave.
She placed the plate on the dining table and told Ayanna to sit. After a quick prayer, they tucked into the reheated meal of chicken and fries.
“About yesterday….” Grandma Cici started, prompting Ayanna to complete her sentence.
The teen placed a drumstick back down and looked her grandmother in the eyes, “I promise you, what happened yesterday into early this morning is our secret. That secret will be buried with me.”
Cecilia Gomes nodded her head, satisfied with the answer she got. “Hurry up and eat, your mother is probably huffing and puffing.”
Despite the serious nature of the last 24 hours, grandmother and granddaughter fell into a light conversation which had them laughing and enjoying the remainder of the meal. Afterwards, Grandma Cici brushed aside Ayanna’s offer to help her clean up. She shooed her granddaughter out of the house and wished her luck in facing her mother.
Days passed and then weeks. The two women fell back into their daily routines. Ayanna went to school and Grandma Cici continued growing and selling her Premium Marijuana.
On the little island, the number of rapes reduced dramatically. Some people said the police were doing their job and the rapist was in their custody. Some said he had left the island. Only a few people thought that he must have crossed the wrong individual and he was dead somewhere or other. Only two people really knew the truth.
Thanks For Reading Little Red Hoodie.
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Below is an excerpt from
INTO THE BLACK WIDOW’S WEB
Audra Kellman is found dead in a place that is said to be where demons cross over to the human world.
Now Three People Want To Find The Killer
The head of an underground narcotic distribution ring. The CEO of an influential group of companies. And a reluctant private investigator who is more interested in finding out the true identity of the person who hired him than finding out who killed the innocent woman execution style.
As D’Angelo Marshall, a private investigator who walks on the razor edge of the law, investigates the case he finds himself caught up in a web of secrets. And the case takes him in a new direction that would change his life forever.
Now caught in the Black Widow’s Web, will D’Angelo fight his way free… would he want to?
A Private Investigator mystery set on the Caribbean island of Redonda, 50 years in the future.
Click here to get your copy of
ONE
IT WAS AS THOUGH the floor had cracked under her feet, then crumbled away, leaving behind nothing but a void of darkness through which she hurtled with no indication of a bottom. It was one thing to be falling, it was another thing to feel a bony creature on top of her, directly over her diaphragm making it hard for her to scream. But the old woman was not prone to screaming. She was known to stare down adversity, even when its cold skeletal hand pierced her chest, wrapped it around her heart and plucked it as though it was an overripe Julie mango. As she fell through the darkness, in the distance was the flutter of wings fading away.
She didn’t have the time to think that both angels and demons had wings. The thought that Lucifer was once an angel wasn’t top of mind as she hurtled through a void that had no top or bottom, just darkness. This could have very well been hell, but it wasn’t. It felt like hell to the old woman who was really sitting in her sunlit office as she stared at the picture that fell out of the dark gold paper envelope. Who would have thought hell could be delivered by the postal service?
Just moments ago, Jucintha Davis had fluttered into her office with the package and a fresh cup of coffee. As the elderly woman studied the postage marks, the housekeeper began to busy herself around the room under the pretense of straightening things up. Mrs. Davis’s nosiness preceded and succeeded her, but she could never fathom the secrets that lay under the surface of the old woman’s home. She was soon shooed away and with the closing of the door, all focus returned to the package.
Small fingers pried the flap open before reaching for the much-needed cup of brew. It was an exotic blend from a small village in Colombia she had once visited. So moved by the village people and impressed with what they produced, she created a coffee company that was the only company in the world that got their beans from the village. Café Negra supplied high-end coffee shops the world over and the old woman’s pantry.
She had sipped a gulp of the coffee when she took the end of the envelope and tapped the contents out. Hell fell onto the surface of her desk display, blinking out one of the documents on display. Hell was a four by six cardstock upon which an image was developed. The floor had cracked.
The mug came down with a thud on the wooden surface along the edge of the desk as the old woman leaned in to better view the image. She had seen this before but so many years had passed, but the feeling of falling never aged. Her heart had been spirited away and try as she might to grip onto something, anything, to stop the fall, all she felt was the nothingness that surrounded her.
Not again.
Pulling her gaze away, she looked up at the wall across from her desk. The screen that hung on the sunflower yellow wall, at first, displayed the image of a little boy with a light complexion, dark eyes, and a broad smile. It soon gave way to an older man with the same broad smile and an even lighter complexion. He soon faded to blackness. A moment of silence before another smiling face would appear.
Not again!
As she fell, the old woman willed a perch into being in her Hell. Her fingers dug into its shallow soil, her muscles strained as she pulled herself up. She was done with falling. Turning around, she looked up and saw a point of light twinkling in the darkness. She willed the rock face into being and then, with strength reserved for the determined, she climbed towards the light.
Slowly, the old woman’s gaze fell to the four by six cardstock. She was not falling, she was climbing. From the image, she looked to the other content of the package, a message made up with letter cut outs. The words were faded but their message was startling.
The old woman started to reach out for it as though touching it would confirm that this was not a dream, but she quickly pulled her hand away. It was not a matter that she wanted to deny herself this reality, it was what h
er eyes had perceived. Not truly her eyes but the lens that had been installed to replace the ones that no longer served her.
It was a Tous lens named after Lara Toussaint, a child prodigy that had double majored in an American Ivy League University who had grown to miss the cool breeze on hot days in a small island tucked away in the corner of the Caribbean. With a roommate, she escaped the wet, cold city and set up a lab using funding from around the world.
By the time it had transitioned from the lenses of eyeglasses to the lenses of the human eyes, the old woman was an investor. One of the conditions of financing was she would have access to the lenses that could tap into the interwebs with a blink of an eye.
The old woman’s Tous was zooming into the fine coating of a shimmering neon green powder. Less than a second later, the possible matches of what the dusting was floated in the space between the woman and the message. The data came from blogs, law enforcement databases, and the old woman’s very own servers. Dismissing all but the results from the servers based in Russia that belonged to her organization, she pulled up all the information attached to the powdery substance that glittered in the sunlight like fairy dust.
Closing her eyes, the text melted away to darkness. She felt her footing give, but her fingers only dug deeper into the rock face. Long enough for her feet to find a solid surface.
“Foster,” she called out.
No one hustled through the door, instead, a tall figure materialized before her, shimmering bands of light ran up and down his body until he was fully in focus. He stood across the desk from her, the sunlight shining through his transparency. Always aware of himself, her personal assistant stepped forward into the shadow cast by the wall between the two large windows.
He regarded her with deep brown eyes set under bushy salt and pepper brows. Of course, he could see her turmoil. Of course, he had already picked up the change in her biometrics. The old woman had the feature installed when she brought the consciousness of her closest associate online in the house’s network, she thought it a wise decision. Never did she think that she would have returned to this position when she would have to hide her distress from the one person who truly knew her.