Rage's Echo

by J. S. Bailey

  “No, go ahead. Why would I care about that kind of thing? Why would I care? Why would I care? Why would I—”

  Laughter. Jessica twitched. She was sitting at a round, covered table in the Kemper house at the park in Cold Spring, and Eric was laughing at something Wayne had said. “Good one!”

  Jessica rubbed her eyes and blinked. She must have dozed off for a moment or two. Fortunately she hadn’t slumped over and fallen out of her seat. Her mother would have died of embarrassment, though her demise wouldn’t have greatly concerned her. Who you gonna call…

  A Reyes walked past the table carrying a bottle of Corona. Rachel nudged her husband in the side. “Hey, look. I told you they’d have alcohol here.”

  Eric wrinkled his nose. “Corona? That stuff smells like a skunk.”

  Rachel pointed across the room. “I see someone with a can of Bud Light. Go knock yourself out.”

  “Might as well.” He rose from his seat and ambled over to the coolers beside the buffet table.

  “Jess, you look tired,” Rachel said.

  “Do I?” She blinked. “I cut my finger.”

  Rachel frowned. “On what?”

  She wobbled in the chair again and gripped the edge of the table to steady herself. “There was a piece of glass in the yard. It cut me when I picked it up. She never kissed it to make it better.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Why didn’t she understand? “No kisses. She never let herself get too close, to make things simple if something happened. Just a pretense of motherhood, like doing it out of duty because you know you have to.”

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  A hand placed itself on her forehead. “She feels a little warm. She might be running a fever.”

  “And that’s going to make her start acting drunk? What’s in her glass?”

  The cup she’d poured rose into the air. “Looks like Pepsi or Coke.”

  Her vision doubled. She blinked again to bring everything back into focus. Two people were sitting at the table with her. A man and a woman. Other people were in the room, too, talking and eating.

  “Jessica, can you hear me?” The man was speaking. He had glasses and gelled hair.

  Of course she could hear; she wasn’t deaf! Who did these people think she was?

  “I think she’s having a seizure,” the woman said.

  “Then why is she still sitting up?”

  “Not all seizures are like that. Sometimes they only cause an altered state of consciousness. She might not even remember it when it’s over. Jessica, honey, snap out of this!”

  She shivered. Someone must have left a door open, because the air in the room was turning to ice.

  Another man came and sat at the table. He was holding a blue can of beer that had beads of condensation built up on the sides. “What’s going on?”

  Eric! His name was Eric. And with him were Rachel and Wayne, and she was Jessica, and they were at a miserable family reunion at a park in Cold Spring, Kentucky.

  Jessica shook her head. She’d zoned out again. Half of her food remained on her plate. “Sorry. What did you say?”

  “Are you coherent now?” Rachel asked.

  “Am I ever?”

  Rachel didn’t seem to be in the mood for humor. “What was that all about?”

  “What was what about?” A few tendrils of fog wove in and out of her thoughts, derailing any line of thinking before it could come to fruition in her head.

  “Do you want me to take you home?” Wayne asked. She realized that he was gripping her hand so hard that her fingertips were starting to turn purple. She returned to full alertness in an instant.

  “No, I think I’m fine now.” Jessica forced a smile. “Did somebody say something about a seizure?”

  “You were having one.”

  How odd. “It must not have lasted very long.”

  “If it had lasted any longer, I’d have hauled you off to the near-est hospital to get your head scanned,” Rachel said. “You haven’t had one of those before, have you?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.” She had fainted a couple of times running around in the heat when she was a kid, but that was it. “Maybe it’s from stress.”

  “Stress doesn’t do that to people. Wayne thinks you’re running a fever.”

  She touched her forehead. It felt sort of warm, but that might have just been because her hand was cold. “It must not be much of one.”

  “Just take it easy, okay?”

  “I haven’t not been taking it easy. I’ll be fine. I swear.”

  Rachel didn’t seem convinced. She picked up her fork and stabbed a piece of cauliflower. “If you insist.”

  Wayne released his grip on her hand. “I’ll keep an eye on her.”

  “I can keep an eye on myself,” Jessica said, not liking how everyone was suddenly treating her like an invalid. One weird spell didn’t mean anything was the matter.

  She bit into a baby carrot and glanced over at her parents’ table again. Her father, having finished his beer, yawned and checked his watch. He said something to her mother, who shook her head. She couldn’t hear what they were saying over the hubbub.

  “So,” Jessica said, “are Mom and Dad driving straight back to Indy after this?”

  Rachel shook her head. “No, they’re staying with us tonight at Uncle Esteban’s. Aunt Sharon’s giving them the guest bedroom down the hall from us. Why?”

  Who you gonna call? “Just wondered.” She stood up. Her drink had gone to her bladder awfully fast. “I’m going to the bathroom. Be right back.”

  She wove her way around tables full of chattering Reyeses who barely even glanced at her and strode through the doorway she’d seen her mother and Marco come through earlier. The women’s restroom was on the left. She felt fine. No doubt her strange spell would not be repeated.

  She pushed open the door of the first stall and latched it behind her. Fine, fine, fine; oh, yes, she felt fine. Even the pain had taken a break, and she felt—

  Fog overtook her unexpectedly, and before it could occur to her that she might not be as fine as she’d thought, she was gone.

  SIDNEY HAD taken her laptop to work so she could kill time and post some online discussion questions for her English class. She couldn’t see why she had to do that in addition to attending her Wednesday night lecture, but you didn’t argue with that kind of thing when you were the dimwit who’d signed up for that particular class in the first place. At least the semester ended in December. And at least she was only taking the one class.

  The console on the counter beeped, signaling that somebody was using their credit card to pay at the pump. Chances were they wouldn’t even come in to say hi, much less buy anything.

  She took a swig of Pepsi and popped a handful of Cheetos into her mouth. Even though Travis may have been a Bible-thumping pain in the behind, he was still cool enough to let her stuff her face on the job as long as she paid for her indulgences first.

  It only took her a few minutes to complete her required discussion posts, most of which had to do with the Poe and Bryant poems she’d had to compare for the week’s assignment. Then she logged into her e-mail account and saw she had five new messages, all of them spam.

  The customer outside hung up the nozzle, got back into their car, and left.

  She sighed. Having customers come inside and keep her busy for a minute or two was too much to ask for these days.

  She wiped the orange powder off of her fingers onto her pants leg. Since her homework was done for the time being and she had no other pressing matters to attend to, she decided to try to find out more about Jerry. Somebody had to have suspected that he’d been murdered. A person vanishes without taking their wallet or car along with them; they have to be either in witness protection or dead.

  No customers lurked in the parking lot. She glanced through the glass door connecting the gas station and diner. Travis stood beside a booth chatting with some of the regular restaurant p
atrons who were probably the only reason that the diner hadn’t gone out of business ages ago. Hopefully he’d stay put while she conducted her online investigation. No telling what he’d think if he saw what she was looking up.

  She ate another Cheeto and typed “Campbell County Kentucky murder 1986” into Google’s search bar. Some crumbs fell between the keys. She could clean them up later.

  One of the first links that the search returned bore the headline, “No Suspects Linked to Alexandria Shooting.”

  Interesting. The missing persons article Wayne had found specifically stated that Jerry had lived in Alexandria.

  Pulse quickening, she clicked on the link, which took her to a reprinted article from a library archive. The article had been taken from a July edition of a newspaper she had never heard of. She popped another Cheeto into her mouth and began to read.

  Her eyes widened as she scrolled down the page, and she accidentally inhaled part of a Cheeto when the second to last paragraph caused her to make an involuntary gasp. Holy crap.

  She managed to cough a few times. Her eyes watered, causing the revelatory words to blur on the screen. They couldn’t be true.

  But they had to be. No one else had that name.

  She sat there dumbly, not knowing what to do. This information was going to alter everything that Jessica had ever known, because she couldn’t have known before. And why in the blazes hadn’t she been told?

  This news could not wait. Sidney fumbled for her cell phone and dialed Jessica’s number. It went immediately to voicemail.

  Crap.

  She tried it again. Jessica’s recorded voice came on the line a second time. “Hi, this is Jessica. I can’t come to the phone right now, so please leave your name and number after the tone.”

  She closed her phone and took a deep breath. Wayne didn’t own a cell phone, so she wouldn’t be able to reach Jessica through him, either.

  The clock on the wall said it was two. She didn’t get off work until four. She could feign illness and convince Travis to let her leave, and she could drive out to Cold Spring to tell Jessica the news to her face and possibly prevent something very bad from happening, if she were correct in her assumptions.

  Come to think of it, her stomach wasn’t feeling all that great anyway—not now that she knew what happened. To help it feel even worse, she chugged down the remainder of her Pepsi in a single gulp and jumped up and down a few times for good measure. Her innards lurched in protest. Perfect.

  She snapped her laptop closed and stuffed it back into its carrying case. She stuck her head through the doorway into the diner. “Hey, Travis?’ she said in a weak voice that surprisingly didn’t need to be faked.

  Her sandy-haired boss turned from the couple he was talking to. He’d been acting kind of cold toward her since their little argument the other day, so he didn’t smile when he saw her. “What is it?”

  “Stomach,” she said. “I think I’m catching one of those bugs that’s been going around.”

  He frowned, his eyes full of concern that made her feel guilty for lying. “Are you sure?”

  She gave a fierce nod. “I feel like I’m going to puke my guts out.”

  The couple in the booth wrinkled their noses and scooted up against the wall to be as far away from her as possible.

  Travis took an unconscious step back from her. “If you’re feeling that bad, leave. Helen should be fine over here by herself for a while.”

  Thank you, God. “Could I? I can make up the last two hours on Monday if I’m feeling better then.”

  He untied his grease-speckled apron and draped it over his arm. “We can talk about that later. Now scram before you contaminate the whole restaurant and get me in trouble with the health inspector.”

  At least some of his old humor was returning. Sidney thanked him, raced back into the gas station, and swiped her things up from behind the counter.

  God, she prayed, figuring that a quick prayer was worth a shot, please let me be making mountains out of molehills. Please don’t let me be too late.

  Like Christ on his way to Calvary, they forced him along to his place of execution, though fortunately they hadn’t required him to carry anything, because he would have crumpled to his knees under the weight. The effects of the drug slowly wore off, but he hadn’t regained enough strength to resist them and run. All he could do was stagger where they dragged him, and pray.

  They were clearly in a forest now. Tree frogs chirped up above, and the earthy smell of decaying leaf matter filled the air. Soft voices murmured close by. Something crackled. He caught a whiff of smoke. Maybe they were going to burn him at the stake.

  “We got him,” a man said so close to his ear that he jumped.

  A hush fell over the forest. Hands forced him into sitting position and lashed him to what felt like a lawn chair. Any moment now and they’d douse him with gasoline and ignite him with the strike of a match.

  His clock was rapidly winding down to zero. He knew that just as he knew the sun rose in the east, and it occurred to him then that he would never see daybreak again—nor the blue of the sky, nor the white orb of the full moon traversing the heavens on a summer night.

  Tears streamed down his cheeks. A sudden dizziness made him sway like a drunk in a prison cell. He couldn’t die like this, blind to the world. “Please let me see!”

  The bag was torn from his head. He blinked. Dozens of people stood before him in an unfamiliar forest clearing. A crackling bonfire raged behind them, turning each figure into a silhouette not unlike the ones who had kidnapped him.

  A woman among them began to weep with a bitterness he knew all too well.

  He licked some of the blood from his lips and struggled against his bindings. “Untie me!”

  Another woman approached him and spat at his feet. “Why should we?”

  He recognized her voice. Though he had suspected her to be a part of this, it still shocked him to know she was here. He decided not to answer her question. “How did you know it was me?” he asked instead.

  “Don’t play us for fools. You’re the only one it could have been.” Her seething voice could have frozen an ocean. His skin prickled.

  “How is that?”

  Though he couldn’t quite make out her face, he had the idea she was smiling. Odd, since he’d put a bullet through her only child’s brain just two days before. “Joanna saw you do it.”

  Joanna Zimmerman? The woman who lived next door whose husband was a cop? “Then why didn’t she tell the police?”

  “Who said she didn’t?” came the voice of said policeman. He stood right behind him, meaning that he had been one of the faceless phantoms who had brought him here.

  The implications of this repulsed him. “But—but why all this? Why didn’t you arrest me?”

  “Maybe we should be asking you why you did it!” shrieked another familiar voice. Meredith Scott. Another childless mother, thanks to him.

  “I had to do it!” he roared, suddenly a hundred times more furious than frightened. “Don’t you get it? They wouldn’t stop looking at me! They knew what she did to me! And they mocked me about it everywhere I went! I didn’t want to kill them, but it was the only way I could make them stop!”

  Angry shouts in both English and Spanish arose from the crowd, but he barely heard them. He could understand their anger, yes, but his deed had been for the greater good—his own.

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” the woman in front of him said as she took a step in reverse.

  “Ready?” Rich Zimmerman asked directly behind the chair.

  She gave a curt nod.

  For one panicked moment he looked into her dark eyes, searching for a glimpse of mercy. “Maria, please…”

  His words were cut short as a rope pulled tight around his neck. He tried to rise by taking the chair with him, but the pain was too great for him to do much more than wriggle.

  Please God let this be fast, oh please, oh please, oh
please—

  “That’s enough!” Maria exclaimed after only a handful of seconds. Then he could breathe again, but only with difficulty. She had had a change of heart! He nearly wept with joy, but instead he shook like an overwrought leaf. Thank you, Jesus.

  Maria leaned over him. A faint trace of vanilla-scented shampoo lingered in the air around her. Here was the moment of forgiveness. She would untie him and apologize profusely, and all would be good in the world.

  “This is for Sarah and the others,” she hissed. Something gleamed in her hand. She gripped the collar of his t-shirt in a bony fist and tore it and his flesh open with a knife in a broad swoop.

  Pain blossomed across his chest. What did she think she was doing? This was not forgiveness. The blade sank into him. Dragged across his abdomen. The sound of his own tearing flesh was as unbearable as the pain. He started to black out but held onto his consciousness with all his might, because if he fainted he knew he would never reawaken.

  Jeers filled the night air. He had no idea what they were saying. Warmth ran down into his lap. Something vital had been severed. Oh, God! This had all been a mistake. He shouldn’t have killed them. It solved nothing. Now he would die, too, and be sentenced to an eternity in a part of hell he had carved out for himself.

  God, please forgive me!

  The blade slid between his ribs with a moist sound like separating pieces of meat. The point met his pulsating heart, which shuddered and fell still.

  He closed his eyes.

  Thy will be done, he thought, and died.

  Sidney drove past the house first just in case Jessica and Wayne had returned home. The empty place in the driveway next to the Taurus told her that they hadn’t.

  She sped out to the highway, zipping around slow-moving vehicles that were probably speeding, too. Hopefully all the state highway patrolmen had taken the afternoon off, because any delay in delivering the news to Jessica might spell certain disaster for those involved in what had happened all those years ago.

  The article had begun tragically enough. Four girls were shot dead in the backyard of an Alexandria home in the early afternoon of June 28, 1986. A thirteen-year-old had been watching her six-year-old sister and two of her sister’s friends while their mother made a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up a package of Popsicles for the girls to enjoy on the warm day. The four had reportedly been sitting at a picnic table playing Candy Land when the mother, Amy Walsh, had left. When she returned no more than fifteen minutes later, all four children lay dead on the ground with gunshot wounds to their heads.