Rage's Echo

by J. S. Bailey

  If only someone could talk Jerry into being reasonable. How hard could it be? He refused to leave the earth behind, which was understandable considering the obvious alternative that Jerry would have to face.

  Someone would have to convince him that staying here was more painful than hell, which was, of course, a lie.

  All Wayne had to do was figure out what he was going to say.

  SIDNEY WAITED for fifteen minutes before she couldn’t take it any-more. Staying in this house would help no one—not the Roman-Dells and definitely not Jessica or Jerry.

  Since driving around the tri-state searching for Jessica was going to be about as easy as finding a particular drop of water in a pond, her efforts might not help anyone, either. But at least Sidney would have something to do.

  She would have to take some precautions, however. If Jessica’s brain had indeed turned into some kind of duplex that housed Jerry’s mind as well as her own, she may become violent.

  Taking a deadly weapon with her would seem desperate and hostile. Something less threatening might work better.

  She stood in the doorway of the junk room. Something in here would have to work.

  A souvenir Reds baseball bat leaning against a storage cabinet caught her eye. She picked it up and tested its weight in her hands. It was solid but not too heavy. Perfect.

  Suddenly bile rose in her throat. Jessica was her best friend. Heck, if she didn’t count her cousin, she was her only friend. Jessica could be annoying and overly religious and somewhat insensitive, but she had always meant well. And now Sidney was considering bludgeoning her.

  She took the bat with her to the car. Maybe she wouldn’t even find Jessica. Maybe she wouldn’t have to use the bat for protection after all.

  IT WAS dark.

  Jessica was sitting in her car eating a burrito. The wrapper it came in told her that it had been purchased from Taco Bell. When in the world had she stopped there? Maybe a kind stranger had picked up dinner for her, which was nice of them, if not a little creepy.

  She paused in her chewing and peered outside. She was in a large parking lot, parked beneath a street lamp. A group of drab cement buildings loomed off to the left. Almost all of the windows in the buildings were dark. A few young people laughing about something walked by on a sidewalk running perpendicular to her parking spot. The glass muffled their voices so she couldn’t make out what they said. None of them paid her any notice.

  She set the burrito down on the seat beside her when it dawned on her that she had no idea how she’d arrived in this place. She was not in Eleanor, that was for certain. They didn’t have a Taco Bell in town.

  “How are you feeling?” asked a voice close by.

  Jerry Madison sat in the passenger seat, looking as calm as a man relaxing on a beach. Apparently she had set the burrito in his left leg. He showed no displeasure at the intrusion.

  His question was unimportant. “Where am I, and how did I get here?” she demanded. This was almost like the time she’d had her tonsils out back in high school. She remembered everything prior to the surgery, and boom! She was in the recovery room with no recollection of the surgery itself. At least that incident had an explanation.

  She had been with Rachel at a mall. Eric was somewhere else. A bookstore, maybe. She and Rachel had been arguing about something, but the topic of their disagreement eluded her.

  And now she was here, in her own car. Several hours must have passed, since the sun no longer hung in the sky. Neither Rachel, Eric, nor their rental car was in sight.

  Jerry gave her a pitiful smile. “Use your eyes and tell me.”

  No direct answers. Not surprising. Direct answers would make things too easy.

  A police cruiser drove by. The side of it was emblazoned with the Northern Kentucky University name and logo.

  “We’re in Highland Heights,” she said. “That’s just down the street from Cold Spring.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You drove here. Don’t you remember?”

  The glint in his eyes made her uneasy. Yes, she should have remembered, but she didn’t. She held up her unfinished burrito.

  “And I guess I went through the drive-thru, too?”

  “You have the receipt.” He gestured at her purse.

  Not taking her eyes off of him, she stuck her hand into the main pocket and grasped a slip of paper that had not been there before. She switched on the overhead light. The date and time were printed on the receipt. Apparently she had visited the Taco Bell at 6:52 p.m. The burrito was still marginally warm, so her stop at the restaurant couldn’t have been very long ago.

  She turned the key in the ignition to turn on the dashboard lights. It was 7:02.

  “I have a confession to make,” Jerry said.

  Her pulse quickened. “Oh yeah?”

  “I knew your parents.”

  Now that was news. “How?”

  “They lived two houses down from me, and we attended the same church. I knew them for years.”

  She caught onto his error right away. He couldn’t have been well acquainted with her parents if he had this one basic fact wrong about them. “Nice try. They don’t go to church and never have.”

  “Then why are you so faithful?”

  “My grandma started taking me to church when I was little. She had me baptized when I was nine.” She shook her head. “You’ve got to have my parents mixed up with somebody else.”

  Jerry shrugged. “Just because they don’t go to church now doesn’t mean they didn’t years ago. You don’t believe me? Fine. I’ll tell you everything I know about them. Their names are Stephen and Maria. Maria’s father came from Mexico, her mother from Norwood. Stephen’s family lived in the Cincinnati area for decades. He was one of three children. Maria has only the one brother. Your parents were both accountants and met each other as freshmen in college. Do you believe me yet?”

  Though she hated to admit it, everything he said was correct. Even the circumstances of her parents’ meeting made sense.

  “What’s Mom’s brother’s name?”

  “That’s easy. Esteban Reyes.”

  “You could have just heard about him at the family reunion.”

  “True. But I met him long ago at a church festival. Maria introduced us to each other.”

  He still could have been lying, though she couldn’t guess what the point would be. She had to think of something that he wouldn’t know from being at the family reunion or from eavesdropping on her conversations with Wayne, Sidney, and Rachel.

  “Do you know Mom’s parents’ names?” she asked.

  “Andrés and Karen. I never had the chance to meet Stephen’s parents, but I think his father’s name might have been Zachary or Zachariah or something like that.”

  Again, all true. Her long-dead Grandpa Roman-Dell was named Zachary. “Okay. I know that you lived in Alexandria. But if you lived on the same street as Mom and Dad, that means they would have lived in Alexandria, too, and they never told me that.”

  “Sorry about your luck.”

  As odd as this news was, she decided he was telling the truth.

  “So, what did you think of them? You can be honest.”

  “Haven’t I been honest with you so far?” A smile tugged at his mouth. “Maria was more talkative than Stephen. Your father always struck me as being dull. Sorry.”

  He still could have picked up on those traits at the family reunion if he’d followed her there, but she nodded anyway. “That’s okay. Were you friends with them?”

  “More like friendly acquaintances. We got along well. For a time, at least. Stephen hooked me up with some of his old college drinking buddies thinking it would cheer me up to be out in public with people, but I don’t think he realized what scum some of them really were.”

  Phil Knippenberg, she thought. The dirt bag from her dream had known her dad?

  Jerry continued. “Maria even made me dinner one time when I came down with the flu.” He cast his gaze downward, probably mourning the
fact that he had been unable to partake in the pleasure of eating for nearly a quarter of a century.

  “Why didn’t you tell me all of this before?”

  He gave a noncommittal shrug. “Do you love your mother?”

  “I’m supposed to.”

  “But do you?”

  “Maybe.” She sighed. She didn’t want to go into this again. “Sometimes people hurt you so much that you can’t love them. I wanted to love her. She’s just never given me a decent reason to do it.”

  “So you think love should be conditional? That you can only love someone if they treat you the right way?”

  She took a bite of the now-cold burrito, chewed, and swallowed. “You’re one to talk. You hate Abigail, right?”

  Her words must have ignited a spark of anger inside of him, because he glared at her. “We aren’t talking about her right now. We’re talking about Maria.”

  “What about her?” She set her dinner down again. “No, I don’t like her very much. Nothing’s ever going to be right between us. She lives in her world, and I live in mine, and it makes life a whole heck of a lot easier that way.” She flicked a tiny piece of lettuce off of her jeans onto the floor. “I don’t want to talk about her anymore.”

  “But I do.”

  “Why? Did you have a crush on her or something for bringing you dinner?”

  He glowered at her. “I never had a crush on the woman. Not even for a minute.”

  “Then why are you fixating on her all of a sudden?”

  “Because,” he said, “Maria Roman-Dell, accountant extraodinaire and devout churchwoman, is the one who slaughtered me like a pig in the woods behind that Methodist church.”

  At first she stared at him, speechless. Then she smiled. Her mother, a killer? The idea was laughable. Maria hated to get dirty. Disemboweling another human being was bound to be…messy. She swallowed and tried to block the image from her mind. It would have been worse than messy. Maria would have been covered in—

  “You don’t believe me,” he said.

  “Mom can’t stand the sight of blood.”

  “She didn’t seem to mind so much then.”

  “You said it was a group of people who did it. And the Satanists!”

  “Maria orchestrated the whole thing. I think the original plan was just to strangle me—hence the few moments someone jerked a rope around my neck—but Maria made whoever it was stop so she could finish the job herself.”

  They were both quiet for a few beats.

  Oh, you could come across severed heads, bleeding limbs, human entrails spread across the ground for the scavengers to clean up…

  Mommy, read me a story!

  Suddenly Jessica wanted to run. She would run and run, off the campus, out to the highway, and she would run back across the bridge into Ohio, and she would keep on running, past Eleanor, running until she collapsed from exhaustion and died.

  She remained glued to the seat. “Why? Why did she do it?”

  The manic look contorted his features, and he began talking faster. “You don’t know what it’s like. My baby gone and suddenly babies everywhere. They looked at me, and they’d smile and coo like they knew what had happened and didn’t want me to forget it even for a minute.

  “Faces were everywhere. I saw them in church. I saw them at the park and in the neighboring yards. I tried to ignore them, but it only got worse. They grew older, and I knew my baby would be the same age as them, and it killed me, because I’d missed out on so much. No birthday parties. No little-league champs or first-place ballerinas. No scraped knees needing kisses. You don’t know what it’s like. Being like that. Everything crashing down. I wanted to die. I tried to die. I prayed for death every single day, and it didn’t happen.

  “Then one day I heard laughter outside. There were children. Four of them. Playing a game in the yard behind mine. So innocent and full of the life my child never got to know.”

  Jessica didn’t like where this was going.

  He went on. “I didn’t want to do it. But I had to. It tortured me. If I let them live, it would never end.

  “I shot the older Walsh girl first. Then her sister. The Scott girl started to scream, and I took her down before she could run away. Stephen and Maria’s girl watched it all happen. She was so numb that she didn’t even cry. I put a bullet through her forehead. Killed her instantly.”

  Jessica felt cold. “Stephen and Maria’s…girl?”

  “Yes. Sarah. She looked a lot like you do. Dark-brown hair, blue-gray eyes just like yours. They never told you about her? What a shame. They doted on that child like she was the heiress to an empire. Nearly made me sick. She was smart, too. Was reading first-grade level books by the time she turned three and spoke perfect Spanish.”

  “So you’re saying…” Her head swam. “You’re saying that I had another sister. And the only reason I don’t anymore is because of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You killed four children!”

  “I didn’t want to. I really didn’t.” His voice held a note of remorse, but he was still grinning like a man who had just won a million dollars.

  Tears made her vision blur. “Then why didn’t you stop yourself?”

  “I had to do it! If I didn’t, I would have died!”

  “I hate to break it to you,” she said, realizing that she’d edged so far away from him that her back pressed against the door, “but I think that happened anyway.”

  He said nothing.

  “Didn’t anyone hear the gunshots?”

  “How should I know? Two sets of neighbors were out of town. It was the week before the Fourth of July, so a lot of kids had been setting off bottle rockets and M-80s and Roman candles. What was the significance of some more loud bangs?”

  She only heard half of what he said. “You killed four kids who never did one blessed thing to you! And I thought I could convince you to go to heaven?” She had been an idiot.

  “I said I didn’t want to do it!” he roared.

  “It’s your fault that my entire childhood was hell! If my parents really did have a little girl named Sarah who you murdered…” She blinked away tears. “You ruined them. They might have been bad already, but you made them worse. You made it so they couldn’t get close to a child again.”

  “They made themselves that way. It was their choice.”

  “You killed their kid!”

  “And in turn, they killed me. Are you happy?”

  “No! You’re a monster!”

  He shook his head. “Abigail was the monster. She pushed the first domino.”

  “Stop blaming other people for what you did!”

  “If Abigail hadn’t—”

  “I felt sorry for you! I wanted to help you! I—get out of my car. Now.” She didn’t want to listen to him anymore. She had to ditch him. Curse her stupid ghost-hunting hobby. If she were to listen to her own advice, she only had herself to blame for getting into this mess.

  Jerry didn’t move. “I’d like to see you try to make me.”

  “In the name of Jesus, get out and leave me alone and never talk to me again.”

  He actually snorted with laughter. “I think you’ve forgotten your holy water and blessed crucifix. What else do you have?”

  “Please leave.”

  “We have too many things to get done. We only let you take a break so we wouldn’t cause you permanent damage, not that that really bothers us. If we kill you, you’ll get to meet your sweet big sister, and won’t that be a nicer family reunion than the one we visited earlier?”

  Alarm bells went off in her head. We? Was the invisible person she’d heard him talking to before with them this very moment?

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing important. Nothing to worry about.”

  And the fog rolled into her mind once more. The drab campus melted away, and it was just the three of them alone together: Jessica, Jerry, and a murky presence she couldn’t quite identify. The latter seemed t
o think something was incredibly funny; she could sense its laughter. Maybe it had been something one of them said. No matter. She was relaxed, and she was at peace. There was no pain.

  As if watching from afar, she saw herself starting the car and leaving the nearly empty parking lot behind. She didn’t know where they were going. Somehow, it didn’t matter very much. She would just sit back and enjoy the ride.

  Sidney spent the next hour patrolling every single street in Eleanor. Every time she saw a dark-green car her heart skipped a beat, and then she would curse herself for getting her hopes up over nothing.

  Her stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten anything since the Cheetos at work. Oh well. She wasn’t going to allow herself to stop anywhere for a pick-me-up. She’d only be wasting time.

  Sidney pulled into a bank parking lot to think. Where could she go next? Cold Spring? Alexandria? Iron Springs? She didn’t know Esteban Reyes’s address, and she had no phone with her that she could use to call up Rachel or Eric to ask them where the man lived.

  Hmm. Maybe there was still a payphone at Eleanor Market.

  She could drive back to the house and use the phone there, but the store was just a block down the street from her current position. Much closer than home.

  She zipped back out into traffic and turned into the grocery store lot, selecting a space right along the edge of the building.

  She was in luck; there was a payphone here. She fished some quarters and the slip of paper containing Rachel’s and Eric’s numbers out of the bottom of her purse and went outside.

  Fifty cents and ten seconds later, she was on the phone with Rachel.

  “Hey,” Sidney said. “Did you two make it back to Esteban’s yet?”

  “Just got in the door.” Garbled voices were conversing in the background, and Rachel’s voice lowered. “My parents are here now.”

  “Okay. Um, just out of curiosity, what’s the address there?”

  “Hang on a sec.” More distorted sounds. “I’m outside now. Let me see…looks like the house number is 223. 223 Martin Court. Why?”

  “Muchas gracias,” she said, deciding that an explanation was not in order. “Gotta go now.”