Vengeance Road

by Rick Mofina

  It was at this time that Karl was grappling with his own strange sensations toward girls at his school, the younger ones in the lower grades. His fantasies grew into agonizing urges that were hard to suppress.

  What troubled Karl was that his desires had shocked his school buddies, when he told them. They’d even shocked the grease monkeys at Hank Jebson’s gas station—and these were the men who’d shown Karl pictures of naked girls from dirty magazines.

  So Karl just stopped talking about it.

  But he never stopped thinking about it.

  He was good at keeping secrets.

  Not much happened after the scarecrow was put to death. Months passed until the night Karl awoke to what he thought was a muffled scream. At his window he saw silhouettes in the dim light of the barn.

  Karl left his room, and amid the crickets, padded shoeless to the gaps in the barn’s wall. He pressed his face to it so he could see.

  As he focused on what was inside, the skin on his arms and neck bristled.

  All the saliva dried in his mouth

  A stranger was in the chair.

  A woman. Her legs, arms, chest and head were bound by the chair’s restraints. Her eyes were wide with fear. The woman whimpered as Karl’s mother sat before her talking in the same soothing voice she used when he or Orly was sick.

  “It’s going to be all right, dear.”

  The woman was wearing a tight blue dress that showed her bare shoulders, the tops of her breasts. She was sweating and heaving, arousing an urge in Karl. She had big earrings and bright red lipstick. Her feet were bare and her dress was slit, showing more of her leg, all the way up to her hip.

  “Don’t worry,” his mother told the woman. “You’ll be fine, dear, he knows what he’s doing. Shh.”

  Karl was frightened and fixated.

  He felt something shift in his groin just as pain exploded at the back of his neck. A powerful force gripped him like a vise as Deke Styebeck’s voice thundered from the darkness.

  “What the hell’re you doing out here playing with yourself, boy?”

  Karl choked on his words.

  Deke marched him back to the house efficiently, the way he’d escorted inmates. Using old prison-issue hardware, he handcuffed Karl, and Orly, who slept soundly, to their beds. Then he bent down and whispered into Karl’s ear.

  “You go to sleep now. And later, you don’t tell nobody nothing, got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s just a bad dream, understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Karl never told anyone what he’d seen that night, yet he couldn’t stop worrying about it. Days passed. He couldn’t sleep or eat. When his mother finally pressed him about his torment, he told her about what he’d seen and his father’s warning.

  Karl’s mother looked at him long and hard.

  She sighed then took him out to the back porch where they could see Orly working with his father far off in afield. She sat in the big chair swing and patted the space beside her.

  Karl sat with her.

  “I think you’re old enough to hear this.” She gazed out at the field. “Promise me you’ll never tell your father what I’m going to tell you.”

  Karl nodded.

  “There was a woman your daddy brought here that night.”

  Karl said nothing.

  “A young woman from Fort Worth, rife with sin. A street woman, or what the Bible calls a harlot. She did bad things. She needed help.”

  “But she looked so scared.”

  “She was terribly frightened, at first. But your daddy helped her with what she needed. She understood what had to be done.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He had to scare her, really scare her.”

  “Why?”

  “He put her in that chair he built to show her where she was headed with her sinful ways. To show her what was going to happen to her if she didn’t change. To frighten her into correcting her life before it was too late.”

  “But she’s okay?”

  “Oh, goodness yes. She’s much better now. Your daddy sent her on her way. She’s not going to sin anymore.”

  “And this is part of his vision?”

  “That’s right, Karl, and someday you and Orly can carry on.”

  Relief washed over him.

  But it didn’t last.

  On a deeper level he could not help but feel something was still wrong. It was the terror he’d seen in the woman’s face, the way she was bound and the fact he’d heard that big generator kick on that night.

  It felt like something had been swallowed by the darkness.

  No.

  That part about the generator was not real. It couldn’t be. It had to be a bad dream.

  Still, it haunted him for days, until it struck him to look into his father’s past. Deke never talked about his childhood, his upbringing. He was the only child of a pastor and his wife.

  That was it.

  But Karl figured there just had to be more to know. So one day when Deke, Belva and Orly went to town, leaving him at the farm to do chores, he began investigating. In his parents’ bedroom closet, on a top shelf, there was a chest where his daddy kept all his legal papers and such.

  It was locked. His parents hid the key in the kitchen. Karl knew where.

  When he was younger, he had no interest to snoop but things were different now. Deep down, he feared something was not right with his father, his mother, and maybe even him.

  It scared him.

  He had no other relatives he could turn to. Or friends, for that matter. No one came to visit them. The Styebecks had always kept to themselves. His family’s history was a mystery to him. Maybe he’d learn more if he could read his father’s important papers.

  The chest was heavy and jammed with envelopes and documents.

  He flipped through property and tax records, the bills of sale for the truck and the tractor, a will, some health records, certificates from his mother’s teaching job and his father’s job at the prison.

  Scraping to the bottom of the chest, Karl heard a hollow knock. Something loosened. The chest had a hidden shelf at the bottom. Carefully, he worked on jiggling the wooden base. It squeaked as he shimmed it open to find large envelopes with old papers yellowed by time.

  There were news pages with stories about a family’s murder in Alberta, Canada. Who was the Rudd family? Something about a sole survivor. Then a church bulletin about a pastor and his wife returning to Texas from Canada with their son, Deke Styebeck. Old letters from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. What was this all about?

  This all looked important.

  Karl blinked.

  Unable to make sense of all the new information, he decided to take a risk. He’d take the envelopes from the chest without telling anyone. He’d keep them until he could read them and make notes.

  He put everything else back exactly the way it was.

  Then he placed the papers in a bag, grabbed a spade and hurried into the woods between the fields, to bury them near where he and Orly had dragged the remains of the scarecrow.

  In the darkened forest he approached the broken parts of the executed scarecrow. Standing near it, he looked around for a good place to bury the papers.

  He shifted his attention when the sun glimmered on a small shiny object.

  Karl bent over.

  It was an earring. Just like the one the woman in the blue dress was wearing when she was bound to the chair.

  Karl stepped back.

  The earth here was dark.

  It had been freshly overturned.

  58

  Gannon found a letter from the Office of the Attorney General for Texas in his mailbox when he returned from Wichita. He read it in the elevator to his apartment.

  Dear Mr. Gannon,

  Your file has been assigned ID # 15894STYE.

  With respect to your request for additional information concerning Deke Styebeck, who was employed as a correctional office
r until his dismissal in 1964…

  The letter said that Deke Styebeck was fired after a “physical confrontation provoked by an inmate.” It provided no details, concluding that much of the personal information Gannon sought remained “excepted from disclosure under sections…”

  A big zilch. Damn.

  His other search options with sources and mining of records had also yielded little. This story was not getting any easier and time was hammering against him. Sooner or later some reporter somewhere was going to break this story, his story, wide open.

  He tossed the letter on his kitchen table then made a ham-and-cheese sandwich. As he ate, he tried to determine where to go next. He needed to know more about Karl Styebeck’s life to connect the dots linking him to the murders. All of the signs pointed to Styebeck being involved.

  But how?

  This was the mystery.

  Gannon weighed everything he knew about Styebeck’s links to Buffalo, Chicago, Texas, Alberta, Kansas, Connecticut.

  Pieces.

  That’s all he had, really, pieces of information swirling in a maelstrom of unknowns. He exhaled slowly, asking himself where he was headed with this story. Seriously, who was he writing for?

  No one was interested in his freelance offer. Well, he hadn’t nailed it yet. He had to keep going.

  Unless he was ready to quit journalism and teach English in Ethiopia?

  No, that was not in the cards.

  After finishing the sandwich, he made coffee, logged on to his computer and worked. Let’s go back to where the trail was freshest, that’s where you’ll find the best leads.

  So there was Jolene’s locket.

  How did Carrie Fulton, a woman from Hartford, come to have it in her hand when she was murdered? Gannon went online rereading stories from the Hartford Courant then he reread the Kansas handout.

  Carrie May Fulton had vanished from the area surrounding the Settlers Valley Mall in northeast Hartford. The articles presented her as a troubled young woman. He called up online maps of the mall, and as the pages loaded, he wondered if Carrie knew Jolene.

  Settlers Valley Mall was near a turnpike, which—he checked again—was near a truck stop. Jolene Peller’s cell phone was used to make calls to Styebeck at a Chicago truck stop. And Gannon could have sworn he glimpsed a truck with “sword” on the door at the Chicago shipping depot.

  In Wichita, there were a lot of trucks of all types rolling in and out of that development, which was off the Kansas Turnpike. In Buffalo, the girls on Niagara had reported seeing a creep driving a rig.

  Did Karl Styebeck have a connection to that truck?

  And was any of this tied to Styebeck’s past? Did it have anything to do with Deke, or the Styebecks’ twisted family history?

  A bit of Texas gothic, there, but was it a factor?

  Gannon didn’t know.

  He couldn’t understand why he was having such a hard time finding out more about Styebeck’s immediate past. He gathered all of his files, spread out all of his papers on the kitchen table. Then page by page he reviewed everything he’d searched, or tried to search: warrant files, genealogical records, census records, voter lists, criminal and court records, birth records, drivers’ records, sex offender registries, property records, credit records, death records, divorce actions, military records, marriage records and on and on.

  Virtually none of it helped him build a profile of Karl Styebeck’s life before he’d joined the Ascension Park Police Department.

  In this digital age, with access to instant information, Gannon couldn’t understand why all of his online-data searches into Styebeck’s past had yielded nothing. Even the professional online companies he’d paid to conduct records searches had struck out.

  It was like Karl Styebeck had hidden his past—or buried it.

  Hold on.

  Gannon saw his note on the search he’d done of the Huntsville Item. He’d only specified a search of reports naming Correctional Officer Deke Styebeck for the period for 1960 to 1967.

  What? No obit? There should’ve been an obit.

  Gannon checked his notes from what the amateur historian in Angelina County, Yancy Smith, had told him.

  “…Deke was part of the execution team at The Walls and word was he was a difficult man to live with before he died.”

  Died. Right. So there had to be an obit.

  How could that have been missed? It’s not a perfect world, he thought as he called the Huntsville Item news library to request another search for all archived articles on Styebeck, including an obituary.

  “Get back to you within the hour, Mr. Gannon,” the librarian said.

  While waiting, he drank his coffee and looked at the faces of Bernice Hogan, Carrie Fulton and Jolene Peller peeking at him from the files.

  Suddenly he pictured his big sister among them.

  Cora is smiling at him. Her voice is crystalline. She is his protector as they go through the library and she finds adventure books for him.

  You’re going to be a great writer someday, lots of people are going to read your stories, Jackie. Wanna know how I know? Because you’re so smart. I see it in your eyes. You don’t let go. You don’t give up.

  The heart-deadening crash of a door.

  He runs to his bed, stuffs his head under the pillow as Cora and their mother wage war over Cora “being late,” over boys, over drugs, over everything.

  Why can’t they stop?

  Cora, please!!!!

  At the cemetery, in the silence, as the conveyor lowers his father’s, then his mother’s, casket into the ground, hehears the last thing his mother said to him before they drove away to find her.

  She may have children, Jack. We have a right to find her.

  Cora.

  I see it in your eyes. You don’t let go. You don’t give up.

  Gannon’s computer trilled, alerting him to a new e-mail from the Huntsville Item. The obituary for Deke Styebeck had arrived, with a note.

  Mr. Gannon, this obituary only appeared once, and we’re sorry not all family members are listed. Back then, that’s how they sometimes were submitted. Please let me know if I can help you further. Nell Fernandez, Library Services, Huntsville Item

  Gannon opened the attachment containing the scanned death notice for Karl Styebeck’s father, printed it off and read the hard copy.

  Styebeck, Deke.

  Deke Styebeck, died April 17, 1968. He was 44 years old. He was the only son of Pastor Gabriel and Adolpha Styebeck, of Shade River. Deke and Belva Denker were united in marriage in 1952. He lived in Huntsville, Texas, where he was employed as a correctional officer with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice until 1964. He and Belva moved to Pine Mill in 1953. Deke worked as a custodian for the Pine Mill School District. His wife, Belva, and their two sons survive Deke. A private service was held April 20. Interment was at Pine Mill Cemetery.

  After reading it, Gannon read it again and underlined two sons.

  There it was.

  The break he needed.

  Karl Styebeck had a brother.

  59

  Jolene Peller did not move.

  Death was near.

  She held her breath, fumbling through the haze of her waking mind, tumbling through a galaxy of streaking images.

  The door had opened.

  He’d removed the tape from her mouth but never replaced it because he’d left food. Hot food. She’d devoured it and drank the water. Then she’d slept, but didn’t know for how long.

  Now, warnings were screaming at her.

  Death was so close.

  You’re a hostage. He’s killed Carrie. He likely killed Bernice. He’s going to kill you. You have to get away. You have a plan. You’ve freed your hands. Keep yourself together. Work on the door.

  But the truck had stopped.

  The door had opened to darkness outside. A glimpse of stars, shadows. Grunting and something being hefted. Boots walking on the foul wooden floor. A body was placed next to her. The pe
el of duct tape.

  Then several silent moments passed.

  Crickets.

  Fresh air.

  The open door beckoned but Jolene’s impulse to flee was reined in by a new reality.

  He has another hostage.

  He was right beside her fixing tape around the other woman.

  That means—Jolene was next to die!

  She feigned sleep.

  Suddenly her face was crushed by a huge strong hand that seized it. Keeping her eyes closed, she groaned under an intense light. Was he inspecting her?

  After a few seconds, the light was extinguished.

  Boots on the floor. He grunted and jumped to the ground.

  The door closed.

  The mechanical grind, hiss and growl of the rig.

  They were on the move again.

  Now Jolene woke fully to controlled panic.

  Calm down. Think. Breathe.

  They were moving fast.

  While they were moving she was safe to work on her escape plan. In the darkness, Jolene went to the woman next to her.

  “Are you awake? Nod if you can hear me.”

  Jolene felt the woman move her head.

  “My name is Jolene. I’m your friend. My hands are free. I’m going to help you. It’s going to hurt but I’ll take the tape off your face.”

  It took several long minutes for Jolene to loosen all the duct tape. To avert excruciating pain, she had to leave strips adhered to the woman’s hair as the woman gasped and sobbed.

  “Easy, take it easy,” Jolene soothed her. “Tell me your name.”

  “Lee. Lee Lake. Oh Christ, he’s crazy! What’s he going to do?”

  “Listen, calm down. Listen to me, Lee. We’re going to escape. I have a plan. Did he hurt you? Are you strong enough to help me?”

  “I think I can help. Oh Christ, all I wanted was a ride. I was stupid.”

  “Lee, listen. I have to remove your bindings from your hands and legs. It’s going to be difficult because he’s got so much tape on you. Do you have anything in your pockets? Anything sharp?”