At that moment, the adrenaline rush mixing with the still active tranquilizer made Connie very dizzy. She felt with her hands for Donald's gun not being able to use her eyes. Then her hands found it, and so did his.
"Like I said, Con... you... lose!" Suddenly a pot flew from the cupboard, hitting him in the head. Connie grabbed the gun.
"No, Donald... you lose!" She yelled with satisfaction. Suddenly, Connie felt something cold and hard press into the back of her head... the barrel of a gun.
"I'm sorry, Connie... I think he had it right the first time," a calm voice came from behind her.
It was Jeff!
* * *
Chapter 19
Don smiled. "I suggest you drop the gun, Connie... before you get yourself hurt."
Connie was stunned. She had not expected this... not at all. Now she knew what happened to Mary... the same thing that was about to happen to her. In a sense, she was Mary. That's why she felt like she couldn't talk while Mary was talking in her dream... because they were the same person. Then Connie remembered her most recent dream. Why could she talk to her in that dream? Then, suddenly, she realized why she had been called here. She obediently dropped the gun.
"That's a good girl, Connie... you sure did train yourself a good wife, Don." Jeff smiled. "Musta been tough too, she's a tough girl... Mary was too fucking easy, but you found yourself a winner."
Donald picked up the gun that Connie dropped. He looked into Connie's eyes. "No..." he smirked. "She's a walk in the park too. Don't let her fool you, she may have put up a fight, but not as much as dear old dad."
Connie gasped. "You killed your father???"
Jeff laughed. "Fuck no... we tortured the bastard. He died of a heart attack, remember?"
"Yeah, he did, didn't he?" Don frowned. "I guess the son of a bitch didn't put up much of a fight after all." He and Jeff began to laugh like it was some sick private joke.
Jeff looked down at the floor and picked up a pot that was lying in the pile of kitchenware. "Geez, Don... your wife sure didn't like to clean, did she?" He looked at his reflection and began to fix his hair. And that's when he saw another woman, standing behind him.
Jeff dropped the pot and spun around. No one was there. "Fuuuck! What the hell was that?!?"
Don looked at Jeff, keeping his gun pointed at Connie. "What was what, dumbass?"
"Mary! I saw Mary standing behind me!"
Don chucked. "Jeff, you softy. Do ya miss her?" He said in a taunting voice.
Connie smiled to herself. She knew what was coming.
Suddenly, the frame of the coffee table began to slam against the floor again. By the sound of it, Connie could tell that it was bouncing pretty high.
"What the hell is that, witch?!?" Don yelled at Connie.
"What is what? What's that noise comin' from the living room, Don?"
"It's the coffee table, you twit. Connie's up to somethin', aren'tcha witch? Go check it out!"
Jeff walked to the hallway but before he could get to the door to the kitchen, it slammed shut in his face. Then he could hear all the other doors in the house follow suit, slamming so hard they shook the house. Jeff spun around. "Okay... how the hell did you do that?" He demanded of Connie.
Connie smiled and shrugged.
Jeff pointed his gun at her again. "That's it, bitch... you're fuckin' dead!" he screamed. Suddenly a loud cracking sound distracted him. It was the windows cracking. "What the -?" The windows shattered, but the pieces of glass did not fall to the floor. Instead they flew directly at Jeff. "Awww... fuck!" The glass hit him everywhere, cutting his skin to ribbons. He dropped the gun, grabbing his face.
Connie saw that Donald was no longer paying attention to her, he was busy being awe struck by what was happening with his brother. She took the opportunity to grab another knife from the floor. "You want some too, Don!?" She asked as she plunged the knife into his chest. Donald fell to the ground, still staring in disbelief at Jeff. Connie ran out of the kitchen.
Connie just reached the door to the outside when she heard Jeff, once again. "Oh, you'd better freeze witch woman." Connie slowly turned. He was barely recognizable as a human, she saw no skin on him... only blood. He had his gun pointed at her. "I'm gonna fill you so full of lead..." He started to squeeze the trigger, but a book from the bookcase flew at him, knocking the gun out of his hand. "What the hell?"
Then he heard the familiar cracking sound of windows breaking, but this time he realized he was in a room with quite a bit more windows. He stood very still, as if to be sure that he hadn't just thought he heard the cracking. But then, he heard it again...
"Holy..." the house didn't let him finish his sentence. One by one the windows shattered, all the glass finding its way through the house and right through Jeff's body. Connie stared in amazement as the glass curved around corners and over furniture hitting him perfectly without missing a single shard. Then she watched in amazement as all the forks and knives followed suit, as if to make sure he was dead. And Connie didn't stick around to watch any more after that. She turned and ran out of the house... right into Sheriff Franklin.
* * *
Chapter 20
"Whoa, Connie, whoa." Sheriff Franklin said in a soothing voice. "Don't worry, we're here to protect you." He nodded to his officers who were standing behind him. They ran into Connie's house, guns drawn. "We were contacted by the police who were checking out your disappearing husband. They never found him, but they found his father... all thirty pieces of him."
Connie started sobbing. She had lived with a monster for the past five years, and she didn't even know it. She had loved that man, and trusted him with her life. For the past five years. "Why?" She asked. She didn't even know who she was asking... perhaps herself, perhaps God.
Sheriff Franklin took it to be himself. "When we looked into Douglas Curtis' life, we saw he was one sick bastard. We only expected his friends were the same way. We would have never expected that he and one of his friends, Jeff Richardson, switched places. He was much too passive to do what Jeff did, and too much of a burden to keep around. They burned him in the fire... but I'm sure you already figure that out.
"Donald was in on it the whole time, even with Mary. He even called the night she was murdered to check up on him, from the old farmhouse. It was like Donald was the master and Jeff was his apprentice. The old farmhouse has been abandoned for years. Abandoned ever since Donald and Jeff murdered their abusive father six years ago."
Connie heard this between sobs. "But I met their father four years ago... how could he have been dead?" Almost still not believing the truth about Donald, she cried "He just now died this past Christmas!"
Franklin frowned. "I'm sorry Connie, I'm speaking the truth here. As for you meeting his father, that solves another unsolved murder. They had hired a bum to pose as their father and killed him, leaving him on the side of the road without a shred of evidence... except for a videotape that we found in the farmhouse. The tape was alongside many others in which they recorded the torture of their father and every single... intimate... moment with Mary through the use of hidden cameras." The sheriff lowered his voice as he said this. He had the decency not to mention the tapes they found of Connie and Donald. He allowed Connie to put that together for herself.
Connie shuddered. She began to think about all the places a camera could be hidden within her home. Then, suddenly, the front door swung open.
"Sheriff... you're not going to believe this."
Jeff and Don were as Connie last saw them: Don clutching the knife that had been stuck into his chest, the look of death on his face, and Jeff... cut to ribbons by every single sharp object in the house. Connie looked beyond Jeff to the stairwell, where an officer was examining a video camera that had been placed on the stairwell to record everything. The video camera was in pretty bad shape, however. It looked like it had sat in the sun for days. "Well, we won't get shit outta this camera." He mumbled. "The tape is more melted than a ice cube in Phoenix
on a summers day."
The sheriff paid no attention to the camera. He was too busy looking at Jeff. "Damn Connie... you sure went to town on this guy." Connie didn't respond to his comment.
One of the sheriff's deputies explained. "I don't know how she did it, but she force fed this guy every shard of glass and every other sharp object in the house... through his chest. But that's not the crazy thing... check this out."
The deputy led them into the living room. Connie gasped when she saw what he wanted to show them. In the midst of the rubble that use to be her coffee table, there was a corpse. The corpse appeared to have broken out of the floorboards and it was in a position that made it look like it was pulling itself out.
The sheriff looked at Connie. "Congratulations, you found Mary."
* * *
Epilogue
Although the case had been solved, Sheriff Franklin really wanted to know what had gone on in that house. Connie had been very short on details... and even words. She hadn't done anything wrong, of course... she caught two very heinous killers. But how she killed Jeff really bothered him.
His officers had gone through a lot to try to get at least some images off of the melted tape they found on the stairwell. It would have captured everything. Unfortunately, it seems as if someone almost baked it in an oven. But that, the crime lab in a neighboring city had told him, was impossible. In fact, the whole camera melting deal was impossible. Also stricken as impossible was Jeff's death. There is no way, the lab said, a single woman could have done that to him.
The sheriff put the picture down and picked up another. It was a picture of Mary's corpse. It had, after all, been identified to be hers. Jeff and Donald had buried it in the living room, beneath the floorboards. Connie had obviously found it, but why on Earth did she have the notion to make it pose in such a position like that? This led Franklin to put the picture down and pick up Connie's psychological profile, as put together by a psychologist working, again, at the lab in the neighboring town. He thumbed through it and frowned. Nothing. She was perfect.
Perfect until now. She had become another missing person. She had replaced Mary in the file cabinet of other missing persons. She vanished without a trace, without a reason, and most importantly... without answers. The sheriff put all the pictures and her profile back into the folder and threw it back in the cabinet. Cases like this usually don't get solved. In the rare case they do, they usually end up as foul play. They usually end up found in a gutter years later, or perhaps in the forest... maybe even beneath someone's floorboards. The sheriff sighed and left his office, turning the light out.
On the other side of town, a woman walked out of town in the dark of night. Just another ghost roaming the countryside. Just another lost soul, searching for closure. Just another bump in the night.
The End
© 2000 David Leblond
Bump In The Night Page 6