Deranged

by Jacob Stone

  “With my money you could get yourself another wife. Someone not crippled. Someone not insane.”

  “You’re not insane,” Henry insisted. “You had a rough patch, that’s all. Besides, I married you for better or worse. We’ve had some of the worse, we’ll have some of the better again. I’m sure of it.”

  Henry meant every word that he said. Actually, he understated it. Sheila wasn’t just his wife, but the woman he was meant to share his life with. He knew that unconditionally. There was a reason why she’d spared his life in Bushwick, just as there was a reason he’d followed her to that home in Queens so that he could save her. Things might not be perfect right now, but having her in his life left him with a certain and undeniable contentment, and the thought of losing her left him paralyzed with fear.

  “You really do love me,” she said after a long while.

  “Of course I do,” he said. “And I know you love me also. I read your diary entries.”

  Her mouth pinched again into a tight, angry oval. “I told you not to read it,” she complained.

  “Too bad. I read it anyway. I know how you feel about me.”

  They stared at each other for several minutes, her mouth pinching into an angrier, smaller circle while Henry maintained a placid expression. He could’ve told his wife that he still had those pages from her diary, and that whenever he was feeling down he’d read those last entries she wrote about him, and it would give him hope for the future, but he kept that to himself.

  Their staring contest ended as Sheila’s pinched mouth softened and relaxed as whatever resentment she’d been feeling bled out of her. Once again she was looking at him with something approaching tenderness.

  “I felt a connection with you from the start,” she admitted. “I didn’t realize it then, but that’s why we walked out of that alley together. Not because I was trying to fool the FBI like I wrote in my diary.”

  “I know.”

  “And I do love you. Even if I don’t show it.”

  “I know.”

  “I can’t stand it, Henry. The pressure has gotten so bad. Like I’m being suffocated. It’s so bad I can’t even think. When I was killing them, it would make the pressure better, and I’d be able to breathe again. But now it’s just awful.”

  Henry was tongue-tied, not knowing how to respond to that. A tear leaked from his eye and wormed its way down his cheek.

  “I want to die, Henry. That’s how bad it is.”

  “Don’t say that. Please.”

  “If you love me like you say you do—like I believe you do, then you’ll help me.”

  More tears leaked out of his eyes. Even Sheila’s eyes had become liquid. “I’m not killing you,” he said.

  “Then kill them for me,” she said.

  He blinked at her stupidly, not quite understanding what she was saying at first. Then he involuntarily shook his head.

  “If you really love me, you’ll do that.”

  “You can’t ask me to do something like that,” Henry stammered out. “That’s not fair. We’re in Portland, Oregon, the center of the universe for alternative healing. Let me please try to help you that way.”

  For a long moment Henry was afraid she’d close up again, but Sheila surprised him by nodding.

  “No psychiatrists,” she insisted. “No therapists.”

  Over the next four months they tried crystal therapy, cranial massage, Reiki, and flower essences. Henry brought his wife to see acupuncturists, naturopathic doctors, and shamans. Nothing seemed to change her mood, and at the end of those four months Sheila refused to see anyone else, and then she stopped eating. Henry brought a nurse home to teach him how to force-feed her, but his wife was rapidly losing weight. Over the next two months, she became so skeleton-thin that Henry could see her skull shining through her scalp. He broke down sobbing in front of her, convinced that he was going to lose her.

  “Please,” he begged her. “Don’t do this.”

  Her voice was weak and barely a whisper as she forced out, “Kill them for me.”

  Henry rubbed a thick hand under his nose trying to wipe away some of the wetness. He felt so icy cold then. Like death.

  “You’ll eat if I do this?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “One person?”

  “Three. I choose them.”

  “Then it’s over? You won’t ask me to do it again?”

  “I promise.”

  There was no decision for Henry to make. He would lose his wife if he didn’t agree to this, and he couldn’t lose her.

  “Not here in Portland,” he said. “It’s too small here. They’ll suspect us if I kill them here.”

  He knew that was true. While he had made acquaintances and casual friendships, his wife hadn’t, and he’d heard kids in the neighborhood calling her a witch. But there was more to it than that. He liked the area, and he liked the house, and he wanted to move back there when this was all done.

  “Los Angeles,” Sheila said.

  Henry thought about it, and it made sense for that to be their killing ground. He made a phone call, and after arranging for a nurse to take care of Sheila during his absence, he bought a plane ticket for Los Angeles so he could find a house for them down there.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Tallahassee, 1988

  “Penny, dear, come on out. Your dinner’s getting cold!”

  Sheila felt a painful twinge in her stomach hearing her mother shout for her older sister. It was nicer at the dinner table without Penelope there, almost like they were a normal family, and she wished it could continue. She chewed another mouthful of macaroni and cheese, but just the thought of her sister made the food tasteless. She didn’t know what trouble Penelope would cause, all she knew was that the peacefulness of the meal was going to end.

  A clumping of heavy footsteps in the hallway made Sheila cringe, and she tensed as the footsteps continued on into the kitchen. She tried to stay focused on her food, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking up when Penelope entered the room, and she cringed even more seeing her sister’s face red with fury. This was going to be trouble!

  “Look what the brat did to my George Michael record!” Penelope said, seething. She was holding one of her albums carefully by the edge. From the way she was showing them the album, Sheila could see the fingerprints all over it. “The little brat snuck into my room and got her greasy prints all over my record!”

  “I did not!”

  “Then how’d my record get all mucked up with your greasy little paw prints?”

  “You did it!”

  Penelope smirked angrily at that. “Peanut brain over there thinks we’re all as dumb as she is.”

  “Peanut brain,” their mother, Mrs. Proops, said, chuckling. “You’re so clever with words, Penny.”

  “That is a good one,” their father, Mr. Proops, agreed. “Such imagery. If we cracked open her skull what do you suppose we’d find? Only a peanut?”

  “No,” Penelope corrected him. “A brain the size of a peanut.” She glared at Sheila. “A baby peanut at best. Something no bigger than a raisin.”

  “Then why not raisin brain?” Mrs. Proops offered.

  “Because when you crack open a shell you need to find a nut of some kind,” Mr. Proops said.

  “A peanut isn’t even a nut,” Sheila said. “It’s a legume. And those aren’t my fingerprints! They’re Penelope’s! She’s just trying to get me in trouble!”

  “Look who’s trying to act smart,” Mr. Proops said. “Such a fancy word from a peanut brain. Like you know what a legume is.”

  “She doth protest too much,” Mrs. Proops added.

  “Peanut brain is too dumb to understand a Shakespeare reference,” Penelope said, beaming over getting the reference herself. She brought the album close to her nose and sniffed it. “It smells like fried chicken grease. I’d bet anything peanut brain went to KFC today, greased up her paws on fried chicken, and then touched my album, being too stupid to realize she�
�d be leaving prints behind.”

  “It sounds like something she would do,” Mr. Proops agreed.

  “Peanut brain,” Mrs. Proops said, chuckling more. “That really is a good one, Penny. You really are such a clever girl.”

  “So what about it?” Penelope asked Sheila, smirking again at her sister. “Are you going to keep denying it? Because I bet you were dumb enough to toss your KFC wrappers and chicken bones in the garbage, and if we look through the garbage cans we’ll find it.”

  Sheila stared at amazement at her sister as she realized the lengths Penelope had gone to to frame her for this because she had no doubt that if they searched the garbage they’d find the greasy fried chicken remains right where Penelope had planted them. Penelope was five years older than her and had teased and tormented her for as long as Sheila could remember, and worse, all to their parents’ delight as if they couldn’t get enough of Penelope’s cleverness and Sheila’s humiliation.

  “Nothing to say, huh?” Penelope said. “What’s wrong, your peanut-sized brain isn’t smart enough to come up with any more excuses?”

  “What about walnut brain?” Mr. Proops offered. “That would be more like the type of nut I would crack open. And the insides look sort of like a brain.”

  “A walnut would be too big for the little brat’s head,” Penelope said.

  “Should we crack open her skull and see?” Mr. Proops joked.

  “If we did we could replace her brain with a dog turd,” Penelope said. “I bet she’d be smarter if we did that.”

  Mr. Proops laughed heartily at that. “Good one, Penny.”

  Mrs. Proops said, “Sheila, you’re not going to make us look through the garbage cans, are you? Because if you make us do that and we find that you’ve been lying to us we’ll have to punish you more severely than if you confess and apologize to your sister.”

  “Much more severely,” Mr. Proops said.

  Sheila felt sick to her stomach as she looked at the way her sister smirked at her. This could all be a bluff. There might not be anything in the garbage cans. What she wanted to do was make a run for it, but she knew she wouldn’t get very far. At twelve, she was a skinny kid, while Penelope was a robust and athletic seventeen-year-old. If her parents weren’t able to grab her, her sister would easily be able to outrun her and sit on her until her parents caught up to them.

  “She’s too much of a peanut brain to apologize,” Penelope said. Sighing with an exaggerated sense of being put upon, she added, “I bet she’s going to make us look through the garbage cans.”

  “You’re really going to make us do that?” Mr. Proops asked Sheila, his expression showing his severe disappointment.

  “I’m afraid she is,” Mrs. Proops said.

  They all went outside, and Penelope took on the task of dumping out each garbage can in turn and then using her foot to sift through the mess as she searched for the incriminating evidence. Of course, she made sure that the KFC bag and the bones from the fried chicken were in the last can that she dumped out.

  “You could be a detective the way you figured this out,” a beaming Mr. Proops told Penelope.

  “Such a clever daughter,” Mrs. Proops agreed. Then to Sheila, “Not very smart of you to make us go through all this trouble.”

  Penelope piped in, “What do you expect from someone with a peanut brain.”

  “True,” Mr. Proops agreed.

  “Part of your punishment will be to put the garbage back in the cans,” Mrs. Proops said.

  “Only part of it,” Mr. Proops said.

  “Get this mess cleaned up and then march your little behind right back into the house,” Mrs. Proops said.

  “You’ll get your real punishment then,” Mr. Proops promised.

  Sheila didn’t want to cry in front of them, but she couldn’t help herself. This happened partly out of her frustration, but mostly because she knew how bad her real punishment was going to be once she returned back to the house.

  “If you run away again, it will be so much worse,” Mrs. Proops said.

  “The same if you bother any neighbors or strangers complaining and spreading lies like you tried before. If you do that, I promise you it will be much, much worse,” Mr. Proops threatened, his lips pressing down into a harsh scowl.

  “Maybe this will teach you not to be a sneak and a liar,” Mrs. Proops said.

  “And to leave your sister’s things alone,” Mr. Proops added.

  “It won’t teach her anything,” Penelope said. “When you’ve got the brain the size of a peanut, it’s impossible to learn anything.”

  They headed back into the house then, leaving Sheila alone to scoop up the rotten food, dirty tissues and other trash with her hands so she could put it all back into the garbage cans. Before they disappeared back into the house, she heard her mother again chuckle over “peanut brain” and compliment Penelope on her clever expression. Once they were gone, the floodgates opened and Sheila started sobbing uncontrollably because she knew the awful things they were going to do to her once she finished scooping up the garbage and they had her alone inside the house. What they called her punishment. She thought again about killing herself. This was something she thought about a lot these days. She emptied out a plastic bag and tried to work up the courage to use it. A resoluteness took over and she put the bag over her head, twisted it around her neck and held it tight, but the inside of the bag smelled heavily of fish, and soon her lungs were hurting and she started coughing, and like a coward she pulled the bag off her head.

  After the coughing fit passed, she finished picking up the garbage and headed inside for her punishment.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Tallahassee, 1990

  Sheila was asleep when they grabbed her, and during the first few seconds was too groggy to fully realize what was happening or to put up much of a fight while they wrestled her onto her stomach. She was fully awake, though, when they pulled her pajamas off of her. The fear pounding through her made her hyper alert to their heavy breathing and their stench of beer, sweat, and body odor. When she opened her mouth to scream, one of them shoved a rag into her mouth and then taped her mouth shut, gagging her. She tried squirming and fighting them as she lay helpless on her stomach, but they easily overpowered her and taped her naked ankles together, then pulled her arms back and did the same to her wrists. After that they flipped her onto her back, and Sheila could see that her attackers were Penelope and two of her delinquent friends, Tommy Morales and Jimmy Connelly.

  “I see your sister’s a natural blonde,” Jimmy Connelly whispered. “How about leaving me alone with her for five minutes?”

  “She’s filthy. You don’t want to stick your dick in her.”

  “Maybe I do,” Jimmy Connelly insisted.

  “Maybe I do too,” Tommy Morales said.

  Sheila always knew her sister hated her. She never knew why, although after years of trying to figure out the reason she accepted that it was simply Penelope’s resentment of Sheila being born, and her no longer being the only child in the family. Her mother used to laugh about how as a baby Penelope loved her little sister so much that she would try to squeeze the stuffing out of her and would have to pull Sheila away otherwise Penelope would’ve succeeded. What Sheila now saw in her sister’s drunken face went beyond hate. They were going to do things to her that were even worse than her punishments, and then they were going to kill her. Sheila could see that as clear as day in her sister’s eyes.

  “Not here,” Penelope said.

  They picked her up and hustled her out of the house and into the trunk of Jimmy Connelly’s waiting Camaro. The trunk was closed on her, leaving her in the dark in that dirty, smelly, greasy space. As the car drove off, Sheila accepted that they were going to drive her to the woods and spend hours doing terrible things to her before killing her, and she found herself oddly at peace with that. At least it would be over. All the fear and anguish would be ending soon. Also all of her hatred toward Penelope for not ever
loving her and treating her the way a big sister was supposed to treat her little sister. And so too the choking hatred that she felt toward her parents for their willingness to always take Penelope’s side and look for any excuse to inflict their punishments on her.

  Sheila lost track of time as her thoughts wandered to odd little questions, like whether her parents would be sad at all when they found out that she had been murdered, and whom Penelope would focus her meanness on after she was gone, and what it would be like to be dead and not have to worry about being tormented any longer. They could’ve been traveling for ten minutes or for hours; Sheila had no idea which it was when the car came to a stop. All she knew for sure was it was still dark out when they opened the trunk and took her out of it. She didn’t squirm or fight them any longer. She just wanted them to be done as quickly as possible so it would be over. That was all she wanted. For it to be over.

  They dumped her on concrete, which surprised her. She was sure they were going to take her to the woods. In the moonlight she could see the way Jimmy Connelly leered at her.

  “I still want time alone with her,” Jimmy Connelly said.

  “And I told you no. She’s too filthy for that.”

  Sheila was surprised to hear fear in her sister’s voice. What happened next surprised her even more as she watched her sister pull Connelly away and Tommy Morales reluctantly follow them. Shortly after that she heard their car start up, and then the sounds of it driving away. They were actually leaving her alive! Whatever homicidal impulses that drove Penelope when she and her friends snatched Sheila from her bed must’ve faded after they had put her in the car trunk, causing her to change their plans.

  It was too dark out for Sheila to see where they had left her. All she knew was that the concrete was rough on her skin and a light rain had started, which made her shiver. Soon she was shivering uncontrollably; partly from the chilliness in the air and the rain, partly over what she’d been through, but mostly because she realized that she’d be able to send Penelope to prison over this. Maybe she’d be able to send her parents to prison also. Their punishments were always done in private without any witnesses, and it would’ve always been her word against theirs and Penelope’s. Three against one. Nobody would’ve ever believed her, especially with the lies all three of them would’ve told about her. But this was different. Strangers were going to find her. The police were going to be called. Penelope wasn’t going to be able to lie her way out of this, and the authorities might now believe her about her parents and their punishments.