“That’s what we’re hoping to find out, if we make it there in one piece,” Ashley responded, still dreading the flight. She could feel a knot forming in the pit of her stomach.
“I hated to hear that about Jana,” Buddy noted. “I didn’t know her that well but she seemed nice. I know you were close, at one time anyway.”
Their short conversation was interrupted by Jack who hailed Ashley from across the tarmac.
“Let’s get going, partner,” Jack yelled as he strolled toward his plane.
“Wish me luck,” Ashley said with fear in her eyes.
“You’ve always had the luck in our family, sis,” Buddy quipped as he waved good-bye.
Ashley took her time crossing the tarmac. She forced herself forward as she was already aware of her own heart beating, something she knew sometimes indicated an approaching panic attack. What if she had an attack while they were in the air, closed up in the small cockpit? Stress was one of the major triggers for her panic attacks and flying across the open skies of Texas with someone she didn’t even know, and for that matter, didn’t even like that much, was quite stressful.
“Your chariot awaits, madam,” Jack said, stunning Ashley by opening the passenger door for her. It was his first gentlemanly act, for her anyway.
“Please keep your hands and feet inside the ride until it comes to a complete stop,” he said in a giddy voice as he slammed the door shut and headed around to the pilot’s seat. “Don’t worry. I’m a very good pilot. Now, how do I start this thing? I know the key is here somewhere.”
“Don’t start!” Ashley snapped as she tried to keep her breathing steady. She clicked on her seatbelt and pulled it tight.
The cockpit was already closing in on her before he even fired the engine, her breaths becoming shorter and shallower. The cockpit was about the size of the inside of a Volkswagen Bug, in Ashley’s estimation. Making conditions even more cramped was what appeared to be Jack’s equipment and part of his clothes closet hanging in the rear. Was he living out of his plane?
“Okay, things that go up and down,” Jack said, looking out both sides of the airplane. “Things that go side to side.”
Ashley locked her icy gaze on Jack.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a startled tone.
“Pre-flight check,” Jack responded. “I do it every time I take off. We wouldn't want something to fall off while we’re in the air, would we honey?”
“We are so going to die,” Ashley said with a sense of dread as she put her head back on the head rest and closed her eyes.
“Don’t worry sweetheart. I haven’t lost a passenger yet,” Jack said as he cranked the engine.
The plane sputtered to life as Ashley took a big gulp of air, keeping her eyes closed tight.
“Here we go,” Jack announced as Ashley felt the plane lurch forward and begin rolling down the runway.
Her gut was now in a tight knot, the sensations of movement making her feel sick at her stomach. As the forward motion seized her insides, she opened her eyes wide, concerned she might throw up.
“Ah, you’re awake for the best part,” Jack said. He looked over at Ashley, noticing her eyes were open just as the plane’s wheels left the runway.
“Keep your eyes on the sky,” Ashley muttered aloud, her gaze fixed through the front windshield of the small aircraft.
The plane climbed steadily, Jack banking the aircraft into the sun as Ashley grabbed the dash. She doggedly maintained her white knuckle grip for several minutes. The tenseness of her body language was not lost on the veteran agent.
“You can unclench those cheeks now, honey,” Jack said. “We’re at cruising altitude. I could fly it now with my eyes closed … see? Look ma, no hands!”
Ashley didn’t know whether to cuss or laugh as her heart still pounded in her chest. She refused to look out the passenger window, not wanting to realize in mid-flight that she also had a fear of heights.
“Seriously, there’s nothing to be scared of,” Jack said, trying to get his passenger to relax. “Hey, look at it this way. It gives us an hour to get to know one another.”
“Oh boy,” Ashley mockingly responded. “I’m such a lucky girl.”
“Hey, I’m pretty interesting if you get to know me, darlin',” Jack retorted. “And I promise I won’t do any loop-de-loops or barnstorming. I’ll stick to straight flying.”
Releasing her death grip on the dash, she lowered her window visor to block the glaring sun. Ashley was breathing normally for what seemed like the first time since they took off.
“Well, I guess that’s one better than my brother,” Ashley admitted. “He would do it just to hear me scream.”
Sensing Ashley beginning to relax, Jack kept the conversation going. He knew a nervous passenger would make for a long flight and, even worse, a potential mess in his floorboard. Jack had a passenger toss his cookies in the plane before during a flight and found, much to his chagrin, the smell lingered on for weeks no matter how much Lysol he used.
“I guess big brothers and big sisters find ways to pick on the younger ones,” Jack agreed. “Just as long as it doesn’t leave scars, I guess it’s all good clean fun.”
Ashley shook her head, finally prying her eyes off the horizon long enough to look at Jack.
“I’m lucky I didn’t have to have therapy after some of the tricks he pulled growing up,” Ashley said with a slight smile. “There was one time, back when I was around three or so, he locked me in my high chair and made me watch three straight hours of Barney.”
Jack gave a chuckle since he found the purple dinosaur quite irritating to the point he had wished for open season on the annoying character. He would have willingly given up a big game stamp reserved for one of his big Appalachian bucks to bag the dancing purple creature.
“I don’t blame you,” Jack agreed. “I hate Barney too.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Ashley explained with her face becoming serious. “I’ve always been terrified of costumes. Clowns, mascots and things of that nature make my skin crawl. If I can’t see who's under there, it just freaks me out. I can’t help it. I can still remember to this day how scared I was. My mom said I screamed for an hour after she came downstairs and found me locked inside my high chair. My brother was just sitting there watching Barney and laughing at me.”
“I’m sure that didn’t help you with your phobia,” Jack grinned. “I bet Halloween was Hell around your house.”
“I’d hide in my room on Halloween.” Ashley admitted. “I still don’t like it. I turn my porch light off at night and put a bucket of candy outside for the trick-or-treaters. Now, as for my brother, he was just six back during the Barney incident so he was just getting started on the picking.”
“Now, I like poking fun as well as the next guy but that sounds just plain mean,” Jack agreed. “I’m surprised you and your brother even get along. It sounds like he has a mean streak.”
Ashley shook her head, settling back against the seat as she looked out into the pale blue sky before them.
“No, he’s my knight in shining armor,” Ashley admitted, cracking a slight grin. “If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here now.”
Ashley was serious. Buddy had saved her life. Her face darkened as she recalled the events of a decade ago.
It happened on a balmy summer night in Austin. Ashley had just turned fifteen and was starting her junior in high school year. She had completed her sophomore courses a year ahead of her classmates. She suffered through physical issues as a child, infirmities that may have defeated any normal person. However, those issues had served only to focus her resolve to excel academically. And excel she did, making just one less-than-perfect mark in her entire academic career: a “B” in seventh grade, and in physical education, of all classes. Ashley cried after receiving the mark, swearing never to settle for anything less than an "A" ever again – and she kept that promise. Despite a heavy course-load and advanced classes, she completed college a ye
ar ahead of schedule, graduating with honors and a degree in Criminology.
With her academic background, she was a feather in the cap for the rangers. The state law enforcement agency eagerly accepted her into their fold on her first application. Most University of Texas students graduating Summa Cum Laude usually go into medical or science fields. Ashley wanted to be a second-generation ranger, to follow in the footsteps of her father, Tyler Reynolds, who had served the department for over twenty years.
Buddy was eighteen that September evening ten years ago and had recently graduated from military school. He had spent most of his high school years at the private academy near Lubbock and would go on to a short career in the Air Force before moving on to the private air service sector. The Reynolds’ were, as far as anyone could tell, an average family.
Ashley went to bed around ten o’clock that evening following her normal evening routine. Despite being a teenager, Ashley had never overcome certain phobias that most children are able to cast off earlier in life. She was careful to keep these fears to herself, realizing revealing such personal information would cause people to question her sanity, something even Ashley did from time to time. Her bedtime routine included a careful check under her bed and a timid look inside her closet, each time the adolescent half-expecting something to spring out and snatch her. She could almost feel its presence on the other side of the door only to open her closet and find nothing but clothes. She had done this for as long as she could remember. It wasn't like she thought something was hiding in her closet. She knew something was hiding in her closet.
Satisfied nothing was lurking in her closet at that particular moment, she would then turn on her stereo. The glow from its dial served as a night light to cut the darkness. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. She was afraid of what was lurking in it.
Ashley couldn’t sleep in absolute quiet. The beating of her heart kept her wide awake. Try as she might, she couldn’t block out the sound of the rhythmic pulsing, the repetitive pumping inside her chest serving only to make her dread hearing it suddenly stop. She had to have noise to sleep and had found years ago that the combination of her stereo and a box fan would do the trick to place her in her own little comfort zone.
And, so it was that night. Her routine completed, she crawled between the sheets and soon nodded off to the sounds of Pat Benatar’s Shadows of the Night. Ashley had always been, and was still, stuck in the eighties.
Her dreams were odd that night. Ashley was always a sound sleeper, her inability to be awoken sometimes giving her parents a start when she was younger. She could literally sleep through anything. Once she was asleep, she was asleep.
In the dream, which she still remembered as vividly as if she had it the night before, she found herself inside a bottle. She had no idea how she got there, realizing only that she was trapped. The sides were too smooth to climb and the glass too thick to break. Pound as she might on the glass, it wouldn’t give. Her screams echoed back at her inside the enclosure. She pressed her face to the glass, straining her eyes to see what was beyond the glass. Her eyes in the dream allowed her to see a perfect twenty-twenty. Ashley always saw clearly in her dreams, only to wake to a blurry world before putting on her glasses.
After what felt like forever, her hands hurting from pounding on the side of the bottle, Ashley heard movement. Was it someone coming to help her? The movement, however, was not from around her, but above her. Casting her eyes upward toward the neck of the bottle, Ashley could see a hand as it placed a lid on the bottle, sealing her inside. Panic overtook her as the air began to thin inside the bottle. Her breathing became labored as her hands traced the side of the glass, hoping for a crack, an opening, any means of escape. She began to gasp, trying to find air to fill her lungs. Then she awoke to an even worse nightmare.
She couldn’t breathe! She was choking! Her room was filled with smoke which was pouring in from under her closed door, the only light was an orange glow around the edges of the door. Her stereo and fan were silent. The taste and smell of smoke in the near-total darkness told her the house was on fire! She opened her mouth to scream but the smoke gagged her, muting her yell for help.
Her head was already swimming from lack of oxygen. She fell from her bed. Somehow, in her panic, she recalled the fact that smoke rises. She slithered across the floor toward her bedroom door and reached up to grab the knob. She let out a silent scream as the knob burned her palm.
She turned toward her window and saw the faint glow of a street light to guide her through the smoke, which was thickening by the second. She fought with the window. She tried to move the latch so she could throw open the window and make it to safety. It wouldn’t budge! Faced with no other option, she flung her fists at the glass. It wouldn’t break. The double paned windows resisted her blows! It was just like her dream. The glass was holding her inside while her air was running out.
Barely holding to consciousness, Ashley stumbled toward the only door left - the door to her closet. She would seek refuge with the monsters. She closed the closet door behind her, hoping to shield herself from the coming fire, hoping to get just one more gulp of air. She lay sobbing in the floor, hopelessly trapped, consciousness now slipping away.
It was then, just when all hope was gone, that the door flung open and a hand reached inside, drawing her from what would have been her personal crematorium. That’s when she fell into darkness.
She awoke sometime later with a mask on her face and bright lights bearing down on her. She suddenly realized she could breathe again.
“You’ll be okay,” a paramedic reassured her as a siren wailed. “We’re taking you to the hospital. You had a close call. Your brother saved your life.”
It was Buddy who used a piece of ornamental block from their yard to smash through the thick glass and gain entry from outside. Her room was located on the first floor of the house. He then searched through the black smoke until he found his kid sister, curled up in the fetal position and lying on the floor of her closet. He was just carrying her onto the lawn when fire-fighters arrived, the first responders helping resuscitate the teen who wasn’t breathing. She was suffering from serious smoke inhalation made worse by her asthma.
She remained in the hospital for three days. The complications from her brush with death nearly claimed her life. She was released just in time to attend her parents’ funeral. They didn’t make it out.
It wasn’t until after the closed-casket funeral that she learned it wasn’t the fire that killed them. Given her serious condition, authorities felt it best to keep her isolated from the truth: her parents had been murdered. She would learn in the days after the funeral that they had been stabbed. Her father was mortally wounded while he slept, and her mother hacked to death as she tried to escape. The fire was then lit to cover the crime. The killer - or killers - perhaps not realizing the children were in the house or, most likely, intending the fire to take care of them. Buddy had privately told his sister that he thought his locked door may have kept the murderer from slipping into his room and ending his life. Buddy made a habit of keeping his door locked, not wanting their parents to come in unannounced and find his stash, which he kept concealed in the bottom of his sock drawer.
Their parents’ killer was never caught. While it was never proven, many in the department suspected their deaths were linked to a case her father was working on at the time of his death. Ashley had used her position with the rangers to access the cold case files a couple of years ago. She had always been kept in the dark concerning the specifics of the case when she was a civilian since the case was technically still open.
The case files revealed her father was pursuing a serial killer who was preying on teens in the Austin area. The slasher had claimed several lives over a two-month period, all high school students. It began with a double homicide at Lover’s Leap, the make out spot for youths at the time. The killer had hacked a young couple to death. The boy’s body was found dismembered in the woods while the girl had
been murdered still in the car.
The killings that followed caused widespread panic. The method of the murders left little doubt they were the work of a single killer. Ashley recalled hearing about the crimes when she was young, not realizing at the time that her father was tasked with solving the high-profile slayings.
While killing five victims without leaving so much as a clue, his sixth attack wasn’t perfect. It involved the assault of a female jogger in one of the city parks but was interrupted by a passerby. The slasher was chased off before he could finish the job. The young woman, who survived despite suffering several stab wounds, told police she was attacked by a large bird. Her description was dismissed as hysteria caused by the trauma of her near-death experience. It was just a week after that attack that Ashley's parents were killed. After that, the killer was never heard from again.
There was no shortage of theories as to what happened to the killer. Some suggested that he had left the area, fearing police were on his heels, possibly to continue his killing spree elsewhere. Others said he might have found religion, while some theorized that he had died himself, perhaps even taking his own life out of remorse for his crimes.
Ashley ended up living with her aunt for the rest of her high school years, leaving to attend college and opting to live on campus. Buddy enlisted in the Air Force, learning his craft during his five years in the service.
“The funny thing is, I’ve never actually thanked him,” Ashley admitted as she finished her story.
Jack was transfixed on the storyteller instead of the open air in front of him. Ashley caught him with his eyes on her instead of where they were going. “Hey, would you watch where you’re going!”
All Jack could do was shake his head.
“That’s messed up, darlin’,” Jack said as he digested the story. “I didn’t know about that. I guess I didn’t read your whole file.”
Friday Night Frights (Jack and Ashley Detective series Book 1) Page 7