A multi-jurisdictional raid took place on the island where Inga Olson had been held captive for years. When the women freed from captivity at various sites returned to the United States, Inga was there to meet them, including her friends who had been rescued from O’Clery’s island. Sadly, Kelly’s fate remained unknown. Maxwell promised Inga that he would keep looking for her, although the odds were low that he, Bo, and Ali would ever find her.
The ship Cara and the other women had been transported on was boarded by the coast guard. Martin Roussin was the Frenchmen that Inga remembered from her own journey aboard. He was a French-Canadian out of Quebec and the ship was registered there. Roussin denied involvement. He later took a plea bargain deal of twenty years after a crime scene unit found fingerprints on the ship that matched several of the women, including Cara. The prints were recovered from a railing inside the ship that had been used by the women to climb out of the cargo hold they had been kept in. Roussin’s nephew, Andre, was given a sentence of fifteen years, and the rest of the crew faced legal trouble as well.
Arthur Collins took a plea arrangement to avoid a life sentence. Despite that, he was still given forty years in a maximum-security prison with no hope of parole. Emily and Karen fared slightly better. They were given thirty-five years apiece with no parole. As they were being led from the courtroom, Cara and the other women stood and gave them threatening looks.
Several of the bidders were given harsh sentences, while one committed suicide and another was murdered by the father of a woman he’d kept as a sex slave. The father was found guilty and, citing extenuating circumstances, the judge sentenced him to a year of community service and ten years of probation. The light sentence was applauded by many.
Tanner returned to the ranch and was Cody Parker again. They were seated in the office when he told Sara about what had happened in their mission to find and free the abducted women. Marian was there and sleeping in her playpen.
After hearing what had happened, Sara made an observation. “You should consider doing something similar to what Spenser does when you do pass the Tanner name on to Henry. It would keep you from getting bored and you’re good at helping people.”
“I’ll consider it when that day comes. I told Maxwell that he can call on me again too. Taran said the same thing.”
Lucas ran into the office and climbed up into Cody’s lap. “Let’s go ride fences, Daddy?”
Cody hired people to do that, but he loved spending time with his son and they both enjoyed riding. In another year or two, Lucas would be big enough to have a horse of his own.
After visiting the stables, Cody and Lucas were moving across their land on horseback, as fathers and sons had done in the Parker family for generations.
“Daddy.”
“Yeah?”
“Go faster!”
Cody laughed, grabbed the reins tighter, and gave the horse a nudge with his foot. Their pace increased and Lucas released a shout of pure joy.
It was music to Cody’s ears.
Epilogue
ONE YEAR LATER
In the small Appalachian town where she’d settled, she was known as a recluse. If she’d been a man and older, they might have called her a hermit. No one wondered why she shunned the company of others. One look at her disfigured face and the answer became obvious.
The house she’d bought was large for one person but not so big that it was ostentatious. It sat in the center of eighty acres. She’d made agreements with a neighboring farmer that he could work the land and keep most of the profit brought in by the tobacco and apple crops grown.
The farmer’s teenage daughter did the shopping for the woman and ran other errands for her. For that, she made more money than she would have received for working as a cashier or a waitress, and she and the woman got along well.
The girl had just dropped off a basket of apples that had been picked fresh that morning by the farmer. The woman thanked the girl and told her that she would probably bake an apple pie sometime in the next few days. The woman wasn’t much of a cook, but her mother had taught her how to bake an apple pie. Whenever she made one, it made her feel closer to her mother, who had died when she was young. Years later, her beloved father was callously murdered. She was alone in the world and figured she always would be.
After the girl left, the woman removed the apples she would need to make an apple pie and decided to store the others away. She grabbed a metal ring and swung open the wooden door that led down to the root cellar.
With the basket of apples in one hand, the woman took careful steps down the steep set of wooden stairs that granted access to the dank space below. After reaching the bottom, she emptied the contents of the basket in a pine bin that was between two others that contained potatoes and carrots.
Before heading back up the stairs, the woman moved to a corner of the space where there was a wooden crate. Judging by the odor arising from the enclosure, she realized that it was time to clean it out again. It was an unpleasant and tiresome chore, but it was one she was willing to continue doing until the day came that she decided enough was enough. She doubted that day was near and knew also that it might never arrive.
Flipping the lid on the crate open, her eyes stared down at the creature within. The wretched being had no arms or legs. They had been severed one by one over a period of months. Its tongue had been cut out as well, but it still had eyes to see and ears to hear.
The woman, who had once gone by the name of Vicky Denton, studied the thing in the box, and reveled at its suffering.
“Hello Mistress.”
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SINS OF THE FATHER AND MOTHER
Copyright © REMINGTON KANE, 2021
YEAR ZERO PUBLISHING, LLC
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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