FIRST OF TWO PARTS
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No one cares where I was born, where my sister and I lived, or where the murders took place or why I got away with it. No matter what I have done or what has happened, I know you are all only interested in one thing.
Well, tough. You want to know all about it and where it is; you have to listen to my story first. Context and all that. So I’m going to tell you. Everyone has a story, right? You wanna shout from a soapbox, write a book. Or get thrown in here and then someone HAS to listen to you. Ha!
So, this is my story. You probably won’t like it. Hell, I didn’t like living it much, either. But ya know, Mom used to say we can only paint with the colors we are given and sometimes the best colors are taken away. Just like that.
Now that I think about it, it seemed a little philosophical for a beaten down woman who never stood up for herself or accomplished much of anything besides baking cookies all the freakin’ time. Oatmeal, chocolate chip, peanut butter, sugar, all kinds of cookies. The kitchen floor was always a little crunchy with spilled sugar that never completely came up no matter how much you swept.
Oh, and before you get all sentimental at the thought of a real-live mother baking homemade cookies in this day and age (oh, come on, I see you smiling…), let me tell you that I HATE the smell of fresh baked cookies. Even the thought of it makes me gag. Besides, I was never allowed to have any cookies, even before I hated them. They were all for “him”.
Fresh baked cookie smells meant that he was coming home and my sister Anne and I were on our own for a while. Those nights were always about him; that’s Him with a capital H, by the way. Just want to make that clear. Mom always talked about him like he was some sorta god or movie star or something. He Who Must Be Obeyed. Cue the ominous music and make his drinks doubles.
I still can’t figure out what Mom saw in him.
Oh, so now you wanna know more about him? What for? Oh, all right, don’t get your panties in a bunch.
Well, I just thank God or whoever is up there pulling on all the strings that he was a trucker who did long hauls and wasn’t home much. I mean, life wasn’t great even when it was just Anne and Mom and me. Personally I think Mom was trying to make up for being such a damned doormat when he was there. Why else would she be all mousy and “yes Dear” and “anything you say, Dear” and all that when he was around and then suddenly grow a spine and lecture Anne and me on how to live our lives when he disappeared again? She sure as hell didn’t have it all together, so why should we pay any attention to what she said? Hell, I already knew the score at fourteen, I didn’t need some broken down old has-been to tell me to keep my knees together.
Like I had any choice in the matter.
Mom always told us we had to call him Daddy, which was completely ridiculous. I knew his name and he certainly wasn’t MY daddy, I wouldn’t be very happy if he was.
Call me an ungrateful kid, but I just don’t think that chasing a little girl out of the house with a broom stick screaming at her just because she ate the last of the peanut butter so that she runs out into the street and gets hit by a car qualifies him as “Father of the Year”. I mean, they aren’t exactly holding parades in his honor, no matter how many times people said it was a “terrible tragic accident”. Bye-bye, little sis. You didn’t miss much by dying young. At least you’ll be eight and cute and a perfect little angel forever. In fact, you got more and more perfect as the years went by. Mom and fake-daddy always compared me to your ghost and I lost every time. Seems like I was the only one who really remembered you… you could be a little brat sometimes. But even though you drove me crazy, I know you were just doing your job as my little sister. So I remember you, the Real You, the Real Anne, better than anyone else left alive.
So when HE died… What? No, I did NOT kill him. I couldn’t stand the creep, but someone else stuck that knife between his ribs. Personally I think that he probably mouthed off to the wrong person in the wrong place and got what was coming to him.
He just never knew when to shut up, especially when he was drunk. Geeze, you would not believe the crap he came up with! He talked as if he were some sort of modern Indiana Jones, digging up priceless artifacts along the side of the interstate while hauling cases of canned tuna or pork and beans all over the place. He spent a goddamned fortune on one of those metal detectors and said he would get “a feeling” and pull his big rig over on the side of the road and haul it out, sweeping over the shoulder or down in ditches and stuff. He brought home the most useless junk from those hauls. Pieces of metal so weirdly obscure you couldn’t tell what they came from, car parts, rusted pots and stuff like that. I guess looking for all that crap paid off because eventually he found that treasure map in that silver engraved tube – yeah, I said a TREASURE MAP – and he came home slap-happy drunk, screaming that we were going to be rich rich RICH when I was about thirteen. I heard him and his best old slimy drinking buddy talking about it constantly for weeks before Theo was murdered…
And no, I don’t think he killed Theo. And I certainly didn’t do it, no matter how much he deserved it. Rotten slime-ball sick-o bastard. Theo got what he deserved. It’s damned funny how they made all these loud grandiose plans trying to find whatever was at the end of that map and then WHAM! Theo gets a bullet in the head while sitting on the crapper. What a way to go, huh? Too, too funny! Can’t you just picture it…? La-de-dah-I’m just sitting here taking a dump, whistling Dixie and reading my stash of kiddie-porn and BOOM! Show’s over!
Oh, don’t give me that look. It is, too, funny. You don’t know anything.
Anyway, before you get all excited, Indiana-Dad and Theo did NOT find the Case diamond, I don’t care what the newspapers said. They didn’t have the brains to figure out that the map was... Well, I’ll get to that later. Imagine, Mr.You-Ate-The-Last-Of-The-Peanut-Butter-So-I’m-Gonna-Chase-You-Into-The-Street and his bestest child-molesting buddy solving one of the biggest and most famous museum jewel thefts in a couple of hundred years with nothing but a pick ax, compass and a bona-fide treasure map…
Oh stop, I knew El-Stupido-Dad better than anyone left alive, so I know he couldn’t possibly have done it. I certainly knew him better than YOU; you never even met him.
And no, I have no idea where the map went. You sure are full of questions.
Even the silver tube disappeared. You do know about the break-in at our house right after Daddy-kins got knifed in that alley, right? I know the cops said it was a regular robbery since our computer and TV were also taken, but it didn’t really look like anything spectacular (unless you knew what to look for) so why would they take THAT and leave my Mom’s Tiffany vase that was sitting right next to it on the bookshelf, huh? That vase was the only really valuable thing we have in the house; she always said my father – my REAL father – gave it to her and used to spend lots of time polishing it every month with this faraway kinda glazed look in her…
You want to know about Mom? She could barely put three coherent sentences together and spent all her time baking cookies and giving heard-‘em-before lectures to her wayward daughters… Wait, I mean daughter, singular. I was the wayward one; Anne was perfect, even before she got run over. She was even BLOND, not boring brown like me. Well, not anymore! See, I bleach my hair so now I can be perfect, too.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Mom.
How on earth could I have anything to do with Mom’s accident? She drove off a cliff, for God’s sake! I was at school, you can check the records. That’s Wellington Place High School; you want me to spell that for you? Personally, I think she drove off that cliff because he died. She used to read those sappy tragic romance novels by the busload and that kind of end to the story would have appealed to her. No happy endings for her, no siree! So tragic, so sad… One more stupid doormat stunt. Can’t live without the creep. What a crock.
So anyway, after Mom’s accident, they put me in a series of foster homes, but nothing ever worked out. I was nothing but a paycheck to them, the lowest of the low and universally despised and tormented by the parent’s natural kids.
Eventually, and by that I mean after six foster families in two years, they sent me to live with my Aunt Mae in Lewittston. What a dump that place was! Total Hicksville, let me tell you! They didn’t even have paved roads except the one right down the middle of the business district. Yeah, that’s what they called it. I laughed so hard when Aunt Mae gave me the “Grand Tour” of the town, which took all of ten minutes, by the way - I figured she HAD to be kidding! I don’t think Mae appreciated me laughing at her town. I mean they must have had sixteen bars and only one pizza joint… shows you where their priorities were!
Mae, she wasn’t too bright, for all her formal education and five or six framed degrees hanging up on the wall. She really didn’t know what to do with me, what to make of me, classic abandonment case and all that. She must have taken some Psych classes along the way to parchment Glory, because she sometimes sounded like the inside of a textbook. She was something else. Mae never got married and liked to think she was a free spirit at heart, at least as far as sex was concerned. She wore about a quarter ton of gaudy costume jewelry and these huge billowing flowery skirts every single day, snow or sunshine. She made all her own skirts and came home just about every Friday evening with a huge bag of fabric to make more skirts, just like clockwork. Also just like clockwork, Mae went out every Saturday night and got herself laid. Sometimes it was quick and she was home early and sometimes it took just about all night to snare a victim.
Someone shoulda told Aunt Mae that free spirits don’t charge their drinks on American Express or need eighty seven thousand pieces of cheap plastic jewelry.
I think she banged just about very guy in Lewittston, so I guess that counts for something.
Anyway, despite everything, I kinda got fond of Aunt Mae. So I figured it would be best if I left town. I had been there about six months and was starting to get all twitchy inside my skin. You ever have that feeling? Like something’s going to happen any second? Spiders were crawling around behind my eyeballs. A million butterflies stampeding across my skin. Tingly goosebumps and a very real feeling that the world is holding its breath, just waiting for something. That kind of thing. Anticipation with attitude. Creepy.
It hadn’t escaped my notice at that point that people seem to have this habit of dying around me. Anne, Mom, Cookie-Dad, Theo… Most people go their whole lives without even one person who hurt them and deserved it ending up dead and here I had several. Not that Anne deserved it. Or Mom, either. Not really, anyway. Okay so maybe it was just the two, but I was kinda the reason they all died. Anyway, I needed some time to figure it all out…
No, it had nothing to do with the stupid so-called Curse of the Case Diamond. What are you, superstitious or something? That is seriously messed up. You sound like you’re writing a B-movie script. The Curse! The CURSE! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!
What kind of psychiatrist are you? This here is real life, lady. Get a grip.
Besides, THEY never even touched that diamond.
If you don’t mind, I will get back to my story.
So I stole $650 from Mae’s wallet. I figured she was asking for it. Like, who carries $650 dollars in cash around in a purse and then doesn’t keep an eagle eye out? I pretty much cleaned her out of granola bars, lifted an enormous yellow cable knit sweater and a bunch of her jewelry, too. Hell, she had so much gaudy costume crap in about four hundred different jewelry boxes all over that big old creaky house so she probably never even missed any of it. She sure as hell didn’t mention it to the police when she reported me missing.
And she never mentioned the cash or that sweater being gone either, so maybe that was her way of giving me a break. She knew I was getting restless and probably left that money for me to take anyway. Now that I think about it, I’m sure that is what she wanted. She knew I was going to book and so…
No, I do not believe I can read people’s minds! What a stupid thing to say. Look, I stayed in town for a couple of days, out of sight, and watched the newspaper racks. Missing Teen – Distraught Aunt Tells Tragic Story was splashed all over the headlines. See? Nothing supernatural about it.
That town really ate it up. They should thank me for adding some real excitement to their drab little lives. Heck, I remember the lead story the week before I skipped Aunt Mae’s was something about someone going around ripping clean sheets off clotheslines and dragging them through the mud. I am not sure which is more pathetic, the guy who dragged the sheets through the mud for kicks or the people who still hang bedsheets outside to dry when everybody owns a perfectly good washer and dryer.
So I hung around, picked up a couple of loose items along the way and found this really great old tree to sleep in at night. It is MUCH harder to try to sleep up in a tree than you’d think! I was up half the first night starting awake so often I almost fell off about a dozen times. I got the hang of it after the second night, though. There were still some apples left on the trees in the Keppler Orchard, so I liberated some after making friends with their scary “attack dog”. People are so funny about dogs. They think that if the dog LOOKS mean, that it IS mean and will scare off anybody who…
What? I’m getting off track? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I am telling the story, it’s MY story and I will tell it any old way I want.
Oh, all right. You wouldn’t want to hear about what happened to me after three days of eating nothing but overripe apples anyway. Ick.
So I lit out of town after a couple of days, keeping off the roads so no one would recognize me or report me or whatever. After a while, I hiked back to the road and tried to get a ride to anywhere. I walked for a long time. The sound of my old Reeboks crunching the gravel on the side of the road was really starting to get on my nerves. Crunch-it Crunch-it. Crunch-it. I was really hot and tired and kinda hungry for something other than granola, too. The sun was just starting to flirt with the horizon when someone finally pulled up behind me and stopped. It was this big old faded yellow Chevy. I couldn’t really see inside the windshield because the setting sun was glaring off it, but some guy inside stuck his arm outside the window, waved and said, “Need a ride, sweetie?”
I certainly don’t like being called “sweetie”, but like I said I was hot and tired and so I walked to the passenger side window and bent down to look in. The guy inside didn’t look dangerous or anything. He was old enough to be my father, had a head shaped like a potato with a bad comb-over, and wore a white shirt and a boring dark blue tie he had loosened around his neck. Very life-insurance salesman out on the road, or what I imagine an insurance salesman would look like. I figured he was pretty safe.
“Sure,” I said. I tossed my newly-acquired Sponge-Bob backpack (I lifted it from some kid who left it in plain sight on his front porch back in town) onto the seat next to him and climbed in. The torn vinyl upholstery made a rude crackly sound when I sat down.
“Where you headin’,” the Potato Head asked as he pulled back out onto the highway.
“Anywhere but here.” I was too bushed to be careful and laid my head back on the back of the seat. I only meant to close my eyes for a second, but I must have dozed off for a couple of hours because all of a sudden it is quiet and very dark and his hands are on me.
“Hey, what are you doing?” It’s amazing the stupid things you say when you are half asleep and wake up to find some old geezer molesting you. Why can’t I ever come up with something biting or clever?
“Shhh, shhh,” he put one finger to my lips, and ripped my favorite lace tank top pulling it up from my jeans. I was tempted to bite the finger off, but he suddenly seemed really strong and I couldn’t move or even breathe all scrunched up on the corner of the front seat.
I remembered that little death jinx I thought I had on people and thought crazily that maybe if I just thought hard enough, he would get it between the eyes. So I closed my eyes and brought all the anger, the pain, the disgust, the lies I had always been told, every single black thought that creeps up on you when you least expect it, the times I was cruel to the cat across the street. I remembered every petty grasping nasty jealous thought I ever had in my life, all the times I let Anne take the rap for something I did, including eating the last of that damned jar of peanut butter. I took that vicious oozing mess of psychic pain, mentally packed it into a hard dirty psychic snowball and threw it straight between his eyes.
By rights, he should have been dead. I mean, there was a LOT of nastiness there. But all that happened was that he kind of hic-cupped and stopped what he was doing for about half a second, then went right back to it.
After he was done he rifled through the pockets of my jeans and backpack and took all my cash. Creep. He tossed everything else back at me and told me to get out.
I grabbed what was left of my clothes and my pack, got out of the car and slammed the door. He sped away in the dark, leaving me there wearing nothing but a ripped lace shirt in the middle of the desert. I memorized the license plate. Not that I was going to call the police or anything. Just in case I needed it to practice my magic on.
Yeah, my magic. The guy definitely stopped for a second when I hit him with my psych-ball, so I figured I just needed practice to get it right. I stood there on the side of the road, practically naked and bruised in the moonlight and mentally scraped all the black tar nasty thoughts and other gunk out of the inside of my brain until I bled. I visualized a malignant javelin and sent it flying right at the faded “JESUS SAVES” bumper sticker plastered crookedly on his dented bumper.
Nothing. Not even a swerve. I suppose he was out of range or something. Oh well.
I knew, even then with such a dismal failure driving off leaving me coughing and shaking in the dust, that I really am magic. I am. I just have to be. I tossed my panties into the bushes – they had been reduced to a couple of pieces of elastic with a few square inches of shredded satin hanging on by threads - and pulled on my jeans and Reeboks. My tank top was ripped but still wearable. Too bad grunge was out, or I’d be real in.
It suddenly hurt to breathe and I sat right down on the dirt before I fell down. I sat there for a couple of minutes shivering and concentrating on breathing in and out, in and out, trying real hard not to cry. Eventually I got it together and just sat there for as long time, working the tangles out of my hair with my fingers.
I could kill people with my brain. I know I could! I just couldn’t seem to do it in a timely manner. I needed to learn control. Controlled kills. Master the controlled kill. Master the kill. Kill them before they hurt me again. Kill them all. They all deserved to die. All of them. All the dirty, rotten, slimy… Yeah. Starting with that freakin’ potato-head. Kill him first. Now. Make his car explode or some…
Why are you looking at me like that? The bastard just raped me on his sticky ripped vinyl seats in his stupid boring yellow car and then drove off and left me in the freakin’ middle of nowhere in the middle of the goddamned night. You want HIM alive and well out on the streets looking to get at your daughter?
I didn’t even know what happened to him until later anyway.
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CONCLUDES TOMORROW
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