Page 5 of False Idols

Everyone in the trailer park is watching us now, not the cops driving past.

“Nevaeh, what did you do?” My mother whispers, while the cop keeps banging on our door for us to open up.

“I didn’t do it, mommy. Beau did.”

BEAU

PRESENT DAY

“Nevaeh Santiago.”

I stare up at the cement ceiling and roll my shoulders in a last ditch effort to get comfortable, but it’s impossible on the state issued mattress I’m laying on. Doesn’t matter though, I always try anyway. I fold my arms behind my head and clear my throat before I say her name again.

“Nevaeh Santiago.”

Those two words hang in the air above my head and I hear my cellmate Ben groan at hearing them again. I don’t give a shit. I’ve said her fucking name every day for the past four years, since I landed in this shit hole nightmare—that’s 1,461 days, because of fucking leap year. Ben’s been with me for the past three years and he’s used to my morning routine by now, but it doesn’t stop him bitching about it.

“Shut the fuck up man,” he tells me, like he has every morning for the 1,095th time. “Every goddamned morning with that cunt’s name.”

I frown. “Watch your mouth when you talk about her or I’m going to break your jaw again, Ben.”

Ben mutters something but he keeps it under his breath. Good. If I hear him talking about Nevaeh like she’s trash, I’ll make him pay. No one talks about her like that. I turn on my side and look at the photos that are taped up on the cement wall. Cement is everywhere here. Prison is a fucking tomb. A cold, cement, tomb. But I’m going to get out.

I’m not fucking dying here. I know that for a fact, because two days ago my lawyers came by. There’s big news. Good news about what happened to me. What they say I did to Carrie. I never would have hurt her. She was sweet, more than willing to give me anything. Carrie was the girl I wanted. I never would have done anything to hurt her.

But someone did.

Someone cut her to pieces and let me take the fall. And Nevaeh helped them do it. I reach out and tap my finger on the photo I know the best. It’s the one that’s the oldest. I printed it off the computers in the common area a month after I got here and realized this was going to be my life.

I wanted to look at the girl that fucked my life up beyond all repair. FUBAR is what the old timers call it. Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. I slide my finger along the curve of Nevaeh’s cheek. She’s smiling big for the camera, but she’s got her arms tucked close to her stomach like she’s trying to hide. Her dark hair is neat and pulled back into a ponytail and she’s baby faced with chubby cheeks and all that shit. She’s young here. Fifteen, tops. That’s how old she was when she lied and said I killed Carrie. This photo came from the Crown of Thorns website where it listed her as a top volunteer for the church. I didn’t notice her then, didn’t even realize we went to the same church. I don’t think I ever really saw her until that night.

She was the girl that cleaned my house. I saw her sometimes with her mom and tried to be nice to her. She worked hard, so did her mom. I recognized her when she had her light on Carrie’s body. Funny thing about how life works. I went my whole life not noticing Nevaeh Santiago and now her name is the first thing I say every morning and she’s the last thought I have every night.

It’s been that way for four fucking long years. Being locked up does a lot for a man’s focus and attention. After they gave me a life sentence for Carrie’s murder, I started paying attention to Nevaeh. I wanted to know everything about her. If she got an award, I knew. She wrote on a weird blog site for about a year—crappy poetry, the normal emo shit, and I knew. I had the RSS feed sent to my email. It wasn’t hard to keep track of Nevaeh and her mom, Terri Santiago. My mother was all too happy to make sure she kept them as close as she could. She knew I was innocent and she wasn’t going to let them get away from her. Du Ponts play the long game, and my family was nothing if not patient. Patience is the first step to power. Without patience, plans fail. Patience meant legacy, it meant deep roots. In a town with a long memory, patience created opportunity.

I could be more than patient when it came to Nevaeh Santiago. Maybe not before, when she was no one to me. But the night she pointed her finger and named me The Reaper? Oh, that’s when Nevaeh became mine.

I might not be the sick fuck that terrorized the tristate county area, raping and murdering college coeds, but I wasn’t the innocent choir boy everyone knew me as either. He died in these cement walls. Now, I’m all that’s left. I don’t even know what I am anymore outside of being obsessed with Nevaeh. Nevaeh is my life. The only thing that has kept me going for four years is my obsession with revenge. If my mom wasn’t blinded by the fact that I’m her son, she wouldn’t tell me what she does about Nevaeh. If she knew to look closer, she’d realize the son she knew is dead and gone. That I’m going to hurt Nevaeh. But even when I do, she won’t believe it.

She’ll take my side over Nevaeh when I’m out and so will the entire town. It won’t be hard to convince them to go after her when she put an innocent man away for murder. They don’t have to know that I’m not innocent anymore. That I became just as bad as the serial killer still free, in order to survive.

I yank the photo down from its spot and knock a couple of others I cut out of the newspaper with it. Nevaeh’s toothy smile fills my vision. Even if I close my eyes I’d see the way one of her front teeth is slightly out of place. How her smiles are never even, but a little crooked. I’ve memorized every bit of her and the information my mom feeds to me helps me fill in the gaps of what I can’t find online. Nevaeh uses social media just like any other nineteen year old and if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t suspect she was the girl from the woods.

The girl they call the hero of the Mineral Belt Murder. She’s the girl that got away and put The Reaper behind bars. The one that saved a town and stopped a man with a trail of violence that spanned years across the state of Kansas. How no one knew The Reaper was behind over thirty rapes and murders within a 15 year span is anyone’s guess, but I’m no friend to the justice system or the fucking police after what they did to me. I was nineteen when they locked me up like an animal. How the fuck was I supposed to be responsible for any of that?

The logical answer was that I wasn’t. Not that it mattered. Not when the Bloom PD figured out the murders and rapes occurring across the tri state area were connected, that they were serial, they wanted it over. It’s not like they cared much how it was done when they were getting heat for letting a killer walk free. The State Attorney General even issued a public warning and statement about The Reaper and called on the community to find him. He didn’t directly go after the police department, but any idiot could read between the lines. The Bloom PD knew they had to end this. They looked stupid as fuck not realizing a serial killer had set up home base in their own backyard for years. When Nevaeh pointed the finger at me, she gave them their out on a silver platter and they took it.

What’s more sensational than catching a serial killer? Catching a serial killer that was the town’s golden boy. It was a no brainer. Roots or not, not even my family could stop it.

My hand clenches and the photo I’m holding wrinkles and folds in my grip, but I don’t care. I’m not going to need the photo or any of the others I’ve put up to keep me focused. It’s easy to get lost in here—to forget you’re a human being. As much as I hate her, my little Nevaeh has been my touchstone to who I was before. A reminder of what I lost and what I’ll take back from her. Not a day has gone by that I don’t know what she’s up to. Not even prison can keep her from me.

Her family moved from that shitty little trailer park into town, into a house near mine, and I knew. I have her address memorized and know exactly what kind of car she drives, even though she just got it two weeks back. It’s a busted up blue pick up truck her mom got off some college kid. Nevaeh’s socials are packed full of summer excitement. Nevaeh hasn’t gone far, not even with her graduating the year before with a 4.0 GPA. She took a Gap Year, a fancy European way of saying she took a year to fuck around. I wondered if she was going to leave Bloom then, but she didn’t. She didn’t apply for schools or choose to go to a school where no one knew her. Somewhere she could start over.

If she was smart, she would have tried to start over, but a high GPA doesn’t make you smart. That’s just a number on a piece of paper. My Nevaeh isn’t smart. She’s staying close to home, which suits me. Her life is about to explode because of that choice. I have dreamed of nothing but hearing Nevaeh beg for mercy. If she wants to stay close and make that easier for me, then so be it. The big news I’d been given a month before is almost enough to make up for the four years I’ve spent locked away in a tomb because I died six months in this shithole. Every day for six months, I’d fought for my right to eat and breathe, for the right to simply exist. That changed after I made an example of the biggest fucker in my block.

That was the day I lost my grip on who I’d been. The friendly, easy going kid that couldn’t hurt a fly was dead. I lost him then. And the inmate that squared up to me lost an eye. Not a bad trade. A soul for an eye feels like a one sided deal in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t it? It did to me.

Not anymore, though. I’ve got no use for a soul, but an eye? Now that’s valuable. I came out ahead with that trade, but it set the pace for the next three and a half years. I did what I had to. The only thing anyone respects in prison is focus. Focus begets strength. Strength creates brutality.

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