Page 3 of Haven't Killed in Years
“No one has been asking you anything about me? Even a small thing could be something.”
“No.” She considered it. “No, I haven’t talked about you in a real long time. I mean…”
“What about your new husband?”
“What about him?” she asked.
“Where’d he even come from? Does he know about me?”
“I don’t know. It was in the papers all those years ago. He might know about ya, but not from anything I said.”
“Are you sure?” I pressed.
She struggled to process my intensity. “What’s going on, Marin?”
There it was again.Marin. It felt like I’d swallowed a cactus. I started backing away, realizing I had been overconfident in how apathetic I could remain in her presence.
“Do you want to go get a coffee or something?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“I’d like to see ya again. If you wanted to.”
“No,” I said, taking three steps backward before turning and booking it out of there.
- - - - -
I collapsed into mycar and cranked up the music, attempting to drown out my thoughts, but it didn’t work. It only made them louder to compensate. Seeing Reanne had been a bad plan. Useless. The only thing it did was open old wounds. I hated my mother more than anyone—even more than my serial killer father. He couldn’t help himself. He liked killing people. He needed to kill people. Something was wrong with him; there were a lot of theories—borderline personality disorder, psychopathy, sociopathy, extreme narcissism, et cetera, et cetera. Plenty had diagnosed a more biblical than medical cause: EVIL.
My mother had no clinical excuse for keeping me there, in that house with him, all those years. She wasn’t brainwashed or abused; I was sure that was all bogus. My father had made her feel important, chosen, and she’d thought it was exciting and made her better than other, ordinary people. It was only once they were caught and faced life in prison that she started to spin a different tale. My father never argued against it. He really did love her. He loved us both. We were his.
Talking to my father was going to be much more complicated. I couldn’t very well show up and get my name on his visitor log,putting a connection between Gwen Tanner and Abel Haggerty on record. Not to mention, even the thought of talking to him released the equivalent of a paralytic gas into my brain. My mother might not have been brainwashed, but I certainly had been. I’d been young, but I had very vivid memories.
I remembered a night he took me into the city to go skating at the Frog Pond. It was freezing and I had to wear these big dopey mittens that slipped off anytime I put my hands down. He held my hand and we went around the rink maybe a hundred times. Afterward, we went to dinner and I ordered a strawberry milk shake and chicken fingers that I couldn’t finish. We took an indirect route back to the car and I watched my father suffocate a homeless man with the plastic bag from my leftovers.
That’s how it always was. It was never particularly premeditated. He would get a feeling or a message or a sign—whatever way he wanted to explain it to me in the moment—and then it would happen.
The homeless man sat against a concrete wall. He let us approach, didn’t even flinch. When my father held out the bag, the man smiled, hoping for a warm meal. Instead, my father removed the Styrofoam container and handed it to me. The man was confused, but I was not; I knew what was happening.
In an instant, the plastic bag was over his head. My father yanked him to the ground so that he could drive his knee into the man’s back, pinning him down while squeezing the bag closed. Eventually the man stopped struggling—a few errant spasms and then nothing. When it was done, my father handed me the bag and I put my chicken fingers back inside.
I had watched him kill so many times—more than what he was charged with, by the way. It wasn’t upsetting or shocking. It was allI knew and it had been happening since before I could form memories. It was our little secret, because I was special too, like him. So fucked-up. I didn’t know that then, but later in life I did a lot of reading and the message became pretty clear.
That’s how I adapted—how, outside my father’s grasp, I was able to learn more socially acceptable behaviors. FromCrime and PunishmenttoThe Hunger Games, murder was always a big, bad thing and it was supposed to take a real toll on you, even if you were the one who did it…on purpose. You weren’t supposed to dust off your hands and go about your day. I mean, you’re even supposed to feel things about a bunch oftreesbeing killed inThe Lorax. So it was pretty obvious that it didn’t bother me like it should, but my indifference wasn’t something I was proud of, just something I had to hide.
I couldn’t go see my father; I didn’t trust myself. I had a good thing going. I had a decent job and an apartment and a Roku TV. I didn’t have much of a life—it was pretty boring, actually—but that was a necessity, and I had learned long ago to make the most of it; we were living in a television renaissance, after all.
The fact that my father was in prison, physically at least, meant he had not cut that arm off and he certainly had not brought it to my doorstep. He wasn’t the one I needed to talk to; I needed to talk to whoever was talking to him.
I hatched a genius plan thanks to my new stepdaddy, Gustus Trent.
I opened my computer and searchedhow to talk to prisoners.It was that simple. The search returned a million websites for exactly that. With a few clicks I filtered the search options to men ages eighteen to forty at Edgar Valley. I did a quick scroll for the most attractive, and there was my knight in shining armor, Connor Nettles.
Connor was twenty-six and serving ten years for armed robbery. It was the best dating site; they laid everything out right in the open for you. Connor was a Virgo who liked drawing and was training to be a mechanic. I wrote him an email making me sound like a dream come true and attached a picture from five years ago that accentuated my body and not my face.
Plan in motion. True love awaited.
Four
