Page 10 of Haven't Killed in Years
Porter was shimmying open a window. It broke my trance and I headed toward them.
“Porter, what are you doing?” I asked, not nearly as panicked as Dominic.
“I want to go in, don’t you?”
“What do you think is going to be in there? Dead bodies?”
Porter slipped through the window, ignoring my shade. Dominic looked to me for help, but I wasn’t offering any. Porter appearedagain, opening the door for us, and then he dipped back into the house.
I stepped around Dominic and went inside. The back door led into the kitchen. It had a nice cream-patterned wallpaper now and a lot of shiny appliances, including one of those expensive KitchenAid mixers that people get as wedding gifts. We hadn’t even had a toaster when I’d lived there.
I wandered into the hallway, where Porter stood perusing the framed family photos. “That’s a different family,” I said. “Stop being weird.”
He didn’t acknowledge my presence until a piercing beep ripped through the house—an alarm system that we had triggered.
“We have to go,” Dominic shouted from the back door, and Porter finally agreed.
We raced out of the house and back to the van, Porter and me giggling, Dominic looking constipated. He cranked it into drive and we peeled out down the street, but at the stop sign, Dominic didn’t turn toward the highway. He looped back into the neighborhood.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“One more stop. Can’t miss this one.”
I knew where we were going—the Abbington house.
Dominic weaved the van through the neighborhood and eventually turned off on the small street the Abbingtons had lived on. They hadn’t been rich by any means, but they had somehow ended up as the only house on this little lane due to zoning around the river and some rare bird that had moved into the trees along the bank in this particular bend. I remembered attending a town hall meeting about it with my parents; it had been only a few days after New Years, I’m not sure which one. Abel had killed a young woman that New Year’s Eve. She was wearing a sparkly silver dress. I thought it was so pretty,but she was clearly freezing, waiting on the corner for a cab. My father offered her a ride—an attractive, smiling man with his little girl in the passenger seat—nothing an after-school special ever warned about. He snapped her neck and we left her body behind a college dining hall among the trash, twenty thousand free suspects.
All the way home, my father had told me how he’d saved her from an awful fate, how he’d been merciful in giving her a painless death when he’d snapped her neck. He had received a message, a sign that he should kill her—a sign that I could now understand was just opportunity. A vulnerable woman alone who could not fathom that a man would do something bad to her in front of his child.
“Abel’s final crime…” Dominic announced as the house came into view. “And the one that got him caught—the murder of four members of the Abbington family. It wasn’t like his other murders. He knew the victims. Cops searched his house and found evidence everywhere. He was arrested within days.”
“Four people?” Porter asked as I stared out the window reminiscing.
“Yes, the parents, Phillip and Caroline. Their teenage son, Blake, and ten-year-old Cody.”
“Who’s the little girl?” Porter asked, studying the family portrait in the back of the packet, a portrait where the whole family had managed to look at the camera and smile.
“That’s Elyse Abbington. She wasn’t home.”
“Lucky,” said Porter.
“I don’t know if she’d agree with you,” argued Dominic. “Survivor guilt is real, man. There it is.” He pointed across Porter’s chest.
There it was, all right. It was abandoned, completely run-down, like I’d thought my house would be. I wondered if the rare birds might have taken up residence inside.
“Are you gonna stop?” asked Porter.
“Not a chance.” Dominic hit the automatic lock button and Porter watched the latch on his own door click.
“Come on. Obviously no one is living in there,” Porter protested.
Dominic slowed the van enough for us to get a good look but refused to stop. “Elyse Abbington still owns it. It was held in trust until she turned eighteen. She refuses to sell it, but refuses to do any maintenance. I think she likes watching it rot.”
“I can’t even see the backyard,” Porter complained. “It says right here”—he tapped on the page—“Cody Abbington was killed in the backyard.”
“Not happening.” Dominic laughed and Porter flung the packet onto the dashboard in protest.
Cody Abbington was such a little asshole. It’s bad karma to call a dead kid an asshole, but I was a kid too and he made my life miserable. Whenever we were alone, he would act like my best friend and then at school he would call me names and throw things at me to make the other kids laugh. When someone has serial killer parents, you shouldn’t toy with their emotions like that.
