School Girl

by Dan Ames

  School Girl

  Garbage Collector #3

  Dan Ames

  SCHOOL GIRL © 2016 Dan Ames. All rights reserved

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. The ebook contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, or stored in or introduced into an information storage and retrieval system in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This ebook is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Foreword

  SCHOOL GIRL

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  About the Author

  Also by Dan Ames

  Foreword

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  SCHOOL GIRL

  (The Garbage Collector #3)

  by

  * * *

  Dan Ames

  “Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.”

  –Marquis De Sade

  1

  The schoolhouse had been built in the early 1900s when the sawmill, and thus the town, had been booming. Eagle River, Michigan was the first community in the area to boast their own school and it was a point of civic pride.

  It was a single story affair, painted bright red with a short staircase leading to the wide double doors. The roof was steeply pitched and featured a cupola with a big brass bell. All of the lumber had been donated by the Prell family, owners of the sawmill and the de facto leaders of the town.

  Big Bill Prell originally asked to have the school named after him but when enough protests had been lodged against the idea, quietly and anonymously because no one was foolish enough to get on the bad side of Big Bill, he dropped the request.

  For years the schoolhouse served the small community with distinction. Several generations were taught how to read, write and perform arithmetic. There were many teachers over the years, good and bad, but in the end, Eagle River’s educational level was raised considerably by the tiny building at the edge of town.

  However, times changed as they always do and a new, better sawmill in a neighboring town was built that lured most of the business away from Eagle River. Once the money left town most of its inhabitants soon followed. And since there weren’t enough children left to justify the salary of a teacher, the headmaster was let go and the school went into permanent recess.

  Sometime before 1950, the school was boarded up.

  Being in northern Michigan, which was home to frequent hellish winters, and because of the natural laws of an abandoned property in a rural area, the schoolhouse became obscured with tall grass, trash maples and scattered pine trees.

  The paint peeled, the roof partially caved in and the floor buckled.

  No one cared.

  No one even noticed, save for the occasional lost teenage couple looking for a quiet, private place to unleash their burgeoning lust.

  It wasn’t until nearly seventy-five years later that a couple looking for a retirement cottage stumbled upon the abandoned property. Having been built in an era where quality mattered, the bones of the structure were still good. The elements had done some serious damage, no doubt, but the frame was solid, the cupola was still there and even the brass bell had managed to stick around. It had fallen from its hanging apparatus and lodged itself in between exposed rafters of the roof as if it had ducked back inside the school to protect itself from the harsh weather.

  The couple who had purchased the old school were from downstate Michigan and they were thrilled to have acquired the property for a mere five thousand dollars. Once theirs, they immediately decided to move the whole structure to a parcel they had purchased on the shore of a nearby lake. The plan was to refurbish it into a quaint, lakeside cottage.

  The cost to move the old schoolhouse would be approximately twenty thousand dollars. Even with the expense and the remodel, the couple considered it a bargain. Plus, they would have the pleasure of living in something with a unique history.

  When spring came around and the time for the actual relocation of the schoolhouse arrived, the couple was excited and the specialty construction/engineering company hired to do the job began in earnest.

  After extensive planning and maneuvering, eventually long poles were inserted from front to back and side to side using hydraulic jacks and the structure was delicately lifted away from its foundation.

  This was the most difficult and complex aspect of the entire operation. After all, if the wood frame was going to buckle and collapse, this would be the time for it to happen.

  The new owners of the schoolhouse were relieved to see the structure remain intact, save for a small section of the floor at the rear of the building that collapsed inward, spilling its contents onto the ground below.

  At first, the moving company’s foreman thought it was an old pile of rags. Soon, he was joined by the men who had operated the jacks. They shouted and then the foreman grabbed frantically for his cell phone as the owners approached from their vantage point. A reporter sent to cover the story for the local newspaper was also there and she rushed up to see what the commotion was all about.

  When the new owners saw what had fallen to the ground, the husband put his arm around his wife and she put her hands to her mouth to stifle a scream of shock and horror.

  The body of a young girl, twisted and broken, was sprawled on the ground before them.

  The husband was shocked by two things. One, the sight of a dead body had made him nearly sick to his stomach. But through the dread, he realized he was equally shocked by the fact that the body wasn’t a skeleton. He had initially thought maybe the remains were from a grave that had been disturbed by the lifting of the old schoolhouse.

  But the dead girl wasn’t a seventy-five-year-old skeleton.

  He didn’t determine this by any forensic knowledge.

  It was that he had spotted, still clutched in her bloody, lifeless hand, a cell phone.

  2

  Hate is not too strong of a word.

  In fact, it’s often not strong enough.

  To accurately describe the amount of anger that was once inside me would need a word twenty times stronger than hate.

  But that was when I was very young. And growing up I learned that a red-hot fury was far less beneficial than a cool detachment, especially when exacting punishment and revenge. Especially if it meant being able to turn a profit.

/>   In fact, it was one of the great fortunes of my life that I was able to find a way to exorcise the turmoil of my youth and turn it into a profession.

  I’m known as the Garbage Collector and I make a living tracking down evil, catching it and when necessary, delivering vengeance upon it.

  Unfortunately for my adversaries, the process of channeling my nature has resulted in extreme acts of violence. In fact, the severity of my disposition often results in direct relation to the intensity of the violence enacted.

  However, as I stated, I’m no longer angry.

  But I am, occasionally, violent in a remarkably dispassionate manner.

  Granted, there is no mention of violence or anger in my name. It simply describes a man and the job or service he provides to the world at large.

  Not surprisingly, I live on an island, both literal and figurative. It’s near the very well-known chunk of land called Drummond Island, located just above the lower peninsula of Michigan and just below Canada, in the middle of Lake Huron.

  It’s not easy to get ahold of me. Again, not a big surprise.

  So when my cell phone rang with an unknown number, I knew it was a client.

  No one ever called me if they didn’t need to.

  3

  “Please come in, Mr.─” the woman said.

  I nodded. “Ma’am.” I didn’t bother to complete her sentence for her. Names were meaningless in my line of work.

  The man showed up next. He was older than me by at least a decade. He was ex-military. I knew it the moment I spotted him. His background was probably how he had been able to find me.

  “I’m Paul, and this is my wife, Cathy,” he said.

  They had a little house, on a little street, in a little town in northern Michigan. I’d caught a ferry back to the mainland, along with my four-wheel drive SUV.

  The town was down the coast a bit, away from the touristy part of Mackinac City along a stretch of coast that was mostly home to modest houses built decades ago.

  It wasn’t the kind of place that attracted the wealthy people from Detroit or Chicago. There weren’t any cute shops or trendy coffee places around. Just a greasy spoon and a supper club or two that served fried fish every day of the week.

  Paul led me into their living room. The carpet was thick and a weird shade of brown. They had a couch and a big recliner that faced a television that had to be at least twenty years old. They sat on the couch, which left me no choice but to sit on the recliner. I was able to swivel it away from the television so I could face them.

  It gave me a chance to better study the man. He had a weathered face and he was thick across the shoulders. But he walked with a limp and I now saw the plastic above his left sock that told me he had a prosthetic leg.

  I did the math in my head. Probably Afghanistan or Iraq. A land mine, maybe.

  “I was looking for a certain kind of guy,” he said.

  “You were recommended,” Cathy added. She was a solid woman, with an attractive face and caring eyes.

  “Highly,” Paul nodded.

  “When you say a certain kind of man,” I said. “I assume you have a certain kind of job.”

  He pulled out a photograph showing two beautiful teenaged girls.

  “Casey and Kelsey Bennett,” he said.

  “They’re twins,” Cathy added.

  “They both went missing nearly a year ago," Paul added.

  I vaguely remembered hearing something about a pair of sisters who’d gone missing.

  "Well they found Kelsey two days ago," Cathy said. “She was murdered.”

  I had heard about that.

  "They found her body hidden beneath an old schoolhouse,” Paul said, his voice barely under control. A single tear made its appearance on Cathy’s face as it ran down her cheek. “When they went to move the old schoolhouse to a new location, Kelsey fell out of the floor onto the ground."

  "I'm sorry," I said.

  "She was such a great girl," Cathy said.

  I hadn't yet asked what their relationship was and Paul must've seen it in my face.

  “They were our nieces.”

  "My sister was their mother,” Cathy said, her voice quavering. “She was divorced. The husband is long gone out in California somewhere doing drugs and will probably be dead pretty soon too. If he isn’t already."

  There was an unspoken message sent and again Paul read my mind.

  "Cathy’s sister passed away,” he said.

  “She was long gone before the girls were abducted. She was an addict,” Cathy said. She seemed to finish off the information that the man could only start. “And she always struggled with depression. It was an accidental overdose. But it felt like suicide. It felt like she just gave up."

  I had them give me more details but I knew that most of the information would come from looking at the old crime reports in the newspaper and I would have to see if I knew anyone on the local police force. Michigan is actually a very small community in terms of friendships and relationships.

  “Casey is still out there somewhere,” Paul said. “We want you to find her. And if you do, that means you’ll find the bastard who killed Kelsey.”

  "What do you charge?" Cathy said.

  I explained my rates and we came to an agreement so I asked for pictures of the girls. I told them that I would get back to them within a few days with an update.

  Paul followed me out to my vehicle.

  "I hired you for a reason," he said. He glanced over his shoulder back at the house to make sure his wife wasn't following him or that she could hear him. "I'm not so concerned about justice in the sense of the court system," he said.

  "I'm not a contract killer," I said. That was sort of true and it was sort of not true because in my earlier days before I knew better and before I had a healthy respect for the law I may have done a job or two like that if I felt the people deserved it.

  I looked him directly in the eye. "Having said that it's impossible to predict what will happen. If I find her and if there's somebody who will die to keep her…”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  He nodded, satisfied with my answer. I got into the SUV and drove away.

  I had a good idea where to start.

  4

  When I rolled into Eagle River, I knew it was small. Because Eagle River wasn’t really a town. It was an intersection.

  Where Old Highway 254 met Highway 73 was a collection of a post office, a mini mart and a supper club.

  I stopped into the post office and an older lady with blue hair, orange glasses and a sherbet colored blouse looked up at me, openly surprised by the presence of a face she didn’t recognize.

  “Hello,” I said. “Would you happen to know what law enforcement oversees Eagle River?”

  She squinted at me. “This about that girl they found up at the old schoolhouse?”

  “Is there a constable, or is it the police department from up in Grande Isle?”

  “Grande Isle, sir,” she said. For some reason, I sensed a small-town unfriendliness. It could have had to do with her job, who she was as a person, or the result of too many years spent in Eagle River.

  I got back into the SUV and drove down to where the body had been found. I had plugged in the address from the newspaper stories I’d read about the girl.

  Along the way, I studied the terrain. It was flat, with only the occasional hill. Most of the surrounding land was a mixture of farm and forest. There were abandoned homes, collapsed barns and long aluminum sheds that could have been residential or not. It was hard to tell.

  The sky was blue, the sun warm, and the road empty. I passed a dead porcupine and was tempted to get out and study it, never having seen one up close.

  But I had work to do.

  Eventually, I came to the sight of the old schoolhouse, still jacked up on poles attached to heavy machinery. The project to move the school had been put temporarily on hold. Probably until it was released by the police and crime scene technicians.
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br />   A part of me wondered about the quality of the team assigned to the task. Probably unfair and a bias against small town law enforcement. But still, I wondered how much budget they had for crime scene analysis equipment. My guess was the amount probably matched about what I had in my wallet.

  I parked the SUV, got out and looked around. There was no one here. I ducked underneath the crime scene tape. I knew that the girl had been found at the back of the structure.

  I walked around, noticed more tape attached to stakes that outlined an area roughly ten feet by ten feet.

  It looked like a grave, which is what it had been.

  An eagle flew overhead and its shadow floated across the hole in the ground from which they’d pulled the dead body of Kelsey Bennett.

  The broken boards had been pushed to the side, and I could see the opening where the floor had given way. From the site of the body’s location, I walked back around the school, peering into the windows as I went.

  Working my way outward, I searched the perimeter of the location. There were a few pop cans here and there, which made me wonder why they hadn’t been tagged and bagged. I worked my way outward, thinking that perhaps my prejudicial attitude toward the local cops had been justified. I found an empty trash bag and an empty half-pint bottle of schnapps. Peppermint. A favorite of high school kids since they were easy to shoplift. And girls liked the peppermint, if my distant memories were correct.