The Devil's Lullaby

by Chris Scalise

  At 11:15, Autumn rushed inside and asked her mother, Marlene, to call Dakota’s mom and make sure everything was okay. But Mom just frowned. “Baby girl,” she said with a tear while gazing out the kitchen window of their double-wide mobile home. “She might not make it.”

  “Why?” Autumn asked, crestfallen.

  Mom gave Autumn a big bear hug and said, “Sweetie, some people are just funny.”

  Dakota never did arrive. The next week at school, Autumn learned that Dakota’s mother had driven by the house fully intending to drop off her daughter for the day. But upon learning that the “house” was actually located in a mobile home park near Fort Apache and Flamingo, she had turned the car around and declared that such places weren’t safe or suitable for children, and that Autumn’s parents were probably using drugs.

  “You can play with your friend whenever you want,” Dakota’s mother had supposedly said, “but at our house.”

  But from that point on, Dakota was uncomfortable around Autumn, and she avoided her at every turn. Word quickly spread around the school, and Autumn was branded with a nickname that would follow her and haunt her all through elementary school, middle school, and high school. She was known as Trailer Girl.

  None of it made sense to Autumn. At only five years old, she had no understanding of the class perceptions that distinguished her from many of her peers. Her modest home was located just outside of Summerlin, an affluent planned community where children’s parents typically earned more money in a single month than Autumn’s mother collected in a year. Though she lived just outside of Summerlin, Autumn’s proximity to the community required her to attend public schools with some of the most financially fortunate children in the Las Vegas area. And the children never let her forget it.

  For years, Autumn simply accepted her fate, enduring the taunts, the ridicule, and the isolation. She developed a hard outer shell, feigning indifference in the face of their contempt. They still frustrated her to no end, but they would not get the best of her. They would not defeat her. She promised herself that one day they would all need her, beg her for forgiveness. But forgiveness would not be granted.

  And then she learned to beat them at their own game. During her third month of seventh grade, as she was still lamenting the fact that she was at a new school with largely the same student body, she just happened to wander past the multipurpose room at a most fortuitous moment. A certain Tara Binford was smoking a certain forbidden herb with a certain Tre Johnson. At first, Autumn was mortified, wishing that she had chosen any other route to class. But her embarrassment was quelled when she saw the horror on Tara’s face.

  Tre dropped his joint and scurried off like a coward. Tara, though, stayed behind and pleaded in a desperate, subjugating manner with which Autumn was unfamiliar. Since third grade, Tara had made Autumn’s life miserable, and now she was practically on her knees begging for silence.

  “Hey,” Autumn muttered, “I don’t care what you do. Whatever. It’s your business.”

  But Tara was clearly unconvinced that Autumn would keep the secret.

  “Look,” Tara said, “if you swear you won’t tell anybody, I’ll give you twenty dollars a week until we graduate high school.”

  The more Autumn thought about it, the more it made sense. Tara was running for student council president. She was an active member of Campus Christians, and her father was the pastor of a small church in addition to being the CEO of a local software startup. She sang praise and worship music on the stage of her father’s church every Sunday, and she was also extremely affluent. Twenty dollars was probably chump change to her. Nevertheless, Autumn felt uncomfortable with the whole arrangement.

  “It’s fine,” Autumn said, trying to walk away.

  But Tara grabbed her shoulder. “And I swear I’ll never make fun of you again.”

  Autumn stopped. She didn’t understand what this power was, but she liked it. Tara Binford, the bitch who had once jokingly organized a “Get Autumn a Decent Pair of Shoes” telethon at their elementary school, was now begging her for mercy.

  “Okay, fine,” Autumn said, still confused by her own enjoyment. “Whatever. Then I won’t tell anyone.”

  For more than a year, Tara paid every Friday like clockwork, and she was true to her promise to never make fun of Autumn, at least to her face. At first, Autumn found it amusing. A twenty-dollar-a-week payment was quadruple the allowance she made from her mother, and it meant she could actually buy music and DVDs. Though it was awkward in the beginning, over time she came to depend on these weekly payouts.

  As they neared the end of the eighth-grade school year, though, Tara missed a payment, insisting that her father had cut off her sizable allowance after she came home smelling of marijuana.

  Autumn was incensed. “We had a deal!” she snapped at Tara one Friday after school. “Get me my fucking money by Monday morning, or you’re going to be sorry.”

  When Monday arrived, Tara avoided Autumn at all costs. Autumn was furious, and it was a type of fury that she had never known before. Her newfound power had been taken away from her, and she wasn’t about to simply accept it.

  On Tuesday, she cornered Tara in the locker room before Phys Ed. class and offered her one more chance to make up the payment, but Tara insisted that she just didn’t have the money. “I’ve been giving you money every week for like practically two years now,” Tara finally shouted at her. “It’s time to just, like, let it go. My dad already knows I smoke pot anyway.”

  But that wasn’t the deal they had made.

  “Fine,” Autumn said calmly. “If that’s what you think. It was nice knowing you, Tara.”

  It was an empty threat, at the time. But with each hour that passed, Autumn grew more and more obsessed with the betrayal and more and more determined to reclaim the power that had been robbed from her.

  That night, as she lay in her twenty-year-old twin bed in the trailer in which she had been born and raised, she tossed and turned uncontrollably, too angry to sleep. But what was the solution? If she told Tara’s parents that she had caught their daughter with marijuana almost two years earlier, the revelation would have little if any impact. After all, Tara’s carelessness had already led to the exposure of her weed habit. Autumn needed a better plan.

  The next morning, Autumn waited for her mother to leave for her job at Smith’s Food & Drug, and then she pulled herself out of bed—exhausted from less than two hours’ sleep—and prepared for school. She took a quick shower, made herself a slice of peanut butter toast, and gathered her homework. Then, without really thinking about it, she pulled one of her mother’s thrift-store vases from the cupboard and set it on the counter. She then took a large hammer from the junk drawer, smashed the glass vase into tiny pieces, and scooped the pieces into a small plastic sandwich bag.

  Humming the tune of Kelly Clarkson’s “Miss Independent,” Autumn placed the baggie in her backpack and headed off to catch the school bus. Her rage had been almost instantly replaced by a sense of excitement and anticipation. Her power had returned, and she hadn’t even enacted her revenge yet.

  During lunch that day, she found Tara sitting alone in the quad, waiting for her equally popular friends to return from the cafeteria line. Autumn had just purchased a burrito, though she hadn’t started eating just yet. She slowly approached Tara and asked if they could chat privately. Tara, visibly fed up, asked Autumn to leave.

  “I just need a few seconds,” Autumn said. “And then I’ll never bother you again. I swear.” She took a seat beside Tara on the blue, plastic bench.

  “You need to go away,” Tara declared. “Seriously. Move along, Trailer Girl. You are an obsessed freak, and if you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to tell the principal. I’ll tell the cops if I have to.”

  “Okay,” Autumn said with a smile. “I’m sorry for bothering you. It will never happen again.”

  “Make sure it doesn’t,” Tara shot back.

  As Autumn walked away, Tara shook he
r head and took a bite of her burrito. But it wasn’t her burrito. It looked like her burrito, and it had been purchased from the same lunchroom line as her burrito, but this particular burrito had been retrofitted with an additional ingredient: tiny shards of broken glass from an old thrift-store vase. Tara hadn’t even noticed Autumn’s clever and instantaneous sleight of hand, a trick which she had been practicing in her tiny bedroom.

  It took only seconds for Tara to start choking, and less than a minute for the first drops of blood to be coughed up onto the concrete. But by the time anyone noticed that Tara was in danger, Autumn was long gone. Tara was quickly taken to the hospital. Several hours later, she was pronounced dead. A lawsuit against the school would soon follow, and sales of cafeteria food would reach an all-time low. But Autumn was never suspected for a moment. Her first murder had gone off without a hitch.

  Still, Autumn was unable to appreciate the victory. She lamented the fact that Tara, in her final moments, had no idea that Autumn was responsible for her death in an act of righteous vengeance. What was the point of vengeance if you couldn’t look your victim right in the eyes and watch them suffer, reveling in their misery as they wept at the realization of their defeat at your hands? The anticlimactic murder would haunt her for years.

  And then there was the matter of her lost income. More than the money itself, she had enjoyed incredible satisfaction at being compensated, in a fearful and submissive manner, by someone who considered themselves to be her superior. She desperately wanted to feel that satisfaction again, but who would be her next victim?

  Nearly two years later, a new opportunity presented itself. Autumn, having just finished her sophomore year of high school, happened upon a Craigslist personals ad from an “affluent mature woman seeking female companionship.”

  Autumn exchanged several email messages with Carla, who turned out to be the 52-year-old widow of a former luxury hotel executive. Carla had been married to a man for more than twenty-five years and was now looking to explore something new.

  Autumn lied about her age, insisting that she was nineteen rather than fifteen, and the two engaged in several lengthy online video chats before the woman finally asked Autumn on a date.

  They met for dinner at Battista’s Hole in the Wall, a cozy Italian eatery located behind The Flamingo and Barbary Coast on Las Vegas Boulevard. Autumn wore heavy makeup in the hopes of masking her youth, and Carla wore heavy makeup in the hopes of masking her advancing age. Autumn possibly could have passed for seventeen, and Carla could have passed for forty-five, but neither of them discussed the age difference. Autumn manufactured stories about attending classes and parties at UNLV, and Carla told stories about her world travels.

  When the check was paid, Carla asked Autumn if she would be interested in coming to her home for a nightcap. Autumn happily obliged but explained that she would need a ride as her car was in the shop being repaired.

  Together they drove to Carla’s massive home in a gated Summerlin subdivision, and Autumn tasted wine for the first time. When Carla slipped away to use the bathroom, Autumn poured four crushed Valium pills into her wine, courtesy of Mom’s medicine cabinet.

  Carla quickly returned, and after about thirty minutes of banal chatter, she complained of feeling tired and woozy. “This is some seriously strong wine,” she said with a laugh.

  “Why don’t we go upstairs,” Autumn said. “You look like you need to lay down.”

  Carla agreed, and together they made their way to the bedroom.

  The house was filled with expensive antiques, fine art, and century-old books, but Autumn knew she wouldn’t be able to sell any of it. Not after what she intended to do tonight.

  When they reached the massive bedroom, Carla plopped down on the bed and said, “I just need a couple minutes to shake off this buzz.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Autumn said, standing over her. Less than a minute later, Carla was fast asleep.

  With her host passed out, Autumn proceeded to ransack the mansion in search of cash. She found sixty dollars in Carla’s purse, but nothing else. She did, however, find a large electronic safe in the bedroom closet. All she needed now was the code.

  Autumn made her way downstairs, grabbed Carla’s car keys, and drove ever-so-cautiously to the nearest gas station. If a cop were to pull her over and discover she had only a learner’s permit, the night could be ruined. So she took her time, stopped at the gas station, and purchased a red canister which she filled with unleaded gasoline. Then she stopped at another gas station across the street and purchased a box of matches. She finally stopped at a hardware store to purchase a hundred feet of rope before returning to Carla’s home, where the woman was still dead asleep.

  Using the rope, Autumn first tied Carla’s ankles together, starting just above the foot and wrapping the material all the way up to the knees. Then she placed Carla’s wrists over her chest and tied them together as if the rope were a straitjacket. She then tied up Carla’s midsection, fastening her arms tightly to her chest. She then wrapped an additional length of rope around the entire bed from top to bottom, holding Carla’s chest firmly in place. She did the same around Carla’s ankles, rendering any major movements impossible. Then, Autumn cut four final lengths of rope: two to tie her ankles to the bottom bed posts, and two to fasten her throat to the top bed posts.

  Each rope was secured just tightly enough to cause physical pain without fully cutting off Carla’s circulation. Autumn wasn’t sure if it would work, but she had been fantasizing about this technique and perfecting it in her dreams for months. Now she would finally get to put it into practice.

  Autumn ventured downstairs, turned on the massive flat-screen TV in the living room, and laughed at syndicated reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond while petting Carla’s Persian cat.

  When she heard the first scream about three hours later, she knew it was time for phase two. She picked up the matches and gas canister, trotted upstairs, and greeted her immobilized host.

  “Here’s how this is going to work,” Autumn said softly as the woman cried out. “Just tell me the code to the safe, and I’ll let you live.” She lifted the gas canister over the bed and poured gasoline across the woman’s face, chest, and legs. Autumn had no real concept of the science related to matches and gasoline, but she had seen Home Alone 2, and she knew that matches plus gas equaled fire.

  “Please, please please!” the woman cried out as Autumn held up the book of matches. “It’s four-six-one-two. Four-six-one-two! Oh, please, Jesus…”

  Autumn lowered the matches, returned to the walk-in closet, and entered the code. Sure enough, there was a massive treasure trove of cash and jewelry. But there would be time to collect her reward later.

  She retrieved a plastic folding chair and returned to Carla’s bedside. She then sat down and basked in the power she had over this rich woman. The cries and whimpers sounded like a choir of angels to her. It was glorious.

  “You’re going to choose how you die,” Autumn said. “You can lay here and think about your life and what a complete waste it was, and soon you’ll die from hunger and thirst. Or, if you scream or try to escape, you can die in a really painful fire. Those are your choices.”

  And so, for five-and-a-half days, Autumn sat beside her, relishing every tear, every plea, every prayer. When the whimpering stopped and the severe dehydration finally claimed the woman’s life, Autumn destroyed Carla’s cell phone and computers, collected the jewelry and nearly a hundred thousand dollars in cash, and returned home to her trailer.

  In later years, Autumn would come to cringe at the carelessness of that crime, but once again, she was never a suspect. There was no record of her DNA with which to link her, and there were no witnesses. Future murders would be carried out with much greater care and caution.

  Craigslist became Autumn’s favorite playground. She sought women seeking love, women seeking contractors, and men seeking “massage services.” Male victims were rare, though. She found women easi
er to subdue and more willing to put their full trust in her.

  The one thing all her victims had in common was excessive wealth. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, Autumn took eleven lives and collected nearly two million dollars. It was an addiction, and in every single instance, she gave her victim the same choice: Die quietly with dignity over the course of a few days, or scream and let the flames engulf you over the course of a few seconds. Two of her victims chose flames, but she tied their mouths and let them starve to death anyway. The gasoline was a nice intimidation tool, but fires were too messy and attracted too much attention.

  Shortly after her third murder, her mother found the massive stash of cash beneath her mattress and demanded to know where it came from. “Have you been whoring, you little bitch?”

  Autumn told her the whole truth, calmly and without fear or hesitation. Killing had become a sport to her, no different than volleyball or soccer. And she knew there was no way her mother would rat her out. On the contrary, it was kind of a relief that she could finally tell someone. Now, perhaps they could buy a real house and Autumn could spend some of her earnings on a nice car without having to explain where the cash had come from.

  “Mom, people in this town treat us like dirt,” Autumn proclaimed. “They call us trailer trash and mock us just because they got a few more breaks in life. So I’m just leveling the playing field a little bit. I’m going after rich, selfish people. And with that kind of money, you know they’ve done terrible things. So let’s make a better life. I’m doing this for us.”

  Mom cried for nearly an hour, and then she made Autumn promise that she would never do it again. Autumn promised, but they both knew it was a lie. Two more murders, and Mom would learn to look the other way. Two murders after that, Mom would start scouting possible victims for her baby girl. These people had it coming, and before long, Autumn and Marlene had their own two-story dream house in a gated part of Summerlin. The house was mere blocks from where Carla had taken her last breath.