Her father wouldn’t be happy about the waste of electricity. He’d go on some tangent about who paid the bills and clothed her and put a roof over her head and all that nonsense, and then he’d call her names and maybe spank her. He never hit her the way he hit her mother, but he did lots of spanking, and it always hurt, and it was always completely humiliating.
So, she went out to turn out the light.
Except her father was out in the shed.
And so was Heather.
What was left of Heather.
Her father was raping Heather’s corpse. Siobhan could tell that Heather was dead because her throat had been cut. She’d been stabbed multiple times, and she was lifeless underneath Siobhan’s father’s movements.
Siobhan ran into the shed, yelling at her father, calling him names. She didn’t know why she did it.
It didn’t make any sense. She was afraid of him, and she should have been running and hiding and pretending she’d never seen what she’d seen.
But…
It wasn’t like that, because suddenly, she had power over him. He had a secret, and Siobhan knew it, and that made her feel big for once. This man had always made her feel small. He’d made her feel like an object, a thing. He’d used her like she didn’t matter, and it had crushed her. And now, for once in her life, she had something she could hold over him.
Her father was startled. He turned to her, pulling up his pants, fumbling with his belt, and he was too stunned to try to stop her.
She had a moment.
One moment. She made the most of it.
Her father kept tools in the shed. There was a workbench made of plywood. That was where Heather was lying. On the wall, there was a pegboard and there were various things hanging on it. Hammers and screwdrivers and wrenches and a pair of garden shears.
That was what she grabbed. The shears. One hand on each handle, the blades pointing toward her father like a divining rod.
“Siobhan, what are you doing?” he said.
She drove the shears into his stomach.
He grunted. He fell backwards.
And then she ran. Sanity seemed to descend on her, and she realized what she’d done, and she took off. She banged out of the shed and out into their yard.
She ran and ran. The yard was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, but she climbed that to get into the neighboring field, a pasture field for cows that the neighbor owned. The grass was tall, even though it was winter. It was dead and dry, but tall. She moved into the darkness and crouched in the grass.
Her father came looking for her.
He wasn’t dead.
Siobhan had learned, over the years, that you could stab a person an incredible amount of times and not kill them. It was the kind of stabbing you did, not the amount of stabbing, that would lead to certain death. The stabbing she’d done hadn’t been the killing kind.
And now she was hiding in the tall grass, in the darkness, and he was coming for her.
He wandered all around the yard, looking for her, talking to her.
In the still of the night, his voice carried over the field to her.
He told her about all the years of grabbing just one girl here and there. He was careful, he told her, always careful, because he didn’t want to get caught. But then, he said, she kept getting older. And she drove him out of his mind.
“Siobhan, Siobhan,” he said. “You’re supposed to be innocent. Sweet and innocent. Why can’t you ever be sweet and innocent?”
Siobhan cowered, hoping he wouldn’t find her. He was always telling her to be innocent and sweet, and she never got it right.
“My girl,” he called into the night. “You’re my little girl. But you’ve never been mine. No matter what I did to you. No matter how hard I tried to make you mine, you never quite were. And I needed to find something and make it mine. So, I took these girls. Three in one year. All because of you, you little bitch. I should have just taken you from the beginning. But, no, no. I said to myself that they’d find me if I killed anyone too close to me. Now, it turns out I have to kill you anyway.”
But he looked and looked all night, and he never found her. He was losing blood, and he was slow, and he got woozy. Eventually, he gave up and went into the house. He made Siobhan’s mother try to bandage him, and he made her promise not to call an ambulance, because he wouldn’t be able to explain things.
Siobhan stayed outside in the field, even though she was freezing, because she was too terrified to move.
Finally, it was morning. She crawled up the steps into the house.
“Siobhan,” said her mother when Siobhan came inside. “Where have you been?”
“Where is he?” said Siobhan. Her hands were like ice. She took off her gloves and rubbed them together over the radiator by the sink. “Where’s Dad?”
“He’s upstairs asleep,” said her mother. “I don’t think you should wake him up. He’s hurt really badly, and I’m worried about him. He’s bleeding so much.” Her mother put her fingers to her lips. “He doesn’t want me to, but I think we should call someone.”
“No,” said Siobhan, and she opened up a drawer in the kitchen and got out a knife.
“Siobhan?” said her mother.
Siobhan went past her mother and up the stairs to her father’s bedroom.
Her mother came after her. “Siobhan? Siobhan, what are you doing?”
Siobhan ignored her. She stalked into the bedroom and went around the side of the bed where her father was sleeping, lying on his back with his mouth open and snoring. Siobhan grabbed a hunk of his hair and lifted his head.
His eyes snapped open. “Why you little—”
But he didn’t get anything else out, because she put the knife to his throat and sliced his neck from ear to ear.
Blood spurted out, all over his shirt, all over the blankets on the bed.
“Siobhan!” said her mother, shocked.
Siobhan turned back to see the woman standing inside the door, her hand on her chest.
Siobhan looked back at her father, who was twitching in his death throes.
“What have you done?” said her mother in a barely-there voice.
Siobhan pointed the knife at her mother. “Should have done it a long time ago.” It felt good. Watching the life ebb out of him, standing over this man who had stolen so much from her, she felt large. She felt powerful. She had been small and pitiful and trampled on for so long, but now she was standing tall.
“Why?” gasped her mother.
Siobhan let out a disbelieving laugh. “You’re really asking me that?”
“He was your father,” said her mother, who was starting to cry. “My husband. I loved him. How could you do this?”
“You loved that thing?” Siobhan pointed the tip of her bloody knife at what was left of her father.
“He wasn’t perfect,” said her mother. “But who is?”
“He was far from perfect,” said Siobhan. “Go out and look in the shed if you don’t believe me.”
“Why?” said her mother. “What’s in the shed?”
Siobhan and her mother buried both Heather’s and her father’s bodies in the back yard. They stripped all the sheets off the mattress and cut it into pieces with her father’s chainsaw. Then they burned all the sheets and the pieces of the mattress in the trash bin.
That night, they drove her father’s truck to the airport and left it there, as if he’d gone off on another business trip.
They waited a week, and then they called the police and reported him missing.
No one ever found him. Not that anyone looked real hard, to be truthful.
Things were never the same between Siobhan and her mother. They never talked about what they had done, and they never talked about her father. Not once. Not at Christmas, not on Father’s Day. Never again. When the police came and asked questions, Siobhan’s mother protected her daughter. She didn’t give them any reason to suspect her. And yet, Siobhan knew that her mother was horrified
by her actions, and that she never trusted her daughter again.
When Siobhan graduated from high school, she didn’t have college plans. After the death of her father, she’d lost it a little. Instead of working ahead and getting all her homework done, she’d stopped doing homework. She did what she pleased and barely managed to graduate high school.
Her mother, however, didn’t want Siobhan in her house, so she made it clear Siobhan would have to leave.
Siobhan did.
Two months later, her mother was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. She left Siobhan a little money and some old jewelry, which Siobhan sold online for fast cash. When there was demand for more, Siobhan set about trying to figure out how to make jewelry. When she set her mind to something, she could always do it.
She tried to be happy. She did try. But there was always something out on the edge of her consciousness, some dark thing with a gaping set of razor sharp teeth, some shadow that had been born when she dragged the knife across her father’s skin. Or perhaps it had always been there. Perhaps it simply woke up. It stirred within her, stalking in the depths of her soul.
And it was always hungry.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Nash blinked at her. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“What?” said Siobhan.
“When your father was asleep, why didn’t you call the police? Hell, you could have called them after you killed him, and I doubt you would have gotten in trouble. The murders would have been solved, and closure would have been brought to Heather’s and Farrah’s and Ginger’s families. And—”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe that’s what I should have done. But at the time, I was exhausted and frightened and not thinking straight. My mother and I covered it up.”
Nash sighed. “I wish I could have recorded that, what you told me. Not that it would have mattered, I guess.” He looked down at the wound in his stomach. He still felt strange, more and more lightheaded. Tired…
He shut his eyes again.
“Nash,” she said, her voice urgent.
He didn’t bother to open his eyes. “Was this your plan?”
“No,” she said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“You wanted to kill me yourself, then?” he said. “You said you fantasized about doing it.”
Her lips on the bridge of his nose. “There’s not much chance of your not doing that podcast, is there? No matter what, you’ll expose me.”
He opened his eyes. She was close now, inches away from him. He was going to die here. He wouldn’t live to expose her. She’d see to that. No, she’d wait, let him bleed out. This was it. This was the end, and he was afraid.
She leaned in close. She picked up his arm and draped it over her shoulders and snuggled against him.
“Will you stay with me?” he whispered.
She kissed his cheek. “As long as I can.”
He wondered what she meant by that. Why would she have to leave? If she waited, he would die, and then she could clean up both his body and Carston’s and get away with no one being the wiser.
Of course, there was Zoe.
Zoe would know. Zoe might come after Siobhan.
Maybe he should tell Siobhan, tell her that she might not be safe.
He chuckled softly. He was worried about this woman and she was letting him die. Something was very, very wrong with him.
“What’s funny?” murmured Siobhan, her breath warm against his jaw.
“I should hate you,” he said.
“Please don’t,” she said, and she kissed his temple.
He shut his eyes again, drifting down into a soft, warm place. Siobhan was close, and he was touching her, and it reminded him of being in that room at the party at Pike’s place, the sweet wonder of kissing her for the first time.
No, this was nice.
If this had to be the end, then he could think of worse ways to go.
And then the darkness swallowed him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Nash coughed his way to consciousness, and every hacking cough sent pain radiating through him, pain that was concentrated in his stomach.
He coughed again, and he was on fire.
“Drink,” said a voice.
There was a cup at his lips, water spilling into his mouth. He gulped at it.
Swallowing hurt too.
He grunted, pushing the cup away, and opening his eyes.
Overhead fluorescent lights. Bright. A white ceiling, and a metal track with a blue curtain attached to it.
“Nash?”
He was in a hospital room. He blinked hard, grimacing. God, everything fucking hurt.
“Nash.” A female voice.
He blinked again. “Zoe?”
She smiled weakly at him. “Hey. How are you?”
He shook his head. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital,” she said. “Your ex called me.”
“My ex?” What was she talking about?
“Your baby mama,” said Zoe. “What’s her name? Tabitha? She seemed to think I was your girlfriend or something and would want to be here. I told her—again—that we were just colleagues, but whatever. Anyway, your parents are here too. Well, they were. They were waiting for you to wake up, but I told them I would watch over you for a while if they wanted to go and get some sleep—”
“Wait.” Nash cleared his throat and tried to sit up. “Just stop for a second. How did I get here?”
“There was an anonymous tip called in about a crime at a farmhouse. When the police got there, they found Carston’s dead body, and you upstairs.”
“Siobhan?”
“So, she was there?”
“She was.”
“She killed Carston, then.”
“Well, I pushed him out the window, but he stabbed me—”
“She didn’t stab you?”
“No.” He shook his head.
“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy for thinking that.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s absolutely insane.”
“As I’ve been saying,” said Zoe. “You should have turned her in when you had a chance.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess so. But she did save me. In the end, after all, she saved my life.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Zoe. “Apparently, it’s not as easy to die from a stab wound as people think.”
He chuckled. Laughing hurt. He coughed. That hurt.
Zoe winced. “You okay?”
“Don’t make me laugh,” he said.
* * *
“So,” Nash said into the microphone, “during the struggle, Carston went through a picture window, and he was injured in the fall.” This was the story that Nash had told everyone, from the police to Zoe. No one knew that he had purposefully shoved Carston. It was better all around if it was self-defense. Sometimes, he felt guilty for lying, but—oddly—he never felt guilty for his part in Carston’s death. “Siobhan finished him off, and then she ran. There are at least three police departments out there with warrants for her arrest, but… she remains at large.”
It was months later, and he’d been released from the hospital with a clean bill of health. Almost immediately, he’d begun recording episodes of his podcast about Siobhan Thorn, which had done very, very well, shattering all his notions of what doing well could be. Things were looking up for him.
He took a breath. “Siobhan cleaned out her bank accounts, except for a bit which she left for Charity Allen. She’s turned her Etsy business over to Charity, who’s still employing people in her town to make jewelry. Charity also got a deed to that house in the mail with her name on it. Additionally, a large chunk of money went missing from Edward Carston’s account. And coincidentally, a big cashier’s check showed up at the home of the Coopers, who were the one holdout not to take a bribe from Carston. It doesn’t make up for what happened to their little boy, of course, but they’re grateful
to whoever sent them the cash. Was it Siobhan? We can’t know for sure. It seems that she’s slipped away without a trace. But it probably won’t be easy for her to continue her crimes now, not with a spotlight shining on her and what she does.”
Another pause, then he lowered his voice. “That’s all I have to tell, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening. This is the final episode of The Feminine Touch podcast. I’m Nash Steven Wilt, signing off.” He leaned back, hitting the button to stop recording.
Zoe smiled at him from across the room. “That one was cleaner.” They were recording in Nash’s living room.
“I still think I should run through it again one more time,” he said. “Maybe in the morning, though. We can cut and splice from the four different takes, you think?”
She nodded. “Sounds good. There were a couple places where you stumbled over words, so we can cut those and put in some stuff from the other takes.”
“Great, we’ll tackle that later,” he said.
“Oh, I thought you wanted to record some stuff from our sponsors tonight.”
He shook his head. “Nah, I think tomorrow. Are we still doing well with that, though?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “You know, between the donations and the sponsor money, this will be the fourth week in a row that you’re pulling in more money than my podcast.”
He grinned. “Well, it’s good to beat comic books. And I want to offer you some money again.”
“This is an unpaid internship,” she said.
“Oh, come on, you’ve been working on this with me nonstop. It’s been like two full time jobs. Take the money.”
She shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”
“Take it,” he ordered.
She grinned. “Okay. But we’ll discuss how much later, all right?”
“All right,” he said. He took off his headphones and got up. He stretched.
“What are you getting into tonight?” she said.
“Not much,” he said. “I’m watching Ariel. She’s going to stay at my place. Tabitha’s going out with friends, I think. You want to stay? We’re going to eat pizza.”
The Feminine Touch Page 25
