by Tarisa Marie
Tainted Crimson
By Tarisa Marie
Published by Tarisa Marie
© Tarisa Marie – 2015
The purchaser of this book is subject to the condition that he/she shall in no way resell it, nor any part of it, nor make copies of it to distribute freely.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.
Table of Contents
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
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Fourteen years ago, when I was only four years old, I was at a park in downtown Denver, Colorado, when I watched my mother get murdered. Every Sunday after church, she would take me to play at this park in particular, because it was her favorite park in the entire city of Denver. She loved it because of its many trees, but she also loved it because of its solitude. It was in a small suburban area out of the way of the city and so one would think that it would be fairly safe.
Once, I remember her explaining to me that it reminded her of her hometown in rural Georgia, because it made her feel like she was back in the country, far from the busy hustle and bustle of the city. I knew she missed the country, but my father had always insisted that we live in Denver. I have no idea why, and I’m not sure that my mother ever really did either. At the time, I didn’t really understand what my mother meant by living in the ‘country’ because I’d always lived in the city. I’d never left Denver, and at four years old, the only ‘country’ I knew of was the United States and that didn’t make sense, because I knew that we did in fact already live in the United States.
And so, that Sunday afternoon began like every other. Upon arriving, I’d jumped off of my brand new bicycle, that I’d gotten for my birthday the week prior, and immediately rushed to the swing set like I did on every Sunday afternoon. The swings were my favorite park attraction both because they made me feel like I was flying, and because my mother would push me while humming my favorite tune, the one she also hummed to me every morning at breakfast and every night before bed. Now, years later, I can neither recall its melody nor its name. I only remember that I loved it, it made me feel safe and warm inside.
I leaped up onto my favorite swing, the baby blue one, and my mother pushed me, while humming the elegant tune to herself. While swinging, I imagined being a bird, flying freely without a care in the world and soaring around the world, looking down at all of the tiny people below. It was both exhilarating and relaxing.
After a few minutes on the swings, I noticed that there was a young black-haired boy about my age a couple of swings down from me swinging all by himself. I couldn’t help but wonder why, why he was alone. Where were his parents? He looked sad, almost in tears, and I remember wondering if he was lost or if one of the other kids in the park had been picking on him. I wondered if his parents had forgotten him there, alone in the park, and if he was scared because he didn’t know what to do.
After a long moment of watching him from the corner of my eye, I urgently asked my mother to let me down off of the swing and I pranced over to the boy and gave him a big bear hug, wrapping my arms around him tightly and asking him if he’d like me to push him on the merry-go-round. At first he tensed as if ready to fight me off, but soon he relaxed and his brilliant brown eyes met mine with just a hint of what I can only describe as hope.
We were quick to be friends. We spent the next two hours rolling around in the sandbox and racing down the matching, side-by-side yellow slides.
I’m sure that the only reason that my mother let me stay so long that afternoon was because the boy’s parents were nowhere to be seen. All afternoon, we’d watched kids and their parents come and go, but no one came for the boy. It eventually got dark and the park emptied out quickly. It was past most children’s bedtimes and I knew that by this hour I was normally tucked into my bed.
My mother asked the boy, whose name I learnt was Daymon, numerous times if he knew where his parents were. Each time, he replied with a shrug and continued playing with me in the sand. He wouldn’t speak in front of my mom and he rarely said much to me either. I didn’t mind, I wasn’t a very talkative kid. I was used to all of the other kids my age talking over me because I was extremely shy, so it was nice to have a friend that let me get a word in for once.
My mother used the payphone in the park to call the police and report the little boy’s presence to someone that could be of some aide. While she was on the phone, her back to us, the boy grabbed my hand and quickly led me under the play equipment.
He pressed his lips to my ear and whispered, “be quiet. Whisper like me.”
“Why?” I asked him, wondering what game we were playing now.
“Look.” He pointed through some trees at an elderly man leaning against a tree trunk and staring towards the park, directly at the two of us.
“Is that your grandpa? Do you have to leave?” I asked him sadly. I didn’t want him to go. What if I never saw him again?
“No, that guy is the guy that hurt my parents yesterday,” he admitted terrified. It was the longest group of words I’d heard him string together since meeting him.
“What did he do to them? Did they get in a fight?” I asked him, confused.
“Yes and he killed them. Ariella, he killed them and I watched him do it. He’s a murderer,” the young boy answered, starting to cry.
My hart hammered in my chest at his words. Was this another game, or was he being serious? It would explain why he was here in this park alone without any supervision, but being only four years old, I couldn’t wrap my mind around what he told me. I mean murder, did that stuff really happen in real life? Sure I knew what the word meant from other kids at my play school but were there really people out there that were that terrible?
“We have to tell my mom,” I whispered back to him.
He shook his head furiously.
“You can’t, she can’t help,” he muttered and glanced impatiently at my mom who was still on the phone.
“Yes she can, we have to tell an adult so that they can catch him and put him in jail,” I insisted, squeezing his hand.
“You don’t get it, Ariella, you can’t understand because your mom is just a mom. She can’t help me. The man will only hurt her too,” he sniffled and his breathing quickened as if he was about to hyperventilate. “Wh-where is your dad?” he demanded.
“I don’t know, at home,” I guessed, a little confused by the comment about my mom. My mom wasn’t just a mom. She was amazing. She was like superman. I wanted to tell him that but I felt like I didn’t want to make the boy more agitated than he already was, so I ignored the snide comment.
“You have to get him. He can help,” he whispered breathlessly and I looked up at the man. To my agitation, he was slowly walking closer to us. My heart started pounding harder. If he killed Daymon’s parents, would he kill us too?
Soon the man was only feet away from us. My brain screamed to get up and run or scream for my mom but my body wouldn’t move. I was in shock. I was terrified.
“Oh hello, sir,” my mother greeted him, hanging up the phone. “Are you h
is father?” she asked hopefully.
“Grandfather,” he corrected with a smile, his voice rough with age.
“Oh, good. I thought he was maybe lost, I just got off of the phone with the police. I’ll have to call them back and reassure them that he’s alright.”
“This is not my grandpa! My grandpa isn’t even alive! This guy, this guy is the guy that killed my mom and my dad last night!” the boy shouted erratically to my mother and now gushing tears. He grabbed my hand and quickly jumped up from the ground, running out from under the park equipment and into the trees while towing me behind him. The tug on my arm snapped me out of my state of shock and I bolted after him. I could barely keep up to him, he was a much faster runner than I was.
My mother’s face wore a look of disdain as she glanced from us to the man. It was a look of disbelief. She clearly didn’t believe the boy and probably assumed that the boy was just saying anything so he didn’t have to go home. He was a toddler after all.
I took a glance behind me just as my mother crumpled to the ground, her hands clamped to her ears as if something was suddenly incredibly loud.
Then she screamed as if whatever it was, was so loud that she couldn’t bear it. I listened but couldn’t hear anything except the sound of my own heartbeat thudding in my ears. Dark red streaks ran down her flushed pink cheeks and fell to sand below. Then after a mere moment, her body slumped to the ground and her screams vanished completely. She laid there, unmoving.
“Mom!” I cried out as loud as I possibly could. She didn’t move.
“Shh! Yelling is only going to get us hurt like her! Run, Ariella!” Daymon pleaded and tugged hard on my arm.
I gathered myself, pushing back my tears like my father had always taught me. He’s always taught me that crying was for the weak and I never truly understood that until that moment. If I started crying, it would hold me up, the crying would make me an easier target than I already was, and so I picked up my pace earning a sigh of relief from Daymon as he continued to pull me forward.
“Hurry!” he shouted frantically. “Where do you live?” he asked. “Do you know how to get there? Is it far?”
“No. I-I don’t know where it is,” I admitted sheepishly.
The boy’s shoulders slumped. “We can’t just keep running. He’ll just catch us. We aren’t fast enough,” he realized, though I didn’t agree. He was just an old man. Then Daymon threw us into an outhouse on the outskirts of the park and slammed the door shut. “Don’t make a noise. Not even a small one, got it?” he asked and I nodded.
It was quiet for only a few seconds before the outhouse door flew open and the old man stepped in, grabbing me by the throat and throwing me out onto the hard gravel outside of the small building, scraping both my hands and knees. I cried out in pain and the man kicked me hard in the ribs sending me back a few more feet. He was strong for an old man, most grandpas I knew could barely even walk. I began sobbing, dropping the façade I was grasping and letting the tears out. That was all the pain, confusion, and fright I could handle.
The bad man then turned to my new friend, and put his large hand on top of his head. The boy began screaming in pain like my mother had even though, to me, it didn’t look like anything was really happening to him.
Then suddenly my father was behind the man. To this day, I don’t know how he found us. Maybe he got worried that my mom and I weren't home yet and he came to look for us. I don’t know. But how he got there doesn’t matter, that he got there is all that matters.
All I remember after that is waking up hours later at home on the couch, my father sobbing. I’d never seen him cry before and it scared me to death. He was always the tough one in the family. It scared me even more than the entire incident at the park had because if he was crying, then the world had to be ending or something equivalent to that anyways.
“Daddy?” I asked him carefully, moving to sit next to him. “Are you okay?” I held in my tears with all of my might trying to show him how strong I was. “Don’t cry, daddy. Crying only makes you weak,” I told him and used my sleeve to wipe away his tears.
“Oh, Ari,” he mumbled, using my nickname. “Thank god you’re okay,” he whimpered, while removing my now tear-dampened sleeve from his face. “Ari, it is okay to cry. Sometimes. But only for a little while. While it’s safe to.”
I didn’t understand what he meant by that but I didn’t say anything. I just stared up at him and climbed onto his lap.
I was smart for my age and I knew something was up. There was something bad that he was going to tell me. I just knew it. My dad wasn’t just sad because his favorite football team lost their game or he fell down and hurt his elbow. I knew that the only thing that could possibly make him this sad, sad enough to cry, was if something happened to me or my mom. I was wrong before, even if the world was ending, my father wouldn’t cry about it. He would do something about it, not waste his time with tears that wouldn’t help a soul. Whatever he was crying about was something that could not be undone. Something that couldn’t be fixed or helped.
“Where’s mom?” I asked him slowly, not ready to hear the answer. I think a part of me already knew what his answer would be. I braced myself, ready to hold back that blast of emotion that would soon hit me like a freight train.
He was quiet for a moment before saying, “she’s gone, Ariella. It’s just you and me now.”
“What?” I asked, tears filling my eyes. Only, I wasn’t confused by the question, I didn’t need any clarification, I just hoped that somehow I’d misinterpreted his words.
“She’s in heaven now, sweetheart,” he answered and kissed the top of my head. “It’s okay to cry now. Get the tears out so now we can be strong again tomorrow. Sometimes holding them in is as big of a weakness as letting them go. We must mourn now so we can be strong later.”
We were quiet for a long time. My father’s sobs eventually quieting as he held me, but I wasn’t as strong as him and my own lasted far longer.
“What about my new friend Daymon? He’s okay right?” I demanded through sobs, suddenly remembering the last thing that I saw at the park.
“I don’t know,” he answered honestly and wiped some of my tears away with his baggy t-shirt.
“But that man is going to jail, right?” I asked him, still sobbing.
He didn’t answer me and I didn’t push because I ultimately did not care much about that old man right then, I was more concerned for my friend and devastated by my mother’s death.
Time passed, days, months, years. Neither of us talked about the park incident after that day. Dad easily could’ve lied about Daymon and said that he’d made it home safely that day but he didn’t because he knew that I could handle the truth. He knew it would make me stronger. That’s what my father was and is all about.
He’s always raised me to be strong, right from day one, the day I was born. Not just mentally, but physically. Shortly after my mother passed away he began teaching me self-defense skills which later turned into an array of different martial arts training. I loved it at first. I loved that if there was ever another time that I or someone I loved was in danger, I might actually be able to do something other than hide in an outhouse and pray for my life. But as the years passed, I became bored of it. The memories of why I needed these lessons began fading. I mean, I still remember that day in the park but it eventually began to seem more and more like a dream than a memory. The memory is blurry, seen through a child’s eyes. The time finally came years ago when I couldn’t remember what my mother’s face even looked like and for some reason my father got rid of all of our pictures of her, I couldn’t find even one anywhere. It’s like she never existed. We literally haven’t talked about her once since she died. Part of me even wonders if I dreamt up that day in the park. Did it even really happen? The only thing that tells me it did is the scar on my left knee cap where the old man pushed me down onto the gravel and I had to get stitches.
I also never mentioned the boy again, alth
ough growing up, I always wondered what happened to him. Is he still alive somewhere? And what about that old man? What did he do to my mom? How did he do it? Who was he? The older I get and look back, the more questions I find myself having, but thankfully ever since that day, my life has been normal, or as normal as it possibly could be anyway.
I mean besides not being allowed to cry and having to take fighting lessons from my father since I was four, my life has been almost too normal. Boring, really.
You might ask why I’ve never brought up my mother’s death or the boy or the incident in the park to my father since that day, well, I’m not sure actually. Believe me, there have been tons of times while growing up that I wanted so badly to ask my father about it, but when I tried, nothing would come out of my mouth. I’m not sure if it was because I couldn’t ever find the words, or if something else was stopping me from talking about it out loud, but I just can’t bring myself to talk about it.
Chapter 2
Tonight is the night of my senior prom and it also just happens to be my eighteenth birthday. Thing is, I hate dresses, makeup, hairspray, heels, and dancing. So you could say I’m a bit of a tomboy, but thankfully I at least have a date. His name is Nathan Walters, he’s just a guy I met last week at a party, no one terribly important like my boyfriend or anything. We hadn’t even really been talking before he asked me. He just came up to me at the party and asked if I had date for prom yet. Here I had been stressing for the weeks leading up to prom thinking I wouldn’t have a date because no one would ask me and then this random guy just asks me out of the blue. Anyways, he’s no football quarterback or hockey captain, but he’s a guy and it beats going alone to my prom.
My friend Mindy stands behind me fiddling with my hair as I sit in front of a full length mirror in my room. She goes to a different school than I do so she isn’t allowed to attend my prom and her’s isn’t for another week so she’s offered to do my hair.
“So is he cute?” she asks me curiously, knocking me out of my daze.
