by Gail Giles
Her touch on my wounds was gentle. “There, I think that’s all. The ones that I can see.”
I turned to face her. “Mom…”
“No more discussion. Right now we’re all too emotional. You are not leaving the house.”
“Mom…”
“Ames, be prepared. Your father and I are going to file statutory rape charges on Marc.”
“You can’t. He didn’t rape me. I wanted to.”
“That’s what we’ll talk about later. When he’s twenty-two and you’re fifteen and confused…” Mom took my chin in her hand. “Marc is a predator. You don’t understand that yet. Did you listen to what your father said? Did you hear about that girl’s pet?” I jerked my face away.
“Your father wants to go to the police tonight, but he’s practically incoherent, and I want to get a lawyer before we file charges.”
Mom left the bathroom and I stood a minute, alone, mind spinning. Dog? Fifteen bullet holes? Why would Earl lie about something like that? But Marc was all I had. I rubbed my face with both hands. Was he? A few minutes ago Mom had been… who had she been?
Whoever, whatever. I didn’t want Marc in prison because of me.
I called Marc.
“You have to get out of here,” I whispered.
“What did he do?”
“My parents are going to put you in jail for statutory rape. They’re going to talk to a lawyer tomorrow. You have to leave tonight.”
“What do you mean I have to leave tonight? Are you bailing on me? Nobody takes you away from me. It’s just us, remember?”
A deep shiver passed over me. Just us? Wasn’t Chrissy supposed to be part of this? I shook it off. I had to trust him. From the first hour, he knew me.
“I know,” I said. “This is happening too fast. You need to get out of here and then —”
“No. It’s plenty easy to take care of this right now.”
I heard loud banging. I clicked off the phone and ran out to find Dad nailing boards across my window. Mom sighed. “I know those boards aren’t going to keep you in your room. Your father is just venting.” She nodded toward the front door. “I’m not going to lock you in, but if you leave this house tonight, you simply will not be allowed back. Not ever.”
My mother and I stared each other down in silence.
“Ames, I sincerely believe you don’t want to go that far.”
“It has to be tonight,” Marc said when I called back. “They’ve pushed us into a corner. I’ll go to jail for years if they do this.”
“But it’s not rape, and…”
“Don’t be naive. Your parents aren’t rich now, but they know people. They know people who can make things happen. If your dad wants me in prison, that’s where I’m going to be. And the rape that happens there won’t be statutory.”
I froze. I wouldn’t just be abandoning Marc, I would be allowing my dad to destroy him.
How did I end up here?
“There’s no choice, is there, Ames? Do you want those people to keep doing this to you? To control your life to make it hell every single day? They messed up their own lives and want you to pay the price? Want me to go to prison for it? Make you live like a slave, never get to go to school, have a boyfriend, do anything but wash their clothes and cook their food while your dad gambles and your mother bitches?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You have the power to do something. Do something now. End this. Come with me. I’m the only one who truly loves you, who’ll take care of you. From the moment I met you, haven’t I always done that?”
“But we can’t…” I said.
“It will be easy. Plenty easy.”
“There’s no way my dad is going to sleep tonight. It won’t work.”
Marc revised the plan a little. Tomorrow night, not tonight. We hung up, and I stared sleeplessly at the white ceiling. It held no clues, no answers.
Marc was my hero. But he did mean to kill my parents. I didn’t have to do it. I didn’t even have to watch. He would kill them and we would run to Mexico. We could be there by the morning after.
Why hadn’t he mentioned Chrissy? He had made her a part of the plan, a part of “our family” when he talked about this before. Before it was real. Did that mean he would leave her in a house with dead bodies? Or would there be no witnesses?
I hated them.
Did they deserve to die?
They would put Marc in prison.
I would be alone in this hellhole… with them.
But… Mom had understood. Maybe we could start over.
Marc was going to kill my parents.
Maybe he wouldn’t.
Yes. He would.
What was he going to do about Chrissy?
Could I let him do this?
Could I?
It was past two o’clock when I got up. I went to Mom and Dad’s door and walked in.
“Mom, Dad.” I stopped. I wasn’t sure if I was going to sob or vomit.
“Ames, this is not the time —”
I rubbed my face with both hands, seeking composure. “Turn on a light. Please.”
Mom switched on her bedside lamp.
I waited, knowing that everything was going to be different now, but not what path the different would take. I closed my eyes. Just say it, I told myself. I kept them closed while I spoke.
“Marc is planning to kill you, both of you. And I think maybe Chrissy.”
I opened my eyes.
I thought Dad would yell or Mom would scream or cry, but we had all turned to salt. I don’t think anyone breathed.
“Explain,” Dad demanded. “All of it.”
I inhaled deeply. Exhaled. “Please? You won’t like what you hear. Can you not yell at me? Just listen until the end. This is hard.”
Then Mom did cry. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, Ames,” she whispered.
I clenched my fists. It poured out. I didn’t get mad or shout. I told them like Chrissy would, like a reporter, listing the betrayals, the hurts, telling them finally how scared I had been and how they hadn’t helped. How I had needed Marc, someone to make me feel safe. With his guns and his protectiveness. Now… I was in too deep. I didn’t want what he was offering and I didn’t know how to stop him.
“Ames,” Mom said, “Do I hear you saying that you wanted Marc to kill us?”
I looked at her. I had to tell the truth. To make them understand how much danger they were in. “Yes,” I said.
From the look on her face I may as well have shot her right then. I guess I got what I wanted. I had destroyed the Commander. It didn’t feel good.
Dad said nothing. He looked at Mom. “We have to get out of here. Right now. I know how desperate young men can be. I know.”
I closed my eyes and all my tensed muscles sagged. He believed me.
“You think he’d come in this house and kill us even if Ames tells him not to?” Mom said.
Dad looked at me. “I think if Ames tells him that —”
“He’ll kill us all,” I finished. “Because I abandoned him.” Then I told them about creeping the judge’s house. “My gut tells me that was practice. He wants to kill.”
Mom covered her mouth. “You’re right; we have to get out of here now. Tonight. Start packing the essentials.” She turned to Dad. “Back to Boulder?”
But we hadn’t counted on something. Someone.
Chrissy.
We went to wake her up. “Up and away, kiddo. We’re going to Boulder,” Dad said.
“I’m still sleeping,” Chrissy said.
“I know, but we’re in a hurry and you can sleep in the car,” Mom said.
Chrissy sat up. “Why are all of you in my room? It’s nighttime!”
“I’m telling her the truth,” I told Mom. “Not telling the truth is how we got in trouble in the first place.”
“She’s too young,” Mom resisted. “You’ll scare her.”
I turned to Chrissy. “Chrissy, you know how Marc gets mad?”
She nodded.
“He’s real mad right now. At me and at Dad and Mom. He says he’s going to hurt us because he’s mad. I believe him.”
“I believe him, too. He’s mean when he’s mad,” Chrissy said.
“Yes, he is, and he is doing some really bad things. He’s done them before. So we’re going to go to Boulder. We’re going to go tonight so he can’t do bad things to us. We’re going to pack fast and leave.”
Mom and Dad turned to go.
“Wait.” Chrissy startled us. “If Marc is bad and doing bad things, shouldn’t he go to jail?”
Dad, Mom, and I looked at one another as if… well, why hadn’t it occurred to us to call the police? All three of us were still lashing our rudders tight and sailing away in a straight line, running from any problem that came up. For months, we’d been running away from each other. Only Chrissy stood her ground and looked for the right answer.
SOME PEOPLE COUNT MORE THAN OTHERS
A man came out of his office, introduced himself as a detective, and sat us down in uncomfortable chairs. He looked tired and didn’t waste time. “Something about a death threat?” Dad gave him the synopsis rather than the novel.
“Are you sure we don’t have a young girl with a case of buyer’s remorse and wanting to get some revenge?”
I flushed but remained silent.
I saw Dad grappling with his anger. “I think if you check to see if Marc DeVayne got a traffic ticket in…”
“He said a few months ago,” I said.
“Marc DeVayne, you say? We have had some dealings with Marc.” The detective seemed much more interested now. He turned to me. “You saw guns in his house? You can testify to that?”
I nodded.
He leaned back in his chair. “Your boyfriend is not as clear of the law as he told you. He did a little B and E here in Texas. He’s on parole, and if he’s got guns, that breaks the terms… He can serve out his eighteen months in Huntsville.”
“Eighteen months?” My mother leaned into the detective. “Don’t you get it? He’ll know my daughter turned him in. He’ll make it his mission to find her and he’ll kill all of us. Eighteen months means he’ll be out in six. Just enough time to get his plans made and his fury stoked.”
“Now you’re going all conspiracy theory here. He’s a bad guy, sure, but I don’t think he would wait and plan and stalk…”
“He did with that judge,” I said.
Silence.
The detective leaned forward this time. “Say again?”
“The house he creeped. It was the judge who gave him a traffic ticket. It made him mad.”
“You should never make him mad. It’s scary,” Chrissy said.
“He found out where the judge lived and that’s who he stood over with the shotgun. I can prove it.” I reached into the pocket of my hoodie and pulled out the key chain. “Marc gave it to me after he stole it from the judge’s house.”
The detective took the chain with the tip of his pen and slid it into an evidence bag. He put up his hands like he was halting traffic and picked up the phone. “Pete, sorry to call so late. Yep, it’s important. You own a key chain, gold fob, octagon shape, stop sign on the front, and — yep, that’s what it says. I know because I’m holding it.”
He looked at me. “Marc say where he got it?”
I nodded. “He said it was still in the box at the back of a drawer in the library.”
“You hear all that, Pete?” Pause. “Yep, not only does that mean you were robbed, if everything I’m hearing is true, but somebody was in your bedroom, standing over you with a shotgun that night. Well, I don’t know about attempted murder, maybe so, but the lawyers can sure make something out of it.”
He hung up the phone. “We got ourselves one pissed-off judge.”
The detective spread his hands fingers out on the desk. “This is what I think. I can’t do much for you except bust DeVayne for parole violation. Now, his robbing a judge and maybe threatening his life” — he looked at Dad and shrugged — “that part will be tough to prove. Defense will say your daughter took the key chain and the threat is… he said, she said.”
He cricked his neck. “But messing with a judge puts good old Marc right in the target sights of the Texas Rangers. Let me see what I can do going that route. Put this bad boy away for a long time.”
“I don’t care how you do it. As long as he doesn’t come in my house with a gun,” Dad said.
The detective looked out his window. “Sun’s coming up. You folks think you’ll be okay during the day?”
I nodded. Marc was friends with the dark.
THE DARK SONG
The house was dark and quiet. When I opened my bedroom door and listened, the breathing from my parents’ room was steady and deep. The lump that was supposed to be Chrissy remained unmoving, face turned toward the wall, one arm circling her favorite bear.
It was time. The dark song welled up in me. I heard it just as Marc described it. Predator’s heart singing to the heart of the prey. Saliva flooded my mouth, usually a precursor to the gag reflex. I swallowed hard and breathed deep, mouth open. Breathed out through my nose. Swallowed again. I punched the cell phone.
“Ames?” he asked without preamble. “You ready for this?”
I tiptoed away from my room into the living room and through to the kitchen.
“Are you sure they’re asleep?” Marc asked. His voice was urgent but pumping with adrenaline.
“Do you have to do this, Marc? Finish it? Can’t you take Chrissy and me away and make our own family?”
His voice was a caress but his words were a punch. “Ames, if we leave them alive, we’ll never get away. There won’t be time. They’ll have border patrol to stop us hours before we get there. It’s the only way. It will be just us when it’s done. No one will ever hurt you again.”
He didn’t mention Chrissy. This was hard. Too hard. I was trapped now.
“Okay.”
“Stomp on the phone, throw it around the place, but make sure the battery’s in a different yard than the other pieces. Then go get in your bed. I’ll do all the rest.”
“The kitchen door is open,” I said. “Let’s get it done.”
“Ames,” Marc whispered. “I love you.”
I punched the phone off, opened the back and removed one piece, pushing it deep into the pocket of my jeans, and then dropped the phone on the grungy linoleum floor. Two hard whacks with my heel set pieces of it skittering across the room. I separated the battery, stomped on it a few more times for good measure. I hurried to the backyard and side-armed the pieces into the heaps of trash and junk piles in the surrounding yards.
I stood for just a second on the porch, my hand on the knob of the kitchen door. Could I do this? My heart pounded and my mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. Had I stepped so far over the line that I was capable of a betrayal this big? This horrible?
I opened the door.
Upstairs, I checked on the Chrissy lump and the one that represented me, then slid into my parents’ room. I backed into a corner, deep into the shadows and waited. If this was going to happen, I needed to watch. I needed to see it all.
I didn’t wait long. I heard the door squeak on the hinge. I don’t know if I heard Marc’s breath or mine. I know I heard my heart pounding, pounding in my head. His sneakers made a muffled sound, like a mouse being strangled as he swept through the living room then slowed as he entered my parents’ room.
I stilled my breath. Would he hear my heart?
Marc crept up to the side of the bed. My father’s side. The sawed-off shotgun hung down along his left leg. From the trickle of moonlight I saw Marc close his eyes and inhale, deep and long. He jacked the shotgun one-handed, his muscles tensing then releasing. Pumping the shells, readying them for their work. He called the sound his shotgun serenade.
He raised the gun.
And…
The muzzle of a handgun pressed against the base of Marc’s neck. �
�Drop it. Now.”
The two sleeping figures that were not my parents sat up, handguns pointed at Marc’s head and torso. The male officer said, “Put it down easy, boy. Do it.”
The female officer was amped and her voice trembled a little. “Hold on to it a second longer and you give me an excuse, understand?”
I glided out of the shadows just as another officer flipped on the overhead light. Marc placed the shotgun on the nightstand. I watched his hands cuffed behind his back.
He stared at me, and I never looked away. Not even as I handed the phone’s computer chip to another officer. Tears rolled down my cheeks. I was more than sure Marc misunderstood those tears.
“You.” His voice was flat. Emotionless. “Who are you?”
He had asked the right question.
I didn’t have an answer.
Who was I?
Who had I been?
Who would I be?
I don’t know.
I do know this.
I am not innocent.
Continue reading for an interview with DARK SONG author Gail Giles
1. Your inspiration for Dark Song came from your own research about several disturbing cases of violence involving young girls in relationships with older men. Can you explain your research in more detail and how you turned that research into Ames’s story?
I watched a TV show about a young girl who developed a relationship with an older man, and her parents intervened. The girl was furious, and she and the boyfriend conspired that the boyfriend and a friend of his would kill her parents. This reminded me of the spree killings of Richard Starkweather and his young girlfriend that began with the murder of her parents. Same scenario: young girl, older boyfriend, parental refusal that girl could see boy again. I decided to start researching if this had happened any other times recently and was dismayed to find twenty-two cases of either one or both parents murdered as a result of parental interference in a young girl/older boyfriend situation. The cases ranged from Japan to Alaska. But the most shocking part was that I only had to search back eighteen months to find those twenty-two cases. It occurred to me that this phenomenon might be a sort of female version of Columbine. It seems like boys tend to take their frustrations and anger out and away, and girls seem to pull their anger in and release it close to home.
