Secret Memories

by J. S. Donovan

  Angela felt the cold wind bashing her back. “Can we talk inside?”

  The hug ended.

  Frank extended a hand. “Frank Frankford. Private investigator.” He gave his best showmanship smile.

  “Hitch Shiffrin,” Angela’s father replied and shook. “You from one of Angie’s support groups?”

  Angela glared at Hitch. “Dad.”

  Hitch noticed he embarrassed his daughter. “Sorry. My mistake.”

  Frank spoke up. “We’re working together on a case.”

  “You’re a long way from Knoxville,” Hitch said. “Who has the spouse run off with this time? It was the biker boyfriend, wasn’t it? It’s always the biker boyfriend.”

  Frank chuckled.

  Angela gestured towards the inside of the house. “May we, Dad?”

  “Oh,” Hitch said, suddenly aware of how dang cold it was outside.

  He stepped aside, allowing the investigators to move into the dimly lit house. It was nice and cozy, if not a little unkempt. There was a large TV playing old Westerns and a recliner that Hitch slept in more than his bed. There were stacked books standing next to a packed bookshelf. Most of them were about history, reptiles, and car repairs. Angela remembered that when she was old enough to work on the 1970 Dodge Charger, Hitch bought her every book there was on the topic. He’d stay all up night, nose deep in the pages so when the morning came and Angela was to work on the vehicle, he knew exactly what he was doing, or at the very least pretended to.

  “Let me get you something to drink,” Hitch said. It wasn’t a suggestion. He jogged to the refrigerator while Angela unzipped her coat. She looked up at the various Bible scriptures and crucifixes on the wall. Kelly and Thomas were not religious, but Hitch found Jesus long before he adopted Angela. He was Baptist but in recent years moved to a non-denominational church with about twenty attendees.

  Hitch grabbed two ice-cold Dr. Enufs, a local light soft drink only found in East Tennessee. He closed the fridge door with his hip, brushing against Angela’s drawings magnetized to the front. Made with colored crayons, they showed cabins, trees, and little Angela holding hands with Hitch, Kelly, and Thomas. In reality, Hitch had no relations with Angela’s biological parents.

  Frank unzipped his winter coat a few inches but kept it on. He opened and closed his hands as he got acclimated to the warm house. Hitch handed Angela one of the glass bottles and then gave one to Frank, who thanked him.

  Hitch’s eyes landed on the unfolded laundry on the couch. He mumbled to himself and quickly started to grab the bundle of clothes.

  “You don’t have to do that, Dad,” Angela said.

  “I want to,” Hitch said, putting a clump of clothes on his favorite chair and choosing to sit on the cushioned guest chair that was not a fraction as conformable. Feeling guilty, Angela plopped down on the couch. Frank joined her. In the heat, she could smell the faint stench of alcohol rising off him. Frank sat with his legs parted and his back hunched, like he’d been a million times before. He downed his soft drink quickly.

  Hitch’s eyes widened. “Thirsty?”

  Frank smiled proudly. “You have no idea.”

  Angela made a disgusted sound.

  There was an awkward pause. Angela felt more uncomfortable bringing Frank under her father’s roof. He probably thought they were an item, but Angela wouldn’t dream of it. She felt that her credibility as an investigator was diminished just by sitting close to Frank.

  Hitch smiled awkwardly at the two of them, waiting for them to say their reason for visiting. Angela and Hitch both spoke at the same time. They looked at each other. Frank gestured for Angela to talk.

  Angela turned to Hitch. “I want to know about that night.”

  Hitch didn’t need to further explain. He knew what she spoke of. Exhaling, Hitch took off his cap. He rubbed his hand up his disheveled and thin grey hair. “Angela, I don’t think you know what you’re asking.”

  Angela frowned. “I’m ready. Spare no detail.”

  “When the is wound healing, you don’t pick at the scab,” Hitch said.

  “Hitch,” Angela said. Whenever she said his name, he knew that she meant business. “A girl’s dead. She had the same scar.”

  He squeezed the arms of the upholstered chair. His face turned white with dread. “Oh,” he said softly.

  Angela continued. “Whoever was responsible left this in the cabin.” She pulled out the puzzle pieces that were broken into groups. She reconstructed them swiftly and gave them to Hitch. He flipped over the puzzle pieces. His mouth moved as he read. With trembling hands, he put the puzzle pieces on the lamp stand and then covered his lips in thought. He locked his glossy eyes with Angela. “You need to call the police.”

  “What are they going to do?” Angela asked. “They have dozens of other incomplete cases that need attention. A secret message to me is the least of their priorities.”

  “Doing this alone,” Hitch said. “It ain’t good for you, Angela. It just ain’t.”

  Angela felt her blood pressure spike. “I’m not alone. I have you.”

  Hitch blinked a few times to keep his eyes from watering. “This case… it broke me. No good came from it. Only hurt.”

  Angela frowned. “I’m a big girl.”

  “It’s a father’s responsibility to keep his daughter from harm,” Hitch said, more to himself than Angela.

  “You’re not my father,” Angela blurted out, and immediately regretted her words.

  Hitch cast down his eyes. He rotated the ring on his ring finger with his opposite hand and nodded a few times to himself.

  “Dad,” Angela got up from the couch. “I’m sorry.”

  She knelt down before Hitch and took his large, calloused hand. She looked up into his downtrodden face. He was seconds from tears. He softly squeezed Angela’s hand. “I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

  “I know,” Angela replied softly. “But, darkness flees from the light. Help me, Dad. Let’s end this together.”

  Hitch smiled sadly at her. He glanced up at Hitch with newfound sternness. “You’re helping her with this?”

  Frank nodded. “It’s personal for me too.”

  Hitch set his jaw and nodded curtly, but with respect. “Promise me you’ll keep my little girl safe.”

  Frank looked at Angela and then Frank. His face was determined. “I’ll try my best.”

  “Don’t try,” Hitch said.

  “All right,” Frank said, getting progressively more uncomfortable. “I promise to keep her safe.”

  After hearing that, Hitch got up. “Wait here.” He marched through the living room and down the hallway, toggling on the light.

  Angela gave Frank a nasty look. “Why would you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Lie to him,” Angela said.

  “About what?” Frank tasted.

  Angela mocked Frank’s deep voice. “Oh, I promise to keep her safe.”

  Frank set his jaw. “I meant what I said.”

  “Sure,” Angela replied skeptically. “I don’t need your protection.”

  Frank let out a frustrated chuckle. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

  Angela glared at him. Frank looked elsewhere in the room. The whole ordeal was incredibly childish, and they both knew it.

  Hitch returned with a heavy cardboard filing box. Angela got up to lend him a hand, but he brushed her off. “You take a seat.”

  Angela plopped down next to Frank. They didn’t look at each other. Hitch put the box on the shag carpet floor. It was labeled “Angela.”

  “What is all this?” Angela asked, suddenly more intrigued by the box than her whole spat with Frank.

  “After I found you that night, the case stuck to me. That’s why I retired. One, because of the blood, but two, because I was becoming obsessed. I knew separating myself from it would be the best thing to do, but it ate at me,” Hitch explained as he sat on the edge of the chair. “When Tammy had the miscarriage and you
r adoption was being processed, I needed something to get my mind off everything, so I started digging again. This was everything that I found.”

  Frank reached over Angela to take the box lid off. Angela didn’t acknowledge it. She turned to Hitch. “Tell us about that night first. I want to make sure we don’t miss anything.”

  Hitch started with his arrival. “It was a cold, snowy night. I was on patrol, just making sure there weren’t any disabled vehicles or anyone trapped out in the cold. The mountains can be quietly treacherous, and cell service is rare. That’s when I found your parents’ place. I knew Thomas Rhymer lived there because I’d seen him walking the dog before. I recognized him from one of his book signings.”

  “Thomas Rhymer?” Frank interrupted. “The novelist? That’s your father, Angela?”

  Angela nodded.

  Frank’s face lit up. “I read all of his stuff growing up. It’s partly the reason why I wanted to become a P.I. That’s awesome, but I have to say, I thought the name Rhymer would be better for a poet.”

  “I’ve never heard that one before,” Angela said sarcastically. She turned to Hitch. “Go on, Dad.”

  Hitch let out a sigh that deflated him. “The door was slightly open. The light in the living room was flickering on and off.”

  Chill bumps covered Angela as she recalled similarities to how she discovered Iris. Same flickering light. Same ajar door.

  Hitch spoke, remembering that hard night. “I had this feeling that something bad had happened. Unsure of what I’d find, I walked inside and saw your parents first. I didn’t check immediately but, by the amount of blood, they’d been fatally stabbed. The furniture was pushed and tipped, showing signs of a struggle. Then I saw you. You were seated on your knees. The back of your sweater had been cut open and the butterfly carved into your back still fresh.”

  Hitch paused for a long moment. He sniffled. “As a cop, you hear horror stories about how evil people can be, but stuff like that doesn’t happen in Ashton. Yeah, you get a few meth heads who accidentally blow up in their trailer or the occasional 4-wheeler fatality. But this was murder. No rhyme or reason.”

  “What happened after you found me?” Angela asked.

  “I took your hand and led you out of the house. I slung my jacket over your shoulder to keep you from getting cold and asked you what happened. You didn’t know. The whole thing was too much to process. Knowing that I was going into shock myself, I called for backup. I stayed outside with you, not wanting to go back until help arrived. When it did, they put you in an ambulance. I was freezing, but that seemed like the least of my concerns. With the help of peers, I went back inside. The mortician estimated that your folks had been dead for a few hours. No one had a clue what happened to you during that time. The only thing taken were your mother’s and father’s wedding rings.”

  “What caused the light to flicker?” Frank asked.

  “The culprits loosened the bulb in the socket. I didn’t understand at the time, but I learned it was his call sign,” Hitch explained.

  Frank perused the contents of the file box. There were newspaper printouts, photocopies of various case files, transcribed interviews, photographs, forensic reports, and maps with Sharpie circles.

  Angela looked at Hitch with a mix of surprise and soberness. “How long did it take you to collect this stuff?”

  “Years,” Hitch replied, almost disbelieving his own words. “The case made me realize that being a cop wasn’t for me. I become a trucker, but all that time in the quiet got me thinking. Maybe I could piece this together. I was unsure if that’s what I was meant to be doing, but when another family was murdered, I decided to pick up the trail again. It didn’t lead anywhere, and Tammy decided she’d be happier with a man who spent more time with her.”

  Frank fished out the case file from December 28, 1989. He opened it an inch before a look of guilt flashed over his face. He handed it over to Angela. She held the weighty folder. She knew it was her last chance to back away. She opened the folder and was bombarded with images of her parents, bloody floors, and more things she wished she’d never seen. She stomached the gore and put the various photographs of the bodies face down on the coffee table. She looked at the black and white forensic sheet that showed a drawn image of a man and woman with various lacerations and stab wounds. There was notes in the margins, saying that the stabs were made with a slashing weapon, like that of a single-sided bowie or machete. Iris’s family was killed by a bladed weapon too.

  Frank flipped through two other case files that reported similar murders. They were all in the winter season and involved a family of three. One was in Bristol in 1992, and the other one was right outside of Ashton in 2000.

  “What do you know about the surviving girls?” Angela asked.

  “Sofia Mathis from Bristol took her own life when she was fourteen. Maxine Trent changed her name and dropped off the map,” Hitch explained. “I had no luck finding her.”

  They spent the next hour going through the various reports and photographs.

  “What about the rings?” Angela asked.

  “They were taken as trophies,” Hitch replied.

  “Did you ever check the fireplace?” Angela asked.

  Hitch shook his head. “As routine, sure, but there’s a chance we missed something.”

  Angela pulled out her mother’s ring. “I found this in the cabin.” She handed it delicately to Hitch, as if the gold band was a fragile glass ornament.

  Hitch rested it in the dip of his palm. “I should have cleaned that place, but… I didn’t want to be back in there. The memories were too real. Still are.”

  “Did you ever get a chance to visit the sites of the other murders?” Frank asked.

  Hitch shrugged. “In a sense. The one in Bristol got torn down soon after the murder and someone else built the house on the land. The place here in Asher was on the market for a while. I went there for an open house, but didn’t have the proper authority or equipment to investigate it properly.”

  “It sounds like a good launching off point for me,” Frank said.

  “It’s worth looking into,” Angela agreed.

  Hitch sat up, fixing his slouched posture. “Stay for the night. There’s no need to rush out.”

  Angela looked out at the dark night sky. Hitch was right. If someone lived on the property, they might not be open to guests at this late hour, and Angela needed more time to look over the case files too.

  Frank cooked up hot dogs and mac and cheese while Angela and Frank turned the living room floor into an investigator’s board. Crawling on their hands and knees, they spread out the various photos and crime reports in chronological order and started looking for parallels or some hidden message. Hitch watched from the doorway, sipping a cola and watching his daughter with sad eyes. The gore must’ve gotten to be too much for him because he stayed in the kitchen to eat and reflect. After all the years of living with him, Angela had never seen him so distraught. She felt guilty for forcing him to relive the memories, but it needed to be done. She’d make it up to him eventually. She owed Hitch a lot. He adopted her days after the murder, put her through the best counseling he could afford, and due to the amount of effort he poured into Angela, the cases, and his trucking jobs, his wife left him within three years. That was when he finally slowed down, but it was too late. She was gone. They never got an official divorce. Hitch mindlessly twisted the wedding ring his finger, still waiting for his lover return.

  When they finished laying out the various documents, Frank leaned his back against the couch with his legs stretched out across the floor. “The guy behind this has been active for twenty-eight years, and every crime scene has turned out to be spotless.”

  “He’s good,” Angela agreed. “Connecting the location of the kills, it’s obvious that he’s centered in East Tennessee, or at least he visits during the winter times.”

  Frank leafed through some of the police transcripts. “The relatives claimed that the victims had
few to no enemies and were all shocked when they heard the news. So who’s targeting them and why?”

  “Good question,” Angela replied. The motive behind the killing was just as important to her. The killer had to have some reason for choosing her parents to start the killing spree. Her first guess was a deranged fan of her father’s novel. Her second guess was someone who her father wronged during his time as a lawyer. He represented blue collar criminals, not murderers. Nevertheless, any one of them could be the killer. Angela sifted for more evidence. The killer wore gloves. There were a number of boot prints found leading in and out of her parents’ cabin. Size 10 male and size 7 female. Angela wondered if they were from her father and mother, the killer, or a combination of both. Angela’s footprints were among them, too.

  Before Hitch went to bed, Angela caught him alone in the hallway. He looked like he’d aged twenty years in the last few hours.

  “Dad,” Angela said quietly. “There’s something you should know about Frank.”

  Hitch brought his brows together. “He’s a drunk?”

  “Not just that,” Angela said. “I don’t trust him. He may be involved with the case somehow. I don’t know, but that’s why I invited him along. To see if he’d reveal something”

  “Oh,” Hitch said. “But, you, uh, brought him into our house. Is that safe?”

  “Just keep an eye on him, that’s all I’m asking,” Angela said. “Nothing is going to happen, but I don’t want to forfeit any possibility with the case being this young.”

  Hitch nodded with hesitation. “I’ll get his bed set up.”

  Hitch brought out a warm blanket and pillow for the couch and wished him a good night. Frank got comfortable. He left his shoes resting at the foot of the couch and slept in his day clothes. He pulled up the covers to his chin.

  “Angela,” he called out as Angela headed for the hall. She looked over her shoulder, awaiting his response.

  “I, uh,” Frank said awkwardly. “I wanted to thank you for letting me tag along. I know it may not seem like it, but I want to find this guy as much as you.”