by Rod Kackley
There was only one person left when the medical examiner’s truck drove away with Tim’s body in the back and Lumpy’s men cleaned up the crime scene tape.
John Sheldon.
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
“The guy was such a putz,” Bree said to her friend Beth as they sat together inside The Reading Room, St. Isidore’s only book store. “Tim did all the hard work. All I had to do was get him off a couple of times and he was jizz in my hands.”
Beth squeezed her girlfriend’s fingers under the table and said, “So he killed Steven and Debbie and you got the insurance money, the inheritance, all of the cash. Why didn’t the cops come looking for you before Tim burnt the house? Why didn’t they try to rescue you? You were kidnapped. And where were you hiding out? His house? Really?”
“Come on. You know how the Swingin’ Izzy police work,” Bree said.
“They were the last ones to know. When Tim killed Paul — and he had to go, that twerp knew too much and I mean, oh my God, he was a cop, right?”
“It was perfect. It gave the cops one more thing to occupy their time. Then Steven and Debbie got killed, and all of a sudden, they had three murder victims, and a burning house.”
“Okay. But I still don’t know why you had to be kidnapped. Why not just run off with Tim?”
“The kidnapping was my alibi. I was not a killer. I was a victim. How could I be a criminal?”
The cops found her little pee bucket in the basement, the cot, the plywood walls, everything was just like Bree said it was.
She was even able to provide tears and hiccuping sobs in the interview with Chief Lumpy, and it worked so well to dissolve any disbelief Lumpy might have, the act became a regular staple of Bree’s TV interviews.
“I gave them everything they wanted and I got everything I wanted,” Bree said.
“The house insurance money, the life insurance money, the inheritance — not much but every little bit helps — and now the book deals. I am the Kim frickin’ Kardashian of St.Isidore.”
“Everybody wants to write your story,” Beth said. “I can hardly wait until Oprah comes calling. You are going to need an agent to help you sort this out.”
Adam and Anne, the owners of The Reading Room, glanced over at Beth and Bree, their celebrity customers. Adam saw dollar signs. The Reading Room, his first business, was fighting the tide of failure washing over bookstores like his. Beth and Bree, “The B Girls” as the bloggers and TV people called them, could bring in more customers.
Anne didn’t look at it that way. She had seen her share of hard times and couldn’t help wondering what troubles were in store in the life of Bree.
“I know where she is in her head,” Anne told Adam over breakfast. “She thinks she has it all figured out. Bree doesn’t have any idea of what is ahead of her.”
“So you still don’t think she was a victim in this?” Adam said.
“Not even close,” said Anne. “I knew what Steven was doing. It was so obvious to anyone who had been through it, like me. The bastard should have died. But murder is never the way.”
“And, what about poor Debbie?”
“She had a feeling it would end this way. We talked about it.”
“Is it true she had a pacemaker?”
“It exploded inside her when she burned. What a mess that must have been.”
“But what about Tim?” asked Adam. “He must have been a real sicko.”
“ I knew Tim. I slept with Tim...”
“You don’t have to remind me.”
“Oh, look who’s getting jealous,” Anne teased. “I did not know he was a killer.”
NOBODY IN ST. ISIDORE, except Paul, knew it. But like Anne, everyone was learning that, too. The police were still counting up the men, boys, girls and women Tim killed and hung up in what everyone was calling “The Suicide Forest” while Adam and Anne were digesting breakfast and the latest news about the neighbors.
“And what about Paul? I knew they hung out together, but I never thought Tim would hang him out to dry.”
“Funny,” said Adam. “So, he was a killer, a kinky SOB of the craziest variety, but you don’t think he was a kidnapper. Seems like a pretty small crime compared to all the rest.”
“Maybe, but still I can’t believe he did it. Tim was lost in a fantasy world. Every one of those killings was the result of one of the impulses he couldn't control.”
“So he had an impulse to kidnap and ran with it.”
Bree was put into foster care as soon as the police finished their investigation. Anne wasn’t the only person in St. Isidore who doubted the official version of the kidnapping or the killing of Tim. There were still some people who liked him, although there were twice as many who told every reporter who asked that they saw this coming.
Bree’s foster parents could have been better. But they could have been a lot worse, if the rest of the world wasn’t watching them.
Dave and Sherri were a little nervous having Bree in their home. After all, she was a teenage girl who some people said had arranged the murders of her mother and stepdad.
Still, Dave and Sherri were able to turn a profit too. Some of the money rolling in off the Bree tidal wave that swept into St. Isidore from the Wild West of internet capitalism slid their way.
But it didn’t come close to the cash that Bree raked in.
Three months into their lives together, Dave and Sherri had to give Bree permission to install her own phone and internet connection. It was the only way she could keep up with the media requests, agent offers and book deals.
Bree turned into quite the entrepreneur. She created her own fashion line.
“Bree could have started small, hoping to expand, but that wouldn’t be Bree, would it?” said one TV commentator.
Bree was also able to sue and take over several small pirate entrepreneurs who were selling Bree screen savers, photos and videos without her permission.
“I’d sue the people selling brie cheese if I thought I could get away with it,” Bree told Beth.
It is not like Bree needed the money, but Beth knew Bree would never be satisfied until she was sure she had it all.
“She’s a schemer,” Anne whispered to Adam when Beth and Bree walked into The Reading Room. “Just look at the two of them.”
“She’s got her own business,” Adam said, doing that quote thing with his fingers in the air, that drives Anne crazy, “Bree Incorporated.”
“I’ve got nothing against that. But she’s just into it for the money. She’s not creating anything for anyone else,” said Anne. “And I just think there’s more to this kidnapping thing than we know.”
Anne drummed her fingers on the table top like the rim shot on a snare head in a burlesque house.
“What about Tim getting killed? If she did set him up, she murdered him.”
“How could Bree set him up? She got kidnapped,”Adam said, while he sent out a tweet welcoming Bree and Beth to The Reading Room.
“What did you just do?”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s in your hand under the table?”
“Just dreaming about tonight”
“I call bullshit on that,” Anne said, reaching under the table and coming back with Adam’s smartphone.
She read the tweet and snorted.
“The Reading Room welcomes The B Girls?”
“Free advertising. They bring in a crowd.”
“A good public hanging would do the same thing,” said Anne. “Watching those two is like being trackside in the chicken wing section at St. Izzy Speedway. Everybody’s just waiting for them to crash and burn.”
It could be that’s what bothered Anne most of all. Everyone in St. Isidore, even Adam, seemed to be in a race to see who could make the most money off the girl before she flamed out.
She’s only, what, sixteen? Beautiful too? Yes, but that doesn’t last. Bree’s going to find out soon enough that all any of us are doing is getting older every day and one
day closer to the finish line
Beth said, “You got away with it. Everybody thinks you were kidnapped. Tim is dead. You got the insurance money. Now we go off together?”
“Yeah baby now we go off together. And a man will never touch me again. Or another woman either, unless you want to watch,” Bree said with a whisper, a laugh and a squeeze of Beth’s bare thigh under the table.
“This is what we have been dreaming of, right?” said Beth.
“Right. But first, I need you do so something for me....”
Two tables over, John Sheldon sipped his coffee, pretended to read a newspaper on his smartphone, and waited.
The End
WICKED REVENGE:
BOOK 2 FROM THE ST. ISIDORE COLLECTION
a preview
FOUR YEARS LATER, JOHN Sheldon returns to St. Isidore to seek righteous vengeance on the two women who he believes are responsible for his brother’s death.
Bree and Beth are still together, in love, and on their own, in the second book in the St. Isidore Collection.
Barely old enough to be street legal, they scramble to hide the truth behind St. Isidore’s crime of the century, dodging the bodies that are snapping at the neck in the Suicide Forest, and running from John Sheldon, who has vowed to kill them.
Anne would love to help Bree and Beth, if only they don’t kill her first.
Here’s a taste of what life is like for Bree and Beth, and the challenge John faces, in Chapter 4 of Wicked Revenge, Book 2 From the St. Isidore Collection.
“A SIXTEEN-YEAR OLD girl is being charged as an adult in the strangulation death of a forty-three year old man. St. Isidore Police Chief Lumpy Doolan says the two were engaged in what the chief described as ‘very kinky sex,’” the WSIR news announcer said.
“The girl, whose name we are not releasing yet, told us the man, that she said is or was her boyfriend, forgot to use the ‘safety word,’” said Chief Doolan told a reporter.
Bree could relate to that.
Sixteen-years old with a forty-three-year old boyfriend, that was Tim and me a couple of years ago.
Strangulation sex. Erotic asphyxiation. That is very, very hot. But you can’t choke them so much they can’t get the safe word out, and yes, Chief Lumpy, it is a ‘safe’ word, not a ‘safety word.’
I would love to get old Lumpy tied up on my bed some night just for the fun of it.
Bree walked into her financial manager and attorney’s office building with a smile on her face that she would also love to explain to the young secretary and the middle-age man behind the front desk.
But, she didn’t. Bree had something more important on her mind — the survival of Bree Incorporated — which was directly tied to the survival of Bree herself.
“You are in serious trouble,” Melinda Black told her young client. “To begin with, you haven’t paid any income tax in three years.”
“I ran my tax numbers online and that’s what it showed me. No tax owed.”
“Take it easy, Bree. I said that was just the beginning. You are being sued by every news organization that covered the kidnapping for using their video and audio reports without their permission.”
“I pulled them off the Internet. Once it’s there, it’s public property, right?”
“Wrong. Or at least that’s a matter of dispute to say the least.”
“This is so not fair.”
“Fair? Who are you kidding?”
Melinda didn’t want to hear Bree ever say the word ‘fair,’ not after what she had done to Tim Sheldon.
Melinda hadn’t been born yesterday. She was reminded of that every time she looked in her mirror and saw the road map of forty-four years that had been etched into her face by slamming her head on a corporate glass ceiling, a breakup with her husband, a romance with a lesbian lover who cheated on Melinda with her ex-husband, and now life as not-much more than an ambulance chasing, keep the wolf away from the door paralegal with a degree from a night school who did taxes on the side.
“I told you Bree, I am not an attorney, I am a paralegal. You need help that I can’t deliver. You need to talk to a lawyer.”
“Oh, come on Melinda. Please. For me?”
Bree and Melinda went back at least eight months after meeting in the Sensations nightclub. Bree was dancing, Melinda was enjoying.
Roy Benvenito had agreed to Bree’s price without an argument, which made Bree realize she was underpricing herself, as she saw for the first time just what a hot property she had become.
Bree signed books, danced and stripped onstage. The audience was huge, all male, all drinking, all spending money and tipping big for thirty-seconds of this famous woman’s time.
Bree never got naked. It’s not that she didn’t want to go nude. She would have loved that. But St. Isidore’s City Council forced topless dancers to wear bikinis on stage.
That took the “less” out of “topless” and thousands of dollars out of Roy Benvenito’s cash registers.
“Who will I sell beer to? Boy Scouts? You can just go down to the lake to see girls in bikinis,” he told the St. Isidore City Council during the Great Bikini Debate.
“And you can bring your own beer,” yelled a voice from the peanut gallery in the back.
Benvenito didn’t go bust without bare breasts. But he came close. It wasn’t until Bree came through his door offering herself for his stage that Sensations started bringing in the kind of crowds Roy was used to, pre-bikini.
“Heavy drinkers, big spenders and all the fans of Bree are going to put my kids through college,” Roy said.
There were always a few women in the crowd. One night Melinda was there and spotted Bree just before seeing her soon-to-be ex-lover kissing her ex-husband.
Melinda decided Bree would be a lever to pry apart their lust. At least that was the first option. The second was to fall in lust herself.
Plan A failed.
Melinda was glad she had a Plan B.
She got totally hooked on Bree in the middle of their first night together. Bree opened the door to a world that Melinda hadn’t even dreamed of dreaming of.
“This is like being in one of the movies that my husband would spend all night watching on his laptop after I went to bed,” Melinda said between deep breaths.
Bree smiled and crawled naked across the bed to her newest lover.
She had another one.
“YOU NEED TO WAKE UP Bree. I can’t do what a lawyer can do,” Melinda said.
“Yes, you can, Melinda,” Bree said. “For me?”
Bree never liked to take “no” for an answer, and very few people who were halfway to the finish lines of their lives ever wanted to say, ‘no’ to Bree. Melinda didn’t.
“Okay,” Melinda said. “I will do what I can,” which meant doing what it took — sexually or otherwise — to get a few free favors from the men in her office.
“Thanks, baby,” Bree said. “See you tonight?”
“Of course, come by around eight?”
WATCH OUT FOR B&M. #CheatingOnYou #KillTheBitches
This was one text that did not shine a new light into Beth’s world. It didn’t scare her, didn’t anger her; it just put her stew on a low simmer.
Beth knew Bree was cheating on her. The only question was with whom and why. Well, maybe the latter was obvious, or would have been with anyone but Bree. She always had an ulterior motive.
Beth, who usually loved mysteries, hated this one. Who was M?
She had figured out Bree’s password. It wasn’t tough. Just her birth date and the street she grew up on were enough.
And Beth had found the thread of a Yahoo Messenger conversation between Bree and her new lover.
They are hot, I will have to give you that, Beth thought as she used her right hand to scroll through the messages and her left to tap through some elicit pleasure.
I want to spank you in your office. I want to take you over your desk, Bree had written.
You liar! The other person wrote b
ack. You were supposed to meet me last night and you stood me up. WTF!
I am sorry. Business, baby, what can I tell you? I so want to spank you today, right now, this minute.
So Bree was cheating. The messages were all the proof Beth needed. She didn’t know who Bree was sleeping with. Could be a man, could be a woman, could be one of each knowing Bree, but there was someone. She was cheating.
Beth would figure it out. She had only broken into one file. There were two more that had different passwords. Beth would hack them.
If there was one thing Beth knew, it was computers. And if there was one person she knew, it was Bree. They had a long history, Bree and Beth, all the way back to St. Isidore High and Tim Sheldon.
“There is no way that Bree is going to keep fooling around on me, and she is going to be punished for being a bad girl.”
“And M. has to be Melinda” Beth said to her MacBook which had become her partner in revenge. “She thinks she’s going to steal Bree away from me? In another life maybe she could, but not now, no fucking way. Let’s see how she likes this message.”
I know who you are playing with. #Cunt.
EVEN THOUGH SHE REALLY didn’t want to believe Bree would be messing around with that middle-aged, muffin-topped paralegal, Melinda, Beth was still parked outside the bitch’s office building when Bree came bouncing out.
It had not been hard to keep track of Bree without being seen.
Bree is so into herself, she never sees anyone else. Beth thought, slouching behind the wheel of her Ford Prius sipping on an energy drink.
I don’t even think she believes there is anyone else worth looking at.
Beth was wrong. Bree had actually been watching Beth, watching her, in the rear view mirror ever since she pulled off of East Belt Line Avenue on to Riverview Drive.
Bree smiled to herself as Beth turned left into a parking garage on the other side of Riverview, while she turned right into her attorney’s — pardon me, paralegal’s — office building parking lot.
