by Roger Bray
Anyone else would have stood, transfixed at the tableau playing out before them, missing the only chance they might have. But Steve wasn’t anyone else—his training kicked in and he took the opportunity. Unzipping the front of his jacket as Alice fell and by the time Hazel was falling over her, he had his right hand firmly around the butt of his Glock pushing it down and out of the holster. The Glock cleared his jacket as Hazel was sliding down the wall and Jim was turning back to him. Jim raised the Beretta toward him.
Steve fired the first shot at Jim’s head, then another two toward his chest. They weren’t needed. The first shot took Jim just below his right eye and the soft nosed bullet expanded and spread into his brain before he knew what had happened. The next two shots hit a corpse; Jim was already starting to collapse onto the floor. Quickly stepping forward as the Beretta fell from Jim’s hand, Steve kicked the gun away and satisfied himself that Jim was dead before turning and kneeling next to Alice. She had managed to get herself onto all fours and reached out a hand as he knelt next to her.
“I’m OK, I’m OK. Just give me a minute.”
He helped her turn and leaned her back against the cinder wall. She looked up at him and raised her hand to touch his face.
“Is he …?”
Steve nodded.
“How’s Hazel?”
Steve looked over at Hazel who was also trying to push herself up, blood dripping from the gash on her swollen cheek and the wound to her ear.
“Alive.”
“Thank God.”
Alice took a deep breath and stood, wobbling a little but with the color returning to her face. She stepped over to where Hazel, with Steve’s help, was getting up.
“Hazel?” Alice said as she stepped forward, “Hazel?”
Hazel blinked a few times before bursting into tears.
Alice hugged her until Hazel said, “I don’t understand. What’s happening?”
She looked at Steve. “Who is he?”
“This is Steve, he’s my friend. He found you. We found you.”
She wrapped Hazel in a hug as the sobbing started again.
Steve and Alice took one of Hazel’s arm each and got her to her feet. Blood was streaming down the right side of her face and her legs seemed unable to take her weight, but they supported her and helped her up the stairs away from the cell, the smell of cordite, and Jim’s dead body. Once they were out of the house, Steve left Alice looking after Hazel while he wandered around with his cell at arm’s length desperately looking for a signal to contact the police.
Chapter Sixteen
Hazel stood looking out of the patio doors. She had got up early which had become normal for her. The snow was falling softly and as the sun rose, she could see that they would be in for a heavy fall that day.
Only a week until Christmas and the floor was cold on her bare feet but she didn’t notice. Her favorite thing had become looking out of the window, any window, and watching the world outside. She loved the feeling of the sun and wind on her face but spending time watching the world go by through a window that she had been denied for so long, was the simple pleasure she enjoyed.
The snow was blowing across the yard and had already started to settle, building up on top of the remaining part of the trunk of the Douglas fir that hadn’t been cleared away. Alex and Steve had promised it would be gone in the spring but for now, she enjoyed the tranquility the scene brought and the barrier it made between their house and Jim’s.
Looking over the trunk she could see Jim’s house quite clearly as it became lighter. The two sheets of plywood that had been used to cover the hole where the fir had smashed the doors were still there. No one had replaced them and although they looked weathered gray, they were still firmly blocking the hole.
Hazel was in the hospital at Springfield while everything was happening at the house at Belknap Spring. Steve and Alice had returned to the house to walk the local PD and FBI through the events and give their statements.
As they arrived, they could see the area was a bedlam of activity, from a quiet little back water, there was suddenly two dozen assorted state and federal vehicles. The FBI helicopter bringing them landed on the lawn out the back and as they descended Steve could see dozens of vehicles out on the road, being held back by local police. More police from Eugene and Oregon State Police had set up a cordon around the property to keep out the reporters trying to sneak through the trees and get close enough to get any shot for the media outlets.
Once the coroner had taken Jim’s body away, and the forensic team had finished a week later, the house had been secured as well as anyone could be bothered to do so. No one was coming back to it.
Jim’s house in Eugene had been searched as well. The bikes had been removed and the computer BIOS password cracked enabling the FBI team in Eugene to see their colleagues emptying the cell in the cellar of the remote` house.
The injury to Hazel’s ear had been stitched, and the broken cheek bone would heal on its own. Once the swelling went down only the purple and brown bruising and the black eye the blows had caused her remained. That would fade in time but there was no treatment she could get for it beyond painkillers.
Alice had bruising and a small contusion where Jim had struck her but apart from some minor concussion she too was on the mend. The hospital had wanted her to be admitted for observations, but she had refused. She didn’t care about herself insisting they look after Hazel. Three days after Hazel was admitted she decided that she wanted to be released. Steve had driven them back with Alice beside him and Alex and Hazel in the back seat, both couples quiet for the whole trip.
Alex was barely able to stay awake after spending every moment in the hospital with Hazel. Sitting next to her bed holding her hand and speaking softly to her he had not moved until he was sure that the Valium had put her into a fitful sleep. Even then he kept his absences as short as possible as the first time she had woken without him there she had gone into a panic and only settled down again when he came back and had taken her hand again.
Once they got home, she calmed down, the familiar surroundings assuring her that her nightmare was over. She had started therapy straight away at her own insistence and it seemed to be helping. The first two months were the worst, she would wake in the middle of the night shivering no matter the temperature and couldn’t stay in a room with the door closed. When she discovered the calm that looking out of a window brought her, she seemed to be able to control her fears a lot more.
Steve was worried that Alice may be affected by what had happened, but after a couple of days she seemed to be back to her old self and more worried about Hazel than herself.
Now, nearly eight months later, Hazel felt as well as she thought she would ever feel. The rest, she had decided, she would learn to live with. She and Alex had even had sex a few nights before and she had enjoyed the intimacy of it. It was the first she had had since she had been raped three years earlier.
When it had first happened, she thought that this was to be her life, what was left of it. Kept and raped when he, she still couldn’t think of “he” as Jim, her neighbor, had first beaten her. Then nothing. He had never raped her again. Occasionally, maybe three or four times he had touched her breasts but that had been all. The therapist had suggested that it was done to control her and make her follow instructions, not for his pleasure.
Hazel agreed, nothing else made much sense. Why keep her locked away like that if sex wasn’t involved? She had seen the IP camera looking down on her as a means to ensure that she was securely locked in. Now she had realized that it wasn’t there for her, she was there for the camera.
In his dreams, Jim Fletcher kept his long-dead wife alive by having a living mannequin to remind him of her constantly. Dreaming that Linda was in the next room only lasted for so long and by seeing her in the camera he could pretend, enough to keep his fragile dreams alive.
The FBI had found the remains of Grace Armitage, Maisie Graham, and Ruth Johnston at the bott
om of a thirty-foot shaft in the back of an abandoned mine on the edge of the property. The cold and dry conditions had mummified each of them and they lay intertwined together. It could be determined that they had been naked and probably already dead when they had been cast down the shaft. A thin piece of rope was found embedded around each of their necks.
Thinking of the cold mine shaft had filled Hazel with more fear than anything else, knowing that was the fate that had awaited her. No one knew why Jim Fletcher had got rid of each woman, but the FBI guessed that either they saw him and he had carried out the same threat he made to Hazel, or in some way they had changed. Maybe they had aged a little too much or put a little weight on being locked away, whatever it was, they began to distort his dream. He couldn’t face that, so they were disposed of and a new “Linda” was found.
Hazel had intended to attend each of the funerals, but it was too soon for her. She had got dressed and had almost made it to the car for the first, Maisie’s, when the panic struck. Alex and Alice helped her back inside and gave her a sedative and she had stayed in bed for the four days over which the internments had been scheduled.
Alex stayed with her. Not moving from the chair, he had set up next to the bed. Holding her hand and talking softly until she slept.
Steve and Alice went in her place to the different cemeteries near where the women had lived. The atmosphere of it, the sense of complete waste cast a despair over the cemeteries each time and Alice could not contain herself from crying. Steve felt like doing the same. They were, he told Phil later, the saddest, most wretched funerals he had ever attended.
Hazel kept looking across the trunk at the house wondering what she would do with it. In the months after she had been found no relative had been found and at a stroke of a pen, as the only survivor of his crime, she had inherited Jim’s property.
The money, almost four million dollars, she had donated to a number of charities concerned with violence and mental illness. She had tried to give it to the families of the dead women, but they had not wanted anything from Jim’s estate. The house in the woods she had given to the State to do with as they wished, and that left her with the house next door which she was looking at.
Should she let it decay and fall apart or demolish it? Maybe she would sell it. She couldn’t find it in herself to make the decision. A point would be reached when she would need to decide but she couldn’t quite comprehend finding someone who would buy a house with such notoriety. It worried her more that she might find such a person and if she could live next door to someone who would want to buy such a house.
The snow was coming down faster now, and she tried to get her mood back to the happiness she had felt a little earlier looking at the white swirling flurries.
She heard a noise and looked down to see Moth outside the door, looking up at her. Since Alex had told her the part the big cat had played in her rescue, she had convinced herself that he had done it on purpose and was her guardian angel in a little furry suit.
Moth had always been happy to come and see her and when she returned, he had not left her alone. Winding through her legs and head-butting her gently, he seemed to be telling her how happy he was to see her.
When she opened the door, Moth came in bringing the cold breeze with him together with little puffs of snow which fell from his coat. Hazel crouched down and Moth lifted himself up and placed his two, big front paws on her knees. She leaned forward as he did and they shared a head bop. He seemed happy to stand there while she greeted him. And he knew that there was probably some fresh tuna in the fridge that she would get out to feed him.
Alex came through the doorway into the kitchen and saw the scene in front of him. He felt tears welling up, but he was smiling too.
After Hazel had returned, he had learned not to come up behind her quietly or surprise her in any way. Initially, such behavior would send her into a hysterical fit.
Crying, sometimes screaming, she would retreat from him and curl up in a corner, back straight and with her knees drawn up in front of her, her hands would cover her face and she would sob until she could no more. He had learned the triggers as her therapist had described them, and now he would cough or whistle a little tune to warn her of his approach.
But he didn’t now. He stood quietly while a tear ran down his cheek. Eventually, Moth gave him away, looking up and mewing softly as he saw him.
Hazel looked over and smiled. She stood and walked to him and gently brushed the tear from his cheek with the ball of her thumb. She put her cheek against his and hugged him, pulling him close while Moth jumped up and sat on one of the stools.
He looked at them, his head slightly bent to one side and for a moment it looked as though he was smiling with them.
Other Books by Roger Bray
The Picture
A warehouse in Japan used as an emergency shelter in the aftermath of the 2011 Tsunami. A distraught, young Japanese woman in disheveled clothes sits on a box, holding her infant daughter. Ben, a US rescue volunteer, kneels in front of her offering comfort. They hug, the baby between them. The moment turns into an hour as the woman sobs into his shoulder; mourning the loss of her husband, her home, the life she knew. A picture is taken, capturing the moment. It becomes a symbol; of help freely given and of the hope of the survivors. The faces in the picture cannot be recognized, and that is how Ben likes it. No celebrity, thanks not required.
But others believe that being identified as the person in the picture is their path to fame and fortune. Ben stands, unknowingly, in their way, but nothing a contract killing cannot fix.
Available at Amazon.
Contact the Author
