by R. Jean Reid
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Perdition © 2017 by R. Jean Reid.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First e-book edition © 2017
E-book ISBN: 9780738751795
Book format by Cassie Kanzenbach
Cover design by Lisa Novak
Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reid, R. Jean, author.
Title: Perdition / R. Jean Reid.
Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Midnight Ink, [2017] |
Series: A Nell McGraw investigation ; #2
Identifiers: LCCN 2017001153 (print) | LCCN 2017006032 (ebook) | ISBN
9780738750651 | ISBN 9780738751795
Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3568.E3617 P47 2017 (print) | LCC PS3568.E3617 (ebook)
| DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017001153
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prologue
They say that power corrupts, but power didn’t corrupt him. It seduced him. He found that the most seductive power of all was life and death.
He had learned that when he was young. Teddy kept following him, the idiot little brother he couldn’t shake. He hated Teddy with his drool, his labored, clumsy speech, the thick glasses that made his face always look like a Halloween mask, and especially the way the other kids laughed at them both. Teddy just laughed along, too stupid to know he was the butt of the joke. But he knew, knew how they made fun of him and his retard brother. He had to take Teddy with him after school, the time between when his father woke up and went off to his shift. Dad didn’t like Teddy much either and was liable to slap Teddy around, or him, too, for not keeping Teddy’s spit-dripped face out of sight.
One day Teddy had come into his room when he wanted to be alone, just listening to music. He had his hand in his pants and Teddy wouldn’t stop asking him what he was doing, Teddy knew he had caught him touching some place he shouldn’t. At first he tried not to answer Teddy, until he realized that he could use his stupid and slow brother. He asked Teddy to play a game. Teddy was always happy when his brother included him. He told Teddy to suck on it like a lollipop. He closed his eyes and imagined Betty Dawson, one of the high school cheerleaders, doing it. That the only contact they had ever had was her calling him a “freshman freak” made the image of her kneeling before him even better.
They played this game a couple of times a week. When Teddy coughed or choked, he told Teddy that the point was to learn to take things like a man.
He always played music, to cover up the sounds that Teddy made, to make it easier to imagine Betty there.
But the music covered up his father’s footsteps; he had come home without warning. He was jerked out of his fantasy by the sound of his door being throw open and Teddy’s whimper.
“What the hell are you doing?” his father roared. But it was all too obvious what they were doing. He glared at them for several seconds, the explosion building. “You want to be a cocksucker, you stupid retard?! Suck a real cock.”
His father strode over to where they were and unzipped his pants. He was a big man and he dwarfed his son’s undeveloped body.
“Suck this,” he said as he shoved into Teddy’s mouth. Teddy whimpered and tried to twist away. “Hold him, dammit,” his father yelled at him.
He did as he was told, holding Teddy by the upper arms, so he couldn’t grab or twist away. His father was rough. “Get your fucking teeth away,” he growled, cuffing Teddy on the side of the head. Finally, he finished, leaving Teddy gagging and retching on the floor. He went to the bathroom, but came back right after the toilet flushed.
“Your turn, boy,” his father told him. He yanked Teddy off the floor and held him expectantly.
He had never dared to disobey his father. He looked once at Teddy’s face, covered with the slime of spit and tears, then he closed his eyes and thought of Betty Dawson. When he finished, they again let Teddy fall to the floor.
It became their punishment, although only Teddy really was punished. Sometimes he couldn’t imagine the girls, and saw his little brother’s face with the scrunched-up look that he knew meant that Teddy was trying to be good but didn’t like what was happening, like eating lima beans. Several times a week, his father would find something they had done wrong and made them go upstairs to his room. But it wasn’t that bad for Teddy, he told himself, maybe just like the lima beans. At least their dad was paying attention to Teddy; sometimes before, weeks could go by and he didn’t even notice that he had two sons. After their mom had run off, their dad had taken to drinking more and he’d had to watch out for Teddy, fixing him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so Teddy wouldn’t try to do it himself and make a big mess.
After the second week, his father broke the silence, barking at him, “What are you thinking right now? You got boys on your mind or girls?”
His father seemed to approve when he gasped out Betty Dawson’s name. “Oh, yeah, she’s a hot little one. What’s she doing to you, boy?” That became part of it, him telling his father what he was imagining. He started to tell the stories his father seemed to favor, like having whatever girl they used being pulled over for a ticket and what she would do to get out of it.
But one day Teddy fought back, screeching out, “No, I don’t play no more.” Then, with his jaw clenched, he whipped his body back and forth whenever they tried to grab him. He would only unclench his jaw enough to yell, “No, no, no, hurts, hurts me,” as loud as he could. His father threatened him, but Teddy was locked in his own little world and nothing seemed to touch him. Even when his father took his belt off, Teddy still wouldn’t stop yelling and twisting.
“I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget,” his father said. Then he roughly grabbed Teddy, threw him face down on the bed, and ripped his pants down to his ankles. The belt cracked against Teddy’s naked flesh, over and over again. Teddy finally stopped yelling, subsiding into a whimpering cry. “I’m going to teach you
to never disobey me again,” his father said. Then he got on top of Teddy, pushing his groin against the beaten flesh. Teddy let out one piercing shriek before his father shoved his head into the mattress, and Teddy again subsided into his whimpering cry.
This was different. He had hit both of them before, but only when he was drunk and then only once or twice to get them out of his way. He watched his father hurt Teddy. For a wild moment, he thought about grabbing his father and pulling him off … and then doing what? He just stood and watched. Maybe it wasn’t hurting Teddy that much. Teddy didn’t understand things, maybe he didn’t hurt as much as other people either. He was stupid and slow and maybe just felt things like a deer being shot or a fish being hooked.
When his father finished, he said, “Your turn.” He didn’t want to, but he knew that if he didn’t do it, their dad would probably just beat both of them. As he listened to Teddy sobbing under him, the pillow wet with his snot and tears, he thought he wouldn’t be a crybaby like that. Whatever their dad had done to him, he hadn’t cried. He had been belted the way Teddy was and he hadn’t sobbed, not even once.
After he was finished, he realized that something had changed. His father needed him and they were in it together. It used to be him and Teddy, now it was him and his father.
He hated that he still had to look out for Teddy when his father was out patrolling. It didn’t feel fair that he should be babysitting his crybaby brother. Sometimes his dad would let him come along, and he could ride up front, his hand almost resting on the shotgun that was holstered between the seats, and listen to the sound of voices on the radio as they talked back and forth. That was where he should be, instead of still stuck with Teddy.
When it happened, he’d only wanted to get away from Teddy, just for a few minutes, the time it took the train to pass. He’d sprinted ahead at the sound of the whistle, just making it in front of the engine, the engineer hitting a heavy blast on the horn as an admonition at his daring. Teddy had whimpered on the other side of the tracks, his moon face blinking in and out as the wheels rushed by.
“How you get …?” Teddy had cried from the far side of the clacking train.
“It’s the timing,” he had yelled back. “If you time it right, you can roll between the wheels.” He just wanted to tease Teddy, to remind Teddy that he was older and stronger. He hadn’t even bothered to wonder if Teddy would believe him. Or that Teddy might try it. “I did it up at the engine where it’s really hard. It’s easy now, just box cars,” he taunted.
Teddy had tried, tried to roll his stupid body between the cars. It ended like that, no more Teddy following him around.
That was when he first felt it, a hot surge of power, when he stood there beside the tracks, looking at what was left of Teddy. He had done this and it had been so easy, so quick. He knew he should have felt sick or upset at seeing the bloodied, mauled body, one of the arms a good twenty yards away. But he didn’t.
The power felt good. He hadn’t even intended to kill Teddy and it felt this good. What would it feel like if he did plan it, if he could enjoy thinking about what he was going to do? A giddy laugh escaped him.
Then he set himself to the task at hand, to act as the upset older brother, running to try and save his kid brother who had gotten away from him and fallen under the train.
He was very good at his act; he didn’t smile once at the funeral. No one, not even his father, knew what had really happened.
A month after the funeral, his father came into his room and told him that he needed to be punished.
“But Teddy’s not here,” he had protested.
“No, Teddy’s not here, so you’ll have to do,” his father told him, then grabbed him off the bed and shoved him down to his knees. He made him take the place of Teddy. When he fought, his father did the same thing that he’d done to Teddy. Even then, he hadn’t cried. His father made him keep telling the stories, but now demanded, “Tell me, girl, tell me how you like what I’m doing to you right now.”
When he was seventeen, his father was murdered. Someone broke into their home after they were asleep and battered his head in with an ax. While he was dying, the murderer had rolled him over and forced a broom handle up his rectum.
His father had angered a number of people over the years, “When it’s my red light flashing in your window, you do it my way,” he would say and make them squirm. He’d make sober judges walk a line if they had made him wait in court or let a defense attorney ask him too many questions. He hadn’t sent any murderers to prison, but he had made more arrests than anyone else. He had also had more of those arrests thrown out. Betty Dawson’s father was claiming that he’d forced her to fellate him to get out of a ticket. Mr. Dawson’s ax was missing and was found the day after the murder in a drainage ditch, covered in blood. But nothing could be proven, and his father’s killer was never arrested.
The town set up a fund for the remaining son, the one who was woken from his sleep by the sound of his father being killed, who had rushed in to try and save him, then, covered in his blood, run down the street to the corner phone to call for help. When asked why he hadn’t called from home, he said that he just had to get out of that house, that he was scared the killer was still there. Ironically, the phone was half a block from where the ax was discovered.
He had been right. It was so much better when he planned it, when he knew the power that he had and could savor it.
one
A storm was coming, the rising wind a harbinger of the tempest.
Nell reached down to grab at the stray sheet of newspaper as it scuttled across the parking lot in front of her. The light newsprint and the gusty wind conspired against her, but no one else was around to watch her awkward lunge. Spring was here with a vengeance, no lambs only lions, this brooding storm one of several in the past few weeks.
She finally nabbed the paper when the eddying wind blew it back against her calf. With it safely in hand, she headed for the trash can located outside the rear door of the city hall complex.
Nell paused at the garbage can. How easily I throw away my name, she thought. The wayward sheet was the editorial page, her name at the top of the masthead: Naomi Nelligan McGraw, Editor-in-Chief. It had taken her months to notice the change. “Who did this?” she’d asked Dolan Ferguson, the business manager. “You do the job, you get the title,” was his laconic reply. He hadn’t answered her question and Nell knew he wouldn’t.
The Editor-in-Chief is dead—long live his widow, the new Editor-in-Chief. The bitter thought caught Nell off guard. It’s been almost six months, she admonished herself, I should be over it. But she admitted she didn’t know how to lose the anger and grief that still blindsided her. How do you get over it? Or do you just learn to accept that you never will? One drunken driver, and the man she’d planned to share her life with was gone. Here she was, living his dream to run the paper that his great-grandfather had founded. Raising their two children alone.
What memories the wind brings, Nell thought as she again looked at the crumpled paper in her hand. She threw it in the trash can and entered the building.
She had intended to go right, along the covered walkway that led from the city hall building to the library, but a glance down the hall to her left, in the direction of the mayor’s office, changed her mind.
A group of men were coming in her direction. She waited.
“Hi, Buddy,” she said as they got nearer. “Going to indict anyone I should know about?”
Buddy Guy, the county DA, was an astute-enough politician to know that Nell’s seemingly bantering question was really a reporter’s query.
“Howdy, Nell,” he drawled. “Always a pleasure to run into you.” He extended his hand in the perfect politician’s handshake.
Buddy Guy—she always wanted to ask him if that was his real name or if a focus group had chosen it for him—had been coming down the hall with Douglas S
haun, the chief of police, Clureman Hickson, the sheriff, and Harold Reed, Buddy’s top prosecutor. Seeing the police chief and the sheriff together was enough to raise Nell’s reporter’s suspicion.
Sheriff Hickson was so close to the archetypal good ole boy that Nell had to constantly remind herself he had to be more than just a walking stereotype. He had a beer belly, some of it gained while on duty; the sheriff saw nothing wrong with tossing one back with the boys. He’d been sheriff for over twenty years, so ensconced that no one had run against him for at least the last ten. His balding head and slicked-back gray hair was usually hidden under a battered cowboy hat. He had never gone beyond high school and believed in “old fashioned law enforcement,” whatever that was. Nell suspected it was more a way of covering his mistrust of new techniques and the upheaval of change.
He and Nell were always polite to each other, but it was apparent he didn’t think that women should be working at all. To have one as editor-in-chief of his hometown newspaper was a change he’d clearly hoped to avoid in his lifetime.
Douglas Shaun, the police chief, was in many ways his opposite. He was new in Pelican Bay, only four months on the job, and was younger, in shape, and taller than the tall sheriff, indeed taller than most men. His hair was a curly, sandy brown and he had a chiseled chin that wouldn’t look out of place on a movie star. His face had just enough lines and his hair enough gray to add maturity to the strong masculine handsomeness that many women found appealing. Nell didn’t consider herself one of them. Thom had had a boyish bookishness about him, and that was what she found attractive.
Chief Shaun’s shirt and pants were always crisp and clean and his belt was loaded down with everything: gun, handcuffs, night stick. He didn’t treat her like a problem he hoped would go away, as Sheriff Hickson did. Shaun was an educated man and quite aware that having a good relationship with the editor of the paper could be very useful. He cultivated Nell, dropping by the office to brief her on things, even escorting her home one rainy night.
