He took a deep breath. “Animals are so much more valuable to this world than anybody even really knows. They bond with you and know your emotions better than any other human would ever be able to understand and comprehend. There’s a reason why so many people have therapy dogs. There’s a reason why dogs are brought into hospitals to visit people. They really do save people’s lives, in more ways than one.”
I nodded along, thinking that even Hitler loved animals, and especially loved his dog, Blondie. But I wasn’t quite sure that this guy was Hitler or even that he was evil. He might have been simply a patsy. His brother certainly could have been the person who was the killer, not him. I had a feeling that this was the case.
“Well, this stew certainly is delicious,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like seconds.”
He smiled, big. “Music to my ears. I should have been born Italian, because I always used to try to make sure that my guests were satisfied. Plus, I have always liked to cook. When I was younger…” His voice trailed off. “Well, that’s neither here nor there, because my life has been nothing but a waste. But when I was younger, I wanted to study to be a chef. That was actually my dream. I certainly never thought that I would end up here, in the woods, far away from civilization. I never dreamed that this would be my fate. But after my brother was found dead, and everybody thought that I was the one who died in that home, I didn’t know what else to do. I was afraid that the police might have thought that I had something to do with what had happened in that house, and I didn’t have a thing to do with nothing that happened. Nothing.”
He sighed as he stared at his glass of whiskey. “You ever make bathtub whiskey, Ms. Ross?” he asked.
“No, I never have.”
“It’s easier than you might think. You just have to get some corn and mash it and put some yeast and water in it and just let it sit for a few weeks and ferment. The first time I made this, I thought it was the most wretched thing in the world. I mean, it was disgusting. It smelled disgusting and it tasted even worse. But it did the job. And I’ve refined my techniques over the years. I’ve learned how to make it taste as smooth as butter. I figured, I had nothing else to do, literally nothing else to do, but to spend my time trying to figure out how to make better moonshine. It’s been a challenge, but I think that I’ve risen to it.”
I looked at the bottle of whiskey and felt my mouth water. I wondered if I could ever be around alcohol, especially alcohol that piqued my curiosity, as this moonshine did – I couldn’t get my mind off of how much I wanted to taste it and see if Steven was right about his whiskey-making skills – and not even have a taste. Not even a taste.
I swallowed hard and bit down on my lip. You aren’t going to try that alcohol. You’re not going to try that alcohol.
“You sure you don’t even want a taste?”
“No. I’m not sure. I’m never sure. Recovering from alcoholism has been white-knuckle for me all the way. It always has been. But I’m stronger than the drink. I just have to keep telling myself that.”
“Okay.” He looked disappointed. “You’re only the second person I’ve seen in almost 50 years, and I’ve been anxious to see if my whiskey is as good as I think that it is. I guess I’ll never know, though. I mean, Anna loved it, but I guess I wanted another opinion too.”
I focused my eyes on the fire, because I didn’t want to look at that glass of booze, as I asked my questions. “So, Steven, tell me again why you felt that you had to drop out of society. I guess I don’t really understand.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him bring that glass of whiskey to his mouth and take a sip. “You see, it’s like this, Ms. Ross. My brother, whose name was Jackson, stole my identity. He stole it. And he was evil to the core. He was determined that I was going to pay for his sins. Bound and determined.” He shook his head. “Jackson was a bad seed. To say the very least.”
I finally felt brave enough to look in his direction, and I saw that he had tears in his eyes. “I don’t even want to go into the things that he did when we were kids.” He pet his beautiful dog, who was staring at him with love in her big brown eyes, which were trained on him. “But he…” Steven shook his head. “Poor Sadie, our golden retriever. I don’t want to talk about that.”
I didn’t want to talk about that, either. No matter how much I saw and heard and found about in my job, I still couldn’t ever bring myself to feel brave enough to hear about any kind of animal abuse.
Steven had a lump in his throat. “And he lived in that house. That house that was in my name. The utilities were in my name. He kept me prisoner in that house, upstairs, in the attic.” He shook his head. “The bastard. He made that poor kid who stayed with him, who went by the name Eli sometimes and Mick other times, dress up in girl’s clothing and parade around before he did unspeakable acts to him. Jackson found clothes at the thrift store that were the kinds of clothes that our mother wore, and he made Eli wear these clothes while he beat him and burned him and hung him up by his wrists for days on end. And he would call Eli the name of our mother – Margaret.”
This was a different story. I was getting another wrinkle in this entire tale – that Jackson apparently hated his mother so much that he made my Uncle Jack dress like her while he did horrible things to him.
“Tell me about Eli,” I said to Steven. “You said that he sometimes went by the name Mick as well. Is that right? Did he ever call himself something different? Were those the only two names that you heard him call himself?”
He stared at the fire while he sipped his whiskey. “No, actually. There was one time that I heard him call himself a different name. I heard this different name on the day that that boy killed my brother.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
My ears perked up. “What does that mean? You heard him call himself something different on the day that he killed your brother?”
He sighed. “Let me just kind of start from the beginning on this. When this skinny kid was brought to this house, my brother decided that he was going to keep him as a house boy. That was what he told me – the kid was going to be a houseboy. He was going to run errands and get food and things like that. I didn’t really know what Jackson was doing at that time. As I said, I was kept prisoner in that attic. He chained me to the bed and I pretty much was on that bed for several years. I…”
He shook his head. “I had a chamber pot that I did my business in, and, originally, that was what Eli was there for. To change my chamber pot. And to make sure that I didn’t get bed sores, so he had to lift me up off the bed from time to time. It was humiliating to say the least, but Jackson said that he had to do it to me, because he was posing as me. Nobody even knew that there were two of us – our parents had died and we moved to Kansas City from Omaha, where nobody knew us. And, well, Jackson decided that he didn’t want people to know that there were two of us, and it wouldn’t do for both of us to be out walking around at the same time, so he knocked me out and, when I came to, I was chained to this bed. I soon found out that Jackson had been posing as me, using my name, around town. He had my identification, and he used that to open up utilities and put the house in my name and all of that.”
I knew why Jackson was doing all of that. It was pretty obvious. If it ever came to where the police found the house of horrors and the bones of all those children, then Steven would be the one who would be implicated. Steven’s name was on the deed and Steven’s name was on the utilities. And Jackson made sure that the people in Kansas City didn’t know that there were twins. Jackson would be able to just skate away and leave Steven holding the bag for his crimes. It was perfect, really.
He went on. “So, Eli was assigned the disgusting job of changing my pot while I lay there wasting away on that bed. But he called himself Jack when he first got to the house. He was a scared kid, frightened of his own shadow, and he cried all the time. But, within a day or so of his being there, he called himself Eli. I…”
He shook his head. “I understood tha
t, I understood what was going on, because I saw it in my mother before she killed herself. My mother had multiple personalities, and it was something that Jackson and I lived with our entire lives. My mother was named Sheila, but she would sometimes go by the name Nanette and sometimes she would call herself Summer. Sheila was frightened of her shadow, just like Jack was, but Nanette was a wise-cracking, hard-drinking, loud woman who hosted large poker games in our home and flirted with every man in the place. As a kid, I liked Nanette a lot, because she was fun, and our mother was the very opposite of fun. Our mother was quiet, meek, locked all the doors and windows and always was talking about danger in the world. Nanette was just the opposite, and she was hilarious.”
This was fascinating to me to find out that Steven’s mother had DID, apparently. “What about Summer?”
“Well, even though that third personality called herself Summer, she was unbelievably cruel. She beat us just about every single day, and put hot wax on us. She kicked us, and she forced one of us at a time to go down into the cellar and stay there.” He shivered. “That was horrible. It was dark down there, and the bugs. The bugs. I was terrified of bugs as a kid, and they were down there by the millions. I think that Summer is the reason why my brother got so messed up. I hated what he did to all those children, but I knew why he was messed up, and it was because of Summer.”
I saw into the psyche of Steven and, to a certain extent, Jackson, and saw why they were screwed up. Steven might have just been screwed up because of what his brother did to him, though. But it had to be horrible growing up with an insane mother. I felt for this poor guy – first his mother abused him, and then his brother did.
And now he was banished to this cabin in the woods. Isolated, alone and fearful of the world. All because of the things that other people did to him.
“Our mother hanged herself one day when she was back to being our mother. Jackson found her and, believe it or not, he tried to protect me from seeing what he saw. I think that was why he went off the deep-end, though. He was never the same after that.”
With every word that Steven was speaking, I was getting a better and better picture on what happened to Jackson. Why he had that break with reality. I didn’t think that it excused his heinous acts, by any stretch of the imagination, because his acts were the very definition of evil. But I saw what tripped him up into doing what he did.
“So,” I said. “You saw my Uncle Jack come in and he called himself Jack and then he called himself Eli, and you knew what was happening?”
He looked at me strangely. “He was your Uncle Jack? I mean, is your Uncle Jack. I’m assuming that he is still alive.”
“He is my Uncle Jack. Yes, he’s still alive.” I was going to tell Steven about my Uncle Jack’s murder charge, but I wanted to hear his story, first. I didn’t want to interrupt him, so I just kept my mouth shut about the real reason I was there.
He nodded. “That’s good. That’s very good.” He paused. “I worried about that poor kid after he killed my brother. I knew that he was going to be permanently scarred. I wanted to check in on him from time to time, but I just couldn’t. After my brother was found dead and everybody knew everything that he did, I knew that I couldn’t live in society anymore. I was afraid that everybody would assume that I was in on that, too. I figured that the best thing that I could do would be to just escape out here into the woods so that I could escape my brother’s notoriety.”
“I guess I don’t really understand. In your previous life in Omaha, people knew that there were two of you. Once the stories about your brother got out into the newspaper, the teachers and others who knew the both of you probably told the cops that there was a twin. Right?”
“No.” He shook his head. “Summer was the dominant personality, and Summer decided that she wanted only one of us boys to be known to be alive. Only one of us could be seen at any given time. She imprisoned one of us at a time in our attic in our home in Omaha. Some weeks I was lucky enough to go to school, but the next week, I would have to stay in the attic and Jackson would be the only one who would go to school. I don’t know why she did that, to this day, except that she was insane. Literally insane. And, for some reason, the alternate personality, Nanette, did the same thing. They didn’t want it to be known that there were two of us. God knows why.”
“What about Sheila? Didn’t she let both of you out at the same time?”
He shook his head. “No. That’s just the thing. Our mother, in general, didn’t want there to be twins around. I think that her own feelings bled out into the alternate personalities, so that all three of the personalities refused to let both of us out at the same time. I wish I knew the reasoning behind it. Then again, when you’re crazy, you don’t have very good reasoning, do you? For all that anybody ever knew, there was only one of us, and his name was Steven. My name was the name that people knew both of us by.”
It all suddenly made more sense to me – why Steven would drop out of society and come to live in the woods. There was only one Heaney boy that was known or seen in society, walking around, and that boy was named Steven. Jackson took Steven’s identity his entire life, which was why he took his identity again when the two of them became adults.
“So, yeah,” he continued. “Since nobody knew that there were two of us, ever, I decided that it was going to be dangerous for me to be seen by anybody. I didn’t want people to get the idea that I was guilty of killing those kids, too. That’s why I’m here. I don’t know how your assistant Anna figured that out, but I’m glad that she did.”
I nodded, but I wanted to get back to my earlier thread. I needed to get the story on Eli, Mick and Jack. And the mysterious other personality who was around when Steven’s brother Jackson was killed. “Let’s get back to what you were saying earlier. About Eli and Mick. When did you realize that there was a Mick?”
He shrugged. “I never saw Mick. My brother told me that Jack became Mick whenever they were…” He sighed. “I don’t know what to call it. When they were intimate, Jackson said that Jack called himself Mick. That was the only time, though. The rest of the time, he called himself Eli.”
“Raping,” I said softly. “The word that you were searching for was rape. Your brother and my Uncle weren’t ‘intimate.’ There was no intimacy. There was only violence and humiliation and degradation. My Uncle Jack was raped.” I shuddered as I thought about my own rape, and how Michael Reynolds was still trying to torment me by appealing his conviction based upon my admitted ineffective assistance of counsel.
“Yes,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have used a word like ‘intimate.’ I should have called it like it was – a rape.”
“It’s okay. I’m very sensitive about…labeling rape as anything other than what it is. I shouldn’t have interrupted you, though. Please go on.”
“Well, on the day that my brother died, Jack came up after he killed him. He said that he was going to free me and told me that I should get out of the house. Which I did. But he called himself something different that day. A name that I had never heard him call himself before.”
I felt excited. This was maybe the key. I had the feeling that there was another personality that was buried in my Uncle Jack’s psyche. I just had that hunch. There was another personality that I was going to have to try to talk to to get to the bottom of who killed Father Kennedy. This was the personality who was going to know about who did that.
“What was the other personality’s name?”
“Sam.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
As excited as I was to find out there was another personality, I was terrified about it as well. This Sam apparently was the violent personality that was in Uncle Jack’s psyche. It wasn’t Eli after all. But what did that mean? Sam killed Jackson. Eli didn’t. Eli might have hated Jackson, but I had a feeling that Eli also feared his captor. After all, if Eli didn’t fear Jackson, then he probably would have went to the police and told them what was going on in that house. Eli w
as the one who was let out of the house on a regular basis.
As for Mick, he felt that he was in love with Jackson. That would be why he never wanted to turn in his captor.
But Sam…Sam apparently was only “allowed” out one time, and that was to kill Jackson. Sam was the one who had the violence. Was Sam the one who killed Father Kennedy?
“Tell me about Sam,” I said to Steven. “Did you only see Sam the one time?”
Steven nodded his head. “Yes. That was the only time. The other times, I saw Eli. Eli was the one who came to me and changed my chamber pot. Eli was the person who I actually spoke to and had a bond with. Eli was the only one of the personalities that even knew that I existed, at least until Sam. Sam knew me. Sam knew that I was around, because it was Sam who freed me and told me to high-tail it out of there because he was going to call the cops and tell them what had happened. Sam told me that he killed Jackson to protect Jack, because Jack was in love with Mary, who was also staying at that house, and Jackson was going to kill Mary. Sam said that he couldn’t let that happen, so he killed my brother.”
“No other time? Sam didn’t come out any other time?”
“No. I only saw Eli. Full stop.” He raised his eyebrows. “Why are you having a tough time believing this?”
“I’m not.” I stroked my chin. “But I just want to make sure I have all of this straight. It’s very confusing, even for me.”
Steven shook his head. “The poor kid. He took so much torture, so much abuse. I don’t know about this Sam, but I get the feeling that he’s the one that protected all of them. Eli was a tough character, but he wasn’t violent. From what I understand, although I never met him, Mick was a homosexual. I don’t think that he was violent, either. At least that’s how Jackson described Mick to me. But Sam was violent. He was the only personality that was, I think.”
Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3 Page 77
