Love You Always

by Lorin, Terra

  I think for a moment. Actually, now might be a good time because Dad will still be at work.

  I gaze at my sister. “Are you up to it, Jade?”

  She nods. “Yeah, why not? We gotta do this at some point anyway.”

  “Okay, then, let’s get this over with,” I say.

  * * *

  Good, Dad’s car isn’t here. He’s at work as usual. Jade and I start packing our stuff while Marcus hauls the boxes out to his SUV. I hope we can take everything in one trip, but it doesn’t look like that might be the case.

  I start selecting only the things I absolutely need—the photos of our childhood with Jade and Spence is one of them. I also have some old diaries that I kept when I was in high school, so I want to take those with me. Damn, I think I remember Dad stored some of our junk in the basement and I’m sure those diaries are in one of those boxes.

  God, I hate going down into that basement. It’s creepy. I’ve probably watched too many scary movies. Oh well. I’ll have Marcus go down there with me.

  “Marcus, I need you,” I call out to him as I stand at the top of the stairs looking down into the empty foyer.

  “Is it room service time again?” he teases as he appears into view.

  “No! Sheesh, you perv!” I exclaim, but with a laugh as I descend the stairs. “I need you to escort me to the basement.”

  “Hmm, you got something kinky in mind?” Again the wise cracks.

  I slap him on the arm. “Yeah, I’ve got some whips and chains I’m gonna use on you if you don’t behave.”

  “Shouldn’t you change into your tight leather pants and spiky heels?”

  I slap him again.

  “Ouch,” he says, laughing and rubbing his arm.

  “Keep it up, buddy, and that whip will be even worse than my slap.”

  “Nothing worse than a dominatrix who just can’t take a joke.”

  I chuckle as we head down to the basement.

  “Wow, this is eerie enough to film a horror flick down here,” my brave escort says once we turn on the light and stand at the bottom of the stairs.

  “And I thought bringing you along was going to help my nerves.” I haven’t been down here since I was a kid. It always creeped me out.

  “Hey, if anything comes jumping out of the dark, I’m holding you up as a shield.”

  I put my hands to my hips and let out a sigh. “My brave hero.”

  “When it comes to humans, I can protect you. Ghosts and ghouls, that’s a totally different story.” He laughs. “You didn’t happen to bring stakes and holy water did you?”

  “Marcus!” I exclaim. “Stop. You’re freaking me out here.”

  He grins and I sure want to smack him again. The jokester.

  “Okay, what are we looking for?”

  “I want to take a few things that were stored down here.”

  “There are some boxes over there,” he says pointing to the stack in the corner next to the large horizontal storage freezer. It’s pretty dim in that corner.

  We head over there and Marcus moves each box down to the floor as I rummage through them. I finally find my diaries amongst some other papers that I wrote in school—of course, they would be in the last box on the bottom of the stack.

  As I put the other articles I had taken out back into the box, a few papers slide under the freezer.

  “I’ll move the freezer so you can get at them,” Marcus tells me.

  I get out of his way and he pulls the freezer away from the wall, enough so I can get back there to get at the papers. The freezer is on rollers so it wasn’t too difficult.

  When I stand from my stooping position after retrieving the papers, I notice some tufts of hair caught in the hinge of the freezer’s cover.

  What the hell would hair be doing there?

  “What’s the matter?” Marcus asks me.

  “There’s hair stuck in the hinge.”

  Marcus furrows his brows. “Really? That’s pretty weird. Human hair?”

  I gaze up at him with a smirk. “Well, it ain’t werewolf hair.”

  I examine it further. Oh my God, whose hair is this? A chill runs through me. We need to open this freezer.

  “Do you know where the key to this lock is?” Marcus asks as if he’s read my mind.

  I shake my head.

  “We should look for it,” he says.

  I hesitate and stare at him.

  “No,” I say with conviction. “Break the lock, Marcus.”

  “Are you sure?” he asks, his eyes look at me with concern.

  I hold my stance firm and nod. “Yes. We don’t have time to look for the key.”

  “Okay, if you say so.” Marcus’ eyes scan around the basement until he spots a workbench with tools. He rummages through the tools and finds a metal rod a little smaller than a crowbar. I think it’s something to fix cars with, but what do I know? I’m no mechanic or tool expert.

  With one firm tug, he breaks the lock.

  Marcus lifts the freezer’s cover and I hold my breath. My eyes are wide, preparing for the worst.

  I stare into the open bin.

  Nothing. There’s nothing in the freezer.

  I let out my breath.

  Although the anticipated body isn’t there, I can’t help but wonder why there’s hair in the hinge. And in a large enough quantity to make me take pause.

  “I’ll be right back,” I tell Marcus and I run upstairs to the kitchen to get a Ziploc bag. When I get back to the basement, I pull out most of the hair that I can get loose from the hinge and place it in the bag.

  All of a sudden, I feel queasy. I stare at Marcus.

  I rush over to the utility sink and hurl whatever contents my stomach had in it. I cough and cough and when I’m finally able to calm myself, I rinse my mouth of the rancid bile.

  As I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, I turn to face Marcus.

  Oh my God.

  He stares at me. My face is probably white as a ghost.

  I know whose hair this is.

  It’s hers—Mom’s.

  Chapter 33 - Marcus

  ~* Marcus *~

  Laura looks like she’s seen a ghost.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Oh my God. I think this is my mom’s hair,” she says, holding up the plastic bag.

  “What are you saying? You think your mom was killed, put in the freezer, and then later disposed of?” I don’t blame Laura for feeling ill, I’m starting to get queasy myself.

  Her eyes stare at me in disbelief.

  “Could my dad be capable of murder? Oh my God, it’s hard to believe.” She covers her hand to her mouth as if to hold back a scream.

  After a few moments, she says, “It was hard enough to believe he’d molest Spence, but to commit murder? Oh my God.”

  “Before you jump to any conclusions, we need to get that hair sample analyzed,” I tell her.

  She nods. Her face is still ashen as though she could faint at any moment. I rush to her side with one arm encircling her waist while my other hand holds her by the elbow.

  “You okay? You don’t look so good.”

  She again nods her head. Her mind is elsewhere though, probably reeling from her conclusions. I hate to say it, but she may be right. Hair stuck in the freezer that way, that’s just too freaking strange. A person’s not going to get their hair stuck like that by just looking into the freezer. There’s definitely foul play here. Seems my family’s not the only one with horrible tragedies. This is too freaking bizarre.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” I tell her, nudging her along.

  “Wait!” she says. “We need to put everything back so he doesn’t suspect we’ve been down here.”

  “We can’t do anything about the lock, he’ll notice that.”

  “That’s okay. That freezer hasn’t been used in a while by the looks of it, so he might not notice it unless he looks directly at it. If he co
mes down here for something else, and sees the boxes tampered with, he’ll then come over here to investigate and see the freezer’s been opened.”

  “That’s a good point. Okay, you go upstairs and tell Jade to hurry it up. I’ll put everything back as they were.” I let go of her. “Also, see if you can find a hairbrush or comb, anything that belonged to your mother that may have hair samples on it.”

  Laura rushes upstairs to take care of those tasks. After I stack the last box, I move the freezer back in place against the wall. The lock’s busted, but I set it in its position anyway so at a glance it’s not conspicuous.

  Once everything is back in its place, I take one last sweep of the area before going upstairs.

  As I walk towards the foyer, Laura’s descending the stairs with a garbage bag full of stuff. I take it from her as she meets me on the bottom step.

  “Is that it?” I ask.

  “Yup. As much as we need anyway.”

  “Where’s Jade?”

  “She’s already waiting at the car. She wants out of here.”

  “Did you tell her?” I ask.

  “No, not yet. I want to wait until we get conclusive results that it’s my mom’s hair.”

  Man, I wonder how that news will hit that poor girl if their dad really did kill their mom. She’s already pretty messed up as it is, but there’s hope for her since she’s reached out to Laura for help and has agreed to go to therapy. I sure hope this doesn’t tip her back over the edge.

  If it turns out my family was deliberately killed, especially if it was George behind it who was like family to us, that’s going to hit me hard, so I can imagine what Laura and Jade will go through being that their own flesh and blood committed the heinous act. At least they already hate the guy. If they loved him, that would be even harder to take.

  I realize it’s not yet conclusive as to whose hair that is, but Laura seems to think it’s her mother’s and there must be a good reason she thinks so.

  “Were you able to find your mother’s hairbrush?”

  “Yes. Thank God he didn’t throw out all her stuff. I found one in a drawer under their bathroom sink.”

  Her eyes look at me with sadness.

  “What is it?” I ask, sensing she’s found something out.

  “The hair. They both match.”

  Oh God. It seems then their father did do something, but without a body, how can it be proven? He might be able to get away with a child molestation charge, but he can’t get away with murder. He deserves to be locked up.

  I’m so glad we’re heading out of here without running into the dad. Having to deal with him would’ve been bad. I don’t think Laura nor I would be able to contain the repulsion of what he did to his son and what he might’ve done to his wife. I can tell you, I’d wanna punch the guy out if I saw him again.

  We drop Jade off at home and I take Laura to the police station. After waiting for about half-hour, a Detective Donnelly is assigned to us.

  “Have a seat,” he says as he walks around to his desk. “What can I do you for?”

  Laura tells him the story of what her father did to Spence and then brings up the hair we found in the freezer. She pulls out the plastic bag from her handbag and shows it to him, along with the hairbrush.

  He examines the two side by side.

  “Hmm. The thickness, color, and curl does seem to match,” the burly detective with a crooked nose says. By his stature, he could’ve gotten that nose playing football as a lineman rather than on duty.

  He takes out a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and looks more closely at both samples.

  “Good, some have got the roots on them, so they’ll be easily DNA tested,” he says. He lowers his hands to the desk and looks at Laura.

  “I’m going to be honest with you. I can’t submit this for forensics because we didn’t obtain the samples ourselves. It wouldn’t be admissible as evidence. What I’d suggest is that you submit it to a lab yourself. Some labs can get the results to you in 3 - 5 days, even less if you pay a RUSH fee, depending on what lab you go through. I’ll give you a list of labs you can submit to.”

  “Oh,” Laura says with disappointment. “Is it expensive?” She bites her bottom lip and a look of worry crosses her face. She’s probably figuring she can’t afford it.

  “Okay, we’ll do that, sir. We need to rush this,” I say before he can answer.

  From my peripheral vision, I see Laura’s head turn to look at me. “You’ve already done too much for us, Marcus. I can’t let you pay for this too.”

  “Hush. It’s my money and I can do what I want with it,” I say, overruling her. I shine her a smile.

  She doesn’t continue her protest and instead smiles back appreciatively. She knows she needs to do this and it needs to be done fast.

  Detective Donnelly looks back and forth between the two of us.

  “If the lab comes back with a positive match, we’ll then conduct an investigation,” he says.

  After asking Laura some questions and filling out a police report, he says to her, “Come back when you have the results and we’ll go from there.”

  “Thank you,” she replies. I sense her relief now that the police will investigate her allegations—at least for her mom’s disappearance because they still won’t be able to make a case for child molestation. Getting him on a murder rap will serve justice for his other crime.

  Speaking of crimes, I hope Agent Crowley is having some success on Vivian’s lead. If George is behind it all, I hope he’s sweating it now that the FBI’s sniffing all over him. After the accident and finding out that Angela and I survived must’ve put a damper on his plans. I bet he waited a few years before he did anything to us, just so it wouldn’t look obvious that the two incidents were connected.

  Well, thanks to Vivian, his motives may be all too clear and obvious now that the dots are connecting. I trusted him as I would trust my family that it never even crossed my mind he might’ve done this for control of the company.

  Goes to show you, you never know who’s capable of evil. It’s actually pretty freaking unbelievable.

  I think I’ll pay George a visit after all to see for myself if he squirms when I bring up the accident and kidnapping. Yeah, I need to do this before I condemn him of the crimes without any proof.

  I’ll call George tomorrow to make an appointment with him. Right now, I’m sure Laura’s exhausted and needs to unwind after today’s discovery so I’ll put my undivided attention on her for now. She could probably use a massage.

  “You okay?” I take a glance at her as I drive.

  Her head’s leaning against the window. She turns to look at me. “Not really, but I’ll survive.”

  I don’t say another word throughout the trip home. I figure she just needs to be with her thoughts. What she uncovered is major and will change both her and Jade’s lives.

  All I can do now is to be a comfort to her, to be there when she needs me. Jade will need me too. I want to be a big brother to her like I am with Angela. That girl needs another person besides Laura to care about her, to help her build her self-esteem and self-respect back up again. No girl her age should have to go through what she’s going through. She’s got her whole life ahead of her—she needs to heal. Laura and Angela need to heal. Christ, even I need to heal.

  I have a feeling that together, with each other’s love and support—we can and will heal.

  Chapter 34 - Laura

  ~* Laura *~

  Putting a rush on it, I got the test results back from the lab in a couple of days. It’s a positive match. They also said there was blood on one of the hair samples that was of the same DNA. Could that mean Mom had a blow to her head?

  My breath catches. Oh my God.

  After giving the evidence to Detective Donnelly, he said they’d get a warrant to search the house, especially the inside of the freezer for Mom’s DNA. All I can do now is wait for him to call back with whatever
their investigation turns up.

  I decide it’s time Jade knows what’s going on. At this point, it’s pretty clear that Mom’s body was in that freezer at some point. It’s highly unlikely she went behind the freezer and somehow got her hair caught up in the hinge. It makes more sense for it to have happened when someone tried to stuff her body into the freezer. That someone, of course, being Dad—who else could it have been?

  “Jade.” I knock on her bedroom door. “Can I come in?”

  “It’s not locked,” she calls out.

  As I enter, she’s lying on her stomach, skimming through a magazine. She doesn’t look up when I approach her.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I ask.

  She now looks at me. “Sure, what’s up?” She sits up into a cross-legged position, closes the magazine and tosses it to the side.

  I sit on the edge of the bed and face her. I stare into her hazel eyes and take a deep breath.

  “Do you know that storage freezer that’s in the basement?” I ask her.

  She squints and I can tell she’s trying to access her memory.

  “Vaguely, but I hate going down into that basement, so I’ve never really paid attention to what’s down there. I think I’ve only been down there twice when I was a kid. Dad didn’t like us going down there anyway, so that was fine by me.” She shifts her legs to hug a knee. “Anyway, what about it?”

  Okay, there’s no turning back now. Just spit it out and tell her.

  “When we were there the other day, I found strands of hair caught between the hinges of that freezer. I sent them and samples from Mom’s brush to a DNA lab. The results came back conclusive that they match Mom’s hair.”

  Her eyes go wide, but she stays silent and listens attentively.

  “The police are now conducting an investigation to find out if Dad might’ve killed Mom.”

  “Fuuuuck,” she finally says.

  I scan her face, but she doesn’t seem to be freaking out yet, it’s more like she’s stunned.

  “We might not be able to prove Dad molested Spence, but with the evidence inside the freezer, they may be able to pin him with murder.”

  Her nose flares. “The bastard!” she finally says with anger. “Do you think Mom found out about what he did to Spence and confronted him?”