The Swamp Killers

by Sarah M. Chen

  What kind of grown man had a name like Timmy? She’d never liked him or his name, never been fooled by his ass-licking grin. He had the easy good looks of a rodeo cowboy, or a carnie. That slicked back hair and chiseled face. He’d tried his charms on her the first time they’d met, brought over to the house by Sheldon, who’d recommended him to manage one of the businesses they’d been in the process of acquiring.

  “Pleasure to meet yinz,” he’d said with a slow grin, letting his eyes run appreciatively down her body, the way some men do because they think it’s a compliment. That immediately lowered her estimation of him, that and the way he’d cast that same roaming eye over her daughter when Melody burst into her mother’s office to ask for some cash.

  “Use your card,” her mother had said, standing abruptly and waving Melody back out of the room, keenly aware of her daughter’s short-shorts and bikini top. It had been a scorching hot June day, and Melody had been lounging by their pool, but it was sweltering and she was “of a mind to go out for a smoothie.” Timmy’s gaze lingered a little too long on that young cleavage and he followed her daughter’s rear end as Melody sashayed back out of the room.

  The other men who worked for the Duplass family were smart enough to ignore Melody, looking up at the sky, or down at their phones, or anywhere at all except her beautiful body. She was off-limits and they knew it, but Timmy had been a newbie, brought in by Sheldon, who wouldn’t know his ass from his elbow when it came to hiring good people. Apparently Timmy was some distant cousin’s wife’s friend’s nephew—Olivia couldn’t keep track of the six-degrees-of-DNA game that Sheldon always wanted to play. Was that just a Southern thing? All she wanted in employees was loyalty and honesty—make that honesty with her. Not with the police. She’d never had to tell any of them before that her daughter was off-limits; it had always been clearly understood.

  She pulled out a burner phone to make the call.

  “What’s up, Liv?” Sheldon answered immediately, his Foghorn Leghorn drawl instantly recognizable even over the noise of construction equipment. The home building business was mostly a front to funnel money, but her brother-in-law had gotten in to it. He watched too much HGTV.

  “Melody’s run off.”

  “What? Where’s she gone?”

  “I don’t know, but she’s not alone. When was the last time you saw Timmy?”

  “Yesterday I think, or the day before. Why?”

  The pause hung, heavy in the air, until Sheldon caught up, suddenly swearing, a long stream of colorful invectives. “I’ll call Boggs and we’ll be right over.”

  The good thing about Sheldon was that he was one of those people who knew his strengths and was happy to operate within his limited abilities. He’d never tried to muscle her out after Mason’s death, for which she was eternally grateful, and he never did anything that hadn’t been ordered by her. He wasn’t the quickest or most flexible thinker, but he was loyal and solid and that was worth a lot more to Olivia. She was quick enough for both of them. Sheldon was also a dedicated uncle, who loved Melody as much as if she were his own. He’d kill Timmy himself if she let him.

  “Dumb loyalty beats a free thinker any day of the week.” Her father’s reedy voice popped into Olivia’s head unbidden, startling her. Her spine straightened, automatically snapping to attention even though Sergeant Francis J. Krauthammer, Jr. had been dead for more than ten years.

  Instantly, she was back on the porch of that base housing in Virginia, lined up alongside her younger brothers while their father conducted his morning inspection. They had to be up at five most mornings, had to make their beds properly and dress “the right way” for school. It didn’t matter to him if they were late for the bus. Nor would he drive them. They could walk the three miles to school because that was a natural consequence. Had there ever been a time, perhaps when she was very little, that he’d shown her any affection? She couldn’t remember one. She thought of the moment she’d first held Melody in her arms, that incredible rush of love, like the discovery of a hidden river, the sweetness of it humming through her body.

  What had walled her father off so completely from his own feelings, or did he have any to begin with? Francis, Jr. was a man happy only when he was hurting others. And since the only people Francis had complete control over were his own children, he’d specialized in bullying them. Olivia, as his oldest offspring and only girl, had come in for special treatment. “Vanity is a sin,” he’d shrieked when she was ten and he caught her trying on her mother’s makeup. He’d made her scrub it off and then he’d taken her to the same base barbershop where he took the boys and made them cut off his daughter’s hair. The barber had taken pity and only bobbed it, but Olivia had still sobbed as she watched her long auburn curls falling to the linoleum floor. From that moment on she’d hated her father.

  “Oh, you don’t mean that,” her mother had protested when she confided this antipathy to her. Willa Krauthammer, nee Woodley, had been many things, but most of all she was someone who’d refused to face reality. Her biggest accomplishment, before giving birth to four children in five years, had been being named first runner-up in the Miss Mobile Teen pageant.

  Olivia was lucky she’d inherited her mother’s looks. Her father had piggish, red-rimmed eyes and wore wire-rim spectacles that he took off and cleaned when he lectured Olivia and her brothers. He was the sort of man who needed a uniform and a gun to feel powerful. How he’d loved appearing in public in his dress uniform, pining for people to thank him for his service, as if pushing papers behind a desk was somehow preserving democracy. He’d been in-country in Vietnam just long enough to mention it forever, cementing the image of himself as a traumatized war vet so successfully that to the end of his life his wife would caution Olivia and her brothers not to startle their father because it could trigger his battle scars, even though the most he’d suffered was the lack of air conditioning in his office in Saigon.

  They moved every two to three years, from one piss-poor assignment to another, the houses getting just that little bit bigger, but never staying anywhere long enough for it to feel like home. How she’d envied the civilian kids she went to school with, the ones who knew everyone in town, and lived in the same house long enough to get bored with the paint color. Who never had to say goodbye to their friends, or be the new kid in school yet again. Sometimes she’d dreamed that she was packing and unpacking the same cardboard box, an endless Mobius strip of moving.

  When Olivia hit her teen years she rebelled. Everything she did ran afoul of her father anyway—if she was going to be blamed, she might as well do something to deserve it.

  “Do you want to ruin this family’s reputation?” Francis had squealed when she broke curfew and came home smelling like cheap whiskey and Virginia Slims. As if he didn’t come home smelling of booze himself. He was a hypocrite of the first order and she’d wanted nothing more than to be as far gone from him and the military life as possible.

  And she’d done it, too, packing a bag the minute she hit eighteen. Not unlike her daughter, except Melody wasn’t running from her problem, but straight to him.

  Olivia crushed the candy wrapper in her fist, pretending it was Timmy’s tiny pecan of a brain. Then she tore it to shreds.

  Where were they running? Olivia stormed back to Melody’s bedroom, searching for clues, Peaches trotting annoyingly close to her feet. “You’re going to break my neck or I’m going to crush you,” Olivia complained, looking down at the furry nuisance. It was impossible to stay mad while staring into those big brown eyes. How could Melody have left her beloved dog behind?

  She fetched Melody’s laptop from the family room and carried it back to her office. Olivia wasn’t a tech person, but Sheldon had people who could look at it. In the meantime, she started to wonder if Melody was the only thing Timmy had taken from her.

  When Sheldon arrived fifteen minutes later, Olivia was wrapping up a conference call with two of her accountants, enlisting them in traci
ng Melody’s cards, searching for any discrepancies in the family finances. Money would be missing, she was sure of that. Her brother-in-law rapped on her office door before poking his head around it. She waved him in, surprised when he was followed not only by Boggs, but Jim-Bob, Slim Pete, and someone she knew only as Hambone.

  She hung up the phone and stood so she didn’t feel small in this sea of large men, coming out from around her desk to talk. “They’re heading south,” she said without preamble. “There’s footage of Melody using an ATM outside of Albany.”

  “We’ll find ’em,” Sheldon said in an ominous voice at odds with his Day-Glo Hawaiian shirt.

  “What do you want us to do when we catch up?” Slim Pete asked. He was not “slim” at all, but a two-hundred-fifty-pound former linebacker for the Falcons. There was a lot of muscle under that fat, and he looked like he could crack a skull just by flexing one dark bicep.

  “I don’t want you to do anything,” Olivia said. “Not directly.” She looked back at Sheldon. “You put the word out—I want them stopped. Melody is to be brought back to me—that’s first and foremost. Nothing happens to her, d’yall hear me? Not one hair on her pretty head is to be messed with or you’ll answer to me.”

  “And Timmy?” Boggs croaked. He was a large toad of a man with slimy, acne-prone skin and cold bug eyes.

  “I don’t want to see his sorry ass again—do you understand?” Olivia gave them each a knowing look, ending with Sheldon, who nodded.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I find them,” he said after the others had filed out, standing so close that she could smell his aroma of Brut and sweat. “Don’t you worry, Liv—I’ll bring Melody home.” He opened his big arms wide and she realized with horror that he was planning to give her a hug—that was so not their relationship.

  She staved it off by stepping quickly back behind her desk. “Thank you, Sheldon, I know I can count on you.”

  He blinked, confused, big arms hanging in the air like the branches of a tupelo tree, before they finally dropped to his side and he backed out of the room.

  Once he and the other men were gone, Olivia sank into her desk chair and thought about the first time she’d caught her daughter alone with Timmy. The two of them sitting and talking by her beautiful inground pool. Like he had a right to lounge at her house, like he had a right to talk to her daughter. She should have knocked him senseless then and there, but she couldn’t do it in front of Melody.

  “I don’t want you talking to him,” Olivia had said when she could get her daughter alone.

  “Why? He’s so smart—he’s got big plans.” Melody had come inside to fetch an orange, tearing strips of the fragrant skin with her long delicate fingers, before popping a segment into her mouth. “Yum.” She’d smiled, swiping at the juice running down her chin. “It’s sooo good. Do you want one, Mama?”

  Olivia accepted the piece, but held it, the juice sticky in her hand. “He’s too old for you.”

  Melody’s laugh was as melodious as her name, but her words made Olivia’s internal alarm go off. “Oh c’mon, we’re just about the same age difference as you and Daddy.” She popped another segment into that pretty mouth.

  Olivia couldn’t tell her daughter that this was why she was scared. She loved oranges, but that day the smell made her stomach turn. She wanted to tell her daughter to watch out, that falling in love at eighteen wasn’t the same as at twenty-eight. That life was so different a decade on. But all Melody knew was her parents’ love story and the words stuck in Olivia’s throat.

  Now she wished she’d said something. She could have kept the story to why men like Timmy were bad apples; she wouldn’t have had to say anything bad about Melody’s father.

  It was ironic that Melody was comparing Timmy favorably to Mason, while Olivia could remember laughing that same way in conversation with her own mother, but then she’d been telling Willa how completely different Mason was from Francis, how she’d never marry a man like him.

  She’d been right in some ways. At least outwardly, her husband’s personality had been about as far from her father’s as it was possible to be. She’d met Mason when Francis was reassigned to a base in Atlanta after finishing a stint at Fort Dix. Quite a change, coming down as a Jersey girl among all those Southern belles, but Olivia had always enjoyed a challenge. Armed with a fake ID and false eyelashes, she’d gone to a nightclub as many miles as she could get from Fort Benning. She’d been busy dancing to a throbbing bass beat when she caught her first glimpse of handsome Mason Duplass grinning at her from the bar.

  He had a wicked grin. Just thinking about it reminded her of that little shiver of anticipation she’d felt when he slid off that bar stool and strolled her way.

  “Do you like your liquor hard or sweet?” had been his preamble.

  He’d paid for their drinks and she’d been impressed when he didn’t even look at the bill the waiter brought over, just scrawling his name on the tab. It seemed so fancy and important. It was certainly different than her father, who would scrutinize each line of every restaurant slip, often questioning waiters about the total. She’d been too young to realize that carrying a tab didn’t mean you were actually paying it.

  Almost a decade older, Mason had seemed to Olivia’s naive eyes the very height of maturity and sophistication. He’d been vague about what he did for a living, referring to it simply as his “business.” Whatever it was, he was obviously successful, or so his fake Rolex and leased sports car had led her to believe. By the time she figured out he wasn’t super rich, she was already engaged to him, and she told herself it didn’t really matter because at least his roots were planted deep in Atlanta and he was already building a dream house.

  Fake it till you make it. Mason Duplass had lived by that saying. He had humble roots, too, but they were different from hers. His father had been a prison guard, a stocky bull of a man who worked his way up and out to the private sector. J. Davis Duplass took a job as the head of security for a local businessman whose veneer of respectability was thin enough to see through. J. Davis sometimes took his son along when he went to collect on the loans his boss had given, figuring a child would dissuade customers tempted to fight. Sometimes it didn’t. Mason learned early the value of holding cold cash in one hand and a warm gun in the other.

  J. Davis built a comfortable upper-middle-class life for his family, but it wasn’t enough for his son. Mason wanted the perks available only to the super rich—the flashiest sports cars, the largest yachts, the most expensive resorts. He thought that ostentatious displays were synonymous with luxury and tried to live accordingly. He loved it when he was offered free drinks at restaurants or got priority seating. So he wasn’t that much different than Olivia’s father after all—a man who lived for the respect and deference he hadn’t earned.

  It was too late by the time Olivia realized this. She’d already walked down the aisle in one of Atlanta’s most beautiful churches, sipped champagne at the swankiest hotel, and endured an awkward father/daughter dance. She’d watched Francis mentally calculating the cost of everything at the wedding, sitting there straining the seams of his dress uniform, lips pursed like a sour lemon. He’d retired from the army by that point, but she suspected he squeezed into the uniform to avoid having to rent a suit. Willa had smiled happily, looking for all the world like an overgrown baby, all chubby pink and giggly, clapping with delight as a slice of wedding cake was put in front of her. She clapped again years later, when Olivia told her parents that she was having a baby, while her father had only sniffed and ticked off the costs of raising children.

  Her mother never lived to see her granddaughter. Willa and Francis were killed in a car crash when Olivia was six months pregnant, when the axle of the car they were driving gave way and they skidded over a steep embankment. When the inquest uncovered that her father hadn’t gotten the car fixed because he’d decided the mechanic’s bid was too high, Olivia went into premature labor and had to be hospitaliz
ed. She’d replay the crash over and over in her mind, stopping the car so that her mother could get out, imagining that it was just Francis left inside, hunched over the steering wheel, squinting through his glasses as he plunged to his death. Maybe her mother hadn’t fully realized the danger as they went over the side. Maybe she kept assuming, right up until the moment of death, that everything would be okay. It comforted Olivia to think so, and when Melody was born a few months later, she gave her daughter Willa as a middle name.

  It was funny how you became your parents no matter how hard you tried to run from it. She’d inherited her mother’s blinders, although only for Melody. A beautiful baby, an adorable child, the light of her mother’s life. Mason had cherished her, too. Everyone who knew Melody loved her, and she was such a perfect child, or that’s what Olivia had always believed. She was starting to realize she might have been wrong about that, just like she’d been wrong about Melody’s father.

  The first year they were married, Mason ran up so much debt that Olivia thought she’d have a heart attack. That was when she stepped in to help run the business, even if she couldn’t rein in his spending. And that’s when she realized that she was like her father, too, frowning over monthly income versus expenditure, becoming accustomed to scrutinizing financial spreadsheets and setting up offshore accounts. She was as much of a tightwad as Francis, but just in a different income bracket. Her questions to Mason were about whether he really needed that brand-new Lamborghini, or how he’d lost ten thousand dollars in one hour of gambling.

  “Don’t tell me how to spend my money, Liv,” he’d complain, his voice slurring after his third Sazerac. Only it wasn’t just his money, it was hers and most of all Melody’s. “You’re gambling with your daughter’s future!” she’d yelled at him more than once, but did he ever listen? He was an old Southern boy, just like his daddy, and thought that women were good for only one thing, and it wasn’t advice.