Wuthering Frights

by Elise Sax

  I heard a loud thud, and I turned around. The serial killer was holding a bat, and Gladie was lying unconscious on the floor.

  Chapter 15

  The hitchhiker screamed like a blonde in a Hitchcock film, which made perfect sense because I felt like I was living in a Hitchcock film. Gladie was unconscious, but her chest was rising and falling, so I knew she was still alive.

  In front of me was the serial killer, the guy I had known since moving to Goodnight. He had fed me and was nice to me. It was hard to imagine him as the killer, but here he was.

  “I should have killed you before,” he said. “You’re so damned nosy. I’ve been watching how you butt into other folks’ business. I knew that it was only a matter of time before you set your sights on me and mine. Who knows that you’re here?”

  “Everyone,” I said. The lie flew out of my mouth with no effort and little thought. “The sheriff’s department, everyone at the Gazette, Tilly. They’re outside. They’ll be here any second. Run for your life. Maybe you can outrun them and escape to Mexico or Texas. Wherever you want to hunt down blondes in peace and quiet.”

  He cocked his head to the side and studied me a moment. “You’re lying to me. Women always lie. They need a strong man to handle them, otherwise, they go wild and get up to no good. You’re up to no good,” he said, pointing the bat at me.

  “I promise I won’t tell,” I said, settling on a new lie, since the last lie didn’t work. “Let me go, and you can go about your business.” I stuck three fingers in the air, giving him my Girl Scout’s promise.

  “Filthy liar,” he said and spit on the ground. “How did you know it was me? How did you work that out?”

  “I didn’t until I saw the flower on the floor in here. It was the same flower that was on the photo of one of the girls that you killed.”

  He smiled. “Yes, I killed them.” He said it happily, as if he was pleased to talk to me about it, as if he wanted credit finally for the evil deeds that he had committed. “But how did you connect the flower to me?” He asked this question with less bravado, and I understood that he was worried that he had left behind clues for others to find. He wanted to clean them up after he killed me. I was more than happy to tell him because it would buy me time. And I needed time, in order to escape.

  “There were a couple things. Amy Goodnight’s box was a big connection,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “She had left her hand-carved tea box with her in-laws. Amy loved tea. She had tea on her mind the day she disappeared. That was one clue for me, and then of course the second was at the Goodnight Diner.”

  He straightened his spine, as if he was bracing himself to be attacked. “I saw the honey for sale,” I continued. “What goes better with tea than honey?”

  “That’s it? You figured it out from a flower, a tea box, and honey?”

  “Yep,” I said, impressed with myself. “I guess I did. And now looking back on it, you were the perfect candidate as the serial killer.”

  “Me? Why? I’m a law-abiding citizen. I have a steady job. I’ve never gotten in trouble.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You’ve been nearly invisible. You’re only Morris Ford, life-long resident of Goodnight. Boring. As the cook at Goodnight Diner, we see you every day, but even there, you’re in the shadows, half-hidden in your kitchen. You barely speak. Face it, Morris, you’re the stereotypical taciturn, loner serial killer. The fake profiler report threw me off. I should have just watched true crime shows on Netflix to figure out it was you.”

  Morris shuffled his weight from foot to foot. He was getting nervous, so I knew it was almost time to make my move.

  “Then there was the thing about your truck,” I continued. “You almost crashed it, and you refused to let anyone look at it. I bet they would have found some interesting stuff, if they had. Am I right, Morris? And then finally, there was the girl in the diner. The one with blonde hair. You gave her a double helping. She showed me how much fried chicken you made for her. I guess you couldn’t resist her beautiful blonde hair.”

  I looked over his shoulder and nodded almost imperceptibly. It was the “look over there” ploy, and I was hoping beyond hope that it would work with Morris. If I could escape, I could get help and save everyone. But I couldn’t do anything against him in a dungeon.

  Luckily, the “look over there” ploy works every time. Morris turned his head for a brief moment, and I pushed him as hard as I could. Because he was half turned, I managed to push him off balance, and he fell to the ground. The bat fell, too, and rolled away.

  I bolted toward the door. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that I had a broken toe, and I couldn’t run as fast. But I didn’t care about pain. I pushed through it and made it to the door and into Morris’s house. I could hear him running after me.

  Morris was fast, and I figured cooking for the town every day standing on his feet had kept him in shape, even though he was thirty years older than I was. I ran through the house. When I reached the front door, I threw it open and ran for my life. I ran behind the house, trying to hide from him. I ran full out, even though I was limping because of the boot on one foot.

  Behind the house, there were about a dozen beehives. I started to run between them when a shot rang out.

  “Stop!” Morris yelled. I turned around as I ran and saw that he was aiming a shotgun right at me. I stopped between the beehives.

  Buzzing in my ears. I realized standing there, that I had heard the bees when I was investigating where Amy’s body had been found. She was right. Morris had been closer than I thought.

  Morris kept the shotgun aimed at me. He was huffing and puffing, trying to catch his breath. I was frozen in place, terrified to make any movement at all.

  “My family moved to this dump right after the Civil War. Did you know that?” he asked. I shook my head. “Of course you don’t. The Fords were never much to talk about. All of them poor, and all of them died young. The second we were born, we felt the doom hanging over our heads. We couldn’t catch a break. Do you think that’s fair?”

  “No. That sounds horrible. I feel for you, Morris. Let me help you.”

  He ignored my offer. “It was my idea to raise the bees. I love the little suckers. They’re strong. Not like the family pets. The pets never lived very long. I used to like cutting them, you see.” Fear completely took me over, and I thought I was going to throw up. “Dogs and cats. All dead and buried, but not my bees. Nothing has given me more pleasure than caring for bees. Nothing except for listening to the pleas for mercy from my collection of girls.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”

  He smiled at me, like he was thoroughly enjoying having an audience for his soliloquy. “You know what? I can’t take credit for thinking the whole thing up. It happened by chance more than forty years ago when I was twenty years old. I was driving my father’s truck down the road when I saw a hitchhiker. She was a pretty young thing, no more than sixteen years old. Sweet and pretty with long blonde hair, just like wheat blowing in the wind. I slowed my father’s truck down, and she gave me a big smile from the side of the road. You know what she was saying to me with that smile?”

  “No,” I croaked. My mouth had gone dry, and it was all I could do to remember to breathe.

  “You don’t?” he said, shaking his head, like I was a moron. “She was asking for it. She wanted me to take her, control her, end her. Don’t you see that? Anyway, I was itching to stop to touch that hair. Oh, just thinking about touching that hair sends the blood rushing through this old body like I’m a young man again. I opened the door for her, and she got in. The second she closed her door, I elbowed her in the face, and she was knocked out. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers and laughed. “It was that easy. That’s how I know it was the right thing to do. Why would God make it so easy if it was wrong?

  “I locked her down in the root cellar,” he continued. “By then, my father was dead and my mother was half-dead with breast ca
ncer in her bed all the time. I kept that girl down there for two days. On the third day, I wrapped my hands around her throat and squeezed until she stopped breathing. All on account she made too much noise, you see, and my mother had started asking questions.

  “But those two days were heaven. Two days of her yelling in her pretty way ‘Please! Let me go! Help!’ I was the king of the world. I was the first in my family to be someone. And not just someone. All powerful. A god. That’s why I knew I had to do it again. If only for my family name.”

  “How many?” I asked, breathlessly. “How many did you kill?”

  “Oh, lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of them. Every day I used to drive my father’s truck up and down that road looking for more hitchhiker girls like the first one with hair the color of wheat. And then every night, I would go down into that root cellar and dig it out. It was a lot of work, but I managed to build a soundproof room with a thick, hearty door, and shackles bolted to the wall and the floor. Now, I’ve got six rooms, all soundproof, which doesn’t matter because I live alone and nobody comes out here. Anyway, it took a full two years before I got another girl. And then suddenly, there she was. A young, pretty girl with long blonde hair. I held onto her for two weeks. It was heaven. Delicious. My mother heard some things with that one and got suspicious, but I upped her morphine dose, and it was all right.”

  “All these years, you’ve been doing this to innocent girls?” I asked, despondent. I couldn’t imagine that such a monster lived in Goodnight, and nobody ever knew. He was left to his own devices to prey on young women, and he hadn’t been caught in forty years. It was a travesty. It was proof that life wasn’t fair.

  He nodded happily. “Some years were busier than others. It seemed that some years, blonde girls were on a crusade to cross the country into California, and they all found my section of road. Some years there was a terrible drought of girls, and I filled my longing with reliving past experiences. That’s when I figured out that I could have more than one girl at a time and that I could keep them longer. I could finish one off while the other one still pleaded with me to let her go. You see? Pure genius!”

  I nodded. Yes, he was a sick, twisted, evil genius. The buzzing of the bees added to the thick fog in my head. I was overwhelmed with disgust and horror. Morris was worse than I ever imagined the serial killer to be.

  “I’ve had a better life than all of the billionaires in the world,” he continued. “You can’t tell me that Bill Gates is a happier or richer man than the one standing in front of you. Anyway, one day a girl tried to escape, just like you. She got further away then you did, though. The damned sheriff’s wife saw her. That Amy. She had come here to get honey, you see, even though I’ve never sold honey from my place. I only sell it at the diner. But she was an impatient, prissy bitch who had a crazy obsession with tea. Anyway, she saw the other girl, so I made quick work of her. It wasn’t the way I liked to do things, and it made me mad. Amy was pretty and blonde but way too old. But still, it might have been nice to expand my collection.”

  So, that’s what happened to Amy. It would be good for Amos to have closure with the knowledge of his wife’s last hours, but I didn’t know if it would make him feel any better.

  “Where are all the girls, now?” I asked.

  “All around you,” he said, gesturing to the ground. “At first, I buried them on the property, but the yard got filled pretty fast, so I started to bury them by the river. Then, I discovered how lovely it was to dump them in the river and watch them float away. Sort of magical. But I couldn’t do that very often, or I would have gotten found out. I just left Amy on the mountain. I didn’t want more to do with her on account she wasn’t mine. You get me?”

  I got him. He had happily recounted his entire life of crime and literally told me where the bodies were buried. And he did all that because he knew that I wouldn’t survive to tell his secrets.

  As for me, I had told him how I figured out that he was the serial killer, and now he would make sure to cover his tracks so no one else would put two and two together.

  But I didn’t want to die, and more than that, I needed to save my friend Gladie and the two girls who were locked in Morris’s dungeon.

  So, I did it again.

  I looked over Morris’s shoulder and nodded ever so slightly. And wouldn’t you know it, but it worked again. While his head was turned, I made a run for it. I rocked back on my heels and sprinted forward.

  I would have made it, but my boot threw me off balance, and I crashed into the beehives. They went down like dominoes, breaking open. The bees were pissed off. Royally pissed off. In a matter of a second or two, they gathered into a swarm and went after me.

  I swung around, trying to fend them off, but they covered me, like they were making me a bee suit. From the top of my head to my feet, every square centimeter of my body was covered in bees.

  So, this was how I was going to die, I thought, as the bees swarmed. Death by bee. It was like nature was getting back at me for using plastic straws.

  I waited for the agonizing pain and the eventual death, but I got none of it. No pain. No death. In fact, I could have sworn that I didn’t get stung once.

  “Look at this,” I said, forgetting for a moment that I was with probably the most prolific serial killer in the history of the world. “They’re not stinging me. I’m a bee charmer! I’m just like a fairy tale character!”

  The bees had swarmed my face but were leaving my eyes alone. I watched as Morris became enraged, probably because his beloved bees had chosen me as their best friend. He lowered his shotgun and marched to me.

  “What the devil?” he demanded, looking over me and my bee coat.

  At the sound of Morris’s voice, the bees seemed to rouse and organize themselves. Like Kamikaze dive bombers, they flew off my body as if they were one creature and attacked Morris with a vengeance.

  His body flinched and spasmed. He rocked from side to side, as if he was being shot a million times. He continued to clutch his shotgun, and he tried to run from the swarm. He ran in figure eights around his yard, back and forth and around. The bees kept up their attack, dropping dead after they stung him. Morris’s face swelled up to an unrecognizable size. I followed him at a safe distance as he ran from his attackers, up the mountain near a cliff.

  Whether it was the change of place or the fact that the bees were fed up with dying for the cause, they flew off, leaving Morris to die in agony.

  But just like a bad horror movie, Morris refused to die. He wheezed and huffed and puffed, trying to get air through his swollen windpipe.

  “I’m going to kill you, bitch,” he growled and aimed the shotgun right at me.

  “Die!” I yelled. “Damn it, why won’t you die?”

  “Get down!” I heard from behind me.

  I dropped to the ground and looked behind me. It was Boone. Somehow, he had found me, just like he had found Amy and all of those giraffes not so long ago. He ran for Morris, totally unconcerned for his own safety. He was like a superhero, and I couldn’t believe that I had ever doubted that he was the wonderful, good guy that he was.

  “Watch out!” I cried, stating the obvious.

  Boone ignored my warning and ran full out. He almost got to Morris when there was a shotgun blast. I prayed that Morris would miss, but my prayers didn’t do any good.

  Morris fired, and Boone fell.

  Chapter 16

  “No!” I yelled, as I watched my fiancé get shot and fall to the ground.

  “I’m okay! He just got my leg,” Boone said, as he rolled around in agony.

  But it wasn’t finished. Morris lifted his shotgun up to his swollen face and took aim at Boone again. It was a nightmare, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was no way to get to Morris in time. No way to disarm him before he killed Boone.

  Why had I wasted time, suspecting the man I love? What was wrong with me? I had let my experience with Rockwell poison my relationship with Boone and now I was go
ing to lose him forever.

  Trust issues. I had major trust issues.

  I had suspected all the wrong people. Boone, Amos, and Silas, the best men I had ever known. They were all beyond reproach, impossible to suspect of anything nefarious. But I had done just that. If I survived today, I would never snoop again. I wouldn’t care who was murdered. I would mind my own business. It was the least I could do to make it up to Boone for believing even for a second that he could have been a serial killer.

  I was so stupid!

  “Get out of my way! I’m exhausted and don’t know what I’m doing!” The voice came from above, up the mountain. All three of us turned our heads to see who was yelling. It was Nigel, still walking around Goodnight, trying to get the world record. But he looked bad. Exhausted. He was still walking, but he was no longer in control of his legs. Gravity was not his friend. Momentum was his enemy. His walking turned into trotting and then into a full run. He was heading down the side of the mountain toward the cliff by Morris, and he couldn’t stop.

  “I can’t stop!” he screamed. “Oh my God! I’m going to die from walking! Help me! Help me! Dead man walking! Dead man walking! Dead man…”

  There was an ear-splitting, high-pitched scream, but it didn’t come from Nigel. It was all Morris. Nigel hit him like a linebacker in the Superbowl. He made contact with a loud crack and Morris’s scream. The shotgun went flying, and so did Morris. As for Nigel, the impact made him fly backward, landing safely on his back onto the short shrubs.

  But Morris wasn’t so lucky. His swollen body was launched into the air on impact. He swung his arms wildly and kicked his legs, trying to stop himself and trying to keep his balance, but there was nothing more he could do. It was all up to fate at this point, and Morris’s fate was set to fall off a cliff, break every bone in his body, and die an agonizing death.

  I was never happier.

  “I look like cotton candy,” I moaned. We were preparing for Mabel’s wedding, getting dressed in the Goodnight Diner. The wedding was going to take place in the center of the Plaza, outside. “Mabel promised me that I could pick out my own dress. She went back on her word, and now look at what I have to wear.”