Authors: Kevin O'Brien
Her father explained how she would have to sit and wait on the bed in Clay’s house until she heard a police siren getting close. That was her cue to climb out this window and start screaming.
Trembling, Annabelle nodded obediently and started to undress.
Her father pushed the window up, then gave her a boost to the ledge. She crawled into the bedroom. Gasping, Amelia sat up in Clay’s bed. Annabelle put her fingers over her lips and shushed her. She could hear Clay on the phone in the kitchen: “Yes…I’ve been on hold for five minutes now. Is there anyone in that office? Yes…yes…I know it’s Sunday, but I have a situation here…”
When their father climbed through the window, Amelia recoiled. She looked like she was about to scream. Within seconds, he was on her, stuffing a handkerchief in her mouth. She struggled as he started to undress her. “C’mon, help me put your clothes on her,” he whispered to Annabelle.
“Well, all I’m getting are these damn recordings,” Clay was telling someone on the phone in his kitchen. He sounded so frustrated. “But I don’t want to leave a message, damn it…. No, I need to talk with a person….”
Annabelle wanted so much to put on Amelia’s clothes, but her father had insisted she run outside in her
underwear
. Humiliating as that might be, it was better than a beating. She helped her father smuggle Amelia out the bedroom window. Then she crawled into Clay’s bed and waited. It seemed like forever.
“Fine. Screw you,” she heard Clay say in the kitchen. “I’ll get someone else to help me.”
Finally, she heard the sirens in the distance. Clay called to her, thinking she was Amelia. “Are you okay in there, pumpkin? You asleep?”
She didn’t answer. She listened to the sirens getting louder and louder. Shaking, Annabelle moved to the window. She hadn’t even gone outside yet, and already she was cold. Peering over the ledge, she thought she might hurt herself crawling out there.
Clay came to the bedroom doorway. “Amelia?”
Wincing, Annabelle jumped out the window and hit the ground. She could hardly breathe, and yet, somehow, she forced out a scream. She saw the police cars with their lights flashing. They pulled up in front of Clay’s house. Then she saw her father marching toward the front door with his hunting rifle.
Annabelle let out another shriek and started running toward the police cars, until she heard the loud bang.
She swiveled around at the edge of the front yard. Clay must have come out the front door to chase after her. But now he lay sprawled on the ground, with blood all over his shirt and his long black hair in his face.
At first, Annabelle was horrified. But then she thought about how her twin sister had abandoned her, and run to this man for protection. He was going to help Amelia, and didn’t even mention helping
her
.
Suddenly, she liked that he was dead. It felt good.
After that, things between her and Amelia were never quite the same. Amelia was different, withdrawn, and acting crazy most of the time. Her parents finally sent her away to live with another family.
Then they moved to the ranch in Salem, without Amelia.
While Annabelle endured her father’s abuse and those awful nights she was forced to help him with his
work
, she still picked up snippets of her twin sister’s experiences in a series of foster homes. Amelia wasn’t very happy, but her life was easy in comparison to Annabelle’s plight. Then something happened to Annabelle that was worse than her father’s most severe beating, worse than those long, lonely nights in the car, listening to those women scream and beg.
What happened was Amelia had decided to forget about her.
Annabelle never really forgave her for that.
She knew her sister was adopted by the Faradays. She still had a glimpse into Amelia’s sweet, privileged life with them, but she didn’t get to be a part of it. As far as her lucky sister was concerned, she didn’t exist, and never had.
After her mother had killed herself, her father and Uncle Duane kept grilling Annabelle about where Amelia was. They knew she’d had a special connection with her twin. Though Annabelle knew her sister’s last name was now Faraday, she didn’t tell them a thing. She somehow sensed they wanted Amelia dead. And Annabelle was still very protective of her sister, even though she didn’t deserve it.
Later, Annabelle figured it out. Her father and Uncle Duane had planned to do away with Amelia shortly after Clay had been killed. In a rare moment of clarity, Annabelle’s mother intervened. She persuaded her husband to put the problem child into foster care.
When she was a teenager, Annabelle found some documents tucked away in her father’s desk drawer. Shortly before the move to Salem, her mother and father had signed papers completely relinquishing parenthood of Amelia.
But once her mother was dead, Annabelle’s father and her uncle were desperate to track down Amelia. They wanted to kill her, because of what she knew and what she might tell. They had no idea Amelia had forgotten all about them.
Stupid Duane had killed those people at the adoption place and gotten himself killed for nothing.
She didn’t talk about Amelia with anyone until later in high school. Annabelle thought it might make her more interesting to people if she’d had a twin who died. But it didn’t make her popular. And all the while, she had a window into her sister’s life. Annabelle had her nose pressed up against that window. She knew Amelia Faraday had a kid brother and parents who loved her. She lived in a beautiful house with a dock and a lake in the backyard. They had a weekend home, not far from another lake.
The closest Amelia Faraday ever came to true misery and pain was when Annabelle experienced it firsthand. Even then, Amelia had no idea where the sensations and visions came from.
It hurt Annabelle to be disregarded like that. It hurt more than all the physical pain and horror she’d endured growing up on that ranch with her awful father.
Now Amelia was beginning to feel some of that pain firsthand. First her brother, then her parents and her aunt, her boyfriend. One by one, the people Amelia loved weren’t there anymore. Within an hour, her therapist—along with her uncle and her cousins—would all be dead, too.
Amelia would have nobody, except the sister she’d chosen to forget.
Huddled inside the phone booth in front of Danny’s Diner, Annabelle listened to the rain beating on the roof. She made another call. It rang twice before he picked up. “Yeah?”
“Hi, babe. How’s everything there?”
“Fine,” he said, “except we got one down.”
Annabelle frowned a bit. “Already? Was it one of the kids?”
“No, a snoopy old bitch of a neighbor. But I have it under control. I asked the housekeeper, and she said the lady lived alone. So nobody’s going to come looking for her. In fact, I’m tempted to check across the street and see if she has anything in the house worth taking. Bet she has a shitload of jewelry.”
“Now, don’t get greedy,” Annabelle said. “Stay put. I don’t want any of the other neighbors to see you going over there. They might call the cops. You could screw this whole thing up. You’ve collected a car full of crap from Uncle George’s. That’s enough. What’s the latest on Uncle George, anyway?”
“The last time he talked to fatso, he said to expect him around nine o’clock.”
“Good. Well, be careful, babe. I got these vibes from Karen that they suspect something. So, if you get nervous, or things don’t seem right to you, then just abort. Shoot the maid and the kids, and get the hell out of there. We’ll worry about the uncle later.”
“I won’t get nervous,” he said.
“Well, once you’ve finished them all off, hurry here, baby. I need you.”
“Huh,” he grunted. “You just want me to help you escape.”
“Well, you promised,” she said. “You’re going to help me get away, and we’ll start new someplace else. See you at the lake house around midnight.”
Annabelle hung up the phone, and stepped out of the booth. She walked through the cool night rain back to Karen’s car in the parking lot of Danny’s Diner. She glanced over the swaying treetops in the general direction of the lake house.
Once she’d killed Karen, she’d wait for Blade. He was in love with her—at least he thought he was. He would be easy to kill.
She had a two-gallon tote container of gasoline in the trunk of Karen’s car. That would be enough to set the lake house on fire. The cops would find two burnt bodies in there, Karen and Blade. She knew what she was doing. She’d pulled it off without a hitch three years ago. Funny, she’d pretty much told Sandra the same thing she’d told Blade moments ago: “You’re going to help me get away, and we’ll start new someplace else.”
When she’d said
we
, Blade had probably thought she’d meant her and him.
But she wasn’t thinking of him at all.
His hands taut on the steering wheel, George studied the road ahead. He’d made it to the city of Jefferson in less than twenty minutes. Speeding along I-5, he’d kept his eyes peeled for patrol cars.
While in the cybercafé, he’d checked MapQuest for directions to Coupland Aeronautics, so he knew the helicopter place was only about a mile ahead in this industrial area. George passed several warehouses, a railroad and container yard, and a chemical plant.
He’d just talked with Karen, who was on her way to meet Amelia at the restaurant near the Lake Wenatchee house. Apparently, Amelia didn’t have any premonitions about the kids or Jessie being in trouble—not yet, at least. Karen said she’d call again from the pay phone when she got to the restaurant. George couldn’t help remembering the last time someone had promised to call him from that place. It had been Ina, the day of her murder.
Although he wanted to phone Jessie again, he decided to wait until he was ready to board the helicopter. The more he thought about how scared Jody and Steffie had to be, the harder he pressed on the accelerator. George started to pass a truck in front of him, but as he veered into the oncoming lane, he saw an SUV barreling toward him. Its horn blared. George swerved back into his own lane behind the truck, again. He got ready to try once more, but noticed the truck’s right turn signal blinking. It slowed down to a crawl to pull into a Chevron plant. George tried to go around it again, but another truck nearly ran into him. Its horn continued to wail, even after George swung back into his lane.
Catching his breath, he waited for the trucker in front of him to make the damn turn. Then he saw a clear road ahead, and he pushed harder on the gas.
George passed Donahue Drive, one of the last major intersections before the helicopter pad, at least, according to MapQuest. And then he noticed the flashing light in his rearview mirror. “Oh, shit,” he murmured, releasing his foot from the accelerator. “God, no, please….”
The cop car was descending on him. He could hear the siren now.
“Please, God.”
George’s stomach was in knots as he slowly pulled over to the road’s shoulder. The lights in his rearview mirror were blinding now. For a moment, the bright strobes illuminated the inside of his car. And then the policeman passed him.
George sagged forward against the wheel. He took a deep breath, and pressed on. But he couldn’t stop trembling. He watched the squad car take a right turn ahead. He hoped the cop wasn’t headed to Coupland Aeronautics.
For the next few blocks, he drove at the 35-miles-per-hour speed limit. Then he noticed the airfield ahead to his left. Two helicopters were parked on the airstrip. George didn’t see a cop car anywhere near the place. Yet his hands still shook on the wheel as he went beyond the tall chain-link fence and followed the signs to customer parking. He didn’t think he’d breathe right or stop shaking until he saw his kids and knew they were safe.
He was just pulling into one of the parking spots when someone trotted out of the trailer office. George rolled down his window and saw that it was a woman in her midthirties, wearing a gray jumpsuit. She was pretty with dark brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail. “Mr. McMillan?” she said, approaching his car.
George nodded a few more times than necessary. He was waiting for her to say something like, “I’m afraid the Salem Police are looking for you….”
Instead, she leaned toward his car window and smiled. “Hi, I’m Kate. You spoke with me earlier. If you need to park for more than twenty-four hours, go ahead and take a spot where that green sign is.”
George glanced over his shoulder and saw a green sign on a light post:
LONG-TERM PARKING
. He looked back up at the woman and nodded again. He was still shaking, and he could tell she’d noticed.
“They charge twelve bucks a day for long-term parking,” she said. “It’ll be added to your bill. And speaking of paperwork, it’s all ready for you. Just come on into the office. We’ll get it signed, and we’ll be our way to Seattle. I’ll be your pilot tonight, Mr. McMillan. Do you have any luggage for your trip?”
He shook his head. “No, I don’t. But thanks.”
“Okeydoke,” she said. “Then I’ll see you in the office.” She turned and trotted back toward the trailer.
George tried to take a few calming breaths as he maneuvered over to the long-term parking area. It just dawned on him that this was a rental, and he’d have to somehow get it back to the rent-a-car company. But that didn’t matter right now. He was just relieved he’d be on his way to Seattle soon, with no one detaining him. No delays.
Still, he couldn’t stop trembling, even after he’d parked the rental and locked it. Standing beside the car, he took out his cell phone and dialed home once more. He just needed to hear Jessie assure him again that Steffie and Jody were all right.
George listened to the ring tones, four of them so far. Something was wrong. Why wasn’t Jessie picking up? He’d figured they were checking his caller ID. They must have known his cell phone number by now. If they were trying to lure him there using Jessie and the kids, they would have had her pick up by now.
The machine clicked on. Hi, you’ve reached the McMillans. Sorry we’re not here to take your call. But if you’d like to leave a message for George, Ina, Jody or Stephanie, just talk to us after the beep!