An Eye for an Eye

An Eye for an Eye

Copyright 2013 Genevieve Weis

Published by Genevieve Weis

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

About Genevieve Weis

Acknowledgements

For my mother, the therapist said it isn’t your fault

For Vic, you have been the most supportive person I have ever known, Thank You

To my children, there is always Mac-n-Cheese in the pantry

Prologue

They found Sadie Smith stuffed into the old dusty rug where Mack had left her lifeless body, not fine like her family had so diligently prayed. More sophisticated investigators may have taken care in preserving the foot prints in the thick dust coating the floor, but this was small town Iowa after all. Homicides were no more frequent than once a year. The conditions for murder were ripe for the reaping, whether by a clever cultivator or by an opportunistic psychotic, it didn’t really matter. The facts were the facts, a girl of six was dead, left like a discarded doll in a deserted old house. No fancy video cameras would reveal suspicious cars or activity at the local gas station, no specialized CSI technicians would seal off the scene, dispensing a sticky hairspray like preservative over the footprints so that they could be cast. The steady hum of latent evidence vacuums would not compliment the sounds of chaos as they searched for hair and fibers to be analyzed later in a lab. An uncomfortable yet familiar routine would play out: Hearts would break for the family, vigils would be held, prayers would be said, time would pass, and he would watch it all unfold. The ending predictable from the beginning.

Chapter One

Traveling through the thick dewy pre-dawn air, a voice from the past came to him. It surrounded him in the dark, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, putting him in mind of her. He strained to see around the dimly lit space within the old barn thinking that she might be there, but only old rusted relics stared back. Lightning fast and just as jarring, pain radiated through his head sending his hand to the scar at his eye, and sent him running for the house. There he washed down a few aspirin by the sink. Something was grabbing at him, pulling at the worn overalls hanging on his bulky frame. Around him the familiar creaking of the old farmhouse seemed to hold something new, a feeling he didn’t like, lurking unavoidably like a spider’s web in his path. Inaudible whispers and pain danced together in his head as he listened against the void for the faint mumblings to become clearer. Nerve endings that ran from his ears to his pulsating eye lit up like forth of July sparklers as he strained against the silence, still listening for something he didn’t want to hear. ‘No man would fear the voice of a little girl’, he thought. ‘Maybe, not one that was alive’, a deeper voice reminded him.

He had lead as normal a life as possible since her death, the rhetorical taunting had subsided, the acidic jaws of bitterness no longer ate at him from the inside. Now the faint whispers carried on the still night air deposited a rotten feeling in his gut. Hearing nothing, but still suspicious, he took a seat in the corner of the dingy kitchen to gather his regressive thoughts. Mack wasn’t one to scare easy but the heavy feeling of foreboding in the darkness seeped into his skin, bringing with it a gnawing reminder of his mortality, and left him pandering for the light that was on the horizon. He was patient if nothing else, and so he sat quietly, waiting for it. Once the light filtered through the blinds he moved to the outside of the house. The smell of stale earth and moisture escaped as he unlatched the dilapidated cellar doors and descended the stairs. There he searched the shelves until he found the old coffee can that held what he still had of her. Carefully he pulled out stiff cotton fabric, speckled with matted brown stains, he inhaled the smell of death. With it came the familiar and deep wrenching ache to his eye socket, just as it had begun to fade. For the hundredth time he considered burning the material in his hands, yet again giving consideration to forbidden thoughts, he wondered what, if any, of the old house was still there. Talk about tearing it down had circulated in the community for years after Sadie’s body was found. He thought of the seven thousand collective hearts that formed the fabric of their middle-America community. A fabric that mostly ebbed and flowed as one, their shared fears and burdens often spurring unified action. When Sadie died the town’s people talked of little else, they milled about with their nervous opinions, sleepless nights, and suspicious chatter. The immediate response to the girl’s death, was a call to demolish all of the old abandoned houses in the county. Expensive talk for an old defunct farming community in which funding was in short supply. Without proper fuel, it didn’t take long for the communal virulence to subside, easing away a little at a time, then a lot, yielding focus back to the agricultural and economic woes longstanding in the area. After all, the town’s fade into oblivion had been hard earned over decades. The lines of complacency were well worn, and besides, production and economic anguishes, laments over the state of the nation’s gross domestic product and bread basket certainly provided more suitable dinner conversation than that of the murder of a little girl. The more he thought about it, the more inevitable a visit became. Like a moth to the flame he was drawn to the old house. He stuffed the fabric back into the canister and left the cellar.

The old Roger’s house stood lonely out past the large clump of ancient oaks in the middle of the field, a common scene in these parts. His heart rose with each detail that came into focus as he rounded the corner on the patchy dirt road, his heartbeats reverberating in his chest as he closed the distance. The fact that the old house was still there, after all of these years, was curious to him. Although he knew that the time to rethink visiting the house had come and gone already, he stopped half way down the road to allow his thoughts to catch up to his body which seemed to be pulled weightlessly. The blue sky and golden fields painted a colorful background to the otherwise drab house, almost making it look like a muted photo pasted onto a vibrant painting. The movement of the morning air filled his lungs but fell strangely still over the fields, leaving them devoid of their normal swaying motion. Without conscious thought the truck started coasting toward the house again, slowly drifting toward the old structure like a stick caught in the current, coasting to a stop at no particular spot in front of it. A rhetorical nursery rhyme playing on some distant level of his mind, like a deranged theme song, warned him that he was slipping deeper. He found himself reciting nervously, and possibly audibly, that she was dead, that too many years had passed, and that everyone had forgotten.

Now close up he could see that the house had indeed aged. Unsure of what he would find he stole a glance under the porch. To his relief only weeds filled the spot where the dead Golden Retriever had lain last time. Without the benefit of stairs, and retracing steps he made ten years ago, he leapt onto the porch and entered through a now door-less front entry. He placed his steps carefully on the tired old wood bowing under him. Holes in the roof allowed rays of light to come through, nourishing a sapling tree that had started growing through the floor in front of the decrepit fireplace. Little of it was of interest to him. Impulsively he picked up his stride, moving toward the back of the house where the kitchen had been. Before crossing the threshold into the sanctum of his past he caught his breath. Invisible strings strained across his chest as he rocked through the doorway, their restraint more psychological than physical- another warning. Once in the old kitchen he expectantly waited. Waited for that satisfaction that had kept its distance, demanding warmth from probing old memories, waiting for it to wash over him. But nothing came. The old room, the house, it held nothing for him but fear and fury. No warm glow, no vivid colors, feelings, emotions. It held the same tasteless, colorless gray haze that filled the rest of his life. Even his eyes found nothing as they searched, his mind remembering where her withering body, the carpet, and the table had once been. But now it was all gone, and with it the warmth he had felt. Wanting more, he clenched his eyes closed and dug deeper, grainy snapshots of the event flashed through his mind, teasing him. A faint, unfocused memory of the one brilliant taste of satisfaction he had felt in those few precious moments, years ago, danced in and out of his grasp.

His desire to relive the feeling had tempted him to take another girl. Not at first, but the feeling had been growing as time had so callously passed. Her murder had built an unsustainable fire within him. At first he was able to kindle the fire from the talk around town, the whispering, the news articles, prayer vigils he attended, they all gave him nourishment. He relished the revival of the story at anniversaries or her birthday, when the paper would run