Chapter Seven #2
They were quick stabs and I knew the cadence.
I counted the ticks in my head. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12.
I didn’t like when he stabbed. It was never a quick killing.
The stabs were quick, but the death was not.
There was always a moment, some longer than others, when the victim would look at us, knowing they were dying.
I didn’t like when they looked at me. What did they expect me to do about it?
Anyway, his gloves were drenched in blood.
We threw them into the river on the way home.
My dad was always having to buy new gloves.
It was a shame Prime didn’t exist back then.
- - - - -
A few hours and several crime scenes later, we were pulling up in front of my old house.
It was painted gray now, recent enough so as to not show any signs of deterioration.
In my mind, no one would ever want to live in that house and it would just sit there, slowly dilapidating over time.
I guess with housing prices the way they were, a little dark history was worth it for a nice discount.
Dominic parked the van in front. “Here it is, the Haggerty family home. Abel and Reanne lived here for eleven years before they moved to a larger home—the big house, get it?”
“That’s awful,” said Porter. “Don’t do jokes. I don’t think they’re your thing.”
“Be sure to put it on the comment card at the end of the tour,” Dominic joked, ignoring the advice. “Now, turn to the next page and you’ll see a picture of Abel and Reanne being led from the house.”
I’d seen that picture before. It had been in a lot of papers. Once again, both of my parents stared blankly off-camera. They loved doing that. Such creeps.
“Can we go inside?” Porter asked our guide.
“No. People live in there.”
“So what?” Porter opened the door and hopped out of the van.
Dominic cut the engine and we both raced to get out and follow Porter as he darted across the lawn toward the front porch.
“Stop,” Dominic whisper-shouted. “It’s trespassing.”
Porter knocked on the front door, then turned back. “I’m knocking. It’s not trespassing.”
Dominic and I mounted the porch behind him with no choice but to wait and see if someone answered the door. Porter bounced a little as he waited. He was really into this, but I wasn’t sure what he expected. It’s not like the new homeowners had a shrine to Abel.
Minutes passed and Porter got antsy. He pushed through us and down the porch steps. I saw Dominic’s shoulders relax, relieved to go back to the van, but he wasn’t so lucky. Porter took off along the side of the house toward the backyard. Once again, we were chasing him.
The grass was greener, literally, and the patio furniture was better quality, but the trees were the same.
There was one in particular with low branches that I had been able to reach and climb on for as long as I could remember.
I stood still while Dominic followed Porter around, begging him to go back to the van.
I closed my eyes and smelled my neighborhood.
I crouched down and ran my hand over the grass.
I remembered being there. It was still part of me.
“Gwen! Can you help me or what?” Dominic shouted from across the yard.
Porter was shimmying open a window. It broke my trance and I headed toward them.
“Porter, what are you doing?” I asked, not nearly as panicked as Dominic.
“I want to go in, don’t you?”
“What do you think is going to be in there? Dead bodies?”
Porter slipped through the window, ignoring my shade. Dominic looked to me for help, but I wasn’t offering any. Porter appeared again, opening the door for us, and then he dipped back into the house.
I stepped around Dominic and went inside. The back door led into the kitchen. It had a nice cream-patterned wallpaper now and a lot of shiny appliances, including one of those expensive KitchenAid mixers that people get as wedding gifts. We hadn’t even had a toaster when I’d lived there.
I wandered into the hallway, where Porter stood perusing the framed family photos. “That’s a different family,” I said. “Stop being weird.”
He didn’t acknowledge my presence until a piercing beep ripped through the house—an alarm system that we had triggered.
“We have to go,” Dominic shouted from the back door, and Porter finally agreed.
We raced out of the house and back to the van, Porter and me giggling, Dominic looking constipated. He cranked it into drive and we peeled out down the street, but at the stop sign, Dominic didn’t turn toward the highway. He looped back into the neighborhood.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“One more stop. Can’t miss this one.”
I knew where we were going—the Abbington house.
Dominic weaved the van through the neighborhood and eventually turned off on the small street the Abbingtons had lived on.
They hadn’t been rich by any means, but they had somehow ended up as the only house on this little lane due to zoning around the river and some rare bird that had moved into the trees along the bank in this particular bend.
I remembered attending a town hall meeting about it with my parents; it had been only a few days after New Years, I’m not sure which one.
Abel had killed a young woman that New Year’s Eve.
She was wearing a sparkly silver dress. I thought it was so pretty, but she was clearly freezing, waiting on the corner for a cab.
My father offered her a ride—an attractive, smiling man with his little girl in the passenger seat—nothing an after-school special ever warned about.
He snapped her neck and we left her body behind a college dining hall among the trash, twenty thousand free suspects.
All the way home, my father had told me how he’d saved her from an awful fate, how he’d been merciful in giving her a painless death when he’d snapped her neck.
He had received a message, a sign that he should kill her—a sign that I could now understand was just opportunity.
A vulnerable woman alone who could not fathom that a man would do something bad to her in front of his child.
“Abel’s final crime…” Dominic announced as the house came into view. “And the one that got him caught—the murder of four members of the Abbington family. It wasn’t like his other murders. He knew the victims. Cops searched his house and found evidence everywhere. He was arrested within days.”
“Four people?” Porter asked as I stared out the window reminiscing.
“Yes, the parents, Phillip and Caroline. Their teenage son, Blake, and ten-year-old Cody.”
“Who’s the little girl?” Porter asked, studying the family portrait in the back of the packet, a portrait where the whole family had managed to look at the camera and smile.
“That’s Elyse Abbington. She wasn’t home.”
“Lucky,” said Porter.
“I don’t know if she’d agree with you,” argued Dominic. “Survivor guilt is real, man. There it is.” He pointed across Porter’s chest.
There it was, all right. It was abandoned, completely run-down, like I’d thought my house would be. I wondered if the rare birds might have taken up residence inside.
“Are you gonna stop?” asked Porter.
“Not a chance.” Dominic hit the automatic lock button and Porter watched the latch on his own door click.
“Come on. Obviously no one is living in there,” Porter protested.
Dominic slowed the van enough for us to get a good look but refused to stop. “Elyse Abbington still owns it. It was held in trust until she turned eighteen. She refuses to sell it, but refuses to do any maintenance. I think she likes watching it rot.”
“I can’t even see the backyard,” Porter complained. “It says right here”—he tapped on the page—“Cody Abbington was killed in the backyard.”
“Not happening.” Dominic laughed and Porter flung the packet onto the dashboard in protest.
Cody Abbington was such a little asshole.
It’s bad karma to call a dead kid an asshole, but I was a kid too and he made my life miserable.
Whenever we were alone, he would act like my best friend and then at school he would call me names and throw things at me to make the other kids laugh.
When someone has serial killer parents, you shouldn’t toy with their emotions like that.
I never should have told my father about Cody.
If I had kept my mouth shut, he never would have gone to their house.
Cody had almost survived. My father was inconsolable, manic, unrecognizable to me.
He kept going to the hospital to finish it, my mother begging him not to—trying to convince him that it was too risky.
It was seventy-two hours of hell—my father punishing her for questioning him, ignoring her, but ultimately failing to get into the boy’s guarded hospital room.
It was my fault. That was when I got the X’s.
He said the demons had gotten to me—led me to corrupt our whole family, forced him to kill when he shouldn’t have.
He held me down, carving into my side, convincing me that it would fix everything.
He had hit me before, dislocated my shoulder once, made me touch the stove a couple of times, but it was nothing like when I got the X’s.
It was the worst thing he ever did to me, but I deserved it.
Cody Abbington suffered a fatal seizure when doctors tried to wake him up a second time, but it was already too late for us.
Cody had come to long enough the first time to give the cops the lead they needed.
Five days after my father entered their home and two days after the cops stormed ours, Cody finally died.
If I hadn’t told my dad about Cody, he never would have gone over there, and maybe he never would have been caught. My parents wouldn’t have gone to prison and I wouldn’t have become Gwen Tanner. It was a lot to deal with.
Sitting in traffic on the Massachusetts Turnpike for two hours wasn’t a very climactic ending to the tour.
Dominic and Porter went back and forth, gushing about Abel like he was a character and not a real person.
I stayed silent for the most part and took it all in.
I liked listening to them. I rarely let myself think of my father in the light that I really wanted to.
He was crazy. He was brilliant. He was evil.
He terrified me. He was the only person I had ever really connected with and his absence was something I felt every day.
We passed the remnants of an accident after the I-95 exit, and traffic finally started to move again. Dominic perked up in his seat. “This is maybe too forward, but do you guys want to come to a party?”
“Yes,” Porter answered immediately.
Dominic looked at me in the rearview mirror. I didn’t answer at first, prompting Porter to flip around in his seat and beg me with his face, ready to cash in on every time I’d rejected one of his invitations.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”