Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 114419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 572(@200wpm)___ 458(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
“Sienna, remember Gina Marr? She’s the criminalist who found the items under the floorboard.”
“Yes, of course. Hi.” They all greeted one another, and Gina stepped forward, placed the evidence bag on the table, and removed a box of gloves from the bag on her shoulder. They all donned the blue plastic hand coverings, and then Gina opened the evidence bag and removed what appeared to be a gold metal bee and a bottle with a piece of paper rolled up inside.
“He left us quite a bit at that house,” Sienna noted. Their reward for unraveling the various clues that led to the address?
Gina tipped the bottle and used her fingertips to unroll the note. It was filled with the same concise writing. The story continued.
Kat used her phone to take a photograph of the letter, and then Gina rolled it up again and placed it and the bottle back into evidence bags. Sienna and Ingrid studied the metal bee, turning it this way and that, but it seemed like nothing more than exactly what it appeared to be. A jewelry charm? Sienna took several pictures of it from different angles, finishing just as Kat returned with three printouts of the note.
Gina packed everything back up and headed off to the lab to add the items to the list of things to be processed. Sienna wasn’t overly hopeful.
Then Sienna, Ingrid, and Kat sat down to read.
Mother had always been a force to be reckoned with, but after she put my father to permanent rest, she was unstoppable. It’s like killing him had breathed an extra breath of life into her. She didn’t allow anyone to cross her, nor did she allow anyone to cross me. If something unfortunate did happen, she’d make it right, my mother. “Don’t give them an inch, Danny Boy,” she’d say, a glint in her sky-blue eyes. “Not one single inch.” And then she’d smile, a melodic hum on her lips as she went back to baking a cake or folding our laundry or some other task that went toward creating a beautiful, comfortable home for us to enjoy.
Things were calm for a while, and for the first time, I felt the happiness of a life without the constant anxiety of knowing Father would walk back through our door any day. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would wake up and hear a car stop in front of our house and panic that it was Father. The whole bloody scene in the kitchen with Mother hadn’t really happened at all. No, he was just away like he’d been so often, and now he was back.
Back to hit me and kick me and tell me how useless I was.
It didn’t matter where I tried to hide.
He’d find me.
Somehow, Mother would always sense when this happened, and she would come to my room, shushing me softly and leading me back to bed, where she tucked me in again, stroking my hair as she sang to me softly until I fell back to sleep.
After a while, I began to trust that Father couldn’t hurt me anymore—couldn’t hurt anyone or anything—and I no longer listened for him to return.
Mother and I played games in the evening, her complimenting my new level of skill at Texas Hold’m, Omaha, and 2-7 Triple Draw. I’d also improved at checkers, chess, and Monopoly. Now that half of my mind wasn’t focused on my fear of Father, I was able to turn my intellect toward cards, and it made quite the difference.
Unfortunately, that peaceful time would be short lived. My next tormenter showed up in a pair of khakis, a button-down shirt, and a sports coat with patches on the elbows. He appeared harmless enough upon first meeting, but I soon found out that first impressions can be deceiving.
Very, very deceiving.
I often come up with names for people before I’ve learned their actual one, and I had immediately called him Mr. Patches because of his attire, and in my head, the name stuck.
Mr. Patches.
He needed a lot of patches when Mother got through with him.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.
Let me backtrack.
Mr. Patches was my science teacher.
I’d never been very good at science. Like I’ve already told you, games were my thing. I wasn’t as good as Mother, but I was good.
Better than most.
Worse than some.
Mr. Patches was an engaging and compassionate science teacher. If he called on you and you didn’t know the answer, he would say, “That’s all right. Make sure to go over page sixty,” or something like that so you weren’t embarrassed in front of your classmates. And then he’d wink and offer a smile and move on. And if you knew the answer, he would clap twice and bang once on his desk and say loudly, “Oh! Doo-dah day!” And the class would laugh and clap with him, and if it was me who got the answer right, I would feel this unusual warm buzzing in my chest and realize I was smiling, too, even though I hadn’t told my face to do it.