A Merciful Silence (Mercy Kilpatrick #4)(87)

My father had had strength, but he used it in the wrong ways. Like with his fists on my mother.

When I was eighteen, I took action for the first time. As usual he had passed out in his bed after leaving my mother black and blue. I stared at him from the doorway for a long moment, hating the stink of alcohol and body odor. I strode in and yanked open the drawer next to his bed. He’d shown the weapon to me many times, lovingly stroking it as he speculated about the soldiers who’d fired it half a century earlier.

The gun was always there and was always loaded.

I didn’t stop to think. I wrapped his hand around the butt, moved the barrel to his mouth, and pressed his finger against the trigger.

The spray from his skull covered the pillow and headboard. Bits of matter hit me in the face, but I didn’t care. I left his hand and gun where they naturally fell on his chest and stepped back, examining my handiwork. A gasp sounded behind me.

I turned and met my mother’s gaze.

Relief. Understanding. Accusation. Fear. They all flickered across her face, and I knew she’d dreamed of doing what I had just done.

Probably wished it a thousand times.

My father had been diagnosed with PTSD. He’d visited dozens of doctors and tried every medication. No one would be surprised at his final action.

My brother appeared beside my mother, and the same conflicting emotions shone in his eyes.

“I’ll call the police,” he said in a monotone. “You’d better wash up and get rid of those clothes.”

The police came. The detective came. They looked sideways at my mother, noting her black eye and the two sons who stood firmly beside her.

It was ruled a suicide.

We never spoke of it.

For a long time, his death was enough for me. My burdens evaporated and life was good. But years later, I started to have nightmares. My brother urged me to talk to a shrink, but I refused. There was no statute of limitations on murder, and I feared I’d spill my secret about killing my father. The incident had bubbled up to the surface of my inner thoughts and fought to escape. I yanked it back down, locking it away, but it kept coming back. Bigger and louder each time.

Then my father began to speak to me from the skull.

His favorite keepsake of Vietnam. The one I couldn’t bring myself to sell or store away with his other treasures.

I moved the skull to the safe, but I still heard his voice.

Is this what happened to him? Did he hear these voices too?

I remembered how he would drunkenly talk to inanimate objects and the one phrase I could make out: Stop talking to me.

Were they talking back to him? Is that what he was trying to escape from all those years?

That is why he battered their mouths. To stop the voices.

For the first time I understood my father’s rage and confusion.

How did he combat it?

Then I saw Britta. It was a sign. Finish my father’s work and find my peace again. The voice will stop.

But I couldn’t get close enough to her. I tried and tried. She was always prepared.

Someone else would have to do.

The first time, I came home and confessed to my brother what had happened. I cried and raged as I told him our father had taken over my thoughts and I suspected his soul had entered me after I shot him. Why else would I feel the need to kill?

In a panic my brother helped me hide the bodies in the dead of night, telling me everything would be fine, that we’d never talk again about the incident, that it would simply go away. I shattered the teeth of the cursed skull from Vietnam and then added it to the pile of bodies under the road, convinced that would quiet the voice in my head.

It did.

Until it didn’t.





FORTY-THREE

I see my breath in the fading day’s light as I wait.

I know she is coming soon. I’ve watched her enough times to know her routine. Every late afternoon, she runs. Rain or shine. She and that dog head west for several miles and then return. On the way back they run by a small rock formation about a hundred yards from her house. It’s where I now hide. The rain and wind have picked up, and far away the thunder sounds, but I keep my ears open for the sound of her feet. I am confident in her habits.

She always follows the bank of the dry creek bed during the return part of her run but leaves it behind as she gets closer to her house and passes by my rocks. Today the creek is no longer dry; it is full of rushing water. When I first started watching her, I could see the dirt bottom of the creek bed and how the water had eaten away at its sides over the decades, digging deeper and deeper into the landscape, creating stunning small cliffs. During the winter I saw its dry bottom coated in snow. Only recently did it fill with the first water since last fall. It’s narrow and not too deep, but its noise interferes as I listen for her.

The dog is an unknown in the equation, the one factor I’m not confident about, but I’ve planned the best I can. It needs to be eliminated first. I’ve worn heavy boots and thick sleeves in preparation. I close my eyes and see myself kick the dog squarely in the face, enough to knock it senseless, and then I swing my hammer at Britta. She’ll be too stunned over the attack on her dog to react.

I have my rifle and pistol, but it is the hammer that is important. She needs to be eliminated the same way her family was.

Then my father’s voice will be silenced in my head.

I need it to end.