Darkness at the Edge of Town (Iris Ballard #2)(20)
Most people aren’t aware when a life-changing moment happens to them until time passes. The moments that form a person, define him or her, when everything changes. I always knew my moments almost right when they happened. The first time Hayden smiled at me. The first time Luke fought back in a verbal sparring match. The moment I pulled the trigger and blew Meriwether’s brains out. But the moment that set me on the path to all those other moments came when Special Agents Samantha Hutchins and Joshua Van Den Berg walked into my house to interview me about my best friend Sadie Armstrong’s murder.
The murders of Cindy, Sadie, and Molly Armstrong rocked Grey Mills down to its bedrock. There had always been a fair share of husbands killing wives through the ages, but that triple homicide was a first, and I prayed a last. Once the Grey County Sheriff’s Department realized Mr. Armstrong fled the state on the third day, they called in reinforcements. The FBI.
I was in shock by the time the agents came to town. Sheriff Hancock the First had already interviewed me once, but that interview was only ten minutes long, and all he’d asked me was if I’d seen Mr. Armstrong be abusive or if Sadie had ever told me she’d been hit by her father. I answered truthfully: no.
What I didn’t tell him, because in my terrified, traumatized ten-year-old brain the sheriff hadn’t asked me, was that a few days before the murders a blonde showed up on the Armstrong doorstep, kissing Mr. Armstrong as Molly and I came downstairs. Mr. Armstrong went from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde in point-five seconds flat. He yanked the blonde inside, who I would later learn was named Stephanie Ridley, a stripper in Pittsburgh, and stepped toward us girls with an expression I’d never seen before. Pure fury and menace. The first monster I’d ever encountered. He grabbed Molly by the forearms, squeezing so tight she shed tears, and said if she ever told her mother what she’d just seen, he’d kill her cat Josie Pussycat. He then turned his gaze to me, and I stopped breathing. He didn’t touch me. He didn’t have to. He just said he’d burn my house down with me and my family still inside if I told anyone. I absolutely believed him.
Mom and Grandpa wondered why I suddenly became “sick” after I ran home that day. I stayed up all night and faked an illness to miss school just so I could look out the window for Mr. Armstrong. I was awake on sentinel duty the night he was supposedly on a business trip and his whole family died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Like most criminals, Mr. Armstrong wasn’t nearly as smart as he believed. It took the local constabulary with their extremely limited homicide experience half a minute to notice the gas line on the boiler had been tampered with and that every vent, save for the ones in the bedrooms, was shut. But what he lacked in intelligence Mr. Armstrong made up for in luck. He was in his mistress’s hotel room celebrating his freedom biblically when the Philadelphia police came to question him. His work colleague later told Mr. Armstrong he’d been interviewed, questioned about alibis and marital trouble, and that the police were looking for him. Mr. Armstrong saw the writing on the wall, emptied his bank account, grabbed his mistress, and fled to stay with her friends in Las Vegas as they worked on a plan to get fake documentation and start a new life in Mexico.
Not that I, or anyone else, knew that at the time. All ten-year-old me knew was that my friends were dead and the man who’d threatened me was out there watching my every move and waiting until I blabbed so he could do to my family what he did to his. The adults knew there was something wrong with me, but I just kept telling them I was just sad my friends died.
Then on that third day, a man and a woman in dark suits knocked on our door.
I knew from the TV shows Grandpa liked to watch that the FBI were like the police, but Hutchins and Van Den Berg seemed so much more serious, more self-assured than the sheriff. They scared the crap out of me. Grandpa was home and sat beside me as the female agent, Hutchins, began asking me about Sadie and Molly under the pretext of getting to know them better. For the first ten minutes, I told her about their love of animals and all things New Kids on the Block. They often fought over who would get to marry Joey.
It was subtle how she switched gears toward their family life. She made sure not to mention Mr. Armstrong’s name or call him their father. The only time she did, I tensed up so much at just the words “Mr. Armstrong” that I gave away my fear. She kept asking questions without mentioning him again for several more minutes, but when she did it again, even claiming she knew I’d been threatened, I almost threw up.
Van Den Berg took over then. I’d been primed by the motherly agent; it was now Father’s turn to assure me I’d be safe. He told me I should be angry at what happened to my friends, to me. That he knew I could be strong and help my friends get justice. That I could be brave because my friends and family needed me to be. That Mr. Armstrong would win, he would get away with his crimes, if I didn’t help.
After I joined the FBI, I tracked down Van Den Berg at the Dallas field office. I asked how he knew to play to my sense of duty and feeling of helplessness. He told me he’d looked into my eyes and that mixed with the terror he found confusion. Determination. And fury. He knew deep down I was pissed that bastard hurt my friends, pissed he’d turned me into a scared little girl. Armstrong had taken my strength. I’d never been afraid of anything in my life before. Not horror movies, not the Boogeyman, not even Wayne Malick, the neighborhood bully. I’d kicked that creep’s ass when I was nine. Got my nose broken but he left Billy, Sadie, and me alone afterward. But Armstrong had murdered my friends. He made me scared to leave my own home. He took my power away from me. Not that I knew all this at the time. My ten-year-old self just wanted to stop being afraid and believed the agents when they said they could protect us. So I told them about the woman he’d called Stephanie and what he’d threatened. I instantly felt freer than I had in days.