Free Love Gone by Elizabeth Nelson Page B

but she hadn’t. She’d helped him choose his
victims, helped him stalk them, find out where they lived, even
helped him torture and murder them if he’d demanded it.
    She’d confessed everything to the
Ketchikan police to help lead them to the whereabouts of her evil,
twisted father, but without any success, creating what the local
news was calling, ‘the biggest man hunt in Alaskan
history.”
    “Nope, this wasn’t your fault or her
fault.” She repeated again. “Not really.”
    She sighed, wondering if anything she
said would get through to him at some point.
    “The police will catch him
Liam.”
    “So what,” he answered.
    “So what?” She repeated,
confused.
    “Yeah, who cares if they catch him. I
mean, I hope they do and they fry him in the chair, but it won’t
bring dad back will it.”
    He was right. Nothing would bring Mac
back. Not even when they captured the man responsible for his
murder.
    “No, it won’t bring your dad back,”
Faith agreed. “But it might give us some satisfaction and peace to
know that he can’t hurt anyone else. No other family will have to
go through this.”
    “I don’t care about anyone else,” he
said gruffly.
    At that, she pulled the car roughly
onto the side of the road and turned to him. Surprised he stared at
her, headphones forgotten.
    “Don’t say anything like that ever
again, do you hear me?” She asked him roughly. “Those are not the
words of the kind, gentle, loving son I raised. Your father would
hate to hear you say that. And I hate to hear you say that. You
think Mac died in vain? Did that monster kill him for nothing? No.
For some reason that girl of his came back to our house, none of
the other victims ever saw them again, but she came back to our
house and let herself be taken into custody. She confessed to the
police after she killed our Mac.”
    Faith was shaking with fury and
indignation. “Do you think that’s a coincidence? This was supposed
to happen. It makes me sick to know that Mac was used by fate in
this way, but damn it Liam if you won’t admit that your father’s
death may have served to stop this sicko, then you and I have a lot
of conversation left and we’re not moving from this stop until you
give your father the respect his death deserves. He died and no one
else will have to die if the police can find the man that did this.
Mac did that. It was the last heroic thing he ever did, but he did
that.”
    She was crying now and Liam was
weeping too, his head against the window, not looking at
her.
    “I miss him so much mom,” he
cried.
    “Me too baby, me too.”
    She grabbed him and pulled him close
to her like the little boy he would always be to her. He didn’t
fight her embrace, just let himself be clutched tightly and cried
into her hair and shoulders while she cried into his.
    They sat like that for what seemed
like an eternity. Crying and reaching out for Mac’s spirit to be
with them.
    Finally they sat in silence. Each
emotionally spent and weary of the tragic turn their lives had
taken.
    “Do you know the last thing your
father said to me?” Faith asked Liam gently.
    He shook his head and rubbed his
eyes.
    “He told us to live.”
    Liam just looked at her
confused.
    “Did you hear me,” she demanded louder
now. “The last thing your father asked of us was for us to
live.”
    His blue eyes, so much like his
fathers, looked back at her, wet with tears and red with
sadness.
    “So what are we going to do about
that?” She asked him.
    At first he didn’t move; didn’t look
at her, but she could see the wheels moving in his head as he
thought about what she’d told him.
    She watched as he steeled his
shoulders, arming himself with an inner resolve.
    C’mon Liam, she thought as she gazed
silently at him, find it in yourself to get through this
baby.
    Finally, he turned to her, his blue
eyes awash with unshed tears, but shining with a new steely
determination she knew he’d need to help him get through