Free Family Murders: A Thriller by Henry Carver Page A

didn't have to?
    Naive, I know. Tried to get my job back, no dice. I played the pity card on that one and almost got punched in the face. To be fair, though, no one did mention what had happened. At the grocery store, on the street, it was all the same. Silence and stares. I was right about one thing—no one would mention it. But they didn't have to. I carried the whole thing around with me, throwing it on people like a bucket of cold water every time I turned a corner. I couldn't forget because they couldn't forget, and they couldn't forget because of me. It was a vicious circle.
    I figure I still could have made it work. I'd lived in that town my whole life, and I don't know if even all that would have been enough for me to get the message. The message was: move on. I get it in retrospect, and I don't blame them. The truth is, they did want to forget. Just like me, they wanted it gone from their heads. Of course, I was the reason they couldn't make it happen, the town's dirty laundry that just wouldn't get clean. Who knows how long I would have taken it, how long I would have lived like a ghost. Probably my whole life—that wasn't the the problem.
    The house. The house was a problem. The second I stepped inside I could feel the slime dripping down off the walls, coming down from her room and straight through the ceiling. I spent whole days scrubbing the place at the beginning. Then I just scrubbed it once a day, then once a week. Then I gave up.
    It wouldn't wash—more dirty laundry. I started sleeping in the yard, camped out in a tent next to the house, but I had to move to the barn because of the nightmares. They'd stop for a while every time I moved farther away, but as soon as I got comfortable with some new distance they'd start up again. It took a few moves for me to put that together.
    When I did, I left. I'm sure people around here were plenty happy; all I cared about was putting as much distance between me and that house as possible. But there's a limit, you know. You can only go so far before you start coming back, so I had to give that up too. I still dream of the house often, but that's OK. With nightmares, I've found, the best thing to do is relax and let them happen, that way they come on slow, like good mushrooms instead of a coke-blast up the brain stem. It's like my life, you know? I live in a nightmare, every day, but you can get used to that. As long you don't fight it.
    I had to give in to something else, too.
    When you spend your nights dreaming of something, you spend your days thinking about it too. Given the lack of a conviction, my sister's case was still open, but I was pretty sure fuck-all was being done about it. The police knew who had done it: me. But a stupid jury had let him off, so why waste resources chasing someone who they can't touch?
    If they wouldn't fix it, someone had to. I decided it would have to be me because no one else cared. So I started to read as much as I could: psychology, criminology, all of it, anything I could lay my hands on. I started investigating my own sister's murder.
    But I never thought of it like that. It wasn't an investigation—it was a manhunt. I started looking for him .
    ***
    "He doesn't exist! Don't you get that? Even if you don't get it, I do."
    Angela's voice pierced the brief pause in Eric's story. She hadn't intended to say anything at all, but the words had escaped her. It was all so…unbelievable. Rocky leaned forward, baring his teeth, chomping at the bit. Her knuckles on the hand wrapped around his collar were white.
    "Oh, he exists. He is very, very real. I only said that I'm not a monster—I didn't say monsters don't exist," he said. "They do."
    "I know they do."
    "Really, Angela? You may think you know. You may think you understand. But you don't. You of all people, I can say with certainty, do not understand."
    "Me of all people?" She was confused.
    "You of all people. You, with a six year-old daughter. She's the same age as Gab— as my