Her tiny feet slapped the pebbled road. Her pigtails swayed wildly. Her rasping throat felt parched, and her lungs burned. The back of her neck was coated with a sheet of sweat. If she focused hard enough, she could feel a drop trickling down her back.
She ran like a bullet leaving a barrel, like a lioness chasing her meal. A simmering ache burst in her thigh.
The modest two-story house came into view. Mackenzie Price came to a grinding halt.
Nestled in a corner plot, Mackenzie’s home was not spectacular. It was ugly and pitiful. It was all they could afford in the strange town of Lakemore.
She stood, catching her breath. She looked at her flip-flops, dangling from her fingers caked in mud. Her mother would be mad. But she could handle her.
It was her father that made her hesitate and say a silent prayer before she entered the house.
The lights were out. Were they not home? They never went out. Were they asleep? It was too early.
Unless Dad had too much to drink again, and Mom cried herself to sleep.
The little garden outside their home was a reflection of how their life was inside. Messy and dry. The front yard was inconveniently small, with patches of overgrown grass in an otherwise barren, brown land. The potted plants had long wilted. Only a small tree had survived in the disaster: a Douglas fir. It was the only thing cared for.
Mackenzie’s first memory was watching her father bending down in the garden. She was behind him, but saw his cheeks lifting, like he was smiling. The light breeze ruffled his brown hair. His strong hands planted seeds in the soil.
Now, those hands beat her mother. The thick cloud of brown hair had fallen off. That smile had collapsed into a constant sneer.
She reached the porch and stood in front of the door. Her heart raced faster than it did when she ran.
She considered going back to Fiona’s house and spending the night there. Two hours ago, she had been giggling because Fiona had kissed a boy. She had also been blushing because her crush, Dylan, was going to ask her out on the next field trip.
But now she was trembling. Sighing, she opened the door.
It creaked loudly.
The dark and silent house felt eerie and uninviting. The air was stuffy with the smell of alcohol.
“Mom?”
No answer.
She was expecting her mother’s shrieks from behind the closed door of the master bedroom, like every other night. But all she heard was the echo of her own heart.
“Is anyone home?”
The living room on her right was empty and clean. Stairs were leading up in front of her. She clutched the railing with her damp palm.
A sound came.
Shrill and abrupt.
She jumped.
It came from the kitchen, behind the living room. She noticed light seeping under the closed door. Someone was home.
“Mom? Are you here?”
It must be her mother. Why wasn’t she replying?
Mackenzie placed her muddy flip-flops by the door and made her way to the kitchen. Something made the hair on her arms stand up. Something made her scalp prickle.
When she opened the door to the kitchen, she froze.
Melody was perched on a chair. A thick mane of curly black hair crowned her head. Her gray eyes were round like saucers. Her lips were puffy and slightly parted. Her long, fragile fingers clutched her blue dress tight enough for her knuckles to whiten. She stared at the floor—Mackenzie followed her gaze.
A body lay there, covered in blood.
Mackenzie blinked. She blinked again. Again and again and again. But the scene before her didn’t crack.
A whimper came, like a strangled cry. She realized it came from her. She felt it in her bones first—the sparks and shivers. They traveled through her body, trying to yank it out of its frozen state.
“M-m-Mom?” Mackenzie whispered. Her eyes turned glossy against the soupy air.
Melody looked at her. No one said anything. Her heart pounded against her ribs painfully. She heard its thumping in her ears. Her toes started wiggling wildly. Her fingers began to quiver uncontrollably.
“Mackenzie! Mackenzie!” Melody’s voice was distant, like it came from the end of a tunnel. “Look at me!” she demanded.
Mackenzie looked.
Melody’s lips moved. But Mackenzie couldn’t understand anything. A fuse had blown in her brain and shut it down.
Melody wrapped her hands around Mackenzie’s shoulders and pushed her down on a chair. Finally, Mackenzie looked at Melody. Her hair was disheveled. Her lip was cut and bloody. Her left cheek was flaming red and double the size of her right cheek. An old bruise from last week on her chin had turned purple.
Mindlessly, Mackenzie raised her hand and touched her mother’s cheek.
Melody winced. “I’m so sorry!” she cried. “I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what happened! Sweetheart, I can’t believe I did this!”
Her teary eyes darted to the dead body. Mackenzie followed her gaze once more.
Her father lay on his stomach, facing away from them. Splatters of blood covered the floor. Blood pooled next to his head. The color was darker than she had expected. Next to his feet was a large frying pan with smudges of blood on it.
“He came in. He was mad,” Melody sobbed. “He was shouting at me, rambling about God knows what. Drinking as usual. He smashed a bottle over the table. Look! Look!” Melody cupped her chin and forced her to look at the table.
Pieces of glasses were scattered all over it. A foul-smelling brown liquid had run across the once-sleek surface.
“He hit me, and I snapped. I didn’t mean to, darling. I promise. I swear!” She pleaded with frantic eyes and gripped Mackenzie’s shoulders. “I didn’t stop. I had the frying pan in my hand, and I just kept hitting him. I… I didn’t realize how much I was hurting him. I-I’m sorry.”
Mackenzie shrugged off her mother’s hold and stood up. Feeling Melody’s eyes on her, she stepped over the body. Her legs wobbled like jelly. When her toe accidentally grazed over the blood, she lost her balance. She dropped to the floor next to her father.
His face was bashed in. His nose was crooked. His teeth were chipped and broken. The side of his head was curved inward. His left eyelid was swollen to the size of a golf ball. Blood matted his skin—hiding the birthmark on his cheek that Mackenzie remembered kissing as a child.
Tears rolled down her face. She lurched forward to touch him, to comfort him, but Melody held her. Mackenzie felt like bursting. Her twelve-year-old heart couldn’t handle the grief or the confusion. Her sobs scratched at her throat. The pain choked her veins. She cried into her mother’s arms for what felt like a lifetime.
“Mackenzie. Please listen to me.” Melody’s voice was firm. “You must help me.”
“We have to call the police.”
“No!” Her voice boomed. “We can’t call the police. They’ll arrest me!”
“They’ll understand! They have to!”
“They won’t!” Melody glared at her. “There will be an investigation. It will take forever.”
“I’ll tell them he used to hit you,” she argued. “They’ll know that it was in self-defense.”
Melody gritted her teeth. “They won’t. They’ll ask me why I never complained that he was violent with me. They won’t believe a child! Either they’ll blame me for not seeking help before, or they’ll say I’m making up lies to justify what I did. You don’t know how cruel this world can be to women.”
Mackenzie’s breath turned shallow as her mother’s words washed over her. Her eyes ached with exertion. Snot dripped down her nose onto her lips.
“Sweetheart, if we call the police then I’ll spend some time in prison,” Melody said. “They’ll either charge me with murder or involuntary manslaughter. You’re twelve! There is nobody else to take care of you! They will throw you in foster care, saying your grandmother is too old. Do you know what happens to young girls in the foster care system?”
Mackenzie knew. She didn’t want to be separated from her mother. Her mother was all she had—even before what had happened tonight.
She stared at Melody blankly. A thick cloud of numbness cobwebbed her mind.
“They are assaulted and harassed!” Each word out of her mother’s mouth stung sharp. “Girls are not safe anywhere. Do you want that life? Do you want your mother to go to prison? I know what I did was wrong, but do I deserve to spend my life in jail?”
Mackenzie shook her head.
“That’s my girl. You have to help me bury him.”
Mackenzie tore herself away from Melody and marched to the other side of the kitchen. She wanted to run. The muscles in her legs twitched, ready to leap into action. Could she go for a run now?
Melody stood on the other side of the center table. “Sweetheart. I know how it sounds. But there’s no other way. I don’t want to do this either. But we have no choice.”
The light fixture hung low over the table, illuminating Melody’s face, pinched in desperation. There was frenzy in her eyes. Mackenzie had seen in old pictures how her mother’s skin was like milk. Now, no inch of it was pristine. Bruises covered her face—some purple and some green.
Melody spent all her hard-earned money on three things: groceries, electric bills, and makeup.
“He hasn’t been a father to you for many years, darling. It doesn’t make this right, but it does make it less wrong. You must help me. Otherwise, we will lose whatever we have left.”
Is this right? Mackenzie’s neck was stiff, but she nodded.
Melody released a long-drawn breath and nodded back. “Thank you, darling. We’ll take him to the woods behind the house and bury him there.” She checked the clock. “Let’s leave in around twenty minutes. Doris goes on a walk in the evening, but she should be back around now. I want to make sure we don’t run into her. You know how prying that woman can be.”
Melody tied her hair up in a bun, took off her apron, and left the kitchen.
Mackenzie’s eyes flitted everywhere else in the room. She hadn’t noticed until now that the walls were lime green. The floor tiles were dirty yellow. The kitchen cabinets were painted a darker shade of green, with pictures of fruits and vegetables on a white strip stuck across.
The place looked old, like something from the eighties she’d seen on television.
The body on the other side of the kitchen had a jarring presence. It took all Mackenzie’s strength to keep her eyes glued on the clean stove and the cracks on the walls above it. She began counting them.
Why didn’t they ever fix the wall? Why didn’t they ever renovate the kitchen? Why was everything in this house falling apart?
Why did Dad start drinking?
Numbness was oddly powerful. It lasted longer than shock and fright, and it came quicker than guilt and sorrow. It was a shield. It kept everything at bay. But it was a silent killer. It bit into the soul without leaving any marks.
Mackenzie was rooted to the spot. She waited for her mother. Her mother would tell her what to do. She was always an obedient daughter; she always did the right thing. She never caused any trouble. She always listened to her mother.
Whenever Melody told her to stay in her room no matter what she heard, she did just that. She always sat on her bed and watched the tree outside her window while her mother begged and her father yelled.
Melody walked in with a white bed sheet. “Help me put him in this.”
Mackenzie swallowed the lump in her throat. With shaking hands, she held the other end of the sheet and spread it on the floor next to her father.
“You lift his legs. I’ll lift his shoulders.”
Her chest tightened when she held her father by the ankles. She didn’t even remember the last time she had touched him. Call someone. Call anyone.
“Lift at three. One… two… three!”
He was heavy. Mackenzie felt the strain in her lower back. They lifted him a few inches off the floor and dropped him on the sheet. She stepped back and watched Melody wrap it around him.
Melody was breathless when she finished. Her greasy hair stuck to the sides of her face. She wiped off the sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’ll go out and make a scene in the garden so that the neighbors think he’s still around. You wash the frying pan with bleach. Can you do that?”
Mackenzie must have nodded, because Melody looked satisfied.
“Then we’ll go outside and take care of this. Once we’re back, strip off all your clothes down to your underwear. I’ll put everything in the wash. Tomorrow morning I’ll go to the police station and report him missing.”
With that, Melody left again. It was easier now that he had a cloth covering his battered face. But there was blood everywhere. Mackenzie tiptoed around the sprays of blood to the frying pan. She didn’t expect it to be so heavy. She felt the pressure on her wrist and had to use both her hands to lift it. The blood on it had dried and looked like gunk. She stared at the depression in the pan for several minutes. A chill crept up her spine. Outside, her mother bellowed a fake conversation with a dead man.
“Look what you did, Robert!”
“Robert! Come out!”
“I don’t know where that is!”
She turned on the faucet and let the water rinse the pan. The scrubber didn’t remove all of the blood. She rubbed harder and harder. It felt peaceful to watch the pieces of dried blood fall into the sink. Some of it still stuck to the pan, and she had to use her nails to scrape it off. She didn’t dare breathe. She didn’t dare think. She was cleaning.
It’s just paint, she told herself over and over again.
From the corner of her eye, she saw a pair of shiny black shoes by the wall, under the curtain. Since when did her father own such nice shoes? Why hadn’t she seen them before?
She took out the bleach and soaked the pan in it. Then she cleaned the sink with bleach too.
Melody returned, breathing hard. She held her daughter’s tiny face in her hands. “You’re doing the right thing, sweetheart. You’re helping your mother. You are so brave. Very brave.” She kissed her forehead. “There’s a shovel here. I’ll do all the digging. I just need help with lifting. Are you ready now?”
Mackenzie didn’t know what disturbed her more: her father’s corpse or her mother’s apparent calmness.
Melody thrust the shovel under the layers of the sheet, on top of the body, and opened the door that led to the backyard. Together they lifted him and carried him out.
As Mackenzie carried the body, her mind wandered into dark places. What if they were caught? Would she be arrested too? Would her school expel her? Would the police allow her and her mother to stay in the same prison?
As they entered the woods, her heart slithered further down her chest. The woods always scared her. It was where the bad men roamed. Now, they were just like them.
She focused on the balmy air, the lingering smell of pine and cedar, the faint glow from the silver moon, and the sticks and stones digging into the bottom of her feet. She hadn’t put any shoes on. The woods were dizzying. Everything looked random and similar. She couldn’t tell where they were, but they were going deeper into the belly. She counted their steps. They were both panting. They were both on edge. Occasionally, they looked around. They paused briefly after every crunch of twigs and flapping of leaves.
What am I doing? I shouldn’t be here.
The woods were notorious for teenagers coming to party at night. But it was a Tuesday.
“This seems good enough.” Melody wheezed and lowered him.
They’d stopped after 317 steps.
“Just sit there. I’ll do everything.”
Mackenzie planted her butt on the wet soil and curled her knees in. She watched her mother start digging a hole.
Melody’s arms were toned. When she flexed, her biceps jutted out. She didn’t break a sweat. She was tall and imposing. Couldn’t she have hit him back before? Would he have stopped then?
Leaves rustled. Crickets chirped. The mountain of dirt beside Melody piled up. Hours later, Melody dropped the shovel and rolled the body into the hole. It fell in with a thud.
Mackenzie swallowed hard. What were Fiona and her mother doing now? Watching the television together? Eating dinner?
Melody scooped the dirt back into the hole to fill it up. Once she had finished, they stared at it. The patch of disturbed land looked innocent enough. Mackenzie knew she would never forget the sight of her mother breathing hard over her father’s grave.
Mackenzie looked down. A sob clogged her throat. She curled her toes in to catch the mud between them and squeezed hard. It felt soft and thick like dough. There was a fleck of blood on her smallest toe. She rubbed it against the soil until her skin burned.
“Sweetheart, you can never tell anyone about what happened.” Melody’s lips quivered. “No one. Not your friends, not your teachers, not the police, not your grandmother. It will put us in danger. This is just between us. No one can know. No one will understand. They will see us as monsters.”
“Yes, Mom.”
Melody offered her a hand. Mackenzie grabbed it and stood up. Together, they walked 317 steps back to their house.
She didn’t feel like a monster; she felt like a ghost.
September 11, 2018
Mackenzie picked up the crime scene photograph and stared at it for the billionth time. The prostitute was lying on the bed. Her hair was soaked in blood. She was a blonde, but now she looked like a brunette.
She had been stabbed forty-seven times. There were puncture wounds all over her body. Her thighs, her stomach, her breasts, her neck, her arms, and her buttocks.
She had cheated on her lover forty-seven times.
“Here you go!” A hand blocked her view and placed a bottle of champagne on her desk. She squinted at it then looked up. “What is this?”
Sergeant Jeff Sully leaned his bulk against her desk. “It is Schramsberg Blanc de Blancs. Famous Californian champagne.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Mackenzie mumbled.
“It’s sparkling chardonnay.” He rolled his eyes, his thick unibrow tracking the movement. “Your knowledge of wine is disgraceful.”
“Your knowledge of wine is surprising. You clearly look like a beer person.” She pointed at his large drum of a belly.
Sully ignored the jibe and crossed his arms, his thumb reaching up to scratch at his graying mustache. “How do you even look at that without flinching? One of the worst ones I’ve seen in my career.”
She clipped the picture back into the case file. “I’ve seen worse.”
Detective Troy Clayton pushed his chair back from the cubicle next to hers and came into view with a Cheshire cat smile on his face. He reminded her of a carrot—tall, lean, and stiff, with a mop of light brown hair that looked orange under sunlight. “Guess you saw a lot of dead bodies in New York?”
She froze. She imagined what Troy would look like if his eyelid were swollen to the size of a golf ball. She wondered about the amount of force required to fracture a skull with a frying pan. It needed a staggering amount of rage.
What Mackenzie did twenty years ago needed astounding cowardice.
The phone trilled.
Papers shuffled.
The toilet flushed.
Sully’s stomach growled as he stood up.
The little sounds snapped her out of her spiraling thoughts and kept her grounded. A little trick she learned from the internet. She smiled. “Nah, I just have bigger balls than all of you combined.”
Sully laughed behind her. Troy reddened, but his lips resisted a smile. He tapped a pen against his chin before wheeling back to his cubicle.
The Investigations Division in Lakemore PD consisted of a Special Investigations and a Detectives Unit. Special Investigations looked into robberies, fraud, and drug and gang-related crimes. Sully was in charge of the Detectives Unit, leading six senior detectives and three junior detectives, investigating homicide, missing persons, felony assaults, and cold cases. Located on the same floor, the detectives had cubicles close to each other, with the sergeant’s office right down the hall. It was like being in a fishbowl. There was no privacy.
Mackenzie placed the blue binder back on the shared shelf. She looked at the unoccupied cubicle behind hers. Files were stacked in a corner. Pictures were pinned to the bulletin board on the wall. An empty coffee cup sat on the desk.
Her nostrils flared; her chest pinched. She looked away. “I think I’m going to go home.”
“What? No way!” Sully said incredulously. “The DA charged your guy, Mack. You solved the case. You celebrate here.”
Troy stood up and looked over the screen separating their cubicles. “Care to share some of that booze, Detective?”
“It’s been a long week––” Mackenzie started, but Troy interrupted.
“I’ll finish that entire thing then. We can celebrate for Mad Mack without her here.”
Mad Mack.
It was her nickname in the department. They called her that mostly behind her back and sometimes to her face. She didn’t appreciate the name, but she knew where it came from.
Her desk was always organized. Her notes were always color-coded. Everything in her life was ordered and categorized. She finished first in the academy. She could run one and a half miles in ten minutes. She worked on Christmas and Thanksgiving. She never relied on coffee or fast food, unlike her coworkers. Her red hair was always straight as an arrow. Her pantsuit showed no sign of crinkles. Her eyebrows were perfectly threaded. There wasn’t even a shadow on her upper lip. She never slumped. She never cried. She never lost her cool.
She must be mad.
“Actually, why not? No one wants to see you drunk, Troy,” she teased him.
Troy smirked. “I’ll find the others.”
Ten minutes later, Detectives Finn, Ned, and Dennis were gathered around Mackenzie’s desk. Becky Sullivan, who led the Medical Examiner’s office, joined them. Having worked with Mackenzie and the other detectives on several cases, she had become good friends with the unit.
Sully stood, facing them, and raised his glass. “We all must be a little mad too for working till midnight. To Mad Mack!”
“To another bastard in prison,” Mackenzie corrected.
“To complaining wives at home!” Dennis raised his glass.
“And complaining husbands.” Becky cocked an eyebrow.
They clinked their glasses. Finn went to his cubicle behind Troy’s and connected his iPod. The song “Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts blasted from his speaker.
Mackenzie sighed, defeated, while they laughed at her expense.
“Mack,” Ned said. “Sterling did a good job with Thatcher. Nailed him. You know how badly I wanted this guy gone.”
Mackenzie’s eyes skimmed over Ned’s aged face. Even though Ned was in his late forties, he looked at least a decade older. His breath was stale with the smell of cigarettes and coffee. The last twenty years of dealing with battered homemakers had left him scruffy.
Did Mackenzie’s scars show? Could someone look at her and guess what she had done? She hoped not. She put a lot of effort and time into looking immaculate. It wasn’t vanity; it was her armor.
“Sterling is good at his job,” she shrugged. “But this was all you, Ned. You’d been building a case against him for months. Don’t let my husband take any credit for your hard work.”
Ned smiled and gave her a pat on the back.
The champagne felt bubbly against her tongue. It wasn’t strong or heady. She sipped it slowly while Troy and Dennis watched the highlights of the football game on the internet, and Ned and Becky discussed their kids, who were in the same grade.
She spotted a water ring on her desk and furiously cleaned it with a cloth.
“Mack, I don’t think you realize how impressed the brass has been with you,” Sully said, taking away the cloth. “Relax tonight.”
“The Lieutenant, you mean?”
“Peck is a hard man to impress. I don’t think he likes me, but I don’t really give a damn about politics. You’re good at your job. I just want you to know that people are watching you. Maybe in the next few years, you’ll have my job. And of course, it helps to be married to an assistant district attorney.” He winked.
She dug her palm into the edge of the table and forced a smile. Being married to ADA Sterling Brooks had several perks—but one day, happiness had stopped being one of them.
Sully looked over his shoulder to the empty cubicle opposite Mackenzie’s and the picture pinned to the bulletin board. “Bruce retired at a bad time. Nick has been under a lot of pressure since he took over the case.”
“I wonder when we’ll find that girl.”
September 12
The scraping sound of a knife slicing through vegetables and the sharp sting of the blade hitting the cutting board was comforting. Mackenzie chopped the carrots into fine pieces and dumped them in the blender.
Next came the tomatoes. The juice spurted and spilled. She stared at the red liquid trickling across the cutting board. It was lighter than her father’s blood. If she added some blueberries to the mix, the color would match.
Heavy footsteps thudded down the stairs. “Baby, have you seen my watch?”
She paused and looked at Sterling. His dark skin was stretched out tight over his strong facial bones. He was clean-shaven—exactly how she liked him. Underneath the gray suit, his muscles were bulging and rippling. He was at least half a foot taller than her. He looked like a cop, not a lawyer.
“Mackenzie?”
“Sorry. I don’t know where it is.” It was in the laundry room.
He groaned. “Dammit. I’m late already.”
“Why? Where do you have to be?” She tried to sound neutral.
“I have a meeting with Ron. He’s in a bad mood. I’ll just go without it then.” He picked up his briefcase and put on his coat.
He cupped her face with his calloused hands. She remembered their first date, when he had touched her like this. He told her she looked like the moon on fire, with her pale skin and flaming red hair.
But Sterling said a lot of things. He was charming, successful, and beautiful. He didn’t let anyone mistreat his wife. He helped with household chores. He liked to go down on her.
Mackenzie was lucky. She had found someone good. She hadn’t made the same mistake her mother had. Sterling was the perfect husband, the ideal specimen.
He leaned in and planted a quick kiss. It left a bitter taste lingering on her lips.
When Sterling walked out, she turned on the blender. The white noise filled her house. She looked up at the box-beam ceiling. She had come a long way from growing up in a house with a cracked and moldy roof. She looked down at the floor. Her kitchen didn’t have dirty yellow tiles. Mackenzie looked around her home—the vast open floor plan, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the front yard. The lack of privacy didn’t bother her; it was easy to look into her house, but there was nothing to hide. No bloodied wives, no dead bodies.
Every day, she admired her garden: the flourishing shrubs, the immaculately mowed grass and the weeping willow that looked like an umbrella. Today, as she gazed out the window, she wondered how he kissed her.
Her stomach churned. Her face turned the color of the tomato she had just chopped. Her bones ached to smash something. She snatched at the blender jug and it slipped from her grasp, spattering the juice over her glistening white counter.
She didn’t bother cleaning it up. Sterling would do it.
She picked up her iPod and went for a run.
Runners usually took the scenic routes in Lakemore. There were plenty—lonely trails through forests or twisting paths along the lakes—but next to Olympia, Lakemore was an ugly mole that couldn’t be surgically removed.
Mackenzie liked to run through the ugliness of Lakemore. Buildings that had no creativity in their design. Parks that were neglected, with broken and vacant swings. Billboards that paraded tacky and half. . .
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