At Least They're Committed

It’s 8:13 p.m. on Oct. 13, no matter what day the blog says it is. I’m sitting in my office surrounded by cobwebs, family photos and creepy dolls. Not scary enough. I figured I’d come decorate a bit while I was waiting for the boys to get out of the college play DS was required to attend at the King Center.

Looking at my reflection in the mirror I lament once again that I wasn’t born more attractive. Whatever.

Demion and the Twins are in place, angry souls that have come back in their unnatural state to wreak havoc on the world that betrayed their innocence, their trust. I wasn’t going to bring them this year, maybe any year. But between laughter, sharing alumni information for an article and bad singing, Deanna asked about them and told me I absolutely must bring them. I thought about them, too, and how unfair it would be not to let them come out to play.

So here they stand, the Twins at mid-floor, Demion with hands pressed against the window to the hall, but although I do believe they’re having delightful time, they’re simply not creepy. What IS creepy is that a little girl in our area got kidnapped and, despite the community’s rally cry to find her safely, she was murdered and dismembered. That’s fucking awful and now a darkness hangs over my people and my cities. It reminds me of a story I’ve meant to tell on here for posterity. It didn’t have a happy ending either.

A frantic mom called me when I was city editor saying the police weren’t looking for her teenage daughter. I think the girl was 18. I don’t remember her name. I do remember the mom’s voice trembling over the phone saying they were treating it as if it was a runaway, but she knew her daughter hadn’t run away. Her coat was there, her clothes were there and her tampons were there. She was on her period. “She was going to talk to someone about a job,” the mom wept. “If she planned to leave town, wouldn’t she at least take her tampons?” I told her I’d make calls. I did. The cops seemed to take more interest in the case because the press had taken interest. They searched.

They found the girl’s decomposing body crudely buried under a tree atop a hill not far from where she was last seen. As far as I know, they never found the killer. The cops told me that they believed it was someone working in the kitchen or busing tables at the restaurant at which she’d looked for work. Someone who at that point was long gone. Not a lot of places do background checks on dishwashers. “There are people who drift, kill and flee, wandering around the country,” the cop told me. “They go from town to town, random, and most times you can’t connect the crimes.”

That was nearly 20 years ago. I hope that’s changed now. I hope they can better connect the crimes to stop further carnage. And I hope they catch and dismember the sick, deviant bastard who abducted and murdered that little girl. Nope, my office simply isn’t scary. Not even a little bit.