Black Aries (eBook)

Shaundra Felder (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
278 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-7459-4 (ISBN)

Infos

'Black Aries' is a gripping novel that tells the story of a marketing executive who returns to her hometown to stop an ambitious special investigator from exhuming her stepfather and exposing the secret she thought was buried forever.

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"e;Black Aries"e; is a gripping novel that tells the story of a marketing executive who returns to her hometown to stop an ambitious special investigator from exhuming her stepfather and exposing the secret she thought was buried forever. In the spring of 1978, six-year-old Denise Blackburn caused her shell-shocked stepfather to fall to his death, then she killed the elderly neighbor who witnesses it. At least that is what the nightmares tell her. Forty years later, thanks to negligent forensic practices by Lubbock County's long-standing medical examiner, a door to the past creaks open and special investigator Michael Thomas intends to walk through it. His official job: determine the accurate cause of death for countless victims of the former fraudulent ME's botched autopsies from 1978 until now. His own agenda: bring the person who murdered his grandmother in 1978 to justice and do it while keeping his personal connection to the case secret. Denise is finally at a place in life that makes it worth living. She's the new Associate Creative Director at an up-and-coming ad agency in Manhattan, but an urgent call from her mother summons her back to Texas. On the flight home, Denise loses all her medication. She struggles to hide the side effects from her mother, but withdrawal from the drugs that she's depended on since childhood forces Denise's fragmented mind to unearth truths that tell a different story than what she remembers...one where maybe she's not a monster after all. As Michael's investigation heats up and veers off in an unexpected direction, Denise must resort to murder to stop him. When the two collide, they unravel a lifetime of lies and unveil a serial killer hiding in plain sight.

Textauszug

Prologue

Spring 1978

Six-year-old Denise Blackburn stood by her mother’s side and watched ringlets of black smoke rise from a house fire. The heat emanating from the flames forced them off the sidewalk and into the street. Their neighbors all rushed out of their boxlike houses and huddled together. Most of them were retirees, but some were young couples with children.

Denise’s mother, Cynthia Blackburn Reynolds, was in a state of disarray. Pink foam hair rollers hung loosely from her sweat-soaked hair as she juggled Denise’s frantic one-year-old sister Lynn in her arms. When Cynthia smelled smoke, she scooped up her girls and ran. She’d lost a fuzzy slipper during the commotion. The oldest daughter, Jenny, eight, stood glued to her mother’s waist. She wrapped her arms around her and buried her face in Cynthia’s stomach.

The sun had only hinted at its arrival on the horizon, yet a stifling 80-degree day was already upon them. Not typical weather for Lubbock, Texas, so early in the spring, but not unusual. It was an indication that summer would be unbearable. The ground had absorbed the heat from the blistering 100-degree day before and released it on the asphalt under their bare feet. Denise shuffled to relieve the discomfort.

As the wind caught the tails of everyone’s robes and whipped them into a frenzy, at the same time it fueled the smoldering embers on the house, which erupted. A collective cry went out from the crowd. The wail of sirens somewhere in the distance meant help for the people inside would come too late.

It was no surprise, though. Services, emergency or otherwise, were never quick to come to the aid of citizens on the east side of town. So, folks got used to handling things on their own.

Mr. Benny rallied the men. Denise knew him because he and her stepfather, Calvin, both worked at the oil mill. He lived across the street, two houses down. He’d come by from time to time, and they’d stand on the porch to talk about work or help each other with odd jobs around their houses. Benny was older than Calvin, but not old old, as far as Denise could tell.

He shot a questioning glance at Denise and her family, then made a quick scan of the crowd. His eyes narrowed and he looked confused, but there was no time to waste. When the group of men reached the lawn, Benny tripped and almost fell. He kicked off his brown cotton slippers, and they all raced toward the structure.

It was Mrs. Bordeaux’s house, the elderly woman next door. Her small, wood-framed home was an inferno, and she was inside, howling like a trapped animal. The shotgun construction meant its narrow, single-hallway design stretched from the front of the house to the back. With the doors opened, the slightest breeze could cool the whole house. It was a functional design that had fallen out of fashion with modern architects and had become a sign of poverty. These were the homesteads of the hard-working poor. Denise’s street was lined with them, all in various colors.

Its ingenious floor plan was also its biggest pitfall. It was a tunnel that allowed smoke and flames to roar through it to create a fireball. By the time the men broke the front door down, the ceiling had started to collapse. They used the door as a barricade, but only seconds after they got in, the flames beat them back. They rushed out. Benny emerged carrying a lifeless young boy.

Just then, a fire truck swerved around the corner on the west end of the street and blocked the intersection. A fireman leaped off the truck and swooped the boy out of Benny’s arms. He laid him down and pushed on his chest and breathed into his mouth. After some time, the boy stirred. A medic wrapped the boy’s left hand in heavy bandages as a younger boy ran up and hugged him.

More fire fighters stood, baffled, around a fire hydrant on the corner. It was broken. Three strong men turned a makeshift lever, and soon water gushed through the hose. They aimed it at the doomed little house. Too little, too late, though.

A hand from hell reached up from the foundation and formed a fist around the house. The cheerful yellow paint and white trim decayed to ash gray as it squeezed until the humble abode buckled. Then an explosion from inside sent the old woman’s carcass crashing through the last window. She flopped over the windowsill. Her skin peeled back to reveal the charred bones.

Draped in a blue nightgown two sizes too big, Denise watched as the horror movie played out in front of her—the kind she was too young to go see at the picture show. The kind that gave her nightmares and Mama said “they only play acting” to comfort her. Except the play actors were people she knew, but nobody was having any fun.

Denise crinkled her nose when a foul odor wafted through the ever-growing throng of people. It was nothing she’d detected before, but she knew instinctively it was the smell of death. The stench of burning flesh hung over her little head like the halo of a fallen angel. Tears welled up in her brown eyes. Then something within started to unravel.

When the fist was done, ravenous flames tiptoed across grass dried by the sun in the West Texas heat between Mrs. Bordeaux’s and the Reynolds’ house next door. They crawled along the walls, then licked the roof of the Reynolds’ house. The fire fighters attempted to increase water flow at the hydrant, but suddenly the flow slowed to spittle and stopped.

A young fireman, Brody Crane, ran over to the crowd gathered in the street. His short blond hair was matted to his forehead. “Who lives here?” He pointed at the Reynolds’ house. “Is everyone out?”

“I do!” Cynthia held her children close. “But I can’t find my husband.”

Denise’s jaw dropped as she watched black coils of smoke rise from the roof of her home, now a fiery coffin. Smoldering curls slithered and swayed like a woman’s hips pushed upward by those coming behind. The sun’s morning rays blazed rings of red glory through her hair. The vision tossed her head back and cackled at the complete and irrevocable devastation she’d left behind. Before it vanished into the heavens, she bowed her head and winked.

Denise shook all over. It was a sight straight from the devil himself.

She looked up at her mother. Had she seen it too—the evil woman in the sky?

She had not.

Cynthia was anxious and observant. Her large brown eyes scanned the scene, charting every move. Desperate, she turned to people standing nearby. “Has anyone seen Calvin?” she pleaded.

They all shook their heads. No, no one had.

Brody disappeared around the corner into the backyard of the Reynolds’ home. He cranked the water hose valve on the back of the house and felt the pressure. He followed the length of the attached hose to a pile of shingles from a roofing job lying nearby. As he tugged to free it, he made a gruesome discovery.

Calvin Reynolds lay on his back in the rubble with a pool of blood around his head, more of it outside than in. Brody spotted the wound on the side of Calvin’s neck. He looked for what might have caused it, but there was nothing but shingles lying around. The man’s eyes were open, glowering up and to the right. A clear thick, viscous fluid filled the sockets and spilled out as the eyes sunk deeper into his skull.

Brody stared, stupefied. He saw his reflection in Calvin’s eyes, and his own blood ran cold. It was his first encounter with the dead. He was fascinated by the stillness. People were never that still, not even when they slept. As he gazed into the eyes, a knot growing deep in his gut screamed foul play, but there was no time for extensive analysis.

The sound of wood splintering and windows crashing as black smoke billowed out of them jarred Brody from his musing. Wispy orange cinders alighted on the pile of shingles, and it, with Calvin Reynolds, went up in flames. Brody made a quick mental note of the body’s position and the blood, then started to beat off the sparks.

Brody did his best to save the body. Leave something for the family to bury. There was a great deal of damage, but he didn’t hesitate. Brody lifted Calvin’s head and let it rest against him. He wrapped both arms under Calvin’s armpits and pulled what was left of him out of harm’s way into the front yard, in full view of his wife and children.

When Cynthia saw the fireman dragging Calvin, she screeched and fainted. Some women ran to catch Lynn and Jenny as all three hit the ground. Denise melted into her mother’s chest and whimpered. A medic picked Denise up and set her aside as another put an oxygen mask on Cynthia.

Little Denise gawked in wide-eyed horror as fire fighters raced to cover the body. There was a bright flash then, and something new—something bad—opened in her brain. It told her, “Look!” Denise looked, and there, in her tiny brown hand, were two matches. She was mesmerized by them. Where had they come from? And then as if in a dream, everything began to move in slow motion.

Dis-ease crept in under Denise’s skin, and her whole body vibrated with dark energy. Trauma made its home in her bones; a plague infected her psyche and stripped away her previous self.

Calvin and Mrs. Bordeaux removed their sheets and sat up. Brody Crane pointed accusingly at her as the other firemen glared. Cynthia took off the oxygen mask and gazed at Denise with pity.

Denise tried to cover her own face in shame, but, “Look!” the new thing yelled—“Look what you did!” Both of her hands were covered in soupy blood. She wiped them on her nightgown,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.6.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-7459-2 / 1098374592
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-7459-4 / 9781098374594