As she got to shore, she realized that the tears still coursed down her cheeks. She stood thigh deep in the water, holding her arms tightly against both the cold and the knowledge that Michael had not meant it when he’d said they’d get married if she found out that she was pregnant. Of course, he’d said it when they weren’t sure. Now that they knew, Michael wanted her to get rid of the baby, an abortion was his solution.
Turning to face the houseboat she could hear Michael and the others yelling her name. How in the world was she going to tell her parents? Her mother would be understanding, but her father wouldn’t be. He hadn’t liked Michael from the first and had often told her that he would kill Michael if he ever did anything to hurt her.
Even though Michael had hurt her, she still loved him so much that it made her heart sink into her chest. She could almost feel herself dying thinking that she and Michael may not be together forever. It was the short sightedness of youth in which now loomed large; next month was far in the future. Six months seemed a long time and a year was a life time, Two years from now was plainly unimaginable.
Goosebumps formed under her skin as a cool breeze blew in from the lake. About 15 feet from her she heard splashing. It must be Michael coming to beg her to come back. She knew he’d come.
"Michael, I am sorry I swam off like that. I’m just upset about all of this,” she whispered still unable to see through the dark blanket of night. The splashing started again behind her. Startled, she turned expecting to see Michael standing behind her. He was always one for sneaking up and pulling tricks on her.
“Don’t you ever run away from me like that again!” he said menacingly. She could hear the grinding of his teeth and the muscles working in his jaws as he spat out the words. His face was contorted in a black rage. He grabbed her upper arms and held her face close to his own.
“You have to get rid of it. A baby will ruin my life. Think about it,” he said shoving her away from him. She lost her balance and sat down heavily on the bank in the wet grass catching herself on her elbows and palms. “Get rid of it or I will and you won’t like it, if I have to do it,” He threatened.
“But, Michael, you said that you loved me. I thought we would get married….” Her words drifted off into the night, she grimaced and then covered her face in her hands great sobs heaving from her chest as if a dam had just released its floodgates.
“I don’t care what you say. I won’t,” she cried as she grabbed a nearby tree and pulled herself up onto her feet and stumbled through the woods, the tears blurring her vision. She ran for ½ mile through the woods heedless of the consequences. Heaving, gasping for breaths between sobs, she slipped. Suddenly tripping she went down on all fours, breaths caught in her throat surprise turned to consternation. A figure emerged out of the darkness. She wasn’t sure if it had come from the land or the lake. Her mind couldn’t even focus on what the figure was. Tired from her forced flight she blinked rapidly. It was as if she had seen a spirit. She had three options she thought as time ran in slow motion. She could scream, except her throat was so tight suddenly that she could hardly even breath; she could run, but her whole body was paralyzed with fear or she could just quit.
A loud splashing could be heard toward the shore as if someone was running through water a couple feet deep, accompanied by Michael’s shouting. The teenagers all looked at each other in surprise as Michael ran toward the waterline from the woods.
Frantically, he repeated himself, "Please, y’all, help me. I can’t find Beth.” Michael turned and ran back into the woods. He ran erratically for a hundred yards and then stopped. Barefooted he could feel the cool wet dirt between his toes. Peering into the pitch black, he hungered to hear any sound. There, over to his left. It was a movement through the trees. He took off again towards the sound. His friends disturbed by his wild eyes.
In the distance Beth could hear the boys swimming towards her and Michael’s shouting as if it were a long way off but knew that she wouldn’t be saved. No one could save her now. So she chose to quit. Her mind shut down and real darkness covered her world, as she fainted. As the blows came, her last thought was that at least she wouldn’t have to tell her father about the baby now.
"Rodney, come on, something happened to Beth,” Curtis yelled as he dove into the water.
Surfacing, he turned to Cat, "You and Sarah stay there on the boat. Don’t you two dare move." Rodney dove into the water, with Curtis close on his heels, struggling to follow.
Rodney and Curtis swam to the edge of the bank and stood as soon as their feet were able to touch the soft brown mud of the shore. They waded through the water trying to run in hip deep water splashing their hand in front of them with swimming motions as if that would help propel them forward at a faster pace.
Rodney reached the bank first. “Come on Curtis, move it!” he screamed and then turned toward the tree-lined bank trying to focus in on the impenetrable darkness. An eerie green glow radiated from the woods; pulsing yet hard to pinpoint its source.
“Michael, where are you, man?” he yelled through cupped hands at the top of his lungs.
“Hey man, I can’t find Beth anywhere” he coughed out bending over to catch his breath. “You gotta help me find her”. Michael turned to go back in the way in which he had come out disappearing barefooted into the weeds, his footfalls silenced by the moss on the bank and the blanket of pine needles from the surrounding trees. Their low limbs reached themselves downward touching the boys as they entered the forest, the trees limbs like fingers searching through their clothes and hair.
“How do you know she’s this way, Mike?” Curtis questioned all three boys pushed their way through the trees.
“I thought I heard her voice come from this direction,” Michael answered stopping abruptly. “I don’t know where though. Beth!” He hysterically shouted. “Answer me!” He paused as if searching for the next steps to take. “I saw someone out here too,” Michael continued. Curtis said, “Yes, we heard someone running through the water at the lake’s edge too.”
“Who was it?” Rodney interjected as he stood his ears aching to pick up any sound able to penetrate the night.
“I’’ bet it was that freak, Stephen. I just know it. Beth!”, “Where are you?” Michael yelled once again. He was answered by silence. There was no sound, not even the wisp of the wind in the pines, nor the sound of crickets, only the far off lapping of the lake against the shore. It was as if all of the sound in the world had been erased leaving behind a vacuum that absorbed the thin taste of moonlight barely penetrating the thick forest. Beth was gone. The silence was ominous.
That evening and into the next morning, the whole town searched for the missing girl. “I can’t believe this happened," George Springer said to his partner as they looked along the lake shore for Beth Kane, the sheriff’s only daughter.
"Me neither. I don’t know what I would do if something ever happened to my wife or kids,” Deputy Tom Moore answered peering into the deep woods hoping to catch sight of Beth.
The sheriff had been a tyrant for the last week, since Beth’s disappearance, and George didn’t blame him at all. Maybe if she hadn’t been hanging out with those kids in the middle of the night, this wouldn’t have happened. But then again Beth had always tried to gain her father’s attention by doing things that she knew he wouldn’t approve of, ever since she had been little.
Tom had known Beth since she’d been born and couldn’t help worrying about his own daughter. Tom’s little girl was only ten but you never knew what could happen to them as they got older. Both men kept walking along the shore, joined by many other volunteer deputies from nearby towns. The sheriff had a lot of friends and had pulled in all his markers to find his little girl or the killer.
A few boats were anchored in the cove dragging the lake for a body in case she had drowned. The
boyfriend was still the prime suspect. He could have drowned her and then staged the whole scene about fighting with her, but all the stories that the teenagers told matched. The deputy had to admit that the kid seemed really upset that his girlfriend was lost. He would have had to be the greatest of actors.
"Hey Springer, what is that out there on that log?" Moore asked as he pointed towards a tangle of logs floating a few feet from the shore.
"I don’t know. Let’s find out." Springer waded out into the water and bent down over the log, examining a red shape.
"What did you find?" Moore asked from his position on the shore.
"You’d better call the lab guys,” Springer answered "It looks like a piece of the white bathing suit that they said that she was wearing, and it looks like it was stained with blood."
Moore, nodded his head, and looked at his partner, a hard line creased his forehead as he pulled out his radio.
Michael and his friends waited impatiently in the sheriff’s office.
“He did it! I know he did. He hated me for seeing her and he wanted her for himself. That freak is responsible. I know I saw him out here and I heard them arguing!” Michael swore under his breath.
“But are you sure, man?” Curtis asked. “I mean did you really see him?”
“Who else could have done this?” Michael screamed turning to his friends. “Swear now! Do it now! That freak, Stephen, did this. Tell me that you will help make sure he pays for this! You both know he’s a freak and out of control. If he didn’t do it, then who did?” Michael confronted them a threatening note in his voice. Curtis and Rodney looked at each other for a moment and the decision was made.
“You’re right, man,” Rodney said as Curtis nodded. “He must have done it”.
“It’s settled then. You’ll back me up with my dad,” Michael stated.
Rodney and Curtis concurred.
The papers said it was an accident and though there was an inquest, nothing was every proven and no one was charged with a crime. Michael’s friends stood with him supporting his story that Beth had disappeared into the darkness in hysteric fit of crying.
The Knoxville News-Sentinel picked up the story sensationalizing it for several weeks. Reporters speculated about the reason that Stephen killed his adopted sister. His original parentage, filled with fanatical lunatics, was pinpointed as the potential reason that Stephen could have murdered Beth.
Stephens’s ancestry was steeped in mystery. The townsfolk knew only that the land surrounding and beneath the town once belonged to an ancient religious group which worshipped the earth and were linked to the supernatural. Stephen, they’d found out over the years, was linked to one of the last members of the last living settlers of this ancient religious group.
Stephens pallid physical appearance, thought to be common among his ancestors, didn’t help his case. It drew the media like moths to a flame. His bizarre albino appearance received more press than the murder. His albinism was portrayed as a supernatural occurrence rather than the inherited genes that do not make enough pigment. He was tried and convicted in the hearts and minds of the townspeople and his friends before the tried ended.
Sheriff Kane testified that when told Stephen of Beth’s death, Stephen cried so much that he didn’t stop for weeks, but it did no good. The townspeople still pointed and whispered Stephen’s guilt.
Stephen’s silvery hair, pale countenance and tall angular form made him look like a ghost. Marie and John grieved for both the loss of their daughter and for the pain felt by their son, Stephen. Jeremy, too, became withdrawn and uncommunicative. When asked about the evening that Beth disappeared, all he could do was hang his head and turn away. Within weeks of his sister’s death, Jeremy too was gone. He disappeared in a less than shocking way, via greyhound bus, to the west.
They knew Beth had been the only person his age that Stephen knew he could count on and who was always supportive of him and always his friend. Now she was gone.
Stephen knew in his heart that Michael had killed Beth. He had drowned her at the lake and now nothing would ever be the same. He was convinced his suspicions were correct but he couldn’t prove anything. The sister, he adored had been stolen from him.
Stephen’s family moved away from Norris and after several months, the town forgot about the incident. But Stephen never forgot about Beth. She was gone and somehow, he would make the Tarlington’s pay.
Chapter 4
Cat stepped through the doors of hallowed Ayers Hall which was better known as “The Hill" and the center point of the University of Tennessee. Ayers Hall was the main part of UT's old campus and stood overlooking the north shore of the Tennessee River. From “The Hill” you could see Neyland Stadium at its base. Though it was built in 1872, "The Hill" was still the center stomping ground for natural sciences, mathematics, computer sciences and engineering majors.
She shook off the foggy haze that normally associated itself with her calculus class. Nothing was better at removing the haze than walking out of that moldy old structure and into the cool crisp air outside. It didn’t matter if it was spring, winter, fall or summer. Anything was better than being captive inside the building facing an aging professor who droned on about a subject that she knew she would never need.
The only reason she was taking the class was that it was a requirement for any degree program she decided to pursue. Other than that it was pure hell on earth. At least it was over and she didn’t have to come back for two whole days, she mused and it was her last class of the day so she was officially free for the weekend.
She rested her full bag of books on the brick wall leading up to the building and pulled out a warm diet coke. Popping the top she took a long drink and sighed with self-indulgence. Some of her friends thought that drinking warm diet cokes put her on the same plane as inhabitants of the Twilight Zone. She didn’t care if the diet cokes were warm or cold, though she did prefer them cold. She just needed the caffeine fix to get her through the hours of lectures and to give her something to do with her hands when her attention span waned. She’d always had trouble sitting still during class lectures of more than about thirty minutes. She filled the time with doodling, tootsie pops and diet cokes to make the event tolerable.
The problem was that she had an above average IQ and had trouble concentrating on the mundane facts that you could learn from the book in a ten minute read. She didn’t need to have the content of each chapter explained to her by a professor and unfortunately that was what usually happened in class. The professor would assign a chapter for reading and then talk through the reading assignment without any value-add on his part.
She finished the drink and tossed it into a nearby trash barrel, shouldered her backpack, walked down the side walk and across the parking lot back towards her dorm, Strong Hall. She’d missed lunch and it was late afternoon. She was anxious to get back, put away her books for the day and find her friends for an early dinner in the dining room that made up the first floor of her dorm. Crowds of students joined her as they all made their way to their dorms and fraternity row. Most of the afternoon classes were finished and on Fridays there were but few late afternoon lessons.
Cat walked down the steps and took a right at the bottom of the hill making her way past the university center towards Cumberland Avenue. She cut across the front of the University Center and crossed the street in front of the Law library. Head down, she was thinking of the potential activities for that evening out with her friends at their favorite bar, Ivy’s, which was a hole-in-the-wall on the back side of the Cumberland Strip.
It was a place only frequented by students, it’s interior small and dark with wooden booths, a room with video games in the back, a large bar as you walked through the front door and a blaring juke box next to the bar. The jukebox played “Rocky Top” and other country songs all night long. As the evening progressed there would be pitchers of beer and about 50+ students singing along to every song that was played. All of her friends frequented th
e same little spot, as the prime location to unwind from a weary week of studies.
She was deep in thought, following the stream of humanity down the side walk when she bumped into someone hard. Her book bag fell off her shoulder as she sat down hard on her backside scuffing her palms on the hard cement. Her attacker was a tall gangly young man with brown hair, brown eyes, obviously a student coming from the Law School building. The young man stooped to pick up her book bag and pulled her back to her feet with his hand under one arm.
“I am so sorry but I tried to step out of your way,” he said. “We did a little dance as you were lost in thought. I tried to side step but you ran into me anyway”.
She wanted to be angry but he was probably right. Sometimes, she was oblivious to her surroundings.
“No, don’t worry. That’s okay,” she said dusting off her hands and looking at her scratched palms. She finally took a moment to look at him and realized that she knew him from somewhere. “I know you. I can’t place the face with a name at the moment but I am sure of it.”
He laughed a moment and turned to his friend saying, “That’s supposed to be a guy’s line when he’s picking up a broad”.
She blushed and turned to go.
“I am sorry. I was just kidding,” he apologized. “You look familiar too but I can’t place it either. Maybe we’ll bump into one another again and figure it out,” he said as he started to walk away.
“Hey, I think I have seen you at Ivy’s, haven’t I? Maybe we’ll bump into each other there,” Cat said as she joined the stream of students walking down the sidewalk. After about 20 feet she turned to see where the young man had gone but he had disappeared into the crowd. She walked on toward the dorms stopping in the courtyard between Strong Hall and Clement Hall, the co-ed dorm next to hers. Sitting on a stone bench she waited for her brother who was supposed to meet her there.