Almost Dead

CHAPTER 17

 

Jenny Pickett looked around her old bedroom at her parents’ farmhouse. The yellow walls were faded and chipped. Every time she came home, the room appeared so much smaller than she remembered. The mirror her mother had made for her when she was little, framed with wood and feathers and lots of glue, still hung above a three-legged dresser.

 

The mirror had been purposely cracked because at the time her mother thought that would give it a unique, vintage look, but what it did instead was freakishly distort the reflection of anyone who looked into it. Jenny had always hated the thing, thought it was the ugliest gift any parent could bestow upon their only child, but looking at it now, with new eyes, she thought differently.

 

Turning, she viewed her profile. Her shoulders were no longer hunched over. When had that changed?

 

Facing her reflection straight on, she leaned forward, peered into the broken pieces of mirror, and smiled. Even the cracks couldn’t hide a straight white smile and killer eyes. Pun intended. She smiled at her own wittiness. The pitiful farm girl was transforming, growing more confident with every passing day.

 

You’re not the fairest of them all. You came here for a reason. Now get busy.

 

She made her way down the hallway, the wood floors creaking and shifting beneath her feet. In the kitchen, Mom stood at the stove, using a wooden spoon to stir all the leftovers from their meal in a giant banged-up pot. Leftover stew. Mom had been making it for as long as Jenny could remember. Only one burner on the stove worked, but somehow Mom had managed to cook a lot of meals.

 

The blue curtains framing the small window above the sink, the scarred trestle table, and the mismatched slat-back chairs—everything was the same. Nothing had changed.

 

A sigh escaped as she watched her parents for a moment longer. Mom had never been considered a good cook, but whatever she served up on any given day always did take care of the hunger pains.

 

Don’t forget how many times you got food poisoning. You’ll be sick by midnight, guaranteed.

 

Dad was sitting at the table, fiddling with his napkin. He wasn’t all there these days, but he still had random moments of clarity. Mom had been forty-five when she’d given birth to Jenny in the back room of this very house. Dad had been fifty. Now he was eighty and sliding downhill fast.

 

Usually she visited her parents once or twice a month, but for reasons that couldn’t be helped, she hadn’t been to the farm in nearly two months, not counting her midnight jaunt into the field to bury Brandon’s body. That was the reason she’d come tonight. After the recent rains, she couldn’t stop worrying about his body floating up to the top of his makeshift grave.

 

You better get moving. Brandon’s corpse could be resting in the neighbor’s yard.

 

“I’m going to take that bucket of scraps to the pigs,” Jenny told her mom.

 

“No need to do that, dear. Harry will be here to feed all the animals in the morning.”

 

“That’s OK—I want to do it. I want to see the pigs before I go.”

 

“You’ll get your nice clothes dirty,” Dad said.

 

“You both need to stop worrying about every little thing. I’ll go to the barn first and slide into one of Dad’s old painting garments before I head for the pen.” She looked at Mom. “Do you mind finishing up the dishes by yourself?”

 

“Not at all. You go have fun with the pigs. Rosa is about to have her litter any minute now. Oh,” she said before Jenny got to the door, “watch out for the new boar. He’s eight hundred pounds and mean as they come.”

 

“A boar? Why do we have a boar?”

 

“Mr. Higgins is moving away soon, and he knew how much your dad always liked the big boar, so he gave it to him. Maybe you should go say hello to Jack before he moves on to greener pastures. He’s always been fond of you, you know. Talks about you as if you were his own daughter. Such a sweet man.”

 

About as sweet as a bite of sour apple with a squirt of lemon juice, Jenny thought but kept it to herself. The last person in the world she wanted to talk to or think about was the next-door neighbor. Mr. Jack Higgins was rotten to the core. Of course, Mom had no idea of the things he’d done to sabotage Jenny’s relationship with his eldest son, Bobby. As it turned out, Mr. Higgins had had big plans for Bobby, and those plans had not included Jenny Pickett.

 

Without another word, Jenny grabbed the bucket of slop and headed outside.

 

Inside the barn, she made quick work of stepping into overalls and a pair of rubber boots, grabbed a flashlight, and then headed out to the field. Figuring Mom might be watching from the kitchen window, she held the bucket of scraps high in one hand as she headed for the pigpen. As soon as she rounded the corner, though, she set the bucket down and ran toward the place where she’d buried Brandon.

 

After scouring the muddy fields for a while, she’d just decided she might be in the clear when she tripped over a half-eaten foot and nearly face-planted in the mud.

 

Damn. Could have been coyotes or raccoons—or maybe her dad’s new prize boar. In fact, that was pretty damned likely. She passed the flashlight’s beam around the field. Its batteries were fading. She couldn’t help but wonder if the old boar was watching her.

 

She hurried back for the barn and tossed a shovel and an axe in the wheelbarrow. Before she got halfway across the twelve-hundred-square-foot barn, though, Mr. Higgins, stepped inside and even went to all the bother to slide the creaky metal door closed behind him. “Well, well. If it ain’t the one and only Jenny Pickett. How ya doin’, pretty gal?”

 

“I’m busy right now, Mr. Higgins, and I really don’t have time for small talk.”

 

His eyes opened wide. “Jenny Pickett has gone and grown a voice. Ain’t that a kicker?”

 

His scrutiny of her felt heavy as a wet blanket on her shoulders, just as it used to feel when she was younger and he stared at her like he was doing now. His gaze rested somewhere close to her thighs before working upward to her bosom.

 

She felt exposed.

 

She didn’t like it.

 

Leaving the wheelbarrow, Jenny walked to the back of the barn, grabbed an empty bucket, and started to fill it with grain, anything to get his prying, ugly eyes off her.

 

“I’m sure you saw it in the paper,” Mr. Higgins began. “My Bobby went and married himself a pretty girl named Jenny. Ain’t that a coincidence? You remember her. Jenny Rowe. Voted most popular girl in your class. Then she won all sorts of awards in college.”

 

Jenny gritted her teeth. The last thing she wanted was to make a scene at her parents’ house. “I can’t imagine why you would think I would care, other than to thank my lucky stars I didn’t get stuck with Bobby myself,” she told him, unable to stop herself. “Everybody knows about poor Jenny Rowe, and I mean everyone. For years after college, she couldn’t get a job and she had to give massages to men she’d never met just to keep a roof over her head and food on the table. And I’m not talking about foot massages, Mr. Higgins. I’m talking about the kind of massages that include a happy ending. Poor sad Jenny must have been pretty desperate to go and marry big ol’ Bobby.”

 

Jack Higgins’s round, droopy-jowled face paled. “You, you—”

 

“Jesus Christ, Mr. Higgins. Get a clue. Your son weighs at least four hundred pounds and he can’t lift a fork to his mouth without sweating. Does he have a job? A house? How the hell is he going to fuck that new wife of his if he can’t find his penis?”

 

Higgins pointed a fat, stubby finger at her. “You better watch that mouth of yours. Your father is lucky he has dementia because he would not be happy to know what’s become of his only daughter.”

 

Jenny dropped the bag of grain and walked toward Mr. Higgins, grabbing the axe from the wheelbarrow as she passed by. She marched through sawdust and shavings until she stood directly in front of him. Her hands shook as she stared him down, holding the axe in front of her chest, ready to raise the sharpened edge and strike him down if she felt the need.

 

Do it. Do it.

 

Jenny’s voice trembled as she spoke. “You think I don’t remember spending the night with your daughter, Jill, only to have you creep into the bedroom in the middle of the night so you could slide your dirty, filthy hands beneath my shirt and touch me?”

 

His bloated lips hung open. One of his big hands rose to them, then slowly fell to his giant barrel of a stomach. His wiry gray chest hairs curled around the buttons of his plaid shirt like the kind of weedy vines that were impossible to eradicate.

 

“I’m not the only one who knows what you did,” she continued. “Jill knows it, too. Why do you think your daughter moved away before she turned eighteen? She hated you. She was disgusted by her own father. I bet Bobby knows what you did, too. Probably the reason why he eats so much, anything to mask the pain . . . So he just eats and eats and eats.”

 

Mr. Higgins turned away and headed for the exit. His steps were slower than before and his shoulders hung low.

 

If you’re not going to kill him right now, at least add him to the list.

 

No. I’m not going to add him to the list. Sometimes living with the truth is worse than dying. “That’s right,” she called out to Mr. Higgins. “Run along now. And don’t you ever come back here again, or I will call the police and fill out a long-overdue report. I wonder what would happen if word got out? How many little girls in the neighborhood would come forth?” Jenny let the heavy end of the axe drop to her side and used her free hand to rub her chin. “I really do wonder.”

 

Even after Higgins left the barn, the putrid smell of him remained. She tossed the axe back into the wheelbarrow, ignored the deafening clang, and then headed through the barn door back toward the field.

 

She had a body to take care of and pigs to feed.