Page 89 of Eldritch

How do you know, idiot? You didn’t get it through your head right away with Taggert, did you?

Something must have shown on her face. He winced. “Damn, that was...I take it that sounded over-the-top, right?”

“It took me by surprise, that’s all.”

“Look, no pressure whatsoever. It’s just an offer. It’s practical for safety.”

She took a few moments, while drying a pan, before she said, “In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve got trust issues where men are concerned.”

She stopped drying the pan and looked at him, half expecting to see something in his eyes that would clue her in that she’d screwed up.

“Want to sit down and talk about it?” he asked.

“Sure.”

They left the kitchen and took up the same seats in the living room as before.

She hesitated. “There’s a lot to unpack.”

“Wherever you want to start.”

She gave him a deeper dive into what her father had done all those years ago. “He was always super critical of me. I couldn’t do anything right. He didn’t beat me, but he lacked compassion. He didn’t give a shit whether I was happy or sad. I had to look and sound like the perfect kid every day. There were times we’d have friends over...my parents adult friends...and after they left, he’d give me a full list of everything I’d done wrong and how I should’ve acted. I’d ask him how I was supposed to act and take notes. I’d write it all down. He’d examine my notes and approve it and tell me to memorize it. I would, and the next time he’d have the friends over I’d do just as he’d told me to do. Hours before the friends came over, I’d study the notes. Over and over. At the end of the evening, my father would come to my room and tell me how I’d screwed everything up again, and that people were thinking I was an idiot. He’d call me a simpleton. That was a fragment of the things he did from the time I was a little kid.”

Raw sadness and anger filled his face. “God, that’s horrible. Where was your mother in all of this?”

“She was under his thumb, too. When he took the long-haul trucker job, we were ecstatic. I resented that she didn’t stand up for me most of the time. She learned it from her parents…I saw her mother berated by her father for ridiculous things, too.”

She explained what had happened the day the police had shown up at their door and asking to speak with Sybil’s mother. The cops had informed her, with kindness and obvious discomfort, that Sybil's father had murdered at least fifteen women during the time he’d been a trucker. They suspected he could’ve murdered another five, but they couldn’t prove it. They’d been building a case for a year and a half.

Doug’s military barring sagged a little as a cloud came over his eyes. “I can only imagine how horrible it was for you. And for the families of the victims.” He shook his head. “I remember reading that they proved the fifteen through DNA.”

A weight lifted off her shoulders. She’d known that Doug had heard about most of this from what he’d said before, but his understanding and sympathy eased something that had stayed dormant all these years.

She sat forward on the couch and clasped her hands between her knees. “So you can understand why I don’t talk about this in depth very much.”

“But it didn’t stop there, did it?”

The burn of all the memories ached to the core. “So many people in high school and college thought I would turn out like my father. They didn’t bother to get acquainted with me. They assumed.”

He scrubbed one hand over his chin. “Jesus.”

Remembering what she’d experienced made her eyes tear up, but she pushed it to the back of her mind. “It’s been a lot of years since then. When I changed my last name to my mother’s maiden name, that helped. People forgot about what happened.”

Sympathy flooded his expression. “It’s awful that you needed to.”

“I have a handle on it now. Most people don’t know about it unless they do something like a background check.”

He grimaced. “Now I’m feeling like shit for doing that.”

“No, please don’t. You were helping Clarice. You were looking out for her.”

“Do your coworkers know?”

“Yep.” She gave him a sardonic smile. “I told them when I interviewed them. I figured if I liked them and wanted to hire them, and if they still wanted the job, then they were all right.” She smiled. “My mother thought it was a crazy idea to tell them everything.”

“How is your mother?”

She winced. “Well, something happened the other night. She called me about my father.”

---