Page 149 of Finding Our Reality

For the good-looking young women, he exchanged prescriptions for sex. A hand job yielded a refill script for a certain number of pills. A blowjob? Even more. And sex? Even more. If the girls didn’t comply, then they wouldn’t get anything. It was then they had to fall into the ranks with the men… and the women Phillip deemed too ugly or too old or too undesirable for sex.

And how did those undesirables find dealer locations?

Kristie.

Her job was to pinpoint the thirsty and lead them to the fountain.

And one of those fountains was the gas station across from Harlan’s. The fountain my brother swam in every single day. After I turned him and Trey in for drug distribution, Phillip shifted gears. He still needed businesses with lots of foot traffic and lots of cash coming in and out. He used a bakery in one location and a cigarette and tobacco store in another location.

You would think he would have trouble keeping up with the demand, but he didn’t. Come to find out, he wasn’t acting alone. He was working with four different pharmacies in the area. One of them was his legit business partner—the same pharmacist Lulu knew the whole time she was growing up, the same pharmacist who filled her bubble-gum flavored amoxicillin when she had strep throat, the same pharmacist located in the medical building with her father.

Sometimes Phillip would write prescriptions for fake patients. Sometimes he would write scripts for real patients—who never even knew about them. The pharmacists wouldn’t run it through insurance, they would issue the scripts asa cash payment. Other times, he would write real scripts for real patients who actually thought they were getting the pain medicine they needed. In reality, the pharmacists were switching the pills with over-the-counter meds and pocketing the narcotic.

This was all going on when Carrie injured herself. She trusted Phillip. Not only was he her doctor, but he was her family friend. He prescribed too much. It didn’t take long for her to get hooked. When she turned down his sexual advances, he wasn’t happy. Apparently, he always had an unhealthy fascination with Carrie. If he couldn’t take Carrie’s body, he could at least take her money. Or her parents’ money, I should say.

Kristie said she tried to keep Carrie ‘safe’ at first. She said she shared her own stash with Carrie. When that didn’t work, she sent her to some of the low-level pushers on campus—fraternity guys. That didn’t work because Carrie got caught by Caleb. Finally, Kristie led her to my brother and Trey. Her habit grew quickly, and she started pushing, trying to inflate her cache of spending money so Lulu wouldn’t notice. It was Carrie, after all, who was trying to teach her little sister how to balance the checkbook and monitor credit card statements.

According to Kristie, it was just happenstance that Carrie was passed out at Trey’s house the night she and Phillip showed up to make a delivery. It was that night that he decided to take what he always wanted—Carrie. Kristie said neither him nor Trey even noticed when she picked up Christina’s camera and took the pictures. She took the memory card with her that night. In the throes of a growing addiction herself, she was afraid to tell anyone. She printed the pictures from her home computer and anonymously left them and the memory card for Carrie.

When Carrie went missing, she asked Phillip about it. He told her to never speak about Carrie again, never ask any questions. And she didn’t. She tried to live with the guilt, drowning hersorrows in booze and more pills, wrecking her already ruined life.

Kristie was fucked up from day one. Phillip started giving her pills when she was just sixteen. By nineteen, she was regularly giving her own dad blowjobs for The Holy Trinity concoction.

She says they never had actual intercourse, though.

I don’t know how many of us believe that.

The hardest part for all of us was finding out exactly what happened to Carrie.

From what we gather, she took a pregnancy test after receiving the photographs. She went to Phillip, telling him that he had to pay for her to go to rehab because her parents would disown her when she told them she was pregnant.

Carrie was perceptive. And she was right. Just look what they did to Lulu.

When Phillip realized that she wanted to keep the child, he snapped. They were standing in his kitchen and he stabbed her with a bread knife in the neck. He called it a crime of passion. Tried to say he was temporarily insane. Fortunately, no one believed him.

He wrapped her body in plastic, loaded her into the back of one of his many cars, and drove her to Trey’s mobile home. They took her out into the woods and buried her. He then had Trey drive her SUV out to the place where it was abandoned, deliberately trying to draw attention away from both Phillip’s part of town and Trey’s part of town.

When we discovered that Phillip still owned the same car, we couldn’t believe it. And when traces of Carrie’s blood were found underneath the carpet in the trunk, wereallycouldn’t believe it.

The day we searched the woods behind Trey’s old, burned-down trailer was one of the worst days of my life. But it was also one of the best days. Despite her bitching and moaning, we refused to let Lulu go. The entire family gathered with her at ourhouse. They kept her company as she waited for the news from me and Marcum.

That night, when we drove up to the house, I found everyone sitting by the firepit. At Lulu’s request, Holt and Ridge soaked wood in copper chloride, making a blue-flamed fire. The entire pond was covered in floating water lanterns. More lanterns than I’ve ever seen in my entire life. More lanterns than her birthday and prom combined.

When we told everyone that Carrie’s body had been found, it was like a collective weight was lifted from everyone’s shoulders. There were tears, but there was also laughter. Joy. Fondness.

Peace.

Carrie and her child could finally have peace. They could finally get the justice they deserved.

The remains were cremated, and we scattered them at the creek, among the blooming wildflowers.

Reality isn’t alone anymore. Her aunt and cousin are with her.

All three of their names are etched on the stone memorial we built. Lulu couldn’t stand the thought of just putting the word “Baby” on the memorial for her niece or nephew. She’d been tossing and turning, thinking about what to do for days when Laura crawled into bed with us one morning after spending the night.

“Ask me,” she said.

Lulu wrapped her arms around Laura. “Tell me something. Something no one else knows.”

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