Page 20 of Ghoul

Hazel

Everyone had secrets. Some were better at keeping them buried than others. As humans, it was only natural to confide in others. It helped lessen the claustrophobic feeling of being alone. But some information was too crippling to be unearthed. Some skeletons were too dangerous to ever be resurrected. At times, though, you were left with no other choice than to dig up your own grave and breathe life into the forgotten bones. For me, this was Meghan. Even though I didn’t want to uncover any more of Dad’s past, not knowing if I would be able to handle it, I had to. I owed Meghan that much. She tried to tell me, and I didn’t listen. Now, I was the only person who was able to tell her story regardless of whether I had the strength to do it or not.

It didn’t take them more than twenty-four hours to find a body near our old house in West Virginia, and another week to identify it as Meghan’s. Even though I had seen all of the horrifying things he had done and read all the details in black and white, something within me didn’t fully believe them until they dug up her remains. Her name wasn’t Meghan at all, as Dad made me believe, it was Isabelle Coatney. She had been on the missing person’s report for longer than I cared to accept. She wasn’t from West Virginia or Ohio, as I had assumed. She had been abducted from Pittsburgh.

My insides contorted, and I dropped to the bottom of the shower in Ghoul’s clubhouse. I hadn’t been home for two months. It made me a shit of a granddaughter, especially what all she had done for me, but I couldn’t face Grams. What I had found out about Dad was too much to cope with, even for her. She loved her son more than anything and would blame herself for all the evil he’d done. I wouldn’t let her live with the inevitable guilt she would allow to seep into her bones after hearing about this, so I avoided her. Of course, her being persistent as she was, it was only a matter of time before she broke me down, but it gave me time to think of something to tell her. I didn’t ask for more information than what was given, but the FBI agent told me none of this would ever make it into the news. There were allegedly some pretty large names on the list of offenders involved in child trafficking, not to mention those who had committed much worse crimes. None of it made sense to me, but I didn’t want to understand it anyway. I wanted to forget every bit of it. Every good memory shared with Dad was now overshadowed by what he had done when he thought no one was looking, but they were watching him all along.

Apparently, he had been on the Fed’s radar for the majority of my life. My suspicions about whether or not he was a police officer were partly warranted. He was, in fact, an undercover cop, that part he had not lied about. I guess he eventually got himself too involved in the case he was assigned to, which led him to death, and the FBI taking over the investigation. I could never fathom most of it, but one thing went without question, I would never forgive him. Perhaps it might have been possible to understand if it was drugs or even stealing tons of money that he had gotten himself involved in, then I could find my way back to him. What he had done wasn’t that easy to accept, though. He kidnapped kids who were my age at the time and sold them. I didn’t know if there was enough evidence to prove he was responsible for killing Meghan, but if he didn’t do the deed, he knew who did. Chills rattled through the marrow of my body and settled into my bones. I ran my fingers up and down my upper arms, seeking warmth, but none would ever be found. Not as long as I was who I was.

At times, life forced your hand, dropping a jagged spade from beneath your sleeve. It was at that point you were left with two choices, to move forward into survival or backslide into denial. It was never clear which motion was the correct choice until you were faced with the seclusion of a dead end. Some embraced the solitude, but it was there that others would be consumed by sin. This was my dead end.

I searched for anything good from my past to cling to but didn’t find anything worth grabbing. My immediate thoughts were to reach out to mom, but I hadn’t heard from her in literal years. Neither Grams nor I had her current address or phone number, so even if I did want to get ahold of her, I didn’t know how to go about doing it. The last I’d heard, she was somewhere around Elizabeth City, North Carolina. There was no telling where she was now, and frankly, that was not my number one priority.

“You okay in there, Ginger?” Ghoul’s voice carried through the door and over the running water.

“More or less,” I answered fully aware that if I didn’t, he would bust through the door. No matter how hard I tried to find an explanation of how he acted around me, I couldn’t. He wasn’t at all the horrible monstrosity I had imagined. He was considerate and thoughtful when it came to me, which, I learned, didn’t hold true for much else. The more time I spent with him, the more it became very clear he gave zero fucks about most people’s feelings, but he genuinely seemed to care about mine and my well-being.

The creaking of the door made it obvious what he was doing on the other side, prying it open. “I’m fine,” I said with a roll of my eyes, pulling back the curtain and clutching it in my fisted hand.

“Shit,” he cursed as soon as the door sprung free, and his eyes met mine. “I need to piss. Thought I’d sneak in here, and you’d never notice.” He shrugged, giving my exposed skin a once over before backing out of the bathroom with his hands held upward.

“You’re good. I was getting out anyway,” I announced, keeping the curtain close to the remainder of my body that was not sticking out, and switched the water off. After snagging the towel off the rack and wrapping it around my body, I stepped out and headed in the direction of his room. I felt his gaze on me as I reached his door and peeked over my shoulder to see if I was right. He leaned his head against the wood of the door frame and blew out a breath, momentarily closing his eyes before disappearing into the bathroom and shutting the door behind him.

Even though I had no communication with Grams, I went home to get some clothes when I was certain she wouldn’t be home. Even this many years later, she still stuck to her traditions as much as possible on Thursday evening. Routines brought her comfort, or so I believed. Maybe it was the fact she had control over it.

I needed to find something in my whirlwind of a life that was a constant, and oddly enough, the only thing that came to mind was Ghoul. He’d only disappeared a handful of times since I had been here to “take care of business” as he put it. Even though I had no right to ask, when I did inquire where he had been, he retorted with, “Don’t ask questions you won’t want the answer to.” That was all it took for my questions to cease. In the time I’d spent here, I had learned he was straightforward and answered me, sometimes with things that made me wish I hadn’t asked.

I stretched out on his bed and closed my eyes, enjoying the moment. I had always been one to chase the chaos, and if current events had taught me anything, it was to appreciate the stillness of silence. For it was when the voices trailed off and people disappeared that I could think clearly; definitely an out of sight, out of mind type situation.

---