It's been a long time since I left off this story, so to refresh memories and to introduce the tale to new readers, I am including a brief excerpt from the prologue, then a bit from another chapter to show some of the dialogue... after that will be the last part of the previous chapter. I will use different coloured text to make it easy to spot the cut-offs...however, each of them represents only a small part of that chapter.

Prologue excerpt -

It’s been said that when a certain place sees enough blood spilled, the earth develops a taste for it.

Our land bordered the Choctaw Indian reservation.  Never, in the hundred-year history of our family’s ownership had anything but peace reigned in our gentle pastures, as far as anyone knew.

It was a different story with our indigenous neighbors.

 The land’s thirst for blood didn’t end at the property line, and it wasn’t until a warm, moonless night in August two years ago that I came to know we’d been fated to suffer as the Choctaw nation had suffered the minute we expanded our use of the land.

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An owl flew across the opening between our house and the stables, its screech echoing across the empty space.  In most Native American cultures, the common barn owl was considered a harbinger of doom, but it was superstitious nonsense as far as I was concerned.   A family had taken up residence in the old silo in spring, and we’d watched them many an evening as they prepared for the night’s hunt, perched on the old rail fence that still surrounded our pasture. 

I put the old truck in park and killed the headlights.  It was close to midnight, and I really didn’t expect Marilyn to be waiting up for me, but it wasn’t like her to leave the yard in complete gloom.  At least one light usually burned on the porch, and we’d recently installed a floodlight next to the barn for security reasons.

The whole place was in darkness so complete it was like I’d dropped into a well.
~~~~~

From the first part of chapter 3 -

“Marilyn, I’m telling you, he’s a bad influence.”

“Dale, I heard you – all I’m saying is you aren’t going to get anywhere ranting and raging at him. He’s a teenager, and he and Mathew have been friends since grade school. It’s not like he doesn’t have other friends, but most of them live in town. You can’t expect him to drop the only friend he has within walking distance.”

“Did you not understand what I’m telling you? They skipped school! George Patterson saw the two of them get off the bus and take off towards the lake before the bell rang.”

“So, what? You never skipped school when you were his age? I seem to remember—“

“That was once, Mare – once! How many times has Scott skipped this year alone?”

I was growing angrier with her than I was at my kid. I didn’t know what had gotten into Marilyn these days, but she was acting like a stranger more and more. Half the time I’d come home from work to find her lazing in front of the TV, or sitting out on the front porch like she didn’t have a care in the world. This was not my wife, the wife who put up preserves every fall, grew her own vegetables; the wife who made Christmas presents for the neighbors instead of buying things, who baked for the church bake sales, and knit the kids mitts, scarves and hats every year.

I didn’t know who she was anymore, and I didn’t like it one bit.

“Jesus Christ, he’s turning into a fucking delinquent, and you’re acting like he’s just some ordinary kid!”

~~~~~
Last few paragraphs of chapter 4 -

If I had known I would no longer have a family, would I have given a damn that Marilyn wanted to watch our new big screen TV; that Scott wanted to skip a class now and then to go fishing; that Abigail wanted to hang out in town once in a while?

Free will versus ‘God will never give us more than we can handle; more than we can bear’-- hell, that’s one ‘gift’ that pretty much excuses anything, isn’t it? Man’s bad choices are to blame. Forget the fact that it isn’t always our own bad choices, but the next guy’s – God is still off the hook. It’s the other guy’s ‘free will’ and his decision to slaughter – man’s screw-up. God’s not to blame.

I’ve always considered myself a pretty decent human being, maybe not so much God-fearing as God-obeying, and I tried to raise my family the same way. Whatever happened to the Almighty seeing into our hearts and having mercy?

Marilyn’s body was discovered in our bed upstairs -- our marital bed had been used for her final humiliation. The murderer had spared Abby the same; our sweet sixteen hadn’t been raped, but she’d died trying to stop her mother from suffering that fate, or at least that’s what the detectives were deducing from her position across the bedroom door’s threshold.

Scott was hung from the rafters in the stables I’d been so worried about replacing. He’d helped me that summer too, not disappearing like I’d thought he would.

The new, six-inch beam held his dead weight perfectly. The hanging had almost been an afterthought; the pooled blood at the front door and the gashes and wounds he’d suffered testified to the fight he’d put up all the way out to the stables.
~~~~~
 
AND NOW...

I awoke soaked in perspiration, my heart pounding, my mouth filled with paste, like I'd been eating glue while I slept. An elephant sat on my chest, but it wasn't a heart attack; at least I didn't think it was a heart attack.

I'd spent the rest of the night and the whole of the next day being interviewed by detectives. They grilled me like I had any idea who could have done this thing, asking the same questions, over and over. Only when I finally lost it and excused myself to vomit all over a patrolman's shoes before I could make it into the downstairs bathroom did the one detective decide they'd cut me some slack.

But I knew they'd be back, and I knew I was undoubtedly on their short list of suspects. Isn't the husband and father always the one first accused when no other explanation exists?

There was no motive, no reasonable explanation as to why some lunatics would walk into a farmhouse and slaughter the inhabitants without taking a thing, without ransacking the place, or even why they would kill two teenagers who obviously couldn't have been much of a threat. Scott, maybe, when they went after Abby and Marilyn, but why the elaborate hanging, dragging him all the way out to the barn--punishment for daring to intervene? He'd been found hanging from the rafters of the same barn we'd worked in all summer, father and son, me so proud of his efforts to please me, finally, after so many disagreements.

But they hadn't killed the dog. I don't know where he came from, because he hadn't greeted me when I got home, but when the first patrol car arrived, lights flashing, Scamp was there to see the officer up to the house.

It looked like a passion killing, like rage. Until the results came back to identify DNA and eliminate me as a suspect, I was it. And that was going to prove no easy task for forensics, since I lived here. This was my home, and my family; my DNA would be all over everything and everyone.

I would have to start wracking my brain for a way to stay out of jail and look for a motive myself. There had to be a way to explain how this could have happened, who would want to do such a thing to us, to me.

I rose from the sweat-soaked, twisted sheets and headed for the half-pint of Jack Daniels I'd almost finished for dinner after the police were through. They'd let me stay in our guest room downstairs, since it seemed no one had been near it, but Detective Garrison had warned me thoroughly not to enter any of the other rooms in the house. They had been taped off with evidence tape, and only the east end of the house was accessible, which included the guest bedroom and bath, the den and my liquor cabinet. I couldn't enter the kitchen I'd only recently renovated for Marilyn, the dining area I hadn't been in for over twenty-four hours, but it didn't matter because I wasn't hungry anyway. I'd drunk myself into a stupor to try and sleep and the headache pounding through my skull now demanded aspirin. I might never eat again.

Back to the bathroom and the medicine cabinet, stumbling. Thank heavens for the water glass Mare always kept on the sink. Mare, my wife, my devoted, beautiful wife, stripped of her flannel nightgown and brutally raped, screaming for her children, for me probably. And Abigail, my sweet, feisty daughter, rushing to her defense only to have her throat slit like her mother's when the animals were done with Marilyn. They had left Abby's body sprawled across the bedroom doorframe like so much inconvenience. Had the pricks stepped over her when they left? Had they even looked at her in her blood-soaked, kitten pajamas?

Rye whiskey with no ice or chaser had served to dull last night's horror, but the images could no longer be held at bay.

I bent and puked into the sink, and sobs rose, wrenched from someplace deep inside that would never, ever be the same.
~~~
to be continued...