Chapter Forty-two
Tallahassee, 1998
Sheila’s parents had a habit of sleeping in the buff, so it was easy enough for Sheila to inject Mr. Proops in his right shoulder without having to fool with pajamas. She would rather have injected him in the eyeball, but she was afraid he’d scream if she did that and wake up Mrs. Proops. When she saw the reaction from injecting a dose of succinylcholine into her father she realized he wouldn’t have been able to scream if she had done what she wanted. The needle had woken him up, but other than opening his eyes all he did was flop for a brief moment like a fish that had been reeled out of the water, and then the paralysis took over.
Damn, she thought, on seeing how fast the drug had worked. She moved over to the other side of the bed, and jabbed Mrs. Proops in the cheek with the other hypodermic needle she had brought. As with her father, Mrs. Proops also woke up and flopped for a second before the paralysis froze her.
The room was dark, mostly just in shadows. Mrs. Proops’ eyes were also open, and Sheila wanted her parents to see her, so she turned on her mother’s night table lamp.
“Hi, there,” Sheila said. She kept her voice low even though nobody passing by outside would’ve been able to hear her—assuming anyone would be passing by her parents’ house at two in the morning. “Long time, no see, huh? What’s it been, four years? You’re probably wondering why you can’t move. Simple reason for that. I injected both of you with a drug I stole from the hospital where I work. If I had injected you with a fatal dose, your respiratory system would’ve shut down completely and you’d be dead now, so don’t fret. This paralysis is temporary. From what I’ve read, in a half hour or so you’ll be able to wiggle some of your fingers, and a half hour after that you’ll be able to move around, although sluggishly, like one of those zombies from Night of the Living Dead.”
She walked back to Mr. Proops’ side of the bed, and she lowered her face so that she was staring eyeball to eyeball with him. Her fingers searched out one of his nostrils, and after she had gripped several of his nose hairs, she yanked them out. He lacked the muscle control to wince from the pain, but from the way his eyes jerked in their sockets, there was no doubt that it hurt him. Sheila straightened up.
“I did that for my benefit,” she said. “From what I’ve read about this drug, it’s not an anesthetic, so it won’t numb any pain; in fact, it actually makes you feel more uncomfortable, more distressed. I wanted to see that for myself, and dear father, the reaction I saw in your eyes told me everything I wanted to know. Anyway, it’s a relief to know that you’re going to be feeling everything that will be happening.”
She had brought a large paper bag with her, and she dumped the contents onto the bed. Four scented candles, a bottle of massage oil, and several copies of the type of newspapers that you get from adult bookstores, the ones that advertise services and products. Sheila placed two candles on each night table and lit them. With that done, she rolled Mr. Proops toward Mrs. Proops. It wasn’t easy rolling all that dead weight, and she had to flip him over three times before she had him lying partway on top of Mrs. Proops, and then she had to yank and pull on him before she had him positioned the way she wanted him. The exertion left her breathing hard, and she needed to stand for a moment to catch her breath.
“That will do,” she said, nodding to herself as she approved of her handiwork. She took the massage oil and squeezed out a large puddle of it next to her parents, and then squeezed a lot more of it all over them.
“This stuff is highly flammable,” she said. “Not very smart to be using it when you have lit candles around, especially when you spread these obscene adult newspapers all over the bed. Oh well, if people weren’t doing stupid things, like Penelope punching a hammer through a wall to find out why she was hearing a buzzing noise, these types of dumb, tragic accidents would never happen.”
Sheila reached past Mr. Proops’ exposed buttocks so she could grab the adult newspapers and spread them over the bed and on the floor. With that done, she reached for one of the candles on Mrs. Proops’s night table so that she could knock it onto her massage oil-drenched parents, but she stopped herself and instead kneeled so she could look into both her parents’ faces.
“You were right about Penelope. I drilled that hole and encouraged a box of bees that I had bought to go into the wall and build a hive. I was also the one to break open the wall with the hammer. You should’ve seen how petrified with terror Penelope was as those bees crawled over her face. What a dummy she was. Here she was, deathly allergic to bees, and after hearing a buzzing in her wall for three months, it never occurs to her that there might be an active hive in there. Makes you wonder what we might’ve found if we cracked open her skull. A peanut? A raisin? A dog turd?” Sheila leaned in closer, her voice soft as she whispered, “I’ll tell you a secret. Whenever I need to cheer myself up, I think about the way Penelope looked with those bees swarming over her. Sometimes when I need to treat myself to a special memory, I visualize the way she looked after being stung by all those bees; her face and body covered with all those swollen red lumps.”
Even though Mr. and Mrs. Proops were paralyzed, their eyes still darted around in their sockets and Sheila could see the fear in them. She breathed in deeply and smelled the fear that their bodies exuded. It was definitely palpable; a sweet, sickly smell, and she breathed in deeply again, letting that odor fill up her lungs. In a way it was a shame that the drug left them unable to speak. Not because she had any questions she wanted to ask them, because she couldn’t care what either of them would have to say. She wanted them to be able to talk only so that she could hear them beg for their lives. Even more so, she wanted to hear them scream when she set them on fire. The thought of them being unable to scream while being burned alive seemed particularly off-putting to her, as if she were going to be cheated in a way.
“It wasn’t very bright of you to keep that spare key under the fake rock outside,” she said. “Especially if you thought I was devious enough to kill Penelope the way I did. You should’ve been smart enough to realize that I’d also be coming back to kill both of you, although to be fair, it wouldn’t have mattered if you had found a different hiding place. The latch for one of the kitchen windows has been broken for years, so I could’ve gotten in that way, but I do thank you for making it easier for me.”
A thumping noise from outside stopped Sheila. She lifted her head and listened intently and heard the noise again and realized it was either a snake or some other critter hitting the glass patio door. She smiled to herself over letting something like that spook her. She lowered her head again and this time stared directly into Mr. Proops’ eyes. She had no interest in saying another word to her mother. The faster that woman went to hell, the better. But Sheila did have something more that she wanted to tell her father. Because she knew what he had been planning.
“Let me tell you another secret,” she said. “I snuck into the house a month after you kicked me out, and I found the insurance policy, and what do you know, you bought the same accidental death coverage for each of us. I wondered about that for all of five minutes before understanding why. You were planning to kill me for the money, but it would’ve looked funny if I was the only one you bought the coverage for, so you bought it for all of us. I guess I was lucky that I killed Penelope while you were still working up the nerve to kill me in some sort of accident. And guess what? Before joining you tonight in your boudoir, I searched through your desk, and sure enough, you’ve still been maintaining that policy. Still planning to kill me for the money, dear old father? I guess you waited too long.”
The fear exploding in his eyes right then was really something remarkable. Sheila watched it for a moment, and then stood up. Instead of knocking over one of the candles, she adjusted several of the newspaper pages so that when one of the candles burned down a quarter of an inch, it would set a page on fire, which would set more of them on fire, which would shortly after that ignite the bed. Sheila moved to the door, but she found she couldn’t walk away. Instead she had to watch the candle burn down. Once the newspaper caught on fire, she left the room and fled from the house.
She had parked her car (a beat-up Honda Civic that she’d bought with a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it) four blocks away because she didn’t want any of her parents’ neighbors to see or hear it, and she was almost a full block away before she heard the crackling noise that the fire made. She looked over her shoulder and saw the blaze. The house had been a tinderbox and it had gone up fast. She wished again that her parents had been capable of screaming. It would’ve been so nice if she could’ve heard them scream.