Patterson was livid. He paced inside his motel room, trying not to feel like a caged animal. However, that was exactly what he felt like. He’d given the note to the hotel clerk, but for some reason, Aislinn hadn’t followed up on his tip. There’d been no sign of activity at either of his sisters’ homes.
They were the last of the older generation; Nina, Gertrude, and himself. The vanguards of a dying age. He had thought long and hard for the past week about it. Nina was dying of cancer. Gertrude was fit as a fiddle, albeit insane. He was also in prime shape. The difference was that only Gertrude knew about him.
And she was being her usual self; bitchy, whiny, and controlling. The entire family was locked in a strangle-hold because of her. Terrified of Joseph, his son, who had been raised by the lunatic after his disappearing act, because the man was clearly as insane as Gertrude.
This made him smile. He judged Gertrude and Joseph insane, but not himself. He thought it was because he controlled himself better. His rage was kept in check most of the time, despite having every reason on the planet to kill his bitch sister who was the keeper of skeletons.
He firmly believed there were things the younger generations didn’t need to know. Things that would scare them, like his father’s habit of burying farmhands instead of paying them. Or the fact that his mother had been a prostitute during The Great Depression, with the consent of her killer husband. Nor did they need to know that the farmhands weren’t all buried in one piece. The Great Depression had been hard on the family, it had been cheaper to kill the livestock than take care of them, but this meant that food was often scarce and the farmhands had helped supplement their diets.
They didn’t need to know that after The Great Depression ended, his brother Virgil had been killed by their father. His father consider Virgil’s death a mercy killing. Virgil had gotten too accustomed to eating the flesh of his fellow humans. They didn’t need to know that Bernard, Fritz, and he had joined the military to get away from their parents and their habits.
The final secret, was that Nina had gotten pregnant at the outbreak of war, by a man joining the service. The family had locked her away and when she gave birth, they let her back out, but never without an escort. As for the child, he was positive his father had killed it, too ashamed to let anyone know that Nina had given birth out of wedlock. Luckily for the soldier who got her pregnant, he died overseas. Their father had given strict orders to all the boys that when he returned, they were to kill him.
The secret of the Clachans wasn’t that they created serial killers, it was that they hadn’t created more than a handful. Gertrude had raised her son to be one. Nina had never tried to have another child, fearing for its safety. Most of the rest had been devoted parents, lavishing their children in order to break the cycle of abuse. Patterson had tried and failed. When his failure had become obvious the day of Lila’s death, he left, hoping to keep them from growing up to be the monster that he was.
Nyleena had, fighting against those that terrorized the country. Eric had not, but a man could only be pushed so far. Aislinn was still a question mark. His letters to her were meant to scare her, push her away from the lifestyle and madness that claimed so many lives. He hadn’t counted on her being cut from the same insane material as him.
After realizing that it wouldn’t work, he’d considered stopping. But it was the only contact he could have with any of his grandchildren and it served a purpose, because Gertrude thought he was trying to drive the girl crazy. There was more to it than that though, he could relive his kills to her, like a grandfather telling his granddaughter a bedtime story, and it helped suppress the urge to kill. Not all the time, but most of it. He enjoyed the act of taking a life, watching their blood weep from them as their eyes glazed over, but his kills were directed at people that had wronged him and his family. Or people like August.
He wrote a second note to Aislinn and dropped it off at the hotel. It was exactly the same as the first. It was time to go follow Gertrude.
Patterson sat in his car and watched the people come and go from the store. Her car had pulled in over an hour ago and she had yet to come out. As he waited, he thought of Nina. His beautiful younger sister with no family of her own, supported by the family trust because everyone thought of her as a leper. Ruled by Gertrude’s madness and iron-fist. Poor abused Nina, always suffering for the sake of someone else. It had been her that had found the body of Lila, sparing his children from the task. It had been her that had arranged for the children to be taken in by anyone but Gertrude. Unfortunately, Joseph had been a problem child and he’d been caught molesting a cousin. He would have been shipped off to reform school, but Nina stepped in and made sure that Joseph went to live with another relative. It had been Gertrude, but Nina had done her best.
She was the closest thing to a saint the Clachan family would ever have. For this, Patterson believed she had suffered long enough. If Gertrude was captured by Aislinn and the Marshals, he’d kill Nina so that she wouldn’t have to deal with the fall out.
Joseph was also on the list of those that Patterson considered a waste. His own son was a child predator. He might not have been caught as an adult, but that didn’t mean those urges had gone away. Patterson understood all too well that the urges never went away.
In his youth, during war, Patterson had been impulsive in his kills. German soldiers were his favorite targets, inflicting horrific wounds upon them and watching them die. However, when German soldiers were in short supply, the general population was good enough. Once home, the urges hadn’t gone away, but he’d suppressed them, reliving moments from the small tokens he’d taken as trophies.
His murderous rages had been contained, every couple of years, he’d take a victim, but he’d always been very careful not to expose his family to it. Until that day with Lila. He switched his preferred victims that day, he’d been symbolically killing his father over and over. He was smart enough to know that. After the incident with Lila, he’d started symbolically killing Gertrude. After the death of his son and granddaughter, he’d just started killing for revenge. He didn’t care about the reason, he cared about the kill.
Gertrude came out of the store. Patterson jumped out of his car, determined to get the whereabouts of her deranged son. For an old, fat woman, she moved fast and he looked suspicious chasing after her. He slunk back to his car and got behind the wheel.
As they pulled out into traffic, Patterson got too far behind. He could see her car, but wasn’t close enough to make the light. She drove further away. He slammed his hand against the steering wheel. The sting wasn’t enough to distract him from his irritation. This was the second time he’d lost her. She hadn’t gone straight home either time. The light turned green and Patterson made the same turn she did. By the third light, her car was completely gone.
He continued travelling east, but the city gave way to more rural areas. He drove down the road all the way to Fulton. When he reached Fulton, he turned around and drove back down WW, hoping to see her car. He didn’t.
There was a Casey’s Convenience Store at the entrance to a suburb. He turned into their parking lot and got out. He stretched and went inside, grabbing a bottle of tea and a slice of pizza. He’d had an epiphany while driving down the rural highway.
Food and drink in hand, he got back on the road and headed east again. This time, he flipped on his blinker and turned onto a property that was deserted. He’d been here once before. He scanned the area. The house was abandoned. It appeared to be in the process of falling to pieces. This wasn’t uncommon on farms in the area, one house became abandoned as the family upgraded. However, he didn’t see another house, only a field with the mangled stalks of last year’s harvest. Someone was obviously farming the land.
He knocked on the front door and got no answer. He tried the knob, but it held fast. Patterson walked around to the back door. It was also locked, but the knob jiggled in his hand. With a little effort, the lock gave and Patterson entered the house. It had been a while since he had been inside.
Everything had been cleaned up and cleaned out. A few pieces of rotting furniture and the detritus of animals was all that remained. He stared at the kitchen floor. He’d nicked several of Tennyson Unger’s veins in this room before holding him down with his boot and breaking his legs, ensuring he couldn’t walk. Then he’d left him for the mongrel dog that Tennyson had loved to abuse.
Patterson stepped out of the kitchen. A quick search of the house revealed that no one was living there or had lived there in a long time. He imagined the Blake family had sold it as quickly as possible after Unger’s death. They hadn’t been a close family.
Outside, he surveyed the tree line. There were a few buildings set behind them. Tractor tires had used the road in the years since Tennyson’s death, leaving deep ruts. There wasn’t a house back there and there weren’t any cars. The barn and shed had been there when Unger had died. A newer metal building had been erected, but he could see a large garage door set on the side of it from where he was. Whoever had bought the land was using it as best they could. One day, they’d probably tear down the house.
Another wasted day.