Gregg Olsen - Fear Collector

“He was smoking pot on my front steps two weeks ago. You should be arresting him. The little creep scares the crap out of me. Other neighbors have complained.”

“What neighbors?” the officer asked.

“Look, I’m not a gossipmonger. I’m a truth teller. I’m not going to give you names of anyone. If they don’t have the balls to tell you when they’re being messed with, then too bad for them.”

“I see,” the officer said, though Jeremy, who was listening from the hallway, doubted anyone could see what his mother said. She was tough. She didn’t suffer any fools. But she didn’t always make sense.

Jeremy was always on edge and Peggy liked it that way.

One time she read him the riot act after he’d set the table with the forks and knives transposed in the place setting.

“Who’s to say I won’t poison you tonight, you little piece of garbage? Maybe you shouldn’t eat. I don’t think I would.”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said.

“Sorry is an excuse for the weak and stupid. You are neither. At least you shouldn’t be. I’m not. Your father certainly wasn’t,” she said. “Stay put.”

She picked up his plate of macaroni and cheese and disappeared into the kitchen.

A moment later she returned, a satisfied look on her face.

“You love me, don’t you?” she asked, setting the plate down.

“Yeah. What did you do with my food?”

“You have to trust me,” she said. “You have to eat it. Whatever happens will be a surprise.”

“Did you put something on my macaroni and cheese?”

She balled up her fist. “What did I tell you about questioning me?”

He looked at his plate, his eyes scanning the pasta for something, he wasn’t sure just what.

“That I never, ever should do that. Question you.”

“Eat your dinner, Jeremy.”

She put a forkful of food in her mouth and grinned. “So delicious. Potato chips on top, just the way you love it.”

He looked at his plate.

“We have nothing if not trust,” she said. It was her game. It was always her game. Later, he would read about people like his mother, those who enjoyed inflicting pain and fear on others.

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Then you are a little bitch and if you don’t eat that special macaroni and cheese, I’ll make you wear my dirty panties to school again. And, this time, I’ll call the school and tell the principal that you are stealing my clothes and that I want them to examine you in the nurse’s office.”

Jeremy’s eyes welled up with tears, but he willed himself to stop the deluge. He put the macaroni in his mouth and swallowed.

“Sometimes, Jeremy, I wonder what will become of you. You’re nothing like your father. In fact, you’re nothing at all.”

After the time Peggy came into his room and made her “love me like Ted” come-on, Jeremy stopped thinking of her as his mother. A mother wouldn’t do that. He vowed never again would he let her come into his room like some kind of pervert freak. He didn’t care if loneliness was her motivator. That was her problem.

Before he climbed into bed at night, Jeremy arranged a trio of empty Dr. Pepper bottles in front of his closed bedroom door. It was the only thing he could think to do. When Peggy swung the door open-drunk or high as she frequently seemed to be-the bottles fell and clattered on the hardwood floor. It was both an alarm and a deterrent. No more “midnight specials” with her son. No, no. No more of the cuddling that she desperately wanted. No more of her pretending that her son was her precious Teddy.

One Saturday afternoon Jeremy went outside with a handsaw and cut down the lilac bush. At the time, his mom was engrossed in a true crime book about mothers who kill their children. She had fanned the book at him as he exited the back door. Everything she did was an implied threat, a promise to be kept. He bundled up the limbs and put them in the trash. Before closing the lid to the garbage can, Jeremy threw up all over the branches. He studied his vomit like it was some kind of a work of art. Masticated particles of a ham sandwich stuck to the cut twigs and heart-shaped leaves of the remains of the lilac bush.

It was the prettiest thing he’d seen in a long, long time.

Peggy Howell took a deep drag on her cigarette and watched her son as he toweled off after showering. She’d removed the bathroom door by then, telling Jeremy that any need for privacy was merely a desire to deceive her. She was not having any of that. Steam curled against the ceiling and he pulled the shower curtain closed. He’d long thought that his mother’s control of him was beyond what others could imagine. He didn’t know for sure, though. Jeremy had no close friends. In his entire life he’d never had a single friend come over to hang out in his room. He stopped asking his mother if he could. After a while there was no reason to ask anymore.

All he had was her.

“You have to man up if you are going to fulfill your destiny,” she said, the smoke coming from her lips like a dragon. Her eyes stayed on his naked body. “You have your father’s lean physique.”

Jeremy tied the towel around his waist. “You talk like a freak, Mom.”

“When your father was your age, he was already taking chances. You just come home from school and watch TV.”

“I don’t have any friends, Mom. I don’t want any friends,” he said, a lie he learned to tell.

She nodded. “Friends can only hurt you, they are deceivers and users.”

“I know,” he said.

Another lie.

“By the time your father was your age, he’d been arrested for burglary, auto theft. Dumb, yes, but he was learning from his mistakes. You have to make mistakes in order to get better. Don’t you understand that?”

“I guess so,” Jeremy said, moving past her toward his bedroom. “But I’m afraid.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. He dropped his towel and started to dress. He hated her just then.

“Good,” she said. “That’s good. Feed on that. Feed on the fear you have, and gather it up for those around you. Fear, you idiot, is absolute power. Use it. Sometimes I give my head a shake and wonder to myself if you are stupid or just weak.”

He nodded. He wasn’t sure how to even answer her half the time. If answering made any difference at all?

“Jeremy, after you’re dressed,” Peggy said, “I want you to massage my feet.”

As the water swirled down the sink, through the strands of hair that collected in a fuzzy, matted circular shape, Peggy Howell thought of the man that she loved above all others. Her life was running through the drain. She’d loved Ted with everything she had. She knew that he didn’t see her as he saw the others. The girls before her. The girls before everything happened.

She traced his history long before crime writers sought to weave a marketable tale of his life story. After high school graduation in 1965, Ted went to a succession of universities. First, he enrolled in the University of Puget Sound, but after only a year he felt it too small, too local. He wanted out of Tacoma, away from his past. He told acquaintances-as by his own admission he had few, if any, real friends-that he wanted more, that he deserved more. In 1966, Ted made good on his grandiose vision for himself and transferred from UPS to the University of Washington in Seattle, ostensibly to study Chinese.

Peggy found that part of Ted’s history so utterly appealing. Chinese? It was such a difficult language. Who but the most brilliant would even think to take on such a demanding course of study? Only Ted. Ted. So ahead of his time, her Ted.

The girls who were Peggy’s rivals were not on anyone’s list of Bundy victims, at least not in the true sense. Ted never spoke of the girls; only one time did he reference them in a letter to Peggy written four months before his execution.