Kevin O'Brien - One Last Scream

Karen gasped. She noticed that nearly all the color had drained from the 19-year-old’s face, and sweat beaded on her forehead. But she was smirking. And she had the gun aimed at Karen. Even with a bullet in her gut, and sitting in a puddle of her own blood, Annabelle was still smiling.

At that moment, Karen figured she was as good as dead.

A shadow suddenly passed over them both. Karen glanced back in time to see Amelia in the doorway. Amelia raised the square-edged, short-handled shovel, and brought the flat end of it crashing down on her sister’s head. It made a hollow ping as it cracked against her skull. Annabelle let out a cry, and the gun went off. A spray of dirt exploded from the ground near Karen’s feet.

Annabelle lurched forward and toppled onto the ground. The revolver flew out of her grasp. Stunned, she rolled over on her back. The blanket fell aside, exposing the gaping wound in her stomach, and two blood-soaked dishtowels.

Amelia warily stood over Annabelle, as if her sister were a wounded rabid dog. She kept the shovel in her hands, ready to strike her again if necessary. She was shivering in just her oversized T-shirt and nothing else.

Karen gaped up at her. In the distance, she heard the police sirens.

“I left her alone for a few minutes,” Amelia said, catching her breath. “I thought about killing her, and then suddenly, I started to remember everything. I felt sorry for her. So I went down there again, bringing her a blanket, and she clubbed me in the head with her shoe.”

Sprawled out on the ground in front of them, Annabelle laughed. But then she started to cough, and blood sprayed out of her mouth. She coughed again, and more blood spewed out. Suddenly, she couldn’t seem to get a breath. A look of panic swept over her ashen face. She seemed to be choking on her own blood.

Karen started to get to her feet. But Amelia moved more quickly. She tossed aside the shovel, and hurried to her sister’s side. She held Annabelle’s head in her lap.

Annabelle reached up and touched Amelia’s cheek. Her every gasp was a death rattle.

Amelia gently smoothed back her sister’s hair. “It’s okay, Annie,” she whispered.

Karen watched, and didn’t say a word as Annabelle Schlessinger struggled for her last few breaths. Amelia’s twin listlessly stared up at the starry sky. Then her jaw slowly dropped and one last breath escaped from her mouth.

Amelia kept stroking her hair for another minute. “There now, Annie,” she whispered. “There now….”

The wail of the sirens became louder and louder. The headlights and red strobes illuminated the forest behind the lake house.

Amelia didn’t have any tears in her eyes when she covered her twin sister’s face with the blanket. She finally stood up, and then wandered over to Karen. She wrapped her arms around her and dropped her head on Karen’s shoulder.

“I don’t feel the pain anymore,” she whispered.

Karen opened her eyes as the squad car turned down her street. To her amazement, there were no TV news vans or police cars parked in front of her house, no reporters or onlookers. All was quiet on her block at 6:40 that morning.

Both she and Amelia had nodded off intermittently in the back seat of the patrol car for the last forty-five minutes. This was their fourth ride in the back of a police car since leaving the Lake Wenatchee house so many hours ago.

It had been during that first trip-to the Wenatchee Police Station-that Karen told Amelia about her biological father and mother, and about something Amelia had wanted to know for a long, long time. The cops and the ambulance only used their sirens when other vehicles or pedestrians were around, but their red flashers remained on for the whole trip. “Back when we had our very first session, you mentioned something to me,” Karen said during one of those quiet periods. Amelia clutched her hand. The ambulance, carrying Amelia’s dead twin was in front of them, and the red strobe illuminated the back of the police car. “You mentioned that when some of those other therapists tried to hypnotize you for information about your childhood, what you wanted most of all was to remember the name of that nice neighbor, the one with the playhouse.”

Amelia nodded. “Yes, I still feel that way.”

“His name was Clay Spalding,” Karen said, smiling. “And he was a good man.”

Two policemen from Moses Lake came to the downtown Wenatchee station at around midnight. Karen made certain to set the record straight with them about Clay. She knew Naomi Rankin had always held her head high at work and around town. She’d never been ashamed of her friendship with Clay. And now, people in town would understand why.

A doctor was called in to patch up both Amelia and Karen. Amelia didn’t need stitches in her hand, but the doctor bandaged it up. Karen received an ice pack for the bump forming on her head, where Annabelle had hit her with the blackjack. They both got a dose of Tylenol, too.

Between the two of them, they drank about a gallon of bad coffee in the police station while answering scores of questions over and over again. The Wenatchee station was surrounded by reporters, TV news crews, and spectators. The precinct had become a hub of activity with e-mails, faxes and phone calls coming in and going out to Moses Lake, Salem, Seattle, and Issaquah.

There was a TV on in the officers’ lounge. It was tuned to CNN. They’d made the national news. Karen and Amelia caught a brief clip of George being interviewed. He stood by the West Seattle Police Station’s main entrance. He looked tired and haggard, but still handsome. Off-camera reporters held microphones in front of him. “No, I don’t think I’m a hero or anything,” he said, shaking his head. “My friend, Jessie Shriver, my son, Jody, and my daughter, Stephanie-they’re the real heroes. And I want to thank Jody’s friend Brad Reece for all his help. He was really there for us. And most of all,” George went on, “I want to thank Karen Carlisle. She’s a friend of my dear niece, Amelia Faraday. More than anyone, Karen helped save my family.”

By dawn, Karen heard that Salem police and local FBI, working through the night at the old Schlessinger ranch, had so far excavated seven bodies from shallow graves on the property. They planned to continue digging through the day. They were also reexamining missing-person cases, all young women in the Salem and Moses Lake areas, as well as in Pasco, where Duane Lee Savitt lived until his death in 1993.

Exhausted, yet wired from so much coffee, Karen and Amelia were taken by helicopter to Issaquah. Once they landed, they had another trip in the back of a cop car to Cougar Mountain Wildland Park, where Karen pointed out for the police the path she’d used in her fruitless search for Detective Russ Koehler’s body.

With Karen’s assistance, and in the light of dawn, the local police had better luck than she’d had two nights before. They found Koehler’s picked-over, half-buried corpse in less than an hour.

Karen suggested they check to determine if he’d been shot with the same gun used to kill Shane. She had no doubt that Annabelle had pulled the trigger each time.

Someone had tipped off the press about the Cougar Mountain Park expedition; so the place was swarmed with TV cameras and news vans by the time Karen and Amelia were whisked out of there.

That had been forty-five minutes ago, and Karen had expected more of the same as they approached her house.

“I shouldn’t jinx it by saying this,” she murmured, waking up from her nap in the back seat of the police car. “But I can’t believe there aren’t any reporters here.”

“Well, the newspeople got to sleep sometime, I guess,” replied the cop behind the wheel. “Enjoy the peace and quiet while you can.”