Kevin O'Brien - Disturbed

He couldn’t take his eyes off the Dennehy place. He already knew the entrances: front, through the garage, and a sliding glass door into the family room. A window by their breakfast table looked like the best way in. But he might end up just knocking on the front door, too. That was why he had all the different costumes in his secret room at home. Those outfits — deliveryman, cable man, paramedic — they opened doors for him. That had been how he’d gotten inside two of his homes.

The Dennehy house was perfect. There was a widow, an older boy in high school, and a little girl. Their house was a bit different from the one on Rochelle Lane — the one belonging to his widowed aunt. But it was on a cul-de-sac, and the ages of the Dennehy children were close to those of his cousins.

When he was eight, he had to stay with them at their house on Rochelle Lane in Ballard. His mother, who never married, used to dump him there for weeks at a time while she went to chase after some guy. He became the whipping boy for the family. His older cousin used to make him strip naked, and then he’d beat him up. The bratty kid sister told lies about him that would send his monster of an aunt into a tirade. As punishment, she’d lock him in a small, dark closet on the second floor — sometimes for as long as six or eight hours. He was always so grateful for the light. But that was one of the old bitch’s bugaboos — when someone left a light on in a room. His cousins always blamed him whenever it happened, and he’d be locked in that upstairs closet again.

Every time his mother picked him up, he’d beg her not to send him back to live with his cousins. She told him that if he behaved better, he wouldn’t get punished. She always drove him back there whenever some new man came into her life. He remembered dreading the sight of that NO OUTLET sign at the end of their block.

Funny thing about time; it seemed those visits to his cousins went on for weeks at a time over a period of two or three years. But it was all within a year. He remembered having his ninth birthday with Warren, the stoner guy who eventually moved in with his mother. He wasn’t sent to stay with his cousins again after Warren came into the picture.

In fact, he didn’t set foot inside the Rochelle Lane house again — not until ten months ago, when he returned to Seattle after some jail time in St. Louis. He’d moved around a lot with his mother, and later with his mother and Warren. And he’d lived many places after he went out on his own at age seventeen. But the place that most seemed like his home had been his cousins’ split-level at the end of that cul-de-sac. As much as he’d hated that place, he felt as if he’d grown up there.

Last February, he wanted to see it again. From the outside, the place hadn’t changed much in twenty years. But other things were different. His bitch of an aunt had died of cancer in 2004. His older cousin, the sexual bully, had been killed in a car accident at age nineteen. He never found out what happened to his bratty younger cousin.

He stopped by the house on a Wednesday afternoon, when the winter sun was just starting to set. He had his switchblade with him. He carried it all the time. He really hadn’t planned on using it that afternoon. He knocked on the door, and someone called out from the other side: “Who is it?”

“You don’t know me, but I grew up in this house,” he answered. “I lived here for three years with my aunt and my two cousins.”

The door opened a crack — as far as the chain lock allowed. Through the chink, a handsome woman in her late sixties stared out at him. She had close-cropped silver hair with bangs and wore a lavender tracksuit.

“Sorry if I scared you,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been away from Seattle for several years, and thought I’d take a sentimental journey. My cousins were the Coulters. I don’t suppose you bought the house from them.”

Eying him warily, she shook her head.

“Does the bathroom in the lower level still have those pink hexagon tiles?” he asked. “And is there still an old hand-crank pencil sharpener mounted on the wall as you walk into the furnace room? I always thought that was a strange place for a pencil sharpener.”

She broke into a grin. “The tiles and the pencil sharpener are both still there.”

He chuckled. “That’s good to know. Well, thanks for your time. .” He turned as if he were going to leave. He heard the chain lock rattling.

“Listen,” she said. “Would you like to come in?”

He swiveled around and smiled at her. She had the door open now. “You sure it’s not too much trouble?” he asked sheepishly.

“No trouble at all,” she replied, opening the door wider. “You’ll have to excuse the way the place looks. I wasn’t expecting company. . ”

The newspaper said her name was Irene Haskel, and she was seventy-four, a widow with two children and five grandchildren. He’d thought she was younger than that. In fact, he’d figured her to be about sixty-five, the same as his aunt would have been — had she lived.

She let him look at the upper level, and he stood outside that closet beside the bathroom. There had been a laundry hamper in there, and shelves full of sheets and towels that kept him from standing up all the way. His aunt had had another shelf with medicines, ointments, enema bottles, and a smelly old heating pad. The whole closet had smelled like that heating pad.

He noticed the bolt lock still on the outside of that door. He hadn’t realized how flimsy it was until that moment.

Standing beside that woman who could have been his late aunt and stepping inside that house again brought back so much rage. He kept telling himself that she was a nice enough lady. He was still telling himself that as he grabbed her by the hair.

The Seattle Times reported that Irene Haskel had received thirty-eight stab wounds. Funny, he counted a lot — usually the seconds in order to time people and determine how long they took to do things. But he hadn’t counted how many times he’d stabbed that woman with his switchblade. In fact, he barely remembered shoving her inside that tiny closet.

What he remembered most was how powerful he felt afterward. He turned on practically every light in her house, and as he drove away, he stole the NO OUTLET sign from the end of the block.

The sense of vindication from the experience was so intoxicating that he had to do it again and again. He’d made it into a ritual now, refining every step a little more each time. The killing had almost become secondary now. The best rush was watching his victims tying each other up while he promised no one would get hurt. It gave him all the power and control. He was in charge.

Some ignorant shrink speculated in the newspaper about how conflicted he was. The analyst said he wanted to be discovered, so he turned on all the lights in the house. At the same time, he was ashamed, so he hid the bodies in closets. Stupid.

There was no conflict. He knew exactly what he was doing and how it made him feel. It made him feel exhilarated.

He slowed down as he walked past the Dennehy house again. He could see someone in one of the front windows. It was the teenage boy.

When the time came, he would save him for last.

Exactly one week after Chris and Erin had buried their mother they were sitting in the front pew at the funeral mass for their dad.

Molly was in the same pew, but she might as well have been alone. Chris had asked Elvis to sit with him. Erin wanted nothing to do with her and clung to her Aunt Trish. Molly was the fifth wheel, seated on the aisle with Elvis at her side.

One good thing about being on the aisle — at least it was easier for her to make a hasty exit when she felt sick, even with the walk of shame down the aisle in front of everyone. Halfway through the service, she’d had to go get some fresh air. Rachel, several pews back, walked her outside, and she gave her a peppermint from her purse. It seemed to help — for a while anyway.