Excerpt 8, Part 3
Passage from my true crime novel, based on an appalling crime that happened in my own immediate family:
She was immovably sure that the monster had returned, fangs wet and shiny and dripping with the blood of the last teenage woman he’d kidnapped, played house with, and killed. She could sense his approach, and their imminent need to decide whether to fight or flee. Inside this moment though, she shoved her son mercilessly behind an actual toilet, squishing him down amid his cries of surprise and confusion, ignoring his protests. She crouched as well, but beside him, holding him down in his crumpled shape, depending on the porcelain toilet to stand between him and his attacker when that time came.
When a set of fingers gripped the rusted metal door handle, she could feel the prickle of deathly suspense in her every bone. This was it. Her final fighting moment had thus arrived.
The massively heavy door swung open, and footsteps marked that someone’d entered in. A young black girl in fact, maybe eighteen or nineteen years of age. Jennifer nearly melted under the release of such a mix of emotion and pent up tension. The girl was fairly trim, wearing ill fitting jeans below a tight red and yellow t-shirt that revealed much of her slightly flabby midsection.
“Um, Mrs. Lancey?” the girl began by way of introduction. “Are you Mrs. Lancey? Ma’am your husband is waiting outside for you and he said to come in and tell you to come out. He said that you’re pregnant and it’s not good for you to be in here so long where he can’t take care of you.”
“Girl! Girl!” Jennifer very nearly shouted back to her in joy and relief, and stood up, releasing her bear grip on Jacob. As she rose, she revealed to the girl a perfectly plump baby belly of eight months’ making. “My girl,” she attempted, before realizing that more words were going to be necessary to quite explain. She took a deep breath, fighting off a choke sensation from all the different sentences competing to be let out first. “Young girl. My name is not Mrs. Lancey. That man is not my husband. His name is David, he is my kidnapper. He took me and my son a long time ago and I have been missing from my family and living in his house as his prisoner, we both have.” She gestured to the terrified little boy, still hiding behind the rusted toilet and timidly peering out, physically quivering.
Within two moments, the girl had dashed out of the bathroom and muffled screams could be heard by Jennifer from inside. She was terribly unsure how to interpret what was currently going on. She imagined the girl, unfit to handle such a revelation, acting rashly and attempting to take on David by herself. She pictured the skinny frame climbing him, claws out and teeth bared. And losing. She pictured her losing that battle with one easy swipe of his paw. Or she imagined the girl, and this scenario was tremendously worse, running scared as far away from this mess as she could. Which wouldn’t necessarily be cause to blame her, but it would be an open invitation to the monster to thrash his way in and reclaim his escaped prize.
Jennifer was jolted out of any imagining though, by the smash of the door against the white plaster wall as it forcefully swung open, revealing in the door frame a burly black man with a modestly small, curly afro. The door was so defiantly heavy, yet he tossed it easily from closed to open like he was batting at a falling feather.
“Mrs. Lancey, have you been kidnapped?” he roughly bellowed in her direction. Then he spied the folded, cowering boy. “Little boy, have you been kidnapped? Mrs. Lancey, have you been kidnapped?” He repeated his questions with an increasing measure of concern and deepening note of agitation. He was her rescuer, fierce and strong. It was clear his intentions were to physically insert himself between the girl, the boy, and the sorry looking bastard outside who stood accused of the crime.
After gentling down into a more approachable form of hero, the bulky weightlifter lowered down as far as he could on his tree trunk legs, and reached out a thick hand to coax the little boy out from behind the toilet, all the while cooing to him that everything was going to be ok. The man paused for a minute before opening the door again to rearrange their order, positioning himself in front of the two victims, so that he would open the door and be the first to encounter whatever was on the other side.
And a massive uproar on the other side it was. In the time that the interaction inside the women’s restroom had taken place, at least a dozen more men had gathered outside, not counting the female students. All appeared to be of college age, or perhaps slightly older. All except two were African American in color, which Jennifer had expected to be the case after her first escape attempt showed her that she was located deep in the heart of a racially homogenous hub. She stood out like a white light bulb, even in the middle of the sun soaked daylight, all white skin and light blonde hair and shamrock eyes. And small frame. The men that had gathered were all particularly footballish in size, excessively beefy and extremely formidable. And she never felt safer, or more protected, or more at home, or more deeply, lovingly protected than here inside this minute.
A light touch came to perch tentatively on her shoulder. “Ma’am?” said the voice of Rose. When Jennifer looked up, Rose’s delicate fingers let go instantly as she pulled her hand back and silently seemed to reprimand it for being so bold. “Ma’am I’m so sorry ma’am.”
Rose was unnaturally timid, and most unusually at a loss for words. “I can’t believe I…” she trailed off, clearly physically unable to further describe the horror she had inflicted on the kidnap victim. Jennifer came into herself, and rose above the clamour of the swelling crowd to step atop her pain and forgive the young girl. Who, she noted with surprise, wasn’t nearly as young as she’d thought after all. She was a college student, obviously in attendance here at whatever campus she now stood beside, at the adjoining bus depot.
“You are totally forgiven,” she said with every gentleness in the world. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t know. You did everything you could to help me and that’s quite alright dear.” Though she was a fair few years younger than the Rose of the family floral shop, she spoke with an elder tone, showing every love to the girl who would have jumped to help in far a different way, had she known that that’s what was required of her. She wrapped her lankily thin arms around her friend then, and quietly returned to the circled crowd of students whence she came.
Everybody seemed to be talking at once, which to her surprise, didn’t overwhelm Jennifer or even Jacob in the least. He could sense too that he was in the presence of protectors. And fierce ones at that. One such protector did step away from the hubbub of activity and pull her aside. He was interested to know a few more specifics and find out what exact kind of situation he and his friends had all just interfered with. Jennifer worded her story as accessibly as possible, choosing to leave out the more gruesome details out of respect for her listeners, while still conveying that the man they now physically held by the arms in their terrific grip was of the devil himself. As she talked, more and more ears perked to the sound of her voice, and a growing hush fell over the continuously gathering crowd, more and more students noticing the commotion and coming over to involve themselves.
“My name is Jennifer St. Joy. I am sixteen years old." She wiped an escaped tear with forceful ferocity, and pointed to the man trapped in place by many black hands. "I was kidnapped a year ago by that man.”