Evergreen (a suspenseful murder mystery) Page 8
“I’m on your side buddy.” Aidan sounded hurt.
“Don’t listen to him,” Mary jumped in with her motherly eyes.
“And what, I should listen to you instead? Why would I do that?”
“I’m your mother.”
“She's a murderer Patrick,” Aidan said. “She killed my son. Don’t forget that.”
“You killed my husband,” Mary spat, “You killed Murphy.”
“I thought Murphy was behind this.”
“Bollocks,” Mary spat. “You thought your past was catching up with you. You killed Murphy because you thought he would panic. You hated Patrick for not kicking him out; you made up lies about him instead, forced him to live away from the others. You realised what was happening, you had your suspicions I was back. You were tying up loose ends.”
Aidan shrugged, he had no words, no excuses to offer. “He was a weird one anyway,” he said indifferently.
Patrick looked confused, he twisted his face up, arched his eyebrows. “She just accused you of killing my father,” he noted. “You didn’t deny it.”
Aidan opened his mouth, closed it again. Then shrugged his shoulders.
“You really did kill him, didn’t you?”
“It was a lot of money--”
“You bastard,” Patrick snapped.
“I stood by you,” Aidan said in defence. “I helped you all these years.”
Patrick shook his head in disbelief. Aidan didn’t have a look of pity or shame on his face, he looked impatient, annoyed. He turned the gun to Seamus. “What about you?” he asked. “What’s your part in this?”
Seamus gulped, looked from Mary to Patrick and then back again.
“You’re with her?” Patrick pushed.
“I was her nurse, in hospital,” Seamus said, looking at Mary as if for guidance.
“Hospital?”
“Psychiatric hospital,” he explained. “Your mother didn’t belong there,” he was quick to add. “But grief and depression sent her there. We became friends. I moved here to keep an eye on you, to let her know how you were getting on. I told her about Evergreen, about you. She told me about everything that’d happened to her.” He looked back at Mary, Patrick sensed more than friendship behind their smiles.
“You helped her kill those people?” Patrick wanted to know.
He nodded, the shame had gone. “They destroyed her life,” he said. “They got what they deserved.”
“What about Susie?’ Patrick demanded. “You put her on display, right outside my fucking door.”
His mother sighed, looked genuinely ashamed. “I didn’t know, and it wasn’t about you anyway. I’m sorry.”
Patrick stared at the three psychotic faces in front of him, passing the barrel of the rifle over each. He didn’t know what to do. The noises above increased. The fire was tearing through the building, destroying everything in its path. There were no flames in the basement but the heat generated from the rest of the building turned the windowless room into an oven.
“You’ve been living here?” Patrick asked, feeling a glob of sweat run from his hairline, down his forehead and into his eyes. He blinked it away, ran his sleeve over his forehead, keeping the gun aimed at the trio.
“We love each other,” Seamus said with a nod. The words made Patrick cringe, not because she was his mother or he was his friend, but because they were spoken with such a cold naivety. Seamus had been roped in to help Mary because she had charmed him, whatever he thought he felt for her, Patrick doubted she felt the same.
“Is that true?” he asked his mother. She nodded, but he knew she was lying.
“Did he help you escape from this hospital?”
She nodded again.
“They’re both insane,” Aidan said, confirming Patrick's thoughts. “I’m your friend, you can’t listen to them over me. Come on, let’s get out of here before we cook.” He stepped forward confidently, holding up his arm to wrap it around Patrick’s shoulders or tap him lightly on the arm. The heat messed with Patrick's reactions, he saw his movements but didn’t do anything about them. Before he could twitch in defence Aidan’s gentle gesture turned into an assault, he whipped his fist across Patrick’s face, sending him and the gun sprawling to the floor.
The gun went off on impact, another deafening roar in the hot and humid room. The bullet punctured Seamus’s stomach, slicing flesh and muscle, piercing organs, before lodging in his spine. He grasped desperately at the wound and dropped to his knees.
Patrick hit the floor hard, forced through the heat and the pain to clamber to his feet again before a swift kick from his former friend sent him back down.
Mary moved to help her lover but the shot had finished him, cutting clean through his vital organs with the deathly precision of a feckless surgeon. He gave her one last smile, offered an open mouthed expression of his love, coughed a spittle of blood over her face and then died in her arms.
Through the haze of his own agony, the blur of the heat, Patrick saw the grief on his mother’s face. He felt for her, despite her absence over the years, despite what she had become, he felt a knife of pity strike his heart as he saw the pain in her eyes. She may have not loved Seamus, she may be a cold, calculated killer, but she lost another piece of her soul as she watched -- helplessly -- another lover die before her eyes.
Aidan retrieved the gun, aimed it at Mary’s head. Patrick could sense Aidan hovering near his feet, could see him as a blur in his periphery as he watched his mother stare helplessly up at him. He tried to kick out, to stop him from pulling the trigger. He managed to catch him on the shin, felt the satisfying thump of toecap against bone, but the big man barely flinched, didn’t even acknowledge him.
Aidan glared at Mary, still holding her dead lover in her hands. “You killed my son,” he said. “The one person I loved. I killed your husband and…” he shrugged, looking at Seamus. “Whatever that freak meant to you. That’s two, and soon I’ll kill you, but first,” he nodded to Patrick. “I’ll make it three. I think that’s a win for me, don’t you?”
He turned the gun on Patrick, waited for him to pry himself from the ground and look into his eyes. He had helped him through the years, had enjoyed his friendship, but he couldn't afford to keep him alive now.
He offered him some last words before he wrapped his finger around the trigger, “Sorry it had to come to this.” He lowered his head to the sights of the gun, for a clean, close range shot. Patrick closed his eyes, waited for death, when he opened them, expecting to see his own demise, he saw a look of terror on Aidan’s face; saw a trickle of blood run down his mouth; saw his finger release from the trigger, the gun slip from his hands.
He staggered forward, Patrick shifted out of the way, left out a dangling foot for Aidan to trip over. When the big man fell he saw the knife imbedded in his back, the blade deep inside his flesh, inside his heart.
He turned to see his mother smiling down at him, offering her hand. The grief on her face had gone, as had the anger -- the twisted rage. She looked like his mother again, the face he remembered from his youth; the face of the woman who kissed him goodnight, soothed his wounds and played down his nightmares.
“Come on love,” she said warmly. “Let’s get out of here.”
20
Evergreen was gone, burned to the ground. The houses, the pub, everything that had once made up the beautiful community was now blackened and charred. The people that hadn’t fled or been murdered by the hands of one of its former members, were littered outside the burnt pub; their bodies stacked up like soldiers at the Somme.
The Aherns had scattered at the sound of the sirens, but the police were nowhere to be seen. The sirens had been for somewhere else, some other disaster in the sleep of morning.
The sun was waiting to rise, to pop up above the horizon and scream its light onto the day. For now the landscape was pitch black, imbued with thick smoke and the stench of burnt flesh and bonfires.
Mary and Patrick, the last of the Ev
ergreen community, clambered out of the burning pub in time to watch its last embers flare and fade.
Patrick looked at his mother, so fragile, so friendly. She was short yet protective, her arm around his back felt so warming, so right. He had grown up without her and he missed her. Aidan had helped, but he needed a mother figure.
“She turned to him when she caught him staring. “I’m sorry son,” she said eventually.
“For what?”
“For dragging you into this. Those people got what they deserved, but I should have found a way of keeping you safe.”
He nodded and turned away, back to the fire. After a few moments of contemplation he turned back to her and their eyes met again. “I’m sorry as well,” he said.
“For what?”
“For Seamus.”
She shrugged, “That’s okay.”
“You loved him?”
She rolled her head this way and that, a so-so expression. “He was a good man,” she conceded.
Patrick nodded. “I’m sure he’s in a better place, and you can always find someone else.”
She nodded, smiled widely at her son and then held him tighter as they watched the embers of Evergreen fade to dust.
Thank you for reading Evergreen.
If you enjoyed the book you may be interested in these other books by the same author:
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Forever After
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Forever After follows Michael Holland, a grim reaper in a grim town. An embittered and melancholic man who struggles to grasp the purpose of his own existence, or lack thereof. He is a minuscule cog in a monumental machine and knows less of his role than those surrounding him -- from his boss, the mighty Angel of Death, to his friend and flatmate Chip: a grubby midget tooth fairy with an addiction to pot and procrastination.
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The opening novel to the Forever After series. The follow-up novella “Affliction” is also available for Amazon Kindle.