Serial Fiction: Murder Mystery Novel
The Rage & Revenge of Emma Jeanne
Part 1: Hugo Lake’s Last Disappearance
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When our shadow appears, it is within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it’s a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil.
— C.G. Jung
Preface — Hugo Lake’s Last Disappearance
There is no such thing as God, just as there’s no such thing as fate or destiny. No matter what anyone tries to tell you, this is the truth.
God is a construct, just like time and space, and time is only an idea. It’s a concept we use to distract us from the dull monotony of life, like all the other vices and drugs hidden in the bottom drawer of our lies.
I used to think the word God could be replaced by Fate, and that everything that’s ever been [or ever will be] could be accredited to Fate. The world was created [in seven days] by Fate. It is Fate that gave us light and water and the exact combination of molecules we need in the air to breathe. We were born by Fate, and we’ll die because of it. There is no need to be afraid, nor discouraged, for Fate will be with you wherever you go. Life is not random. Karma is real, and bad things don’t happen to good people.
But that’s just not the case. And if you disagree, I suggest you stop reading this story before it causes you too much frustration. However, if you do agree, or if you have an open mind to consider agreeing, or an open mind to know that you’ll never agree but you’re curious to learn why I have such a cynical view of the world, then you should continue. And, while it may not mean much coming from me, I think you’re a true Christian if you do.
Now, where were we? Oh right, God is a lie and time is a trap…
But time feels so real. So real that we think we can measure it, as we measure water. We imagine it swishing around the gears of a clock, keeping the hands ticking forever forward, never slowing to gain ten extra minutes when you’re running late for work, never offering you the opportunity for a few extra words to a loved one who has died.
Time is a constant reminder of the fragility of life. There’s nothing worse than sleeping in a room with a clock that ticks because you will not sleep. You lie upon the cement block your grandparents have passed off as a bed, eyes peeled, cringing with the echo of every second. Eight hours may be a blink in your dreams but it’s 28,800 ticks to insanity when you’re awake.
They’re taunting you. It’s intentional. It must be. An audible reminder that life passes quickly and that, by the time your grandparents were your age, they already had a house and four children so you better get your ass in gear before you die alone.
Just imagine how long time would feel if we didn’t check it all the time. Imagine the lack of stress without urgency. Imagine having nothing to run out of, or around for. Imagine the stillness, the decisions we would make, the new rationale. Our priorities would change. Our disposition would change.
And if intuition was a real thing, that would change too. But like God and time and fate, intuition doesn’t exist either. Or else, it exists only in hindsight, in the aftermath of an event that made a difference in someone’s life.
“I had a strange feeling about it,” we say if we’re still alive to say it, but that’s just bullshit. We had no feeling at all, which is why we chose to walk that particular path on that particular day. There was nothing telling us not to.
But what about the man who hitches a cab the same morning his usual bus flips over on the highway, killing everyone inside? Well, I suppose some of us get lucky. The rest of us don’t.
So, we go about our lives, making decisions and taking risks in hopes that, at the end of the day, we’ll be fortunate enough to wake up and do it all over again. Sounds easy enough. Well, sure it is until time and money get in the way. The obstacles we’ve created. Materialism. Status. Holidays. That’s how things start to get messy.
If intuition were real, Linda would have thought twice as she crept out of her apartment that night. She would have “trusted her gut” as it twisted into a tiny hangman’s knot. And the way the streetlight above her blew out, spontaneously, while she waited for a car to pull up. How the loud “ZAP” startled her. How being startled made her feel like a child stealing a cookie from the cookie jar, while her father napped drunkenly in his recliner. “What’re you doin’ kid?!” he’d shout and her heart nearly exploded out of its chest every time— caught red-handed, as if she had committed murder.
Linda laughed, embarrassed at her own unease, but her stomach ached. If intuition were real, Linda would have blamed that gut feeling on something much greater than her own guilt. After all, her child was too young to be left alone. But there was no intuition, no animal instinct, only motherly love and shame and pride that led to the last disappearance.
Linda’s daughter, Amy was turning six on Friday and Linda wanted to plan a party. She would plan a party, an extravagant party with cake and balloons and expensive streamers, not the dollar store kind. She’d invite everyone in Amy’s class and afternoon playgroup. She’d invite all of the aunts and uncles and cousins. Linda would even invite her own mother and stepfather, knowing they wouldn’t show, knowing that their lack of attendance would disappoint little Amy almost as much as it would disappoint Linda. Still, she’d clean the apartment as if they were coming. She’d scrub the underside lip of the toilet bowl, like her mother always insisted, even though nobody checks. She’d have the party catered; food her mother would approve of. She’d buy party favors, little pink bags with chocolate coins and sparkly pens inside. She’d buy it all.
She just needed the money.
Linda looked at her watch. It was 11:33 PM when the truck pulled up and Linda was thinking about her little girl. Amy was at home, alone, fast asleep by now. Linda would only be a few minutes. Twenty minutes tops.
Linda noticed the black, block letters on the side of the white truck: R.J. Landscaping, it read, which surprised her. Men rarely used their company car to pick up prostitutes, but Linda was in too much of a hurry to worry about that. Besides, she wasn’t a real prostitute. She only hooked when times were really tough; only once or twice, a handful. Tops.
The man in the car had a baseball cap on, which cast a shadow across most of his face. This, on the other hand, was common. Most men tried to disguise themselves somehow, tried to hide the fact that they picked up random women off the streets like this. Something to do with Ego, or else their girlfriends, mothers, or wives at home. Linda didn’t care. She’d rather not know what he looked like, in case he was someone she recognized, or worse, someone she knew.
“Hi,” she said, smiling sheepishly. She hoisted herself up into the truck and slammed the door beside her, remembering how just last week, she had told her little Amy, “never talk to strangers,” not to mention get in their car. She fastened her seatbelt, as they negotiated a price and started down the road. They’d go to the parking lot of a foreclosed convenience store, a few blocks away. That’s where Linda did most of her transactions. “Transactions,” she called them as if it was a drug deal, not a sexual favor, which was just as illegal but less shameful somehow.
And that’s when the classic façade of intuition began to set it. Because the route to the grocery store required a right-hand turn, not a left-hand turn like the truck had just taken.
“Wrong way,” Linda said politely, smiling a little. Linda knew she wasn’t cut out for hooking, but then again, who was? She was too shy, too nice, naive.
She turned to the man with the baseball cap, the stranger who sat beside her, who suddenly held her “fate” in his hands. But, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t apologize, or turn the truck around. He didn’t even glance over.
Instead, he pushed his foot down hard on the gas and took two sharp turns. Linda knew immediately where he was headed: towards the highway.
Hooking came with a risk, she knew that too. She saw the stories in the papers. Girls were taken advantage of all the time, beat up, bruised, mistreated, left without compensation, and that wasn’t even the worst of it. Not lately, anyway. She tried not to think about the worst of it. “It won’t happen to me, Karen,” she had said to her sister over coffee, a couple of days prior. “I don’t hook enough, ya know? The chances are slim to none.”
“I hope you’re right,” Karen replied, but she wasn’t. You can blame it on fate, or irony, or something else… she wasn’t right.
Linda’s hand reached robotically for the door handle, but the car was moving too fast for her to jump out now. She’d surely break a bone if she tried, hit her head on the pavement, knock herself out, and then what?
And that’s when she heard it, a sound which normally ensures a sense of safety to its passengers: the hollow thump of the car door locking. It split through her heart like a bullet. She could practically taste the rapid beating of it. It reverberated inside her ears. They burned. Her neck itched. Her palms began to sweat. Crazy, isn’t it? The physicality of fear. The way it can be measured, read upon a person’s face like a good horror story.
Meanwhile, the man stared blankly ahead. Was this a dream? Linda asked herself. She felt like a fly on the windshield, paralyzed by the sheer speed of the moving vehicle. Her body was not her own. She had never felt this tiny before, this insignificant.
Powerless in the face of a stranger.
Humans have grown accustomed to seeing each other behave in a civilized manner. We stand in a single-file line at the grocery store checkout. We hold doors open for each other. We say “please” and “thank you.” We pick up hitchhikers and we bring them where they need to go without asking for gas money. We call 911 when someone faints or falls. We console each other. We even ask the question, “How are you?” But do we really care about the answer? Considering the answer is almost always “good” and if it’s not “good” then it’s something else, and anything else requires a follow-up question, and who the hell has time for that?
But most of us are good, except for the large handful of us who are not and, of that handful, some are sick of pretending that they are…
And thus, you have it: The Genesis of a Serial Killer.
“Where are we going?” Linda croaked, but the man was still silent. She could see more of his face now, as the flash of passing streetlights illuminated the dashboard. He was younger than she expected, twenty-five or six. Linda was thirty-nine. She couldn’t have been his mother, but she was a mother…
“Hey, you’re upset. I can see that,” she said. “Why don’t we just slow down and… and pull over for a second? We can talk.” Linda placed her hand gently on the man’s white knuckles as they gripped the steering wheel. He swatted her away and she jumped from the suddenness, and then he shoved her head hard into the passenger window. Linda cowered.
“Don’t touch me,” he whispered under his breath. His tone of voice was timid as if he was the one being tormented and had finally gained the courage to speak up. He whipped the car onto the interstate at a dangerously fast speed.
“Where are you taking me?” Linda asked, nervously. “What do you want from me? You can have it. Whatever you want. Please. Please just bring me home. My daughter…”
“Your daughter?” He snickered.
“Yes,” she whispered and then began to sob. What had she done, mentioning her daughter to this strange man? She wasn’t thinking clearly. She wasn’t equipped for this.
“Is she alone?” he asked, without a trace of emotion in his voice.
Linda searched her mind, not for the truth but for the best answer. Among all of the yes’s and no’s, among all the white lies and excuses, she could not find it. She didn’t know what to say or do to save herself.
“You left your daughter alone while you went out to do what?” Linda kept sobbing. “I asked you a question.”
“I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have left,” Linda muttered between gasps. And suddenly, she was the bad guy. Evil in the relativity of evil among motherhood. There was no comparison between Linda and this strange man. There was no comfort in knowing that Linda had never committed murder or kidnapping. Because, after all, it wasn’t really kidnapping. Linda left her house by choice. Linda waited on the sidewalk. Linda heard the lightbulb blow. Linda knew she shouldn’t have done it. But she did. She got into the car. Despite everything that had told her not to. She took the risk.
“Please, my God please, where are you taking me?” she stuttered.
But the man kept driving, erratically and in complete silence. Linda looked up at the next exit as it approached. She closed her eyes and prayed to God — or whoever the hell stopped shit like this from happening — that he didn’t take the exit. She waited for the sound of the blinker. Nothing. Nothing. Thank God, nothing. And then, a sharp jerk. Her head smacked the window. Linda opened her eyes as he barreled off the exit, the exit to the lake.
“Please slow down,” Linda begged desperately. “You’re gonna kill us.”
And that’s when the man looked at Linda for the first time, adjusted his hat, and revealed his distinctively flat nose. “Flat nose,” Linda thought. “He had a flat nose.” The words rang through her head as if she had heard them before. But the words were spoken in her own voice. It couldn’t have been a warning from other girls on the street. Could it? Or was she repeating the detail in case she needed to remember it if she made it out alive? Alive? Jesus Christ. How did she know she was going to die? It was the same exit as the lake. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe he was just messing around, trying to scare her. Or maybe he wanted to murder her.
But he couldn’t be the Hugo Lake Serial Killer. Wasn’t the killer already dead?
His eyes were so dark, she couldn’t decipher where his pupils ended and his irises began. Linda had seen faces like his before, as a social worker. He was angry and tortured and deeply depressed, and yet there he sat, grinning wildly at her.
