Member-only story
Haunted
(Though the names and some details have been changed, all of this really happened. Except for the parts that didn’t.)
“Daddy’s killing Mommy,” I said, shortly before my father snatched the phone from my 4-year-old hands and shattered it against the wall.
That’s one of my earliest memories. Not knowing what else to do, I’d called my grandmother from the rotary telephone in the kitchen, while my father strangled my mother in their bedroom.
Grandma called the police, and before long there were two units at our house on Gravel Drive in the small town of Keokuk, Iowa. My father answered the door, all smiles, jokes, and, ‘How ya doin’, Randy? Sorry you had to come out,’ in that Texas drawl of his.
My mother said she was fine, like she always did, and that Grandma had misunderstood me. Of course, that didn’t explain the marks on her neck, nor her black eye, all of which the officers studiously ignored.
After all, my father was one of them. He was a deputy with the Lee County Sheriff’s Department. He could, and often did, get away with anything.
The officers apologized to my father, who by that time was starting to sober up from all the Budweisers he’d downed with one of his girlfriends at Pony’s Tavern earlier in the evening.
