Erika took Liam to a shrink, but my parents had different ways of dealing with me. After I killed that cat, my mother locked me in the closet under the staircase. She left me there for six hours and ignored me when I banged my fists on the doors and screamed until my voice was hoarse. It didn’t “cure” me. After the next incident, my father beat me with his belt until I cried. Back in those days, nobody at school cared about the welts all over my back. Beating your kids used to be more acceptable. He did it frequently.
And then when I was fourteen, there was that girl. Michelle. My first. I don’t remember all of their names, but you always remember your first.
I didn’t get caught by the police. I was too smart for that. But my parents knew. They had no information that could have stood up in a court of law, but it was enough for them. Unfortunately for them, I was too big to be locked in the closet anymore—as tall as my father by then. And stronger.
That was when my mother hired the exorcist.
He was a priest—or at least, he had the collar. A middle-aged man with a round, red face. They surprised me when I came home from school one day, and my father, the priest, and his assistant worked together to hold me down and tie me to my bed while they drew the shades. For hours, they shouted prayers in my face and threw holy water at me. The priest demanded I repeat the prayers, and for the first hour, I refused.
By the second hour, I was willing to say whatever he wanted to let me go free.
When they finally untied me from that bed, I was the angriest I had ever been in my entire life. There were bruises on my wrists where I had been bound to the bed, and I was soaked in a combination of holy water and my own sweat. I wanted to lunge at that priest and scratch his eyes out, but I was outnumbered. I had to wait.
That night, I removed the batteries from the smoke detectors in the house. I turned on the gas stove. That night, my parents unfortunately died in a tragic fire that their only son managed to survive. I told Erika my mother died of cancer and my father had a heart attack, but there was really no way for her to know that was a lie.
And that priest—well, he was mugged a few days later in a dark alley. Poor guy—the police report indicated he suffered quite a bit in the hour before his throat was finally slashed.
After I buried my parents, I went to live with my grandmother. Nana was eighty years old, demented and half blind. She couldn’t care less what I did with myself. We got along very well.
Everybody says Liam is a smart kid, but he’s not as smart as me. I made two million dollars selling my first startup company when I was only twenty-five. No college diploma. Just brains. I made a lot more on the second one. So I’ve got plenty of money. Money that Erika has no idea about. She worries about the income from her stupid little newspaper job, and it’s hard not to laugh.
Yes, I could do without the family. But it’s not so bad. I take a lot of business trips, when I get to have some fun, then I go back home before the police arrive. I’m much more careful when I’m near home. That girl sharing the hole with Olivia was named Hallie Barton—that’s what her driver’s license said. She ran away from home because her mother was a drunk and her stepfather beat her up, and she was hitchhiking when I picked her up. Don’t these young girls know how dangerous it is to hitchhike? I mean, look what happened to Hallie.
In any case, nobody is looking for Hallie.
I could have been happy this way my whole life. I could’ve continued doing my own activities on the side, and nobody would have been the wiser. But then there was Liam.
He did stupid things to attract attention. What was he thinking, duct-taping that girl in the closet? I know he was only five, but it made me sick when I heard about it. They threw him out of the school. And Erika later ended up taking him to a shrink. As many times as I told her that it wasn’t a big deal, she knew it was.
Liam was a reflection on me. And I knew it was just a matter of time before people figured it out. Before Erika realized Liam didn’t get his personality from her loser, jailbird father.
Years ago, I saw Liam skulking around the house of that English teacher of his. I had gone to parent-teacher night that year, and I could tell the guy hated Liam. Saw right through him the way my parents saw through me. And now Liam was going to do something stupid and obvious, and probably get himself in just enough trouble that Erika would want to take him back to a shrink.
So I gave Liam a hand. Broke the radiator to cause the leak in a carbon monoxide. I shorted out the detector. Liam never would have been clever enough to do it himself. They were supposed to be dead by morning. A neighbor would have noticed Liam sneaking around the house, and he would’ve taken the fall. But the teacher didn’t even die, and the police were too incompetent to arrest my son. So that was a bust.