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“I was taken to a house where a woman and three other children lived. I remember the swimming pool in the back yard. It felt like a vacation to me, but when I asked about my parents, no one would tell me anything. It was weeks before I really understood everything that had happened, and even then, I only understood as much as a four-year-old could. My parents and my sister were gone, and they weren’t coming back.
“There wasn’t any extended family for me to go live with, so I got shuffled around in the system. Five different foster homes the first two years. Once I started school, I was never in the same place for more than a semester, never made any friends or anything. When I was nine, I was put in a more permanent home. That’s when I started really looking into what happened to my family.
“It was years before I knew the whole story. No one would ever give me any information when I asked. My foster mom would take me to Mass, and the priest would tell me my family was with God and that they were happy now. I tried to focus on that, but I needed to know what happened. It ate at me. When I was ten, I figured out how to get ahold of court documents, and I found the police reports of the break-in. A neighbor had called the police when he heard gunshots, and he saw three men leaving the house before the police got there. He didn’t get a good look at them and couldn’t ID them or anything like that. When the police arrived, they found three bodies in the living room and one four-year-old boy hiding in the closet. My sister had been…had been raped before they killed her.”
“Oh my God.” I reach for Deklan’s leg, but he doesn’t look at me. He drains the glass and continues.
“No one was ever charged with the crime. I might have dug into it more then, but that’s about the time my foster father died of a heart attack, and my foster mother went nuts.”
“What did she do?”
“She was convinced my foster father died because the rest of us—herself, me, and another boy in the foster care system—had sinned against God, and we were all being punished. She was convinced that she was going to die as well unless we all atoned.”
“Atoned?”
“The other boy was Brian. He only had to put up with it for a couple of months before he was moved to another family. I was left there to take the brunt of it.”
“Brian? As in the guy who took me to see you at the hospital? You were in foster care together?
“Yeah, that’s him.”
I ponder this for a moment. In essence, this makes Brian Dek’s brother, and I see him in a slightly different light now.
“What did your foster mom do?”
“I was a sinner,” Deklan says quietly. “I had to pay for my sins. It’s not like I ever did anything—she was just a nut, ya know? But I had to pay for whatever she thought I’d done. At this point, I figure I still have a few more sins to commit before I catch up to the punishments.”
“How did she punish you?”
He looks at me with dark, narrowed eyes. There’s a long pause before he answers.
“Whipped us with a belt. Made us stand with our arms out, holding up Bibles, boiled water for the bathtub. That was the worst of it.”
“She put you in boiling water? Oh my God.” I gasp as I place my hand over my mouth. My thoughts spin around in my head as I put it all together. “The scars on your leg…”
“I guess the neighbors heard me screaming,” Deklan says. “Had to have skin grafts because the burns were so bad. That’s when they took me away from her for good. I never saw her after that. She died of an overdose a couple years later.”
“I was twelve then and was placed in a group home. I ran away and was caught and placed in another group home. That was the trend over the next couple of years until I figured out how not to get caught.
“I lived on the streets for about six months, just doing whatever I could to survive. Not long into it, I came across Brian, and we helped each other out sometimes, finding odd jobs, mostly quick manual labor stuff at restaurants or loading docks. I was big for my age and pretty strong even then. People seemed okay with giving obviously underage kids a few bucks to haul boxes around.
“I met Fergus Foley at a loading dock. I’d made a bit of cash there earlier in the day, and it was raining that night, so I stayed in the shipyard and was going to sleep in one of the containers. Sometime in the middle of the night, Mr. Foley caught sight of me, questioned me, and then put me to work. He offered to buy me a steak dinner and give me a place to sleep for the effort.”
“I kept loading containers for Mr. Foley for a few weeks after that. After a while, Brian joined me. Fergus and I talked more, and he found out what happened to my family. One day, he came in and told me he knew who had killed them.”
“I’d never felt such rage before. When he offered to help me locate them…I didn’t even consider consequences. I wanted revenge, pure and simple. Fergus Foley helped me get that.”
Deklan glances at me before giving me a wry grin.
“I’ll spare you the details, but believe me, they paid for what they’d done.”
“You killed them.” It’s not a question, but I still need the confirmation. He doesn’t answer me in any case; he just stares at the bottom of his empty glass.
“So that’s how I started working for Mr. Foley full-time. He set me up in this apartment so I would be close to him, got me a car to get around in, and paid me a shit-ton of money. He gave me a job, a purpose, and helped me get my revenge. He gave Brian a job, too, which got him off the streets. I owe the Foley family everything.”
I stare at my hands as I take in everything Deklan just told me. All thoughts of my encounter with Sean are gone. All I can think about now is Deklan and what a horrible childhood he had. I try to imagine Deklan as a child, hiding under a blanket in a closet as his family is murdered, but the image that comes to my head is too horrible. I think about him as a teenager, loading cargo containers for Fergus Foley, and that’s a much more relatable picture.
“So that’s me,” Deklan says as he sits up a little straighter on the couch. “You now know more about me than anyone alive does.”
