AllFreeNovel
Share Us
4
KIRRA
67 Wendell Way
Outskirts of Porte Franklyn
EARLY APRIL
For the first time since she’d come back to the States more than five years before, Kirra drove her dark metallic blue turbocharged Audi A3 through the neighborhoods, shopping centers, and parks of Porte Franklyn to its outskirts, toward her childhood home. The closer she got, the more anxious she felt. She hated that her heart was already racing as she approached the house and memories of that long-ago terror rose stark in her mind. She saw the young girl listening to two men quietly climbing the stairs on their way to murder her parents, saw herself climbing down the old oak tree, wounded, in shock, running, running, into the woods to her cave.
The closer she got to the end of the street where she’d find the gutted remains of her family home, the more difficult it became not to turn around and drive away. But she didn’t, she couldn’t, and all because of a hunch.
She remembered telling Uncle Leo about her visit to a local art gallery where she’d found one of her father’s paintings. The manager told her the painting’s owner had sold it to the gallery the month before. The price was astronomical, but of course Kirra had bought it. It was an oil painting of a small sailboat moving smoothly toward a dock, a white-whiskered old man on deck holding a rope ready to loop it around the stanchion. Her father had loved to paint the incredible array of boats he saw on the Potomac, from skiffs to fishing trawlers and motorboats, and the occasional yacht. It was sad his beloved subject didn’t sell well. It was his country scenes and portraitures that had kept the household afloat. She shook her head at the irony of that—her father had to die before his paintings became valuable. And then, just this morning, she’d remembered her father occasionally stored paintings in the shed. The killers hadn’t burned it down. She knew the odds were against her, but she had to look.
Her cell phone buzzed and she looked down at a text from Uncle Leo. He always seemed to text her when she needed him to. She could put it off a while longer. She pulled over her Audi and read it.
HEY, KIDDO. JAWLI SAYS HI. HE MISSES THROWING YOU IN THE DIRT. I MISS YOU, TOO. LOVE YOU, LEO.
She laughed. It was all too true. She’d landed in the dirt sparring with Jacko more times than she cared to remember. He’d taught her most of what she knew about how to fight, how to defend herself. She answered right away.
TELL JAWLI HE WON’T HAVE A CHANCE WHEN I SEE HIM IN JUNE. ALL IS GOOD HERE AND YES, I’M FINE, I LOVE AND MISS YOU, TOO. KIRRA.
She missed them all, missed Australia. It was still very early spring here on this side of the globe. In Australia she could be enjoying a glorious end-of-summer day at her uncle Leo’s house overlooking the Pacific. She missed scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef, missed lying on the pure white sand at nearby Lake McKenzie, slathered in sunscreen against the fierce Australia sun. She even missed the dingoes who sometimes dashed in and stole your sandwiches and fruit if you let them. They loved apples.
Even though Uncle Leo had understood Kirra’s decision to make her career in law and return home, he wasn’t happy about it. When she’d told him she’d taken a job as assistant commonwealth attorney less than an hour from where she’d spent the first twelve years of her life, he never mentioned what he knew to be true. That she’d become a prosecutor in her hometown because she hoped to find her parents’ killers.
She and Uncle Leo had kept up their correspondence through the years with Jeter Thorpe, the detective who’d found her that night and investigated her parents’ murder in Porte Franklyn. The three of them had become friends, and when Jeter made lieutenant, they’d sent the new lieutenant, a pro basketball fanatic, season tickets to the Washington Wizards. Though Jeter had tried for years, he never found the killers, and her parents’ case was in a cold file now.
Kirra had made a few other friends, of course, mostly at law school at UVA, including her best friend, Cila McCayne, who was in New York attending a seminar representing her law firm, Alden, Carruthers and Smith. She missed Cila, and her whacko adventures with so many boyfriends they’d both lost count. But Kirra missed Uncle Leo more.
She forced herself to pull back onto the flattop and continue driving slowly forward to the last property her parents owned, the property that was hers now as their only heir. She’d asked Uncle Leo to keep the property just as it was, frozen in time, not obliterated by some contractor, her parents forgotten. She’d turned down half a dozen offers for it over the years, but she didn’t mind because the land was only becoming more valuable because of the oak and maple forest it bordered that stretched undisturbed for half a mile.
Kirra’s knuckles were white on her Audi’s steering wheel when she pulled onto the weed-infested driveway. She saw the forest had steadily encroached over fourteen years. Weeds filled the concrete foundation where her home had stood, growing over the fallen beams and burned detritus. It hadn’t been much of a house, she realized now, but it had been her home, her parents’ home. She felt tears sheen her eyes, swallowed.
She couldn’t seem to pull her hands off the steering wheel, simply stared at the foundation through the windshield. The huge oak tree outside her bedroom window had burned down with the house. She’d loved that old tree. She’d shimmied down it when she’d run into the woods to her hidden cave. Fourteen years ago. And Jeter had found her, saved her. Her parents had died but she’d lived, thanks to him.
Kirra slowly got out of her car, her legs stiff, her heart pounding. She remembered something had always needed repair in the house. She pictured her mom replacing a pipe underneath the sink, plunging out the toilet, and planting purple and white petunias in a simple wooden box her father had made, trying to make the modest house look warm and welcoming. Where had her mother gotten the money to buy flowers? How hard had it been for them to make ends meet from her father’s sporadic sales? She remembered her mother had worked as an assistant manager in a grocery store, but later, she’d stayed at home. As a young child she hadn’t wondered about that, realized only later when her mother got sicker she’d been too ill to work. But her parents had loved each other, and they’d loved her. Kirra closed her eyes. It was hard to keep from trembling, from crying over what had been destroyed.
As she stood there, another long-forgotten memory flooded back. She’d heard her father saying to her mother, Don’t worry, sweetheart, I know what I’m doing. When you’re well again, you’ll be dancing with me in Paris. Was he only trying to cheer her mother up, or had he really thought he’d be bringing in a lot of money? Was that what had brought those two monsters into their home?
You didn’t know monsters like that existed, did you, Dad? You meant no more to them than a pebble in their way, and they kicked you aside, snuffed out your life.
She looked up again to where the huge old oak branch had nearly touched her bedroom window, heard a voice shouting again, I see the little bitch! Let me do her! She didn’t hear rage in the voice, she heard excitement.
Kirra shook her head, forced herself to walk to where the front door had stood, and looked down at the concrete foundation, where the weeds had grown and tangled, and vines had speared upward and climbed over the concrete. She turned away. Her home was no longer there, and neither were her parents. There was nothing here for her.
She looked again toward the forest. The shed still stood near it—she had prayed it would still be there—weather-beaten and slowly rotting, weeds pushing against its sides and burrowing into the cracks.
Jeter and his team had come to believe the murderers had burned down the house because she’d escaped and they couldn’t find whatever they were looking for, something her father might have had that was a threat to them. But then, why try to kill her in the hospital? She was a child. What could she have known? Maybe whatever it was got him killed.
Please, please, let me find something.She crossed her fingers as she walked through the weeds and tangled vines to the dilapidated shed. Let there be some of his paintings and not only her dad’s ancient lawn mower.
A rusted old padlock hung on the door. Had her father put that padlock on fourteen years before for a specific reason? There was no key, but it didn’t matter, the wood was rotten. Kirra kicked the door hard once, twice, and it fell inward off its creaking hinges.
It was too dark to see inside. She pulled her cell phone from her pocket, switched on the flashlight. A rat was walking between spiderwebs that were everywhere, its eyes fixed on her until it scurried across the rotted wooden floor and out through a hole in the wall. The shed was small, maybe six by eight. There was the ancient lawn mower, rusted through now, and two sagging shelves with dust-covered gardening tools her mother had used. She remembered her father staring at those tools and looking bewildered, and her mother laughed, took down one of the tools, and showed him how to use it.
Kirra’s heart began to pound. She saw it—a thickly bubble-wrapped canvas leaning against the far wall. Rats had chewed on the plastic, but they hadn’t eaten all the way through. All that thick impenetrable wrapping, it had to mean something. Would her hunch pay off?
