The Second Coming (36 page)

“Holy shit,” Chris whispered with bulging eyes as if he just witnessed the whole thing.

“That is un-fucking-believable,” Mark said.

“The husband rushed out to save Amy as his wife dialed 911 and as he held Amy bleeding to death in his arms, he watched in shock as the friend’s car went speeding off in the darkness.”

“Did he see what kind of car it was?” Chris asked riveted with shrugged shoulders as he held his hands out, palms up, as though he was balancing the pros and cons of his question.

“Not only did
he
see what kind of car it was, but at that moment, as he held Amy dying in his arms, Amy’s parents came driving down the street and were almost run off the road by the killer’s car.”

“So her parents saw the killer’s car too,” Mark said proudly.

“I’m guessing it was the same type of car you drove,” Chris deduced with a knowing nod of his head. “The police made you their prime suspect because you had blonde hair, drove the same type of car and were jealous of Amy’s popularity.”

Amy nodded silently in between drags of her smoldering cigarette. “The cheerleaders at school started whispering to each other and glaring at me,” Jenny recalled with a look of distress in her distant eyes. “After a couple of days of spreading rumors, kids started calling me a murderer and throwing stuff at me. It was a total mob mentality and I was told to go home by the principal for fear of my safety. But it didn’t stop there. People called our house with death threats and vandalized our home. It was a really scary, horrible thing to go through,” she said with wide unblinking eyes as smoke from her cigarette trailed off from her hand. “The community as a whole didn’t want to hear that my Jetta was a dark color when the witnesses said the killer’s car was a light colored Jetta and that the husband said the killer had long blonde hair and I had short platinum hair. They just wanted someone to blame and who better than the jealous ‘loser’ friend,” she said signing quotations with her hands. “They all said I did it because I didn’t become a popular cheerleader like Amy did. What they failed to realize was that I didn’t want to be like every other little miss sunshine, preppie bitch cheerleader. I didn’t blame Amy for who I was. It was my choice.”

“What did your parents do?” Mark asked concerned.

“They tried to protect me, but there was no way to stop everyone from convicting me in the court of public opinion. Our attorney told us that we should move away until the police were ready to press charges, so we moved to the Bay Area. That’s when my mom became the motherly caretaker,
constantly worrying about me and telling me everything was going to be alright and my dad became angry and drank a lot. I could hear him in his study on the phone, cussing and threatening to sue everyone, but after a few weeks, when he realized there was nothing more he could do to protect his little girl, his study fell silent.” She exhaled a cloud of smoke. “There were no more phone calls, no more swearing. The only sounds were the TV and his feet shuffling on the hardwood floors as he smoked and drank himself numb. One night I went to say goodnight to him and I was about to knock on the study door when I heard him sobbing.” Jenny stopped as black tears ran down her face. Her chin quivered as she sniffled. “My dad is a big, strong, Texas man and I had never heard him cry before, but the fact that there was nothing he could do to stop what was happening to me made him feel helpless and in his mind, worthless as a father. It broke my dad and he aged 25 years in those first two months,” she said with a trembling voice as she wiped her tears and then took a gulp from her beer as she composed herself. “The morning after I heard him sobbing in his study, I came down to the kitchen wearing faded jeans with a white t-shirt and no makeup or any of my piercings. I wanted to show him I would do anything for him as well. When he asked me why I was dressed like that, I just shrugged my shoulders and he knew what I was doing. ‘Fuck that.’ He told me in a loving tone. ‘You be who you want to be, not who they want you to be.’ And then he walked over and gave me a big hug and for the first time since it all started I felt safe,” she explained with a glowing face. “He looked down at me with eyes of admiration and said, ‘I know what you’re trying to do and I appreciate your concern, but I love you because of the way you are. Don’t be something you’re not. Be strong for me.’” Jenny paused and reflected. “It had broken him, but he didn’t want it to break me. That was the only way he knew how to protect me; just by being there for me and not letting it break me.”

Mark and Chris’ eyes were watering as they drank from their pint glasses trying to hold it together.

“Your dad sounds like an awesome guy,” Chris said with a splintered voice.

“Yeah, he is,” Jenny agreed with a smile.

“Did the police ever press charges against you?” Mark asked despondently.

“They didn’t have any evidence against me,” she reminded Mark as she filled her glass under the beer tap. “There was nothing they could do.”

“Did they ever find the killer?” Chris asked intrigued.

“It turned out that the police were right,” Jenny explained coyly as she reached across the bar and grabbed Chris’ glass and began to fill it up. “The killer was someone Amy knew that was jealous of her. It just wasn’t me.”

“Who was it?” Mark asked impatiently.

“It was Deidra, the girl whose mother spread the rumors about me so that I would get black listed from cheerleading,” Jenny said with a sinister smile of satisfaction as she filled up Mark’s glass with dark foaming beer. “Deidra’s mom put so much pressure on her to be better than the other cheerleaders that she snapped. She couldn’t handle her feelings of inferiority and resented Amy for being better than she was so she stabbed her with the family Thanksgiving carving knife.”

“That fucking bitch!” Mark said passionately.

“How did they catch her?” Chris inquired earnestly.

“A few months after the murder, a boy at school noticed that someone had written ‘I killed Amy’ on the desk he was sitting at,” Jenny recalled with amazement. “He thought someone with bad taste wrote it as a joke, but showed it to the teacher who reported it to the police. The police interviewed every kid that sat at that desk each period and when they interrogated Deidra, the stupid bitch confessed. She couldn’t handle the pressure of listening to people talk about the murders every day knowing that she did it.”

“It almost sounds like she wanted to get caught,” Mark replied with disbelief as he lifted his full glass of beer to his lips and took a large gulp.

“What happened to her?” Chris inquired through clenched teeth as he lit a cigarette.

“Because she was under the age of sixteen she couldn’t be convicted as an adult. She could only be held in a minimum security prison until she is 25.”

“When will that be?” Mark asked appalled.

“In about two years,” Jenny replied.

“What about you?” Chris asked. “Did anyone ever call and apologize to you?”

“The police contacted us through our attorney and apologized for the inconvenience,” she said under her breath with disgust. “Can you believe they referred to us being run out of town as an inconvenience?”

“Didn’t you want to go back and...”

Jenny cut Chris off harshly. “And what?” she asked perturbed. “Tell them all ‘I told you so’ and expect them to welcome me back with open arms? They didn’t give a shit about me to begin with. Nothing would have changed. They would have still judged me because of the way I dressed and the friends I had.” And then she said something that was disturbing to both of the young men. “They were all such bitches. I wish I had killed her.” Jenny saw the look of shock in the boys’ eyes and realized how she sounded. “Not Amy you stupid fucks. I mean Deidra. Then Amy would still be alive.” She put her cigarette out and took a sip of beer. “You know the thing that really gets me is all the families that have had their lives turned upside down by Deidra’s callous act of jealousy. Amy’s family, my family, the family of the people who owned the house where it happened, the guy that held Amy in his arms as she died, the dinner guest at the house, all of Amy’s friends and even Deidra’s family.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I know that it is the hardest on Amy’s family and I feel terrible for them. They are such nice people. I can’t imagine what they’ve been through.” Jenny paused as her eyes welled with tears. “I’ve thought about reaching out to them, but I wouldn’t know what to say. The last time I talked to them I was thirteen years old, but I feel like we have this sad connection and maybe something positive could come of it.”

“I don’t know what I would do if it had happened to me?” Chris said shaking his head impressed with Jenny’s fortitude.

Jenny gave a sideways frown of her thin black lips as she looked at him and shrugged her shoulders. “After a while, you learn how to accept it as part of your life. There is nothing I can do to change the past. I can only control the things that happen in the future. One day I would like to meet the love of my life, get married and have a family. When that time comes, I won’t dress like this anymore and I will become the typical soccer mom. I don’t want my kids to know what I’ve been through and I don’t want them to see me as different than the other moms.”

“Why do you keep up this persona now?” Mark asked puzzled. “Why not stop dressing the way you do now? Don’t you think you would have a better chance of meeting someone you want to marry?”

Jenny looked at him amused as she lit another cigarette and exhaled. “I want the man I fall in love with to love me for who I am, not for who he wants me to be,” she explained with a hint of contempt in her voice. “When I find the right guy, he will fall in love with me, not the image of what he thinks I can be for him.”

Chris looked at Jenny with glowing admiration as he grasped his pint glass from the bar. “Whoever that guy is, he will be a damn lucky man.”

“That’s sweet of you,” Jenny said tenderly as she reached her pint glass out and touched rims with Chris’ glass. “Thank you.”

There was a moment of silence as the three youths sat in the bar drinking their beers and smoking cigarettes. The music had stopped playing and it was eerily silent when Jenny regretfully realized that it was after 2:00 am. She pulled the mirror out for one last blast, lay it on the bar and then eloquently cut up the last three lines of cocaine. They each snorted their line and then helped her to clean the bar before she turned off the lights and they exited out the back to the concrete court yard that separated the bar from her apartment building.

The Sterling Killer stood in the corner of the dark living room of Jenny’s apartment looking out the window towards the back of the Kingfish bar. He watched with concern as two boys and the girl bartender walked out the back door and stood in the court yard. If all three of them came up the killer would have to make a quick decision; flee out the back door or kill them all. He waited with bated breath.

It was cold and misty as Jenny fumbled with cocaine induced, trembling hands, to slide the key into the dead bolt slot. The key finally slid in and she clicked the dead bolt to the locked position. When she turned around, Mark was gone and Chris stood in the darkness with the hood of his sweat shirt pulled over his head and his hands jammed into his pant pockets as steam billowed from his nose and mouth.

“Where did Mark go?” Jenny asked with a knowing tilt of her head.

“He went to get a cab,” Chris replied stiffly. “I told him I’d meet him out front after I walked you to your door.”

Jenny smiled slyly. “You didn’t have to do that, but I’m glad you did.” She approached him slowly with her hands held to her chest for warmth and leaned her slender frame against his tall body. Chris wrapped his arms around her as he looked down longingly into her sapphire eyes.

“I’ve been wanting to kiss you for a long time,” he told her with timid apprehension.

“I know you have,” Jenny responded innocently as she fluttered her dark eyelashes at him. “I’ve wanted to kiss you too, but the timing wasn’t right. I wanted us to be friends first. That’s why I told you about my past tonight.”

“I don’t care about your past. I just want to be with you.”

“You don’t think I’m a murderer?” She asked teasingly.

“I think you are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever laid my eyes on,” he told her affectionately as he leaned down and kissed her passionately for what seemed like an eternity.

“I better get inside,” she said as she pulled away from him, shivering.

“Can I call you some time?” Chris asked innocently.

“You can call me any time,” Jenny responded as she seductively strutted up the stairs to her front porch in black heels and spandex pants.

Chris watched her and as she opened her front door she turned to him.

“Good luck sleeping tonight,” she said mockingly.

“I’d sleep a lot better if I was with you,” he said with the wishful plea of a horney young man.

“If you came in, there wouldn’t be any sleeping tonight,” she teased him.

“I’m not going to be able to sleep anyway,” he whispered dejectedly to himself.

“Good night rock star,” she said as she shut the front door mercilessly behind her.

The Sterling Killer watched as Chris and Jenny kissed in the courtyard. He would only have to kill two people now. That would be easy enough as long as the other boy didn’t come back looking for his friend. To his amazement, Chris and Jenny separated and she began climbing the stairs to her front door as Chris began to walk away. Now he would only have to kill her. She was going to be an easy victim. She didn’t have any idea what was
about to happen to her. He couldn’t wait to have his way with her. He readied himself as she entered her apartment and shut the door behind her.

Facing the door from the warmth of her small apartment living room, she leaned the top of her forehead thankfully against the wood and whispered to herself, “You have to trust someone eventually. Why not him?” She rolled her head against the door as she spun around and leaned her back against it and for the first time since she moved to California, she thought things were turning around for her. She was at peace when she saw with horror a tall, dark figure in a hooded robe standing in front of her. He looked like the grim reaper and she knew immediately that it was the Sterling Killer.