I left Dave for a few minutes and went downstairs for another cup of coffee and to let Shadow out to do his business. The cool morning air perked me up slightly as I leaned against the post of the porch and watched Shadow pick out the perfect spot. I was dead tired, but I would not go to sleep until I got Dave back and he had to be coming back soon, he just had to be.
After I got Shadow back inside, I headed to the kitchen and as I stirred some two-percent into my coffee, my stomach growled angrily so I grabbed up a banana off the counter, and made my way back up to the bedroom. I settled my breakfast and coffee on the nightstand, turned on the radio to a low volume and sat down on the bed next to Dave.
I studied his still form again and thought god, I miss him, and on impulse got up onto my hands and knees and leaned over my beautiful man and kissed his forehead and both of his gently closed eyelids.
“Come back to me, sweetheart,” I whispered and touched my lips to his for a soft kiss before laying my cheek against the stubble of his, rubbing against the plush roughness.
Somewhat heartened by the contact, I sat back down next to him and ran my hand over his perfectly muscled chest and the smooth skin and soft, dark hair, thinking wistfully that I wished that it would only take a touch to bring him back to me and immediately my mood swung again back toward helplessness because I know that there is nothing that I can do but wait and keep watch over him.
I picked up another newspaper article, this one from the Des Moines Register & Tribune for July 7, 1959, and continued to read the actual police report information released by authorities. Thompson had provided a full confession and in-depth details to police, shortly after his capture, laying out the sequence of events.
Mark Thompson stated that his wife, Cindy, was seated in a chair in the living room when he shot her. He said that he dragged her body out to a nearby garage and put her into the family car, placing the gun in her limp lifeless hand on the seat beside her so that it would appear to be a suicide. He admitted that his plan had been to stage the scene to look like a murder-suicide spree, framing Cindy for the crimes.
Thompson then headed back to Craton to pick up the kids from the arcade. He said that he knew that he was going to need more guns and ammunition, so he drove his five children to their home in Agency where he retrieved additional weapons from the gun safe located in his bedroom. The children were left in the car, and when he returned, he put the items in the trunk of his 1949 Buick and headed back to the campgrounds.
I grabbed another clipping, the Ottumwa Courier.
Mark Thompson drove his children back to the campgrounds and the secluded family cabin at about 11:30 p.m. To disorient the children and to hide the blood in the living room, he had pulled the fuses from the house and cut the phone lines before he had headed back to pick the children up. When they pulled in, the cabin was dark and the children believed him when he told them that the power was likely knocked out due to the lightning storm.
Thompson said that the girls jumped out and ran through the pouring rain and into the house. Suzanna came back out after just a minute to confirm that the lights were out and added that her mother wasn’t inside. Thompson told her that she was in bed but one of the other girls came back out to announce that it wasn’t so, that their mom was gone. Thompson told them that she had probably just run to the ranger station for a copy of the parade schedule, and Tim Thompson went to the garage to check for the Fairlane.
I felt nauseous thinking of Dave discovering the body in the family car. Would he? Or would it play out differently? We had the freedom to make slight changes in the warps but nothing substantial. I had a sick feeling that Dave would likely find the body of Cindy Thompson—if for no other reason than he was a thirty-eight-year-old man currently residing in a sixteen-year-old boy’s body and things wouldn’t seem right to him, knowledge of the events or not. It would be common sense that would drive him to be suspicious and go to investigate, just as it had been Tim Thompson’s discovery, those many years ago, that had begun the horrifying chain of events.
“Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol began playing on the radio and as the words of the song washed over me, amplifying my pain, I felt my tears spilling over onto my cheeks. I tossed the stack of papers onto the floor as I trembled uncontrollably from fear and nerves; I sat on my heels and laid my head against Dave’s chest, trying to find some comfort in his nearness while listening to his strong steady heartbeat. I rocked gently, smoothing my hands over his shoulders and wishing that his strong arms would come around my body, sheltering and reassuring me that everything will be okay. Racking sobs possessed me as I placed fleeting kisses all over his face, his neck, his chest and I lifted his hand to place a kiss into his palm and cradled his hand against my cheek, watching his expressionless face.
“Come back to me, David. Please come home,” I croaked brokenly.
Chapter 40
The Buick maneuvered around washed-out gravel and it took all three of the guy’s attention and eyes to spot the holes.
“On your right,” Ricky shouted. “Now, left—oooh!” he groaned as they hit the edge of another jarring pothole.
Suzanna, Bridget, and Barbara were looking on anxiously from the backseat as Ricky and Dave rode shotgun and navigated.
“I can’t see a damn thing through the fog on the windows and the rain,” Horn-Rims complained, reaching up to wipe the inside of the windshield with the sleeve of his forearm.
“Tim, quit breathing!” Suzanna said with a laugh. “You’re the one who’s full of hot air.”
Funny, aren’t you, Sis? Dave thought angrily but said nothing as he realized that siblings were as big of a pain in the ass fifty years ago as they were today. Who knew?
They had been driving for almost another fifteen minutes in the crappy old car on bone-jarring bumpy gravel and this drive to the cabin earlier today hadn’t seemed to take nearly as long. When we get home, ‘if’ we get home, Dave thought pessimistically, his plan was to go straight to bed and then hope against hope that by the time that morning comes, he will be out of this hell and back with Torie.
***
“Hey, the house is dark,” Suzanna observed, as they finally arrived at the cabin.
Let’s state the obvious, Suzanna, Dave thought, irritated beyond bearing with the girl. It then occurred to him that he was starting to actually think of her as his pain-in-the-ass sister. This has been too long an f-ing time warp! Time to wake up, Cameron! he thought angrily, but no—no such luck.
“The lights were probably knocked out by the storm,” Mark offered as he pulled the car up close to the kitchen door, where everyone piled out and the girls ran ahead for the house.
“I wonder why Mom doesn’t have the flashlights out,” Bridget said as she dashed across the rain-swept drive.
“Your mom is sleeping,” Mark snapped. “Be quiet in there, girls.”
Dave pushed the car door shut and walked alongside Ricky as they headed to the protection of the covered porch, passing Mark who had paused to lift the trunk lid.
“Mom’s gone!” Suzanna announced as she came back to the screen door and walked out onto the porch.
“She’s in bed,” Mark snapped with irritation.
“No, she isn’t,” Barbara announced coming to the door to look past Suzanna to Mark, as he slammed the trunk shut without removing the items he had picked up from the house.
“Goddamn it, get inside the house and find some flashlights!” he ordered.
Dave started to wonder about the mother also as he stood there on the steps listening to the exchange between Horn-Rims and the girls.
“She probably went to the ranger’s station for the activity schedule,” Horn-Rims suggested with certainty.
“I’ll go check the garage to see if the car is there,” Dave decided. If the car was gone, it would tell them a lot.
“Wait until we have a flashlight!” Mark called after him but Dave was already off of the steps and jogging the few paces across the driveway
and to the side door of the garage.
Both garage doors were down, but since he had been in the garage earlier in the day, he knew where the Fairlane would be parked. He entered the side door, shuffling his feet in the pitch blackness to be sure that he didn’t stumble, as he reached out in search of the car. He touched the back fender and then came around the rear and to the left side. He wanted to check the ignition for the keys and yanked open the driver’s door, when he did—the dome light came on.
The dead, lifeless eyes of Cindy Thompson appeared to be looking directly at him as she sat slumped behind the steering wheel. The scent of blood was thick in the air, wafting over him and filling his nostrils with the sickeningly sweet smell, a smell that he had always associated with hunting and a freshly killed and skinned rabbit. He stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, as his eyes lowered to her light-blue blouse which was saturated with her blood that had been flowing from a wound in her right temple that had run down the side of her face and onto her blouse. Coming from his initial shock, Dave recoiled and in a panic stumbled backward away from the car and then he was running for the door because it all came together for him in an instant of clarity and he had no doubt that Horn-Rims was responsible for this.
When he came out of the garage he saw that Horn-Rims and the kids were no longer standing on the back porch and he ran through a new wave of pouring rain, crossing the drive and heading for the cabin. He leapt up the three steps in a single bound and grabbed the screen door handle, heading for the dim glow of a flashlight beam he could see coming from the living room when he heard a scream.
“Daddy, no!” cried Suzanna in a panic and as Dave raced to see what was happening to her, he heard the muffled blast of gunfire and more screams and then the light was extinguished and without a thought about it, Dave plunged headlong into the blackness, moving silently, in search of the others.
Chapter 41
Fremont Gazette (continued from page one)
Hunts His Children
“I don’t know why I did it,” Thompson admitted.
Bridget was the first to be shot. She was found by authorities where she had fallen and died, shot in the head just past the kitchen in the hallway leading to the living room. Barbara was next, chased by her father into her bedroom and shot in the head as she cowered in the back of her clothes closet. The others ran for cover, dashing through the dark house, and Thompson systematically hunted them, one by one with his .38 special and later with his Winchester rifle, both modified with silencers. Thompson is a veteran police officer and did not shoot blindly but instead he was methodical and took his shots carefully.
Suzanna was next, executed as she lay upon the bathroom floor. Thompson said that she had run into the bathroom and had stumbled and fallen before she could close the door against him. She had pleaded with him for her life but he had pulled the trigger and then unloaded a second shot into her brain.
Ricky was shot in the back and found just inside the kitchen door of the cabin, apparently trying to escape with his brother Tim and finally Tim, shot twice in the head and found in a pool of blood about one hundred yards from the cabin.
I sobbed into my tissue and threw the newspaper article off of the bed. I looked at the clock on the nightstand: 1:00 p.m.
Dave appeared so very still and it had been ten hours since I’d awoken at 3:00 a.m. He had to be getting close to dehydration and I considered that I was going to need to make a decision about whether to call for emergency help because if he didn’t wake up soon, he was going to need, at the very least, some intravenous fluids. I started thinking about what I could possibly say to the authorities regarding his very apparent deep coma or worse, what if he never did wake up, what if he were to die—but I determinedly refused to let my thoughts go down that path, as I crawled over to sit by Dave’s side and touched his face which felt cool. I reached out and pulled the sheet over him and then added the lightweight comforter from the foot of the bed.
“Come on, baby, Dave listen to my voice, and come home to me. Please!” I whispered as I placed my lips against his cool forehead and a tear fell from my eye, tracing along his skin as it slid toward his hairline and I wiped it away.
My mind turned to thoughts, sudden glimpses of our too brief times together and I remembered the first day that I had met him, that first look at him standing on the porch of this old house with his beautiful smile, the trips that we had made gathering supplies in Omaha, the night at Stevie’s as we had bar-hopped in Fremont and I remember his eyes on me when I had seen him at the lounge in Des Moines as he had watched me from across the crowded bar. There was the street dance and that first dangerously intense kiss that we had shared, then the night that I had come to his house for dinner and we had made love for the first time and he had showed me finally and truly what a man is supposed to give to a woman—he had made me a woman that night. So many little moments but all of them didn’t add up to enough to last me my lifetime, not nearly enough. I wanted to love him and live with him for the rest of my life and grow old with him by my side. I lifted his head now, resting it in my lap and cradled him, smoothing his hair from his forehead and rocking him gently.
“Come home to me, Dave.”
***
As Dave moved quietly through the house, he could see a penlight beam as Horn-Rims stalked another victim. He heard a blast somewhere in the recesses of the bedrooms and a moment later, feet running and then he heard a body hit the floor. He could hear Suzanna pleading, “Daddy, please don’t!” and two muffled shots and then silence.
Dave moved to crouch behind a sofa and could hear frantic breathing close by his side; it was eleven-year-old Ricky. Dave reached out to take the little boy’s hand and then whispered into his ear, “We have to get out of this house.”
Ricky didn’t speak but held Dave’s hand tight, as together they came from behind the couch and started for the kitchen. They had to skirt around Bridgett’s body and Ricky gasped in shock and Dave could feel a shiver run through Ricky as the little boy unintentionally had stumbled over his sister’s arm, flung out in death. Dave tightened his grip on Ricky’s hand, urging him on.
They made it to the kitchen and Dave reached out to find the kitchen table in the dark and drug Ricky around the obstruction but before they could get to the screen door that was just ahead, a beam lighted the room as if day and a muffled shot rang out, and Ricky was yanked from his grasp as the blast hit the little boy, throwing his body against the screen door to block it open. Another shot and Dave could feel a burning pain explode in the side of his head and then the floor rushed up to meet him as his head slammed into the linoleum.
Stunned and nearly deafened from the percussion of the impact in the closed space of the kitchen, Dave struggled to lift his head and reached out a hand toward Ricky and fumbled in the dim light, finding his legs and shaking a foot which was limp and lifeless but Dave didn’t have time to be sure because he could hear Horn-Rims boots coming around the kitchen table and Dave staggered unsteadily to his feet and careened toward the open door. He leapt from the back steps and ran across the driveway toward the boat dock, thinking that if he could just get to the water then maybe he would have a chance to survive.
He glanced behind him to look for Horn-Rims and when he did he stumbled and fell ponderously onto the driveway, rolling to his back, just twenty yards short of his goal. The blood from his head wound was running into his eyes, mixing with the pouring rain, and he had just used the heels of his hands to clear his vision when he saw Horn-Rims just a few feet away and he watched him casually cock the Winchester rifle as he approached. There was a sudden crack of thunder that cut through the night and reverberated through the ground beneath him, from a lightning strike somewhere nearby but still Thompson kept coming.
Refusing to let the approaching evil be his last sight on earth, Dave closed his eyes and brought Torie’s face to mind as he fervently, reverently studied the soft blue-gray eyes that were the doors to her very soul, her beauti
ful smile and her sweet full lips that he would never taste again and he spoke quietly, out loud to her, one final message.
“I love you, Torie.”
Then the gravel crunched beneath Horn-Rims’ feet and he could sense the man towering over him before he felt the deadly cold muzzle of the rifle against his forehead at point-blank range and Dave braced himself for the impact and didn’t pray to God for courage to face his impending death but instead he whispered Torie’s name, just one last time.
Chapter 42
I entered the office and waited at the reception desk as the efficient secretary was busily fielding several phone calls.
“Reiner, Mitchell, and Jones, hold please. Reiner, Mitchell, and Jones, hold please.”
“Miss Mills, if you would have a seat for just one moment, I’ll let Mr. Mitchell know that you’re here,” she said with a courteous smile.
I took off my stocking cap and pea coat, tucking my hat and gloves into the sleeve of my coat and holding it over my arm; I took a seat in the stylishly decorated waiting area. I picked up a magazine and tried to find something that interested me to read but nothing caught my eye and I tossed it back onto the side table.
From my vantage point, I could see the frosted-glass door open, and John Sweeney with his wife Margaret came in, looking a bit lost.
“John! Margaret!” I called, waving my hand to get their attention.
“Hey, Torie, there you are. We had a little trouble finding a parking place. Glad we aren’t late.”