The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (free e reader txt) 📗

I started scanning the newspapers from six years ago — the ones my mom had hidden from me — looking for information related to Amy’s murder.

I don’t know why I suddenly wanted more details. But having the history of Dunford at my fingertips — all those hundreds and hundreds of newspapers — made me think about all the information Mom had kept from me during the weeks following Amy’s death. Maybe it was the awareness that Ricky had a disturbing reputation for hanging out with younger girls that was chafing at me, but I was seized with an overwhelming desire to know the specifics about what had happened without the protection of my childhood naivety. I wanted actual facts.

It was difficult to control the microfiche viewer. At first, I kept zooming across the micro pages so fast that the content was nothing more than a purple blur. Eventually, I figured out how to slow the magnifier down so I could search systematically. The first article about Amy was from the day after her disappearance, when everyone was still looking for her. When everyone was still hopeful. There were oblique references to me, the only witness, and what I had seen. My unsatisfactory and vague descriptions of a blue car were trumpeted as potentially the most useful piece of information in the search.

The best clue we have to go on, Detective Armstrong was quoted as saying.

Further down, but still on the front page of that day’s edition, there was a small blurb about a fire at the Boelen mill.

Flames ravaged the abandoned mill yesterday evening as firefighters fought to control the blaze. The smoke could be seen from as far away as the water tower on the north side of town. Although slated for demolition, the mill …

I scrolled ahead to the next day’s paper. The details around the discovery of the body were grisly. It was no wonder Mom didn’t want me reading about it. Amy’s head hadn’t been cut off, despite what Gabby Kloster might have said in grade four, but Mom had been right about her braid.

The body of Amy Nessor, the six-year-old girl who went missing from Dunford two days ago, was found less than a kilometre from her home on Lindell Drive. Her partially unclothed body was discovered in a ravine that runs perpendicular to her street. Police had searched the ravine earlier in the week and found nothing suspicious. “Her body was obviously placed there after our initial search,” said a spokesperson for the police department. He went on to describe the condition of the body, saying, “Everything was intact, except one of her braids had been sheared off at the scalp.”

“She was wearing Mickey Mouse hair ties,” her mother Janet is quoted as telling the officers in her original description of her missing daughter. “She wanted to wear her Mickey Mouse elastics on Tuesday.” The braid was not recovered with the body.

Mom’s whispered conversation on the phone about sick souvenirs came back to me. My tongue was thick and dry in my mouth. I could barely swallow, but I kept reading.

Preliminary reports suggest that Amy Nessor was strangled with yellow twine. “The kind you can buy at any hardware store,” said the police spokesperson. “There were fibres of it in the skin around her neck, although no twine was found with the body.” Her ankles and wrists were bound with loosely tied lengths of rope. Her body was arranged under a spirea bush “… as though her killer had posed her there like a doll,” said the spokesperson.

She was partially naked when they found her, wearing only her underwear, although according to the police, there was no evidence she had been interfered with sexually. Possibly the killer had taken her clothes in an effort to remove any evidence that might lead to his/her identification. I took a deep breath then, feeling something hot and angry smouldering in my chest.

But I didn’t stop scrolling through the archived newspapers. The front-page spreads with their oversized photos of a smiling and gap-toothed Amy, and then the progressively shorter and less-emotional clips did nothing to assuage my suspicions; instead they dredged up my old fears.

I sat at the microfiche machine in the library reading about Amy’s braid and the Mickey Mouse hair ties and the yellow twine and an anger ballooned inside me that was so intense it made my teeth hurt. When I left the library, I walked down the locker-lined hall where Steve Marky, an entitled asshole who usually stood out by the front doors of the school smoking and whistling under his breath at all the girls, made the mistake of catching my attention. He cocked an eyebrow at me and before his mouth could form whatever insult I imagined he was about to utter, I slammed my fist into his face.

His head snapped back and hit the locker behind him with a satisfying smack. Stunned, he turned to face me and I hit him again. This time I caught him square in the nose. As the blood poured down his face, dripping onto his white T-shirt, I said, in a low growl that I hardly recognized as my own voice, “Don’t fucking look at me like that.”

PART THREE

CHAPTER ONE

•

I STARTED TO GO DOWNHILL in grade ten. Walter and I were sitting in the cafeteria one day, eating French fries out of a soggy cardboard carton, when some chick walked past our table and purposefully elbowed Walter in the back.

“What’s your problem?” I called after her, getting to my feet.

She spun around slowly, an expression of mock amusement dancing across her face. Walter was trying to get me to sit down, but I knocked his hand away and approached the bitch who obviously thought she could get away with shoving people for no reason. People she probably thought were beneath her.

“You think it’s funny knocking into someone like that?” I asked. “Does it make you feel like a big strong girl?”

“Cool it,