Chasing Clowns: A Novel (Girl Clown Hatchet Suspense Series Book 2) Page 23

  Chloe reached over and placed a hand over Alicia’s. “What happened was horrible. No one should ever have to endure what you did. You had every right to be afraid, and leaving a dangerous situation was the right choice. The only choice. You had to do what you did.”

  Alicia glanced up to Chloe and met her eyes. “Thank you. You’re the first one I’ve told since—”

  “I understand.”

  Alicia sniffed, relieved to have unburdened her terrible secret.

  Chloe said, “Did your boyfriend ever hurt you?”

  “No, goodness, no. He was a good person. Gentle. Just mixed up with the wrong crowd, I guess. He never really fit in with them. I mean, he acted tough, but I never saw him hurt anybody. The leader, Wolf, was a criminal, but a pretty decent guy, you know. Made everyone behave, keep in line. There was this general…” Alicia hesitated for the right word. “understanding that women were the gang’s property, but no one ever touched me. No one showed an interest—except Otis. And I think his obsession stemmed from jealousy of Thomas’ relationship with Wolf more than anything.”

  “Thomas was your boyfriend?”

  “Yep.” Alicia sniffed again, reached for a Kleenex box on the coffee table.

  Chloe said, “You say he was close to Wolf?”

  “Yeah, Wolf was practically his father. Thomas had joined up at a young age. His Uncle forced him.” Alicia blew her nose. Serene giggled and reached for the Kleenex.

  “Is Serene his?”

  “Yes,” Alicia answered.

  Serene patted Alicia on the face as if comforting her.

  Chloe let out her breath and bit her lip, chewing on it a moment, before deciding to tell Alicia.

  Alicia said, “What is it, Officer Jackson?”

  Chloe said, “Maybe have a drink of your coffee first.”

  Alicia reached for her coffee mug, her eyes never leaving Chloe’s as she took a sip and set it down. “I’m ready.”

  Chloe said, “I think you ought to know that Thomas misses you and Serene very much.”

  Alicia leaped to her feet. “How do you—Does he know I’m here? Does Otis know I’m here? Oh. Oh. God. I’ve got to leave.” She touched the electric blue spikes in her hair. Her eyes were crazed and wild like a frightened animal.

  Chloe stood with her and touched Alicia on her elbow. “It’s okay. No one else knows who you are. Thomas is my parolee, and he asked me to try and find out what happened to you. He thinks you’re….”

  “Dead?” asked Alicia.

  “Mmm.” Chloe nodded.

  “I don’t understand. Your parolee?”

  Chloe said, “He knew that your disappearance had to do with someone in the gang. After you and Serene had disappeared, he started asking questions. Too many, apparently. Someone planted five pounds of coke on his bike and tipped off the cops.”

  Alicia frowned. “Damn.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t know that. They sent him to prison?” Alicia sat down again, and Serene clapped her hands like it was a game.

  “The judge went light on him since it was a first-time offense. He got out in a few months on good behavior.”

  Alicia had tears in her eyes once more. “But still. That must have been awful for him. For everyone to turn on him like that.”

  “You’re his family, Alicia. You and Serene.” Chloe put a hand on hers again. “He’d like to see you again. So would your parents. They’d be so relieved if…”

  Alicia raised her baby blues and shook off Chloe’s hand. “But what about that gas station I robbed? Won’t I go to jail? What would happen to Serene if—”

  Chloe said, “The cop who wrote the report fucked it up big time. I think even if they tried to pin you with it, they couldn’t.”

  “Hmm…” Alicia buried her face into Serene’s tufts of fine baby hair. “So, I’m not in trouble with the law?”

  Chloe shook her head. “I think if you could reach out to Thomas—”

  “No, no, I can’t.” Alicia sniffed, lifted her head and wiped a tear away. “I don’t want anyone to know.”

  Again, Chloe was struck by her face. The youth of it. She was so young.

  “If Thomas is Serene’s father, he has a right to meet his daughter—to know she is alive.”

  “I know. But. Not now. Just not now. No one can know about me.”

  Chloe tilted her head to the side. “You say you worked at Carnival Circus?”

  “I did, but, um, I work at a bank now as a teller. It’s only part time.”

  Chloe asked, “Under a false name?”

  Alicia shrugged. “I take Jacob, uh, Serene, to the library for toddler time on Tuesdays. I met another girl; our babies are the same age. Her Dad works at the Spindler Credit Union. He pulled some strings for me. I gave them fake identification and references that Sammy had made for me, but they didn’t check them or anything.”

  “Wow.” Chloe was both shocked that Alicia would tell her all this—and that she was able to pull it off. “Look. I know you’re upset and you can take the time you need, but, eventually…” Chloe let the sentence drift.

  Alicia nodded in silence; then she looked up as if she wanted to say something, but held her tongue instead.

  Chloe said, “Is there anything else?”

  Alicia shook her head and glanced away.

  Chloe took out her card. “Here’s my card for when you’re ready to straighten things out or for anything else. Anything else at all.”

  Alicia took her card. “You won’t tell Thomas?”

  Chloe said, “No, not if you don’t want me too, but, he does miss you very much.”

  Chloe stood, and Alicia walked her to the door. Alicia moved lighter now—as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. But the young woman still withheld something. She had shared a lot today, which meant she trusted Chloe. Alicia would tell her when she was ready.

  Alicia opened the door for Chloe.

  Chloe stepped to the porch, then turned and asked, “Have you noticed there have been a lot of clowns around town lately?”

  Alicia swallowed hard and ran her hand over her spiked hair. “Oh, um, n-not really. I mean, it’s almost Halloween, right?”

  Chloe eyeballed her. “You sound hesitant.”

  Alicia shrugged. “I mean, I guess, I’ve seen a few of the guys around all dressed up, but,” The words wouldn’t come from her mouth, then she said, “I saw on the news this morning, they’ve found two dead girls hacked to pieces. They think it was clowns who did it.”

  Hmmm… Chloe nodded. “I know you used to work with clowns at Carnival Circus, but please be careful. Don’t go out at night alone.”

  Alicia said, “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Worry? I know of at least three people who have lost sleep every single night for the past nine months over you. You matter Alicia, so does Serene. You have family that loves you. I hope you understand that.”

  Alicia blushed and looked away.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  Alicia nodded and shut the door.

  Chloe glanced back toward the old house as she started up the Vic. Alicia was watching her through the living room blinds. She let them snap close when she saw Chloe watching.

  Chloe reached for her commuter mug out of habit. Her coffee was cold, but thank God Alicia Meyers case was not. Far from it. Alicia was scared and alone, but she would come around.

  It was midafternoon. Chev and Shayla would be getting out of school any moment. It was their day to walk home.

  Chloe had read the bulletin at the office about the young women’s axed bodies left in the ditch. How clowns had been seen in the alleys and down by Spindler river.

  A flash of crimson drew her eye from the road. A red balloon floated toward the sky. The sunlight reflected off the shiny surface like lava.

  Balloons, she remembered balloons. A chill crept down her spine. A premonition.

  At the stoplight, she pulled into the left lane and flipped on
her left blinker. Chloe would pick up the kids while they walked. Just as a precaution.

  Her cell rang. It wasn’t the normal ring tone, but shrill, like the emergency broadcast alert, making Chloe jump and almost swerve into the right lane. When she checked her phone, she could feel the color drain from her face. Shayla’s pic showed up above the number.

  Her step-daughter never called her. “Hello?”

  Shayla was crying. “I’ve been calling Dad. It just goes to voicemail.”

  “Oh, honey, what’s wrong?”

  “This clown. It’s really, really scary, Mom. It followed me home from school. It had this hatchet and…and…”

  Chloe could hear the teen throwing up.

  “Are you at home? Where’s Chev?”

  “No, I’m at my boyfriend’s house. I don’t know where Chev is. Please come and get me?”

  “I’ll be right there.” Chloe hung up, grabbed a business card from her notebook and dialed the number.

  “Trooper Hanks.”

  Chloe glanced at the oncoming traffic and flipped a U-turn in the intersection. “Donny, it’s Chloe. I need your help.”

  “I just got on shift. What’s up?”

  Chloe explained what she needed before hanging up and calling Tanya. Chloe slapped a light on the roof of the Crown Vic and zipped across town, almost hitting a clown who walked on stilts across a sidewalk.

  He fell over as she passed. Chloe watched it in the rearview mirror.

  She waited for the butterflies to hit her stomach, the black abyss to consume her, but it was different this time. Instead of a bleak abyss, Chloe felt a river of red-hot anger building.

  A volcano.

  And it felt good.

  Along with the anger, came a voice in the back of her head, whispering to the beat of a drum….

  Here they come,

  Here they come,

  Here they come.

  22

  A Case of John Wayne Gacy

  Donny exited off the highway, flying toward the connecting streets between Spindler Elementary and Chloe’s home. He had a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach. She’d said it wasn’t just any clown that had been stalking her kids, no, she’d said it was a—

  Clown with a hatchet.

  As a state trooper, Donny hadn’t dealt with the criminal side of the Carnival Circus clowns other than handing out speeding tickets and DUI’s, usually the domestic violence calls, drugs, disturbing the peace, etc… was left to city and county cops.

  He hadn’t thought of the clowns much in years— the Carnival Circus clowns dealt in the drug business, most knew that—but seeing Chloe the other night brought back a feeling of déjà vu. He had never forgotten the day that Erin almost drowned. Donny had frozen when the lifeguard had dragged the limp little girl from the water, but when Chloe had shown up, and it looked like everything was going to be okay, something else had caught his eye.

  A clown was handing Sharon a balloon over the fence. There was something awful about the clown, more than just its creepy pink bunny ears or the black and white face with a jagged zig-zag down the middle. Donny had this terrible feeling that Sharon was in danger. Not necessarily that the clown was going to kidnap her in broad daylight, but something was terribly wrong.

  That was when he’d seen the hatchet it was hiding behind its back. He thought it was going to…but it didn’t.

  It was after Sharon accepted the balloon that the clown had looked over at Donny. The expression on its face spelled caught.

  It’s large red grin grew impossibly wider. It brought its long gloved finger to its impossibly wide red grin: Shhhhhh.

  It tiptoed away slowly, comically, when Donny had screamed and pushed through the crowd while Chloe and the lifeguard argued over Erin.

  After he’d handed Sharon over to Chloe, he had felt so shaken up that he’d had run toward the bathroom to throw up.

  He hadn’t made it and instead had puked all the colors of the rainbow into a fake palm tree container in the pool lobby. The staff was out trying to control the commotion at the pool, so no one saw Donny commit the shameful deed, though they surely found the mess later.

  Kara Leigh found him shaking and shivering on the lobby’s tile floor. She’d helped him up, and they had left together. He had never talked about what he’d seen that day, not even to Kara Leigh. She had seen the clown too, but she hadn’t seen the hatchet or the pure evil on the clown’s face. She didn’t know what the clown was capable of—not the way Donny did.

  In the following days, he felt many things: guilt for distracting Chloe, shame at neglecting to watch the twins in the pool, regret for how had fallen for Kara Leigh’s tears and took responsibility for all her troubles, but the most overwhelming emotion of all was fear.

  He was afraid of the clown with the hatchet.

  Donny had stayed at home the rest of that summer, stewing in fear and guilt. Kara Leigh had tried to get him to smoke pot, but he felt he didn’t deserve the relief the drug would bring. Weasel and Kelly tried to get him out of the house and invited him to the movies, but he refused to go. One year later, when they’d been killed in a hit and run on the highway by a drunk semi-driver, Donny had wished he’d gone out with Weasel and Kelly, that he’d spent the whole year hanging out with them. Their death was why he had decided to apply for state trooper after completing his BA in Political Science at Western University.

  There was no way that Donny could have known that Weasel and Kelly would have been taken so suddenly, and in the way his own father had died. No, that particular summer—and the months following—had been about facing his shadows. Only by acknowledging the truth did Donny even begin to process the way he felt, and the truth was this: He was afraid. He was a coward. It was his fault a little girl almost died. Chloe had carried the burden and guilt of Erin’s near death, and he had let her.

  He had been so ashamed that he could never bring himself to tell Chloe he was sorry, that it had been his fault and not hers.

  When Mama Nola committed suicide, and Chloe left with her Aunt, Donny knew the chance had passed to apologize.

  He avoided clowns as much as possible since that day. And on occasion, when he pulled over Carnival Circus clowns for DUI’s, he’d found himself especially harsh on them. Donny couldn’t help himself, the only thing he disliked more than a drunk driver was a clown.

  His old fears had been triggered when local authorities found the axed bodies of the street girls. He thought of the clown with the hatchet from that horrible day at the pool, and the night sweats came back—the nightmares. Donny wasn’t afraid for his life, but for Kara Leigh and the baby. They could only afford to live on the bad side of town.

  There were other things that could have triggered that fear—such as Thomas mentioning a future plot of bank robbery by Carnival Circus thugs, and the Harvest Parade (sponsored by Carnival Circus) was this weekend, then Halloween coming up. All of this would have made Donny feel uneasy, but there was more to it than that. The local cops kept talking about the recent clown activity in town, the way that the clowns seemed to be gathering—congregating—like locust.

  The captain of the SPD was good friends with the Mayor, who, in turn had business dealings with Carnival Circus. Street cops were uncomfortable with the possible connection between clown sightings and the axed girls. They wanted to investigate, but the captain wouldn’t have any of it. If the two were going to be connected, it would have to be with an agency outside of Spindler.

  Donny had tried to explain his suspicions to his supervisor, Wiles, but he had laughed every time clowns had been brought up, saying, What? You think we got a case of John Wayne Gacy in little ol’ Spindler? We’re State Troopers, Hanks. Our job is to catch the real bad guys. Stay out of the local drama clubs. Get out there and do the job I hired you to do.

  Donny flashed his lights and turned right at an intersection by Super Dumee-Dee Food Mart, and spotted two clowns in the grocery store parking lot. One was walking on its hands. The
other held its feet as they moved toward the store.

  They were both dressed in rainbow stripes with unicorn horns attached to the tops of their color heads like party hats.

  Eerie.

  A toddler clung to his mother and pointed as the clowns passed them. The mother ushered her boy back into their minivan.

  Donny didn’t blame them one bit. He crossed a four-way stop and passed Spindler Elementary. He slowed as he turned on an interconnecting street that would lead to Chloe’s home, and looked for a kid in a green jacket and black tennis shoes.

  It was sunny but cold with surprisingly few children out. The few he did spot were with an older sibling or a parent.

  Donny headed toward Chloe’s home address when a burst of color from an alley caught his eye. The tires squealed as he slammed on his brakes and slammed the car into reverse.

  A little boy in a green jacket stood half way down the alley. He held a backpack with his head cocked to the side. The boy appeared to be talking to someone.

  Donny squinted his eyes and spotted what he had seen when first driving by. A clown half concealed in the shadows of the dumpster was talking to the boy.

  Donny pulled the car into the alley, but it was too narrow to fit the car. He leaped out and called for the boy. “Chev? Chev Jackson?”

  The boy turned around with surprise at hearing his name.

  He yelled, “Stop!” at the clown, but it was already jetting down the alley in his big red clown shoes. Pink, worn bunny ears bounced up and down as it ran.

  23

  Uktena

  SHE’D SEEN CLOWNS ALL THE WAY there. Clowns spun circles on street corners. Clowns climbed telephone poles and leapt off. Clowns hid behind bushes holding hatchets. They all looked the same. A black and white face split in half by a lightning bolt. They wore bunny ears and held hatchets and balloons.

  This was it. Chloe was going crazy.

  She thought the flashbacks would stop when she learned of her past. But they hadn’t. In fact, it felt worse.