I was living in Carroll, Iowa, with my mom and two little brothers. My oldest sister was in college at BV. My dad had walked out when I was five. He was a busy businessman. He traveled sometimes, but it was never more than a month and he always came back. One time he left, and just didn’t come back. My mom didn’t struggle, though. She worked at Boeing and moved up in the rankings. One day Mom came home and announced that we’d be moving to Charleston, South Carolina. Then everything went downhill.
The packing started, and seemed to never end. My friends thought that I wanted to move and leave them, so they left me. I was so mad at my mom that I started taking everything out on her, and our relationship waned. My little brothers ran away from home four times. My older sister, Emily, knew we were moving but wasn’t caught up in the rush, and I was jealous, but she was my best friend, and still is, so I vented to her about everything.
Finally, moving day arrived and we trooped onto the plane. Once we got to Charleston, and drove to our new house in a rented Highlander, I was in such a funk I could barely breathe.
Then I saw the house. Huge, victorian, and absolutely ancient. I was in love. My natural instinct to explore took over my body. I ran inside and gaped at the wonder all around me.
“MOM, DRAKE, JOSH!!” I shouted at the others, “This is soo amazing!! Come look!”
“Sweetie, I’m so glad you like the neighbor’s house, but I don’t think they’ll appreciate you just barging in like that!” Mom yelled to me.
“Oh, whoops,” I couldn’t even try to hide the disappointment in my voice.
“Hah!! I’m just kidding, this one is ours!”
“Seriously? With how we’ve been? Nice.” I rolled my green-gray eyes at her.
“Oh grow up, you!” Mom sighed. I sighed back and creeped upstairs. Looking around, I notice that a door was propped open and had another staircase leading to a third floor. I walked into a bedroom, put my bag down on the bleak carpet, and walked back over to the other flight of stairs. I cautiously peeked around the door up the dank stairwell.
This part of house reeked of depression. I crept up the stairway and looked around the attic I entered. Dust motes danced around the room in the soft afternoon sunlight that filtered through a grimy old window. Boxes were snuggled into a corner next to an enormous wooden trunk.
“Wow...” The room was huge, if it wasn’t so clearly an attic, I would have thought it was another floor for more bedrooms.
But that wasn’t what caught my attention. It was the intricate painting laying against the far wall that made me gasp for air. I scurried over to the piece of art and carefully examined it. It was a water paint of the house. The colors of the stained glass window that spotted the house were so vivid it seemed to have been painted yesterday. The painting was so immaculately detailed that I could barely breath.
“Rik!! Come down for lunch! Where are you??” Mom bellowed from the floor below. “What are you doing up-woah. That is beautiful.”
“I know...” I whispered. For some odd reason, I felt the need to whisper.
“I made your favorite for lunch, you should come down and eat.” I nodded to my mom and followed her to the kitchen. Which was ginormous. We sat at a large oval table and ate homemade mac n’ cheese. When lunch was over, Drake and Josh went to get lost in the mansion(seriously, it’s that big!) and I went back upstairs to get the painting so we could hang it up.
When I moved the painting over, a latch on the wall was flipped, and a small trap door fell open. I set the artwork off to the side and peered into the small, dark, musty space. To my surprise a stack of over a dozen books sat in front of me. I pulled one out and looked in the inside flap. Property of Rebecca Smith was written in scrolling script.
“Huh?” Mom had said the last family to live here didn’t have any girls. I looked in the others and saw many other names. Chelsea Winters, Erika Wine, Billy Jean Lakes, Rikki Bond.
“Omigosh!!” I squeaked. Why is my name on this?? I thought. Worry and fear spiked my imagination into thinking it was some kind of stalker-book. I shivered. I opened it and read the first page. Then it hit me. These are diaries! Duh. Think before you panic, Rik. Just a coincidence. Then I wondered, Uhm, why are there so many? And from so many different people?
“This is weird...” I whispered to myself.
Dinner that night proved to also be weird. Mom told us why this was the house that we moved into. We’d moved into it because it was our father’s home.
When my father left us, I was utterly heartbroken. I was only five and the twins hadn’t even turned one, yet. No note. No message. No checks. No letters. He just vanished from our lives. Completely.
After a couple of years, I learned to hate my father. If my mom hadn’t become Corporate Manager when she did, we would be living in a shack apartment and she would have been struggling to raise us. A father shouldn’t just disappear from the face of the earth like that.
I was brooding all the way up to my bedroom. Which didn’t feel like my own, and instead like my father’s, which made everything worse.
I decided to go to the public library and look up some information on the ladies I found in the cupboard. I walked because the new house was close enough and I needed the fresh South Carolinian air to chill me out.
I saw a strange man in a long overcoat watch me from the Starbucks across the street, which was strange because it was summer. In South Carolina. HOT. Something in his eyes made him kind of familiar, but in the “familiar-stranger” type of way because I’d definitely never seen this guy before. I thought.
At the library, I got on a computer and researched each and everyone of the names I saw. All 17 of them. And what I discovered chilled me to the bone. I couldn’t stop the sadness from stabbing my heart over and over again. I couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down my face. Each of the girls was brutally raped and murdered in the years 1985-1995. Their bodies found mangled and torn in different places all over Charleston. They were all under the age of 18. The first one, Rikki, was 14. Like me.
I had to leave. I shutdown the computer and gathered my notes. I went to check out, but the librarian stopped me.
“Hey, I saw you crying.” I nodded. “I know it’s probably not my business, but strangers are easy to confide in sometimes.”
“17,” I breathed. “17 girls. Raped and Murdered. Right here in Charleston.” I burst out bawling again, “All of them, cold cases!” I looked up at him for the first time, tears dripping off of my chin. His face had blanched as I was speaking. He had a paper name tag pinned to his striped green polo that said Matthew Smith.
“The Charleston Girls. You must be new here, everybody who’s been around knows,” Matthew Smith whispered. “Nobody ever discovered what happened to them. The last one, Rebecca, was my daughter,” his voice cracked and tears leaked out of his closed eyes.
“Oh! I’m so sorry,” I said. I truly couldn’t stand this anymore. “I have to go home, I’m sorry.” I rushed out before more moisture could escape my eyes.
“Bye,” Matthew called after me, sadness dripping from his voice like the tears off his face. I felt so terrible that he experienced the loss first-hand.
I raced home and flung myself onto my bed. Whomever hurt these girls kept their diaries as trophies. Trophies to reward him of his filthy deeds. The jerk even kept them in a flipping trophy case! Whoever did this was going to pay.
The next night, we went to dinner at the Peninsula Grill. The same creep from the library was there. This time he was wearing a long brown cloak. Okay, jeez, was this guy trying to be super conspicuous? Although he still had that familiar-stranger look about him. It was only the second time I had seen him. I thought that it was purely coincidental and that he was just that crazy homeless guy nobody knew about. But seeing him reminded me of the library and my search results.
After going out, it was too late to go back to the library to do some more research, so I pulled out my Mac and fired it up. I pulled up a site for cold cases. I searched Charleston, South Carolina. Hits popped up like moles from the ever popular arcade game. Eesh. “The po-po ain’t so slick here, huh?” Then I read that this was since the early 1900’s. I narrowed my search to 1985-1995. There were a lot less hits this time. In fact, the 17 girls were the only ones. I looked through all of them.
The reports were all the same. A girl goes missing. She’s found days later in the woods. The girls older than 13 were found with a slit throat and girls under 12 were strangled. Each had multiple bruises and signs of torture and rape. There was no DNA anywhere on anyone. I needed to look into the city databases if I wanted more information.
The next three days it rained. Mom was at work and I had no way to the library. Crap. But on the first day, well, something scary happened. Remember the “crazy homeless guy that nobody knew about?” Well, he showed up at my house. Like he rang the doorbell. From my front porch. At my house. I swear it was the creepiest thing that had ever happened to me.
“Uhm, hello?” I said hesitantly. This guy was seriously freaking me out. I looked around and made sure Drake and Josh weren’t anywhere close.
“Hi? Is this the Bond residence?” the strange man asked. He had a beard that looked like a rose bush gone wrong, a twitchy cheek, a face that truly deserved the nickname “crater-face” (You know, what Kenickie called the Scorpions leader in Grease?), and a pair of seriously shifty eyes. Hello, drugs.
“Yeah, can I help you, sir?” I wanted this guy out of here.
“No, no, I’ll be on my way. Buh bye now!” The weirdo scurried away. That was super strange. I closed and locked the door.
On the third day, I looked out my bedroom window and saw him standing in the back yard looking up at my window. I screamed and called the twins upstairs and told them to go to the toy room, which, thankfully, had no windows. I locked the door and played with them for several hours until mom came home.
The next day was finally sunny. I packed Rebecca’s diary in my backpack and headed to the library. When I got there, Matthew was working again, today in a blue polo. I walked up to him and pulled out the notebook. Without handing it to him, I said, “I have something you might want.” I gave Mr. Smith Rebecca’s journal. His eyes widened, his face paled, and he clutched at his heart.
“Where did you find this?!” He whisper-screamed.
“It was in my attic with 16 other journals. That’s what made me come down here Monday. I found them in a small compartment in the wall,” my voice twisted in disgust as I told him the next part. “In the killers ‘trophy case.’”
“Did you find anything else?” Duh!! Why hadn’t I thought of looking for more when that cursed door flung open?
“Agh!! Duh! Stupid, stupid. I didn’t even think of that. Hold on.” I raced back home and grabbed the rest of the diaries. I scrambled up to the attic and found the latch that opened the little invisible door. I flipped it and the door fell open. I looked inside, and to my surprise, found many more objects hidden in the back.
“Omigosh.” There were bits of clothing, jewelry, a watch, and when I looked underneath it all, several sheets of paper. I picked them up and gasped in horror. They were pictures. I’m sure you can figure out what they were pictures of. This little cut out in the wall truly is the murderer’s “trophy case.” I looked closer at the images and recognised the man in them.
It was my father.
I shook my head in horror and felt the wetness of fresh tears leak over my cheeks. That couldn’t have been it. I hated my dad, I thought he was terrible, but not that terrible! I wanted to curl up into a ball and cry for days and days. But justice had to prevail.
I packed everything into my bag and booked it back to the library.
“These, I found these,” my voice was thick with emotion. Matthew stared at the pictures for a few minutes.
“We are going to turn James in,” he said.
“How do you know my father?” Shock rippled through me.
“James Montero is your father? He’s crap. Wears trenchcoats all day and hasn’t shaved for about two years.” Oh, my God.
“Does he have a nervous tick in his cheek?”
“Yes,” Mr. Smith grumbled. I had to keep him calm so we could get the things to the police. I couldn’t breathe.
“He’s been stalking me,” I squeaked. “I thought he looked like a familiar-stranger, I didn’t recognize him at all-we have to go to the police right now.”
“Excuse me, but you won’t be going anywhere, Rik,” a scratchy voice from behind me made me jump. I slowly turned around, already knowing but needing to make sure.
“Hi, Dad,” I said in a small voice.
“Hey, sweetie, miss me?” That jab made me lose it.
“MISS YOU? I was devastated! Mom was devastated! You left your wife with newborn babies and a kindergartener, James! Sent divorce papers in the mail! You’re lucky I even have the ability to miss anything now! You took our hearts and tore them to shreds! You can’t just waltz in nine years later and say ‘Hey, sweetie, miss me?’ Then, of course, I move into your old house and find out you raped and murdered 17 girls. 17 FREAKING GIRLS! ” I was screeching now, but my voice dropped to a whisper, “and you say ‘miss me?’” I was going to kill him. I was going to launch myself at him and rip his throat out with his own hands. My voice was low, deep, and shaking with rage, “17 innocent, young girls. 17 innocent, happy families were left with mangled remains of their loved one.”
While I had been talking, James had reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a gun. The scary kind that police carry around in movies. He pointed it right between my eyes.
“How did you figure it out, Rikki? How did you discover the horrible truth about your dear old dad?”
“Simple, I got evidence. From your trophy case,” I began, but didn’t have a chance to end, James had started towards me with the gun.
“I don’t really care, Rikki. If I cared, I wouldn’t have left.” Okay, that really stung.
“Well I do. Tell me why, James. Why did you rape all of those girls, and then decide to settle down, and then leave again?” I couldn’t bear to call him dad. He didn’t fit that description anymore.
“I enjoyed the power. Those petty females did everything I told them to, and I liked the risk. Then I thought that I was all risked out, that I had fallen in love. Turns out I wasn’t quite finished. HAHAA!” the laugh that escaped his open mouth was shrill and ear-piercing.
By now he had become level with me and had the gun against my head. I was trembling with panic. Where had Matthew gone? Stall!
“Did Mom know about them?” I asked quietly.
“Nope,” he replied. I was mortified but partially relieved. Keep going...
“You wouldn’t actually kill your daughter, would you?”
“Why not? I killed 38 other people’s daughters. I could do it again, what’s two more added to the mix?”
“Please, no, don’t kill me,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry, honey, but you know too much. You have to die so that I can survive! Think of it like the circle of life.”
CRASH!! James crumpled to the floor. I looked up and saw Matthew standing there with a shattered flower vase. As he went to hit James more, I tried to stopped him.
“No, if you kill him, you’ll go to jail and justice will not have been served! Think of Rebecca!” I shouted the last part right as he was about to hit James a third time. Matthew looked up, dropped the bloody vase, and caved in on himself, sobbing.
I pulled out my cell phone and called the police. They came and saw the mess. They immediately put everyone in cuffs and made me tell the story about a million and one times. They examined the evidence and concluded that it was enough. Mom came and got me and took me home. Mr. Smith’s wife came and heard the story, too. The minute I said Rebecca’s name, she started bawling.
For a few weeks, everything was trials and the news. We heard from siblings, parents, and friends of the the Charleston Girls. I cried a lot during that time period. James was put on trial and sentenced to death.
A year later, we were moved back to Carroll, Iowa. I loved the big Victorian house, but it had too many memories there, even if they weren’t mine. And I was glad to be back in a familiar town, with familiar faces.
Another year later, and you have me right here telling you this. So I say to you, “Count your blessings you’ve never had a gun put to your head.”