“As you can well guess, Jacob took a little ribbing from his asshole buddies, that here was a girl, a city girl, a girl younger than him and far less experienced, shooting like she’d been born with an over-under in her hands and teethed on 12-gauge shells.”
“He didn’t like it I take it?”
“It cheesed him right the fuck off. Especially when the girl came back every practice and improved her scores. And her father, who was an airplane mechanic making decent money working on bush pilot planes and wilderness guide tour planes, bought her a brand-spanking-new, top-of-the-line Remington 12-guage over-under skeet gun so she’d have her own. A nicer gun than any of the other kids on the team had or could likely ever hope to afford. Some of the kids didn’t even have their own guns, but her dad wanted her to have the best he could afford for her because, for once, she’d quit acting like an unholy fucking brat and was finally enjoying Buttfuck Acres, Montana.”
Ellis smiled. “A bribe?”
“More like ensuring parental sanity. Even bought the girl a full reloader setup, which really made her a cool kid with most of the kids on the team.”
“Except Jacob.”
“You catch on quick, chief.” She looked down at her hands again. “The girl was on the team six months when she won her first state juniors competition,” she quietly said. “Jacob choked. Windy day, he missed two birds in one round, high house four and low six. His father was not pleased.”
“Asshole perfectionist dad?”
“Oh, yeah. With his sights on one day running for the office of sheriff of Buttfuck Acres.”
She looked across the grounds to where someone with a small front end loader was racking cases of clays in a trap house. Her voice turned quiet. “Small town. So unlike New Jersey. The quintessential small town where no one locks their houses or their cars, the one stoplight in the town permanently blinks yellow, and the only likely traffic jam is if someone’s moving stock from one field to another across a county road.
“The girl actually grew to love where she lived. New school year started. She ignored the assholes at school, because at least on the skeet team, she had a place. The others looked up to her, even older kids. Kids were asking her for pointers instead of Jacob, asking her to pull for them if the coach wasn’t there, or they wanted an extra practice, asking her to spot them to see what they were doing wrong, asking her to help them reload or pattern their guns or whatever.”
“Jacob wasn’t cool anymore.”
“Not with those kids he wasn’t.” She went quiet for a moment. He didn’t interrupt her, because despite his certainty what was coming, he hoped he was wrong.
Hoped the ending of the story would turn out better than he suspected it would.
“The girl’s mom went to work as a receptionist at a dentist’s office in a town a few miles away. She got off work fairly early, usually home by three or so. On that day, she’d stopped by the grocery store first. So when the girl got home from school after two o’clock, and it wasn’t a practice day, she had the house all to herself.
“Someone knocked on the door. Girl went to go answer it, found it was Jacob himself. He pushed his way in and…” Sachi took a deep, shuddering breath. “You’re an attorney. You connect the dots.”
He nodded.
“The girl had tried to run. Made it as far as the dining room in the back of the house. It was right at the end of the attack that the mother showed up, but Jacob had been too busy…doing his thing that he hadn’t heard her.”
Sachi’s face paled. “She started screaming,” she quietly said. “Dropped the groceries she had in her arms and started beating on his head. The mother was a tiny woman. He shoved her against a wall and started hitting her. They both fell to the floor, him on top of her. He was three of her. He had his hands around her neck to choke her. Wouldn’t stop.”
She took another deep breath. Her gaze dropped to her hands. “The girl picked up the first thing she laid her hands on, which was a large can of baked beans that had fallen from the grocery bags.”
Her hands clenched into trembling fists as her voice dropped to a whisper. “And she hit him in the back of the head as hard as she could to get him off her mom. Again. And again. And again. Even when he rolled off the mom and his arms and legs started jerking, she hit him again. And again. And again. And she screamed. Then finally the can was so dented and slick from blood that she lost it and it rolled across the floor.”
She wouldn’t look up, her face tortured agony. “The girl finally managed to call 911. Guess who the responding officer was?”
“Oh, shit.”
She closed her eyes for a minute. “Autopsy said Jacob broke the mother’s neck. Jacob’s father tried to make it look like we…like the girl and the mother had attacked his son, who was still alive, by the way. But the EMTs who responded immediately called for more law enforcement backup. Fortunately, they could tell what really happened. Especially when they caught him in the act of trying to choke the girl.”
When she looked up, Ellis saw her blue eyes were too bright, as if unshed tears lurked near the surface. “Jacob lingered on life support for nearly a month. The father was fired and brought up on an array of various charges, including assault, attempted murder, all those lovely things. Jacob’s mother finally had life support pulled because he was brain dead and being kept alive on a ventilator. Jacob’s mother went home after she did it and took a hot bath, a full bottle of Valium, a quart of vodka, and a couple of razor blades across her wrists. People say it was a moving double funeral, as far as those things go.”
Her gaze drifted past him, to a distant point in time. “At Jackson Clary’s trial, the attorney tried to plead temporary insanity as his defense. That he just snapped when he arrived on the scene. Fortunately, the jury saw right through it.”
She returned her gaze to his. “The girl’s father moved them to a different town, across the state line to Idaho. He petitioned a family law judge to let her change her name and seal the files, because there were rumors that maybe friends of Jackson Clary’s might try something. So she took on her mother’s first name, and her paternal grandmother’s last name. She cut her hair short and died it blonde and her dad enrolled her in a private Catholic school of all places, this non-practicing, half-breed girl from Jew Jersey. She gave up shooting skeet with a team, but once she was old enough to get her driver’s license, she’d drive an hour away to a skeet field in Spokane and shoot several rounds at least once a week.
“And the day she turned eighteen, which was a month after she graduated, her father gave her the money from her mother’s life insurance settlement and she bolted for literally the farthest state she thought she could go and still be in the continental US. She packed up her truck, her gun, and her reloader, and boogied with her father’s blessings.”
“And that’s how she ended up in Florida?”
She nodded. “Yep.” She sat up straighter and picked at her cuticles. Her voice returned to normal, albeit a little more subdued in tone. “Enrolled in community college to get an AA and worked several jobs until she…I got my skeet instructor certification. In the meanwhile, I developed the other gifts I knew I had, the less profitable metaphysical ones, and eventually ended up on Julie’s doorstep one day while I was still in school. She took one look at me and hired me on the spot even though I was only in there to look at Tarot decks. She insisted. Who was I to refuse her?” She sadly smiled. “I loved that witch. So, so much.” She sighed. “Got to the point where I quit looking over my shoulder, quit dying my hair, let it grow out again.” She shook her head. “Ironically, most of my ‘gifts’ came out after the attack. Julie’s theory was maybe during the choking, or when Jacob hit me…” Her voice trailed off as she studied her hands. “Something taken away, something given.”