“Why did no one in town mention to me the cabin I'm staying in belongs to your family?” I ask.
“Because they don't know. My mother was my grandmother's only child. She loved her, but she also knew the type of person she really was. She saw that my mother only truly cared about my sister and didn't want anything to do with her sons, especially me. Pretty quickly, it became obvious any acknowledgement of me or affection toward me meant my mother took me away, and my grandmother didn't see me for a while. I was always in worse condition the next time she saw me. So, she stopped talking about me. Stopped asking about me or showing any sign of caring about me. Until my mother would leave. Then she showered me with love, fed me as much as I could eat, and encouraged me to play. I never got any of that any other time. Whenever my parents would show up to get me, I pretended to be miserable. If they stayed for dinner, my sister sat at the table with my mother and grandmother while my father put me downstairs with the dog. He barked if I got near the door. They didn't want me running out and going into town. But the better I got at acting like my grandmother's house was hell, the more time I got there.”
“But then your grandmother died,” I guess.
Jake nods.
“When I lost her, everything was taken away. What I thought was a bad life was nothing compared to the way things got after that. It got worse and worse until finally, everything shattered. My brother walked away, and we never heard from him again. One day I came home from school, and my mother and sister were gone. They had just packed up everything and left, abandoning me here with my father and nothing else.”
“If you went to school, how did nobody know what was going on? How did nobody know where you lived or the type of family you had?” I ask.
“This town has secrets, Emma. And it keeps them for others. People believe what they're told and close their minds off to everything else. It means I don't have to confront things I don't want to think about, and they can protect what they don't want other people to know about themselves.”
“The entire town failed you,” I frown. Even if he did horrific things, I still have to keep up appearances that I care about him. “Someone should have protected you.”
“But they didn't. After my mother left with my sister, my father just got drunker and angrier. More often than not, I was the one running the bar because he just couldn't do it. He died when I was nineteen. I inherited the bar, and I've been living my life ever since.”
He's had his back to me as he speaks, but now he turns and looks over his shoulder with a hint of a smile. “Do you really believe it was that simple?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Good. You're catching on.” He turns back to the dinner scene, then moves over to the board game, leaning down to clean up the pieces scattered across the floor by the ornament I threw. “The first time I killed someone, it was a man I watched get drunk at the bar and then hit his wife. It brought up all the memories of everything I went through with my family. I hated the idea of anyone else hurting their family the way mine did each other. I held him back as his wife jumped in the car and drove away, then let him stumble down the street, making sure people saw him leave. Then I went around the opposite side of the building and down the alley so I could meet him a few blocks down. When they found him, they called it a mugging. That started my habit.”
“You became a vigilante.”
“In a way. I told you, it was about elimination. I eliminated those people who hurt others and were perpetuating families that were toxic and destructive. I hated the idea of any other child having to go through what I did, or more being born into paths that would just lead them to being the same type of people as the parents who came before them. Each killing cauterized the wound. I stopped it before it could happen. But after a while, I realized I wasn't really doing myself any good with it. I wasn't moving forward in my life. Killing those people was still me having to give something up, still doing what was right for other people rather than what was right for me. So, two years ago, I decided to change that.”
He looks me straight in the eye.
“I never had a happy home or a happy family. I never got to make any of the memories children are supposed to make. If you ever look through all the photo albums in my house, you'd see a lot of pictures of my grandmother, my sister, some of my father. But there are only a few of me. They are all at my grandmother's house, and she hid them away so my mother would never find them and know she took them. I found them in the cabin years after she died, and my mother didn't step forward to claim the property. I wanted to take the quilt with me, too, but something told me to leave it. It's like still having her there.”
“What happened to these people?” I ask. “Why them?”
“It wasn't about them. Not really. I'll be the first to admit most of these people did absolutely nothing to justify what happened to them. Unfortunately, sacrifices sometimes have to be made, and after a lifetime of sacrifice, it was time for me to be the one who benefitted. I deserve memories of a good family. I wanted stories to tell and things to laugh about. So, I set out to create them for myself. I found people who reminded me of my family members at different ages, or what I wished they would look like. Then I brought them here and created the memories I always wanted. I told you once that archery was my thing. Along with that came preserving animals. I don't do either one of them anymore, but I was able to use those skills to preserve these people as much as I could. This way, I can keep them. They can be my family, and I can share these memories with them.”
I'm somewhere between my heart breaking and passing out. Jake is settling down, sliding into the calm complacency I want him to be in so I can convince him to open the door. But there's still more for me to know. If I have to be down here, I need to get every bit of information out of him I possibly can.
“What about your father's bones? Why did you dig up his body and hide them at his best friend's house?” I ask.
“I didn't want to keep my father's body. He was the worst of the memories I had as a child. I wanted to completely obliterate him and replace them with others. So, that's what I did. I found men who exemplified everything I would have wanted in a father and put them in his place. But that didn't fully release me from everything he put me through. There were others who still needed to answer for what they had done. Including Cole Barnes. He really was my father's best friend. They were friends nearly their entire lives. He did my family a lot of harm. What little harmony we may have ever had, he was at the heart of destroying it. My father discovered he had been having an affair with my mother, and it put him completely over the edge. My father took it all out on me. He needed to pay for what he did. I dug up my father and put the bones with Barnes to remind him of what he did to give him a little bit of hell, knowing it was all catching up with him. I wanted him to fear being arrested. Going to prison. If you hadn't interfered, I was going to make sure there was much more he went through. He deserves every bit of it.”
It's clear to me now why Jake was ostracized from his family. Why his father despised him, and his mother wanted nothing to do with him. He wasn't his father's child. He was the product of his mother's affair with her husband's best friend. Every moment of Jake's life was a reminder of her betrayal and the further breakdown of their family.
A feeling deep in my gut pulls me away from the door and closer to the center of the room.
“Jake?” He turns to face me, and I look toward the only scene that doesn't make sense to me. He walks toward the young woman cradling the baby in the rocking chair. “Who is she?”