Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,70

a few weeks before summer vacation commenced. They didn’t run into the bullies but instead came across a girl named Genevieve. She was in special ed with Earl and Floyd. Whenever Spencer stopped by the special ed classroom to pick up his brothers, he would try to tap Genevieve on the head because it set her off yelling and banging around the room like a human tornado.

Spencer spotted Genevieve in the long grasses off to the sides of the path, her shirt held in front of her like a pouch, holding a dozen or so freshly-picked wild berries. He called her name in a singsong way which also drove her nuts. Earl and Floyd joined in, repeating everything he said and chuckling stupidly at their ingenuity. Genevieve shouted at them in the inarticulate gibberish that passed as language for her. Hands held up, palms facing outward, as if he were an ambassador of peace, Spencer got close enough to tap her on her head. She threw her arms into the air, dropping all her berries at the same time. She spun in circles swatting the air and herself until she tripped on her feet and fell. Spencer stood over her, watching her dissolve into a blubbering mess on the ground. He didn’t feel guilt. He didn’t feel pity. He didn’t feel disgust. He didn’t feel anything but curiosity—curiosity at what it would be like to kill her. That’s all he remembered thinking in that moment.

He knelt beside her and plugged her snot-dripping nose with his thumb and index finger. She wailed and tried to pull away. He placed his other hand over her mouth, pressing her head into the ground. She flailed her arms and legs and was surprisingly strong. Earl and Floyd shouted at him to stop. He ignored everything except Genevieve’s eyes. He stared into them and saw that she understood she was dying. This gave him a great satisfaction. Then, eventually, her eyes glazed over and she went still.

That’s when Spencer returned to himself, when his nerves kicked in. He wasn’t remorseful at what he’d done; he was scared white at getting caught.

He told Earl and Floyd that they would all be in really big trouble if they didn’t help get rid of Genevieve’s body, and so they obeyed him without question. The three of them carried her to a waterhole where Spencer had gone swimming once, and where his mother had banned him from going ever again, telling him swimming unsupervised was how little boys died. The waterhole was the third the size of a baseball field and filled with sludgy brown water. They loaded Genevieve’s pockets and backpack with rocks and sank her in the middle of the pool.

For a few weeks it seemed as though her disappearance was all anybody talked about. Spencer often overheard his parents speculating what might have happened to her, while the kids at school had their own more fantastical theories. Yet after a month or so Genevieve became old news. She was gone, she would never be seen alive again, she was best left forgotten.

Spencer didn’t kill again for six years. He thought about doing so on most days. He might see a girl in the supermarket, or riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, and he would imagine getting her alone somewhere and suffocating her to death as he had done to Genevieve. He never followed through with these fantasies, however, because he was too afraid of getting caught. Killing Genevieve had been a spur of the moment action. He knew he had been very lucky. Someone could have seen him and Earl and Floyd cut through the woodland that June afternoon, or seen them while they were disposing of her body. The waterhole could have dried up and revealed her skeleton and perhaps some link to Spencer. Earl or Floyd could have talked.

In the end it was the move from home to his dorm at Case Western Reserve University which kicked him into action. The freedom he found living on his own at college intoxicated him and gave him the confidence he had until then been lacking. He had a private room. He had no curfew. He could come and go as he pleased, no questions asked. He could do anything and everything he wanted.

Spencer found the person he would kill in the classified section of The Plain Dealer. Her adult-services advertisement read: “Sensual massage to forget your stress and worry. Black, busty, 24 y/o Monique will make