Starlight Web (Moonshadow Bay #1) - Yasmine Galenorn Page 0,28

father could fight back, Psy shot him point-blank. He also shot the mother. Then he tied them to chairs in the kitchen. The kids woke up and he forced them to sit at the table, and he tied them to the chairs, then proceeded to make breakfast for everybody, including the dead parents. He made the kids sit there and eat.”

I shivered. “No wonder I never heard about this. My parents would never have told me that story. What happened?”

“The next few days, Psy made the kids eat regular meals with him and the corpses of the parents. He only untied the kids for bathroom breaks. He never assaulted the kids, but he propped their parents up on the sofa, and he tied the kids up near there and made them watch TV with him, and forced them to play boardgames with him. He made them call him ‘Uncle Psy’ and pretend that they were all one big happy, albeit partially dead, family.” Hank sorted through some papers near his desk and pulled out several glossy black and white photos, pushing them toward me.

I blinked. The photos were horrifying. They showed two very dead adults who were starting to decompose, propped up on the sofa. My stomach churned. “Please tell me the kids got away.”

“Unfortunately not,” Caitlin said, joining us. “They tried to escape. Over the next couple of days, it’s thought that they hatched a desperate plan. Psy’s recollection could be false, but what he told police was that the little girl pretended to be sick, and the older son begged Psy to untie him so he could help her. Psy did, and the boy tried to attack him.”

“Brave kid,” I said, worrying my lip.

“He was, but Psy was just too strong. The twelve-year-old had no chance. Enraged that his ‘brothers and sister’ would ‘betray’ him, Psy tied the kids up by their parents and shot them. He made the mistake of doing so just as the mailman was bringing a couple packages to the door. The mailman drove off, flagging down the nearest police car he could find. He knew gunshots when he heard them.”

I closed my eyes. “So they found Psy with the family?”

“Yeah, and he had completely lost it by then. They took him into custody. All the time, he was crying, insisting that his father had killed everyone. When the cops looked into his background, they found out that Psy’s father had clubbed Psy’s mother to death. Psy was eleven when he witnessed the murder, which took place on Christmas morning. The father got the death penalty, but that morning forever warped the kid’s mind.” Hank shook his head, showing me a mug shot of Psy. The man looked haunted, like he was living in a different world.

“He looks…” The man had demons torturing his memories, but they weren’t the demons that you summoned in. No, these demons were all created by his memories.

“Yeah. Back then, they didn’t think a lot about PTSD outside of military cases. Psy was taken in by an aunt and uncle who lived in Seattle, but they didn’t want him, and he ran off when he was fifteen. He fell into heavy drug and alcohol addiction, but then he returned to Moonshadow Bay. He set out to create a new family for himself.”

“And of course, it didn’t work. So, they committed him to the asylum instead of putting him in jail?” I asked, torn. On one hand, it was obvious he had a predilection for violence. On the other, if they had helped him when he was young, he might have lived to an old, easy age.

Tad nodded. “Right. And he died in that asylum. On Christmas morning, the next year, Psy Schooner was dead. The administrator reported it as a suicide. Nobody paid much attention when inmates died. Back then, mental illness wasn’t understood and treated like the condition it is.”

“How did he die?” I asked.

Tad consulted his screen, scrolling through information. “The doctor on call recorded it as death by hanging—self-inflicted. However, the gravediggers who buried him got a look at the body when the lid to the coffin came loose. The diggers reported that his body had gashes all over it, as though he had been cut with a sharp knife. The cops ignored the report.

“Since the asylum wasn’t officially within the boundaries of Moonshadow Bay, they sent the report to Bellingham, where it was probably tossed in the round file.” Tad frowned. “The next year, the