Blood Child (2 page)

A
talik’s body, according to the county records, was interred on his estate in the family mausoleum. The magnificent mausoleum rivaled that of Heinrich Schliemann’s in Greece, shaped like a temple with marble columns and carved reliefs. It wasn’t an original part of the estate but had been built shortly after the property was purchased.

The architect, Matthew Rodriguez, worked on many of the renovations made to the estate. The mausoleum was one of his last projects. He was fascinated with secret passages and giving his clients a little something extra in each design whether they requested it or not. He died in a car accident returning to the city one weekend after a party at the estate. His will, which was immediately contested by his family, left everything, including his portfolio, to the count. It even when so far as to say that Atalik was the sole executor, which gave Atalik the right to dispose of his body however he choose. Knowing Matthew’s mother was old-school Catholic, he had the body cremated and the ashes mixed in with the cement for a planned extension to the house’s foundations. Atalik had everything in it shipped to the estate.

Atalik liked to infer that he came from old money, so the deceased members of the Bath family were moved from their original resting places to the mausoleum after its completion. It cost him a pretty penny in bribes to move the bodies and begin a cemetery on private land. At one moment he even thought of abandoning the project due to cost, but being defeated by a penny was not something he could allow. Eventually the site was even sanctified by a member of the local clergy to ensure the peaceful rest of its inhabitants. He had never had close relations with any of his family after he graduated from high school. The few living relatives he did have stayed as far away as they could. None of them ever seemed tempted to ask their cousin for a favor beyond being left alone.

According to Em, her father had a secret crypt built in the basement of the house for himself and his “special” wives. It was for the three women who gave him a child. Each one received a cash payment of a million dollars and a swift divorce, and died within two years.

Each was brought back to the estate and interred. All total, Atalik was married seven times, but only three of his wives survived him. Helena Jacqueline Antoinette Bath was in the process of divorcing the old scoundrel when he died. She left the house prior to the funeral, taking her small spending allowance with her. Her refusal to stay and see him buried surprised no one, once she knew the contents of the will. In the nearly decade-long marriage, he had never changed his will. It hadn’t been changed since the year after Emily was born. Her allowance was a provision of the will that allowed for her to receive a cash disbursement of three thousand dollars once a month for five years after his death; after that time the amount would be cut in half. The money was less than a third of what Antoinette spent in a month on clothing, beauty treatments, and entertainment. It was her entertaining of young men that incited the divorce proceedings.

The first time Em saw the crypt was when she was six years old. The youngest, most precocious of the children, she was always wandering away or, in the words of the nannies and tutors, sneaking off. It truly wasn’t malicious. She was just a naturally curious and restless child. Mihaly called her Houdini because of her repeated seemingly impossible escapes from their lessons and training. One moment she was working quietly alongside her brothers, and the next she was gone. It didn’t seem to matter who was watching her; there was always a moment when no one was looking, and she knew how to take advantage of it.

She was smart enough never to explore when her father was in attendance. More than one nanny was fired for failing to keep an eye on little Em. It was impossible in his mind that she could be so clever or they so absent-minded.

It was late in the evening when she slipped out of her room and made her way to the basement. Like the rest of the estate, it was unbelievable huge and mostly off-limits to the children. The buildings were under constant repair and renovation since its purchase. In her young mind, the basement, with its stone floors, timbers, and dust, was King Minos’s labyrinth beneath his Cretan palace, where Athenian youth were sacrificed to the bloodthirsty Minotaur.

Em was pretending to be the hero, Theseus, who saves the princess from the beastly Minotaur, when she heard the rhythmic sounds of footsteps hitting the stone floor in unison. She swiftly moved behind one of the wine racks. Her father, his manservant, Gerald, and four robed men came into the chamber. The men, who worked in various positions on the grounds, were carrying a long ebony box. The party came to an abrupt stop at the far end of the room. It seemed like they would have continued to walk forward into the stone wall if Gerald’s arm had not flowed up as a signal to stop.

Fear and intrigue held her tightly in place. She thought they would merely be depositing the crate and returning momentarily. After all, there was no place for the men to go except the way they came. She crouched as low as she could while still keeping an eye on the strange group.

Her father raised his arms and began muttering in Latin. When he finished, a section of the wall slid back, and the ensemble entered the newly formed doorway. Em nearly snickered at her father’s horrid elocution; had she demonstrated such poor pronunciation, she would have received a beating that would continue until she corrected the error. Consequently, she and her siblings practiced continually, drilling one another until they had mastered each lesson. Mihaly led his younger siblings in these drills. Sometimes they sneaked into one another’s rooms to prepare for assessments. No matter how intensely they practiced, their father and the tutors always found a reason to punish them.

The door closed as quickly as it had opened. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it didn’t deter Em. This mystery was too much for her to pass up, so she waited, watching, shivering on the icy floor. The Minotaur was safe for another night.

By the time they came out of the chamber, Em had nearly fallen asleep; only the return of rhythmic footsteps sounded just in time to keep her from nodding off completely and banging her head on the floor.

She waited until after the stomping sound had ceased to echo before she moved to investigate. It didn’t take her long to find the floor latch and open the crypt’s door. Secretly, she praised the
Hardy Boys
novels she had recently finished for helping her quickly locate the trigger for the door. Not that she would ever tell Mihaly, who had suggested the series. It just wasn’t proper to let your big brother know you thought he was cool or appreciated his advice.

The chamber was lit from an aperture running around the perimeter between the wall and stone floor. A shiver dashed down her spine when she noted the eerie similarity of this chamber to the one in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

In the center was a stone sepulcher with her father’s name etched into it, along with his birth date and an epitaph—the date of his death waited to be carved. Along the walls three ebony boxes exactly like the one she had seen carried in were standing on end facing the sepulcher, except these boxes appeared to have glass fronts. There was one for each of the three walls before her.

Had Em been a fearful child, she would have run from the room and not taken another step. However, the physical and emotional abuse she had endured prevented her from experiencing the normal fears of a six-year-old child; she had seen too much and knew it wouldn’t kill her.

The boxes were like shiny bobbles left out for a magpie to snatch; the least she could do was inspect them. Em moved towards the one on the left for no other reason than her eye had turned in that direction. As she advanced on her target, an unexpected queasy feeling built in her stomach. She attributed it to the cook’s latest experiment, not knowing any better.

There are some things in this world that every child should be prevented from seeing, but Em continued forward, as she always had and always would. It only made sense in her mind to keep moving. She had no way of knowing what the crypt truly held or how similar its contents would be to one of Poe’s chilling tales.

The faint light caused her eyes to strain; however, the figure of a woman was becoming clear. Forward. Always forward. A foot away from the glass, details came into focus. Another chill ran through Em. The woman’s face was obscured by a veil, so Em tried to balance on her tiptoes for a better look. Her failure landed her face first on the frigid stone floor.

Her head ached, but her eyes widened when she read the name—Marcella E. Bath, her mother’s name—etched on the base in golden script. To her credit she didn’t scream or run from the room. She did crawl to the next black casket and then the last, reading the names of her brothers’ mothers.

Making her way back up to the main house, Em began to build a wall between her consciousness and the new knowledge, trying to shred apart the carefully constructed mental configuration that kept her young mind from collapsing in on itself. Children, after all, are the ultimate survivors. Forward, just keep moving forward. Back out of the basement, through the kitchen to the back staircase, up to the second floor, and down the hall to the nursery.

At six years old, she still slept in the nursery and would continue to do so until she turned eleven, when she had her first period. The decor of the nursery reflected Atalik’s predatory nature. The furnishings were all dark wood, and a mural of a jungle took up the largest wall in the room. The animals weren’t cute or cartoony, but realistic. In two of the corners, a hunter was positioned with rifle in hand, aiming toward the animals in the center. The opposing walls contained trophies from Atalik’s various hunting expeditions. A pair of kudos with their stately spiraled horns took up positions on either side of the door, with a lioness positioned directly over it. A few of the nannies interviewed by Atalik declined the position after seeing the room he had so thoughtfully decorated for his children.

The light flicked on as soon as she entered; Atalik sat on the bed, patting it slightly. His face wore its usual sinister smirk, a forewarning of his intentions. Em didn’t even freeze for a single moment. Hesitation would only make things worse. Forward she walked, taking her place beside her loving father and silently sliding the last brick in place. She had learned not to flinch when her father reached for her.

His hands gently brushed the hair away from her forehead. The grin dissolved when he noticed the mark blooming on her temple.

“Tell Papa how this came to be.”

“I was playing, and I fell, Papa.”

“And where was Ms. Kasik?”

She tilted her eyes down, trying her best to appear demure and innocent; manipulation was a survival skill she had learned early.

“
Mmm,” she said as she bit her lips slightly
, “
I went into the cellar when she wasn’t looking.”

“The cellar is out of bounds, young lady.”

“I know, Papa. I apologize for breaking the rules. I wanted to play where the boys wouldn’t hear me. They think playing Theseus and the Minotaur is moronic.”

“I see. And that is how you got the bruise, fighting the Minotaur again?”

Em nodded a shy affirmation. The wicked grin returned as Atalik tucked her into bed, placing a tender kiss on her forehead. Exiting the room, he chose the door leading to Ms. Kasik’s room.

As much as he relished disciplining his offspring, he never tolerated anyone else doing so without permission. The offense was especially odious if a visible mark resulted. Ms. Kasik was clearly guilty of neglecting and thereby injuring her charge.

The next day Miss Amber Russo, the nanny for her brothers Andras and Sandor came in to prepare her for breakfast. Em asked about her nanny and was dismissed quickly. The next week a new nanny was hired, a Ms. Ingrid Picador from Newark, New Jersey. She would remain with the family for three years before exiting in a similarly mysterious manner.

Atalik had a hedge maze built on the property for the amusement of the children. Em was allowed to play in the maze without her brothers under the supervision of her new nanny. She never went into the basement again to play.

The fate of Ms. Andrea Kasik is unknown. No record could be found of her being employed after her dismissal. She wasn’t the first or last employee to go missing over the twenty-five years that Atalik lived at the estate. Detective Anderson told me when I spoke with him that there wasn’t anything they could do. No one could find anything substantial to link the estate with their disappearances—no bodies, no evidence, no crime. Strangely enough, very few missing persons cases were filed. They just vanished. Charges couldn’t be filed based on rumors and speculation.

T
he blood evidence alone could have been used for finger-painting, it was in such abundant supply after the weekend of the funeral, but Old Count Atalik couldn’t be charged. He had been dead a week. The crime scene photos Em provided were even more grotesque than the ones in the file. I guess paying for information didn’t guarantee you got everything. I wondered why she had them and how she got them. The partial reason was that her money and connections had greased the wheel more than mine had. The other part of the reason was because of Em’s therapy.

She couldn’t remember what had happened, so she tried reacting to or stimulating the trauma with one of her therapists, using the photographs. It was absurd and didn’t work. The therapist quit, saying that helping Em gave her nightmares.

Bodies were mutilated to the point that I wasn’t sure the mounds of flesh were really human until my eyes, seeking to make sense of the images, found the stray finger or a head staring blankly at the camera. It took the coroner’s office nearly a month and a half to put the bodies back together. It would be another month until the final report came out.

Cause of death for most of the deceased was unable to be determined. The majority of the bodies had been dismembered in an “incomprehensible manner” while they were still alive. The lucky minority, including Em’s beloved brothers, were poisoned and then slaughtered. Every corpse had the same marks that Em’s body bore as scars.

The investigator’s report indicated traces of an unknown substance in her system. Doctors speculated that a mystery drug, combined with the medication she was taking at the time, led to an altered mental state, possible amnesia. She had been prescribed antidepressants and anxiety medication since her sophomore year of college. The therapy started after she moved to Florida. It was the beginning of her quest for a normal life. Maybe that was the reason her home was so blah now. She just worked at being normal. An ordinary life was her goal. Her money would have allowed her to have whatever she wanted if only she let it, but normal to her wasn’t being trapped behind walls with bodyguards. She strove to be boring the way some people sought out fame. The bookshelves in her house were lined with just the right number of books to make her appear well-read without seeming cluttered.

Nearly everything I saw could have been easily purchased on a teacher’s salary. It made me wonder what, if anything, she had done with her father’s money. She had also inherited her brother’s estates as well. She had sold their cars, condos, and possessions in a private auction a year after their deaths. The auction house had leaked news of the sale and her attendance to the press. Em didn’t show up for the sale, but plenty of other people did. She made over three million dollars. And she drove an effing Volvo. A rusty one at that.

Her lack of recall about the weekend after arriving at the mansion and having dinner with her family and their guests was still stunning. Some of the tabloids reported that Em had spent her fortune trying to bring her memories back and prove her innocence. They also claimed that she had multiple personalities, and as soon as she remembered, the personality who was responsible was going to kill her. It was insane, but running her picture or a picture of someone who looked vaguely like her still sold papers.

It is possible that the trauma she experienced caused the memory loss. More than likely she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, given her violent childhood and the bloody occurrences of the funeral. Diagnosing PTSD isn’t a straightforward process. Symptoms range from memory loss to memories of the event constantly intruding on the person’s life. Frequently, symptoms are ignored by health-care professionals because the traumatized person may be unwilling or unable to talk about the event and its aftermath. The lost memory and the scratches were clear indications she had experienced something; whether or not she would ever remember was the real question.

The Lifetime movie about Em played up this PTSD angle to the point that one of her coworkers quit her job when she found out whom she was teaching next to. She even tried to get Em fired, saying Em was evil and tried to control her with blood magic. All Em recalls doing was going into her classroom, seeking a Band-Aid for a nasty paper cut. When she reached for it, a drop of blood fell onto the desk near a half-empty coffee cup. Em apologized and made some more coffee. The woman refused to drink it and began to harass Em about going to church. Since the days at First Methodist, Em had never really cared for church. Her refusal added fuel to the inferno, and the science teacher lost it. She also lost any chance of being rehired after she was caught on school grounds trying to cut the brake lines in Em’s car.

Em was lucky that it wasn’t as easy as in the movies, and the woman was caught and taken away. She was still in Orlando’s Lakeside Mental Hospital. Every time she was released, she would seek out the “vampiric bitch,” as she called Em, and try to cure her. One of the patients who had contact with the deranged woman threw holy water on Em one day; the poor woman didn’t understand why Em hadn’t begun to burn. She was caught at a gas station a half-hour later, attempting to put gas into a Big Gulp cup.

***

The next day Em left a message saying she wouldn’t be able to continue our discussion until the day after tomorrow. No explanation, just a new time and day, as if I had nothing better to do than to wait around for her. The assumption was entirely accurate, of course; it just bothered me. Dealing with people of Em’s stature and wealth, I had often encountered such attitudes. They were treated differently by the vast majority of society because there were people who believed that their money made them better than the rest of us working stiffs.

Perhaps I was just being oversensitive. After all, Em had been quite generous with her time, as well as her wine. Given the nature of the interview, it was understandable that she would want to delay talking about it again. She had avoided interviews for nearly a decade. Her desire to talk now was both miraculous and mysterious.

I needed to breathe, as my friend Anthony would say. It was his answer to nearly everything. Just breathe…It was good advice, even if I didn’t like to admit it or put it into practice. Anthony was preparing to help me locate people interested in buying the piece. He kept assuring me that if I succeeded in landing the story, it wouldn’t matter what Ashley said; someone would buy it. It was too big to allow a petty vendetta to stop it. The world still wanted to know about little Emily Bath.

Admittedly, I was also becoming financially desperate. I was living in a run-down pay-by-the-week hotel that promised housekeeping. The only thing I saw the maids cleaning regularly were the stairwells, which still smelled of urine. I felt like there should have been a chalk outline on the floor of my room; it certainly smelled like someone had expired in it, and the outline would have added a bit of charm to the place.

I wanted and needed this to get back to work on a regular basis, maybe even back at a major newspaper, though the majority of newsrooms had shifted away from large staffs. It would mean that people would return my calls and e-mails. I had started writing under an assumed name, Frank Wisborn, but work is slow in the paid blogging world when you are an unknown entity. My career needed to come back before Frank Wisborn ran out of money and lost his lease.