Little Lost Angel (11 page)

The two walked back to the trunk and opened the lid. The rush of cold air caused Shanda to stir, and she slowly began to sit up. Her hair and arms were smeared with blood and the pupils of her eyes rolled back in her head as she tried to speak, managing to mutter only one word, “Mommy,” before Laurie hit her with the tire iron and slammed the trunk lid down on her.

After driving awhile longer, Melinda and Laurie came up with a plan to finally kill Shanda without getting their hands soiled. They stopped again and opened the trunk, hoping
that Shanda would stumble out on the road where they could run over her. But Shanda was too injured to do anything but lie there, so they closed the trunk again and drove on, cursing Shanda for clinging to life so determinedly and hoping that she would just go ahead and die.

*  *  *

Back at Laurie’s house, Hope and Toni talked in whispers so not to wake the Tacketts. Neither could believe what had happened on the logging road. They hadn’t considered that it would go this far, and both wondered what was happening now. Was that little girl already dead? What were Melinda and Laurie going to do with her? They were afraid of the answers. Afraid of their involvement. Afraid of waking Laurie’s parents and telling them what was going down. Afraid of what would happen to them if they walked into the kitchen and called the police.

The quiet was suddenly broken by a soft tap on the window.

“What . . . what was that?” Toni stuttered.

“I don’t know.” Summoning her nerve, Hope looked out the window. “It was just Laurie’s cat,” she said, sighing with relief.

Then they heard heavy footsteps walking down the hallway toward the bedroom. Scooting under the bedcovers, they pretended to be asleep. The door cracked open slowly. Laurie’s father stepped inside and flicked on the light.

George Tackett was startled to find two girls in Laurie’s bed.

“Where’s Laurie?” he asked.

Thinking quickly, Hope said, “She and Melinda went to get something to eat.”

“It’s way too late for that kind of stuff,” Tackett grumbled before closing the door and returning to his bedroom.

*  *  *

Laurie and Melinda had passed through the country crossroads known as Canaan and were into another stretch of thick woods when they heard a noise barely audible over the tailpipe’s roar, a thumping in the trunk. Then came Shanda’s voice.

“It wasn’t really a scream or a yell,” Melinda said later.
“It’s like something was messed up with her throat. It was like a gurgle. I know at one point she was saying my name. That’s when we stopped and Tackett told me I had to get behind the steering wheel and keep my foot on the gas so the muffler would be louder than Shanda’s kicking.”

Laurie walked back to the trunk, grasping the black metal tire iron.

“I watched through the rear-view mirror but I couldn’t see much,” Melinda recalled. “I heard something thump and there was like a weeping sound. I heard this hit like you would hear when someone hits you in your stomach. I heard a yell and a thump and then I heard the trunk door slam down. Then here comes Tackett back in.”

Laurie slid into the passenger seat and told Melinda to drive off. As she did, Laurie stuck the bloody tire iron under Melinda’s nose. “Smell this, will you,” Laurie said gleefully. “I hit her head and it was so cool. I could feel it going in.”

Laurie thumped the tire iron against the dashboard. “I hit it like this. I hit it this hard. It felt so neat.”

“Stop it!” Melinda screamed. “You’re making me sick.”

Laurie stuck it in Melinda’s face again, and Melinda ripped it from her hand and threw it in the backseat.

Laurie laughed. “You’ve got to see her. She’s soaked with blood. She’s red.”

Laurie’s bloodlust made Melinda shiver. She wanted Shanda dead but she’d never imagined that murder would be such dirty work.

And so it went. Driving and listening for signs of life in the trunk. Every time they heard a stirring, they would stop and do what was necessary to silence Shanda. This continued for hours, until the light of daybreak sent them rushing back to Laurie’s house.

Laurie’s father was gone by now, having left early for work at the factory. Laurie’s mother was still in bed and the house was silent as Laurie and Melinda walked into Laurie’s bedroom, where Hope and Toni were half asleep.

Toni slowly opened her eyes. “Where’s that little girl?” she asked.

“It was just a nightmare,” Laurie said prankishly. “There was no little girl.”

“Oh, good,” Hope muttered groggily.

It was a nightmarish experience, all right. But it was real. Toni could see Shanda’s blood splattered on Melinda and Laurie.

“They had blood on their hands and Melinda had blood on her face,” Toni remembered. “They went to the bathroom to wash it off.”

Upon returning, Melinda and Laurie told Hope and Toni that Shanda was still in the trunk and that she might still be breathing. At least she was the last time they’d checked.

“They said that every time Shanda screamed they hit her on the head with the tire iron,” Toni said later. “They were laughing about it. Both of them.”

Toni was scared. Scared of the situation. Scared of Laurie and Melinda. But Hope’s fear was more focused. For the first time she began to look at their dilemma from a practical standpoint. It had gone too far to turn back now. The job had to be finished.

Leaving the others in the bedroom, Laurie went to the telephone and dialed the number of her neighbor, Brian Tague.

“Brian, this is Laurie Tackett. Do you have any gasoline? I need some gas. I need to burn some clothes on our burn pile.”

Tague was irritated by the early-morning call, but he wanted to be neighborly. “I don’t have any gas, Laurie,” he said. “I might have some kerosene. I’ll check. Why don’t you call me back in a little bit.”

Laurie said she would, but she was growing impatient. Maybe they could get a fire going at the burn pile with matches and lighters. Laurie stuck her head back in her room and told the others to follow her. The four girls walked through the cold morning mist to the car parked by the burn pile.

“Want to see her?” Laurie asked Hope and Toni.

Toni gazed blankly at the blood-stained trunk lid, then said, “No. I don’t want to see anything.” She looked at Hope, expecting her friend to agree with her. But Hope had chosen her path. She was with Laurie and Melinda now. She nodded at Laurie to open the trunk.

Laurie gave Toni a chilling stare. “If you don’t want to look, then get in the car and rev the engine,” she said tersely, handing Toni the keys. “She might scream again.”

Following orders, Toni slipped behind the wheel and cranked the engine. Laurie slowly opened the trunk. Shanda was lying in a fetal position.

“There was not an inch of her that did not have blood,” Hope said later.

Laurie pulled an old sweater out of the trunk, laid it on the burn pile, and tried to set it on fire. While she was doing this, Hope reached into the trunk and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner that was lying beside Shanda. She pointed the bottle at Shanda and sprayed the blue liquid on her wounds.

“I don’t know why she did that,” Laurie said later.

“She had this strange look on her face when she did it,” Melinda recalled. “She was into it. Sort of like when you dissect an animal.”

Shanda moved. The girls held their breath in horror as the bloody, beaten girl pushed herself up into a sitting position. She had one hand on her head and the other on the spare tire and slowly swayed back and forth.

“Her eyes weren’t really open, but they sort of were,” Hope recalled. “They were kind of back in her head.”

“We tried to talk to her then but she wouldn’t talk or couldn’t,” Laurie said later.

Melinda turned to Hope and asked, “Where’s your heart?”

Hope touched the left side of her chest. “Here. Why?”

“Well,” Melinda said, “how do you get a knife to go into somebody’s body?”

Eager to end it now, Hope told Melinda, “You’ve got to jab it in.”

This bizarre scene was suddenly interrupted by the voice of Laurie’s mother. Peggy Tackett had walked out on her back porch. From her position facing the front of the car, Laurie’s mother could see only the three girls standing around the trunk and Toni behind the wheel.

“What’s going on?” she yelled.

Laurie slammed the trunk down on Shanda’s head, imprisoning her again. “I’m trying to get a fire started,” Laurie yelled at her mother.

“You aren’t starting any bonfires at this time of the morning,” Peggy Tackett shouted back. “Are you just getting in?”

Fearing that her mother would investigate, Laurie stormed toward the house, arguing as she went. “Just shut up and leave me alone,” Laurie sneered. She and her mother stood nose to nose, wrangling for several long minutes. After a while, Peggy Tackett’s anger began to fade. She looked at Melinda, Hope, and Toni. These were the kind of nice girls she’d been wanting Laurie to hang around with. They weren’t weird like the Leatherburys and Kary Pope.

“Well,” she said finally, “do you want me to fix you and your friends breakfast?”

“Nah,” Laurie said as she turned away. “I’ve got to take them home. We’re going to stop by McDonald’s.”

Laurie drove the car away with Melinda beside her and Hope and Toni in the backseat. “We’ve got to get some gas,” she said. “We’re going to have to burn her. We have to kill her. She knows all our names.”

Laurie pulled the car into a Clark Oil station on State Road 62, a busy highway lined with fast-food restaurants north of downtown Madison. But at this time on a Saturday morning, there were few people on the road. Laurie told Toni to go with her into the station, where they bought a two-liter bottle of Pepsi and paid for several dollars of gasoline.

While they were inside, Melinda and Hope heard Shanda moving in the trunk. At that moment a car pulled up beside them at the pumps. Fearful that the man getting out of his car would hear Shanda, Hope ran around to the driver’s seat and moved Laurie’s car away from the pumps.

“What’s going on?” Laurie asked upon her return.

“Listen,” Hope said.

Shanda’s moans were growing louder.

Laurie quickly passed the Pepsi around, and after each girl took a drink, she poured the rest out. By this time the
other car had left and the girls drove back to the pumps. Laurie filled the plastic bottle with gasoline, topped off her gas tank, then drove away. They headed back north, taking some of the same side roads that Laurie and Melinda had driven the night before. Hope said she knew a place where they could burn Shanda—a little-traveled gravel lane called Lemon Road.

There were no farmhouses around, only harvested soybean fields on both sides of the country lane. The car stopped beside a wide dirt path that ran between a crop field and thick woods. Laurie swung the sedan around and backed a few feet up the path. All four girls stepped out. A tractor and a combine were parked about thirty feet up the path on the edge of the woods. But otherwise it was deserted. As Laurie started to open the trunk, Toni got back in the car.

“I didn’t want to take part,” Toni said later. “I didn’t want to touch her. I didn’t want to look at her.”

Laurie held the blanket used earlier to cover Melinda at Shanda’s house. “Come on, let’s wrap it around her and lift her out,” she said.

“Oh, gross,” Melinda moaned, backing away in disgust.

Angered by Melinda’s wavering, Hope snarled, “I don’t know what your problem is. You started the whole thing.”

Hope grabbed one end of the blanket and helped Laurie wrap it around Shanda’s trembling body. Toni glanced out the window as Shanda, rolled up in the blanket, was lifted out of the trunk and dropped behind the car in the middle of the dirt path.

“I saw her arm move, then I looked away,” Toni said later. “The radio was on. I just listened to it and didn’t watch what was happening. I didn’t want to be there.”

Laurie stood over Shanda with the bottle of gasoline. “Here,” she said, extending her arm toward Melinda.

Melinda backed away.

“Here,” Laurie said, shoving the bottle at Hope.

“No,” Hope said.

Laurie leered at her. “Just pour it, damn it. Just do it.”

Hope grabbed the bottle and doused the blanket with
gasoline. Laurie stepped closer and drew a pack of matches from her jacket. She struck a match and tossed it. A flash of flames leapt up, scorching Laurie’s hair before she could step away. As the fire raged, the girls scrambled back to the car, all three piling into the front seat. As Laurie wheeled the car onto Lemon Road, Toni, alone in the backseat, turned to look at Shanda’s burning body. They’d driven only a few hundred yards when Melinda noticed that the flames had already begun to die down.

“My God, what if she doesn’t burn all the way!” Melinda yelped. “We’ve got to go back. Go back.”

Laurie spun the car around and jerked to a stop a few feet from the flaming blanket. This time Melinda got out alone and walked over to the smoldering body. Holding the bottle, still half full of gasoline, she stood for a moment, looking into the face of the girl she so hated. Then she tossed the open bottle on her. The fire surged again with an angry flash.

Melinda was laughing when she got back into the car. “You should have seen it,” she roared. “Her tongue was going in and out of her mouth.”

Toni shrunk deeper in the backseat and bit down on her knuckles so hard that she drew blood.

“I’m so glad she’s gone,” said Melinda with a giggle. “I’m so glad she’s out of me and Amanda’s lives.”

As they drove away, Melinda wondered aloud if someone would see the smoke.

“Nobody goes down that road,” Hope assured her.

“I’m going to come back later tonight with a shovel and bury her,” Laurie said.

Toni’s conspicuous silence worried Laurie and Melinda.

“Everybody has to keep their mouth shut,” Laurie said, making menacing eye contact with Toni in the rear-view mirror.

Melinda spun around in her seat and told Toni, “If we all stick together, everything will be okay.”

Hope spoke up for her friend. “We’re not going to say anything, are we, Toni?”

Toni said nothing but nodded her head in acknowledgment.