The Hum (7 page)

CHAPTER 12

Changing gears, Kevin said, “I read a book a few years back where this guy lost 90 minutes of time while driving to New York and when he came to, he discovered a gym bag with a bloody knife, gloves, and five grand in his backseat. I’m surprised the same thing didn’t happen to me, because I had absolutely no recollection of that short twenty minute drive to the hospital.”

“Yeah, I remember that book. I read it too. Having missed a few exits myself, I could so relate.” Russell replied, surprised that the two of them had actually read the same novel.

“As I got out of the driver’s seat of my car and headed into the hospital, a million thoughts ran through my head. What if she’d been shot by one of her crazy patients? What if she’d gotten food poisoning from the leftover chicken I made for dinner the night before? As silly as it sounds, I thought that would be God’s way of making me pay for poisoning my brother Wayne. What if she died of some strange illness that we both knew nothing about? The questions assaulted my thinking, and I hoped none of them were true. At that time in my life, I honestly couldn’t picture a future for me without Jeannie and the kids.”

It was pretty clear to Russell that it was getting harder and harder for Kevin to continue, as the brunt of what he’d done finally hit him full force. “When I made my way up to the counter at the hospital, I was immediately met by Jeannie’s boss. He told the head nurse behind the counter that I was with him, and then he ushered me off to one of the rooms down the long corridor to the right of the nurse’s station. He didn’t say anything until we stopped outside a door with a chart that read Jeannie Black—
my Jeanne Black.”

In the midst of more tears, Kevin said, “Seeing that chart with my Jeannie’s name on it caused to me break—my knees gave way and down I went. I didn’t completely pass out, but I lost all of my strength and struggled to get back upright. With the aid of Jeannie’s supervisor, I managed to stand while he led me a row of chairs along the back wall near her room. Seated with my head down, he reached over and placed his hand on my shoulder and proceeded to tell me that Jeannie had been attacked by one of her patients at the clinic. I immediately asked if she was okay, but the concern in his eyes told me it didn’t look good.”

Another pause and then Kevin continued, “The patient was one of Jeannie’s regulars for the past two years. Her supervisor said there was nothing in the man’s records to indicate violent behavior, or they never would’ve placed him with her in the first place. I should’ve strangled the man right then and there, showed him a little bit of my
violent behavior
.”

Reaching back, Russell lightly patted Kevin on the shoulder, unsure of what to say and feeling a little guilty for trying to console a murderer.

“Finally, I grabbed his shirt and yelled at him to tell me whether or not Jeannie was okay. That’s when he told me that she was in critical condition. He went on to tell me that she’d been raped and beaten by this psycho, and that’s when something snapped inside of me. I totally lost it. I shoved him out of my way and ran into Jeannie’s room. What I saw there, stopped me in my tracks. My wife, her face a beaten and bruised mess, was hooked up to a breathing machine, hanging on to a small thread of her life.”

By this time, Kevin was freely crying. It was an awkward moment, and Russell didn’t know what to do.
How do you console a murderer? Should you console a murderer?
This man was hurting just like any other human out in the world. He’d just reexperienced firsthand the cruelty that the world had to offer, and Russell was left questioning himself as to how to handle the situation.

Russell was let off the hook this time, as Kevin continued. “I sat there watching her chest rise and fall, and my own heart felt like it would stop beating at any minute. I’d never really been the religious type but I prayed for the second time in my life that she’d make it through. I gingerly crept over to her side, and stayed there until the police came the next morning. I didn’t sleep a wink, as I stood guard over her swollen body.”

The pride in Kevin’s voice was obvious to Russell. The man was back inside that hospital room, watching over his wife like a soldier patrolling the perimeter. He stood ready to kill anyone who might attempt to harm her; only no one would be harming her anytime soon. The damage was done, and they’d have to walk through it for the rest of their lives; at least Kevin would. Russell knew this story somehow ended with Jeannie’s death, and after hearing the crap that life had shoveled upon them both, he began to sympathize with Mr. Black.

“The police took me out into the hallway and proceeded to tell me that they’d caught the psycho responsible for the attack, and were holding him at the county jail until his initial hearing. That’s when the humming started in my head again, and with it came the worst migraine I’d experienced up to that point. My mind immediately tried to conjure up ways to get in there and strangle the life out of that man.

I wanted nothing more than to kill the individual responsible for doing that to my Jeannie, but I never got the chance.”

Russell suddenly found himself
needing
to know what happened to Jeannie and her assailant.

“What do you mean,
never got the chance
?”

The look of rage in Kevin’s eyes told Russell that he was taken back to that day when he saw the woman he adored, beaten and broken in that hospital bed, with her assailant locked up out of his reach in some jail cell.

The change in Kevin’s tone matched the rage in his eyes, as he continued. “I immediately went down to the police station to find out what they planned to do with the guy, and they told me that he’d be prosecuted in the court system! It was there I learned that the great American judicial system planned to allow that rapist to serve out his sentence in the state mental ward! Enraged, I tried to get into the asylum where they were holding him! In my mind, I believed strangling the life out of him would relieve the rage I felt consuming me on a daily basis. At the very least, I thought it would rid me of the blasted humming and the headaches!”

“I take it that you weren’t able to get to the guy?” Calming a bit, Kevin said, “They recognized me from

all of the media exposure I’d gotten from this thing, and wouldn’t let me past the front desk. That was just the beginning of my troubles, though. My Jeannie remained in the hospital for the next two months, and when she returned home, she didn’t want anything to do with me. I was at a loss—I didn’t do anything wrong, and here she was treating me like I was the one who raped her.”

Kevin stopped for a second to wipe more tears from his eyes before continuing. “It wasn’t more than three months after she returned home that she began to show. That worthless misfit had impregnated my wife!

I was livid! I jumped in my car and headed back to the mental ward. I had a gun hidden underneath my jacket, and I intended to kill him no matter who stood in my way. When I asked the woman at the front desk to take me to his room, she
regrettably
informed me that he’d passed away in his sleep from a heart attack!”

The facial expressions of the man in front of Sheriff Russell Jent suddenly changed from rage back to regret in an instant.

“I’ve never felt more robbed in my life! How could he die like that? He didn’t deserve to die a peaceful death in his sleep! I was supposed to kill him! Me! Reluctantly, I left the ward and went back home to talk with Jeannie.”

The mixture of emotions all over Mr. Black told Russell that even though he felt guilty for the lives he’d taken, he would’ve gladly taken one more: the life of his wife’s rapist. It was written all over his face. Even after all these years, he still felt cheated of his revenge. It’s amazing how much cheated revenge can take away from a man. Russell had seen cases where guys lost everything in the wake of cheated revenge. The person seeking revenge is left with no one to take out his anger on, but himself. It consumes him to the point where he no longer views himself a man; he begins to pull away from the world, and eventually takes his own life.

“What happened next took me totally by surprise. When I tried to console her by telling her that we’d have the baby aborted, she went berserk on me. She started shouting something about her Catholic upbringing and before I knew it, she locked herself in our bedroom and wouldn’t allow me inside.”

Through tears and possibly a little anger, Kevin said, “Things remained like that for about four more months, before something else snapped inside of me. What had once been an incredible marriage had suddenly transformed into a living arrangement where I paid the bills and went to work every day and she pretended I wasn’t there. The kids even began to get on my nerves, as I grew more embittered towards Jeannie and her desire to keep
that child
.”

With those final words, Kevin put his head down in his lap, as if he was finished with his tale.

“You can’t leave me hanging like that. What happened next?” Russell said, more like a young boy than the Sheriff of Wise County.

“I killed her.”

“Come on, man. Walk me through it.” Russell felt a little ashamed at himself for sounding like a little kid being read a story where the parent suddenly stopped and said,
we’ll stop right there and finish the rest tomorrow
.

“I came home on August 12
th
, at about seven-thirty at night. I’d been throwing a few back at the bar in an attempt to drown out the drastic downturn in my life, when the idea came to me. I couldn’t live a life with
that child
in my midst. I had to kill Jeannie and it would all disappear. As soon as I made up my mind, the humming suddenly stopped and the headaches did too. It felt like I was doing the right thing.”

In an attempt to recollect his thoughts, Kevin put his head in his hands and remained there for a few long seconds. “I’m sure now that it was a combination of the humming, the alcohol inside my system and the video games I’d been hiding in as of late. I think I kind of got lost in all the killing from a couple of the war and zombie slaying games I’d been spending most of my evenings in.”

“It’s easy to get lost in that sort of thing.” Russell said, in an effort to keep the man rolling along.

“Add in the fact that all of the couples that I thought were our friends and Jeannie’s family thought she was the bravest woman in the world for not aborting the child and for going forward with the idea of raising
it
as our own, and you have the perfect recipe for murder. As you can imagine, the guys at work and my friends around the area ribbed me on a daily basis for not aborting the child, so I simply had to take matters into my own hands.”

“So, how did you do it?” Even asking the question made Russell feel a little dirty, but his curiosity had gotten the better of him and he felt like a kid on the brink of discovering how ice cream was really made for the first time.

“I went home after leaving the bar, and found Jeannie and the kids gathered around the dinner table finishing their meal. She didn’t even act as if my being late mattered to her little schedule at all. The humming came back like a roar, and before I knew it, I found myself in front of the knife holder. In an alcohol induced fog, I pulled one of the mediumsized steak knives out and went about the task of stabbing her in the back. She never saw it coming. It all felt surreal, just like I’d done a hundred times in the video games.”

Russell was on the verge of tears himself, after hearing Kevin speak so matter-of-fact about killing the woman that he’d once treasured above all else.

“What about the kids?” Russell finally asked.

I’m still not too sure I meant to harm them. When they saw their mother spitting up blood, they began to yell at me. They couldn’t understand what was happening, and I was too far gone to comfort them. I know now that they wanted me to help Jeannie. It dawned on me that I wouldn’t be able to cover everything up if they remained alive, so I closed my eyes and stabbed them both.”

Just hearing that peer pressure from his friends and coworkers was what finally pushed Kevin to commit murder left Russell feeling both sad and angry. The broken man currently sitting in his backseat couldn’t take his friends ribbing him for raising another man’s child, so he did the only thing he thought would rid him of it all. Once again, a simple divorce would’ve been so much easier, Russell thought.

“In a state of panic, I ran into the bedroom and tried to clear the madness from by head. By this time the humming was gone, so I cleaned up the bloody mess and turned on the gas from the stove. I knew I had to make it look like a simple house fire, if I hoped to get away scotfree. After burying the knife out near my father’s old corn fields, I got out of there.”

“Did the cops question you about the fire, the murders?”

“They picked me up, but I tricked the bartended into lying for me. After I torched the place, I went back to the bar and threw a few more drinks down. I made sure the bartender saw me, too. When questioned, he told the police that he thought I was there at the bar most of the night, so they weren’t able to stick anything on me. They ruled my evil act as an accidental house fire, and murder was never an uttered word in the investigation. I took off as soon as I was cleared.” The story left Russell visibly shaken. He wouldn’t likely forget the crimes that the man seated in the back of his car had committed. He was also left wondering what had forced him to come clean after all these years. Had the man’s conscience finally gotten the best of him, or was there really something out in the woods, inside Mr. Black’s imaginary tunnel? Did it have something to do with the strange humming inside the man’s head or was he certifiably insane?