14

Twelve

H e took a long drag on the cigar, blowing the smoke in a blue puff directly at the ceiling. His doctors would heartily disapprove if they knew he was smoking again. He didn’t care. Life was too short. He spun the cigar in the cut-crystal ashtray, grateful for the hard edge, which made it easier to knock the burning ash off the tightly rolled tobacco leaf.

He flipped the paper open, overcome with emotion when he saw the headline. SNOW WHITE KILLER RESURFACES, KILLS 4TH NO LEADS IN BICENTENNIAL MALL MURDER

Oh, the beauty of it, the pure, exquisite joy. To see that name again, to know the fear that beat just below the surface of every heart that read those words. Snow White Killer. Oh, the boy was doing well, so very well.

The article captured the frisson of fear that was sweeping through Nashville. The previous generation was talking of nothing else. The younger were fed by rumor and innuendo, the vivid fear of their parents making them lock their doors and keep their own youngsters under a watchful eye. The whisper campaign was out in full force. The Snow White Killer had truly reappeared after a twenty-year hiatus; the entire city was in a panic.

And he was the cause of it. Just as he was in the past.

Granted, his hands were gnarled with arthritis; he may never have the strength again to wield the knife at the throats of innocents, but his protege was so good at sharing the most intimate moments of the kill that he almost didn’t have to be there. Of course, watching, holding, painfully touching their tender flesh made it so much the better.

The old feelings rumbled through his belly, taking root in his aching loins. He was too crippled to pleasure himself anymore. He licked his lips and rang the bell.

The door to his study opened, and a man in his midthirties stuck his head through the door.

“Yesh, Father?”

He looked at his spawn, the watery blue eyes, the weak chin. That boy was going to be the death of him.

“Come in here, and stop that lisping!” he roared.

Obediently, the son made his way into the room, coming to stand at the foot of his father’s chair. Snow White gazed upon his progeny, his stomach curdling. The boy was a freak-wide, pouting lips, the bottom thick as a finger, so loose as to look like red rubber. His chin tucked neatly into his neck, sloped from bottom lip to clavicle with almost no indentation or marking indicating there was a jawline to prop up his face. His eyes were slanted down and the irises cloudy. He’d been sightless since the age of three, couldn’t see the wreck his own father had become.

“Yess, Father,” he said again, calmly. A long sibilance replaced the lisp, the boy’s best attempt to work within the confines of his deformity. He stood tall, his shoulders back, ready to accept whatever his father could give-be it love or hate.

Snow White was both sickened and proud. It had taken years of work for the child to lose that lisp, though if he hurried his speech it came back with a vengeance. His mood softened when he saw the boy try. He noticed a silver object in his hand and the emotions mixed again.

“You’ve been practicing again, I see.” That fucking flute. Fit so perfectly under that fleshy lip, replacing the chin that wasn’t there with silver.

“Yess, ssir. I wass hoping to try out thiss year.”

“You know you can’t do that. You’ll have to content yourself to playing for the cardinals in the backyard. The symphony doesn’t take blind musicians.”

“Beethoven wass deaf. They let him work.”

“Now, now, don’t sulk. Take your flute and go. Send along Marcia, tell her I’m ready.” He dismissed him with a wave of the hand, something the boy couldn’t see but could sense. He left the room, leaving Snow White alone with his thoughts.