Hell Within -- Chapter Ten: The House of Lancaster -- Scenes 12&13

-12-

It was the time of the evening when it was too dark to see on the roads and still too light for the Ben's headlamps to have any effect. The road flowed like smeared ashes under the hood, as he headed out of Lakewood Village the road bent gracefully around the edge of the woods.

And the trees peeled back from the right side of the road revealing a brook that ran parallel to the road. Fireflies at the mouth of the woods performed their twilight dance, as the gray gradually turned to shadow.

Just as he crested a deep bend in the road, he sat up straight and squinted through the fuzzy blue at the girl standing on the side of the road gaping at the steaming open hood of her white Escort station wagon.

He slowed the truck to a crawl, and reclined the passenger's window.

"What's wrong?"

Mandy Green peered at him through the darkness -- not sure that it was him, and then she approached the truck.

"Small world," he said.

"I was just going up the hill and the car started revving and lurching like it was jumping in and out of neutral."
Ben nodded. "I can smell transmission fluid from here."

She threw her hands up in the air. "I was supposed to meet Paul Ambrose in Bridgeton and give him back the key to the practice."
"What a coincidence! I was just headed to Bridgeton to find out what happened to my wife."

"You still haven't heard anything?"

He bunched his lips together and looked back down the road.

"Can you drop me by Dr. Ambrose's office?"

"Is it anywhere near the sheriff's department?"

She nodded.

He waved, and she opened the door and climbed in.

And once they were off, they fell into an uncomfortable silence. Ben found himself distracted by Mandy's staring at the side of his face, and more than once he responded with an inquisitive grimace. She seemed not to notice.

"What is it?" he said finally.

"Amy said you went to UGA."

He smiled. "A quarter or two."

"Then you might've known my mother."

Ben laughed. "A University is not a high school. Chances are very slim that I've ever seen your mother, let alone known her."

"She was a business major," she insisted.

"So was one out of every three other students on campus."
Mandy frowned and looked out the windshield for a moment and then back at him.

"Yeah, she probably went there about the same time as you."
Ben squinted at her. How in the hell would she know when he was at UGA, and why did she care?

"Terra Green?" she said.

And a pang of something terrible split through Ben's chest like a bullet. The name shocked him so badly that he hit the brakes causing the truck to fishtail.

Terra Green.

He looked at the girl sitting beside him. There was indeed a slight resemblance.

"You're Terra Green's daughter?"

She smirked at him. "I guess you do know her."

He shook his head. "Damn, what a coincidence!"

He eyed her. "Of all the thousands of people who attended UGA at the same time as I did, she's maybe one of three or four non-instructors I remember."

Mandy smiled. "You liked her?"

Ben frowned and studied her carefully, but she seemed to mean nothing ill. He shrugged.

"Well, as much as any married man can like a woman with whom he's not related or married."

Mandy gave him a knowing smile. He wasn't particularly fond of how grown-up this high school girl seemed. Her perception into people made him uncomfortable.

"She was in an undergraduate class that I taught while I was working on my Master's. She was smart."

Mandy's smile faded into a look of forlorn and then changed completely into an expression that looked a lot like resolve.

"So what's she doing now?"

Mandy looked down at the floorboard and then out the passenger's side window.

"She died."

"Died? She was younger than me!"

Mandy licked her lips. "She never had good luck with men."
Ben grimaced. All of a sudden, he felt like a total piece of shit.

"Did she ever finish school?"

Mandy looked at him. "She dropped out when she got pregnant with me."

Ben opened the console fished his Winstons out, shook one out and lit up, and just as he was exhaling the first drag, a new and even more horrifying thought occurred to him.

He looked at her for a long moment until he felt the truck veering off the road.

"How old did you say you were?" He said.

Mandy eyed him and smirked again. There seemed to be anger behind the expression that he chose not to think too much about.

"Seventeen," she said.

And Ben chose not to say anything else for the rest of the ride.

-13-

It was curious how quickly they seemed to drop off the face of the earth as soon as they passed out of Bridgeton's city limits.

Bridgton was the only semblance of a good sized-city for miles, but not a mile out of the city limits the streetlights disappeared, the stores disappeared, the houses grew sparse. . . . And now, there was nothing on either side of them but trees and a few power lines.

And the clouds of earlier in the day had never dissipated, so the high-beams of her attorney's Cadillac Seville were scarcely enough to penetrate the gloom. And the ride, so far, had been mercifully quiet.

The events of the day were all a blur.

The cops coming to the house, the hours of questions, the attorney. . . . And the realization that she'd thought she'd had earlier concerning her husband seemed ridiculous. The only person Ben seemed intent upon harming was himself.

She studied her attorney who seemed not to notice her stare. He seemed to be extremely old for a practicing attorney. His skin was thin like that of a person in his late sixties or early seventies. He had a sparse covering of white hair on his sunburned head, and a razor-thin mustache clinging to the top of his upper lip -- like the kind of mustache one might have noticed on a movie star from the twenties or thirties.

He'd seemed knowledgeable and friendly enough. He'd certainly managed to get Detective Davis off her back quickly. But it had taken him all day to show up.

When he arrived, he apologized for his tardiness, extended his hand and introduced himself as Steve Mize.

"You don't do divorces do you?" she said.

Mr. Mize chuckled. "Funny you should ask. I believe your husband thought I was a divorce lawyer the first time we spoke."

She shook her head. "This morning?"

"No, I met your husband a few months back when I was handling Mr. and Mrs. Eaton's will."

"Oh, that was you?"

He nodded.

She looked down at her lap.

"Now that we seem to be talking," Mize said, "there's a couple of things we need to discuss."

She looked at him.

"Wood County doesn't have a case. There's not a shred of evidence connecting you or yours to that crime scene. All they've got is a tire iron they found on the side of the road two miles away, and that's pretty thin."

"Thank God," she sighed.

"Well, they'll continue to try to get evidence. That means they'll probably get a search warrant for your home and maybe your car. -- I expect they'll do that tomorrow."

"Great."

"If they don't find anything, the District Attorney won't let them go any further. Everything else they have can be explained away."

"You think?"

He nodded. "They won't take a chance on what they have. I mean, it seems like to me I went to the Publix in Bridgeton about the same time he was supposed to have come up here, and they were having some sort of district big-wig convention there."

She nodded. "They were."

He gave her a hard look.

"How do you know that?"

Amy recognized her mistake immediately and felt dirty.

"Never mind," he said. "I don't want to know the answer to questions like that. If we end up in a courtroom, the less I know, the more options I'll have."

She looked out the passenger's side window and watched the dark shapes of trees and leaf-laden hills beyond roll past.

She didn't want to talk anymore. She was too tired. Hell, she'd practically just told a perfect stranger that she'd had an affair.

Steven Mize began laughing to himself. She gave him a screwed-up look.

"What?" she said.

"I was just thinking of poor old Tom Davis when he comes out to that old monster of a place you live in tomorrow with a search warrant."

She grinned in spite of herself.

"So you know the house?"

He nodded. "I was a very close friend of your husband's father."

"Oh yeah? So what were Ben's parent's like?"

"His father was the smartest man I've ever known. Ted Eaton built the firm that I work for practically by himself, and you wouldn't believe some of the pro bono work he did."

"He used to run your firm?"

"Sure! It was originally Eaton, Stancil, and Mize, (of course both Eaton and Stancil have passed away)."

"What about his mother?"

He shrugged. "Most of the time, she was as sweet as she could be, but she was always a little bit unstable."

Amy nodded. "So that's where Ben gets it from."

Steve huffed. "I certainly hope not. Jamie Eaton went off the deep end shortly after Ben was born, and Ted walked in one day and found her trying to strangle their baby."

Amy's mouth fell open.

He glanced at her and nodded. "Yeah, that's why your husband had to go live with his uncle. Jamie kept getting worse."

"That's sad."

He rolled down his window and spit out his gum.

"Unfortunately, that's the way it seems to go for the Lancaster family. Once a generation, something terrible always seems to happen like that. They're all unstable, I guess."

She nodded. "Ben hasn't been without his moments."

He looked straight at her. "I know."

He looked back at the road, and pulled another stick of big red out of the ashtray, peeled off the foil and stuck it in his mouth.

"Given his genetic predisposition to screwiness and everything that I've read about his past, I'd imagine he has some powerful bad spells from time to time."

She sat up straight.

"What about his past?"

Steve gave her a helpless look as though he'd spoken out of turn, and shrugged. "I don't know what you know."

"What?"

He shrugged again. "I don't guess any of it is privileged. I shouldn't have been reading it because the file on all of that should've been sealed years ago, but somehow someone stuck a copy of all of that in with his DEFACS files. . . ."

"Are you gonna tell me or not?"

He frowned and glanced at her and then looked back at the road.

"How much do you know about the time he spent with Rudy Eaton?"

She shook her head. "He's weird about that. We don't discuss it."

"I'm not surprised."

And that's when she remembered. "You know, not too long ago he asked me one of the strangest questions about that."

He gaped at her. "He asked me if I'd ever met His Uncle Rudy. As far as I know, Rudy's been dead since he was a kid."

"According to the DEFACS files, the institution that is now DEFACS sent social workers out to that apartment 15 or 20 times over the course of his eight-year stay. They knew that Ben was probably being abused, but there was a different culture regarding that kind of thing in those days."

"Abused how?"

He gave her his most serious look. "Any way that you can think of."

Amy sat back hard. She was overwhelmed all over again.

"No one ever helped him," he continued. "I'm sure that's why the whole thing fell apart like it did."

She frowned at him. "What do you mean?"

Steve sighed. "When the police finally went out there to check up on the missing person's report filed by Ben's teacher, Ben had been locked in that little apartment for almost a week with his uncle's corpse."

Amy's mouth fell open.

"When they found Ben, he was curled up in a fetal position on his uncle's bed. They said he was naked and that a subsequent physical exam revealed that he'd been sodomized."

She couldn't believe her ears. She looked down at the floorboard. "Why didn't he tell me?"

"He probably doesn't remember."

She shook her head. "Well, at least that bastard had the decency to kill himself."

Steve shook his head. "Oh, no! That's not what happened at all. In fact, the way that police report was written up was kind of interesting if not satisfying."

"What're you saying?"

He looked her straight in the eyes. "No one ever came out and said that Ben killed his uncle, but he did."

(Continue to Scene 14)