Psychopathy

Chapter 36- Sickness And Injury

Reid looked back down at the green notebook that was open to an entry he'd already read. He'd wanted to reread it so that he could ask Teresa about it when he saw her. He was rereading some of the entries to distract himself from the one entry he hadn't read. The one detailing her skin avulsion. He had read enough of it to know that it was the entry detailing it, but not enough to know what actually happened. It had been so horrible that Teresa couldn't even talk about it. Reid wasn't sure he could handle reading it. So instead, he reread the entry he had opened to.

May 22nd, 1993

Something bad happened today. But it might have led to something good. The jury's still out on that one.

Simon and Kasey had left Ty and me at Tomahawk while they took Teresa to the doctor. Poor girl had stepped on a nail while playing in Simon's woodworking shed. I'd told her not to go in there, but Teresa hadn't been inside, and she was curious. She'd missed one of her doses of the DTaP vaccine when she was little and she hadn't gotten her 4-year dose, so Kasey was worried about tetanus. So they took Teresa to the ER and left Ty and me at Tomahawk to play.

Ty had wandered off at some point and I had wandered off to find him. Ty gets into trouble when Simon and Kasey aren't watching him, and though I probably couldn't stop him, I wanted to make sure he didn't do anything horrible. When I found him, he was in an alleyway with a trash can fire. I assumed he'd set the contents of the trash can on fire. He did like setting things on fire.

He'd gotten bored of the fire and was shooting things with his slingshot. Whose bright idea it was to give that boy a slingshot, I'm not sure. But he was shooting things with pebbles he picked up in the alley. There was a low-hanging branch above the fire, and a cat was hanging out on the beach, cleaning itself. Ty picked up a pebble and before I could stop him, he shot the pebble at the cat. It fell off of the branch and into the fire.

I think I screamed. I'm not sure. My ears were ringing with the cat's yowls as it burned to death. I was frozen. All I could do was stand and stare. That was, until someone yanked on my arm. It was Kasey. They must have come back from the doctor and found we weren't there. Or maybe Ty had gone back to Tomahawk and told them what happened. I don't know. I don't know how long I was frozen.

Sheriff Anderson was there, too. He wanted me arrested, but he had to talk to the cat's owner first. It belonged to an old Italian woman, Caterina Lombardi. But everyone around town just called her Nonna. So while Anderson went inside to talk to Nonna, Simon and Kasey grabbed my arm and dragged me to the fire. They said I should feel the same pain I put that cat through. I tried to explain it wasn't me, but they wouldn't listen. So they held my arm over the fire.

When I screamed as my arm burned, I had hoped that someone would hear me and come to help. But I guess no one heard me, or no one cared. They held my arm there until the skin was white and stiff and waxy and hurt like nothing ever had before. I wanted to tell them I had to go to the hospital, but I didn't think they would listen. So I just held my arm close to me and cried as Anderson said that Nonna wanted to talk to me.

When I got inside, Anderson went back out to talk to Simon and Kasey. It was just me and Nonna. At first, she looked down at me with so much hate. But when the door closed, her face softened, and she smiled at me. She told me to come closer, and when she saw my arm, her face fell. She sighed and said she'd tell Simon and Kasey to take me to the hospital.

But then she said that she knew it wasn't me. That she had been watching from the window and saw what had happened. She told me that she wasn't going to let Anderson arrest me. Instead, she was offering that I work for her every Saturday for the whole summer. That's what he was talking to Simon and Kasey about. She said she wouldn't make me do anything hard. Mostly just some help around the house with things she couldn't do anymore and maybe even she'd take me grocery shopping with her.