Hands in the Dark

Chapter Six Charged with Slaughter

Chapter Six Charged with Slaughter

“So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.” ~ Stephen King, Bag of Bones

            Ruth sat in the computer lab of the art college’s section, one whole area, other than the library, had computers. Her gray eyes were beginning to hurt as she kept staring at the screen, but she needed to keep looking. To find something that Tara may have missed.

            She glanced over to her pink file folder, inside it were the copies of information that Tara had found and gave to her. But this was odd to Ruth, why would her friend do this when she was going to be home in a matter of hours?

            Unless she knows that she isn’t coming back… Ruth shook her head quickly. “No, Tara’s coming back she’s not the kind of person willing to get herself killed to find something.”

            But then again…

            When Tara lost her mother she had changed quickly, she did a complete one eighty in personality for the longest time when in ninth grade. But then considering how that place treated her for that one whole year, who could blame the violent outbursts and eyes filled with utmost hate to everyone but her few close friends.

            Even now she could still remember being at the funeral.

            Everyone who knew her mother, including Tara’s friends, all came to pay their respects, there were more than two hundred people to say goodbye to this woman, it astounded Ruth. So many people knew this woman. Though in all fairness her mother, Valery, died incredibly young, only fifty six years old yet looked so much younger than that.

            Her father Michael couldn’t stop crying, yet Tara, cried only a bit.

            Ruth remembered what she looked like, small, she just finally hit puberty, chest becoming larger, body more defined. Dressed in a black dress, with a slight slit going up her leg to showing some of her thigh, though the dress originally didn’t have sleeve, her father got her two versions of the same dress, one with capped sleeves, the other with long sleeves that started after her shoulders. Black heels and to Ruth surprise, she thought for a split second Tara had a guarder belt on that held up her stalking.

            Her hair done up in a ponytail with a styled clip, but had been curled to fall around her shoulders and dark makeup, but her lips were red, dark red, like blood.

            At some point Ruth and the others lost Tara with all the sea of people, they found her later in front of the alter with Melody, one of Tara’s oldest friends, standing there just looking at the blue marble urn that held her mother’s ashes.

            “It’s my fault…” she said to Melody. “If we had gone some other way… if I had slowed down and walked beside her like I usually did… then none of this…” her hands clasped together began to shake not from sadness, but from rage. Rage at what she believed she caused as tears fell from her blue eyes. “I should have been the one to die! Not her! How the fuck is any of this even fair!?! How!?”

            If that wasn’t the worst of it, her boyfriend now ex, came with Aaron; the young man’s father had been the one to kill her mother.

            Ruth clued in fast as to why Aaron was there, he wanted Tara to feel worse than she already had, to blame herself more, and from the look of the bastards smile, she could tell that he wanted Tara to kill herself.

            That made Ruth so angry, she didn’t give a crap if this asshole was stronger than her, hell, the pencil that she used for sketches that she had done for today that was in her bag would be more than enough to gouge out his eye!