At the End of the Road (25 page)

Outside, Dana approached the lighted kitchen window from the side. From a crouched position, she edged into the elongated rectangle of light and peered through the window. From outside, she would be backlit and plainly visible, but she knew that she could not be seen from the inside due to the reflective qualities of glass.

Dana saw Kenny Ahearn and Kyle Edwards sitting at the kitchen table. The scene was almost homey, like a boy and his grandfather having a heart-to-heart. All that was missing was slices of pecan pie and glasses of milk. But then Kyle stood up, pointing his finger, and said something to the old man. The look on Kyle’s face was one of defiance. Dana was so enthralled to witness the interaction between the man and the boy that she did not hear the sound of the snapping twig some distance behind her. Ahearn looked sick. His skin was pale and oily sweat glossed his forehead. He retrieved something from his lap. It was a gun. He pointed it at Kyle.

Dana stood and instinctively drew her weapon. She was going to fire. She paused only long enough to consider whether the glass pane would alter the bullet’s trajectory. She couldn’t put Kyle in jeopardy. She cursed herself for not having called in backup. She had to act. The sound of the snapping twigs was closer to her now, and the noise finally did penetrate to her brain. She turned to see what was rushing toward her.

Melodie Godwin, able to distinguish the outline of a form against the light, began to run toward it. The one thought now in her reticulated brain was to kill. To kill the monster. She leapt, her mouth open in a silent battle cry.

In a single fluid movement, Dana pivoted her hips, swung her arms around, and turned to face her attacker. She raised the revolver at the wraith that was coming down on her like a disease-maddened bird of prey. She fired.

ing down. Give me another one.”

Kyle opened the refrigerator and pulled out another syringe.

“Do the other leg this time.” Kyle complied, uncapping the needle and pulling at the top of the paralyzed man’s loose fitting pants to get at the upper thigh. As he always did, Kenny averted his eyes. For while he took a certain delight in the piercing, he did not care to see the needle violate his flesh. Kyle plunged the needle in with almost tender care and depressed the plunger.

The paralyzed man cried out, “It burns! It burns!”

A gunshot exploded in the night, and the full of Kenny’s attention was divided between the excruciating burning in his leg and the meaning of the gunfire just outside his window.

Kyle grabbed another syringe and stabbed it into the hand holding the pistol. The pistol fell to the floor.

Kenny pulled down the top of his pants to look at the sight of the first needlestick in his dead right leg. It had gone black. The flesh was giving off a putrid odor. Kenny prodded it with his index finger, and it sank into the liquefied flesh up to the knuckle.

Kyle scooped up a handful of the Drano-filled syringes and uncapped the needles.

head, but that didn’t stop it. As it flew through the air, the thing had its mouth open, as if in a scream, but only an airy squeak came out. It landed on top of Dana. She was able to subdue the woman easily. For it was a woman. And she had no strength, no fight left in her. Dana stroked the woman’s stringy hair and soothed her, quieted her. She was Melodie Godwin. She was alive.

Dana raised her head and looked through the window. Kyle’s back was to her, blocking the paralyzed man. Kyle held needles in his left hand. The syringes were interlaced between his fingers and the needles stuck out like vicious metal claws.

group Eagles would release the album
Hotel California
. From the end of 1976 and on into 1977, the eponymous single seemed to receive near constant airplay—unusual for a song of desolation and lost hope. It seemed to define whatever it was that America was feeling as it turned two hundred and then looked forward. And every time Kyle Edwards heard that song, he would think back to this night. He would listen to it, waiting for the lyrics to catch up with the tight knot he felt in the center of his stomach. Waiting for the part where the doomed guests brought out their steely knives to stab it. And knowing that they could never kill the beast.

Kyle didn’t kill the beast. The paralyzed man didn’t die that night. But if he ever moved again, it was upon his belly he would squirm, eating dust.

last of the needles from him, Kyle was finished anyway. He’d prepared half a box of syringes filled to the brim with America’s favorite caustic drain cleaner, and he used most all of them, injecting the Drano multiple times into Kenny Ahearn’s legs and arms; and when Kyle read about it later in the papers, it said that they had to amputate all the paralyzed man’s limbs. Kyle wasn’t as practiced as Kenny Ahearn though, so the injection meant to burn out the man’s voice box had not been clean and precise, but messy and amateurish. The acid took out the vocal cords all right, but it also destroyed the man’s GI passage so that in order to keep him alive, Kenny Ahearn had to have an emergency tracheotomy so that he could breathe and, later, a feeding tube was implanted surgically to deliver nourishment.

the ambulances and the sheriff’s department got there, turning Eden Road into a dance floor of swirling lights, Dana Turpin told Kyle to walk to his father’s house. She told him to sneak in it the same way he snuck out those other nights. And when he woke up in the morning, he was to say that he’d run away because he missed his daddy. That was it. No more. He would have no part in any of this. Deputy Turpin would not speak his name to anybody. In fact, Kyle would never again see Deputy Officer Dana Turpin, but thirty years later, she would call him. And when she did, she wouldn’t acknowledge what had happened here this night.

Even after she recovered, Melodie Godwin also never communicated to the authorities about Kyle’s role in this horror that rocked the South and reverberated across the nation. And Melodie Godwin did recover—to a degree. She did survive. Kyle read about it in the newspaper. “Lone Survivor of Eden Road Horror House Emerges.” Kyle read the newspaper almost every day the rest of that year. They found more cars dumped in the reservoir. More bodies.

And with each revelation, each new obscenity revealed, the newspaper articles always included a small black-and-white photograph of Deputy Officer Dana Turpin—the source for everything that followed. It was an event that would propel her career ever forward.

Deputy Turpin reported that she was patrolling Eden Road at the end of her shift. Just watching, observing. It was a habit she’d gotten into when she first started the case, following her hunch that Ms. Godwin went missing from this lonely road. She reported that she heard a disturbance at the Ahearn residence—gunfire. She found Melodie Godwin just outside the house; and through the window, she observed Mr. Ahearn stabbing himself repeatedly with hypodermic needles.

Given the right-side paralysis of his body, there was some question as to how Ahearn could have repeatedly injected a corrosive drain cleaner into all four of his limbs (not to mention his throat). When the investigators went to pull fingerprints from the Drano bottle and the used syringes, those items had somehow disappeared from evidence. The unspoken consensus was that Melodie Godwin had in fact inflicted her own revenge on the monster, and Deputy Turpin was covering for her. The matter was not investigated any further. And if it was spoken of, it was only with a sense of regret that Melodie had been too weak and injured to finish the job.

Given the nature of his crimes, it was agreed that Kenny Ahearn was quite insane and had somehow found a way to inflict this harm upon himself.

The paralyzed man would never say any different. He couldn’t.

At his trial, they carted him in on a little wheeled platform. His body was wrapped in gauze and he looked like a legless reptile. Everybody in the courtroom could hear the whistle of his breathing through the tracheotomy tube. His eyes were slitted and his tongue darted out every few seconds to wet his scaly lips.

Opal Phillips—she of the constant casseroles and longing looks—was the only witness for the defense. A character witness. For mercy. She got up on the stand and talked about what a good, kind, Christian man Kenny Ahearn was. How he was a deacon at the Lithia Springs First Baptist Church of God. She cried a great deal and slobbered on herself in a manner not unlike the fervent Preacher Seevers. Opal said that both she and God knew Kenny Ahearn was innocent of these crimes. That she would stand by him. That if they let her, she would be by his side every day for the rest of his life, ministering to him.

On his little wheeled platform, the paralyzed man rocked to and fro with such force that only his stumps stopped him from tumbling off the cart. The whistling from his trach tube grew high and urgent, like a referee calling a bad play. And tiny balls of tight white foam formed in the corners of his mouth.

The call from the Atlanta Homicide detective was professional and courteous.

The woman identified herself as Detective Dana Turpin, but she did not acknowledge that she had known him when he was just a boy. Yet Turpin must have sought out and volunteered for this unpleasant task—the coincidence would otherwise have been just too great.

Other than confirming his identity, there was no preamble and she flatly told Kyle that his sister was dead.

“At this time,” she said, “we’re deeming it an accidental overdose.”

And it was only there that Kyle felt the detective’s voice belied a deeper level, an unspoken insight.

Kyle thought of the phone calls he was going to have to make. The family was scattered now, and their interactions tended to focus on holidays and funerals. But he did see them from time to time. Except for Grace, of course. He had not seen or spoken to Grace in two decades, since she ran away at the age of seventeen. No one in the family had. And if he was being honest, it had really been thirty years since he’d last seen Grace, since the summer she was seven years old.

Detective Turpin went on to sketch out a few details of Grace’s final circumstances. Kyle knew the Clermont Hotel and that portion of Ponce de Leon Avenue, and he understood that this matter would not be delved into any deeper than was strictly necessary.

Voice still flat, Detective Turpin said that there was a note.

“Oh?”

“Not a suicide note,” she said.

“Well, what kind of note is it?”

“It was found in her pocket, tucked inside a prescription bottle.”

The detective paused, and Kyle instinctively understood that her training was to not give out too much information all at one time, to parcel it out, to see if the other party would add to it—perhaps in an incriminating way, or an exonerating way. Kyle had nothing to add, but still felt compelled to fill the uncomfortable silence.

“Really?”

“Yes. The note was addressed to you. It has your name on it.”

Pause.

“My name?”

“Yes.”

“Am I allowed to see it?”

“It’s not a suicide note.”

Pause.

“I don’t understand.”

“It will go in an evidence bag and be stored in the case file.”

Pause.

This time Kyle didn’t fill in the silence. He stood there mute, holding the cell phone to his ear.

“If you like,” the detective volunteered, “I can read it to you.”

“Please, yes, thank you.”

“It says, ‘Go to the green pond.’ That mean anything to you?”

Kyle could not find the words to answer. Did that mean anything to him? It meant everything to him.

“No,” he finally said. “No, that has no meaning for me. But, unless she had changed, Grace was using drugs, and had been for quite some time.”

“It’s sad, but, unfortunately, this kind of thing happens a lot more often than most people think.”

“Yes. Thank you, Detective.”

the country of his childhood. A foreigner.
I do not belong here
, he thinks.

Eden Road is paved now. The cornfield has been graded and a cluster of bevel-sided split-levels has been put up (an architectural style that Kyle’s wife disparagingly refers to as “double stacks”). The sweet potatoes and peanuts have been turned under and replaced with a rolling expanse of green suburban lawns. Cookie-cutter houses crowd the land that Grace and he once burned to the ground.

Their old house is still there, looking small and insignificant. His father had lived there, alone, until a series of ministrokes erased so much of his mind that he could no longer care for himself. The silver lining of the brain damage was that Boyd Edwards no longer had to dwell on the fact that he had once been accused of molesting his daughter and that his wife had left him and married an Atlanta real estate broker.