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  THE DEVIL GAVE THEM BLACK WINGS

  Smashwords EDITION

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Lee Thompson

  Copyright © 2015 by Lee Thompson

  Digital Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  One of the Best Novels of the Year... The Minneapolis Books Examiner on A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS

  Thompson knows just when and what to reveal, and when to keep it hidden... This really is a remarkable effort... Crime Fiction Lover on A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS

  Unlikely and questionable heroes, unsolved mysteries, senseless murders and an old ring all mesh together in a twisted collage of dark mystery, murder and intrigue in this riveting character-driven drama... Tome Tender Book Blog on A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS

  Fast paced and riveting... Delivers a mesmerizing, heart wrenching tale... Literary Mayhem on A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS

  ...an exceptional novel... The Crime Scene on A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS

  THE DEVIL GAVE THEM BLACK WINGS

  By

  Lee Thompson

  “All changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.”

  Easter 1916—W.B. Yeats

  Tuesday

  The human animal is beautiful and mysterious...

  They hold potential one such as I can barely fathom…

  I watch them because I know them, because I want to know them, because they are my charges. Their lives are brutal poetry.

  *****

  September 25th 2001 was two days before someone kidnapped another little girl, but it was the first day that Nina Kunis’s life took a drastic and unexpected turn because she approached the odd young stranger sitting quietly in the park across the road from her home.

  Nina—thirteen-years-old, and raised by an outspoken and practical mother—did not feel the grief that others felt over the attack on the Twin Towers, though she sympathized on a basic human level. Most of all she was in denial that humans could hurt each other so badly in the name of any God, her being a Christian herself and a bit of an outcast in the Assembly of God church. On the twenty-fifth, when she wasn’t actively thinking about it, she was still dealing with it, trying to believe it, or accept that it had happened, and she felt bad that she didn’t feel worse for the families who suffered such loss, because she knew she should, yet she couldn’t, because they were strangers to her.

  She grew aware of Jacob Elder quickly, and knew that even there—in Cleveland, Tennessee, eight hundred miles south of Ground Zero—the reverberations and ripples of shattered security manifested themselves in most citizens’ everyday lives. And it was as if he had carried debris with him, for she would learn later that he came from New York and had been there to witness the devastation among the crowds clogging the streets, his voice raised with theirs in a wail of disbelief and fear and anger.

  And he’d been there later as lower Manhattan was evacuated, his clothing saturated with sour funk and dust, stumbling blindly among the ashes and rubble, the heavy watch his wife, Santana, had bought him tight on his wrist. He carried it away while she lay buried beneath the destruction, their unborn son lifeless in her womb. And he’d felt trapped too, dead inside, as unfeeling as the mass grave dust from the Twin Towers that would always blemish the shoes he had taken off in their apartment two weeks ago and left by the door as a reminder.

  She did not know that Jacob had planned, like many men, to be the best father in the world. It was an obligation that seemed much easier than being the best husband.

  He dreamed often of the graceful stork bringing their son through the snow and wind-driven night, swaddled and sleeping, the child’s small hands pressed into tight fists against its eyes as the light in the nursery grew brighter and the infant witnessed its first sunrise.

  The stork, close by, watching and listening, loving maybe, until the parents rose and saw their son or daughter and the creature left the infant in their care. And Jacob would give the stork a gentle stroke, believing the being as pure and as magical as his dream, and then it would be gone, to carry other gifts to other couples, he was certain.

  But he hadn’t known then that there were some storks whom God had made as white as the driven snow, and others whom the devil gave black wings with which to ride the wind and cause men and women and their offspring misery and calamity in their early years.

  He certainly had not seen his own misery coming, and when he fled to his wife’s childhood town, to find where she had lived and to bury her ashes there, he had thought his grief, like his wife and unborn son’s lost potential, was like tiny pebbles beneath his skin, a simple irritant he could not free himself of without flaying his own flesh…

  He had not foreseen his own helplessness at the hands of memory, which at times were wistful and at others savage…

  He also did not foresee the young girls that would change his life forever, those touched by the infected and malevolent two-toned storks’ irrevocable curse, in a town serious about the ministry of saving the lost…

  The morning Jacob arrived Nina was sitting on her bed next to Clint Friendly, a local bad boy three years her senior. His father was a policeman, and a friend of her family. She had overheard him just the past week talking to her mother over coffee at their kitchen table about the change he’d seen in his son, how he wanted to believe that it was normal hormones, the normal shifts from boyhood to manhood, but he could not be certain. He worried that his son was sometimes living a double life, that his temper too often got the better of him, and that he had grown too interested in Satanism.

  Clint’s voice was sometimes deep, and other times so high-pitched it hurt her ears. He walked around with what seemed a near-constant erection that he was proud of, especially around Nina and her friends in the seventh grade. Most of them giggled, and sometimes he would blush. Sometimes he didn’t. She didn’t know what to make of it, other than to think it was normal because she saw how all of the other boys acted around girls, and she watched how men, including her stepfather, Rick Torrent, acted around her mother.

  And sometimes she would catch her stepfather staring at her developing breasts and he would look away when caught, ashamed, and vanish into the garage to tinker with the mower, or disappear into the yard to rake last year’s leaves, or he’d hang his head as he weeded the flower beds, or he’d turn up the stereo in his man cave and organize his tools on the shelves. She didn’t mind the attention her budding body brought her so much, at least with Rick, because he didn’t do it lewdly the way some boys and men did. In some ways she thought her mother and she were lucky to have him in their lives because he worked hard for them, listened when they spoke, and did other things that her natural father showed no interest in.

  She shook her head, tired of thinking and looked at Clint sitting next to her on the foot of her bed. His black hair hung in his eyes as he pulled a joint from the inside pocket of his leather jacket. A spatter of pimples stuck out on his forehead. He palmed the joint and rolled it down her thigh. His hand was warm and she smiled and said, “We’ll have to smoke it outside.”

  He didn’t argue, just smiled, that glint in his bright blue eyes that felt like someone running cold water over her chest on an incredibly hot day, made her grin and shiver at the same time. She found it hard to breathe when he looked at her, and she’d spoken
to her older sister, Patricia, about it once while wandering the grounds of Lee University, one mile from their home, where Patricia attended school. Her sister had simply laughed and said, “Men,” and Nina had laughed too, a little disturbed, and a little uncertain what they were laughing about.

  The bed springs squeaked as she stood. He followed her out the side door. He lit the joint. She relaxed further in the narrow alcove between the duplex her mother rented and the house next door. It was well-shaded and the sunlight was bright, glinting against the equipment in the park across the road where a dozen children played loudly, their voices and innocent screams joyous and harmless. The parents—some mothers huddled in little knots, some fathers sitting alone, staring at the kids, or staring at nothing—appeared bored, almost as lost as the young man sitting on the steps of the gazebo watching them all.

  He was most likely in his early twenties, a few days of rough beard growing on his cheeks and throat, his fine leather shoes scuffed and dirty. His watch, which looked large and expensive, glinted like the metal the children played upon. He held an open beer can and raised it slowly every few seconds, his throat working hard as he swallowed, his eyes appearing glossy even from a distance. He drained it as she watched.

  She thought that he was probably somebody who had recently lost his job, and his home, and was reduced to begging, and she felt sorry for him in a way, figuring that he kept the expensive wristwatch for some reason or another, most likely a very personal one, perhaps because it was a family heirloom. But the day would come to either eating or keeping time, and he would have to pawn it.

  She hit the joint and held the smoke in her lungs for a moment and coughed, giggling, coughing more, Clint resting his hand on her shoulder, his other hand taking the joint again, his mouth perfect. She wanted to kiss him but knew that if she could see the families in the park they could more than likely see her, too.

  Clint said, “What do you want to do tonight?”

  Nina shrugged, feeling good, in a giving mood. “I don’t know about tonight, but I know what I want right now.”

  He grinned, took her hand. “Interesting. Go on…”

  It took her a second to realize his thoughts had turned toward the physical. She’d heard all kinds of horror stories about men and their needs… from her mother, her friends, older girls at school, from magazines, and television and films and songs. But so far, in the month they’d been dating she hadn’t surpassed kissing him. Although she could see his need in the light of his eyes, in his aggressive posturing, in the mean, sudden set of his mouth when she’d refuse him, his seriousness would usually pass quickly. That smile she found so sexy would return and the warmth would come back in his eyes, and she thought Clint only pretended to be a bad boy, in those moments he overpowered his own lusts, she believed him to be better than most men.

  “Well?” he said.

  She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the house.

  “Your bedroom?”

  But no, she pulled him into the kitchen. She made three turkey and roast beef sandwiches. She handed one to Clint. He looked at it as if uncertain what he was supposed to do with it. He looked at her holding the other two and said, “That stuff didn’t give me the munchies, Nee.”

  And she, smelling the beautiful, rugged smell of leather and the sweet heady scent of dope and the food she’d just fixed, simply smiled in return, saying, “Come on.”

  She walked through the living room and nodded at the front door and he opened it and followed her out into the bright light. She hurried across the street, past Clint’s old maroon Camaro, beneath the old towering oaks and waited for him in the shade as he closed the door and looked at himself to make sure he appeared just the way he wanted. Once satisfied, he rushed across the street, taking small controlled bites of his sandwich and his doing so made her grin. She said again, “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  She turned and strode toward the gazebo, fast for how small she was. The closer she drew to Jacob the faster her heart beat. Up close he was a few years older than she thought, maybe thirty. He stared at the ground about ten feet in front of him, sitting on the steps, his shoulders hunched in a newer hoodie. Behind her, Clint paused. Glancing back, she saw disgust on his face. She shook her head, disappointed with him. She turned back to the stranger and said, “Hello.”

  The man acted like they weren’t there. She cleared her throat and spoke louder. “Are you hungry? I made you a sandwich.”

  Clint came up beside her. He didn’t say anything at first. He just looked from the guy sitting on the gazebo steps to the kids playing forty yards to his right. Nina looked back to the stranger. She said, “Sir, I made this for you.”

  She stepped closer, squatted down in front of him and held out the food.

  His eyes were soft and green and distant.

  She thought he might be high, too, but he wasn’t. His gaze took a moment to focus on her though, and when it did she smiled and shook the sandwich. “Take it,” she said.

  His voice was as soft as his eyes which searched her face openly now that he saw her. “No,” he said, “thank you.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Clint said, “You know it’s illegal to live in the park, man?”

  Nina said, “People live in parks all the time.” She turned back to the man and said, “I’m Nina. What’s your name?”

  “Who cares?” Clint said. “He’s a nobody.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “If you don’t want to be here, leave.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Well, say it somewhere else, to someone else.”

  He looked back and forth, then nowhere. Then he walked off, trying to appear tough, unfazed, but he wasn’t. He was confused. She was so young and yet sometimes acted like she was his mother. At the street he looked back at her but she only waved him away, as if dismissing him. Clint climbed into his Camaro and slammed the door and his stereo grew louder as he put his foot down on the accelerator, thinking for a second that he’d proved something to her but all she thought he proved was that sometimes he could be an idiot.

  When she turned back to the man, he said, “My name’s Jacob.” He glanced at the street. “Isn’t that boy a little old for you?”

  “No.” She hoisted the sandwich up between where she squatted and he sat, determined he’d take it, certain that he needed it. “You sure you don’t want this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Is it okay if I sit by you?”

  “It’s a free country.” His voice was so neutral that she couldn’t read him and she was good at reading what people really wanted, no matter what they said, simply by listening to the tone of their voice or the body language they unconsciously used.

  She sat next to him, one step lower and studied the kids playing.

  He said, “What are you doing here, Nina?”

  She shrugged, then smiled, enjoying the shade, enjoying the way her blood hummed. He didn’t stink like she thought he might, like some street people stank, and there were plenty of them around, always had been. Usually they came from Chattanooga and the cops made quick work of running them off.

  He was different though. Maybe not homeless at all, she thought, judging by the cleanness of his clothes. He kept toying with something inside the large pocket of his hoodie, and if his eyes weren’t so sad and kind, she might have worried. But instead, she thought he was one of those men who look very scraggly sometimes but cleaned up well.

  She also noticed that he wore a wedding ring. It was simple and gold and seemed too large for his finger. It clicked against the beer can when he reached for it, before realizing there was nothing left in it. He looked like a dark-haired Leonardo DiCaprio, and since she was attracted to older men, and had recently seen the movie Titanic, she imagined that she looked like a much younger Kate Winslet. It warmed her stomach, burned inside her imagination, what their unexpected meeting might
mean and where it might lead, so unaware and inexperienced that she had no idea true love only happened quickly in the movies. The real stuff took work, and compromise, and patience, and strength.

  And it was so easy for her to forget that she was still a child when men had begun looking at her like she was a woman. Secretly she wanted to be a woman now and leave her adolescence behind.

  She said, “Do you live around here?”

  “If you call this living.”

  “Why don’t you go back home? You can get in trouble for drinking in public.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, shifting his feet, “there is no going back.”

  “What do you do?” Nina asked.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Just a question,” she said.

  “I don’t do anything.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Because there’s no point in it.”

  She laughed. “You’re weird. Are you some kind of hippy or something?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “or something.”

  “You should shave. You look like a homeless guy because of the scraggly beard.”

  “I don’t want to shave.”

  “It’s just a suggestion.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Is everything okay?”

  He hung his head and she thought she heard him sob as he covered his face, and she didn’t know why but hearing it scared her. He didn’t have to be homeless to be crazy, she realized. But she held her ground, cleared her throat again, said, “Something wrong?”

  He shook his head. “No. I just want to be alone.”

  “I get that way sometimes,” she said. “Life gets too busy with people always wanting to talk or do stuff.” She pushed herself up, not hungry, not sure what to do with the two sandwiches. She set them on the step next to him, said, “Well, it was nice meeting you Jacob.”