My eyebrow lifted, but I didn’t comment. However, I locked the name Lacey Daniels in my head for D to investigate.
“Bev felt sorry for the poor girl and started hanging out with her. Anybody with half good sense could see that that poor child wasn’t being treated right.”
My new informant put out her cigarette, tilted her head to the ceiling, and blew her smoke like an expert. Her upper lip was tucked behind her bottom one, leaving a hole for the smoke to exit.
“Do you know where they lived...Lacey and her foster family?”
The woman caught a chill. She rubbed her hand repeatedly up and down her left arm after her body visibly shook. “Yeah, they didn’t stay too far away from here. Over there in those Dumont Duplexes. But, after what happened over there, they tore the building down.”
Now, she had my attention. I sat higher in the dusty chair.
“That poor girl must’a got tired of them people abusing her. I didn’t see the crime scene, ‘cause I was working that night and couldn’t walk over there to be nosey.”
The woman pointed, I guess towards the location of the duplexes. “The place is right down the street, two blocks over. It ain’t nothing but an empty lot their now. The kids claim that the lot is haunted.”
This woman had no idea how much I wanted to stand and shake the information out of her. She was taking her time getting to whatever point she was aiming for.
Stretching out her pause, she scratched the back of her head, and her eyes remained on her feet before she went back into her bra and retrieved another cigarette. I winced at the sight of her tits that she didn’t care one bit about flashing as she fished around in there for the small blue lighter.
Her story didn’t continue until after she’d taken two long pulls that took the cigarette down to the halfway point. I didn’t know if this Lacey Daniels was the girl that might be Megan, but my mind was set to hear the rest of the lady’s story.
“It’s no wonder they tore down that duplex, the way they say that girl killed that family. Bev was fourteen at the time, so Lacey was probably the same age, but when I saw her, the time she had come over here with Bev, she looked no more than eleven or twelve. She was skinny like her foster people starved her or something. She must’ve gotten tired of that foster father raping on her because one day she just up and killed them all.”
She fucking paused again, giving that cigarette every bit of her attention. This woman was killing my damn patience, stabbing it all to hell with her slow-ass storytelling. She flicked off the ashes of her cigarette into an already full ashtray.
“By the time I made it home that night, the yellow tape was already around that duplex and Bev came busting in this house out of breath, telling me that Lacey had stabbed them people up, killed every last one of ‘em. She said the police found that lil’ skinny girl in that house with the knife still in her hand, and she was all bloody. The kids say she looked like that Carrie from that Stephen King movie.”
Another pull on that damn cigarette took it down past the butt where the ambers threatened to blaze if she sucked on it any harder. She shoved the butt into an ashtray with at least twenty others. Some of the ashes spilled over onto the scratched wood of her coffee table, but she didn’t care.
“When the police finally got lil’ Lacey out of that house of horror, they said that child had gone plum crazy. It’s a shame for somebody that young to go crazy like that. When the news broke it down the next day, they say the foster father was stabbed over eighty-something times. The foster brother fifty-something times, and that old foster mother over fifty times.”
Storyteller paused long enough to shake her head for cinematic effect. If this woman grew tired of sitting around her house smoking, she could try her hand at being a professional narrator.
“Come to find out, the cops found a recording of the father raping that little girl. The whole thing was some crazy shit. They say the recording the police found was so brutal that it justified the girl’s actions. So, that poor child didn’t break—she snapped clean in half. Ump. Ump. Ump.”
Storyteller paused and shook her head with a far-off look in her eyes. The scene must have been a gruesome one if she was telling this story second-hand with that haunted look in her gaze.
“From what I know, they put lil’ Lacey in the crazy house. After the way she had stabbed her foster family up, I don’t know if she ever got out, even with the recorded evidence. If they did let her out, I don’t know which way she went after that.”
The smoking narrator glanced up, and as I expected, she reached her hand back into her bra. I cut my eyes in another direction. If she flashed her saggy-ass tits again, I was bound to get nauseated.
As I stood, it occurred to me to ask the foster family’s name. “What was the name of that foster family?”
“Them people kept to themselves. They didn’t much talk to nobody outside their house. I think the father was Carlos or something that started with a C, and I never knew the son or mother’s names.”
“The family name?” I asked. “What was their last name?”
“Shit. I think it was something that started with a D, like one of them long Spanish names. They were Mexican or something.”
If Lacey was Megan, what the hell was she doing with a Mexican family? The story was getting stranger by the minute.
“So, was Lacey Daniels a Mexican girl?”
“No. Back then, the foster care system didn’t care nothing ‘bout who they placed them kids with. Them damn case workers didn’t have degrees and shit like they do now. I guess they figured that a little black girl with curly hair and light-enough brown skin wasn’t too far off from being Mexican.”
Curly Hair.That clue raised both my brows.
I pointed a daring finger at the storyteller. “If I check this story out, it had better not be a bunch of bullshit or I’m coming back for my money.”