Sunkissed Innsmouth
Party Twenty Three
The next shack they came to made Mullens’ seem palatial. Many of the small shacks in and especially around the outskirts of the village were single room affairs. Most didn’t have a wash basin. Some didn’t even have a stove. Some were little more than four uneven walls made from broken up shipping crates with a tired, tar paper roof. This shack seemed to be an example of all manners of village deprivation gathered together to resemble little more than the outhouse Felecia had just seen.
The shack wasn’t big enough for Phillip and Felecia to enter at the same time, not around the single bed and the dead body. The mud around the front of the shack told the same story as the mud in front of Mullens’ house. Many people had come and gone, those who did the crime, those who found the body, those who came to see the spectacle, and the crowd that gathered afterwards.
The older woman was laid out beside the bed, perhaps surprised in her sleep. This crime was very different than how Mullens had died. Mullens was face up and left choking on poison, he was also still clothed for the day. This body was half naked, face down in a pool of congealed blood. Felecia felt little of that trepidation from earlier, she didn’t stop at the doorstep out of a sense of fear or disgust for the subject of the crime. This time Felecia only stopped for a moment because she felt a sorry and sick sense of empathy. She needed to know how this had happened. The older woman died badly, she had time to notice her murderer, maybe even beg them for her life. The blows landed again and again and again. Waves of blood and gore splattered the inner walls and ceiling of the shack. The attack didn’t end until the murderer ran out of steam. Jacks or pawns be damned, this wasn’t about wins or loses.
Felecia observed the scene and then stood in the doorway while Phillip circled the body once and then a second time. The woman’s life changed and ended in the sad shack and it was an awful but easy moment of death to sort out from a distance.
The older woman finally gave up and turned away from her murderer, not because she feared them, but because need drove her to turn away from her attacker. She turned away from the blows, perhaps to protect an already battered and damaged face only to offer up a fresh farm for familiar brutality. There were whip marks on the old woman’s back, dozens of them, all long since scared over.
Phillip stepped out into the night and took a deep breath. “Whoever poisoned Mullens did that before coming to do this. Mullens wasn’t particularly smart but he wouldn’t have opened the door to share a drink with anyone covered in that much blood.”
Knowing who the old woman was and who disliked her seemed more worthwhile an endeavor than continuing to stare at her battered corpse. “Who was she?”
Phillip walked farther away and took a second, even deeper breath. “Margaret, people in the village call her sour Marge. She, uh well, she was a Conway. If memory serves, she was a first cousin of the old witch’s.”
That should elicit outrage, shouldn’t it? If Felecia were still within the warm and dry halls of Rotary house, surely someone with that last name dying under any circumstances that didn’t involve the sea or old age would demand outrage.
Felecia took a deep breath of her own and felt old and tired. A thirteen-year-old girl isn’t supposed to feel old and tired, is she? Then again, neither was a ten-year-old girl, or an eight-year-old already grown weary of her elders. The other girls and young women of Rotary house all seemed to wear their lives, and their stations and trappings so much better, and easier. The sheer knowledge of being a Conway felt suffocating, being a girl with a peeping older brother was exhausting, being under Nana’s scrutiny felt like being constantly naked and always judged accordingly.
Was it a shock to see a member of her family murdered brutally? Of course. Was it surprising? Not after everything Phillip had told her so far. He had already mentioned other members of the family who didn’t bend to Nana’s will and what happened to them. Perhaps this Marge was a much earlier rival for what was deemed owned by and owed to someone else.