Sins of the Mother

The Sins of the Mother

By Imani



Jewel Warrington’s eyes flew open and searched the darkness of her room. She wasn’t sure if it was the thunder or a noise from within the house that pulled her from her deep sleep.
Lightening lit up the dark skies outside causing the huge tree in front of her window to cast an eerie shadow across her room. She slid further beneath her covers and lay still, listening for sounds from within the house.
Maybe her best friend, Taneisha Davenport who had slept over, had gone to the bathroom or to the kitchen. The only sounds she heard was the loud clap of thunder and the heavy rain beating against her window pane. She was almost convinced that it was the storm that woke her.
She stood to her feet and grabbed her cream colored bath robe from the back of the bathroom door. She didn’t think she would be able to get back to sleep with the noise. Normally, she didn’t mind the storms, but tonight, it had her restless. Uneasiness hovered over her head like an ominous cloud. She shook her head because she knew she was being ridiculous.
She’d lived in this four bedroom house for over two years, and had been in it multiple times before that when she was younger. When things got crazy in their home which was quite often, Aunt Martha always welcomed Jewel and her older sister, Priscilla, with opened arms. When Aunt Martha died, Jewel inherited the house.
It was located in Mossville, a small town on the outskirts of Louisiana. She loved its Victorian style, its soaring rounded tower and its porch which wrapped all the way around the house.
Apart from its beauty, it offered a sense of tranquility which she as a novelist cherished.
Her closest neighbor, Norten McAllister who was a cop, lived in the house right across the street. The fact that she had a cop for a neighbor should have been comforting, but it wasn’t.
Norten was a middle aged guy. He stood about 6’3” with broad shoulders. His black hair which was cut military style was graying at the temples.To Taneisha, he was an exceptionally handsome guy and whenever she spent the night at Jewel’s, she’d spend some time at his place as well. It wasn’t like he didn’t appreciate her beauty. He loved the attention she gave him.
To Jewel, he was downright creepy. When she first moved into the house, she spent a great deal of her time on the porch when it was relatively nice outside, with a glass of iced tea and maybe a book that is until Norten moved in a year ago across the street.
She caught him staring at her from his bedroom window countless times.
His face was often expressionless and his dark eyes piercing as if he could see into your very soul. If there ever was a smile that crossed his features, it appeared to be rather sinister.He was a loner. Jewel thought it was odd that he never had any visitors.
Pulling her bathrobe tight around her, she decided she’d go downstairs and put on a pot of tea and head to her office to do some writing. She stepped into the darkened hallway and was surprised to find the door to the guest room where Taneisha was sleeping open.
She reached to close the door when lightening lit up the entire room giving Jewel a full view of an empty bed. She moved further into the room and turned on the light on the night stand. The sheets were wrinkled and the pillow had a slight dent in it. Jewel ran her hand over the sheets. They were cold which meant she’d been up for awhile. Where could she be? Jewel thought.
She went into the hall. All lights downstairs were still out.
Frowning, Jewel felt her way down the steps into the living room and flipped on all the lights. It wasn’t until she peered outside through the glistening window and saw Taneisha’s white Honda still parked in her driveway that she started to get really worried.
A sick feeling started in the pit of her stomach and rose to the back of her throat when her eyes settled on the house across the street. At two in the morning, every single light in the house was on.
Jewel wasn’t one to over react. She wouldn’t be surprised if Taneisha had paid Norten a late night visit. She could be quite spontaneous like that. So why didn’t that fact make Jewel feel any better?
As she forced herself away from the window, she couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling she was having which seemed to be growing every second.
It would be insane to bother McAllister this early in the morning, but she had to know if Taneisha was at his house. They’d been friends since middle school and Jewel would never forgive herself if anything happened to her. With that thought in mind, she slipped into her running shoes and hurried outside into the pouring rain.
By the time she stood in front of the door, her shoulder length hair was plastered to her face and her robe was soaked. She raised her hand, but couldn’t bring herself to knock. Instead, her attention was drawn to the basement window like a moth to a flame.
The light here was on too and she could hear a faint noise coming from within. She moved closer to the basement window, mindless of the mud underneath her feet. She knelt and peered inside. She could see a pair of legs stretched out on what appeared to be a bed. Ropes were tied at each ankle and extended to the bed poles. The purple color nail polish on the toes indicated that it was Taneisha.
Jewel couldn’t stop herself as she moved in for a closer look; her breath came out in short little pants as it fogged up the window; her nose touched the cool glass window. She fought the urge to puke when she saw blood splatter on Taneisha’s thighs and on the bed.
A cry of despair escaped through Jewel’s partially opened lips when she discovered her friend’s intestines spilling out. Blood covered Taneisha’s entire upper torso. Her lifeless eyes stared straight up at the ceiling.
Jewel immediately felt light headed. Her heart pounded erratically inside her chest as she jumped up and immediately slipped in the wet grass twisting her ankle painfully in the process. She stood again ignoring the throbbing pain and limped as fast as she could back across the street sorely afraid that she’d been caught peering inside Norten’s basement window.
She thought she heard footsteps behind her as she pushed opened her door, threw herself inside and kicked it shut. Panting and sweating, she pushed herself up on her knees and dead bolted the door then leaned heavily against it. The image of her friend’s gutted body was like something from a horror movie.
Who the hell was that man? Why did he kill Taneisha? Was it possible she was lured to his house and this was part of his plan?
Nausea swirled around in her stomach as she tried pulling herself together. She stood to her feet and limped into the kitchen and grabbed the phone off the mount on the wall and with shaky fingers dialed 911. She put the piece to her ear and waited for the voice of the dispatcher, but was met with dead silence instead.
She stared at the phone then tossed it against the wall. Panic began setting in as she realized that her lines had been tampered with. He was in her house!
She whirled around on her good ankle and grabbed a knife from its holder and peeked into the living room. Swallowing against a dry throat, she proceeded across the room to the door. But before she was able to unlock it, a leather gloved
hand came over her mouth propelling her backwards. She screamed, but it came out muffled. She tried stabbing at the arm that was holding her, but her hand was so sweaty the knife slipped and fell to the floor.
Norten dragged her into the kitchen and pushed her into the dining room chair. Jewel flung her fists at him, but was rewarded with a punch in the face.
She tried kicking him in the groin, but only ended up catching him in the shin. He moved behind her and pulled her arms together. The rope he tied around her wrists was so tight, it dug painfully into her skin.
Jewel could taste the blood that had trickled from her nose. She stared up at the perpetrator. It suddenly dawned on her that he never looked as atrocious as he did now and it made her blood run cold.
She didn’t suspect him to be a murderer. He was a cop for God’s sake, but even they could be crooked.
“What do you want with me?” she cried, feeling like she was trapped in a bad dream that she was never going to wake up from. Tears streamed down her face. He pierced her with a look that could have alone sent her to her grave.
His lips which were turned downward at the corners flattened against his teeth.
“It’s finally good to see you again, Jasmine,” he said, his voice sounded unusually calm.
Confused, Jewel looked at him. What the hell? Jasmine was her mother’s name, but Jewel couldn’t be sure he was talking about her.
“I’m not Jasmine,” she whimpered to him. Her eyes fell on the butcher knife he was holding. Taneisha’s blood had dried on the silver blade. Jewel looked away.
He came closer to her and slid the flat part of the blade across her cheek making her tense. He stared down and dipped a finger into her cleavage where her robe which still clung to her body fell open. Jewel immediately recoiled. The further she leaned away, the closer he got. His cigarette breath mingled with the sweat pouring from his body overpowered her.
“Oh, but you look just like her,” he whispered close to her ear. “So beautiful just like my Jasmine.”
Jewel tried not to react to what he was saying, but it was hard not to. Her mother knew this nutcase? She couldn’t help herself from asking.
“How did you know her?”
“I was her lover. She said she was gonna leave your father, but instead, she stayed with him.” He moved away seeming very agitated. He snatched opened his cardigan causing buttons to fly and revealed a jagged looking scar in the center of his chest.
“She tried to kill me to cover up our affair!” he said through clenched teeth, saliva flying out of his mouth.
Jewel stared at the ugly scar. The mere thought of her mother standing over someone’s body, especially one ten times bigger than herself, with a knife in her hand just didn’t fit inside her head. She might have been a lot of things, but a murderer wasn’t one of them.
“My mother was happily married to my father for twenty seven years,” she said just above a whisper, but she knew there was no truth in that statement.
Memories of her parents fighting because of her mother’s infidelity tugged at the corners of her mind. For some reason, it had been hard for her to remain faithful. Just about everyone in their family knew that Jasmine cheated continuously on Jewel’s father and each time she did, like an idiot, her father forgave her. Why her father put up with it for so long was beyond her. So there might have been some truth to what this psychopath was saying.
Her mother had been dead for four years now. She’d been murdered while she was soaking in the bath tub. She had taken six stab wounds to the chest.Police believed it was her father. He told them he found her dead when he came home from work. Even though he was distraught when he called 911, police didn’t believe him. He had no alibi and he had plenty of motive so they charged him with her murder.
On her first visitation at the jail, Jewel learned that her father hung himself. She was shocked, even more confused, but most of all hurt because he had taken the coward’s way out.
It was very clear to her now. For the past four years she’d been wondering who was responsible for murdering her mother.
She couldn’t stop her lower lip from trembling as she stared up at the scumbag who took her mother’s life.
"You bastard! You killed my mother!” she hollered.
“She left me to die!” Norten hissed. “It wasn’t so that she can live happily ever after with your old man! Your mama was a slut and I hate sluts!
“And for this you must pay. You must pay for the sins of your mother.”
Jewel wailed aloud as she watched him raise his knife, but she knew that no matter how loud she screamed, nobody would hear her.
Miles away in Sterling, VA snuggled inside her bed in the comforts of her condo, Priscilla Warrington slept, oblivious to the fate that her sister was dealt in Louisiana.
Some hours later, the ringing of her cell pulled her from a peaceful sleep.
“Hello,” she murmured.
“Is this Priscilla Warrington?”
“Yes,” she said to the unfamiliar male voice.
“Are you of any relation to Jewel Warrington?”
Priscilla sat straight up in her bed fully awake now.
“Why? What happened?”
“Your sister’s been murdered, maam.”
Priscilla held her cell in a death grip certain that she was hearing incorrectly. She couldn’t speak and for a second she could not breathe.She had just seen her sister last month when she came up from Louisiana to visit on Labor Day weekend.
She wanted to know how it happened, but couldn’t force the words past her constricted throat. Instead, she listened as the cop continued speaking, his words sounding so hollow and thoughtless.
Hours later, she had booked an afternoon flight to the very place she vowed she’d never step foot in again.
The day promised to be a chilly, cloudless, sunny day in Virginia for mid October, but in Baton Rouge, it was cloudy, gray and muggy.
As soon as she stepped onto Louisiana wet soil, she was wound tight. Emotionally strung, she was suddenly bombarded by unwanted memories of the swamps of Louisiana Bayou.
It was no secret that her parents’ relationship was doomed because of her mother, Jasmine’s inability to remain faithful.
She was an attractive woman back then and she knew how to use her beauty to snag the men of Louisiana Bayou.
Women of the First Baptist church they attended years ago were always leery of her and held on tight to their men.
Priscilla and her sister were called “the daughters of the whore” at their high school and as results, they barely had any friends.
There was no way to escape the awful small town gossip.
The next thing Priscilla knew, her mother was murdered and her father hung himself shortly afterward. With all the embarrassing rumors that circulated, Priscilla wondered why he hadn’t done it sooner.
Priscilla hated her mother for what she put their family through, especially her father. She wasn’t sure when, but somewhere along the line, she stopped having respect for her own mother. She didn’t even attend her funeral when she died.
After retrieving her luggage from the baggage claim area, Priscilla took a cab to Mossville where Jewel lived because for some odd reason the officer she spoke to earlier, who hadn’t bothered to leave his name had given her strict orders to meet him there before she headed to the morgue.
Moments later, the cab driver pulled up in front of the black and white three story Victorian style house.
Priscilla expected to see the place swarming with police, but only one cop car was parked on the side of the road.
A knot lodged itself inside her throat as her eyes took in the yellow tape that declared Jewel’s house an official crime scene. The fact that she would never see her sister alive again was beginning to sink in.
Unshed tears filled her eyes as she tossed the cab driver cash then stepped out the vehicle.
After it disappeared from view, Priscilla stared up at the house that stood eerily against the gray sky, a sense of foreboding she couldn’t quite understand swept over her as she made her way up the walkway to the porch.
She was surprised when she pushed the door open and it gave way under her hand, and she wasn’t prepared for the offensive odor that instantly smacked her in the face and nearly took her breath away. She put her hand over her nose and stepped cautiously into the dimly lit house.
Almost instantly, her eyes fell to the pool of blood on the white gleaming dining room floor.
She gasped when she saw her sister in a chair with her hands tied behind her and her head hanging at an awkward angle off her neck.
She stood rooted to the floor afraid to go any further. A red flag suddenly went up in her head. As much as she wanted to run toward her little sister, something didn’t feel right.
“So sad, isn’t it?”
Priscilla jumped and spun around to face a tall, dark skinned, broad shouldered guy in a police uniform. His name tag read Norten McAllister. The emotionless voice she heard hours ago somehow went right along with his stony appearance and cold eyes.
She swallowed hard trying not show how uneasy she was feeling with him so close to her.
“McAllister,” she said uncertainly.
She studied him openly. His dark eyes were fixated on the dead body in some sort of sick manner.
“She was so beautiful just her like her mother,” his eyes took on a faraway look. Some sort of shadow passed over his features as if he was remembering something that saddened him.
“I didn’t want it to be this way,” his nostrils flared as he said the words. The sad expression was gone and replaced with hostility.
“Better she die now than become like her mother, don’t you think?”
Priscilla frowned, clearly confused. Her first thought was to run because she realized that she had walked right into the trap of the maniac who killed her sister, but as she made an attempt to pass his large frame, he blocked her.He studied her intently.
Fear seized Priscilla and she slowly backed into the dining room, thinking of some way to escape, but she realized her only shot was the kitchen window. He would surely be on top of her before she had a chance to break it.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she pleaded backing right into the kitchen counter.
He wasn’t fazed by her words or the tears that began rolling down her cheek.
It was then that she noticed the bloodied knife in his hand.
“I’m going to kill you my dear,” he said calmly. “And you have your mother to thank for that.”
Priscilla turned quickly and started to climb the counter, but she knew inside it was hopeless when she felt the first plunge of the knife in her back.