It has been nearly a week since my mother’s murder. She had been killed while walking home from the grocery store. The police had concluded that it had been a robbery gone wrong, but I knew there had to be more to it; I knew it was Holden.
I have been living in Seattle, Washington for the last three years and working at a small coffee house on the eastside of the city. A very eccentric area of town filled with musicians, poets, actors and authors all looking for their big break. It was a far cry from the small mid-western town I had grown up in. I moved to Seattle to try and find some direction. I suppose that is why most people move to big cities; to find themselves, or perhaps to get lost. Looking back I am not sure which one I was really seeking, direction or ambiguity.
I was walking home from work when I got the call. I have always had a bad habit of not answering calls from numbers I don’t recognize. Not that hearing the news of the last person in the world that cared about you had been taken away would have been any easier to receive had it been from a real person rather than a message left on voicemail. I felt numb. I will never forget that feeling.
When someone jumps out from behind a corner yelling “BOO”! That feeling of avoiding a car accident by inches; when your brain shuts down for a split second to absorb all that just happened. However, this lasted more than a split second… this is a numbness that has never gone away.
I jumped on a bus that night; in such a hurry that I barely remembered to pack. I didn’t even think to call work. I was pretty sure they would understand but even if they didn’t, I really couldn’t care. I couldn’t be sure if I was going to be coming back at all. My mind started to wander on the long ride home. Who could have done this? Could I really allow myself to believe that Holden could really have done this? Murder?
I arrived in Hurtsman at 2:35 then next day. As the bus pulled sluggishly into the parking lot behind the McDonalds, I knew I was home. The smells, the sights, the people; nothing had changed in three years, nothing. It was like a snap shot. As if I had taken a picture the day I had hopped onto that same bus going the opposite direction. The only difference now was that I was going to the home I had grown up in and now it would be empty, except for Holden.
There’s only one thing in my life I would do anything to rid myself of, and that would be Holden. In the movie, “It’s A Wonderful Life”, a man sees what the world would be like if he had never been born, and it’s a terrible place. If Holden had never been born, the world would be a much better place; at least my world. Holden is as unyielding and merciless as an unreachable itch.
Holden is my twin brother, my other half. The one person that knows me almost as well as I know myself, and I hate him. Holden was born three minutes after I was and has always resented me for being older. When we were kids he was always getting me in trouble, it started out innocently enough. Normal kid type pranks; taking the top off the salt shaker, door bell ditching, putting bugs in girl’s hair. Harmless pranks that I always got all the blame and punishment for. I would try to tell my parents I had nothing to do with any of it but they never believed me. And the older we got, the worse Holden had become.
What started out as harmless kid’s games became a lot darker. By the time we reached middle school Holden had moved from sabotaging salt shakers to hair cutting, door bell ditching to setting fires, and from bugs in girl’s hair to killing the neighbor’s cats and dogs in the woods behind our house. Still, I got blamed for all of it.
By middle school my parents had gotten fed up with everything. I suppose they figured if they sent me away that Holden would stop acting out. Maybe they assumed that I was the antagonist and if I was gone they could concentrate on reforming him. However, they never got a chance to send me away. Two days before I was to be sent away to reform school, my father disappeared. My mother could not bring herself to send me away with my father missing. I think part if it was that she didn’t want to be left alone with Holden. That was the first time that I felt completely numb.
Although time was irrelevant at that point; hours, days, and weeks, blended into one big stretch of time. It was then that I first noticed my mother’s desk. She had gotten the old roll top desk from her aunt Dorothy after she had died. We had the desk for as long as I could remember. It had always been there, just a part of the scenery that collected dust. It had never been used, and I had always just assumed that it was locked and the key lost long ago.
But it wasn’t long after my father’s disappearance that my mother started using the desk nightly. She would sit for hours scribbling in her books. I never knew what she had been writing but she always did. I would try to pry her away from the desk but she would not budge, or allow me to see what she was writing, but she always shared with Holden.
Three weeks later they found my father, or what was left of my father. His body had been found in the woods behind our house by a group of hunters about 4 miles from our home. My mother never gave me the full details about what the police told her. The only information I gathered from listening in on phone calls in the other room, was that he had been out drinking and gotten attacked by an animal in the woods. But I knew the truth, it was Holden.
It took me five more years until I could gain enough courage to escape Hurtsman, my mother, and Holden. As expected Holden didn’t take the news of my leaving well, he screamed at me for what seemed like an eternity. He told me that I would be back and that when I came back he would make me pay for abandoning him; that he would make sure of it.
Now here I was, just as Holden had predicted. Back to Hurtsman, back to my mother, and unfortunately back to Holden. I decided to walk to my childhood home as I wanted to prolong seeing Holden for as long as possible. Why rush the inevitable? Besides, I needed some time to rehearse what I was going to say to Holden.
As I came to the front door I didn’t know what to expect, was I going to be greeted with a hug and a good cry with my brother over the loss of our mother. Maybe I would walk in to find Holden had already moved in and laid claim to the house. Perhaps Holden would live up to his promise, making him the sole benefactor. I held my breath like I was about to go down with the Titanic, knowing this could very well be my last breath even taken. I grasped the door knob, barely able to turn it as my palms were covered in sweat. The door creaked open slowly and my eyes widened as my worst fears were revealed. The entire house was vacant, except the roll top desk sitting in the middle of the room staring back at me like a wild animal about to pounce. A small note hung down attached by a small piece of scotch tape, it read simply “It’s ALL yours…”
As I approached the desk I was terrified of what I may find inside. I was not even sure I even wanted to know what was waiting for me underneath those wooden slats. My heart pounding, a cold sweat began to flow down my back and I knew I had to face my fear. I reached down and grabbed the handle, and with a speed I had not anticipated the lid slid open with a sound I could only refer to as a shriek.
Books! The entire desk was filled top to bottom with books. Not novels but notebooks, those spiral wire bound notebooks. Could this be what my mother had been writing in for all those years? Why would Holden have taken everything else but these notebooks and that damned desk? Was this what my mother had left me? Would these answer all the questions that I had been trying to comprehend for so long? Would this bring my mother back?
After what felt like an eternity, (and in reality was at least an hour), I realized I only had one thing left to do. Taking a handful of notebooks, I cracked open the front cover. Pages yellowed by age cracked as if they had never seen the light of day. In the top right corner, today’s date. My eyes made way to the middle of the top line, as if the title of a story or report a child would have written for school, “Why I Did It” was written.
This was it… Holden had confessed and left it for me to find. Left it for me to learn what he had done to my mother, to our mother, to me. My whole life Holden had tried to hurt me, but after I had moved to a place he could no longer get to me, he still knew how to. He knew how he could bring me home and he had succeeded in his intentions; I was home, and I was hurt. Although I wanted to run straight to the police, give them the note book and have them take care of it, I knew there had to be more. Why would Holden leave all the notebooks for me if he had only used one? I read on.
“If you are reading this I am already dead. I know that the papers will say I was a monster for the things I have done. I assure you I am not, nor am I insane. The actions I have taken have been through my own free will. I remain accountable and am fully aware of my actions and of the consequences… Today I killed my brother.”
Oh my god, Holden had planned this whole thing! He had planned to get me back here so he could kill me. Holden was framing me. He was going to kill me, then kill himself to make it look like self defense and make it seem as if I was the one who had killed our mother. My brother and I have always had a strange relationship. Growing up I always knew he was troubled, that he had problems, but I never thought he could kill our mother and then frame me. Although I knew I was in mortal danger I was compelled to continue reading on.
“Several days before my mother’s murder, my brother came home for a visit and something was clearly wrong. He had shown up on the door step ranting and raving that people were after him, that he was on the run and feared for his life. My mother could not turn him away; she told him if he was really in that much trouble we would find a way to help him. Later that night, after mother had gone to bed, my brother came to me in what I assume was a drugged-out daze, apologizing to me for killing our father. “Holden” he said “I am sorry that I killed dad.” As if I didn’t already know. I had followed him that night. My father got home from the bar and my brother begging my father to look at the tree fort he had built. My father blindly followed my brother and I watched as he jammed a kitchen knife into my father’s chest, again and again, and again.
Stunned, I sat with my mouth agape long enough for my tongue to feel like sandpaper. Franticly I started going through all the note books, twenty plus years of journal entries all Holden’s, all accounts of the evil he had done, the bugs in the hair of girls at school, the slaughter of cats and dogs, the murder of our father, all being blamed on me.
In my blind frustration I kicked the desk hoping I could break the truth I had discovered within it. That’s when I discovered it; in a secret drawer in the side of that damned desk, what appeared to be a sort of list:
KILLED
Aunt Dorothy
Jim Andrews
A kid that lived down the street
Mandy Applewhite
Samantha Heminsworth
John Abbot
A hitchhiker
Killed, Killed, Killed! How could he have done this? How could he have never been caught? My mother knew the whole time! The list was in her handwriting.
Holden: I saw him mother he did it, I wanted to stop him but I couldn’t
Mother: I will have to punish him then. I know it was not your fault my beautiful boy.
Holden: I love you.
Mother: I know.
Over and over and over, always the same! Holden say this, Mother accepts, I get punished, it gets covered up, the body never gets found. Now she was dead, my father was dead, countless others were dead, and if I did not act quickly enough, I would be dead.
I gathered all the journals, the list, everything. I had to get this to the police, get in protective custody till they could catch my maniac brother. I had to escape. That’s when I noticed the last notebook, or the first depending on how you looked at it. A leather bound journal that was my mothers. On the first entry, the date was the day of my birth was in the corner. “Today I had a beautiful baby boy, the doctors said because of complications he will be our first and last child. The doctors are referring to it as a “miracle.” They say there is no way I should have been able to conceive at all. After so many years of trying, so many tears, and so much pain, God has finely answered our prayers. Now I will do whatever it takes to protect this gift. He is my everything and I will do anything to protect him. I think we’ll name him … Holden.”
