Alace sweets, p.1
Alace Sweets, page 1
Alace Sweets
MariaLisa deMora
Edited by Hot Tree Editing
Cover designed by Debera Kuntz
Copyright © 2017 MariaLisa deMora
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
First Published 2017
ISBN 13: 978-1-946738-07-3
DEDICATION
Revenge really IS sweet. ~ Alace Sweets
To my friends who have odder obsessions than I do. Thanks for making me look normal.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I must confess to a lifelong morbid fascination with serial killers.
Most likely, it can be blamed on the era in which I grew up. While other generations fielded their share of murderers, my imagination was supplied a diet of the unbelievablely intense stories of the Manson family, Zodiac killer, Gacy, Bundy, Son of Sam, and the Hillside Strangler.
Sensational reporting meant my developing sense of right versus wrong was bathed in a stew of gloriously gory articles, movies, and documentaries. Pair that with the perplexing adult discussions I often overheard about seemingly normal people who went on to commit atrocious crimes, and you’ve got the right setting for the making of a hell of a tale.
As she’s written into my story, the character Alace doesn’t exist. At least, as far as I know. To me, this protagonist presents an opportunity to put together an interesting blend of situational inspiration, allows me to invent symbol-rich scenes that take your breath away, and then enables me to mix those with a dash of strategic gender role subversion. All to create a believable monster. Her very name is a metaphor. I love it.
I appreciate Becky Johnson and her staff at Hot Tree Editing more than they know. As ever, they helped me take a good story and make it better. I also want to say a huge thank you to Debera Kuntz for her cover design. She took the clay of my rough idea and ran with it, executed in a way that far outstripped my meager imaginings, and created a piece of art.
My alpha crew were astonishing and supportive beyond belief. Kelsi, Kori, Megan, Jamey, and Jesse, I want to thank you for NOT running screaming from the manuscript!
Woofully yours,
~ML
Alace Sweets
Revenge really IS sweet. ~Alace Sweets
A dark thriller, this book is not a light read. Filled with edge-of-your-seat suspense, this intense story commands the reader's attention as it drives towards the explosive ending. Alace Sweets is a vigilante serial killer, with everything that implies and is sure to trip all your triggers. Be ready.
At seventeen, Alace Sweets turned a corner in her life, taking the wrong shortcut home from school.
Resisting the harsh knowledge her attackers will never be made to pay for their actions, Alace takes a stand. Justice must be served, and if fate’s scales are out of balance, she’s determined to set things right as best she can.
When the laws of men fail, the rules of Alace prevail.
Chapter One
Two minutes and forty-seven seconds.
That’s how long it took to die inside.
Alace knew it was longer. The whole encounter had been so much longer than that. About seventeen lifetimes, that’s how it seemed at the time. From the moment she rounded the corner of the alleyway and saw Trev and his posse waiting for her, a line of bodies spread out across the space, their practiced actions so coordinated, she knew she couldn’t be their first target. The instant she grasped that this wouldn’t be something she could outrun or avoid—and would be finally tossed to the side, landing on the cobblestones like nothing more than a used tissue—seventeen lifetimes seemed about right.
No. The not-quite three minutes—and that’s how their defense attorney categorized it, minimizing it as less time than a parking meter put on the clock for a quarter—was all the jury saw. A portion of her attack had been videoed on a phone, the footage whispered about in the hallways and bathrooms of the warehouse where she and her attackers all worked—the only employer left in the tiny New York town where Alace had lived all her life. Shaky footage discovered by a man’s wife one night when he was too drunk to discourage her exploration. A discovery shared with the police who pieced together that the blurry face held against the hood of a car, cheek flattened to the metal, white panties gagging her screams, must be the girl claiming rape at the local hospital.
She hadn’t named Trev when she went to the ER. God, no, I’ve never been stupid. If she’d named him, there would have been no saving her. She would have been found drowned in the river, another victim of the particular version of depression that seemed to run as a contagion in the little town. A taint acquired through exposure to the small pond bullies cultivated amidst the economic woes of the region.
Alace was just the daughter of the town slut, not even a father’s name to claim. It’d be the joke of the century if she had named names when asking for the slim care available at the tiny hospital. Blood tests and a pill to make sure their seed didn’t stick. That’s all she’d been looking for, the gift of reassurance, but none of that came without a price. With the local bleak climate, even her battered body wasn’t unique enough to justify a second glance.
Hopelessness breeds violence, and their town had ample evidence that crop was well rooted.
It wasn’t until the next girl turned up dead as well as raped that Alace realized exactly what they’d risk covering their tracks. Same age, same desperate confrontation, but a different, very permanent outcome because Tansy had talked, and talked, and talked until she wasn’t in any shape to talk anymore.
Two minutes and forty-seven seconds.
That’s the length of time the jury was required to watch the large screen brought into the courtroom for that command performance.
She sometimes wondered how long Tansy lasted.
Alace didn’t look at the projected images. She would have blocked out the sounds with her hands if she could, but the lawyer assigned to prosecute Trev and his hounds had warned her against that kind of avoidance. Said it could look like she was culpable, like she was trying to withdraw from owning the acts committed on her body. His contradictions didn’t make sense, but it didn’t matter. Frozen on the bench behind the barrier wall, separated from her attackers by only a few feet, forced to breathe their air, Alace sat quietly, but she wouldn’t watch. Couldn’t, not and stay sane.
She’d kept her eyes on the judge, noting he avoided the screen, too. But, of course, he’d seen it before since just the admittance of the video was a contentious point for the defense. Argued and argued behind closed doors, while the rustling masses stayed seated in the courtroom. Whispers and pointed fingers bringing the strain of humiliation down on Alace. Regardless of his angled chin turning his face away, she knew the man in the robes already had seen it, forced to watch and make a ruling, implacably throwing his weight on the side of the evidence.
The jury had watched. Some showing an apathetic disbelief, some with expressions of disgust, and one woman had worn such a look of avaricious delight on her face Alace had stared at her for long moments, uncertain of what she was seeing.
“Be quiet, bitch.” That had been the only phrase grunted loud enough for the cell phone speaker to pick up. Alace heard the words and was transported out of there, landing back in her crawling skin plastered against cold steel. The taste of her own panties shoved into her throat, heaving against the cloying feel of wet cotton, tasting the acid tang of ammonia, telltale evidence of her terror. Strands of her long hair in her mouth, tangled on her tongue, shoved in and held in place by the gag. “Be quiet, bitch.”
Alace wrestled her way back to reality in time to hear the sound of ripping fabric tear through the air of the courtroom. That would be her shirt, torn along the side seams so they could grapple at her breasts with flesh claws made from hands.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. That everyday sound was the suspension of the car as it rocked back and forth, a timeless motion that should have been comforting. Transformed to violence, the sound was obscene.
Sweat-wet flesh slapping together shared space with broken howls and cries. His thighs had been hammering against her haunches as her throat convulsed around a scream. Thick ribbons of bruises had banded her belly and hips for weeks, darkness slowly bleeding to purple and then green, yellow reminders of danger remaining the longest.
A loud scratching noise, sounding like beetle’s legs scrambling for purchase in a hot frying pan. Her nails had clawed at the unforgiving metal surfa
Alace had waited, counting down every damned second of the playback from the worst day of her life.
The entire charade inside the courtroom wasn’t anything she’d asked for. In fact, when the police had shown at work and demanded to talk to her, she had told them there was nothing to report. One man, a detective, had looked at her with sad eyes. “I know your mother,” he had said, and she’d immediately directed her eyes down, not wanting to see the kindly expression morph to disdain on his face. His words didn’t make sense, and she dismissed them out of hand, only keeping the parts that fit into her view of the world. “Alace, what those men did was not okay. They hurt you, but they did so much worse to Tansy. We can do this without you, but with you is easier.”
He’d had to come back three days in a row before she would say anything other than, “Nothing happened.” Still, the sad-eyed detective had eventually worn her down, his murmured kind words and façade of caring too unfamiliar to resist.
In the end, it was all for naught.
“Not guilty.” The woman who’d been wild-eyed during the rape playback read the verdict, her voice shaking.
What if? Alace’s brain was plagued with the ideas. What if I’d spoken up first? She likely would have preceded Tansy on a walk off the train trestle. Would it have been a fair trade, if Tansy lived?
Tansy had a family who loved and mourned her, attending each day of the trial even if the charges for their daughter’s death weren’t on the docket. Weeping when Trev and his posse had been paraded in and out of the courtroom, the mother with her hand covering the bottom half of her face, capturing and holding her cries as the verdict rang through the room. I should have done something.
That night, Alace went to bed for the last time in her little room on the top floor of the hotel in town where she’d lived all her life, literally, having been born there eighteen years ago. The sign on the marquee read Palace Suites. At night, the P was dark, leaving just her name blazoned against the sky.
Alace Sweets.
Chapter Two
Seventeen years later
Alace swam sluggishly up from sleep, feeling a pleasant burning stretch of muscles well used as she shifted on the surface of the too-comfortable bed. The rise was uncharacteristically slow at first, but as her body and brain awakened, the last moments were a rush to full consciousness, her instincts screaming at her to run, hide, get away.
She was a firm believer in listening to gut feelings. Of course she was. Those hunches were the only thing that had kept her alive and free over the years. She’d learned from past mistakes, however, and didn’t give those vague misgivings a chance to push her to panic, instead, holding tight to her better sense. That better sense told her first, she needed to know where she was to evaluate the danger, and second, running without a plan nearly always turned out badly.
Distant voices filled the air, at first just a quiet, near-subliminal murmur of sound. She heard a blending of vocal patterns rising and falling close by with a considerately moderated volume, which meant one of those voices knew of their sleeping guest. Not quite as senseless as the sound of rain on a tin roof, but nothing to further raise the freak level of her nerves. So, she focused, listening hard.
Eyes closed, she homed in on one voice. Male, gruff and hard, filled with gravel from whiskey and smokes. Nate. She shifted on the mattress, feeling the rough scratch of flannel sheets along every inch of bare skin. Nate's bed.
Not the worst thing, having her boss take her home after work so they could fuck. He’d termed it as giving her a chance to finish what she’d started by wearing short shorts and a boob-exposing crop tank to work. She was inclined to just call it fun. Plus, Nate was safe, never once pinging her radar as anything except what he seemed to be: a hardworking business owner in a small town who was lonely. She generally trusted her radar as much as she did her gut.
Working as a waitress in a sleazy strip club meant her wardrobe was limited. She could dress conservatively and starve on the thin slide of tips that barely covered a 15-percent requirement, or don a costume to look as if every customer could have her for the cost of a single drink. Doing the latter meant Alace could afford to eat regularly, as well as rent her own single bedroom apartment in a decent complex with security. In this gig, I’m mostly incentivized by eating. She justified her actions by habit. It might be true, but it didn’t mean the role her clothing bought her fit comfortably.
The voices drew closer, and Alace returned her attention to what she could pick out of the conversation. Not much. Her success at eavesdropping seemed limited only to Nate’s side of things, but she still heard enough to have her scrambling across the bed to where she remembered her clothing being tossed last night. “Yeah, she’s here, but I’m telling you she was here all night long, Ike.”
Ike was Irving Duncan, and if he was looking for her, it would be in his official capacity as sheriff. Which meant her time in this town might be done.
At least I already concluded my business. She shrugged into her shirt, fluffing the bottom edge to free it from the curve of her breasts. Slipping the shorts up her legs, she gave a little hop to get them into place over the apple of her ass, buttoning them as she scanned the floor for her socks and footwear. Tugging her last boot over her foot, she eyeballed the windows in Nate’s bedroom, picking out the one next to his side of the bed as the most likely escape point. But the sound of a rough palm sliding across the wooden door stopped her in her tracks.
Out of habit, she checked herself quickly, glancing down to verify her clothes were clean, unstained by anything except the drink spilled on her by the drunken bachelor who’d tried multitasking at the wrong time last night. Good as it’s going to get, she thought, twisting to face the door and schooling her face to a pleasant expression.
Nate’s face appeared in the opening, his chin jerking back in surprise at finding her not only awake but dressed and apparently waiting for him. If you only knew, honey.
“Pauline, Ike is here. He’s got some questions for us.” Nate was being generous with his attribution for the questioning. Ike only wanted to talk to her, she knew. Pauline was her long-time cover name, and one she would readily respond to, even in her sleep. Along with about fifteen others. One for nearly every year of her newborn life. That thought took her aback for a moment. Since this gig was winding down to an end, it was nearly time to pick a new, seventeenth alias. What the hell name starts with Q? Giving a mental shrug, she thought, I get out of this, I’ll give Regg a call. He’ll know.
“Is everything okay?” She crossed the distance between them and leaned in so Nate could kiss her forehead, something she’d noted he liked doing. She let him wrap an arm around her shoulders, drawing her close to his side before he turned so they faced Ike.
“Nothing to worry about, baby girl.” Nate’s voice dropped into the lower registers, and she shivered at a sudden memory. That was how he’d sounded just before he buried his face between her legs last night, finding that delicate balance of aggressive licking and kissing, and a fragile tenderness that had been missing from her life for a long time. I’ll miss you, big guy.
“Hey, Ike.” She offered a little wave with the hand not currently tucked into Nate’s back pocket. From the outside, it probably looked like they were a longtime couple, only Nate would know that before last night all he’d gotten access to were her forehead and fingers. She’d gently rebuffed all his overtures while keeping the door open for use when it mattered most. Like last night, she thought, keeping the smile on her face small. “What’s up?”
“Hey, Pauline. Sorry to bother you and Nate.” Ike gestured towards the front room, and Nate led her towards the couch there. “I got some bad news, honey.” Tipping her head to one side, she settled next to Nate, letting him hold her close. She rested one palm on his thick thigh, allowing her fingers to curve possessively around it. “Alan Trueward, how well did…do you know him?”
