Greetings, Steemians and Steemettes!
Good morning to you all. Well, I hope it is morning from wherever you are reading this right now. I woke up a bit earlier than usual, which is a good thing because I wanted to make that a habit earlier. In the spirit of the #minnowuprising and the #upvoteplankton movements, this will be my series of morningly blogposts. I will read with you through a book I found in the bookcase two weeks ago. It is a thriller called Secrets to the grave, Sounds like a good start into the day, doesn't it?
The book is written in english, so I won't have to translate on the fly this time around.
If you like this series, give me some feedback in the comments below and let me know about it!
After having read the first two chapters, I can say that this book isn't for people with faint hearts and week stomaches. Read at your own discretion.
50 Greyshades of Rodin
Chapter 1: November 1986
Just a two page chapter, great. We are being welcomed into the book by the colorful description of a house off the road. A small farm somewhere in nowhere as we haven't been told where we are. There is a Radio Flyer red wagon though, so someone with a better understanding of these kind of things may already be able to deduce the location off this. Some cats are also at present and having a good time, with two of them playing peekaboo with one another. The third one claimed the roof of the Radio Flyer for itself.
There are plenty of living things inside the house as well. Mostly flies. This being said here confuses me and you will see why soon. There is something dead inside this house as well. Namely a woman, a mother, who has been carved up and left bleeding out to death. Her days are counted. With her lies her child. It isn't made clear whether the child is still alive, mourning for her mother or if they both died. Because of the flies, I take it that they both ended up being killed, but I hope that the next chapter will tell us a bit more about this unclear factor.
What we do know is that the phone has been used one final time. Apparently, the child, whether it being still alive or not at this point, made a phone call. We don't know who was receiving it, but we know what the child said:
"My daddy hurt my mommy..."
Chapter 2
Ah, information, right from the first sentence! I love it when we get exposition from detectives and policemen. The carved up woman is called Marissa Fordham. She made a living as an artist and managed her life being a single mother, age 28. The man giving us the information is a certain Sheriff's detective Tony Mendez. He did not take lightly upon seeing the crime scene for the first time. Mendez is accompanied by an FBI profiler called Leone, whom he discusses the case with at this point. The knife used for the murder has been taken from the victims kitchen. No forced entry. A lot of chaos throughout the home, but nothing has been stolen.
The woman has been lying dead there for a couple days before she was found. Flies must have been having a field day at this point, as do the maggots who have already befallen Marissas dead body.
The small child that lied with Marissa was her four year old daughter. The killer strangled the little girl somewhat fiercely. She still has a faint pulse and is being taken to the hospital at this point, but they don't think she will make it. .
Which is nothing compared to what the killer did to her mother.
A cleanly cut throat. Her breasts have been chopped off and where the killer left the butcher's knife used for his work....well, you don't want to know where he left it, let's put it like this. A lot of carves and stabbing wounds two. The killers arm must feel sore after stabbing the poor womans body thirty to fourty times.
Apparently, the child's final phone call reached 911. Given the time of this story, there was no system in place that immediately showed name and address of the contact, so the police wouldn't know where to look. Goes to show how technological advances may end up saving lives. Instead, a friend of Marissa dropped by her house and found the scene I described earlier later. We do not yet know the name of this friend, but the investigators do consider him a potential suspect. Given how we have a certain piece of extra information, unless this yet unnamed friend ends up being the father of the not yet dead child, we can rule out this possibility.
My conclusion so far:
Given the hints I as a reader get, it seems clear that the murderer has been the girls father. The mother being single and the brutality of the murder heavily indicates at there being either a huge fall-out between the two or a long chain of ongoing problems leading up to this bloody final confrontation.
What irritates me is the fact that he also attacked the child. Did the killer, the father of the child project the problems he has with the mother onto the little girl? Maybe the man was on drugs, maybe alkohol was involved, maybe the man had some kind of mental sickness that showed itself in the form of brutal tantrums. I can only make wild guesses at this point, but I expect to get some more clues for this case.
We will continue working on it tomorrow!