A Killer Among Us by Rhys Stalba-Smith

Author:Rhys Stalba-Smith [Stalba-Smith, Rhys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2021-05-24T22:00:00+00:00

Charlie spent the rest of the day biting his nails, watching the clock. He wanted to get out of the building and into a phone booth. Hopefully get a call. But even as he stood in the phone booth after work, watching his second bus leave, he knew he wouldn’t receive one. When the third bus for his round came he boarded and spent the entire ride consumed in his thoughts.

Five years old Davidson had said. If this was revenge, as he guessed, how long had the killer been planning this? If it was Ethan. If it was revenge. But for what?

Charlie remembered dealing with a few patients that were high strung paranoiacs. A constant feeling of persecution dogging them. Elaborate schemes in which the world was against them. Wild theories that connected their toast burning to the feeling in their gut and how that meant their phone was being monitored. Narrative psychology had interested him, but never more than he needed to work with his patients. He was dealing in psychiatry as it were. If all else failed he drugged them to the eyeballs. Of course no one ever said that. But it had been interesting theory to learn, in that if there was anything that the brain could use to tie something all together, it was their sense of identity in the story. That the paranoia was most definitely happening to them.

He remembered asking Jesse Mullins about her paranoia. Why was she paranoid? What had she done? She sat there for a time, biting her nails, staring at the steam rising out of the cup of tea he’d brought her. It doesn’t matter, she said. It’s just there. Following me. The shadows are there. Course he should’ve seen how complex her case was, not just a compulsive liar, but also a paranoid bipolar schizophrenic. She was the lottery winner of neurosis. Abusive parents that had sent her in circles, then she escaped to an orphanage. Unfortunately she just jumped from the cooking pot into the flames. He’d known and seen that happen many times.

He sighed, feeling more tired than he’d ever been. They passed the sign for Silversgrove. What had been fields and crops was now suburbia housing. Silversgrove had grown from it’s Adelaide Hills base and spread down the foot of the range. On it stretched, blending into the neighbouring suburbs and cities. Adelaide was one long gash down the coast, a cutting of life in the dry harsh land. The farming had since moved to the backsides of the range or north and south of the city. The crops stretched further and wider than the city itself now. The building where his sister had been found had been destroyed. Now it was a wheat crop. An old power utility shed was there now, if he remembered correctly? He still remembered taking his parents out there fifteen years after Sarah’s death, his mother screaming all the same.

His stop came and he descended, feeling depressed that he hadn’t received a call.

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