Against Their Will by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ulysses Press
Published: 2012-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Katie Beers—Lost from View

ON THE WEEKEND BEFORE her tenth birthday, Katie Beers was staying with her Aunt Linda, her wheelchair-bound godmother, in West Bay Shore, Long Island. On Wednesday, her birthday, Katie had to be back with her mother, Marilyn. The two women were embroiled in a custody battle over Katie. That Sunday, Aunt Linda was holding a pre-birthday party for her favorite niece. Katie called a family friend, forty-three-year-old building contractor Joe Esposito, and left a message on his answering machine, saying that they had saved him a piece of cake.

At 11 a.m. on Monday, Esposito returned her call. He said he had taken the afternoon off work to have fun with her. Before the party, he had delivered a Barbie Dream House, but had been unable to stay. Some neighborhood kids would assemble it while they were out.

At 1:20 p.m., Esposito arrived at Linda Inghilleri’s yellow-shingled house on Ocean Avenue and came in through the side door. Katie leaped into his arms.

Esposito had been a longtime friend of both the Inghilleris and the Beers family. He was a small man—just five foot seven and slim—but they called him “Big John” to distinguish him from “Little John” Beers, Katie’s sixteen-year-old half-brother. Linda thought that Esposito was gay. She trusted him with Katie, and they had been out together many times before.

Linda told them to be back by six and asked Katie to mail some letters for her. Katie grabbed her coat and purse, and the floppy hat she always wore when she went out after her hair had been shorn due to an infestation of head lice.

They took off in Esposito’s black 1989 Nissan pickup and drove down to the Toys “R” Us in Bay Shore. He bought some toys, a videotape, and the Super Nintendo video game Home Alone 2. After a Slurpee in a 7-Eleven, they went back to Esposito’s house on North Saxon and upstairs to the game room to play the video game, or so Katie thought. Instead Esposito took her into the bedroom, threw her on the bed, and kissed her. It is not clear whether he had planned to do that. It may just have been an impulse. However, he knew that he was in big trouble. Marilyn Beers had already accused him of molesting Little John, and he had been charged with a sex offense some fourteen years before. On the other hand, what happened next may have been planned for a long time.

Over the previous few years, he had dug a deep pit behind his garage and dispersed the dirt across the adjoining field. Then he’d covered it over with a concrete roof and turned it into an underground bunker. When he finished, he covered it over, laid a cement base, and erected a carport. He covered his tracks so well that neighbors were none the wiser. Nor was his former sister-in-law, with whom he shared the house. As a building contractor, Esposito was always coming and going with building material, and he frequently worked late into the night.

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