The Watched Family by Shawn Jolley

Author:Shawn Jolley [Jolley, Shawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

7

Chapter Seven

Seth called the police, and they came. Freddy was pronounced dead at the scene; he had probably been dead since thumping onto my porch. His blood pooled and stained the concrete walkway, even after they removed his body. The memory of what had happened was attached to our property forever, and I couldn't make sense of any of it.

I had ushered Archie away quickly, even though all I wanted to do was curl up into a ball and forget everything. I sat with him on our couch in the living room; he was silent. I knew he was in shock, and I didn't know how to comfort him, so I just kept my arm around him and hoped that he was as resilient and adaptive as Judy had said only hours before.

The wall of windows, blackened by night, seemed so oppressive. I turned away from them the best that I could and tried not to feel like I was being watched.

Seth had done all the heavy lifting; he checked on Freddy, saw him up close, tried to revive him, and stayed on the phone with the dispatcher until the police and paramedics arrived. The officers were different from the ones who had come to collect the tapes.

They didn't ask me many questions, but I told them what I knew. I had heard a thump, investigated the noise, and found Freddy on my porch, dead. It wasn't until later in the middle of the night that I remembered I had seen him standing on his back deck not ten minutes before that awful event. How had it happened, and how had nobody seen anything?

All of our guests had left by the time anything happened. We had gotten Judy on the phone, and she had said she saw nothing while walking to her car; she would've been the nearest to Freddy, perhaps passing the death as it was unfolding, totally oblivious to the dead man walking. And yet, she saw nothing. Of course, Archie and Seth had been in the backyard messing around with the drone; they couldn't recall having seen Freddy on his deck at any point during the night.

Archie, Seth, and I stayed up until about three-thirty in the morning when the final officer taped off our front yard and told us we could stay in the house since it wasn't technically part of the crime scene, but we weren't allowed to enter the taped off area until the following morning.

A police unit was to stay out front for the remainder of the night. Of course, I didn't want to stay in the house, but I didn't know where to go that would make it better. So we all piled into the master bedroom, snuggled up in bed the best we could, and tried to get some rest; we were all incredibly tired and in no position to leave.

I held Archie tight as though he were a baby again. "Ruby," I thought to myself, "this has to do with you.

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