Read Online Between Dusk and Dawn by Lynn Emery - Free Book Online

Mr. Young stood staring at
wood carvings on a side table. Then he gazed up at the landscape
painting of one portion of LaShaun’s family acres around the house.
She’d taken down the portrait of Monmon Odette. The painting had a
tendency to unsettle visitors. Instead she loaned it to the local
museum, to the curator’s great delight.
    “ The coffee will be ready
in a few minutes. I have some homemade tea cakes to go with them.”
LaShaun smiled at the somber man.
    “ Don’t go to no trouble for
me.” Mr. Young seemed accustomed to being shunned instead of
welcomed.
    “ I didn’t, Mr. Young. The
tea cakes are waiting for guests, and the coffee was easy.” LaShaun
sat down knowing he waited for her to sit first. “How can I help
you?”
    “ Lotta times folks just ask
that outta habit. Don’t really want to help. They just tryin’ to
get rid of somebody fast.” Mr. Young sighed again.
    LaShaun now had time and more light to
study him. Mr. Young’s thick hair was a silvery white. A long lock
fell across his high forehead. Deep frown lines cut into both sides
of his mouth, as though smiling was something he rarely did. He
looked about seventy years old. His shoulders sloped down as though
he was weighted with heavy burdens. She thought of the scripture in
the Bible; he appeared to be a man of sorrows, acquainted with
grief. << Isaiah 53:3>> And yet she sensed something
else beneath a shield to keep others out.
    “ I know you’re Manny
Young’s granddaddy,” LaShaun said, answering his unasked
question.
    Orin Young’s shoulders slumped lower.
The weight of acknowledging his kinship with a serial killer seemed
to press him down even more. He nodded. “Most folks don’t know he
was a twin. His baby sister died, something called placenta
failure. His mama always said Manny sucked all the life outta his
twin.”
    His first victim? LaShaun felt a lump settle into her mid-section at
the thought. “But you said he was a happy boy, so his childhood was
normal. Right?”
    “ His mama wasn’t right in
the head. She took off, ended up living on the streets in New
Orleans. My son, well he had problems with drinking. Me and my wife
raised Manny. We’d go fishin’ and huntin’. He loved to hunt.” Mr.
Young stopped and looked at LaShaun. “It ain’t what you’re
thinkin’. He didn’t take pleasure in killin’ just for the sake of
it. Lots of reporters said that, but they lied.”
    LaShaun wondered if Mr. Young’s love
for Manny made him blind to early signs of violence. Yet there were
stories of killers who seemed no different from others; no horrible
childhood to explain the burst of brutality later in
life.
    “ I see. So his childhood
was normal, even happy,” LaShaun said.
    “ We did our best,” Mr.
Young said with strength. A light flared in his watery gray-green
eyes.
    “ I’m sure you did, sir.”
LaShaun meant it. She felt his fierce love for the boy as he
remembered him.
    “ Still he missed his mama,
like any child would. Never could understand why she was gone. My
son wasn’t around, and when he did show up most times he was drunk
and draggin’ some bar fly floozy with him.” Mr. Young scowled as
though his son had walked into the room. “Manny had his problems
when he got older, but he wasn’t no killer.”
    “ The state police had
strong evidence that Manny murdered at least seven of the twelve
victims.”
    Mr. Young blinked hard for several
seconds and then rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. He
looked at LaShaun. “I don’t think it was him. Oh, I know they had
evidence he did it. I’ve never been one for superstition, all that
hoodoo hocus pocus crap. But I seen his eyes, and it wasn’t
him.”
    LaShaun sat forward forgetting the
scent of coffee that floated into the room. She wondered if he
would have the strength to say it. “Explain what you
mean.”
    “ I looked in my boy’s eyes.
I don’t care what nobody says, Miz Rousselle. What looked back at
me wasn’t my