Read Online Blood Echoes by Thomas H. Cook - Free Book Online

us,” Patricia remembered, “and she was strong, very, very strong. I think the fact that she didn’t fall apart that night was the one thing that held us all together.”
    Still, it finally fell to Patricia to alert her two sisters, Nancy and Elizabeth, both of whom lived in Albany, and neither of whom had telephones. The only thing to do was to call the Albany Police Department and have one of its officers deliver a message to her sisters.
    But what kind of message?
    Barely able to conceive of the murders herself, and not knowing how to break such news to her sisters, Patricia penned an oblique note, one that gave no details as to what members of the family had been killed and made no reference whatever to the fact that they’d been murdered.
    Once the message had been received, the Albany Police Department dispatched two officers to the home of Nancy Alday, the older of the two sisters.
    â€œIt was about five in the morning, and we were all sound asleep, of course,” Nancy later remembered. “There was a knock at the door, and two Albany police officers were standing there.”
    As she glimpsed the two officers through the screen door, Nancy suddenly felt that sense of dread which had earlier seized Patricia when the phone rang in her bedroom.
    â€œIs your husband here?” one of the officers asked.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œCan we speak to him?”
    Nancy summoned her husband Paul to the door, then eased away, wondering, against all reason, if Paul were in some kind of trouble.
    From her place a short distance away, she could hear the policemen speak to Paul for a moment, before returning to their car.
    Paul approached her slowly and handed her the note the policemen had given him.
    â€œIt’s from Patricia,” he said.
    Nancy read the note quickly, then looked up at Paul, still puzzled. “It just says that people in the family have been killed,” she said. “Who? How?”
    Paul shrugged. “We’d better go tell Elizabeth.”
    They dressed quickly and drove the short distance to the small house where Elizabeth lived with her husband, Wayne. While the two sisters sat in the living room, their husbands walked to a nearby store and called the Alday homestead in Donalsonville. Patricia answered the call, and told Paul and Wayne all she knew about the murders. Stunned, the two men walked dazedly back to Elizabeth’s house. On the way, they agreed that they could not tell their wives what Patricia had told them. At the time, Elizabeth was seven months pregnant with her first child, and because of that, they were afraid that such a shock might bring on a miscarriage.
    â€œPatricia had told our husbands everything,” Nancy remembered, “but when they got back from the store, they just told us that some people in the family were dead, and after that they wouldn’t say anything.”
    As a result, for the next hour and a half as Nancy and Elizabeth rode through the early morning light toward Donalsonville, they assumed that some of their first cousins, younger, teenage Aldays, had perhaps been killed in a terrible traffic accident. It was not until they reached Jerry’s trailer that a considerably grimmer possibility entered their minds.
    â€œThere were police cars all over the place by the time we got to Jerry’s,” Nancy recalled, “but we kept going until we got to Mama’s house.”
    Fay Alday met them in the driveway, standing grimly in the morning light, her face streaked with tears, as she ticked off the names. “Daddy’s dead,” she said. “And Shuggie. And Jerry. And Jimmy. And Uncle Aubrey.” Then the final, unbelievable detail: “Somebody killed them.”
    At that moment, Nancy and Elizabeth felt as if the world had suddenly turned upside down, all the rules by which they’d lived, the little certainties of life, spilling into the void.
    â€œI didn’t know what to do or