Read Online Tabula Rasa by Kitty Thomas - Free Book Online

the castle, then finally came back
with a wheelbarrow and shovel. I have no idea where he’d found
that, but he was right, the castle was big and contained all sorts of
useful things. He propped the shovel next to the fireplace and took
the wheelbarrow back with him into the other room.
    It was a long time before he came back out. When he did, he had
Trevor in small pieces in the plastic inside the wheelbarrow. He
tossed the pieces on the flames of the fireplace he hadn’t used
yet, then he took the plastic and returned to the kitchen once again.
    He didn’t seem remotely distressed by any of this, and I became
increasingly convinced he planned to kill me next, but now that I was
tied up there was nothing for me to do but cry and wish somehow I
could have made a different choice. I kept reviewing everything in my
head from the moment he’d shown up, trying to think how and when I
could have truly escaped. Would he have let me go if he hadn’t
started the process of getting rid of the body? If I didn’t know
what he was?
    He took the plastic back into the kitchen and was gone another maybe
five minutes before he returned. The plastic was clean now. He’d
obviously rinsed the blood off down the drain. He folded the plastic
neatly and set it next to the fireplace. Why?
    I tried to think of it all as a puzzle. I tried not to think about
what I was really witnessing or the horrifying smells of burning
flesh coming from the fireplace that contained pieces of Trevor.
    Shannon went back into the kitchen again—I guess for further clean
up—while I tried not to gag from the smell of burning flesh and
equally tried not to think that it could be me in those flames next.
My lip trembled as I worked to keep my crying quiet. I was sure he
was just one minor annoyance away from deciding I wasn’t worth
sparing.
    Finally he came back with another pitcher of water, some soap, and
some rags. I watched as he scrubbed up the blood on the floor from
the initial shooting. He went back to the kitchen for a moment, then
returned with wrung out rags that he tossed in the fire with the
sheet he’d tossed in earlier. The fire smoldered a bit from the
dampness still in the cloth, but quickly recovered.
    I glanced over at the other fire that was still eating Trevor and I
somehow found the courage to speak. Maybe if I got him to talk to me
he wouldn’t see me as just more evidence to dispose of.
    “Wasn’t there
any bleach?” I asked.
    “There might
have been, but it leaves too strong a smell. If my friends come in
the room, they’d wonder why one room in an abandoned theme park
castle smells like bleach and is ridiculously clean. It’s why I
left the vomit. It works in our favor. They aren’t going to clean
it up. They’re going to stay away and out of this room because
they’re pansies. By the time another random group of people comes
exploring, nobody will know what it was or that anything of note ever
happened in here.”
    “But that
smell... where you burnt him... that’s a lot worse than vomit.
They’ll smell it.”
    “I guarantee you
they’ve never smelled anything like that. They’ll take one look,
get one small smell, and flee without analyzing it too deeply. People
notice what they want to and everything else gets filtered away and
buried.”
    “O-okay...
but... the fire won’t burn him all the way... there will still be
bones.” I said this like I’d somehow figured out something he
didn’t know. But of course that was crazy, all things considered.
    “I have a
contact at a crematorium. He can incinerate the rest. I just wanted
the body unrecognizable. I trust my contact, but you can never be too
careful, and I would prefer he not recognize this guy. Too many
questions with it being such a high profile case.”
    I cringed when Shannon came over and sat next to me at one of the
tables. He brushed a long strand of hair out of my eyes.
    “Don’t be
afraid of me, Elodie.”
    “H-how can I
not? After what you just