Wicked Revenge: Book 2 From the St. Isidore Collection: St. Isidore Collection, #2

By Rod Kackley

Revenge: Hurt the ones you love.

What if the evil young woman who lives next door to you, and her sexy lover win? How's that going to go down in the neighborhood?

Well, get used to it. Sometimes evil wins. Bree and Beth are winners. They have fame, fortune, and freedom — just what they wanted in A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection, a noir crime thriller that is at its heart, a story of crime and punishment.

In Wicked Revenge: Book 2 From the St. Isidore Collection, the second in this series of crime thrillers, these young lesbian lovers have a problem. An ex-cop is out to kill them. He's John Sheldon, the brother of the serial killer Bree stepped over and killed to become a national celebrity. John is pissed.

However, John Sheldon is only one of Bree's challenges in this noir novel of dark realistic fiction. She has another lover, Melinda. And you know what? Beth is just as pissed at Bree as John. Maybe she is even angrier because Beth never thought she'd get stuck in a lesbian love triangle. There's just something about it that seems so nasty.

Oh, and there is one other problem that Bree needs to solve. Her business is going bust. A leading female entrepreneur in St. Isidore, Anne, is more than willing to help. And she will if Beth doesn't kill her first.

There is a solution.

Just like in A Wicked Plan: Book 1 From the St. Isidore Collection, someone is going to have to die. Bree knows it. Beth knows it. Anne knows it, and John knows it too. It will probably have to be one of them, maybe more. But who?

Wicked Revenge:  Book 2 From the St. Isidore Collection. Just when Bree thought she had the world figured out and spinning just the way she wanted it; everything got all messed up.

Welcome to the wild world of St. Isidore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rod Kackley
• Release date: Aug 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507059180

Rod Kackley

Rod Kackley is an award-winning author and journalist, with a lifelong fascination of crime, who lives in Grand Rapids, Mich.  Rod also writes crime fiction books in the St. Isidore Collection.

Book preview

1

Mary Kay was amazed by the brightness of the stars, the roundness of the moon, and the sounds of the night. They were the last things she was to see or hear in this world, as she stepped off the thickest branch she could find in a tree that was the perfect height.

She had approximately a second-and-a-half left in this world.

Her last thought was not of her daughters. Mary Kay wondered in that split second before she expected her neck to snap whether she had really done the right thing, if she had really made the right choice, and if there was any way to get a second chance.

Mary Kay had longer to think about that than she thought she would. Her neck didn’t snap. Mary Kay strangled to death.

She died slowly and violently.

Instead of a split-second of she didn’t know what hit her; it was five minutes of black-tongue sticking out, screaming if she could have made a sound, gurgling and drowning in saliva and vomit, fighting for just one more breath of fresh air, agony.

Mary Kay died in the Suicide Forest.

It was the cable TV news people who started calling St. Isidore Park, the  Suicide Forest when they discovered Tim Sheldon had been killing people since he was a teenager, stripping them naked and hanging them out to die.

It became a worldwide sensation. The people of St. Isidore had lost count of the number of bodies that had been found in their forest, all of the dead boys, girls, men and women who had either stripped themselves naked and hung themselves, or were stripped and murdered.

For some reason the former was easier for St. Isidore to accept than the latter, so the town went with it.  Suicide.  After all who wants to think about living next door to a serial killer.

Repeat anything enough times and people will believe it, especially when they want to believe it and everyone around them wants to believe it too.

The world believed it too, and fell in love with the Suicide Forest.

Soon people from around the world, who were tired of living for one reason or another, or maybe they wanted to send a message to formerly loved ones, or perhaps they were chronically and desperately ill,  started hanging themselves in the trees of the Suicide Forest.

Others got creative.

While hanging was the perfectly dramatic last act of the desperate, there were  also those who took their lives by firearms — sold next to the rope at St.Isidore Hardware — and others took pills purchased next door to the hardware store at the St. Isidore Pharmacy.

No matter the method, it always ended the same way. Either they swung from the trees, blasted their brains out or  laid down and went to sleep in the Suicide Forest.

Rather than battling against the fad that became a trend that morphed into a simple fact of life and death, St. Isidore and the world embraced the Suicide Forest.

The Forest had its own Facebook page. Photos would appear on Pinterest when fresh bodies were found. A cottage industry sprung up around the Suicide Forest, and St. Isidore’s business community couldn’t bring itself to turn off the tap of fresh cash that was washing over it.

The people of St. Isidore didn’t do this because they had nothing else to do, suicide tourism brought hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city. 

So, St. Isidore City Hall created a bureaucracy to respond to the rush of death.

Park rangers got in the habit of marking new cars in the Forest’s parking lot with chalk on the tires the same way the St. Isidore meter maids would mark cars parked downtown to make sure they weren’t there too long.

If a car had been in the Suicide Forest’s parking lot more than a couple of days, the rangers could be sure John Sheldon would find a new body in the trees. That was his job.

Anyone who didn’t leave on his or her own, left with John.

Suicides brought out the entrepreneurs, too. People selling maps and trinket dealers hawking little Grim Reaper figurines set up shop on the highway leading into the park.

Grisly it was, and grisly was profitable for the merchants of St. Isidore, and the city that sold them licenses and permits.

There weren’t many people within driving distance of the Forest who didn’t have a key chain that looked like a tree with keys swinging from the branches. Hangman’s Noose car deodorizers were also very popular.

Teenagers would strip each other naked and play in the trees with nooses around their necks. Sometimes their role playing turned into real life.

Sometimes, they decided somebody just had to die. Then real life turned into real death.

Tourists would walk through the woods with maps, smartphones and cameras in hand, both  afraid of, and hoping to, find a dead body.

With smartphone cameras ready to be clicked and St. Isidore Suicide Forest mobile apps leading the way, helping them find the trees that had been the next-to-final resting place for people who had lost all hope, or perhaps filled with new hope that their next life would be better, the tourists strode purposefully through the trees.

It was gruesome, exciting, and profitable for what had been the recession-wracked city of St. Isidore.

John Sheldon thought it was also disgusting. He was a rookie on the St. Isidore Police Department when he found the first bodies in Suicide Forest.

It was a chilly, lonely, autumn evening. Just John, Buckwheat his dog, and two girls, teenagers, both dead, both naked, both gently swinging from thick ropes, their necks snapped. One black tongue pointing to the sky. The other was blasting a raspberry right at John.

Not only did John have to live with that memory, he had to live with the knowledge that it was his brother, Tim, who killed both girls. Along with his best friend, Paul, Tim stripped them naked and hung them from the trees.

Tim and Paul, what a pair, John thought with a mental sigh. Both dead now, but their memories live on.

And so did John’s burden. It lived on, too.

We have a serial killer in the family. That’s the skeleton in our closet. What’s in yours?

MARY KAY WAS ANOTHER of those who would never walk out of the Suicide Forest.

She had put it off as long as she could. Losing her job was one thing. When the county took her kids away, there was no sense waiting any longer.

Mary Kay had lost her final reason to live.

No matter how bad her life got, no matter what she had to do to earn a dollar for food, Mary Kay had always known she was doing it for her children.

And she always felt good about it.

The moment her children were gone, when she saw their little faces minimizing into nothing as the county social worker’s car drove way, Mary Kay knew her one last reason to wake up and make it through another day was also gone.

There was no reason not to die.

And, now she felt good about it.

The struggle was over.

Some Suicide Forest tourists found her body a month later.

They took selfies, uploaded the pix to Instagram, Facebook , all of their favorite social media. It was huge in cyberspace.

However, the story barely got three inches in the St. Isidore newspaper. There had been so many before and there would be so many to follow, why bother? At least that is what the editor believed.

The more stories they ran on suicides in the forest, the more deaths followed.

Mary Kay was not the first. She would not be the last.

The tow truck driver who pulled Mary Kay’s car out of the parking lot was struggling with the end of his marriage.

And now he was thinking and wondering.

2

Bree and Beth were in the middle of another argument. They went to bed fighting, they woke up fighting.

It had become their routine lately.

As usual, Beth was worried they are going to lose their business. At least that is what she told Bree.

What Beth admitted to herself, but never to Bree, was the fear she was losing Bree.  That bothered her much more than their little company, Bree Inc., evaporating.

I can always get a job at Walmart, Beth said to Bree.

I just don’t want to go back to not having you, she said to herself.

You at Walmart? Beautiful Beth standing at the door saying, ‘Welcome to Walmart,’ all day long? Give me a break. Baby, you don’t even like Walmart, Bree said. The one time we went there you said the customers scared you.

Have you seen the emails? There was a picture of a woman getting burned alive somewhere in the Middle East, but your face was photoshopped on to her body. That doesn’t scare you?

There is nothing to worry about, Bree said. Baby, you have to believe me. This is all working out just the way I planned.

These people hate us, Bree. They used to all love you. Now they hate us. They hate you and they hate me.

You just have to trust me, baby. I know what’s best. These people are the fringe. I am not worried about them. You don’t have to worry about them. Haven’t I always known what’s best?

Bree knew what Beth was really worried about was their relationship. But Bree didn’t see that as a bad thing. If Beth was worried, Bree knew she was in control, and that is just where she wanted to be.

In control.

Bree had learned at an early age that for some reason people were attracted to her. Old and young, boys and girls, men and women wanted to be near Bree.

And she learned at an early age that if she did not give them everything they wanted, but always held something in reserve — usually the kind of love they all needed — that she could stay in control.

She would give them tastes of love but never the full meal.

Bree smiled thinking about that as she looked at Beth, the girl she intended to stay with as long as it was convenient. Beth had been such a loser in high school.  Her mother said Beth was afraid of her own shadow.

Bree knew her Mom was wrong. Beth’s real fear was that no one loved her, no one cared, and no one ever would. So, Bree gave Beth just enough attention — playing with her like a trout who lusted after a fly  — to reel her in just close enough to get Beth to do whatever she wanted.

And to be glad of it.

Bree had perfected this kind of control with her former, and now late, high school teacher Tim Sheldon. Not only had she gotten him to fall in love with her on the Internet —Facebook, Pinterest, and Snapchat can be so effective — but she had talked him into kidnapping her — the perfect alibi — and then killing her evil mother and stepfather, and even his best friend, Paul.

Tim wiped out the bad people, and one of two witnesses.

The cops killed Tim — he was the last standing witness — and the world opened up to Bree.

The media from St. Isidore’s radio and TV stations, all the way up the media dog-and-pony show chain to two tiers down from the kings and queens of cable TV, along with hundreds of bloggers on the Internet, had fallen for Bree.

Her story was magic. A teenage girl  kidnapped by her high school teacher who would kill her parents and his best friend before the child was rescued by a bullet from a SWAT team sniper’s rifle.

It had everything cable TV wanted; emotion, drama, and video.

The anchors and their pundits were breathless.

Bree was Bree, and that is all she had to be.

Bree set up her own company — Bree Inc. of course —and hired a public relations and media management firm to handle her public life.

Beth became Bree’s girl Friday first and lover/partner second.

A part-time paralegal who moonlighted as a financial manager, Melinda Black, did all the numbers, and they all profited by their association with Bree.

Beth couldn’t have been happier in the beginning. She was basking in the most intense limelight she had ever experienced, and on nights when she and Bree partied, she had the men and women Bree didn’t want. Beth felt loved and needed.

That was the best part. Loved and needed. Beth had never had both feelings at the same time, and wasn’t sure she had ever really had either one.

Bree loved her and needed her.

The world loved and needed Bree, so the world, by implication loved and needed Beth.

Of course, all of that love brought out the trolls. Bree Incorporated’s email inbox, Facebook page, Twitter account, all of it was slammed by haters.

Evil people, sinful people, who wanted to slice, dice, rape and pillage Bree and by implication, Beth.

Since Beth was the vice president and secretary of Bree Inc., all correspondence came through her computer. She was up late at night answering fan requests, filtering out the best media for Bree to see, and invoices that had to be paid.

And there were the hate email, tweets and Facebook posts. The filth she had to dig through became staggering.

At first, Beth thought they were entertaining. Better to be talked about then ignored, right?

Bree was an attention whore. There was no doubt about that. The more action there was, the better she felt.