Life was so stupid unfair. Betsy caused him to get fired. She teased him. Flirted with him. She wanted him, and he fell for it. He hated Coralee, too. He would get back at her. He knew where Coralee lived. Coralee thought she was better than him. She was a woman. They could never be better than him. He would pay her a visit. He had paid many women “visits” over the years, starting in high school, when they rejected him.

He went to the doctor because of his still-swollen groin. The doctor said there might be “permanent damage.” The doctor, a woman, did not seem to believe Duke’s story about how a woman inmate “went wild” on him. His eyes burned for two days, turned red, and his vision blurred. His head pounded where Betsy had kicked him, and his gut was all bruised up. It even hurt to drink beer.

He would get his revenge on Betsy if she ever got out of jail, he thought, getting super drunk that night, then passing out on the patio of his apartment.

Three days later, after hitting the deer, crushed against his steering wheel and unable to move or feel his legs, he remembered what Betsy had said.

Duke never walked again. He never attacked anyone again. He was alone and bitter the rest of his life.

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Tilly Kandinsky
Portland, Oregon
1975–1985

Tilly, Johnny’s younger sister, stopped speaking on the night her father was killed. She had been a frightened, quiet child ever since her mother left, cowering from her raging father, but that night she completely shut down.

Tilly hid behind the couch during Johnny’s argument with her father, but she saw everything, she heard everything. She saw the knife, she saw the blood, she saw her father collapse. When the police tried to talk to her, she moaned and rocked back and forth and cried. She could not explain what happened, her eyes staring into the air at a faraway place.

She buried the trauma, the murder, the screaming, the gush of blood.

Tilly was sent into the foster care system, where she was almost catatonic for the first year. Eventually, lost in the system, she had the usual and expected horrific things happen to her: Abuse. Neglect. No love or care. Shipped from one house to another, one school to another, where she disappeared to other people and to herself. A few of her teachers tried to help, tried to get her to talk, but she wouldn’t. Mostly, though, she was ignored. Dismissed. Case workers were in and out who barely remembered her name. In fact, at one stretch she didn’t see a case worker for almost two years.