Repairman Jack [02]-Legacies

She realized that for the first time in her life she had control—power—over a set of these prints. And power over the negatives too. How could she do anything but destroy them?

She reached into the envelope and pulled out three or four prints, eight-by-ten sheets with glossy color surfaces—no, she would not look at them—and fed them into the top of the shredder. Whirring, grinding, then thin little strips cascading from the bottom, twisting into a tangle of paper spaghetti.

Yes! It worked. The images were destroyed, all coherency lost in the hundreds of divisions. No one but a madman would try to put them back together, and the more strips she added to the tangle, the harder it would be. A hundred, no, a thousand years to reconstruct even one image.

Sensing that this might be some sort of watershed for her, Alicia dug into the envelope and pulled out more to feed into the whirring maw. She felt tears running down her cheeks and heard herself laughing.

This felt so good… so good!

12.

BZZZZZZT!

A woman in tears was bad enough. Never failed to bum Jack out. What do you do? What do you say? But a woman laughing and crying while she was feeding a paper shredder…

Very scary.

But the tears and the laughter soon slacked off, and then she started talking about it, and that was worse, because it made him wish that Ronald Clayton were still alive… so that Jack could kill him… very slowly.

"I did it for my daddy," she said. "That's how it was. A part of me sensed it was wrong, or bad, especially when it hurt, but my daddy wanted me to do it, and I didn't have much choice. And after all, he was my daddy… the man who took care of me. He wouldn't really make me do something really bad. Not my daddy."

Her tone was remote, as if she'd cut all emotional ties with the child she was talking about.

BZZZZZZT… more prints into the shredder.

"And that was the really sick part of it. Beyond his perversion. That he would take his own child, someone who depended on him, who looked up to him and trusted him, and use that bond of trust and dependency to make her do exactly what he wanted in front of his camera. But that's part of the pedophile's nature: he gets off on the power over the young and weak and small, the power to corrupt innocence through unspeakable acts."

BZZZZZZT!

"Of course, I didn't know they were unspeakable then, but there had to be something wrong because I was never allowed to mention them. And some time before I reached ten, the picture taking stopped. I guess I was too old then. I guess the people he was trading pictures with liked their little girls under ten. Whatever the reason, it stopped and… would you believe?… I felt sad. How sick is that? Not because of what I'd actually been doing, but because my father no longer seemed interested in me. He'd never been warm or even vaguely nurturing—the words 'remote,' 'uninterested,' 'disengaged' don't even come close—but at least… at those times… when I was doing those things by myself or with Thomas, I'd had his… attention. Now I didn't even have that. Can you imagine?"

No. Jack couldn't even begin to imagine. He felt his gorge rise as he thought of someone making Vicky do what he'd seen in the few prints he'd glanced at, and fought the urge to grab the phone and call her to make sure she was safe at home with Gia.

BZZZZZZT!

"But as I grew older, I learned, and I realized what I had been a part of. I tried to tell myself that it had never happened, that I'd imagined it all, dreamed it, but I knew no imaginings like that could have originated in me. How could I make up those perversions? No… I must have been there. And so I worked on blocking them out, making myself believe they'd never happened, and I was doing pretty well at it… until my early teens when I started developing. That was when I woke up one night and found Thomas with his hand on my breast wanting to 'do it, just like we used to.' I managed to fight him off, but that was confirmation, and it brought it all back. I began sleeping with a knife under my pillow."

Jack didn't want to know this much about her, but didn't see how he could stop her. And it wasn't as if she was talking to him. She was talking to the air. He could have been a mannequin.