BUILD A BETTER BOY TRUISM #13: Teach him to ride a two-wheel bicycle. It means freedom for the boy. For your health, especially while he is learning to ride the bike, jog along beside him.

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Last Time: Daydreaming about the simple pleasures he enjoyed, his cell phone rang.

He answered the call with a simple, "Darden."

Her enjoyable evening out with her family ruined, Louise fumed under her breath, "Always a detective. Can't even finish a nice dinner without being interrupted."

The transmission was from the Orderly, Jeremiah Brownlee. Drew Larsen was missing from the psyche ward of the hospital.


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The asymmetrically-shaped Rose Chateau featured elaborately-ornamented, bell-shaped spires, steeply-pitched roofs, and a facade composed of receding planes. Two white pilasters stood outside the heavy oak front door of the estate. Each possessed convex chapiters, supporting square abacuses and circular shafts. Large, pink, Madame Caroline Testout roses, emblematic of the French-bred hybrid tea variety, acentuated the pilasters.

Ricky had inherited at least one of his Mother's many talents. He held a penchant for sketching, particularly portraits. But, not just any characterizations suited the aspiring artiste. No, his secret masterpieces were goblins, trolls, and sprites. He had just recently given his visionary flairs to creating these effigies.

An assortment of power tools including a cordless wrench, a nail gun, and a grinder dangled from a rack in the far corner of the garage. It was there beside the washing machine that Ricky stashed the aluminum baseball bat he'd stolen from his PE class at school earlier that afternoon. He was not a kleptomaniac, nor could he explain why he pilfered the bat.

Lately, an unexplained small voice had been talking to him. Ricky heard the whispers when he was alone. Standing in front of the rack containing the power tools, he noticed three silver bells hanging on a string. He reached up, extracted them off the hook they were on, and slowly shook the trinkets.

Ting-a-Ling! Ting-a-Ling!

Ricky liked their sound. It rang pleasant to his tender ears. He rang the bells a third time and wondered where they came from?

"You know," that still, small, voice whispered to him.

When he noticed the word "REVENGE!" attached to the string the bells hung on, a slight, but sinister, smile creased the boy's face.

"Oh, yeah. Now I remember," he said to himself.

And, he did.

"Just a little longer," the voice told him, "there's still one more item we have to collect first."

Along the paneling of the garage, Ricky observed shadows as they sashayed back and forth. None of them morphed into a figure.

With the baseball bat carefully inserted into a cardboard tube previously used to store his autographed poster of Russell Wilson, the star quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks NFL team, and his favorite player, Ricky headed inside the house.

"Is that you, son?" he heard his Mother call.

"Yes, ma'am," Ricky replied, "I just went out to make sure I'd put my bike in the garage like you asked me to."

Quietly, he tiptoed, unnoticed, up the stairs to his bedroom. His prized trophy in hand. Ricky sat at his desk and extracted his sketchbook out of the top drawer. The media pad contained several dog-eared pages. An eerie sensation settled over him as he applied the sharpened point of a charcoal pencil to the next available blank canvas in the repository.

Ricky allowed his mind to drift far away. He envisioned a dark, black forest full of densely populated trees that prevented light from entering their canopy. Never one with an overly active imagination, Ricky conceptualized what it would be like if he metamorphosized into one of his creations.

He foresaw a scenario where he snarled, thrashed about, and howled at the moon peering down on him. Not as a werewolf, but something much more menacing than that. The thought comforted him. Soon, the aberration of the beast appeared on his paper.

Finished with the drawing, Ricky thought the eidolon was the perfect likeness of him.

Cast of Characters:

Detective Sean Darden - Lead Investigator of the Larsen family murders.

Louise Darden - Detective Darden's wife.

Ricky Darden - One of Detective Darden's twin sons.

Jeremiah Brownlee - Orderly at the hospital where Drew Larsen was placed after committing the heinous murders of his family members.

Russell Wilson - Real life Star Quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks NFL team.

Drew Larsen - Thirteen-year-old boy who confessed to the brutal slayings of his family members. The question remained, did he?

Notes to Readers:

-"Ting-a-Ling! Ting-a-Ling!" the baseball bat, the bells, "You know" and "REVENGE!" are all clues previously revealed in earlier chapters of this book. They are central elements of the storyline.

-At the top of the page are blue numbers. In order to follow the action revealed in this chapter you may wish to read them, even if you only review this one chapter, otherwise my use of them here may be something you will not pick up on.

DISCLAIMER:

If you are intending to provide a fluff, or cut and paste, review in order to quickly pick up a few Member Cents, I would much rather you did not review my writing. Too many FanStorians resort to cut and paste reviews for this very reason. However, cut and paste reviews serve absolutely no purpose and are useless for writers.