Savored

Caramels and Sharpies

Photo by El S on Unsplash

The caramel truly seemed from another world, beyond anything of the same name mass produced in North America.

Derryanne had been instructed to cleanse her palate, savor it, eat it in her favorite robe.

She thought those instructions may have been a little too much for a single piece of French candy, but she followed them anyway. A lark, a brief luxury. She tilted her head back and felt the caramel on her tongue, the taste and texture living up to everyth–

Deep and hollow thuds and bangs, voices, a light spinning as though it was being thrown at her window.

Derryanne swallowed wrong and began to choke.

Her brain wanted to know the nature of the noise and commotion in her yard, her esophagus wished to be cleared of the jumble of thick liquids and salts that had traveled the wrong way, her whole body tensed from the immediate absence of the relaxation she had felt seconds before.

Internal and external threats collided in a ventricle searing wave of panic and disorientation.

She blinked and spun.

A flat Sprite her niece had left on the counter earlier that afternoon soothed the throat temporarily, then another coughing choke took over.

In the midst of this spasm she turned and stepped toward her dining room window.

Multiple humans, voices both authoritative and inhuman, crackling from radios.

Cops.

Her own motion sensor light flooded the back of the house, the driveway, the rose bushes cared for but wilting with the season.

A gun in silhouette sent Derryanne back from the window, pressed against the structural wall between dining room and kitchen addition.

A twelve pack of bottled water sat on the floor, still in plastic. She hated bottled water but sent waves of gratitude at it now. Somehow it felt closer than the sink, a glass.

There was a noise as she ripped at the plastic, and three echoing bangs from outside.

Derryanne let her ass drop to the kitchen floor, as she extricated a single bottle of water from the clinging plastic.

Her brain told her the bangs were something hitting her garage door, not gunshots, though once she had seen the gun that image slapped at her mind, alone.

The cap from the water fell from her hand, but the bottle was open, so she drank.

She got it for Cecelia, so she could drink it out back, out back where multiple cops were.

Her throat calmed, she stood, a bit lightheaded, wobbly.

Maybe she should stay seated, but she had to know. There was no crime here except…

This was West Hickory Park, not…

Derryanne chilled to the point of vomiting.

It couldn’t be…

Derryanne Colmur went to her back dining room window just as Lt. Walter Habrum knocked on her front door and shouted Police!

Against her garage door, in the strange shadow from Derryanne’s motion lights, was the face of a man. His skin seemed to color the bone of his skull as though it was part of it.

He writhed, his wrists cuffed, and from every angle Derryanne saw the man was as though the police sketch of the Hickory Hangman had come to life.

Derryanne felt bile rise, but also tasted an imported French caramel, a gift from Roger.

The police Lieutenant knocked again.

Derryanne stared at the man as the police wrestled with him.

At one point the man laughed–he laughed and the bile heated up in Derryanne’s throat though she could not hear the laugh and the laugh made the man look less like the police sketch.

I have to call Roger.

When Roger Ellerbeigh picked up his phone he said “Tell me those fucking caramels are orgasmic.”

Derryanne said “Umm…” confused, not sure what to say.

She was walking through the hallway to open the door for the cop.

Somewhere in the walk she had the presence of mind to cinch her bathrobe tight.

“You didn’t like the caramels,” Roger said, disappointed almost to the point of anger.

Derryanne opened the front door at the same time she said into her phone “Roger, they arrested the Hickory Hangman in my fucking driveway.”

Habrum, a state police officer for 32 years, did not know Derryanne Colmur.

To hear what came out of her mouth shocked him.His prepared speech discarded, he said “I don’t know who you’re talking to ma’am but that information is extremely premature.”

“Who the fuck is talking?” Roger said.

“The cops,” Derryanne said. 

“Why are the cops there, Derr?”

“Honey, they arrested the Hickory Hangman in my driveway.”

“You’re fucking with me, Derr. Seriously. Did you drink the absinthe and not eat the caramels?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay, ma’am and let you know our task force…our officers will need to be on the property a little longer, due to an ongoing…investigation,” Habrum said before Derryanne could answer Roger.

“If you’re in Cincinnati, Rog, get the next plane home. I don’t know why they arrested the guy in my backyard, but he’s the Hickory Hangman.”

“Ma’am,” the Lieutenant said, trying to maintain protocol, “it’s best if…”

Habrum stopped. 

Some of the local cops in the side yard were high fiving. They knew who they had.

Eight unsolved murders in fourteen months. A gap of twenty three months without a similar crime, during which Roger Ellerbeigh wrote a bestselling book about it and met Derryanne Colmur at a signing. 

They fell in love.

They didn’t discuss Roger’s book much anymore, they had exhausted the subject. 

But Derryanne felt like she was as much an expert on it now as Roger was.

The Hickory Hangman killed eight women, six by blunt force trauma and two by strangulation.

He garnered the nickname by drawing a little hangman’s noose at the base of their neck in black Sharpie. 

Roger traveled often, and when Derryanne couldn’t accompany him he brought her back gifts, like fancy caramels.

Derryanne realized that there was no coincidence that the Hickory Hangman was in her backyard.

Roger knew it too.

“Is that really a cop, honey, the cops are with you? You’re okay?”

Derryanne didn’t answer immediately.

The cops were dragging the man, handcuffed and shackled, out to one of the seven squad cars.

Derryanne knew she had been targeted, The Hickory Hangman had been watching them, and one of Roger’s gifts splattered all over Lieutenant Habrum’s shoes.

***