Blackened Spiral Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

deliver mail, and the townsfolk have to go pick up their mail each day.  Armington is the classic story of a small town gone down the tubes.  The other two houses near mine, on Old Farm Road, are vacant.  The “for sale” signs in the yard are rusty and have weeds growing up around them.   So no one else would have ever noticed the strange visitor going in and out of the old church.  It was all up to me to find out what was going on and help the police catch the bastard.
     
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    It was two weeks after he started going over to the old church that I got the nerve to go over there myself.  He had a key and went in the front door the one time I saw him.  Since it was locked up tight, I decided to go around back and try getting in where no one would be able to see me.  Despite Armington being a ghost town the last 10 years, there was still the occasional passerby, and in a small town – everyone knows everyone.  There are few secrets.
    I’ve lived in Armington all my 44 years.  I was raised by my grandparents, who both lived in the house on Old Farm Road, where I still reside.  Grandma had a massive stroke in the fall of 1985, and it left her nearly incapacitated.  Grandpa and I did our best to take care of her, but it wasn’t easy.  Six months after the stroke, Grandma hadn’t improved.  I walked in one night to Grandpa shoving a pillow into her face.  Tears were streaming down his face while he did it.  I knew it was an act of love, even though it was murder.  She barely put up a fight, as if she wanted to die and pass on to the other side.  Grandpa turned around to find me standing there in the bedroom doorway, and told me to keep my mouth shut about it.  He told me that he hated to see her like that, and he couldn’t bear it for another day. 
    When the deputies showed up with the ambulance to pick up Grandma, they took me outside and away from Grandpa so we could talk.  They knew what happened, but it was difficult to prove that he smothered her with the pillow.  They threatened me and said I could go to jail as an accomplice to the murder if I didn’t tell them what happened.  So I told them all about it.  I figured they wouldn’t do much of anything to Grandpa since he was old and was a grieving widower, putting his wife out of her misery.  I was wrong.  They charged him with second degree murder, and his lawyer said that the jury would probably feel sorry for him and only give him ten years.
    Two days before his trial was to begin, I found Grandpa in the basement, hanging from a noose he made with a bedsheet.  He swayed beneath one of the galvanized water pipes, his eyes wide open and staring at me.  Even though he was dead, I knew his eyes didn’t lie.  He hated me for telling the police what happened.  He never asked me about it, but he knew.  I could tell by the way he acted around me.  As he was swinging in the dim light of the basement, I felt an overwhelming guilt for putting him in this situation.
    Now it was me all by myself in the big, 90-year-old, two-story Cape Cod-style house surrounded by cornfields on the north edge of town.  I was surprised that Grandpa had left me a sizeable inheritance, and since there were only distant relatives, it all came to me.  The old house was paid for, and the property taxes were relatively small.  I now owned forty acres of farm ground that surrounded the house, and many years ago, Grandpa had leased it out to a local farmer to plant corn and beans for a nice sum of money.  There were also the six wind turbines on the property that earned me $10,000 each on an annual basis.  Thanks to Grandpa, I didn’t want for anything, as long as I was smart with what he left me.
    As I made my way through the tall grass in the back of the church, I noticed a small window near the back door was broken.  I was able to reach in to unlock the door and gain access inside.  The pungent smell of mildew was striking as soon as I walked in, probably