“I could have killed him. I wanted to tell him who I was and gut shoot him while he was inside me, watch him die slowly, miserably, knowing he’d just raped his own daughter, knowing who had killed him, and why. But right then, at that moment, I realized it was exactly the right time of the month for me, that I might become pregnant as my mother had, that without consciously thinking about it, I might have planned it that way all along. And in that instant I knew—if I were to kill him and then find out I was pregnant, he could never be confronted with his child who was also his grandchild—Winter.”
For how long had I suspected it? Only minutes? Or much longer? Perhaps I’d caught a whiff of it in Myrtle Beach. I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that this revelation came as no big surprise. It might have been the dementia circling in Victoria’s eyes like smoke, a feeling that nothing she’d ever done had the power to surprise me. She’d captured us, stripped us, tied us up in this dank, modern-day dungeon. She’d killed Jonnie and Milliken and Greg—horribly. Beheaded them all, hacked off sex organs, removed brains. In her madness she was capable of anything.
“Oh, how I wanted that, as soon as the idea came to me,” Victoria went on. “I wanted it so much…my God, you wouldn’t believe. The rapist and bigshot city councilman knocking up his own daughter! The thought was amazing, fantastic. He came in me three times that night, then drove me back to Reno and let me out a block from the bus station at four in the morning, begging me not to tell, shaking with fear. He gave me three hundred dollars to keep me quiet, the same way he’d treated my mother—the Sjorgen solution to everything. And it wasn’t long before I knew I was pregnant, less than a week. I knew. I told Edna. I said I wanted to go back East again, back to Jewel’s.”
“After murdering Wendell Sjorgen,” I said.
She smiled. “Yes. Oh, yes-s-s-s. Granddad. Another monster. To protect his beloved son, he abandoned my mother—and me. He paid tens of thousands of dollars to rid himself and his son of us. He buried my mother’s rape, turned it into something that never happened.”
“As did Milliken’s father,” I reminded her.
“Victor Milliken died when I was ten years old. But David Milliken paid for what he did. You found his head. He got what he deserved. But Wendell was Jonathan’s father, my grandfather. He bought Edna’s silence like he bought everything that was inconvenient, without so much as a passing thought about Jacoba and me. But he knew who I was at the end, in that alley. He knew exactly who I was, and he very much regretted what he’d done. It wasn’t murder,” she added. “It was an execution. Slower, messier and more painful than the state would have done, I must admit, but nothing he didn’t deserve.
“I gave birth to Winter, Jonathan’s child…and his grandchild. My daughter, and my baby sister.” She put an arm around Winter’s waist and drew her close.
No wonder they’d looked so much alike when I’d first seen them. Not only were they mother and daughter—they were also sisters.
Kayla stared at them in horror. Jeri, however, was sizing up the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the ropes that held her, everything. She gave me a grim smile, still tough, still searching for a way out. Something in her eyes said don’t you dare give up.
In Conway, South Carolina, Victoria raised her daughter-sister, told her who her father was, taught her to hate, to loathe beyond all reason, to want to kill, and finally to want to hold steaming loops of Jonnie’s intestines in her hands, to hear him scream as she pushed red hot nails into his eyes. All that by the age of six. By the time she should’ve started first grade, she was already a monster, destroyed. She couldn’t go to school, couldn’t be around normal children. If the authorities had found out, they would have locked her in a juvenile detention facility and tried to save her with years of therapy. They would have tossed Victoria in prison. Keys would have been thrown away. In order not to lose Winter, Victoria had to keep her isolated at home, away from the rest of the community, watch her every second while she continued to teach her to hate. With Jonnie in mind right from the start, she taught Winter how to fence, starting at age four. And she taught her all about men, their bodies, their weaknesses, their wicked goatish lusts.
“You came back,” Jeri said to Victoria. “You had Winter rape Jonnie, didn’t you?” She’d been paying attention, even as her eyes were taking in every detail of the room.
“Jonathan raped Winter,” Victoria hissed. “His own grandchild.”
“Yeah, right,” Jeri said.
“Dressed up like a hot little whore, no doubt,” I added.
She whirled. “She was his granddaughter. That inhuman beast climaxed inside his own grandchild. How she was dressed was of no consequence, none at all. She was fifteen years old and looked it.”
She paced for half a minute, then fixed her eyes on me. “Jonathan hadn’t changed. He was still a vile beast. He was fifty-one years old when Winter approached him in a parking garage downtown. She was a ninety-pound schoolgirl, extremely pretty, but young, obviously too young. She barely spoke to him and he was ready, salivating in his desire to be with her.”
Divorced from his first two wives, unaware of the satanic soul burning brightly in the girl sitting next to him in his new Jaguar convertible, Jonnie had driven her not to Lake Tahoe but over Donner Summit and all the
