Neither father nor son knew of this killer in their midst as they walked into the small farm house to share the joyous news.
On the other side of the globe in Arkansas
Wendy Steele stepped out the back door, giving a sigh. “He made another trip,” she mumbled, looking at her husband’s pickup truck. The bed was loaded with junk to her. To her husband, Arthur, it was free work material. She could see half a dozen computer towers and then, a stack of laptops. Then in two neat rows were electric motors of various sizes.
Since they had bought the land they were living on over eighteen years ago, Arthur made one trip a week to the landfill near Clarksville, over twenty miles to the south. “He could just buy the stuff,” she groaned but knew it was a lost cause.
Arthur was a tinker. He loved to build stuff and that’s what had gotten him several patents. None of the patents were earth shattering, but the royalties let them live in reasonable comfort.
She had met Arthur at a party when she’d been in high school. One of her friends had snuck a group of them into a college party at the University of Arkansas and Wendy had fallen head over heels for Arthur. At the time, Arthur had been in his first year of nursing school.
When she’d graduated high school in the fall, Wendy had enrolled in nursing school and the two were married a year later. They had only worked as nurses for a few years before Arthur had filed his patents and sold them to industries. They’d moved from Little Rock to the land they lived on now for almost two decades.
Walking around the swimming pool, Wendy heard music coming from Arthur’s shop. Coming to a stop, Wendy looked around at the wooded backyard. Oak and cedar trees dotted the area behind the house with the only real clearing around the swimming pool. The house was set on a steep almost one hundred-foot cliff, overlooking the valley floor and in front of a saddle between two small hills that barely rose fifty feet. Arthur’s shop was dug into the hill on the right, or west side.
Originally, they had bought three hundred acres but four years ago, they had bought two hundred and fifty more acres that bordered their property to the south. The first property had come with a two-bedroom house that now served as Wendy’s studio and office. The second had come with a bigger brick house, but nobody had lived there in thirty years so Arthur had torn it down, salvaging everything he could. Now, they had pallets of bricks.
Also on that property was another barn. It had been overgrown, but they’d cleaned it out and rebuilt it. That barn was where they did a lot of their textile work. They produced silk, hemp cloth, cotton, and wool. Not in large scale, but the quality was very good. In truth, the farm produced for them a nice living by itself, but they had to carefully itemize so the government didn’t take everything that they loved to do.
They had lived in the small two-bedroom house as Arthur, over two years, had built their dream home where they lived now. Granted, it was much bigger than they needed, but they were hinting to their son that they had room for grandkids; even though Joseph had only been twelve when they’d moved into it.
Thinking about their son, Joseph, Wendy smiled. He was twenty-four now and in the Navy flying transport planes, waiting for his chance to fly jet fighters off aircraft carriers. Joseph had been ten when they had moved and the hills, creeks, and ponds on the land had become his playground. Many times, Wendy had had to send Arthur out to collect Joseph for supper. And long ago they quit counting how many times he ‘fell’ into the creeks on the property.
Glancing over to the east hill, she saw the windows of the greenhouse that was buried in the hill. That greenhouse was their year-round garden. There were two more greenhouses that were massive just behind the two small hills, but those were more orchards. “That man can build anything,” Wendy chuckled, then turned back to the swimming pool. When Joseph had been in junior high, Wendy had told Arthur she wanted a swimming pool, since Joseph was constantly swimming in the creeks and ponds.
She’d handed Arthur a sketch of what she wanted and in three months, it was done and only the concrete had been bought. Everything else had been salvaged by Arthur. The pool was kidney-shaped with a hot tub near the shallow end where water flowed out over rocks and into the pool.
In truth, Wendy didn’t mind the ‘salvage’ because it had saved them tons of money and Arthur always kept the land neat. She could almost set her watch that by tomorrow, the truck bed would be empty and all the junk neatly stored in bins in the shop until needed.
The whole reason they had moved to the middle of nowhere was that they hated being raped by the government. What the government called taxes, they called rape. They made more money now than they had when both were nurses full time, but when working as nurses the feds had taken over forty percent of their earnings.
Now, with Arthur’s royalties from his patents and the books he had written, her crafts and selling vegetables at the farmers markets, and other goods grown on the farm they were using an accountant that had them paying thirty percent taxes. Granted, they didn’t like that, but
