Short and Long Stories Part 2

Memories of Heidi

1982...

It was only a light rain and had started to fall in the afternoon. By now it was growing dark. The Police had already removed her small body from the shallow grave, which was beside the train tracks, near the paper mill, where her father worked.

The Police were horrified by her injuries and were busy in discussion about how they had failed her and which one of them would notify her parents.

They had searched since the morning and the search party had long dispersed, the killer already in custody. Andrew Baker Hall had helped look for the girl, but when the sniffer dogs were brought in, Hall folded like a deck of cards. He killed her. He molested her and then shot her in the face with a twenty gauge shotgun hoping that the blast would remove traces of his semen.

Her name was Heidi Collister, she was ten years old, and her story is very much my own.

Let me begin with her parents.

Their names were Jennifer and Peter. She was a housewife, he worked a pulp press at the paper mill. Due to problems finding work, they had relocated to Dairy Creek, a small town seperated by a channel in the Princess River. The population was barely ten thousand people, but the locals loved their town. It had three schools, a Post Office, a medical centre, and two supermarkets. Having two supermarkets was a big deal to some of the old timers. Housing was always cheap and there was work to be found there. To Jennifer and Peter Collister, Dairy Creek was attractive.

They had three children. Melissa was turning thirteen, Stephen was eight, and Heidi was ten. The Collisters were an average family, never ones to make enemies easy, the children did well at school, and they were always well dressed.

Jennifer soon joined a weaving club and they ladies there made her feel welcome, noticing that she was shy, sometimes prone to over eating, and she often spoke of a diet she was on, but never really was. She was pretty, repeated jokes she had learned from her husband, and she loved her children dearly. She also hinted that Peter needed his space, especially when he was drinking, but he never hit her, or the kids.

He was a shouter, though. He would shout about any small slip in grades, shout at the dog, shout about his dinner, and he loved shouting his new friend Andrew Baker Hall to a drink. Both men worked at the paper mill.

Hall lived by the water on a block of land he owned. His house was an old bus and on occasion he liked to hunt feral pigs. He was thirty-five, a loner, enjoyed horror films, and collecting pornography. He never carried himself poorly and was convincing enough to have people think he was a man of high moral standard. He was dark haired, handsome, and quite tall.

The Collisters welcomed him in and Jennifer felt sorry for him, even more so after he told her about nursing his mother through her cancer, having to bury her, and being the only one present at her funeral. Hall was an only child and never met his father, because his father died in a car accident before he was born.

At first, the family were unaware that Hall had a wandering eye for Melissa. She was well built for her age, pretty like her mother, and after her thirteenth birthday Hall started writing to her in secret. She always wrote back.

He bought her a mobile phone, small gifts of jewellry, and provocative clothing. The clothes and jewellry she could never accept, because her parents would ask too many questions. A phone was easy to hide.

Hall bought the Collisters a new used car, helped them fix their utility accounts, payed school fees for the kids, took them fishing, staged wonderful outdoor dinners, and Heidi and Stephen even refered to him as Uncle Drew.

He and Peter went hunting one weekend and Jennifer would later tell Police that her husband changed after that. He was scared of Hall.

The relationship between Hall and Melissa intensified. He would come over after work, have dinner, act like he owned the place, and she would sit on his lap. Mother and daughter would argue openly. Peter was at a loss. The other children would think nothing of it, being too young to understand, and they would simply go and watch cartoons.