When Jason Gaines was told by his dying father that he was a serial killer, he took it pretty hard.
Jason was 41-years-old when he sat by his father’s deathbed and listened to the old man reveal his deepest, darkest secrets. His dad was Winslow Gaines, a 71-year-old property magnate whose company GAINES CONSTRUCTION had built houses, condos and apartment buildings across the length and breadth of The Gold Coast in Florida for nearly 40 years. Winslow was a very wealthy man and prominent member of the Miami business scene. He was beloved in their home state for the countless charitable donations he’d made over the years, as well as for the jobs provided to the local communities in which his buildings were developed. He was a very public figure and for the last 10 to 15 years of his life had been very careful to construct a certain image for himself; that of a kindly grandfather of impeachable morals, always quick with a piece of sage wisdom or a nugget of homespun advice that stemmed from his youth growing up in the dusty plains of Texas.
Winslow was also a brilliant father to Jason and his sister Olivia, who was four years younger than him. In fact, Winslow was the only parental influence Jason and Olivia had known for most of their lives, as their mother Cheryl abandoned the family when Jason was six and Olivia just two. She had no real memory of their mother and any memory Jason had was sketchy and fleeting at best, so their father had always been the center of their world. He had never remarried and had never even had a serious relationship while Jason and Olivia were growing up. Sure, he had dalliances here and there and every now and again Jason would see a woman leaving the house in the early hours of the morning, but he and his sister were never introduced to anyone who even came close to being their father’s new girlfriend. Winslow seemed to get what he needed from their brief encounters and, to be honest, it didn’t matter much at all to Jason and Olivia because their father was always loving, attentive and interested in what they were doing with their lives. He traveled for several months out of any year, and Jason and Olivia therefore grew close to their housekeeper/guardian Melinda, but Jason never felt riddled with anxiety about their father being away. They knew he was an important man who had business to attend to all over Florida, so that required him to be away from time to time. Jason had friends at school who rarely ever saw their parents, so he counted himself lucky that for at least three quarters of the year their dad was present and accounted for.
Of course, this close bond he shared with his father made the old man’s words even more devastating when he began spilling his guts about his crimes. Initially Jason thought the cancer-riddled husk that was once Winslow Gaines was making some sort of joke, a bizarre and desperately unfunny attempt at humor that was simply too bizarre and downright baroque to make any sense. He started to wonder if the disease had finally spread to the brain, as he knew lung cancer tended to do in around 40% of cases, and a deep cavern of sadness began to build inside of him. He didn’t want to see his father like this; he had always been an articulate, sharp man, and Jason couldn’t stand the thought of him losing his faculties.
But after a while, a growing sense of unease began to take hold of Jason. His father wasn’t slowing down in his revelations. Rather, they kept coming thick and fast and Jason could see in the old man’s eyes that there wasn’t even a hint of irony about what he was saying. He was telling Jason that for the better part of the last 50 years, he had been a serial killer who preyed on the men and women of Miami, West Palm Beach, Coral Springs and many other places. Jason was dumbfounded, struck into a silence that felt like someone had grabbed a hold of his throat and was squeezing tightly, preventing him from uttering a single syllable. That growing sense of unease then began to turn into something that closer resembled dread when he looked into his father’s eyes more intently than before. It was as if they had begun to change color, or perhaps it was as if the normal blue hue of his iris’ were starting to be drained of colour; after a few seconds it looked to Jason, as impossible as it may have seemed, that his eyes had gone black. Couple that with the unsettling smile that had set in on his father’s thin, cracked lips, and it was all Jason could do to stop himself from turning away from the old man’s gaze. A chill had set in in Jason’s bones because he knew, then and there, that this was no joke and most certainly was not the nonsensical ramblings of an addled brain. Everything Winslow Gaines was telling Jason was 100% true.
Jason shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He realized at that point that he was still holding his dad’s thin hand, his fingers touching Winslow’s mottled, bruised skin. He had taken the hand in his, as he always did, when he first sat down at the bedside. Occasionally Winslow had told Jason that it wasn’t the done thing for a man nearing the age of 50 to hold his father’s hand, but Jason had told him he didn’t care what anyone thought and besides, he kind of liked doing it because it made Winslow uncomfortable and he enjoyed messing with him. In reality, he always believed it gave the old man some comfort, despite his protestations, so he didn’t mind playing along with the charade. But now the hand felt different, as if Jason was holding a strange foreign object that he’d never touched before in his life. He felt like his father’s skin was now starting to burn his own; a white hot heat that started small but was building in intensity with every passing moment. He had to let go of the hand now, or else he was going to be left with an imprint in his skin that he could never erase. Jason then told himself to calm down; there was no burning sensation, he was simply panicking and it was making his mind play tricks.
But then an even worse thought seared itself into his mind: what awful things had his father’s hands done over the years? What unspeakable acts had he committed with these very hands? Jason was holding a hand that had potentially closed around the throats of innocents and wrung the life out of them. He was holding a hand that had held knives as they plunged into flesh. He was holding a hand that had beaten young men and women mercilessly until they were left lifeless on the floor. It was then that Jason snapped back to attention and listened to his father’s words: he was describing beating a teenage boy to death in a filthy alleyway in 1979. He wasn’t letting his mind run away with him. These things he was imagining his father doing were all thing’s the old man was describing, it’s just Jason’s brain seemed to be processing things out of order, zoning in and out of attention. It was all becoming too much and Jason could feel his head begin to spin. He choked down some bile that was rising in his throat and closed his eyes momentarily, hoping for the wave of sickness to pass quickly.
The wave came and went and Jason didn’t vomit all over his nice new suit that one of the paralegals at his firm had commented on earlier in the day. He exhaled deeply and counted himself lucky for small mercies. Then chastised himself for feeling relief over something so trivial.
He looked at his father again. The old man had turned his head slightly and was now looking straight up at the ceiling, still reciting his grim confession. The fact that he wasn’t even looking at Jason anymore told him everything he needed to know. Jason wasn’t an active participant in this situation; Winslow Gaines was going to say everything he wanted to say, whether Jason was listening or not. Clearly these words had been festering inside him for decades and Jason even felt like the speech sounded rehearsed. In fact, it sounded like his father was reciting a fourth or fifth draft of his terrible confession, as opposed to a stream of consciousness outpouring of the truth.
In many ways it sounded to Jason like one of the speeches his father would have given at the launch event for a building. He was always famous for those, with the local papers waxing lyrical about his ability to be a keen storyteller who also somehow managed to maintain a rigid structure in his speeches. He always stayed laser focused on the core message of his words, yet also managed to wander occasionally into anecdotal territory, which made sure his speeches never sounded dry. Then, once the anecdote was complete and the crowd laughed their approval, he would circle right back to the point. That was what was happening here, only instead of the core message being about architectural feats and jobs being created it was about how he had fooled everyone for nearly half a century, hiding his malignancy in plain sight. Instead of an anecdote about the hoops he had to jump through to sign the contract on his first build as an eager 25-year-old, it was a disturbing recollection of the first time he watched the light fade in a victim’s eyes, the blood leaking out of their ruined skull onto the pavement below.
There was a detachment to Winslow’s delivery that suggested each sentence had been agonized over, changed and corrected to exacting specifications, before being recited to Jason. This was the main difference between his speeches of old, which sounded warm and even charming, and this heartbreaking mockery of that style. Now his words sounded cold, aloof and cruel. It made Jason want to burst into tears but again he resisted the urge to have an outburst of any kind. If he was truly honest with himself, he would’ve been able to admit that he didn’t cry or vomit or make any sort of sound for the entire time his father was speaking for one simple reason: he was frightened. Jason Gaines was scared to death that if he said anything or made a noise of any kind that his father would turn on him and fix him with that gaze that now made his blood turn to ice. Up until this night Jason could’ve honestly said he’d never been afraid of his father; not even for a second. But that had all been a carefully constructed lie, hadn’t it? Now the overriding emotion Jason felt about his father was fear.
All in all, Jason couldn’t quite believe that this man had appeared to be one thing for his whole life and had then chosen to dash their entire relationship against the rocks on his deathbed. Was that selfish? To grieve for a relationship with his father that had been inexorably changed in one awful night, all while hearing about the lives the man had taken? Surely these poor souls deserved his thoughts right now, rather self-involved ruminations on his own life? Jason wasn’t dead in the ground somewhere, like they were, buried deep so that the world would never have a hope of finding them.
It was then that Jason realized he still hadn’t let go of his father’s hand. The festering old bastard was now talking about how the foundations of his buildings, all across Florida, were littered with corpses. It was when Winslow managed a grotesque chuckle at the idea of covering a human being over with cement and stone and erecting a building on top of them that Jason finally extricated his hand. He wiped it on his pant leg, vainly trying to get rid of the stain he imagined had now seeped its way through his skin and was going to start working its way up his arm, poisoning his bloodstream. His knee then began to nervously shake and it almost made Jason jump. He felt like he was losing control of his body; a nervous anxiety had set in and he began to think to himself ’why the hell am I still listening to this?’. He hadn’t said a word for what felt like an eternity and Winslow was still recounting his sins. He clearly didn’t care what this was doing to Jason, so why in the name of fuck was Jason humoring him like this? Just get up, he started telling himself. Just stand up, walk over to the door, leave the room and get the hell out of the house. Never come back. Just get outside, have a cigarette to calm your nerves, and then call the police. Don’t even say anything to the miserable piece of shit that was your beloved father a few hours ago; he’s thrown it all away and should get what he deserves.
Just do it. Just get up and go.
Do it. Go.
Now.
It was only when a soft set of fingers gently laid themselves on his shoulder that Jason remembered that it wasn’t just him in the room with his father. He’d become so overwhelmed that he’d completely forgotten his surroundings. He glanced to his right and she looked at him with her wide, soulful eyes. Tears were beginning to form and she clearly had just as little idea of what to do as he did.
Olivia is here too, Jason thought. Jesus Christ, she must be devastated.