COMING HOME
©2003 Elizabeth L. Clark

She looked at her grandmother lying so peacefully. The lines of age and suffering were gentled as if by an angel and she wondered if the old woman had recognized her. She had come back after many years away to be with her grandmother at her moment of passing.

She had stayed in the shadows, listening to the elderly woman take her last breaths. She could not come forward... they all thought her dead long ago. But she had touched her beloved grandmothers mind as she left her long life... reassuring her that she was not alone.

Now she stood over her, looking into the dead woman's peaceful face. So different from the death she was accustomed to seeing. She had been taken across when she was but eighteen and thirty years later she stood in her home town once more. She had killed... and enjoyed it many times in the past three decades.

A sound sent her into the shadows once more. A doctor came in, settling the sheet over the cold body lying so still and tiny in the hospital bed. He paused, then shook his head, leaving rather quickly.

She left then, blood tears running down her cold, beautiful face. She made her way over to the home she once knew, listening to the family. What she heard appalled her.

They were talking about the woman as if her rather vast back account was all that mattered. They were angry... angry that she had left everything to her missing granddaughter or her children should there be any. They were ranting that once more she was a source of trouble.

She cocked her head top one side and a slow, cold smile touched her lips. She left with a plan forming in her mind.

Days later they were all called into a lawyers office. She sat there, dressed as a young person would in this day and time, gazing at them with ill-disguised disdain. They stared at her in shock and anger. They screamed, pointed fingers, some even spat at her.

But the case was iron clad. All her grandmothers monies and lands came to her. They were informed to pursue it in court would be futile. She generously gave them all a small portion with the understanding that they were to let it drop and never contact her. They greedily took her offer and scurried away like the rats they were.

She smiled as she had all the money transferred out of the country. Once that was done she set the last of her plan in motion.

The news people flocked to the scene of the crime. An entire family wiped out. The home was a slaughter house. It would take days to ID the parts and sort them all out. Funny thing... all of them had been drained dry of blood.....