Tonbe nan larivye
Hello, Dear Reader, it's been awhile. I finished my short story sequel to 'Lying by Water'.
It is called: 'Tonbe Nan Larivye' and can be found on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Tonbe-nan-Larivy%C3%A8-short-sequel-ebook/dp/B0DLKPLNXS?ref_=ast_author_dp
link to tonbe nan lariye
The story sat unfinished for years, quite frankly, because my taste for murder stories was dulled by the real life spree killings that happened in Idaho while I was writing it. At the time, I was working on the autopsy report scene and didn't have the stomach to continue. I ended up minimizing the detail of the killings in the story and focusing more on psychology. I find that as I get older, I have less tolerance for grisly scenes involving the usual victims: young women. So the story sat there for a long time.
I consider myself a compassionate and mostly psychologically normal person, so I have often wondered why it is that I've always been interested in death and murder. I think that it is a result of growing up in an era of horror TV, VHS slasher films, and laissez faire parenting. In my day, there was little concern about limiting what young children are exposed to, and many of my peers have the same interests. As a child, I had a vast library of books to chose from and one of my favorites was a collection of Victorian ghost stories. I also read many mysteries, from Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys to Agatha Christie. As I became older I voraciously read books on serial killers, which lead into (or complemented) an interest in abnormal psychology. I tried to pull the latter together in this piece, so the story does not fall into my usual category of ghosts and the supernatural.
The little story is most likely best understood in the context of the first 'Lying by Water'. It features the same characters. None of these are based on real people, although Louisiana did have a spate of serial killings during the 90s, some of which have never been solved. Derrick Todd Lee and Sean Vincent Gillis are the most well known Louisiana serial killers, but there are many others who have never been caught. While I was finishing the story I went back to check a bit of research and came across an unsolved group of NOLA serial killings that I had never heard of, that oddly seemed to have a parallel to what I had already written. I hope these Storyville Slayer victims get justice someday too, even if so much time has passed to make it unlikely.
The story is dedicated to one of my former professors who was a profiler and died decades ago. I often wish that he could have been alive to work on what are some of my generation's most baffling cases: Jon Benet Ramsey and LISK (now solved). There are so many online forums dedicated to these two cases that it borders on obsession. Why? What make normal people spend so much time dwelling on the most negative aspects of human existence? I decided that it is because the most enduring cases in the forums are popular not only because of the shocking horror involved, but because they are complex mysteries. The pieces don't fit. Trying to find out a solution to a gruesome crime fulfills two primal needs. The first is the urge to put the pieces of a puzzle together correctly and restore order in the universe. The second, of course, is to attempt to right a wrong by getting justice for the victim.
May we learn from the dead, in order to protect the living.