‘Couple on the Run for Child Abuse Found Dead’.

That’s how the paper read the next morning.

The House sat quietly on the same beach it had been on for many decades, with two dead bodies in and around its premises. If it could have, it would have whistled and rolled its eyes innocently, and told the detectives looking for evidence, that it was just reading its Sunday school lesson, and the people kind of just died inside.

But that’d be a lie, now, wouldn’t it?

if The House could talk.

The woodworker was found at the bottom of the stairs going to the beach, on a small landing where beach chairs and coolers were kept for guests. His eyes were open. There didn’t appear to be any obvious injury. The Medical Examiner would dictate on the death certificate the cause of death: ‘intracerebral bleed sustained from blunt head trauma from falling down steps. He also had a severed spinal cord at C1, resulting in complete and sustained respiratory failure/hypoxia due to lack of innervation to the diaphragm from the high cervical fracture.’

What the certificate would not say, was that for four minutes after the fall, the woodworker was completely awake, and aware, but unable to move, due to the severed spinal cord, loss of diaphragm movement, and resulting suffocation.  In that agonizing 4 minutes, the woodworker would relive his life of abusing the foster children that he and his wife had taken in. Lying there helpless, unable to move or breathe, he listened to the kids laugh somewhere down the beach. He realized that how he feels right now is how his own victims must have felt: trapped, and hopeless.

The one word that kept resonating in his now-still mind: Karma.

The woodworker’s wife was cooking dinner in the 1980s kitchen, and listening to The Doors on the portable CD player that sat on the harvest green countertop by her chopping board, as she sliced onions and carrots up for a pot of soup she planned for their dinner that night. Her head snapped to the left just in time to see the rug fly out from under her husband’s feet, as he screamed, and then he thudded helplessly down the wooden steps.

Jerking her body to the left to run and help her husband (and partner in evil), she had forgotten that she had a large and very sharp knife in her hand. Both of them had failed to notice the water that was now oozing from under the refrigerator.

Oddly, there had been a sudden leak in the ice maker line.

Water on tile floors can be very slick and dangerous, indeed.

‘Accidental knife wound to the left ventricle, resulting in ventricular fibrillation and loss of any blood circulation and instantaneous death’ is what the woodworker’s wife’s death certificate would say.

So there, by the ocean that night, karma would visit the current renters of The House. And the two people that had molested and abused children in private, but showed their faces as respectable in public and in church, would fall to the judgment of The House.

When the police arrived, the CD player was still playing The Doors on the dated countertop, with the smell of freshly chopped onions and carrots still in the kitchen air.

Jim’s haunting voice in the dark night set the background nicely for an evil woman lying in a pool of blood, and her equally depraved husband’s lifeless body, now being discovered by nosey night sand crabs at the bottom of the landing.

The House smiled a very accomplished and proud smile and hummed along in the background with the CD player still spinning….

‘When you’re strange

Faces come out of the rain,

When you’re strange,

No one remembers your name.’