Chapter Text
Taffy was a good daughter. No; Taffy was a great daughter. She was the perfect child, beautiful, loyal, honest. She loved her family and her community, she was cheer captain, she volunteered, she won all her pageants. She did everything right.
Her sister was dead.
There were mixed feelings involved about the incident that took Lisa’s life. Her therapist told her to make lists when she felt these conflicting feelings. Taffy loved Lisa, she really did; she had always wanted a sister and when her mom married Dale, it was like one of her dreams had finally, finally come true. Sure, she was a little damaged (seeing your mother murdered in front of you will do that to a person) but she was there, she was hers. They could play dress up and braid each other’s hair and share secrets! Everything that sisters did, they could do it.
Lisa didn’t end up liking her very much. At the time, Taffy hadn’t thought much of it, of course she would have been a little shy, her mom had just died and she’d been forced to move to a new town and a new house and the whole thing must have been so overwhelming. Looking back, she could see the contempt, but she could see the love as well. It was like Lisa said in the car after the ‘incident’ with Michael (she tried not to think about it, his face, his dick ---) she did love her, loved having a sister, was grateful that Taffy had taken the time to be kind to her in a town full of people who thought she was weird and off putting and just too much for their tastes.
Then, she walked into the woods and that was the last time Taffy saw her alive.
Lisa killed her boyfriend (hook-up, friend-with-benefits, whatever it was that they were to each other) or at least, was indirectly responsible for the strange man who came in and chopped Michael’s ding dong off with an axe from their shed. He’d done it for her, that much was clear, through the haze of her shock and terror, Taffy remembers blood everywhere and Lisa saying something, something about them and about Michael and then the man grabs the dismembered, well, member and then she’s in the car with Lisa, on their way to god knows where.
Taffy held Lisa’s mom’s rosary tight in her fist as she stared at the grave. It was shaped like a heart with Lisa’s name engraved on it. There were flowers surrounding the freshly dug plot, and a bouquet of a dozen black roses, tied with red lace, placed directly against the headstone. She wasn’t sure who’d brought them, it wasn’t her or Dale, and they were the only two people to bring her anything as far as she was aware. The rest of the town was split, arguing amongst themselves whether or not it was a tragedy that Lisa had perished in Taffy’s pageant prize tanning machine. Some said that Lisa was a murderer and deserved a slow, crispy death, while others claimed that she had been seen being followed around town by the same man who Taffy saw.
Taffy focused on that thought. There was a man following Lisa around town on the last day of her life. She had seen that man, with his bushy mutton chops and black hair, dressed like a victorian man and wielding an axe and a dead high schooler’s penis. He also, presumably, killed her sister.
“Daddy,” she said, her voice quiet and so unlike her usual self. Dale looked at her from over his glasses, pulling himself away from the grave. “I think I know what happened to Lisa.”
“I think we’ve had a long day today, Taffs,” he replied. “Maybe we should head home.”
They actually couldn’t head home because their shed was under investigation by the police. Right now the two surviving members of the Swallows family were camping out at a hotel, waiting for the investigation to clear and for a crew to inspect the rest of the house for any damage that might’ve been caused by the shed fire.
“But daddy,” she whispered. The pointed ends of the cross dug into her palm, the pain was almost grounding. “She didn’t…”
“She did,” he said grimly, pushing up his glasses. Dale sighed, and looked up at the sky. It was cloudy, warm rays peeking through as the sun set. “Lisa did something terrible. It’s awful, but it happened. We can’t change that sweetheart.”
Taffy was silent for a moment.
“Taff? Honey?”
“Just go back to the car daddy, I’ll be there in a minute,”
Dale gave her one last sad look before he turned away, starting on the trek back to the car.
She turned back to her sister. “Lisa. I know you’ve always been sort of into the macabre and stuff but I saw that man. Did he make you help? Force you? I don’t---you didn’t murder mom, or that loser nerd, or Michael. Even though you were mad at me for hooking up with him. He was the one with the axe, not you. I saw you try to stop him from hurting me, when I was---when Michael----in the bed. You pulled me away from the---the body, even though you didn’t have to do that. You could have left me, or let him kill me, but you didn’t.
“I don’t think you did it. I don’t want you to have done it. You’re my sister. I saw him. I did. When I told the police, they didn’t believe me. He doesn’t match the description of anyone in town and I just---” Taffy huffed, frustrated tears pooling in the corners of her eyes. It would ruin her makeup if she cried, something she had carefully reapplied in the bathroom of the funeral home before the drive over to the cemetery. She held her head back, looking up at the sky to keep them from falling. She’d done enough of that today already. “---I need someone to believe me. I can’t be Laffy Taffy anymore, not after all that. You were brave when I couldn’t be. I’m going to be brave for you now, I’m going to find that man, Lisa. I promise.”
She kissed the rosary, pressing the warm metal of the cross to her lips before letting go. It bounced against her chest a few times before settling, light reflecting off the smooth metal surface and the colorful stained glass of the beads.
“Bye. I’ll be back soon, hopefully with better news. He won’t get away with it.”
Taffy’s fingers brushed against the crest of one side of the heart that made up her sister’s tombstone and stepped away, turning to walk back to the car.
It wasn’t denial, if Lisa had been responsible for all the murders, then why had she saved her? Why hadn’t she let that man gut her with the axe like he’d very clearly intended to until she stepped in? Dale didn’t understand, he wasn’t there, he hadn’t seen what she saw. He just didn’t get it.
She opened the door to the car and looked back one last time at the graveyard. The one plot of freshly dug soil, the bouquets they’d brought nestling the oddly shaped stone.
Taffy would find the man responsible for Lisa’s murder, and she thought she might kill him for it.