The Turning: Book 1 (The Bates Sisters) Read online

  The Turning: Book 1

  Copyright © Tiffany Kahapea 2020

  All rights reserved

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a database and retrieval system or transmitted in any form or any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both owner of the copyright.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidences are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  ∞∞∞

  Chicago.

  The city known around the world for its crime and corruption. The city where there’s a mass shooting on the news almost every day. Many wonder how someone could live in such a place but for my sisters and I, that’s all we’ve ever known. We grew up on the city’s south side with our wonderful mother. She worked tirelessly to make sure we had a decent childhood. We’d have family outings and take family vacations. There are six of us; Miranda, Mary, Annie, Sydney, Stephanie, and Ashley. There’s also my best friend Rebecca. She’s practically my sister since she grew up with us.

  We live in a modest five-bedroom three-bathroom house in a relatively good area. Even in our nice neighborhood, we’ve all had our fair share of brawls. Because of this, mom made sure we knew how to fight. Miranda took up boxing, I learned judo, Annie learned MMA, Sydney learned karate, Stephanie learned Muay Thai, and Ashley learned Jiu Jitsu. The neighborhood new us as the brawling six. Brawling seven if we counted Rebecca and her krav maga skills. If you messed with one of us, you messed with all of us. We’re a tight group of siblings and family means everything to us.

  We never knew our father and mom refused to talk about him. She would only say, “good riddance to him”, “hopes he rots in hell”, and “filthy scum bag”. Our mother is what some people would call weird, but we liked to think of her as eccentric. She was always smiling, dancing, singing, and laughing. One day, she started telling these crazy bedtime stories about seers, magic, and demons trying to take over the world. To us, these fictional stories were fun and entertaining but little did we know, to her they were real. She fully believed that there was magic in the world and that one-day chaos will rise. Her delusions only got worse as we got older. She started painting the windows black so that no one could see into the house. She smashed all the tv’s and any other electronics. She became suspicious of other people. She even started talking to herself. Her behavior is getting worse and we have no idea how to help her. This has gone on for years. Even though we are now older, we still live at home because moms mental state has deteriorated so bad.

  “I am going to have mom committed,” said Miranda.

  “WHAT!” I said shoving the chair back. We were gathered around the dining room table eating dinner. “You CANNOT have mom committed, are you crazy?”

  “I don’t know Mary, this may be a good thing,” whispered Stephanie while pushing her food around on her plate.

  “Moms getting more and more unstable by the day,” Miranda argued. “She doesn’t even know who we are anymore, what day it is, hell, maybe not even the damn year!”

  “I think that we should all talk about this and take a vote instead of Miranda calling the shots like she always does,” Sydney said.

  With Miranda being the oldest, she tends to take on the maternal roll in our moms’ absence. It can be tiresome but we know she means well. She stepped in and divvied up household jobs for everyone. That way the house was always clean and there was always food on the table.

  “Well, I think that whatever we do, we do it fast because this is ridiculous,” Ashley chimed in. “I’m tired of getting weird looks while I’m out because we have a crazy mother.”

  “Look, let’s just have mom committed to a hospital where she can get the help she needs.” “We can visit her whenever we want but there is nothing more that we can do!” yelled Miranda.

  Quietness descended over the dining room. Each of us lost in thought over what to do with mom. Its’ heart breaking because we all love her so much. We miss those days when she smiled and laughed. When she would do silly dances around the house while singing weird songs. This whole situation is just depressing. How could things have gotten so bad? Just as the thought crossed my mind, we heard a loud noise coming from the back of the house.

  “What the hell was that?” Miranda said as she jumped up from the table.

  “I think it came from moms’ room,” yelled Ashely as she ran down the hallway. We all jumped up and followed suite.

  “The doors locked!” said Ashley.

  We started banging and kicking the door as we heard more commotion and screaming. “Mom!” we yelled through the door. We were pounding on the door so hard that it started to splinter. We hadn’t even realized that the room had gone completely silent.

  “Move!” yelled Miranda as she came running towards the door with a sledgehammer. She swung and hit the lock on the door. It splintered some more.

  BAM!

  BAM!

  BAM! After a couple of hits, the door swung open.

  “Mom!” we cried in unison. She was laying lifeless on the bed. There was blood everywhere. The bed was disheveled, the dressers were knocked over, and there was glass everywhere from the broken windows.

  “No, no, no, no, she can’t be,” murmured Ashely as she slid down the wall to the floor. “She was just sleeping.”

  “How did this happen, what happened, WHAT HAPPENED!” she yelled louder.

  Miranda walked around the room surveying the damages. With tears streaming down her face she spoke one word.

  “Mom?”

  She climbed onto the bed and gathered her in her lap. Her shoulders were shaking so hard from the crying as she fanatically wiped the blood off of mom’s lifeless face.

  “Mom?”

  “Wake up, please!”

  “We need you.”

  “Please don’t leave us,” she cried.

  I stood there in the doorway frozen at the scene in front of me. Ashley crying in the corner, Sydney and Stephanie crying on the floor, and Miranda crying on the bed holding our lifeless mother. I could hear Annie on the phone with emergency services in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to do. This could not be happening. We were just discussing how to get mom the help she needed.

  What happened?

  Why was she screaming?

  Who broke the windows and trashed her room?

  That couldn’t have all been her could it?

  What are we supposed to tell the police? This is all too much. Then, it finally hit me.

  Moms dead.

  She. Is. Dead.

  The next thing I saw was total darkness as I fainted and hit the floor.

  My mind is this big empty void. This big vast space of nothingness. What happened? I hear voices nearby. But who do they belong to? They’re calling my name. I open my eyes and I see Annie leaning over me.

  “Are you ok?” she asked me. “You fainted while I was on the phone with the paramedics and police.”

  That’s when I remember. Everything starts swirling back to the present. Mom is dead. I start to tremble as a cry breaks free from my lips. Annie holds me as I start crying. Crying for the loss of a mother, crying for my sisters, and just crying for this entire fucked up situation.

&nb
sp; “Wh-where’s m-m-mom Annie?” I asked.

  “She’s dead Mary.”

  “You fainted in her room,” she says.

  I pull back as she starts to stand. She helps me up just as emergency services arrive. As soon as they made it in the house, they started rendering aid to mom. But I knew it was too late. I don’t know how long I was out but I do know that there’s no bringing her back. She’s just as lifeless as she was when we found her. The police began pull each one of us aside to get our statements. First Miranda, then Annie, me, Stephanie, Ashley, and Sydney. This has got to be the worse day in the history of days.

  “They’re going to take the body to the Medical Examiner” Miranda told us.

  “They don’t suspect we had anything to do with moms’ death.” She’s shivering, no doubt from the shock of today’s events.

  “Once everything is done, we can start to get things in order for the funeral.”

  She’s just staring off into space while spouting off things that need to be done. We were told we couldn’t touch anything until the police finished their work. So, we all just headed to our rooms to wait things out.

  I turned around slowly and walked to my room. I count the stairs as I go up remembering all the times we played on them as children. Sliding down on cardboard boxes, falling down, and even falling up the stairs while laughing hysterically. My steps slowed in the upstairs hallway as I looked at all the photos hanging on the walls. Photos from our birthdays, Christmas’s, elementary school graduations, family trips, proms, and high school graduations. We’re all smiling and laughing without a care in the world. We had no idea our lives would turn out this way. I finally make it to my room and fall on the bed. It is here that I let out all my sorrows. I start crying so hard that the bed is shaking from the force of it. So many tears streaming down my face as I remember what we lost and what could have been. Until, finally, I drift off to sleep.

  After a couple days of us just merely existing around each other, we finally get the all clear to clean our house and plan for the funeral. The police are done with their investigation and the medical examiner has finished the autopsy. It was ruled that mom died from a heart attack. We were all shocked by their findings, especially after what we told them. I mean, we weren’t in the room but there’s no way that all that ruckus was caused simply by her having a heart attack. But we don’t have any evidence contrary to what they found.

  “Mary, you can start with cleaning the kitchen,” I heard Miranda as her voice penetrated my thoughts.

  “Sydney and Stephanie, you guys can start cleaning the common areas,” she told them while looking around at anything but our faces.

  “Annie and Ashley can clean everything else while I start cleaning moms’ room.”

  We all shook our heads Okay and started cleaning in our designated areas. Just as I was loading the dish washer I head pounding on the door.

  “Oh my God guys, open up!”

  “It’s Rebecca!” I shouted as I ran to open the door.

  “Oh my God, you came!” I cried.

  “Of course, I came.” She says while wiping her eyes. “Miranda called me and told me your mom died!” “What was I supposed to do, just sit at home and wonder if you all were Okay?”

  She walked through the front door, taking off her coat and shoes along the way.

  “What do you need me to do?” Rebecca asked.

  We all got to work on cleaning the house. I cleaned the kitchen and dining room, swept and mopped. While Sydney and Stephanie cleaned the living room, den, and vacuumed. Annie, Ashley, and Rebecca cleaned everything else. Windows, shelves, laundry, and whatever else needed cleaning. We were just about done. I turned around and walked down the hallway toward moms’ room and noticed Miranda just standing in the middle of the room.

  “There’s so much blood,” she mumbled looking around.

  “How could THIS have been a heart attack!” she yelled.

  “I know, but all we can do is take it one day at a time.” I said.

  “You know mom was unstable. She could have broken the window and cut herself. She could have worked herself up so much that it gave her a heart attack. But we’ll never know because we weren’t in the room,” Ashley said.

  “Come on, we’ll clean up her room together”. I said

  We all started cleaning up the damage in her room. We were sweeping away all the pain and agony. Mopping and rinsing away the tears. Throwing out trash and cleaning dirty memories away from the room. Once clean, all that was left was an empty room full of dead memories and the only option we had was to pull together and move on.

  Chapter 2

  ∞∞∞

  It’s been two years since mom passed away. We still live at home. Neither of us could bear to move away from each other. Things have returned back to normal. Well… as normal as normal can be given the tragedy we all endured. Miranda is still the overbearing and mothering sister she’s always been. She works for a local law firm downtown. Annie is back to her usual calm and collected demeanor. She teaches second grade at Hyde Park Elementary School. Sydney and Stephanie are usually never too far from each other. Sydney is a police officer for Chicago Police Department and Stephanie works for the city as an environmental ecologist. Ashley is a forensic medical examiner for Cook County and Rebecca and I are Cook County Sheriffs. We enjoy our jobs but we love the time we spend together more. We always make sure that we eat breakfast and dinner together. Just as I laugh at the memory of last night’s fish tacos, made by Miranda, my phone rings. It was Annie calling.

  “Hello, house of beauty this is cutie!” I say into the phone holding back a smile. Annie hates it when I answer the phone like that.

  “Ugh, why do you always act so childish?” she said. “I swear I don’t know why we still put up with your shenanigans.”

  ‘Because you love me and I keep your asses out of jail” I said.

  “What’s up?” I asked as I put on my turn signal to make a left-hand turn. I had just gotten off of Lake Shore Drive on Canal St. I love going to the Maxwell Polish stand down here. There’s nothing like having a burger loaded up with sautéed onions and mustard splashed all over.

  “Mary, are you even listening to me?” Annie says.

  “Oops, sorry. I was too busy fantasizing about this Maxwell’s I’m about to eat,” I say singing into the phone.

  “I said, what are you making for dinner tonight because I refuse to eat those fish tacos Miranda made last night.” she says.

  “I mean, why do we continue to let her cook?”

  “Do we want food poisoning?”

  Laughing, I said, “What do ya’ll want me to make for dinner?”

  Annie was quiet for a moment. I know she does this when she’s thinking of something that all of us would like. That’s no easy thing to do. We all have very different and very interesting likes and dislikes.

  “Oh, I know!” she shouted.

  “How about you make a good ole’ southern dinner?” she said with a country accent. “Everybody loves it when you cook like that.”

  “Okay, I can do that” I said. “I’ll just swing by the store on the way home to get what I need.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you when I get home, Bye!”

  Just as Annie said bye, I stepped out of my cruiser and into the line at Maxwell’s. It wasn’t overly crowded at this time of the afternoon nor was it excessively hot. So, I was able to get my food rather quickly. I spent the rest of my day just driving around the Dan Ryan. I gave out a few tickets here and there but I was ready to be on my way home. As the end of my shift approached, I walked into the station, down to the weapons room, and turned in my gun. I saw Rebecca at her locker getting ready for her overnight shift.

  “Hey, Bec. How’s it going” I asked her, noticing how disheveled she looked tonight.

  “It’s going. I swear it seems like the days are shorter when you work overnight shifts.” She replied.

  I laughed because I told her she wouldn’t like w
orking nights when she got the job but she chose it anyway. I walked over to my locker and quickly changed my clothes. I made a mental note to remember to stop by the grocery store and pick up what I needed for dinner as I closed and locked my locker.

  “See you later Bec.” I called as I walked out the door. All I heard was a mumbled see ya. She is not a social person when she’s sleepy. Soon, I make it to the store, pick up what I need, and make it home with enough time to start dinner.

  “So, what cha making tonight Mary,” Ashley asked.

  “Well, Annie called me and practically begged me to make dinner tonight so that we won’t die of food poisoning from the fish tacos Miranda made last night” I said.

  “I did not beg!” yelled Annie from the living room.

  “And you will not get food poisoning from the fish tacos!” Miranda yelled rolling her eyes. “I swear, you act like you’re going to die every time I cook.”

  “We’re still wondering why we still let you cook in the first place” Sydney said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, aren’t we all just getting better from the last time she cooked?” asked Stephanie. “I believe Miranda made meatloaf, but it wasn’t cooked all the way through!” she said laughing. Tears were streaming out of her eyes; she was laughing so hard.

  I’m trying to hold back my laughter as I said, “Okay, guys. Give her a break. At least she tries to cook for us.”

  “Tonight, I’m making fried chicken, sweet potatoes, greens, and corn bread.”

  I go to the spice cabinet and start taking down the spices I’ll need for dinner. Then I start opening packages of chicken wings and drumsticks. Pointing my chicken coated fingers at each one of my sisters, I allocated tasks that they can all help with. Ashley is picking the greens at the table, Miranda is mixing the cornbread on the counter, and Sydney and Stephanie are peeling the sweet potatoes by the trash can. It was then that I noticed that Annie wasn’t in the kitchen. Just as I was about to call her, I felt the ground shaking.