Fear Her (Complete)

Episode 5

ALBERTSON’S

Tucson, Arizona

Mini Tyler wanted nothing to do with the story of the Zodiac Cult Killer, and even less to do with any talk of the Zodiac Cult Disciples. She was finished with all that. She wanted to take her groceries and go home, nothing more and nothing less, but the media had different ideas about how Mini’s day was going to proceed.

She cursed under breath and pushed her Dolce & Gabbana sunnies higher over her eyes. Today was godawful bright and Mini was still doing battle with a lingering hangover from all the wine she’d drunk last night. She’d had just enough to be malleable and entertaining, no more than it took for Grant kiss her hair and tell her to meet him upstairs for a marital nightcap. He never liked her more than when she was giggly and punchdrunk ridiculous. It was the mornings after she had a problem with. 1

Mini clutched her oversized tote to her chest as though it could make her invisible to the press’s all-seeing eyes.

“Mini! Mini!” they cried in her direction as she apologetically wove her way out the supermarket’s automatic doors, past incoming shoppers and others trying to make their way home. Mini was accustomed to being in the limelight, if that was the way you wanted to put it. She wasn’t accustomed to being hounded, not anymore. Got to get home. There’s a timetable to keep. The lasagna alone will take me a couple of hours and there’s still the ironing to do, she fretted to herself because she couldn’t do so aloud. It wouldn’t do to show discontent; nobody ever read it well. She didn’t wear it quit right, or sooner late aunt had said. 1

Mini steadied her cart as a television cameraman almost toppled it in what she was sure was a deliberate act of sabotage. Dropping her groceries (enough for a small cocktail party of Grant’s very best colleagues, all of whom Mini loathed on a deeply personal level) would mean having her on the ground and vulnerable, unable to hide from their ghastly flashbulbs and ruthless, penetrating questions. She began to grit her teeth from the stress. Her orthodontist would berate her at her annual exam. ‘Your beautiful teeth,’ he’d tut and she’d fantasize about removing his bleach whitened bicuspids with an eyelash curler while he rooted around in her unhinged jaw.

STORY CONTINUES BELOW

The mental image made her grin and the photogs crowed in delight, all but beating off to the picture she painted. The Zodiac Princess Expresses An Emotion! Clearly groundbreaking reporting. She forced her poison grin to stay and pushed on.

Beckett and Annaliese, her two children, twins, were due home from kindergarten in less than half an hour and Mini needed to be there to meet them. Her husband had very particular ideas about how the children should be seen to and that included them never being left at the house alone. ‘It’s too dangerous, Mini,’ he’d say. ‘What about the guns, Mini?’ He acted like their children were evil geniuses out to put their parents in the madhouse with their madcap hijinks. She hadn’t had the heart to tell him that their children were average at best: playing with a gun they had no idea about hidden in a linen cabinet that was locked on a floor nobody used was beyond their capabilities. She loved her fair dolt of a husband, but he was no less a dolt for being so lovable.

Mini was not a dolt at all. That’s why she kept her head down when a reporter with an oddly familiar voice shoved a microphone in her face outside the Albertson’s in Tucson, Arizona. Mini just wanted to live her life, not re-live shit she’d already gotten past.

“Mrs. Tyler, do you have a comment on the recent report that the Zodiac Cult Killer has been released from prison?”

“Please, leave me alone.” Mini used her petite stature to her advantage, ducking from beneath the clutch of photographers and reporters to navigate the parking lot, using her sparsely filled shopping cart as a kind of roving shield. Let them follow her if they wanted to, she’d lead them straight into oncoming traffic. Mini had a schedule to keep, a husband to keep happy, and little people wearing Muppet backpacks who expected animal crackers to be waiting for them at home. Fuck anybody who fucked with Mini Tyler’s schedule.

“Are you still in contact with any of your fellow cult members from the Divine Zodiac Disciples, Mrs. Tyler?” 1

Mini bared her teeth. She had a reputation for her smile. Wonderfully straight teeth, bleached white. Soft, plush lips. Fantastic eyebrows. Yes, she was aware. She tended them with great care. What people overlooked while staring at her mouth was all she managed to hide behind her Nordstrom Rack designer shades: Mini rarely smiled with her eyes. What she did with her lips was a defense mechanism while the truth was far better hidden.

“Mrs. Tyler, what do you think of accusations that your father sired several children on the underage Disciples at Stargazer? Were you aware of your father’s pedophiliac leanings, Mrs. Tyler?” 1

Mini’s breath left her lungs in a rush. Her shopping cart collided with a sign indicating parking for expectant mothers. The cameraman and photographers scattered like a murder of buzzards over a creature in its death throes, rallying once more before it fell. She rounded on the woman who asked the question. She in her smart business casual attire, cat’s eyeliner lethally applied to a stiletto point that knew no fear. Not a hair out of place, flawless but for rivulets of sweat skimming down her temples at speed. She was just a person, Mini could decimate a person.

“Stop this, now. I was a child. We were all children.” Her voice cracked. Fuck. A litany of self-upbraiding curses rocketed through her mind. She was better than this. It was written in her stars. “Why don’t you care?”

The reporter was momentarily taken aback. “It’s just a question, Mrs. Tyler.”

Mini stared the woman down till the woman shuddered. Mini had been told all her life she had her father’s stare. “They’re not just questions when they’re your life. Leave me alone and, yeah, I mean you in particular.” She glared at the other reporters hungrily watching their interaction. “But I will find each of your names and get a restraining order against all of you. TRY ME. I mean that.” She gathered up her grocery bags-far more than she could carry, in all honesty, but weight training had been good to her, she didn’t so much as pant under the burden. “Come near my family, come near my children, I’ll have your jobs and your shitty, secondhand cars.” She dodged through the throng to lose herself in the crush of the busy parking lot.

The reporter’s voice behind her remained level despite all the venom Mini directed her way. “This is Pia Hayes for WNXC. Back to you, Nate.”

Mini Tyler spit nails in her mind. Nobody spoke to her this way. Nobody reached into the past she had left moldering in a dessert unless she permitted it. She was somebody else now. How dare they wake that hibernating, positively beastly time of her life?

Her Range Rover was waiting, parked intentionally a moderately far distance from the store so that she could work a few hundred extra steps into her daily activity. She kept track through an app on her phone linked up to the FitBit Pro on her wrist. She tracked her steps, those run, walked, and sprinted, scrupulously in a spreadsheet on her phone. She knew precisely how many calories she burned and how many she consumed each day. She was the master of her body, the mistress of her home, and the sole leader of her internal, spiritual life. Nobody got to take that from her. Not anymore.

Still, once the rear of her four-wheel drive was loaded, she found she couldn’t move to put the car in Drive and burn rubber departing this fucking store she’d never set foot in again. She couldn’t do a thing, just clutch the platinum pendant suspended on a chain hanging from her neck. Inlaid in the platinum was a wreath of stars and set in the very middle was a symbol in emerald. The symbol for Gemini.