This, That, and the Other

As she sat in the chair gazing at his artwork, if that’s what you would call it, she knew what had to be done. And there was no doubt in her mind that she would have to be the one to do it. She was the only one who saw things clearly.

It was so obvious to her. She couldn’t understand why others didn’t see it. There, brazenly taped to his studio wall, his sketches of the young girls, of the animals, of the bizarre scenes, and most telling, of his self portraits.

She had done her research. She had read everything she could get her hands on regarding people suffering from multiple personalities, or what the psychiatric journals referred to these days as “dissociative identity disorder” or “DID.” Until she saw his self portraits, she had been skeptical that her father suffered from it. But then she knew.

And she also knew that he was responsible the deaths of all of these young women in his sketches, for being the serial killer who had been terrorizing the region. She had contacted the police, but they didn’t believe her. So now it was up to her to stop the madness. She began searching her father’s table for his hunting knife, the long one with the serrated blade. Her plan was to wait until he came home. Then she would end it. She just needed to find his knife.

She was startled when the door to the studio was pushed open, expecting to see her father. But instead of her father, it was the chief of police, a detective, and two uniformed officers. The two officers approached her, pulled her off of the chair she was sitting on, and cuffed her. Then, after the chief read her her rights, he said, “Carla, we are arresting you for a series of brutal stabbings in the county over the past year.”

“No, you’re wrong,” Carla shouted. “It’s my father you should arrest. He’s the one who did it. He has multiple personalities, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. You should be arresting him, not me.”

“Take her to the station and book her,” the chief instructed the two uniformed officers. Once Carla had been escorted away, he and the detective began removing the sketches from the wall and putting them into evidence folders.

“So all of these are her father’s sketches?” the chief asked.

“Her father sketched the pictures of these girls,” the detective said, “but he didn’t realize that in her disturbed mind, Carla saw them as competition for her father’s affection and they became her targets. Maybe she was upset that he was spending time sketching them and not spending time with his own daughter. But the two sketches of the man with the mustache, her father, were her own, sketched shortly after she stabbed him to death last year.”

Written for the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Photo Challenge prompt. Photo credit: Natalie Ruka.