Two

A couple of hours later Stephanie had finally arrived and today she was only seventeen minutes late, which for her, is a major improvement. She is usually any where from thirty minutes to an hour late for her shift.

Owen should have put his foot down and fired her long ago, but finding anyone brave enough to risk being around him or willing to work at the motel was harder than it seemed. People are skittish and they believe what they hear. If they hear someone say that he is a killer, they believe it and they do what they can to stay clear of him.

So, Owen bit back his annoyance and forced himself to not react whenever she was late or when she was being horrible to him, because he really needed her to work there. So he would always bite his tongue, trying to grin and bear it. Typically. But today, she had seemed to have even more of a vitriolic and invective attitude towards him.

Owen was used to her sometimes rude behavior towards him and her general snarkiness, but this seemed to be more so. Maybe she was just having a bad day, he thought to himself, because she was not usually so aggressive in her manner of speaking.

It usually has a playful tone that is lacking today, but Owen chooses to ignore that little fact. As long as she does her job then he does not give a damn if she has a problem with him or not.

Moving through the empty hallway towards his private domain in the sprawling motel, he marvels (not for the first time) at just how much he was able to change the interior. All it had taken was a small fortune and a lot of elbow grease on his part.

Thankfully he can hardly recognize it as the same place that his father had built. He had changed everything about the place in the vain hope of burying all of the memories deep down. He thought if he destroyed the walls that had trapped him in terror as a child, he could destroy the fears that still plagued him.

But it did not work.

Yet, some good still came from the renovation. He was able to open the motel back up. It had taken him a long time to live down the legacy and the reputation that his father had saddled the place with. It had taken much more than a new coat of paint and new front door.

He had completely gutted the place and practically built it new from the floor up. Then all the business that he had gotten had come from the morbid horror chasers and those who are obsessed with true crime. He likes to refer to them a bottom feeders, vultures or the classic 'fucking freaks' depending on his mood.

With all the media coverage that the case had garnered nation wide, he had hordes of people beating the doors down to see it. Everyone had wanted to see the infamous 'murder motel' where the crazy man and his deranged son had kidnapped all those women and then brutally murdered them. Everyone's favorite place to check out was the old well that had held all the bodies of the victims. 

They got very disappointed when he told them that he had had it sealed off a long time ago to try to bury all of the bed memories associated with it. Just like how he had both Dave and Nate's rooms ripped out and redone into a large indoor gym that was accessible to guests, if they asked for said amenity.

The gym is how he manages his anger. He lifts weights, kicks the weighted sand bag or runs for hours on the treadmill. He cranks some old rock songs and lets it all out. He figures that it a much healthier alternative that snatching women off of the street to torture them.

Not that the town believes it. If only his crazy ass father and brother could have found another outlet for their psychotic episodes. Then he would not be the town pariah.

Owen lives fifteen miles outside of town and he rarely goes there, except for when he is out of supplies. But even after all these years, he still has the few people that look at him and whisper.

For the first few years after the story of his family came to light, it was the worst. People would cross the street to stay away from him. He would walk into the grocery store and folks would abandon their carts to gather their children and leave.

He had grown use to all of the whispers, stares and abject fear; but that does not mean that he likes it. He has been treated like a leper all of these years when he did nothing wrong. He tries not to let it bother him, though, because he can not really blame the people for their fears.

It is as he expected that he would get judged for his family's crimes as well. They do not know him or anything, except for what they heard. They have no way of knowing that he is nothing like the people that raised him.

They only know that he come from a horrendous situation and they naturally assume that he was raised or 'groomed' to be a part of it. He would probably feel and act the same way if he were in their shoes, thinking that the person must have had something to do with it, if they grew up in it. He was there with them, however unwillingly, so he must be an accomplice. That is what everyone thinks.

When he reaches his room, he stops just inside of the room to look at the many framed photos on the wall. Photos of his family. There is a picture of him a few years ago, holding both Jack and Sunny in his lap in front of an oversized, perfectly decorated Christmas tree. A picture of him holding a newborn Marnie. One of him with all three kids, when Marnie is about two.

There is a picture of him and Andy on a fishing boat, holding up this twenty-nine pound channel catfish. They had been featured in the local paper for the impressive catch and they had an older man buy them supper so that they could to talk fishing with him. It had been a great day. One that Owen looks back often on and smiles.

There are pictures of him smiling with Lacey in front of a pool. A picture of him, Sunny and Lacey decorating cookies for Marnie's first birthday. More recent pictures of Owen letting Jack drive him around in his own truck after the boy had gotten his permit. 

There are so many pictures, as Lacey loves to document hapy times. Each time they get together, she manages to take enough pictures to fill an album, which she does and she gives it to him to keep. He has them all on a shelf in his living room. On lonely nights, when he is at his darkest, he pulls them out and pours through them, smiling at the memories they bring.

When he feels so alone and cut off from people, he craves the love and warmth that feels him when he sees the faces of his family. When he replays those memories in his mind, hearing their laughs, seeing their smiles, it makes him feel connected to them and the lonliness is gone.

Seeing these pictures line the walls takes him back to a time when he use to stare at his father's photo collection in disgust and shame. The imortally documented proof of all of the evil atrocities his father had commited.

It brings to mind a dark time in his life when he used to be afraid to leave his room, because he feared what he might see or hear. It had gotten so bad that he was constantly afraid of the house. He had horrible anxiety all of his life, but one of the worst times her can remember is from his early childhood.

There was a time long ago, when Nate had taken this young woman and he was so horrible to her, constantly 'teaching her lessons' as he put it. She had screamed and moaned in agony all of the time. It had been a horribly haunting sound that would chill Owen to his soul.

Owen had been about eight at the time, but the sound of it gave him such anxiety and made him so sick, that he had spent five days living in the woodshed out back, just to try to escape the pain and guilt he felt each time he had heard her.

He had nearly gotten bite by a rattlesnake and he had apparently worried his father, because he had gotten a hell of a whooping when they had finally found him. But he never heard the woman again. He did not know it for sure at the time, although he suspected that something was off about his family, but they were killers.

When Owen had turned twelve, Dave tried to get him interested in joining them. By then it was no longer about 'teaching lessons' or 'punishments', as Nate had once told him Dave had used to call it.

By then they did it because they wanted to. They enjoyed searching for their next victim. They got a thrill out of snatching her without getting caught. They were addicted to torturing her, but most off all, they were insatiable for the act of killing someone. The sight of blood, the begging for their lives.. their screams.. it was all some huge turn on for Nate and Dave. They felt powerful and they loved it.

Neither of them ever showed an ounce of remorse for taking someone's life. Instead, they treated it as if it were not a big deal. That was mind blowing to Owen. He could not fathom how someone could do that or be that kind of monster. The fact that he came from that gene pool truly scared him. Nate always used to tell him that killing was in their blood. Blood that Owen considered to be tainted.

They came from a line of killers and Nate had seen no need to break the cycle. Talk like that is what worried Owen. It was kept him up many a night, torturing him with thoughts of how he might be.

He had always feared that he might turn out like them, but he had kept true to himelf and his beliefs. He knew that it was wrong, what they wre doing, and he hated it. No matter what, he was not going to be like them. But there was always that small doubt that maybe everything he had seen and heard had impacted him just a little. That maybe someday he would just.. snap.

That is why he kept to himself. He feared what he might do if he was put in certain situations. He liked to tell himself that he would never do such a thing, but he knew better than anyone that in certain instances, a person could be forced to do anything. 

Take Lacey for example. The kindest woman that he has ever known. She is perfect. She is kind, generous, warm and loving. She devoted her life to helping people and she loves so fiercely, that she would gladly die for anyone. Yet, she took the life of two men. Yes, she had been forced into it, but still. If a woman as gentle as her could kill, what was he capable of doing?

He was the son of a killer, after all. The brother of a truly sadistic fiend. The grandson of hot-headed murderer. He had bad blood and tainted genes running through him. That combined with the childhood he had and all that he had been forced to witness. That shit becomes ingrained. It is rooted so deeply in his subconcious that he will never be able to rid himself of it completely. 

His biggest fear is turning out like Dave or Nate.

Although he has some similiarities to Dave, personality wise, he is nothing like Nate. Nate was so.. intense. When Owen was a child, he had watched a movie on tv about a man who had been possessed by a demon and he did such terrible things.

His eyes were vacant and he gave creepy, siniter smiles that would give you the heebie jeebies just seeing it. He liked causing mayhem or inflicting misery and pain on to others. That had struck a cord of recognition in the kid.

When Owen had seen that, he thought that his brother was either possessed by a demon or he was the demon. Hell, Owen would not have been surprised to find out that Nate was the devil himself. That would have at least explained why he was the way he was. 

He had known since he was a little child that his brother had something terribly wrong with him, so that theory was easily something that he could believe. Nate had been messed up in the head and he had no emotions at all, much as the boy in the show had been unfeeling.

That was when Owen had started keeping a Bible beside his bed to try to keep the evil spirits at bay. Not that it worked. His brother still came around him, much to his dismay. Although Nate loved him and had treated him well, doting on the child, Owen could not help but hate his brother for everything that he was and all that he did.

As for his father; he was just an evil old bastard who enjoed hurting people. He saw it as a way to assert his dominance over them. Due to his own messed up childhood, he thought that the way to be a 'real man' was to abuse women and to be a dick to them. Flawed logic, but after forty years of being that way, he had been pretty much stuck on that belief, be it right or wrong. 

Lacey tells Owen all the time how easy it would have been for him to follow in the pattern that they set for him, since he was raised around and exposed to their sadistic ways. She told him that the fact that he had the strength of will to say 'hey, this shit is not right' that he was a strong person.

Owen did not see it that way. Had he actually been a strong person, he would have done something to actually stop them, rather than hiding like the coward he was. The way he sees it, every time they took a woman and tortured her, and he did not stop them, he was just as guilty as them. Those women's blood was on his hands, just as much as it was on Dave and Nate's hands.