Whatever Mother Says... by Wensley Clarkson

identified.
    Moments later Theresa had second thoughts. She candidly confessed to the assembled children that even she considered the idea of smashing her own dead daughter’s teeth to bits a little daunting.
    Theresa then carefully peeled on a pair of yellow Playtex Living Gloves, ripped a plastic garbage bag up and used it to line the cardboard popcorn-cup box Billy Bob had brought home from his work at the nearby Century 21 movie theater on Howe Avenue. Theresa used that particular brand of gloves because they had a little diamond-shaped grip on them that obliterated all fingerprints.
    Then Theresa sat on her bed with a stack of pink-and-blue-flowered pillowcases and slowly plucked all the hairs off those cases until there were none. She wanted to ensure her family had no connection to the body.
    She then took the same pillowcases and lined the garbage bag inside the box with them to soak up any blood. Terry was then ordered to stand outside the house to make sure that nobody was nearby.
    Inside, Billy Bob and Robert leaned into that tiny closet to pull their sister’s remains out into the hallway. But the body would not move because half of the left side of Sheila’s face was stuck to the floor where she had been frozen in death.
    Billy Bob then decided to remove the door of the closet in order to get more access to take out the body. A few minutes later, having taken the door off, the brothers pulled at the rotting corpse and finally hauled it out.
    The boys then put their sister’s remains in the box—which had been so carefully prepared by Theresa Knorr—before wrapping silver duct tape around it. Then they carried the box outside and put Sheila in the trunk of their mother’s Ford LTD. Next they packed shovels in the trunk. Robert got in the rear seat in the exact same spot where he sat when they took Suesan off to the mountains almost a year earlier.
    Moments later Terry watched as her mom and two brothers drove off into the darkness to find a final resting place for Sheila.
    This time Theresa made the long drive up Interstate 80 to the Highway 89 turnoff, but instead of driving to Squaw Valley where Suesan had been burnt, they found a new location near the runway at Truckee Airport.

Nine
    The battered child syndrome … characterizes a clinical condition in children who have received serious physical abuse, generally from a parent or foster parent.
    Pediatrician C. Henry Kempe, who invented the term “Battered Child Syndrome”
    It was hardly surprising that Terry Knorr found herself choking back the urge to vomit as she started cleaning out that closet of death while her mother and brothers were out dumping Sheila’s body in the mountains.
    When they did eventually arrive home, her brother Robert cut the dismantled closet door up with a saw and then threw it in the Dumpster at the end of the driveway to the apartment complex that was attached to the house. Theresa and Billy Bob then collected all Sheila’s belongings and dropped them in the same Dumpster. There was to be no olive oil burning ritual this time.
    Terry, gasping against the pungent odor, tried to drink an iced grape Crush soda as she scrubbed away on her hands and knees inside that tiny closet. But all she could taste was death. She held her nose, swallowed hard and tried not to breathe in the acrid fumes.
    Terry’s brothers later told her they had tried to bury the box containing Sheila, but as they were digging, somebody had passed nearby and they got scared and drove off, leaving the container sitting in a clump of bushes.
    Theresa Knorr had decided not to burn Sheila’s body because she did not want it to look in any way similar to Suesan’s death.
    Terry’s memories of her sister Sheila center around a cowboy hat that had become like a calling card for the pretty teenager.
    “It was black velour or velvet and it had a big, like, feather decoration on the front. And she loved that hat. It was a personal belonging, I mean really