She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. From the way his pupils widened, she knew he remembered everything.
“I could kill you. But death is easy. You’re going to live and remember. Live, but never be a man again.”
What happened next changed not only Peters’s life, but the whole town. Eleanor acted with the cold method of someone who had planned every step. She did not rush.
After all, she had time. The whole night ahead of her, and no one would miss Peters until morning. His wife was away, the neighbors were used to his drunken nights out. Ideal conditions for payback.
People later told the story in different ways. Some claimed they had seen a strange figure in men’s clothes near the old shed. Others said they heard muffled sounds, like groaning.
But that night, with half the town drinking, nobody paid much attention. And in the morning… the town woke up different.
The packing plant watchman, old Frank Delaney, found Peters at six a.m. He was on his way to open the gate when he heard odd sounds from the shed. The door stood slightly open.
Strange, because the shed should have been locked after that earlier incident. Frank looked inside and nearly fell over from what he saw. Peters was lying on the same filthy tarp where the girl had once been found.
He was alive. But… The ER doctor who came out on the call had trouble shaking it off afterward.
In ten years of practice he had seen plenty of injuries: industrial, domestic, criminal. But this… This was not ordinary mutilation.
Too careful. Too deliberate. Almost surgical. The wound had been treated with iodine and wrapped in a rough but effective bandage.
Whoever did it clearly had not wanted the victim to bleed out. Peters stayed in the hospital two weeks. For the first three days he did not speak at all—couldn’t or wouldn’t, the doctors never knew.
To every police question he only shook his head and indicated that he remembered nothing. Detective Warren visited him three times.
On the third visit, when they were alone in the room, Peters suddenly grabbed his arm and rasped, “Don’t look for them. Don’t. I had it coming.” Warren stared at him for a long moment, then nodded and left.
In the report he wrote: “Victim does not recall the circumstances of the incident and cannot identify the assailant.” But the town was already buzzing like a kicked beehive. Rumors spread faster than official news.
People said Peters had been unmanned, that it was revenge for some girl. Peters’s wife, a well-connected woman at City Hall, tried to keep the story quiet. But some things won’t stay quiet.
Not when nurses whisper in corners and orderlies carry details into every boardinghouse kitchen. During those days Eleanor lived her usual life. In the morning she went to the plant, in the evening to the hospital to see Susan…
