Chapter 4: Posted with Hesitation

Hello everyone,

I post the next chapter out of hesitation. It was a difficult chapter to compose, and I spent hours working it so it made at least a bit of sense. The reason I wrote this chapter is because the novel is in its beginning stages. I wanted to show why Sheila Carter became the way she is, and why she was so troubled psychologically. It is possible that I will never refer back to this crime she committed because there is still the main story of Scott Grainger and Lauren Fenmore to be written and well thought out. Let me know if you have any ideas as to how this chapter can be re-worked in order for everything to fall into place.

Enjoy!

Love, F.

P.S. Tomorrow (May 1st) is my 22nd birthday!

Chapter 4
The trauma that Sheila Carter exhibited came to a front-burner soap opera storyline when she turned 18. As stated before, Sheila felt isolated from everyone, and her age-mates at school were no exception. That is, until the day before her senior prom.
A young man that was in Sheila’s English class asked her out on a date. Sheila was taken aback by this sudden love interest. All of the girls at Walnut Grove Academy were rich, blonde, and beautiful. Sheila was awkward, had long plain brown hair, and wore braces. Sheila assumed that Jason Worthington was a womanizer and he was known around campus as “Mr. Jock”. There were rumours that he had all the blonde bombshells that were cheerleaders of his football team. He was the all-star quarterback. (Keep in mind that Sheila’s mind was not logical. She assumed all of these things about a guy she never met before until that minute). She made up a story in her head that he was all of these things, just because she found him to be attractive. This was her fantasy when Jason finally introduced himself after knowing her and attending the same school as she did for 4 years. Jason was really a shy young man and frequently kept to himself, quite contrary to how Sheila pictured him. She went by his looks and his looks alone conjured up all the rumours that she “heard”, but only imagined and assumed.
When Jason asked her out on a date, Sheila was a lonely recluse and she kept in mind the high school movies which portrayed the lead character as a victim, being invited to the prom as a cruel and practical joke. Sheila wrestled with her conscience, similar to her second-favourite Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet. When she studied the play, she got annoyed that Hamlet contemplated without making up his mind in exacting revenge against his uncle Claudius for killing his father and then marrying his mother Gertrude a short time thereafter. This led to his downfall. Sheila did not want to think about this offer, she wanted to take a chance. Though she was blissfully unaware at the time, this night would lead to Sheila’s lengthy and impending psychological downfall.
Molly Carter forbade Sheila from going on dates. Molly became ever so cautious of her surroundings since she killed her own husband. It was the best thing that she could ever do for herself, but at the same time, she lived in fear of being discovered. It became difficult for her to trust people, especially her own daughter. Sheila neglected to tell her mother the truth. Sheila wanted to rebel. Internally, she felt trapped like a caged animal wanting to explode, be discovered, and live a normal life. Sheila felt trapped in her romance novels and writing in her diary. She wanted to experience life, and to know the meaning of having an enriched sense of zest and a quest for wisdom and experience, as Eve wanted to know in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Sheila wanted to get married and have children, a life that her mother dreaded for her due to her own insecurities and her own personal experience with an abusive husband. Most of all, Molly thought that Sheila would never be strong enough to take care of herself should something or someone like her dead husband surface in her life. Fortunately for Sheila, Molly would never know that her daughter possessed her courage to conquer her own demons. Sheila would prove her mother wrong soon enough…
Sheila agreed to meet Jason after school. Jason Worthington had a red Convertible, the kind that was of that year. From the minute that Sheila Carter stepped into his vehicle, she knew something was amiss with her date.
They were driving along the interstate, and suddenly Sheila saw a couple of empty beer bottles underneath the passenger seat. Sheila panicked, and she nervously told Jason that she wanted to be brought home. Nearly colliding with a pick-up truck, Jason stopped and he swerved the car to the right and it crashed into a heavily wooded forest. It was a dark, wooded area and late at night. This was an area that no one had ever been into and very few people had ever seen or been into.
Sheila wondered what had gotten into Jason. He pulled out a gun, and told Sheila to take off her clothes. Sheila tried to escape, but he fired a shot in the air, paralysing her with fear. She proceeded to take off her blouse, and he began fondling her breasts. He decided to take off her clothes instead. The whole time she was screaming, but no one could ever hear her cries of help. She pleaded with him to stop, but he was relentless. The intercourse was successful, but because Jason was drunk, he passed out on the steering wheel. Sheila was traumatized. To her, the rape happened all in an instant. She thought of calling for help, but she didn’t have a mobile phone on her. She had short-term memory loss, and didn’t recall that he had a gun. Sheila wanted to exact her revenge on her assailant, and then the thought of the gun flashed in her mind. She took the weapon from his hand, and he suddenly woke up. He reached over for her, and she anxiously opened fire, a direct hit to his forehead. She blew his brains out execution-style, and he died instantly. Sheila, like Hamlet, didn’t think her plans to their fullest extents. She had to get rid of the corpse, the gun, and the car…
Her location was the one that housed all the components for the perfect crime. Since no one could hear her cries of help, it was therefore assumed that no one could have heard the gun shot. She noticed the Cliffside wasn’t far from the vehicle’s current position. She noticed a box of matches in the front-door compartment, and she took the container of gasoline from the trunk. She poured the gasoline, and started pushing the Convertible to the edge of the Cliffside. Similar to the adrenaline rush that overcame her mother many years ago, the pressure on her person amounted to as close to nothing in humane terms. Before the car tipped the scale of the cliff, she set the car on fire. She then gave it the final push. Jason and the car blew up in mid-air before crashing into the stream leading to the waterfall. She took the gun and placed it in her purse.
Due to the trauma of her recent victimization of another violent perpetrator, she did this without thinking. The sudden rush of adrenaline overcame her again, and she thought to herself that this crime happened in a little known part of town. No one knew that Sheila Carter was the one going out with Jason Worthington; therefore she would not be a suspect. This did little to ease Sheila’s mind.
A couple of days later, Sheila Carter picked up the Genoa City Chronicle from her doorstep. She panicked when she saw the remnants of her crime found by police on the front page of the newspaper. She went in her room and continued with reading the article. It stated that the car was so unbelievably damaged that the tests conducted from the wreckage determining whether or not there was a body inside turned out to be inconclusive. They then determined that this gruesome crime might be a closed case since they couldn’t prove that a crime had been committed. She breathed a sigh of relief, but then she realized that Jason was still missing. For two weeks, Sheila frantically searched for a missing person’s report to come up on the local newscast. To her surprise, everything was fine and therefore, Jason Worthington was still alive. Could it be possible that he had no loved ones in Genoa City? No, that can’t be true!, Sheila thought. Little did she know that Jason Worthington was just an alias. He didn’t even exist. She immediately searched through her yearbooks and looked him up in her classes throughout her 4 years of high school at Walnut Grove Academy. She could not find his name. For a moment, Sheila thought she was really losing her mind. Jason was Mr. Jock of Walnut Grove Academy, or so she fantasized when she would see him in her English class of that year. How could he vanish into thin air? How could he not exist?
She decided to do some investigating, but yet she had it etched in the back of her mind that she must remain inconspicuous. She went into her school’s library and went through all of Genoa City’s current newspapers and found nothing.
It was coming up to the final exam period, and Jason wasn’t among the students showing up to write their finals. It was a critical time after all to be missing his finals just one week before graduation. Another student reported him missing to the principal, and the principal called the police. Jason Worthington was a false identity, so the police never even heard of him. His picture was released as late breaking news on television, but in that time no one came forward to confirm whom he was and if he was indeed missing and/or dead.
After the final exam period, Sheila found out from her eavesdropping that there was speculation that perhaps the missing student’s disappearance and the car found by the waterfall were connected. They found evidence that the car was reported stolen from the local car dealership. The case had to be re-opened but yet, it was shut again. This is what Sheila could not figure out. She knew with absolute certainty what she had done, but the authorities couldn’t piece together the segments that were necessary in order to prove that a crime had been committed. There was no evidence of a body since the convertible was burned to a crisp. The car was stolen, so Jason didn’t even own the car in question. Sheila reasoned that without a body, the police couldn’t prove that a crime was committed. She laughed it off, and torched all of her newspapers. It was a closed case. It seemed that Jason Worthington vanished off the face of this earth, and nobody cared. She instantly thought of her all-time favourite play in the fifth act of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth found out that his wife committed suicide and he adopted a fatalistic attitude because of his tragic flaw of vaulting ambition. “She should have died hereafter…/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death.” Sheila was happy and relieved, thinking in her naïveté that she was the smartest person in the world.
Sheila Carter had committed the perfect crime, or so she thought…