Sleep In Heavenly Peace. M. William Phelps

there had been parts of a bed in it.”

      An old friend of Bright’s, who also happened to be at the auction, apparently had the same idea, because he started bidding against Bright as soon as the unit went up for sale. For a while, the bidding went back and forth. When it got to $75, however, Bright won.

      “And there I was,” he recalled, a chuckle in his voice, “with a seventy-five-dollar bid. And I really didn’t think I wanted it.”

      Regardless of Bright’s ambivalence, it was a purchase, he was about to learn, he would never forget—and a purchase that would have nearly every news organization in Arizona looking to talk to him about.

      5

      When her father didn’t rush into the room to save her from the man with the stocking over his face, holding a switchblade knife in front of her, little Dianne screamed again.

      “Daddy…?”

      The man was waving the switchblade back and forth, Dianne recalled, like he was going to do something with it. She was terrified.

      “I had been raped by my half brother,” Dianne claimed later, “when I was six.” It was a safe bet the thought of the man in the black stocking violating her had crossed Dianne’s mind as she sat crouched into the corner of her living room in a fetal position wondering where the hell her father was.

      After Dianne screamed again, the man, who was holding her down now, said, “Looks like you’re on your own, little girl.”

      Dianne started struggling to break free. But she couldn’t move; he had placed his hand around her throat. He was laughing.

      She recognized that laugh: the voice, its affect and inflections.

      She begged, “Don’t, please, don’t…”

      He let go. Backed away. Stood up. Then took off the stocking and started laughing louder as Dianne sat trying to figure out what was going on.

      As the man walked away, Dianne could see her father, who had poked his head around the corner of the opposite room. He had stood there and watched it all. Her father and the man, Dianne said, were now both laughing at her.

      When the man turned to show his face, Dianne couldn’t believe it was her older half brother. He had since walked over to their father, who then patted his son on the back as if he had just hit a home run.

      “Good job, son!”

      Years later, after telling the story, Dianne said, “I realized that day I had always been invisible, but after that I would always have to be invisible…or I’d be dead.”

      She cried herself to sleep that night, and every night she had to spend in the Molina house afterward. Maybe tomorrow will be better, she’d tell herself under covers, as if it were some sort of prayer.

      “Little did I know that tomorrow and all the tomorrows after that would never be all right.”

      Indeed, in the coming weeks, months, and years, Dianne’s life at home, according to her, would become a litany of incredible, almost unbelievable episodes of abuse and emotional torture.

      6

      After the bidding concluded, those who had purchased units at the Smith Storage auction had to pay off their debts and, with locks, secure the units they had purchased. Bright had purchased another unit to go along with number six, but he didn’t have any locks. So he ended up driving to his brother’s house in town, picking him up, and then heading home to get a few locks.

      Within a few hours, Bright was back at home with the contents of the two units he had purchased, scurrying through the boxes to see what he had. Yet, inside the next forty-eight hours, Thomas Bright’s simple life of driving a cement truck and bird-watching would take an inconceivable, horrific turn.

      CHAPTER 2

      1

      THOMAS BRIGHT LET the boxes he had purchased at auction sit in his stepson’s trailer at Thunderbird Mobile Home Park in Safford for a few days while he decided what to do with everything. There were dozens of boxes. Upon a quick look, Bright didn’t see a treasure trove, or cache of antiques, as he might have hoped. What much of it amounted to was nothing but papers and film and old pairs of panties and letters: some unknown person’s life packed away in boxes and sold to the highest bidder.

      “The unit I took the boxes from,” Bright recalled, “was pretty dusty. It turned out, I thought, ain’t nobody had been in it for years.”

      Bright’s stepson’s trailer had a rather large carport protruding over a good portion of the front of the trailer. Bright figured it was as good a place as any to store half the boxes, while “a dozen or so,” he added, “we put in the livin’ room” inside the trailer.

      On Sunday evening, May 11, Bright returned to the trailer to begin digging through the boxes. Immediately he uncovered a keyboard for what appeared to be an old computer, and hoped to find the hard drive and perhaps even a printer. It wasn’t a bag of gold coins, but better than nothing.

      After a night of searching, all Bright could come up with was an out-of-date Nintendo game set.

      As usual, he went to work Monday morning, May 12, and didn’t think twice about the boxes. While talking to a friend, however, the boxes came up.

      “If you got anythin’ good,” Bright’s friend said, “I’ll buy it from ya.”

      “All right. I’ll go home today and check it out and bring whatever I have with me to work in the mornin.’”

      On Monday night, after dinner, Bright and his grandson walked over to the trailer where the boxes were and began searching through them one last time to see if there was anything of value.

      “That monitor and that other thang,” Bright told his grandson, “is in the livin’ room. Why don’t you go and look at it. I’ll go through some of the boxes on the porch.”

      “Sounds good.”

      Bright walked onto the porch and picked a box at random. “It was about two foot by two foot.”

      Bright could tell the rather nondescript box was old. Inside, he found a few wrinkled, worn, and musty blankets. One was yellow, one red. Surprisingly, underneath the blankets, there was another box. Smaller in size.

      Ah…, Bright thought. This must be my treasure.

      He laughed.

      Pulling the tiny box out of the larger box, Bright noticed a white plastic bag inside the smaller box.

      What the hell is going on here?

      “As I opened it,” Bright recalled, “I smelled an old musty odor. There was some brown, dried stuff in thar, too.”

      I hope this ain’t what I think it is, Bright thought.

      With that, Bright immediately considered the notion that an animal had somehow crawled inside the box and, like a lobster caught in a wire trap, couldn’t get out.

      “I had already gone through some boxes that had some old groceries in them and some of the cans of food had broken open.”

      Still, this little white bag, Bright insisted, didn’t have the same odor.

      “It was more of an earthy, musty smell.”

      Bright put the bag down for a moment and noticed a second white bag, same size. When he opened it, the smell overtook him. It was stronger. Much more potent.

      What the hell?

      Looking farther down into the main box, Bright spied a third bag. After opening it and looking inside—there it was again: that same raunchy, earthy odor—Bright realized his simple life was about to change.

      2

      For Dianne Molina, living at home with her mother and father and brothers became a test of her emotional and physical will, she later