Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1) Read online

  Going Home: Cedar Valley Hauntings,

  Book 1

  RENEE BRADSHAW

  Copyright © 2017 by Renee Bradshaw

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved.

  Artwork by Jess Polk

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  ALSO BY RENEE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  For Gee. He introduced me to the world of Stephen King before junior high, and he let me watch science fiction and horror movies when I was little. For that, he helped shape my imagination.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The following people are just a handful that helped me this year get the story of Meg onto paper.

  My husband and two wonderful daughters for understanding my time crunches this year.

  Heather Pfortmiller my amazing proofreader, thank you for finding all those hidden issues. Find her at: https://www.facebook.com/heatherpfortmillerproofreading/

  My massively talented cousin, Jess Polk for creating the perfect cover for Going Home, and giving me encouragement as my first reader. Find her at http://www.jesspolk.com/

  My critique partner DM Paul for all of her redlines in my draft. My book wouldn’t be as polished without her.

  And my amazing team of beta readers: Krysteen Damon, Pamela Brooks, Holly Scheer, Amber VanOrder, Patricia Hawkinson, and Alissa Modrow.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Meg, Dad’s dead,” Angela said.

  I dropped Tracy’s phone in my lap, not from the shock of my sister telling me Dad had died, but from my roommate’s sudden reappearance in the living room. Tracy tapped her empty wrist, and I nodded.

  “Meg!” Angela’s voice came from my lap.

  I grabbed the phone and thrust it back at my ear. “I’m here.”

  Angela sighed and lowered her voice. “I don’t want to get into the details right now; Bethany’s in the car with me.”

  “How is my perfect niece?” It had been a year since I last saw Bethany.

  “Running behind, but fine. Listen. They found him a few days after…uh, after it happened. They think—”

  “I’m leaving in five minutes,” Tracy said, waving her mascara around like she was preparing to pull a rabbit out of the empty cigarette carton on the dresser. I blinked in annoyance. Obsessed with her phone much? “I need my phone back before I go. Five minutes. Do you understand?”

  “Hold on, Ang.” I put my hand over the receiver and smiled with false apologetic eyes. “It’s my sister.”

  “I know it’s your sister.” She spun around halfway to the bedroom, her long black braid slapping the paint-chipped wall. “I answered the phone. My phone. My couch. My apartment. My TV. Mine.” She applied her mascara without looking in the mirror on the back of the door, and I thought about how she poked herself in the eye the last time she attempted reflection free application. “I’m going to get dressed.”

  I nodded and flipped the bird behind her back. I shouldn’t, because even though she was in a shitty mood that day, she had let me leach off her for over a month. In my defense, she had said I could stay however long I needed. A margarita fueled conversation, but I was sure she meant it.

  “Megan!” Angela shouted, and the inside of my ear vibrated. My sister, the marine, learned years ago how to scold in a deep voice; so unlike the high-pitched squeal she used to scream at the rest of us when we were younger.

  “Jesus. What?” I grabbed the pack of menthols off the dented and nail polish speckled coffee table. “Oh yeah. Dad.”

  A frigid silence set in, and I dug my big toe into the dusty carpet, rubbing it against the bald spot in the fibers. What did she want me to say? I jerked my toe back as I found something crunchy. Beetle, or cereal? I didn’t want to find out.

  “Meg, are you fucking kidding me?” Angela must have been mad to swear in front of Bethany, who’d been on auto repeat since she’d turned four earlier that year. “Did you really say, Oh, yeah? Dad?”

  “Dude, I didn’t even know he’s still alive.”

  “He’s not. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “You know what I mean.” I pulled my legs up on the green and yellow checkered couch as I lit a cigarette. “Well, what’s up? He got a bunch of debt to pay? I’m broke.”

  “No shit,” Angela said. Bethany laughed in the background. “Don’t draw on that.”

  I could imagine Angela sitting in her dent-free green Neon, her jet-black hair pulled up into a tight bun, her uniform pressed to perfection, makeup flawless. Most people didn’t notice the bags she sported under her eyes. The pack of cigarettes she hid in a pad wrapper. The only indications that life was not as simple as she wanted so badly for everyone to believe.

  “You sound tired,” I said and she sighed. “How much does he owe?”

  I hoped it was more than my creditors wanted. Might not make what I had done seem so bad to my brothers and sister. Oh wow, Meg. I’m so glad you never got to Dad’s level of—

  “Surprisingly, there’s no debt.”

  Dammit. “Then what’s up?”

  “He left us the house.”

  “What?” I asked, coughing on smoke. “I thought he’d leave it to one of his sisters.”

  “I called Aunt Carol, he hasn’t talked to any of them in years either.”

  I flicked ash off my leg. “No surprise there. Aunt Dee said Dad only ever liked Uncle Aaron.”

  “That twin bond. Duncan and Ray seem the same way half the time.” Duncan and Ray were our brothers, twins, and four years older than me.

  I shrugged even though she couldn’t see me. “Yeah, except if one of them died, I don’t think the other would forget about the rest of us. Not like Dad did after Uncle Aaron died.”

  That was all an assumption based off of stories from Aunt Dee. She and Uncle Aaron weren’t even married a year before he died. Mama and Dad had felt sorry for her, and let her move cross country with them. She helped raise
us, more so after Mama left.

  “So, listen,” Angela’s words blended together in speed, “I talked to Dad’s lawyer and gave him Tracy’s address. The keys should be there in two days, a bus voucher, and Dad’s old car – he’s still got – had – the same one – will be in the parking garage by the depot for you.”

  “Wait. What?” I dropped my cigarette in the ashtray and leapt to my feet, knocking into the table. A plastic vase fell over, spilling questionable water and a few dead flowers. My heartbeat sped up at the mention of a bus ticket and keys. Cedar Valley? The five of us vowed to never go back, so why was a lawyer sending me keys and a bus ticket? “Why the hell do I have to go there? If anyone, it should be Todd, right? He’s the oldest.”

  “The boys and I agreed it would be best for you to go home and get the house ready to sell.” Of course. I gritted my teeth. She talked to our brothers first, and the four of them all agreed what was best for me. “It’ll give you a project.”

  “A project? I don’t have time for a project right now.” Tracy snorted, crossing onto the linoleum of the tiny so-called kitchen. She tsked and shook her head as she poured day old coffee into an empty water bottle. A purple stain in the shape of the letter C sat, centered on the back of her white waitressing top. I opened my mouth to say something, but Angela spoke again.

  “Oh, are you working again? Because the last I heard, you were laid off. Sleeping on Tracy’s couch. Living out of a suitcase—”

  “I’m not living out of a suitcase.”

  Tracy turned around and called out, “It’s a duffel bag.”

  I changed my mind about telling her about the stain.

  “Duffel bag, suitcase, whatever. The rest of us all have jobs and kids. We have lives. We can’t drop everything to go home. You don’t have things to drop. You can go home.”

  “Oregon isn’t home.”

  “Then where is?” Angela waited for an answer, but I was quiet as I watched the vase drip the last of its sludgy water over stray ashes. “I talked to an agent, Marcy from my lacrosse team, remember her? She thinks the house needs a deep cleaning, a few updates. The land’s worth something. But the real estate market still sucks. The better shape the house is in, the better our chances of selling.”

  “What? I’m supposed fix the house?”

  “Clean. Get rid of all the trash. Put fresh paint on the walls.”

  “Are you going to send me money to buy paint and cleaning supplies? I don’t think it’s fair that I have to pay for it all if I’m the one doing everything.”

  “Fair?” Angela laughed.

  Crap, I said the wrong thing; Angela was a single mom, in the Marines, and still sent her little sister money. If I said the word fair again, I’d be in for a lecture. Wouldn’t be the first.

  “Good morning, Parker,” Angela said, muffled and cheerful. Then clear again and frustrated. “How much money do you have?”

  “Let me check my purse.” I walked over to the hook by the front door that held my bag and fished around inside. A roll of quarters and a bunch of loose change at the bottom. “If I had to guess, fifteen or twenty dollars.”

  “Not cash. Like, in your bank account and everything.”

  “I uh...” didn’t have a bank account anymore. At least, not one where the balance didn’t start with a minus sign, and wasn’t frozen from overuse.

  “It doesn’t matter. You’ll have enough to make a fresh start after this.”

  “The money from the house is mine?” I didn’t want to go home. I’d rather jab Tracy’s mascara wand in my eye, but I needed the money. How much would it be? The front half of the house was over a hundred years old, and not in the fancy historical way. The condition had been sad ten years ago when I left home; it would be downright pathetic now. The land? Thirty-something acres on the side of a forested mountain. A river ran through it too. Well, a stream or something. That had to be worth a lot.

  “We’ll split the money five ways.”

  “What? But I’ll be doing all the work.” Whining was something I perfected as the baby of the family.

  “We all earned a chunk of that money by getting out of there alive, and sane. Most of us, sane.” She paused, and I bent my head to the side, propping the phone under my ear. I pulled my shoulder length blond hair into a ponytail, as graceful as an elephant doing ballet.

  “Ang?”

  “I’ll talk to the boys. Maybe a bigger percentage.”

  A wailing noise came through the phone. “What is that?”

  “I gotta go.”

  “What is that?” I asked again.

  “Sirens kicking off the base exercise. I have to drop Bethany off at the CDC so I can get to work.”

  “What’s wrong with Bethany?”

  “Huh? Nothing, why?” Angela’s sounded distracted; our conversation and any points I wanted to raise were lost.

  “The Center for Disease Control?”

  “What are you – No. The Childhood Development Center. I swear we’ve had this conversation before,” she said. Then muffled, she said, “Get your backpack.”

  “Oh, yeah. Can’t you call it daycare like everyone else in the world?” I asked. She always had to make things complicated with her acronyms. “I’ll call you tonight when Tracy gets home. But, someone else has to go. Or at least come with me. I can’t do this.”

  “You can do it. You need to do it.”

  In the silence, I plopped back on the couch and stared at the piano in Tracy’s Johnny Depp poster tacked over the TV. She hadn’t been my first friend with that poster, but the first friend to hang it in her living room instead of her bedroom. I chewed at my thumb cuticle and imagined quiet music coming from the poster; as if Johnny played on.

  “Meg?” Angela asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “The bastard’s dead.”

  That concrete like ball of tension that always sat on my shoulders, the thing that made me hold my breath when I stepped into a dark room, the thing that made me cringe when someone raised a hand too close to my face, that made me want to run away when I witnessed a couple arguing. That tension eased.

  I smiled.

  “The bastard’s dead.”

  We exchanged goodbyes and hung up. Tracy walked by, hand out waiting for her phone. She pointed at the vase, laying on the table. “Are you going to clean that up?”

  “Of course, I am.” Though I hadn’t thought about it. The flowers had been dead for months. Her weird, but hot, coworker had handed them out to everyone as a May Day gift, and it was now mid-summer. She should have tossed them a while ago, but she kept feeding them water as if that would reanimate them instead of prolonging the stench.

  As soon as Tracy left, I grabbed her bath towel and mopped up the water. Most of it had already soaked in to the old wood, leaving behind thick and chunky brown goop.

  After I cleared the slime, I hung her towel back up in the bathroom to dry so Tracy could use it that night. Smelling like BO and fish sandwiches when she got home from the diner, her first course of action was always to shower.

  Yep. I was a considerate roommate.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t contribute either. Tracy just didn’t know about the real reason Mrs. Rodriguez had dropped the price of rent.

  Days after I’d moved in, I slipped the rent check under the landlord’s door. She had opened the door just as I stood, and asked me to help tip the couch back so she could reach an earring she had lost underneath. I reluctantly went inside, and helped. The heavy couch slipped out of my grasp and onto her hand as she reached underneath, I walked with her to urgent care to get X-rays. Somewhere on the mile-long walk, I learned that she cussed like a teenage boy. She learned that I had entered an extreme drifting period of my life, and said “We all need to give the fuck up every once in a while, or we’ll be too busy pushing ahead to see the other damn paths.” That seemed like good advice to me.

  She liked my company while we watched her old VHS recordings of Bob Barker’s “The Price is Right.
” I liked feeling as though I was something more to anyone than a burden to be handed off. Company wasn’t enough to drop the rent almost in half. That had started when I started scanning for her every afternoon.

  Mrs. Rodriguez had stacks and stacks of magazines starting back from 1985 that she refused to part with, no matter the insistence of her son and daughter-in-law. She was certain that there were messages hidden in the articles from her first husband, Hector, who had been brutally murdered in the early eighties. An early morning bottle of scotch had her sharing that story with me.

  When her son stopped bringing her grandchildren for visits, Mrs. Rodriguez compromised and purchased a scanner and computer to save every issue for further inspection, searching for the messages on a second-hand tablet.

  I ran into her daughter-in-law one afternoon at the mailboxes, and she told me Mrs. Rodriguez was a high functioning schizophrenic. Her disease was the reason she thought there were messages hidden within the articles. She shuddered when she told me that, and then laughed it off as a joke. I felt like I had betrayed Mrs. Rodriguez in that moment. To relieve my guilt, I began to help Mrs. Rodriguez with scanning. She never said it, but I knew that was why Tracy’s rent dropped starting that month. I never said anything to Tracy about my time with Mrs. Rodriguez’s magazines. If I had, it would have been another betrayal.

  But at times when Tracy barked at me and accused me of living off of her, it was hard to bite my tongue.

  I leaned over the sink and looked into my reflection, seeing Mama in the almond shape of my eyes and Dad in my dimpled chin. I closed my eyes and leaned against the mirror. “Mama, will you come back? Now that he’s dead?”

  I stayed like that for at least a minute, soaking in the realizations. Sleepless nights and screaming matches were behind me now. Not that I had seen Dad in years, but a living fear always clamored at me when an unexpected knock came loud and angry at the door, or footsteps sounded too close to me in an empty store. A sinking pit in my stomach that told me hiding was over, and he found me. I had always been waiting for him to jump out of the shadows. He wouldn’t find me now.