Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1) Page 5

  I took a deep breath to steady myself, but instead inhaled rot. No matter how clean my father was with the furs and his tools, the scent always lingered. My family told me more than once, the garage was almost odorless, but I could smell death, iron and bleach. Dad did all the bloody stuff in a small shed behind the building. Blood. Innards sliding. Ripping skin. Dripping. The drop thud when the inside of a deer fell to the ground; I’d heard it on more than one occasion, and it was the reason I spent most of my teen years a vegetarian.

  “You can do this.” Time to face the eyeballs. I flipped the wall switch and sucked in a sharp breath as I took in all the animals. At least fifteen dogs littered a shelf on the closest wall. Cats posed in sleeping balls cluttered the top shelf. They weren’t as imposing as I remembered, taking up only one rack in the room.

  Meanwhile, four deer, two cougars, and an otter stood in a circle around a rope hanging from the ceiling. It sounded like an opening to one of those morbid jokes Jordan and I used to tell each other on the track during gym class. Moles held onto the rope like something from a Vegas show, stacked floor to ceiling, hanging back in various poses all frozen in time. Some had rope wrapped around a leg, an arm, their waist, while others climbed, hand over hand, to the rafters. The great escape. Thwarted by a man and his tools.

  Every last tiny marbled eye was turned towards me as though they knew I was coming. One freak show observing the other. I looked at the rest of the room.

  His pride in his work must have slowed; the garage was dirty with clutter and dust. I would call the local museum and see if they wanted any of the pathetic animals for a display. It would be a shame for all of his work — their lives — to go to waste. My eyes darted from creature to creature, remembering a cat. Sphinx? The dogs; Robot and Charlie.

  Our pets were always outdoor animals with short life spans, who seemed to be the main responsibility of my brothers. There had only been the odd one or two I grew an attachment to. But never had I carried the same affection for any of the four-legged creatures as some of the pet owners I’d met had been to their own household beasts. Sweater wearing dogs and YouTube cats.

  Animals were put here for work, not for sleeping in the bed with you, Dad said one night, pulling a rabbit out of Angela’s arms. My stomach felt sick at the memory. The rabbit had been the class pet, and her responsibility over Christmas break. The next week when we returned to school, he gave her a rabbit’s foot to hang from her backpack. He’ll do more as a foot than he’d do as a bed warmer. I went with Aunt Dee and Angela to replace the rabbit; Aunt Dee shuffled her feet and told the teacher the original rabbit had gotten loose and ran off.

  I spotted Wolfy then. The light shone off of his dark eyes, making them sparkle when none of the others did. I bonded more to that wolf than I did any of the pets we owned. He had been my protector, my shadow, my knight. At least, that was what Aunt Dee said about him. Now, I could see he was simply a lump of mangy gray fur, a sick animal when he was taken down. Feeling as though I betrayed him by thinking this, I turned my back to him.

  I threw open the chest freezer and leaned forward to peer inside. The crackers I had eaten earlier came up in my throat, dry and thick, at what I saw and smelled.

  “Ho-ly shit,” I said, gagging. My small snack spilled from my lips.

  Bad idea to speak. Or breathe. Covering my mouth with my sleeved hand, I let the lid drop and backed away. If I had been paying attention, I would have noticed the unplugged cord laying on the floor in front of the freezer. It must have been unplugged for some time, because the level of spoiled rotten meat inside was too much for me to take. I vomited on the concrete, my hands on my knees.

  Forgetting about the wolf outside, I ran full speed for the door. I took big gulps of fresh air, certain that with that one lift of the freezer door, I had returned to vegetarianism.

  My head felt woozy as I stood up, and I forgot about the howl momentarily as a vision of Mama came crashing down on me.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  West Virginia, 1968

  Geraldine, 7 years old

  “I don’t wanna go to school. I wanna stay with you and Ruby.” My feet stomped and dragged into the dirt, digging to connect to anything. Mama grabbed me by the shoulders and shook. My little sister Ruby stood, empty-eyed with her pigtails swaying and her thumb in her mouth.

  “You can’t stay home with me. You gotta move on and start getting ready for the world outside this house. Jon!” Mama hollered. My big brother grabbed my arm and pulled me down the drive, all while I’m wailing for Mama.

  Her and Ruby disappeared to the back of the trailer, and I lowered my voice. No reason to scream if she didn’t even care. When we got to the end of our row, I saw Mama walking around the side of our house. She had a laundry basket on her hip and a big milk bottle in her other hand. Ruby followed behind her, walking over to Ol’June’s trailer. Then they were gone.

  “I always go to Ol’June’s with Mama.” I sniffled. “I stir the pot while they talk over it and drop in the lady’s—”

  We jerked to a stop, and Jon spun me round to face him. “Don’t be talking about none of that stuff at school.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. People know what they know, and what they don’t know could fill all these mountains. ‘Cluding what Mama really does when she ain’t making little bottles for folks to be getting a baby or fixing tea to heal sick plants.”

  We were moving again by the time he was done scolding me, dragging me along still. My legs were lots shorter than his, but he didn’t care while we were walking to school.

  “Why can’t I tell anyone what Mama does? Daddy says knowledge is power, and the more we all know—”

  “Don’t be an idiot. You can’t make seven-year-olds understand what their parents don’t know. Especially if they’re close to thinking we’re some kind of weird devil—” Jon stopped talking in the middle of his sentence and looked at me. He looked kinda sad. “Don’t worry about that stuff right now. Just...just do what all the other kids do. Find some girls with blond hair and clean dresses, and just do what they do.”

  Jon always wanted to find someone to be like. This one time, he walked to his friend’s house, so he could ride the bus and get to school looking normal. Not a trailer rows kid, but like he belonged in some better family. Too bad he didn’t make it in time and had further to go to school. He showed up dirty, and wet from the rain. He never tried that again.

  The kids at school were assholes. Jon said so, a hundred times before. I sure didn’t wanna go to the same school as them. He’d come home one day last year with a black eye, and Mama tanned his hide for getting blood on his shirt. We can’t get new clothes every damn time he makes someone mad.

  We were a block away from the yard when he saw some of his friends from school and ditched me. They were all taller and older than me, by ‘bout five years. I stayed where I was, hiding by a bush ‘til they’re gone.

  I stood quiet and still when I got the feeling like something ain’t right. I looked all around when I heard something closer to my feet and looked down.

  “Leaping frog farts!” I yelled, falling backwards onto my butt. A girl sat there at the bottom of the bush, right where my feet were. My age but with skin dark as the evening, and hair like midnight. She smiled.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” she said.

  “I ain’t scared,” I said, sitting up and crossing my arms over my chest.

  “Then what are you doing down here?” she asked.

  “What are you doing down here? You scared?”

  “Yes,” she answered. Well, that was weird, never knew no one to admit they were scared before.

  Instead of answering her, I pulled myself to my feet and brushed off my dress. I skinned my palm and there was blood already on my hand. I was careful not to get any on my dress — didn’t want a whooping from Mama the first day of school.

  “Don’t you mind what I am,” I said, trying to sound like Mama. “What are you sc
ared for anyway? You’re the one hiding in the bush.”

  “School,” she said.

  “Why?” Though it’s not too hard to figure out why she was scared. I’d been worried the whole summer. My tummy’d been in knots every night when I went to bed, one day closer.

  “Cause Granny Darling told me they might beat me up cause of the way I look,” she said.

  “Your Granny’s wrong; that ain’t legal now,” I said, sticking out my chin. “My uncle says, and my uncle’s a policeman.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What’s what mean?” She never heard of a policeman before?

  “Legal?”

  I shook my head and looked up at the clouds. “Don’t you know anything? Means you can’t do it. Plus, my daddy said anyone does that gotta answer to him, and I can tell him about anyone at school who’s mean to you.”

  “Why’s your daddy care?”

  “We got three black neighbors and Mama is real good friends with them.” Actually, they were Mama’s other points on the compass, but I wasn’t allowed to tell no one that ‘cording to Jon.

  “Really?” she asked, crawling out from under the bush. “Three? I never met one black person before.”

  “Ain’t you black?” I asked, my eyebrows feeling like they pinched together.

  She shook her head. “Just dark. Granny says I’ll go lighter being inside all day at school.”

  Without discussing it, we started to walk to school. The words came out like we knew each other longer than that morning. We talked about the river, and playing in the summer, and how my only friends were my mama and Ruby, and her only friend was Granny Darling.

  “Your hand’s bleeding,” she said, noticing when I waved to Jon’s friend’s little sister. We played together at the house sometimes when her mama had to pick stuff up from Mama. She didn’t wave back.

  I shrugged. “It ain’t bad.”

  “Wait a second.” She bent her elbow, and picked a scab. She grabbed my hand and put it against her elbow; blood mixing with blood. Then she scooped loose dirt from the ground and packed both our cuts ‘til they stopped bleeding. “We’re sisters now.”

  That made me giggle. I stared at Dee, getting sucked into her dark eyes, and she tugged my hand. “Come on. We don’t wanna be late for school.”

  We ran, hair flying and mixing in the air behind us. Thin threadbare dresses wrapped ‘round our knees, and we didn’t look or care ‘bout no one else and what they thought of us. And for some reason, they didn’t care ‘bout us neither.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I’d never had one of Mama’s memories crash over me while I was awake before. If it was indeed her memory, and not a weird vision brought on by smelling years’ worth of rotten meat in the warm freezer. Was that really how Mama and Aunt Dee had met? The thought and the memory slipped away before I could solidify it in my mind, and I turned on the kitchen sink.

  Crystal clear sink water filled my hands as I rinsed cracker vomit from my mouth. I spat out backwash looking water when out of nowhere my palm began to burn. “Ouch.”

  I looked at my hand, but couldn’t find anything wrong with it, and the pain quickly passed. I grabbed an envelope from the table and a pencil from the junk drawer, and then wrote ‘things to do’.

  1. Auction house?

  2. Museum for bodies?

  3. Food

  4. Beer

  5. Bug Spray

  I tapped the pencil against my chin.

  3. Burner phone — Emergencies

  I’d been without a phone for months, but I had been crashing in an apartment on a busy street with a roommate. A phone hadn’t seemed as urgent downtown as it did now when I was alone twenty miles from town. Out here, a phone might be more than an extra expense. Many things, still unimaginable but coming swiftly, could happen far from the real world. I looked out the window at the forest, searching for...I don’t know what.

  As if confirming an object worth looking for hid behind the garden, the vegetation swayed roughly in the wind. A wind that rustled the leaves at the treetops, swooped down and handpicked which plants to blow. I shuddered and turned away from the window.

  Stuffing the list and pen in my back pocket, I braced myself for the rest of the house, and pushed through the swinging door into the living room. Another life fossilized. Two dead houseplants sat shriveled on top of an over-sized wood-mounted television. The front door, which had been forgotten ever since the porch collapsed, stood beside the TV. The green sofa and orange easy chair faced the television, separated by a dark coffee table at the center. An open beer sat on the table, and I wondered, did it belong to Cecelia or Dad?

  The shag carpet felt thick with decades of dirt and camouflaged a respectable looking room; Aunt Dee told me once when I spilled a can of cherry cola not to worry. She said one day it would be torn up, because underneath waited hard wood floors, untouched in decades. I planned to check that out according to Angela’s plans. Hardwood would sell better than the shag.

  “Ugh.” The thought of tearing out the carpet reminded me how much work loomed ahead in the next few days, for me and me alone. Oh. Another reason I needed that phone. To call all my siblings and tell them what ass-hats they were for not helping.

  They shouldn’t blame me for being between jobs. I might have gotten laid off from The Chicken Burrito and couldn’t find another job immediately, but that didn’t mean I’d never work again. I was sure I’d get another reliable job without a problem — as soon as I started applying for jobs.

  I wrote ass-hats next to phone on my list.

  I walked down the hall towards the two bedrooms, Dad’s bedroom on the left, mine and Angela’s on the right. Duncan, Ray and Todd shared the attic upstairs, which meant their bedroom was the size of the entire first floor of the house. Our envy was worn down by the defeats of living upstairs. They had to stoop at the corners where their beds pressed up against the walls. The attic also leaked in the spring, and more bugs hid in their dressers than we had on the entire bottom half of the house. The biggest bonus to our bedroom was the short walk to the bathroom. When seven people shared a toilet, distance meant everything.

  I paused at Dad’s door, but I decided I couldn’t be that functional on the first day. Instead, I pushed open the door to my old room.

  When most people I knew returned to their childhood homes, their parents had taken over their bedrooms, converting them into offices, mini gyms, or sewing centers. I supposed if Aunt Dee had still been around, she might have done the same thing. A place for her yarn, loom, and paintings. Dad didn’t have a hobby outside of taxidermy and he already had the huge workshop. What use would he have with a little bedroom?

  I flipped the light switch a few times before remembering it had never been connected to anything. I clapped and the tall brown lamp clicked on.

  “Let’s do the time warp again,” I whispered.

  My double bed sat in the middle of the room right in front of the window. My stereo pressed against one wall with Angela’s Nine Inch Nails poster above it; Trent Reznor stared at me, shiny black gloves by his face. The poster was always so disturbingly out of place on top of the Rainbow Bright wallpaper.

  On the wall, opposite Trent’s tortured stare, were some of my old drawings in black marker on the wallpaper. Trees with eyes built into them, hands waving from the leaves. Some had a single finger raised.

  “Lovely,” I muttered.

  Tacked up in the center of my artwork, was the last picture of all of us together with Mama. We stood at the tree line in the valley a few weeks before my first year of school started. All eight of us.

  Mama disappeared a few weeks later; ran off on my first day of kindergarten. All I had was Aunt Dee for a mom after that. Then, Aunt Dee drowned the week I got my driver’s license. Mama left a note, but Aunt Dee was just gone.

  I touched their faces in the glass. We never saw Mama again, but we saw Aunt Dee when she showed up fifty miles south in the river, her hair tangling up in
a Barbie fishing pole. They showed Dad her picture. When he didn’t speak, they showed it to Todd, and I saw. Her face splotchy, bloated. I thought she was flying at first, the way her hair floated around her. But the river created the illusion.

  The police said Aunt Dee had alcohol in her system. Angela said Aunt Dee didn’t drink, but they said tests don’t lie.

  Wasn’t till I had a few years away from the house that I realized the police should have questioned Dad more, not just assumed her death was a suicide. Questioned any of us. Why hadn’t her death been investigated?

  I shared my concern with Angela once, and she admitted to asking the boys the same thing at the time. They figured the police didn’t want to mess with us mountain people. Didn’t want the hassle. Some things never changed, even when our mountain of families was rezoned to become part of town.

  I looked at Dad in the picture. Not quite as I remembered, but not as free as he seemed in the dream I had on the bus. Aunt Dee said he had been so handsome when he was younger, but once the darkness took over him, his face twisted and became less of man, and more of the spirit of anger. Empty and terrifying. I assumed the darkness came from his beer, but she said the alcohol dulled it.

  The two miserable and quiet years after Aunt Dee died, I saw what she meant. Left alone in the house with Dad, the days were quieter if he had a beer in his hand. The temper came when he didn’t have a drink, and those weren’t quiet nights. By the time I turned eighteen and followed Bobby Benson down to California, none of Dad’s brothers or sisters were even speaking to him. Six brothers and three sisters is a lot of people to piss off. I don’t think I ever pissed off all four of my siblings at once. At least, not since we’ve been adults.

  Then, I remember they nominated me to come back to Dad’s and deal with the house. Guess I pissed them off in the past year, and hadn’t realized it.