Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1) Read online

  I took the frame from the wall and lay down on the bed. We sure looked normal. Even Mama, with her pasted-on makeup to hide the bruises and sadness, looked happy in that picture. I wondered what was going on in her head? Did she already know she was leaving us? Did she think it would be safe to run as soon as her youngest left for kindergarten? I would be in the state’s capable hands then, seven hours a day.

  Mama. Funny how much I missed someone I couldn’t quite remember. Not in my waking hours anyhow.

  I must’ve fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew Mama cradled me on the bed, my head against her shoulder. Stroking my hair. Humming a little tune. I tried to place the old lullaby I hadn’t heard since I was as young as my little niece. We weren’t on my double bed though; we laid on the bottom bunk in the middle of the night. Angela snored softly above us.

  “I love you, Mama,” I whispered.

  “I love you too, Megalorsaurus,” she said, and I giggled. My nickname came about for my love of dinosaurs. I had a toy box full of dinosaur toys and books. Every single one of them secondhand, but I loved them as though they’d been made just for me. I didn’t remember much about dinosaurs after Mama left.

  “I miss you, Mama,” I whispered, tears sliding down my cheeks. She smelled like cheap lotion and the earth.

  “I’m right here.” She kissed the top of my head.

  “No, you left me.” I let out a sob. It all felt so real. My problem was always the same; unable to tell my dreams from reality. I pinched myself. Nothing. Not real. Real or not, I wanted this to last forever. I had Mama back from my own mind instead of hers. A brand-new memory.

  “I never left. I’ve always been right here,” she whispered. “I’ve been waiting for—”

  The bedroom door kicked open, and Dad’s silhouette moved quickly to the side of the bed. He grabbed Mama by the hair and I screamed.

  The room ripped away, Mama and Dad growing smaller and smaller. I cried out, reaching for her, but it was too late. She disappeared into a dot.

  I lay awake on my bed kicking the blankets off. The picture frame clutched in my arms, digging lines into my skin. The back of my hair was sweat soaked, the walls of my mouth were dry as cotton. How long had I slept? Two days of travel with little sleep had caught up in murky, tired confusion.

  I pulled back the edge of the curtain. Black outside, the stars eaten by trees and a cloudy sky. I crawled underneath my blankets, not caring if I slept under ten years of dust and regret. The picture frame fell to the floor.

  The clapper seemed to like the thud and switched off, plunging me into complete darkness. My eyes strained to get a grasp on something in the room, to adjust to the night. I almost clapped the light back on, but I decided I was being silly. Forcing my eyes shut, I counted back from one hundred until sleep took over.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Cecelia placed the six boxes of Chinese takeout in a circle, then each open before piling her paper plate high with rice and deep-fried meats. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  “What? That you brought food?” I said, opening the closest box. General Tso’s chicken. My stomach turned, thinking about the freezer in the garage. Nope. I closed the lid, and opened fried rice instead, plopping it and sweet and sour sauce on my plate. The warm pickles I had eaten that morning burned off already, returning the growl to my gut for a surprising second time in one day. I groaned in delight, as I took a bite.

  She giggled, the sound a little less annoying. Not pleasant, but I didn’t feel the urge to run screaming into the woods anymore. Of course, that might also have been because of the wolf living out back. His howls jerked me out of sleep twice the night before.

  Something else had eased my feelings towards Cecelia. Maybe it was the resemblance between her and Mama. Or, maybe I was agreeable with a decent night of sleep behind me.

  “No, I don’t mind that you brought food.”

  “The food, yes, but mostly that I let myself in.” She tapped the keychain next to her plate. “I have a key, but I can give it back if...”

  “Nope. You keep it for now.” If I decided to make a quick getaway, the agent would need someone in town with a key. I took another large bite, conscious of her stare. I raised my eyebrow. “Sup?”

  “I didn’t take you for an eater, that’s all. You’re so damn skinny.” She said it like it was a curse. I appreciated that. I’d had too many people tell me they’d kill for my metabolism, but they didn’t understand. My skin bled and bruised too easily. A cold took me down for a week. I’d been told to eat a burger more times from friends than I’d heard, “How are you?” But, there was only room for so much, before it came back up. My body rejected every calorie it didn’t beg for.

  “Guess I got my appetite back.” I shrugged. Cecelia took a small bite of her fried chicken and fiddled with her purse hanging on the arm of her chair. That reminded me and I leaned over, grabbed my purse from the floor, and fished around for the card. “Do you know this lady? She’s the real estate agent Angela’s been talking to. I think they might have gone to school together. Which doesn’t automatically make her the best choice; Angela hung out with a bunch of idiots.”

  “Never heard of her.” She set her fork down and took the card in her hand, thumbing the corner. “Are you really gonna sell it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She dropped the card onto the table. It was the first time I’d seen her without a giant smile. “You don’t wanna keep it in the family? It would have made your dad so happy. Somewhere for you to settle down, plant your roots.”

  “Not my decision. Not my problem.” I dove into my food. Never my decision, always four to one. In this case, they told me to stay longer if I wanted, until I got my feet on the ground. An illusion of a choice for me to make, but almost always their decision. Not a one of them said anything about me staying on forever, and there was no way I wanted to live here for the rest of my life. This town was filled with too many shitty memories.

  We ate in silence, the faded blue curtains blowing in and sucking out through the screen-less kitchen window. The breeze moved through the room, but it was the kind of hot where the wind doesn’t cool you down, only moves the hot air around and around.

  Aware of the way she watched me, looking up every few seconds, as though she had something to say, I ate in silence. After I worked myself through my first plate like a ravenous dog, I forced myself to slow down. I might have felt hungry, but I probably just consumed more fat than I had in one sitting in...ever? I didn’t want it all to come back up, especially after throwing up twice yesterday. I grabbed an egg roll and caught her turning away from me again. “Why are you here, Cecelia?”

  “I thought you’d be hungry, and looks like I was right.” She smiled and pointed at my plate.

  “Not here, but...” I sighed.

  “You mean Cedar Valley? Right? I told you, I came around to collect your mama and—”

  “And she wasn’t here. You guys haven’t talked to her in twenty years, and you randomly come to get her? She’s not here, but you drop your bags and stay?” I bit into the egg roll before I could accuse her of… Of what, exactly? There might have been a touch of ridiculous paranoia to my words, but nice, normal girls like Cecelia didn’t come to the house often. My brothers had a few girlfriends that made it to the house once or twice, never to be seen again anywhere near our property line again. I looked at her square on, daring her to spit out the truth. “Level with me.”

  She nodded and took a sip of her Diet Coke. “I didn’t grow up like you did. Mama was alone. I didn’t know who my daddy was, and I got three sisters way younger than me whose daddy wasn’t much better, disappearing when something easier came along. And he never treated me like I belonged to him.

  “I stayed home after I graduated instead of going out and getting a place of my own. Helped Mama to look after the girls. They left home, got married and such, leaving me with Mama. She was real lonely, and I figured I’d come get her sister.” She closed her eyes and pinch
ed the bridge of her nose. “Like I said before. But she wasn’t here. Your daddy said she’d run off. I wasn’t sure if I believed him. I mean, if she’d run off, surely she’d come home sometime for you all? But no one ever saw her again? I asked your daddy about it, and he’d say—”

  “Some women weren’t meant for families,” I interrupted.

  “Exactly.”

  “He said it to us a lot, if we started missing her. I didn’t so much, but the boys did. They knew her better.”

  Her face turned sad again at this, and I felt sorry for her.

  She said, “I got here, and it was like you guys lived in a palace compared to the way Mama and I lived.” I snorted and her smile returned. “I know. I know. The house needs fixing and I’d be happy to help, but this land...the woods...” She looked out the window. “We have woods for fishing or camping, for a fee of course, but nothing of our own. What I wouldn’t give...” She froze, her smile plastered on her face and looked at me. “Well, anyway, don’t really matter. Except you can buy your own land here for almost nothing—”

  “Um, I think you’ve got that wrong,” I said. “It’s expensive to start up here.”

  “Compared to buying land at home, I can do it here. Gary and I are saving up to buy a place of our own. Nothing this big of course.” She waved to open kitchen door, indicating the woods. “I put Mama in a little apartment, and my sisters are helping her pay the rent. Just till I get space, then Mama’s gonna come here and live with me.”

  Cecelia’s mom. Mama’s sister. I couldn’t imagine. She hadn’t been a person to me until a few days ago. Now to think, I had an Aunt? She might move here. Someone like Mama.

  I stopped myself. I’d be long gone by then and wouldn’t meet her.

  Pushing the idea of family away, I pulled my shirt away from my stomach and waved it back and forth a few times to get separation between the hot fabric and my skin.

  “So, Cedar Valley?” I asked. “You actually like the town?”

  I picked at the last of my egg roll. Sure, I got it. Cedar Valley was beautiful, but the memories this place held for me stripped most of that beauty away. Like the spotted owl had lost the entire battle and the mountains were all bald.

  “Cedar Valley,” she said, shrugging. A smile tugged at the corner of her lips and her cheeks went a little pink. “And Gary. But yeah, Cedar Valley. Speaking of men, Bobby Benson wants me to tell you hi.”

  “What?” My stomach churned. After I moved to California with Bobby, he left me. Well, actually, he locked me out of our apartment. No money, no clothes, no friends.

  “I work with him. Well, he does maintenance at the nursing home. I’m a hairdresser, so maintenance in a way, huh?” She giggled. “He was in the salon, working on a backup in my sink, and he knows we’re cousins because we look so much alike. Well, he was telling me sorry for my loss, and I told him you were coming to town to clear out your daddy’s house. Didn’t he just get so excited to see you again?”

  “No.”

  “He’s separated from his wife.”

  What dumbass had married him? “No.”

  “But—”

  “No. I am done with him.”

  “He feels bad for—”

  “You don’t know the things he’s done.” I’d heard that before, but she was clueless.

  “Now, I do know some of what he’s done. Got himself in silly trouble with the law since he’s been back. Wouldn’t you know it? Boys being boys. Just dumb stuff, and he’s apologized since. You know, it takes a big man to apologize.”

  Yeah, as big of a man as it takes to hit a woman. “Not interested.”

  “You know, Jordan said you’d say that. Jordan don’t want to let go of the past neither, they had their own problems, him and Bobby.”

  I cocked my head. What could Jordan and Bobby have gotten into it about? “Whatever. Bobby Benson is just one more thing I’m not getting involved with while I’m here.”

  I snapped my fortune cookie in half. ‘Enjoy the good luck a companion brings you.’ No. I glanced up at Cecelia. No, absolutely not. “Can I borrow your phone? I want to call some of these auction houses?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  After five companies tried to schedule me for a week or more in advance, I spoke to a brand-new family run auction house. They were able to send a few guys out the next afternoon to catalog what I had. They would label everything they wanted, box it and take it next week for an end of the week auction. That left me with little else to do in the meantime besides clean.

  I didn’t want to spend the afternoon with Cecelia, but she offered to help burn all the newspapers, and who was I to turn down free labor? We decided I would carry the burn barrel up from the valley close to the porch, instead of hauling the trash down. I checked on the barrel; it was rusted, making it incredibly light. Unfortunately, the rusting and cracked sides also created a hazard to my hands.

  I found a clean pair of gloves on the woodpile on the porch. Cecelia dropped a small stack of newspapers in the driveway with a slap thud. “Did your daddy always collect papers like this?”

  “No,” I said, shaking the gloves out before sliding them on. “I don’t even remember a single newspaper in the house.”

  Gotta train them like a dog while they’re young. Check this out. Dad’s friends laughed.

  Okay, an occasional rolled newspaper to slap one of us across the nose. I wondered what could have brought the hoarding on as I grabbed the barrel. I jumped as the bottom fell out, and a pile of wet ash and half burned trash poured over my feet.

  We worked in silence, scrunching up paper and tossing it into the burn barrel. When it was about half-full, I lit the edge of a Sears ad and stepped back. It seemed only seconds before the aged paper caught.

  “You know; we didn’t have one of these growing up. You’d think, me being from more of the old country I would have,” Cecelia said, staring into the flames that licked around the top of the lid.

  “We used to do this weekly. Well, my brothers or Angela did. After Dee...it was just me. No reason to bother.” I swatted at my face as a tiny fire floated out and close to my nose.

  “Is that s’posed to happen?” Cecelia asked, worry in her voice, and I turned back to see a few more pieces of burning paper lift into the air and float towards the porch.

  “Um, no.” I looked at the barrel; something was missing from the top. The mesh screen. It was supposed to lie on top of the barrel and keep bits of fire from floating away and catching the forest or the house on fire. Shit. “There’s a cover, um somewhere. It looks like a metal screen.”

  It hadn’t been in the valley, and I ran to the other cans to see if it sat behind them. No luck.

  “Uh, Meg!” Cecelia called.

  I looked back to her next to the burn barrel, stomping on small fires starting in the dry brush; all a little too close to the porch steps.

  I stood for a moment, my foot frozen inches from a new teepee of smoke, seeing the house burn down in my mind. Watching as every single bit of memory, hate along with the love, and joy along with the sadness, disappeared in a puff of smoke. All of my requirements, obligations and worries fizzled and disappeared. It would be so easy. Just stand back and let it happen.

  “Meg! Help me before the trees catch on fire!”

  A sad howl came from the darkness in the woods and wrapped itself around me. Not everything out there was full of hateful, putrid memories.

  “Right.” I ran up the incline in the driveway, out of breath by the time I reached her. Up the steps and to the end of the deck, I grabbed the hose, turned the faucet and hoped for the best. Water surged out before I reached Cecelia, and I sprayed everything in sight, and then soaked the papers in the barrel.

  Slowly getting our breathing back under control, we both stood, me with hose in hand, as water pooled in the burn barrel. Cecelia clutched her chest.

  “Maybe we should just take all these to the recycling,” she said.

  “No, we need to find the lid.
There’s gotta be something in the—”

  “The barrel’s full of water anyways,” she said as water flowed from the rusted cracks like a cartoon boat with holes in the bottom.

  “Abandon ship.” I pointed the hose straight up in the air, partially covering the hole with my thumb, letting the spray fall on us. “I can just pick it up and move it.”

  “Yeah but.”

  “What?”

  “You froze. It was like you were gonna let the house burn down.”

  “I wasn’t.” I pinched the hose and walked back to the faucet, turning it off. Just because I had thought about it, didn’t mean I was actually going to let it burn. Besides, how could she know what I was thinking? I might have frozen because fire was scary.

  “Maybe it would be better if you didn’t play with flames.” Cecelia stepped on a piece of smoldering paper. “Burning down a house is a felony you know.”

  She was too assuming for my taste.

  “Whatever.” I huffed. “Anyways, the recycling center’s on the other side of town. It’ll take me thirty minutes to get there, thirty minutes back. Not to mention, I only have so much money you know, and the car burns through gas too fast.”

  “They opened a new recycling center on this side,” she said as though it was the greatest thing since boxed wine.

  I had no other options except to leave the newspapers in the driveway and wait for them to blow away or get five times heavier after a rainstorm. We loaded the papers into the car as she gave me the directions. The good thing was that it was scarcely out of my side of town. I passed it the other day on my way out to Dad’s and had not even noticed the parking lot full of dumpsters. The bad news? It was next door to Dieter and Sons.

  The pit in my stomach grew larger, the closer to the intersection the car creeped. I fingered a cigarette, wanting to light it and calm my nerves. But, if a spark flew behind me in the car... Driving into the recycling center in a car full of burning newspapers did not scream discretion. And then being spotted by Jordan? Also, not on the list of things to do.