Ah. Now I saw the resemblance. She had inherited her exuberance from Sofia.
Areila continued, "The matriarch of the Baptista family was furious, said the child should have a Hispanic name, but Sofia wouldn't budge. Her husband was a cold bastard, and he didn't care what Sofia named her son as long as she put meals on the table, kept the house clean and sent his kids out to work in the orchards."
My darling Sofia had not gone on to make a love match. I was not glad; I had hoped that somehow she would find happiness.
"Aunt Bea said my grandfather, Frank Vincent Baptista, didn't look like anyone in the family. He looked like an Anglo, and the family gossip was that Grandma Sofia was in the family way when she married Facundo, and not from him. I asked if anyone knew who the father was and Aunt Busybody said the rumor claimed that Sofia was involved with a white boy. They had a fight, he joined the Army, deserted even before he went to war and Sofia never heard from him again." Areila took a breath, brought her tone down from that excited pitch, spoke to me warmly, sympathetically. "I think from what you told me —that's you. I think you died here trying to get back to her. I'm pretty sure I am your descendent."
She waited as if she expected me to answer her. And I wanted to. I wanted to so badly. I wanted to weep at the news that I'd left Sofia alone to bear our son. I wanted to turn back time, go to the beach in Virtue Falls and save that woman's life and my own, and return to Sofia.
Instead, I was mute, held by invisible bonds and all too aware of the menace growing behind Areila.
"Sofia and Facundo had two more kids. He died four years later. Sofia inherited the orchards and she tended them while she raised all the kids, his and hers, and got them into college and through college. She never remarried. I knew my great-grandmother. She was an amazing woman. She taught me so much about being independent and proud of my intelligence, and she said that I should follow my dream, whatever it was." Areila's voice caught. "She lived a long life — she outlived Grandpa Frank — and she died only two years ago."
So my darling Sofia was gone. She had moved on. I had given her passion and heartache and a child, and now she was gone from me forever. I had always known that was what had to be. But to face that truth, to know there was no other ending — I gave a wail of pure grief.
Areila looked around, up at the trees, down at the ground. As if she recognized the sound of my sorrow, she spoke in a softer voice. "Before I came here, I went to my great-grandmother's grave. I spoke to Grandma Sofia, told her what I had found, told her where you are and that if my suspicions were right — and we can find out with a simple DNA test — I would bring your remains to her."
I snapped to attention. The killer was close. Pay attention, Areila. Great-Granddaughter, listen for footsteps behind you. Don't be caught unaware!
Blithely she continued her story. "I came back to Virtue Falls and spoke to Sheriff Garik and the librarian, Kateri. I told them what I'd found and that I was sure you were buried back here where it's stuffy and dark." As if she sensed the cold hand of death on her neck, she shrugged restively. "The sheriff was maybe a little skeptical — he said even if we were related it was a far stretch to think I could divine your gravesite. But Kateri stuck up for me, convinced him that it wouldn't hurt to excavate the site, so here we are. I came early because I wanted to talk to you, explain everything. The sheriff is bringing Kateri. Walt, the park grounds keeper, has volunteered to help exhume your body."
No! The killer is here!
Areila glanced at her watch. "They should be along at any minute."
The sun was setting. One beam broke through the clouds, penetrated the branches and I saw it — the glittering sharpened point of the pickax raised high above her.
The killer brought it down with all his might.
I leaped.
My palm smacked the wooden handle.
The thump resonated through the grove.
Areila turned. Even as my grip dissolved, even as the handle slipped through it, she saw the threat. Without hesitation, she lifted the shovel and smacked Walt on the side of the head.
The gray metal clanged against his skull. He stumbled sideways. But nothing could dim the light of murder and madness that twisted his face. He lunged again.
She gripped the shovel with both hands and drove the edge toward his face. It broke his nose, slid off his cheek, opened a bloody gash that exposed the bone.
He gave a shriek of pain and surprise.
God, that noise did my long-silent heart good.
He swung the pickax sideways.
But the shovel's handle was longer and Areila didn't give up her advantage. She hit him again with the sharp, shiny edge, right on the center of his throat.
Gagging, he fell backward onto the ground. He put his hand to his throat, to his face, and looked at his bloody fingers as if he couldn't believe she had done this to him. He gave another shriek. "Bitch. You bitch! How dare you! You and your great-grandfather. I'll kill you!"
"I'm already dead," I said. I was enjoying myself.
She hit him again with the flat of the shovel. Bones crunched in his face and at last he fell over, unconscious.
One more time she hit him on the skull. "To be sure," she muttered.
Of course Areila was Sofia's great-granddaughter. She sparked with temper. She fought with all the resources at hand. She didn't stop until the beast was vanquished.
Sofia's great-granddaughter . . . and my great-granddaughter, too.
She turned to me. "You saved me."
Exultant, I nodded. "I did."
"I was afraid you were gone, and you saved me!"
"You fought like—" I almost said a man, but I realized that wasn't true. "You fought like a woman. You fought like a warrior."
"He tried to kill me. Why did he try to kill me?"
My exaltation faded. "For the same reason he killed the others." I had saved Areila. But I had failed the rest of his victims.
On the ground, Walt moaned. He opened his bruised and blackened eyes.
Areila lifted the shovel edge over his face. "If you move, I'll chop your throat open."
We heard running footsteps.
We turned and Sheriff Jacobsen raced forward shouting, "What are you doing?" He caught the handle of the shovel in his grip.
"She tried to kill me!" Walt screamed. Or tried to. His voice was raspy.
"He tried to kill me," Areila said. She relinquished the shovel and pointed at the pickax. "With that."
"Liar!" Walt whispered. Whimpered.
Across the park, the woman with the walking stick hurried to reach us.
Indignant as only a man who has been duped can be, Sheriff Jacobsen shouted at Areila. "No one sees the ghost unless they're crazy or medicated or mentally impaired. No one! Yet you say you can see him. Who should I believe? Our groundskeeper who's worked for us on and off for years? Or you?"
In a reasonable voice, Areila said, "I can see him because we're related."
"Right." Sheriff Jacobsen spoke into a two-way radio hooked to his holster. "Attempted homicide at Eugene Park. Request back-up and an ambulance." He put the device away and said to Areila, "Walt brought the pickax to help excavate the grave you believe is here."
"All the graves are here," I said.
Sheriff Jacobsen looked around. "Who said that?"
He had heard me. "I did," I said.
He spotted me. Just like that. He could see me. For one moment, he covered his eyes with his hand. Then lowered it.
He could still see me. And he wasn't crazy or medicated or mentally impaired.
Areila realized what was happening and smiled. "Perhaps, Sheriff Jacobsen, in the right circumstances anyone can see my great-grandfather Frank Vincent."
Sheriff Jacobsen didn't want to believe it.
I moved closer to Areila.
Sirens sounded in the distance.
Kateri arrived, limping and leaning heavily on her walking
stick.
She saw me, too. But then, she would.
With their attention captured, no one bothered to notice Walt. But I knew what was happening with him. Areila's blows had broken his nose, cracked his cheek and battered his throat. Blood clogged his breathing passages. His throat was swelling shut, and as it progressed, his struggle for air became progressively more acute. I watched and cheerfully considered how much he deserved this miserable death.
"My girls," he whispered. "You can't take my girls."
That brought the sheriff's attention back to him. "What girls?" Sheriff Jacobsen asked.
"The girls he's murdered," I said.
The sheriff put one finger in his ear as if trying to block the sound of my voice. But I didn't have a voice; he was hearing my thoughts in his head and he liked that even less. Yet he looked at me and answered, "That's impossible. This is a public park. I'm the sheriff. We would know if someone was killing women."
Areila said, "He's the park groundskeeper. He's quiet. He's non-descript. No one notices him. I didn't."
"He can always clean up the mess." With one shaking hand, Kateri pushed the fall of shiny black hair away from her face. "Mary Lees was my friend. I don't believe she would have left Virtue Falls without telling me. I really don't believe she wouldn't return her books first."
The sirens got closer. I could see red and blue lights flashing on the street.
Sheriff Jacobsen fought the truth. But he was a man of the law, a man of honor, and he acknowledged, "Last autumn, we had a tourist who went missing. One of the homeless women has disappeared. And I got a report from the FBI about a girl who ran away from home; they found her car in Virtue Falls Canyon and asked us to keep an eye out for her remains."
Areila made the logical leap and asked the logical question. "When we excavate Frank Vincent's grave — what will we find?"
"Bodies?" Kateri asked hoarsely.
Walt tried to speak, to demand his cache of murdered and mutilated woman remain untouched. But finally, he lost the power of speech, then consciousness.
Sheriff Jacobsen raised his voice. "EMTs needed here!"
Why? This killer deserved to die.
But people ran toward them, yelling. Police officers. Men and women with medical equipment.
I was so angry. I wanted to shout at them. Let. Him. Die.
Something distracted me. The faintest whisper on the wind . . .
Dearest. It sounded like Sofia.
I wrenched my head around.
Dearest, where have you been?
I looked. I couldn't believe it.
It was Sofia, mature, glorious, glowing with beauty and grace. She stood on the other side of the line of consecration, smiling.
Dearest, where have you been? I've been looking for you all my life.
Her voice. In my head. Warm, loving, exactly as I remembered it.
She extended her hand to me.
I didn't think. I didn't hesitate. I moved toward her. I reached for her hand.
I stumbled to a stop, bound by the rules that had governed me for more than seventy long years. I can't. I'm not allowed.
Take my hand, she said.
She was so confident. So sure.
I reached. I touched.
Her fingers closed around mine, warm, vibrant, alive in a way I could never have hoped or imagined. At last, at long last, I was able to step beyond the bounds of my prison and into her arms.
Love had freed me.
Sofia was so lovely. So real. So there. She glowed with happiness, glowed as she had after we made love and created our son.
She looked beyond me, toward our great-granddaughter. Areila, thank you. Thank you for finding my love. Thank you for letting me know how to locate him. From the day you were born, I knew you would be a blessing on our family.
Areila threw her a kiss. And then one to me.
Somehow, it reached me, made me feel as if I'd been hugged by a beloved child. Sofia, she reminds me of you.
Sofia laughed, a soft chime of merriment. Frank, she looks like you. Every time I gazed on her, I saw your face.
Really? I looked at Areila again, pleased to know I had left something of myself on this earth. I turned back to Sofia. But in her fierceness and determination, she is yours.
Ours, Sofia corrected. Our great-granddaughter. One of our descendants.
I cupped Sofia's face in my hands, stared into her warm brown eyes. I never meant to leave you alone.
I know that. I never doubted you.
The guilt and horror of so many lonely, helpless years slipped away from me. For all of these years, my heart was broken. At last . . . it is healed.
#
Time stopped. The space under the trees grew still and silent.
Kateri and Areila and Garik watched as the two ghostly forms reached, touched, combined, became one. The glow surrounding them grew to blinding proportions.
"It's love," Areila whispered. She spread her hands like a woman warming herself before a campfire. "We can see love."
The embrace of beyond enclosed the ghosts, enveloped them in warmth and welcome.
Abruptly they were gone.
Garik cleared his throat. "I guess they, um . . ."
"She never stopped looking for him." Kateri laughed a little. "She found him at last and they . . ."
"Love never dies." Areila blinked tears away. "They're together."
"Yeah." Garik pulled out his handkerchief and honked his nose.
The two women looked at each other in rueful amusement.
Then in a jarring return to the real world, action, light and noise lit up the darkness.
Cops arrived, pistols and flashlights out.
EMTs ran up with a stretcher. They shoved a breathing tube down Walt's throat, saved his life, and sent him to the hospital. They saved his life so he could face trial for murder. That's what they had been trained to do.
After briefing his men, Sheriff Jacobsen ordered them to set up strings of lights on the branches around the bare ground that Areila claimed as her great-grandfather's grave.
Garik no longer seemed to doubt they would find the body.
Because it was her right, Areila dug into the ground first. With the second shovel filled with dirt, she brought up a colorful scrap of flowered cloth.
Immediately she quit, but the deputies and curiosity-seekers continued. Before dawn broke in the now-clear sky, they uncovered five women's bodies, including Mary Lees. All the women had been murdered within the last year. The next morning, a different crew took their place and dug deeper. The people who wielded the shovels found another three bodies. Those women had died about thirty years ago, but with the same gruesome brutality.
Sheriff Jacobsen ordered an investigation into Walt's past, what he'd done, where he'd lived, whether those locations had suffered any heinous unsolved crimes.
When Walt's wife learned of his arrest and why, she was shocked and horrified — she seemed sincerely unaware — and started divorce proceedings.
Beneath all the skirts and bras and locks of hair and delicate bones and grinning skulls, the diggers found what Areila had been looking for — a broken pine coffin with an unknown man's remains. Shreds of a cheap suit styled in the forties covered the skeleton. At first the experts doubted enough DNA could be recovered to make a match. But the corpse's teeth were intact, and from those the geneticists determined that Areila was a direct descendent of this body and that he was a relative of the Seattle Montgomeries. Based on the evidence, the deceased was assumed to be disgraced World War II veteran Frank Vincent Montgomery who had been listed as a deserter.
When notified, the Seattle Montgomeries had no interest in the remains.
Whoever had cared about Frank Vincent was long dead. That left Areila free to have Frank Vincent's remains cremated. She took his ashes to her family's home in Yakima and on a gray rainy spring day, she carried the simple black crematory urn and a
bouquet of orange blossoms to her great-grandmother's grave. She knelt beside the simple headstone. "Grandma Sofia, I know you're not here. Mostly because I saw you go on to the next world." In a really spectacular way. "But I wanted to tell you — I promised you I would bring Frank Vincent to rest with you. Here he is. I got the family's permission to have him placed in the ground here. We'll have a ceremony, just a few of us — my mom, my sisters and my little brother. We're working on having Frank Vincent Montgomery's name cleared with the U.S. Army . . . He doesn't deserve to be recorded as a deserter." Areila waited, somehow expecting a reply.
The rain spattered softly on the grass. The wind whispered through the trees.
"I wanted to come here by myself to say — as a child, you helped show me what love is, and I'm so happy you have found each other. I hope at last you're both . . . home." Areila felt a burst of warmth on the top of her head. She opened her eyes.
A ray of sunshine broke through the clouds, illuminating her, the urn, and the headstone.
She smiled through a sudden uprush of tears.
Yes. They were home.
THE END
Christina Dodd here: Thank you for enjoying A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT: Stories of Virtue Falls. I hope you’re a fan of the Virtue Falls series … and that you accept my invitation to explore my worlds and join my free mailing list for news, book sales and exclusive excerpts!
The Virtue Falls series in order:
#1 THE LISTENER
#2 VIRTUE FALLS
Readers' Guide
#3 THE RELATIVES
#4 OBSESSION FALLS
Readers’ Guide
#5 LOVE NEVER DIES
#6 BECAUSE I’M WATCHING
Readers' Guide
#7 THE WOMAN WHO COULDN'T SCREAM (TK 2017)
You can access all my books sorted by genre and series on my Printable Booklist and view the covers and access excerpts on my Books by Series and In Order page.
A Dark and Stormy Night: Stories of Virtue Falls Page 10