Echoes among the Stones

by Jaime Jo Wright

  An absentee father. A dead mother. A crotchety grandmother.

  Her family tree was enough to make anyone cry—only Aggie hadn’t. Not a tear. Not once.

  Aggie brought her knuckles down on the door with a firm rap.

  “There’s a doorbell, you know.”

  The voice behind Aggie wobbled with age, and Aggie spun on her muddy heels. Mumsie’s petite, bent frame came around the corner of the old house. Her walker had tennis balls attached to its back legs, so Mumsie lifted it a bit to maneuver through the grass. Her elastic-waisted pants were navy with pleats down the front, and her flowered blouse brought out the lively green of her eyes.

  “I didn’t see it,” Aggie answered lamely. What a way to say hello to someone’s own grandmother after eight years! Yet she couldn’t help the tang of bitter she tasted as she noticed the obvious fact that Mumsie’s hip wasn’t broken. The obligation to come to Mumsie’s aid was apparently, as Mumsie herself would have put it, a “falsehood.”

  Mumsie’s face was powder soft, wrinkles lining blushed cheeks, and cheekbones that hinted of faraway beauty. Her gray curls sat on her forehead, permed and poised. She was ninety-two years of perfection, and Mumsie knew it.

  The old woman tapped the glasses that hung around her neck on a gold chain. “I’ve found eyewear to be quite useful for seeing things like doorbells,” she quipped, waving her finger at the bell Aggie hadn’t seen. “Never mind. It’s about time you’re here. Come inside.”

  Mumsie shuffled past Aggie, who sidestepped out of the way of the walker-hoisting artifact that was Mumsie. She watched with a bewildered fascination as Mumsie reached out and opened her front door, then shot Aggie a look over her shoulder as she moved inside.

  “You’ve let yourself go, Agnes. We must fix that.”

  Welcome home, Aggie sighed inwardly. But it was then she heard her mother’s voice deep in her soul.

  It is home, Aggie love. She’s all you have left.

  Those weren’t the words Aggie ever wanted to hear, let alone acknowledge. That it was just her and Mumsie left to function through life together. They had nothing in common. Nothing. Except for a family deceased, a runaway father and son-in-law, and a way of eyeing each other with censure that affirmed the other had reached a conclusion and they’d been found wanting.

  Aggie pulled the door shut behind her and followed her grandmother through a dimly lit hall into a front room that housed a recliner, a television, and an end table. The table was cluttered with a tissue box, a pair of cuticle trimmers, a bottle of wine-colored nail polish, and a TV remote.

  She sniffed. The place smelled musty. The antique architecture was lost to the modernized elements of Mumsie’s makeshift living space. Wood paneling wainscot dressed up the walls of the room, the trim an ornate walnut. Aggie reached out and touched the fine wood, recalling how beautiful she’d always thought this old home to be. Dusty and unkempt, with some TLC this place could be transformed into a charming bed-and-breakfast or sold to homeowners who understood classic beauty.

  Now? Aggie brought her attention back to Mumsie, who was easing herself into her recliner. Now the house was simply an extension of an old woman waiting for the clock to cease ticking. For time to stand still. Until then, Mumsie would make sure both the house and Aggie had her indifference.

  “I was weeding the flower bed in the backyard.” Mumsie adjusted herself in the chair, reaching for a tissue to wipe her nose. She did so, then stuffed it in the cuff of her sleeve. She gave Aggie a curious look. “Well? Are you going to just stand there?”

  Aggie bit back a sigh. She tugged the hem of her red jacket for something to do rather than to straighten it. Moving to the side, she slid an antique wing-back chair with a worn green velvet seat near Mumsie and sat down. Crossing her legs at the ankles the way Mumsie had taught her to so many years ago. It was what ladies did. No knee-crossing or bouncing a foot like a nonchalant hussy. Crossed ankles, skirt tucked tight against one’s legs, and hands folded in one’s lap.

  She hated to admit it, but the posture had served Aggie well. In sales. Until she’d lost her license, that is. And her career.

  Dang. It always came back to remind her with the vicious taunt of failure.

  “You don’t have a job, then?” Mumsie’s hands were folded in her own lap as she gave Aggie a sharp look.

  “You don’t have a broken hip?” Aggie shot back, then bit her tongue.

  “Oh, that.” Mumsie waved her hand. “What’s an old woman to do to get any help? Stretch the truth a bit, I suppose. I did pull something, I believe, a few weeks ago going up the stairs.”

  Mumsie gave Aggie such a pathetic look, Aggie couldn’t help her instinctual grimace of empathy. Then she straightened her features. No. No! Mumsie had lied. Aggie had been duped into coming, into planning to care for a bedridden, hip-broken grandmother.

  Aggie shifted in her seat and uncrossed her ankles.

  Mumsie’s gaze flitted across them.

  Yes. Yes, I did just flip my leg over my knee. Aggie bounced it for good measure too.

  They sized each other up.

  Green eyes of age.

  Brown eyes of a father who’d left when Aggie was eight.

  Stubborn. Willful. Strong.

  “You didn’t come after your mother died.” Mumsie went straight for the jugular.

  “No.” There was no use denying the obvious, but Aggie didn’t offer any justification for her actions either. There wasn’t any justification anyway, outside of the fact she simply did not want to come.

  Mumsie noticed. Her eyes narrowed. “And yet you came to care for me now?”

  “You said you broke your hip.”

  Mumsie waved her hand nonchalantly. “Well, you’re here now.”

  “For now.” Aggie gave a curt nod, strands of straight black hair falling over her shoulder.

  Mumsie offered a small smile that transformed her from being censorious to downright adorable. And she knew it too. Aggie could tell.

  “We’ve much to catch up on.” Mumsie reached for the nail polish on the table next to her. “But I’ll need your assistance when I’m finished with my nails.”

  “My assistance?” Aggie was having difficulty following her grandmother’s cavalier attitude.

  Mumsie looked up. Their eyes met. This time, Aggie saw something flicker in her grandmother’s before it hurried away into the shadows of her irises.

  “Yes. There’s a body in the backyard. We need to bury it or something—before I’m accused of murder and incarcerated for a hundred years to life.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Imogene

  You will let me see my sister!” Imogene shrugged off the grip of a policeman and shoved her way into the front office of the station. The heels of her brown pumps echoed on the wood floor. A burly officer pushed himself away from his desk and stood as she stalked over to it, aware that the eyes of several policemen were watching her.

  A war poster still hung on the wall, its edges a bit ragged. For a moment, she almost insisted they rip it off the wall. But that was another battle for a war already over. She was immersed in her own now.

  “Now, Miss Grayson . . .” the burly officer started.

  “Don’t ‘Miss Grayson’ me, Chet.” Imogene sat on the desktop and hiked her knee over her leg, planting her left hand on the green desk blotter in the center of the massive piece of furniture. She eyed her older brother with vehemence. “I want to see Hazel.”

  Chet snapped his fingers at the policeman behind her. His eyes sparked with a green fire that probably matched her own. “I told you to keep her outta here.”

  Imogene shot a glance at the officer. Poor Harold Pittman. How he’d become an officer of the law was beyond her. How he’d survived the war was a miracle. The man had all the tenacity of a beaten puppy.

  “I couldn’t manhandle her!” Officer Pittman defended himself with a whine.

  Imogene would have smirked if she wasn’t already frantic over seeing Hazel. Sh
e gave a saucy tilt to her chin at Pittman and then leveled her glare at Chet.

  “Where is she?” Curse her watery voice. The quiver always gave her away. Imogene swallowed back tears. Blinked back the vision she’d seen just that morning. A vision she knew would never, ever go away.

  Chet waved Pittman off, and the other officers in the room made a respectful pretense of returning to their work. Her brother rounded his desk. He was older than Imogene by a full five years. Made a deputy already and was good at his job. Until today. Today he stood in her way. No one stood in Imogene’s way, least of all where Hazel was concerned.

  “Chet?”

  His hand wrapped gently around Imogene’s arm, and he tugged her toward him, urging her off of his desk. Her dress fell around her calves in a sweep of red floral.

  “Genie, come with me.”

  Satisfied she was getting what she wanted, Imogene followed her brother down a short hall and waited as he opened the door. With a quick motion, he pushed her inside and then closed the door firmly behind them.

  “Chet!” Imogene set her teeth together in a stubborn gesture.

  “No.” Chet neared her and put his hands on her shoulders. “You can’t see Hazel.”

  Imogene twisted away from her brother’s grasp. “I will. I must! You can’t keep me away from her!”

  Chet’s eyes filled with tears. His voice cracked. “Genie, she’s gone. She’s at the coroner’s. There’s nothing we can do. Nothing you can do.”

  “No.” Imogene shook her head, the choked argument wrenching from her throat.

  “Hazel is gone.”

  “No!” Imogene’s vehemence didn’t match the buckling of her knees. She plopped onto a chair that was pulled out from a wooden table. “No, she isn’t.”

  But she was. She was! Imogene had seen her—found her—lying on the floor of her attic bedroom. A crumpled heap in a dress spattered with red. The floor, a puddle beneath her, and—

  “I need to see Hazel!” Imogene’s insistence came out in a long moan, and her arms came up to wrap around herself. She cast a desperate gaze on her brother. “Chet, she’s not dead. She’s not. It was someone else. It wasn’t her. All that blood—I can’t—”

  Chet squatted in front of her, his blue uniform usually so smart, so handsome, now rumpled from his own foray into the pit of grief and family horror.

  “Listen, I promise you, once I find who did this to Hazel, I’m gonna let him have it. But until then . . .” Chet cleared his throat when his voice caught.

  Imogene locked eyes with her brother. In them she saw the same gut-wrenching grief that was threatening to steal her breath. The same sickening knowledge that Hazel had not died peacefully—had not taken her last breath with any sort of comfort. Only fear. Only terror.

  She had to know.

  “Did she suffer?”

  The silence that followed was the only answer Imogene needed.

  She wasn’t allowed to return home, Chet said, but Imogene ignored him. The farmhouse, a mile outside of Mill Creek, nestled in the rolling hills and between acres of cornfields, was to be left alone for now. Cordoned off like a museum of sorts. But Imogene never listened anyway. It was why she was here, in the dark, in the shadows of Hazel’s death.

  Their parents had taken refuge at their neighboring aunt’s home, taking with them the memories of their youngest child, nineteen-year-old Hazel. They’d begged Imogene to come, to be with them. But she couldn’t look at her heartbroken mother or sit beneath the haunted stare of her father. Not for a moment. It just solidified that Hazel was dead. Reminded her that she was now their only daughter. It was the grief they’d hoped to escape during the war—the grief they had escaped—but now? Hazel stained by her own blood was enough of a vision to reconcile for the day. Imogene couldn’t wrestle with her parents’ grief as she tried to temper her own.

  But, strangely, while she wished to avoid her parents, she still wanted to go home. It was empty now. Starkly so. As it had been hours ago when Imogene had returned home from the beauty salon for dinner and her evening porch laze. Hours since she’d given a permanent wave to one of the church deacon’s wives. The chemicals from the processing still clung to her white dress that was in her valise to be taken home and washed. She couldn’t forget the silence in the old farmhouse as she’d entered their home. The creaking of the screen door as she opened it, laughing at the dog who darted out from the front sitting room and into the outdoors.

  Imogene’s first hint that something was amiss was that no dinner smells hung in the air. Not a liver loaf or even the pungent smell of cauliflower to go as a side to a roasted chicken. The perks of farm life, they’d not lacked for meat the last few years. Although she could go for a cup of coffee in the evening and a fresh one too—not having to re-brew with yesterday’s grounds.

  The shadows of rationing still on her mind, Imogene had called for her mother.

  Oh yes. She’d taken the car and gone to her cousin’s one county over. Imogene had remembered that, and then she’d remembered the fact that Hazel had promised to be home from her work at the powder plant in time to get dinner on the table.

  Imogene’s curiosity took her into the dining room. An empty table. The kitchen. A cold stove. She wasn’t sure when the pit began to form in her stomach. If it was when her feet landed on the second floor, peeking into the bedrooms and seeing no one, or when she opened the door to the stairs leading into the attic and Hazel’s quaint and secluded bedroom. Her “place of respite,” she’d called it. Wonderful for a romantic girl who dreamed of soldiers far away and gave them sweet smiles when they passed by, blushing a bright pink and looking at her feet.

  “Hazel?” Imogene had called.

  The echo of her footsteps going up the attic stairs still rang in her ears hours later. There had been a strange scent, one she couldn’t place. And then it was as if time slowed to a crawl. Imogene’s eyes had scanned the attic room. The white iron bed frame. The bedspread neat and tidy across the bed. What looked to be red-spattered paint on the delicate rose wallpaper. Hazel’s hope chest at the end of the bed, pushed askew from its normal geometrically aligned position. And then her foot, still with its stocking on, the seam as straight up the back of her leg as when she’d pulled it on that morning. Hazel’s crumpled form, lying on her side . . .

  Imogene blinked rapidly, attempting to clear the vision from her mind as she stood on the porch of the farmhouse. It was now the dark of night. Chet had no idea she’d left the station and immediately started to hike home. He probably should have guessed, though. Imogene never listened, never obeyed anyone before, so why start now? And something tugged her back here to this dreadful place that had once been a haven of security, filled with childhood memories of growing up moderately poor on a farm during the tight years. Of blowing kisses just five years before to Chet and her other brother, Ivan, as they went off to war. And they had returned home! The rejoicing, it was all a distant dream now. Foggy and muted by the pall of death. Hazel’s death.

  Imogene reached for the screen door, which opened at her touch. The hinges squeaked their familiar protest, and the chipped white-painted frame was cool beneath Imogene’s fingers. Entering the house was like repeating her steps from hours before. She turned on the electric lights, but it didn’t seem to clear the darkness. Nausea filling her, Imogene leaned against the wall that hugged the stairs leading to the second floor. Instinct made her squeeze her eyes shut against the memories, only it prompted the vision of Hazel lying in blood, the injury to the back of her head, the way the walls ran red with—

  Imogene gagged. Her hand clamped over her mouth as she sagged onto a stair. Her skin was clammy, and though she’d not eaten since lunchtime, it all threatened to come up.

  “No,” Imogene whispered against her palm, against the sickness. “Hike up your skirts, honey.” Her verbal coaching allowed herself the gumption to draw in deep breaths. Her sickness assuaged, she pressed against the wall with her hand and stood.

 
While staring up the staircase in the direction of Hazel’s room, a whiff of roses filtered through the air, alerting her.

  “Hazel?” Imogene’s voice tremored into the darkness above. The place where Hazel should have been. The place that still held her scent. Only Hazel was no longer here. Just the shell of the room where she’d once been safe. The place she’d curled up and read book after book, dreaming of becoming a librarian someday and putting away her bandanna and coveralls for the factory.

  Imogene ignored the nostalgic smells of home and of Hazel. She moved up the stairs, beyond her own bedroom and to the attic stairs. She hesitated. Looking up at the darkened room beyond. The place where someone had invaded and taken Hazel’s life. Terrorized her sister and permanently ruined this family farm and its memories forever. Murdered—

  “Imogene?”

  She yelped, spinning on the bottom stair. Her heart pounded like a locomotive, and she was sure the Glenn Miller band had nothing on her rhythmic pulse of fear. Clutching at her necklace of fake pearls, she met the troubled gaze of Oliver Schneider. Concern was etched in the corners of his eyes, and for a moment she wondered if her neighbor had a glimmer of sorrow in them.

  “You frightened me, Ollie,” Imogene breathed, rolling a pearl between her forefinger and thumb. Trying to exude an air of casual collection rather than the panicked visage of a young woman standing on a precipice of calm and about ready to careen into hysterics.

  Ollie gave her his familiar crooked grin. The one all the Schneider boys were known for. All nine of them. Ollie being the—the what?—the sixth? She didn’t know. She didn’t care.

  “You should go home,” he ventured. His voice was gruff, edged with something she couldn’t place. It was as though he knew. Knew what she’d seen that morning. Knew how it had seared into her soul like the branding iron on a cow’s hide.

  “I am home.” Imogene tried to soften the snap to her voice, but it was too late.

  Ollie studied her for a long second. His blue eyes were iridescent. Clear. Knowing. “You don’t need to revisit it, Imogene.”