Donn's Hill

by Caryn Larrinaga

  “I said I’d do pretty much anything.” I sipped my coffee. It tasted as bad as I’d expected. “My friend Mark showed me some pictures of past festivals, and I saw that you were on the committee last year.”

  Gabrielle was starting to brighten and had downed half her coffee already. “Yes, it’s one of my favorite times of the year. Just wait until you see it. It’s marvelous.”

  Trixie returned and refilled our mugs, and Gabrielle immediately slugged hers down to the halfway mark.

  “What do you do at the festival?” I asked.

  “I organize the intuitives. It can be quite a daunting task. Not everyone within the psychic community is friendly with each other, and it takes quite a bit of creative juggling to make sure our tarot reader doesn’t feel like she’s close enough for the palmist to ‘steal’ her clients.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  She cracked a wry smile. “Yes. Fun. But tell me, have you had any more trouble with your poltergeist?” she asked.

  I remembered seeing his face in the photo after the volunteer meeting. It occurred to me that Gabrielle might have worked with him and could know his name. “No. I really can’t thank you enough. But speaking of—”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” She emptied her mug and stood abruptly. “Thank you for the coffee, Mackenzie. I really needed that today. However, I should get back to my shop.”

  “Oh. Well, this will only take a—”

  “Thank you again, dear. I’ll see you soon.” Gabrielle hurried out of the diner, clutching her stomach.

  I watched her leave then frowned at my coffee. After Gabrielle’s quick exit, I wasn’t sure I wanted anything more to do with that watery concoction.

  I stared out the diner’s window at the tendrils of fog creeping across Main Street. That didn’t go at all like I wanted. I’d envisioned a nice, warm chat over steaming cups of chai tea where I might be able to learn more about my mom or even figure out who the man in the photo was. Instead, I’d gotten subpar coffee in a filthy, deserted diner and Gabrielle had dashed off before I could really press her about anything.

  Trixie returned to the table again to refill my mug.

  “No thanks,” I told her, pushing my coffee away. “I’ll just take the check.”

  “You want to add anything to your order?” She leaned down close enough that I could smell her breath; it was stale and reeked of cigarettes. “Anything… not on the menu?”

  “What? No. Just the check.”

  She shrugged and slapped a slip of paper onto my table. I tossed some cash down beside it, wondering what on earth she was talking about. Did they make custom sandwiches or something? I couldn’t imagine what the food there tasted like. If my coffee and Trixie’s breath were any indication, it wasn’t worth coming back for.

  My thoughts returned to Gabrielle as I pushed open the door and went back out into the misty rain. She’d looked tired, and I felt bad about dragging her out for coffee, especially since I had an ulterior motive. It hadn’t been an act of gratitude. She’d come to my rescue, and I owed her better.

  I owed Graham, too. He’d helped me, and yet I hadn’t done anything to thank him since he’d left my apartment after the smudging. Furious with myself, I stalked off toward the grocery store.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Striker was angry. She stood in front of my apartment door, meowing at me loudly. She broadcast her ire each time she opened her mouth.

  I roamed my apartment, trying to make the place look a little bit less like a junkyard. One of the few good things I could say about Josh was that he was a neat person, and he’d never minded straightening up after me.

  “What is it?” I asked Striker as I picked up a pair of socks from the window seat and tossed them into the laundry basket.

  She looked straight into my eyes and scolded me again. “Meeeeee-ow!”

  I sighed. “Do you want to go outside? Look, the window is open. Go on out.”

  I picked her up and dropped her onto the window seat. She spun around and slapped me on the hand with her paw. Her claws were out, and it stung.

  “Ouch!” I raised my hand to examine the four tiny puncture wounds forming on my skin. That’s when I saw the time on my watch. I’d been in my apartment for half an hour; I’d only meant to stay for a few minutes.

  I ran out the door and sped down the stairs, racing into the communal kitchen. Black smoke seeped out of the oven, and the room smelled like charred food. I grabbed a potholder from the drawer beside the stove, yanked open the oven door, and pulled out the cookie sheet.

  “Aaaggh!”

  My thumb was unprotected. I dropped the cookie sheet on the floor with a clatter, sending blackened disks flying across the kitchen. I kicked the oven door closed and ran to the sink to thrust my burned thumb under some cold water. Striker hunched forward and raised her backside into the air, wiggling it a few times before tackling one of the desecrated chocolate chip cookies. She promptly batted it underneath the refrigerator and looked up at me with an expression of pure pride.

  “Thanks a lot,” I told her. “Why not bat them into a neat little pile so I can get them cleaned up before anybody walks in here?”

  My thumb had gotten all the relief it could from the running water, so I went to work cleaning up the charred cookies. I cursed myself for letting them burn. Now an entire batch was ruined.

  “Everything all right in here?” a deep voice asked.

  I jerked my head up and saw Graham standing in the doorway to the patio with an empty water glass in his hand. His short brown hair was covered with an orange beanie, and his skin was smeared with something chalky and gray.

  “Oh!” I straightened up and dusted my hands off on my jeans. “Yeah, it’s fine. Just burned some cookies. Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Ooh, cookies.” He walked over and examined the previous three batches cooling on the counter. They were the lucky ones that hadn’t fallen victim to my bad time management. “May I?”

  “Well, yeah. They’re…” Heat coursed into my face. “They’re actually for you. Sorry. I meant to surprise you.”

  His eyes were wide, so maybe I’d succeeded after all. “For me? Why?”

  I cleared my throat. “To thank you for your help the other day. With the… you know. The thing in my apartment.” I felt awkward. I’d passed him on the stairs a few times over the past couple of days, but neither of us had brought up the smudging or said anything at all beyond a greeting. “I couldn’t have done it without you. Really. So...” I shoved the cookies toward him.

  He popped a cookie into his mouth and said, “Aw, thanks, Mac.”

  I cleared my throat again —What the heck keeps getting stuck in there?—and cast my eyes around for something to talk about. I noticed his messy clothes. “What are you doing? Painting?”

  He looked down at his black t-shirt, smeared with the same gray mystery stuff as his arms. “Oh, no. I’ve been sculpting.”

  “Really? What do you sculpt, pots?”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.” He refilled his water glass, scooped up several more cookies from the non-burned pile on the counter, and headed out the door. “These are great, by the way.”

  I piled some cookies onto a plate and followed him through the backyard to the large garage that sat to the side of the tenant carports. One of the two overhead doors hung open, and through it I saw a half dozen long, deep tables covered in carvings and statues. Wooden shelves separated by cinderblocks ran the length of both sides of the walls, and like the tables, every inch seemed covered in sculptures. Radiohead blared through speakers at the back, and Graham wove his way between the tables to turn it down.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asked as he walked back toward me.

  I stepped into the garage and looked around. The sculptures varied in size—some could have easily fit in my hand while others were taller than Graham—but they all had a similar feel. Their shapes were mostly human, but their forms were exaggerated to be more fluid. Fini
shed pieces, shiny and colorful, sat on the shelves. The tables appeared to hold works in progress, most of which were covered in plastic sheets. Between the finished pieces and the ones he was working on, there were hundreds of sculptures in the room.

  “Wow,” I said. “This is all you?”

  “All me. The product of a lot of years of work.”

  I moved forward and examined a three-foot-tall statue of a man. It didn’t appear to be finished, but I recognized his long headpiece and the crook and flail in his hands. “Is this Osiris?”

  Graham stood beside me. “Nice eye.”

  “My dad was an archaeologist. He was always showing me pictures of the old gods and goddesses.”

  “I do a lot of deities. They’re really popular at the Afterlife Festival.”

  “You sell them at the festival?”

  “Yep. It’s the best time of year for me—for the whole town, really. Most of us make our real money during the festival and the rest of the year we scrape by or get our fingers into other pies, like my dad and this apartment building.”

  “So you don’t sell them the rest of the year?”

  “No market for it, really. I get the odd commission from someone who gets my card at the festival, like this one over here.” He gestured toward a realistic bust of an elderly woman wearing round eyeglasses. “People occasionally want their loved ones immortalized in clay. So the rest of the year, I just work on pieces for the festival. I’m lucky—I get to do what I love all year long.”

  I was floored by how beautiful and detailed his work was. He was such a quiet, shy guy. If I hadn’t seen him with the evidence of his artistry all over his clothes, would I have found this out about him? And he seemed a different person in here: relaxed, open.

  “So what are you working on today?”

  His face lit up, and he beckoned me toward a wooden workbench. The head and torso of a muscular man were growing up from a mound of clay. The man had a long mane of wild hair and a thick piece of leather armor that covered half his chest at a diagonal.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  Graham looked momentarily surprised, and then he laughed. “Oh, right. I keep forgetting you’re not from around here. This is Donn… as in, Donn’s Hill.”

  “Ah.” I looked up at the statue’s face. He had a narrow nose and thick eyebrows. His expression seemed sad, as though he carried a heavy burden. “The Donn. I see,” I said, even though I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “I don’t suppose you have any Irish in your ancestry?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure what I am, really. American mutt maybe?”

  Graham laughed. “Well, have you heard of the Driscoll family?”

  Penelope’s history lesson had stuck in my head. “Yeah, they’re the famous mediums who started the festival, right?”

  He nodded. “They also founded the town. The story goes that our founder, Alastar Driscoll, fled here after breaking out of a mental institution in New York.”

  “He was mentally ill?”

  “The doctors around him thought so. Alastar could talk to the dead, and the hospital thought he was crazy. His family and some of his followers helped him escape, and they followed his visions west with the homesteaders. He led them here and said it was where they were meant to be. His family wanted to name the town after him, but he insisted it be named after Donn.” He gestured to the statue. “He’s the Irish god of the afterlife who helps spirits pass on to the next world. Alastar claimed to be his agent on earth.”

  I studied Graham’s face, trying to gauge what he thought about that claim. His relaxed features and professorial air forced me to ask, “Do you believe that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It was a hundred and fifty years ago. They mistook a lot of things for madness and miracles back then, so both explanations seem possible. And whether he settled here because he thought it was a magical gateway to the afterlife or not, there’s no doubt that it was a smart move for him and his family to stay here. It’s prime farmland, and the surrounding area turned out to be chock-full of valuable iron ore.”

  I raised my eyebrows. That was a pretty lucky break for them. “The family must’ve gotten rich.”

  “Funny you’d say that. They didn’t. Alastar died penniless. His kids all did okay because they figured out how to attract attention with the festival and make loads of cash every year. Thing was, nobody discovered the ore until a lot of other families had moved into the area and the town really got started. A guy named Frederick Bishop got his paws on the mineral rights, and his family ended up taking over the town.”

  “Bishop! Like Penelope Bishop?”

  Graham made a face. “Yeah. You know her? She’s my cousin.”

  “What?” I couldn’t imagine kind, quiet Graham being related to that stuffy woman. And on the lease, his name had shown up as Graham Thomas. “Are you a Bishop or a Driscoll?”

  He gestured out the garage door toward his beat-up Geo. “Guess.”

  I smiled. So he wasn’t one of the town’s wealthy elite, but he might be one of the spiritual elite. “Driscoll then. So did you inherit any psychic powers?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Got shortchanged there too. The old talk-to-the-dead gene has been skipping quite a few generations lately. Gabrielle is the best psychic in town, and she’s not even a Driscoll. She’s got the Spanish gypsy blood instead.”

  He picked up a long, slender tool and began carving more detail into Donn’s armor. I dragged a stool over and sat down to watch him work. A light breeze blew in from the open garage door, bringing with it the fresh smell of earth. It was very pleasant in the studio.

  “So what’s the deal with your cousin?” I asked after a while. “To quote a friend of mine, she’s kind of ‘difficult.’”

  “Yeah, she’s got that reputation for sure. I feel bad for her, though. I mean, yeah, she managed to double her Donn’s Hill pedigree by being both a Driscoll and a Bishop. But she had to marry a real piece of work to do it.”

  I frowned. “She’s married?”

  “Technically.”

  I tilted my head to one side. “What does that mean?”

  Graham sighed. “It’s complicated. Her husband skipped town a couple of weeks ago, probably to shack up with one of his mistresses.”

  “Sounds like a winner.”

  “Yeah. You know what’s ironic? I’ve always thought part of the reason Penny married him was for his money. But my dad says he thinks Tom’s been cut off from the Bishop family fortune. Either one too many stints in rehab or one too many affairs.” His face was growing red, and his voice began to rise. “So Penny put up with his crap for years, all for nothing. But I say good riddance.”

  I watched as Graham continued to work on Donn’s chest, gouging out thin lines of clay to create a filigree pattern. I knew what it felt like to be with a cheater, and it hadn’t made me the happiest person to be around. Maybe Penelope wasn’t being rude to me because of anything I did. Maybe it had nothing to do with me.

  She was probably just having a really horrible time dealing with her husband bailing on her, and I happened to see her when she was at her worst. Next time I see her, I’ll be extra nice.

  “Here,” Graham said, passing me his cell phone, “Can you pick some music?”

  As I flipped through his phone, appreciating his vast collection of 90s alt-rock albums, Striker sauntered into the studio and hopped up into my lap. I chose Goo by Sonic Youth and watched Graham continue to refine his sculpture of Donn.

  He has a gift. Like Gabrielle, Graham wasn’t afraid to share his gift with everyone at the Afterlife Festival. His quiet demeanor masked a confidence strong enough to produce all of these breathtaking sculptures. While he worked, he had a small smile on his face, and he hummed along quietly with the music.

  That can be me. All I had to do was embrace my gift—run with it, use it, and not be afraid to add it to the huge list of things that made me who I am.

  But the sa
d, burdened eyes of the god Donn bored into me. Alastar Driscoll’s psychic gift hadn’t brought him happiness. He’d been locked up, treated like a crazy person, and had ultimately died with nothing. What if I was more like him and less like Gabrielle? What if this so-called gift just led to madness and a lonely death?

  I shivered. Psychic or not, I couldn’t see the future, and it terrified me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I pulled on my new work shirt, which had the show’s logo on the front and “Film Crew” printed across the back. It made me feel very official.

  “Step aside, ma’am, I’m with the film crew,” I told Striker. She blinked at me. “Oh, right. You’re on the crew too. I better get you a teensy shirt!”

  Despite my worries about my psychic powers driving me crazy, it had felt so good to banish the poltergeist that I wanted to have another crack at it. And if I could help someone else reclaim their home from an invading spirit, well, that would probably feel ten times as good. It might be worth the risk of madness.

  During my years behind the reception desk at the ad agency, I’d never looked forward to going to work. I’d lain in bed most mornings, trying to talk myself into getting up. I’d always wondered how some of the executives and salespeople could walk into the office with big smiles on their faces as though they were super excited to spend eight or more hours trapped there.

  As I walked downstairs to the kitchen, boxing an imaginary opponent and feeling like Rocky, I finally got it. Those happy-go-lucky morning people didn’t look at the office as though it were a prison, swallowing the best years of their lives. They had a passion for what they were doing and couldn’t wait to dive in and start doing it again each day. I finally had that feeling now, and I felt a little guilty for all the daggers I’d shot through my sleepy eyes at the weirdos who breezed through the door with a chipper “Good morning!”