by Dana Moss
Taffy spoke to the eerily silent, woodsmoke-scented kitchen. “You got me, Nana. This will scare me straight, for sure. One night in your creepy, haunted house in Abandon, Oregon, and no doubt I’ll transform into the granddaughter you’ve always wanted.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Taffy woke the next morning to the sound of banging. Her head ached, and she was shivering. For an instant, she thought she was back in the trashy jail cell in New York, but when she pushed away her sleep mask, she found herself under a thin patchwork quilt, inside a granny chic–styled turret room.
The night before, after fumbling up the dark stairs before her phone’s battery failed entirely, she’d dropped into the first bed she’d found. She’d slept fitfully, dreaming of cramped coach seats and tiny cars that drove themselves to hell. Now this relentless banging. She was three bangs away from a full-blown migraine. Annoyed, she crossed to the window to discern the racket.
Outside, parked behind her little Aveo, was a navy pickup truck. Beside the pickup was a heap of firewood. Next to the firewood was a man swinging an axe. He wore a red-checked shirt and baseball hat. Had Nana hired the locals to further aggravate Taffy?
She leaned out the window. “Hey, you there! Stop that! I’m sleeping here!”
He didn’t stop, just kept swinging. He had earbuds in his ears. She waved desperately, but he didn’t look up.
She ran down the house's creaky old stairs, not caring that she was only wearing a short red nightie. She burst through the front door, waving and yelling, “Stop that racket!”
The red must have caught his eye because the axe stilled as he did a double take. Withdrawing his earbuds, he gave Taffy a lopsided grin.
“Good. You’re up.”
“No, I’m not up. I’m trying to sleep. Your banging woke me up.” She glared at the heap of firewood at his feet.
“I thought you’d appreciate some kindling.”
“I’d appreciate some peace and quiet. I’d appreciate a good-night’s sleep. I’d appreciate a first-class ticket home.”
He looked down at her with that silly lopsided grin as he listened to her tirade. He was thirtyish, broad-shouldered, green-eyed, and quite tall, as if he might have to tip his head to get through some doorways.
Half-dressed and only half-awake, Taffy now felt self-conscious. She crossed her arms over her chest and assessed her situation: crazy woman in skimpy nightie berating hunky outdoorsman for chopping kindling.
He said, “Are you always this angry in the morning?”
“Only when I wake up on the wrong side of the country.”
“Maybe you need a good cup of coffee?”
“Only if it’s Nespresso.”
The crazy woman in the nightie turned on her heel and pranced back to the front porch.
She was sure the hunky outdoorsman was laughing at her as she stormed away.
Who the heck was he? She turned back at the top step. He’d set down the axe and was climbing into his pickup truck. Good. She’d scared him off. As he turned his truck in her driveway, she saw a sign painted on the truck’s door: Oregon State Parks, and the word Ranger underneath.
The truck bounced away down the driveway.
Taffy sighed. The quiet morning ringing with birdsong pooled around her like a rising tide. She walked through the front door, shut it, and was about to go up the stairs and back to bed when a shape on the foyer floor caught her eye.
She screamed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Flinging open the front door, she ran out across the porch, skipping over the ribbons of yellow and black tape she had so nonchalantly torn away the night before. It wasn’t a joke. It was a crime scene! There was an outline of a body on the foyer floor. And a small crimson stain.
Taffy’s breath came in short gasps. She felt sick to her stomach. She’d slept in that house. Where someone had died. Where someone had possibly been murdered. She had to get out of here.
She skittered down the front steps toward the car, and then she stopped. The keys were in the bushes somewhere. She got down on her hands and knees and scrabbled about but couldn’t find them. She jumped to her feet, thinking she should call the police. But her phone was upstairs. And totally dead. Dead! She stifled a panicked gasp as she thought of the body that had once lain in the foyer. She was not going back into that house. What was she going to do? She started to shiver. Her bare feet were damp with dew.
She’d left her bigger suitcase in the car and one of the doors was unlocked. She yanked out a sweater and a pair of yoga pants, plus socks. She was pulling everything over her nightie when her eye caught the axe wedged in the stump next to the pile of wood. The ranger. Had he…? She looked back at the house…and then at the axe. What if he…?
The chirping birds now sounded ominous.
When she heard the crunch of tires rolling down the narrow gravel driveway her skin prickled with goose bumps. The navy pickup truck was coming back. Her heart started racing. She felt an urge to run through the forest at the back of the house. In her socks. She lunged for the car again and yanked shoes from her suitcase. She shoved one on each foot.
The pickup truck rolled to a stop beside her tiny car. She wouldn’t be able to run fast enough, especially not with the two mismatched heels of different heights wedged painfully over her socks. She teetered backwards toward the woodpile as the burly park ranger opened his door.
She was trapped.
She picked up a piece of wood to arm herself, but it slipped out of her hand, giving her a splinter as it fell. Grabbing the axe handle with both hands, she pulled as hard as she could. She staggered backward when it loosened, and she tripped over the piece of wood she’d dropped.
“Careful with that axe. You could hurt yourself,” he said, walking towards her.
She scrambled out of her sprawl across the woodpile and brandished the axe. “Stay away!”
He furrowed his brow.
She lurched forward. “Get back!”
He shifted slightly to one side and then reached out to grab the axe handle.
“You’re not even holding it right.” He took it from her. “Here let me show you.”
He’d disarmed her, effortlessly, with just one hand.
Taffy turned to run, but having lost one shoe, she lost her balance on the second step and fell, for the second time, on top of the woodpile. “Ouch.”
The ranger stood over her with the axe. “Are you all right?”
She was dizzy with spent adrenaline. She whimpered, “I don’t want to die.”
He set the axe down and reached for her hand. “That’s a good attitude to have in the morning.”
Taffy kicked off her other heel and stood on the grass in her socks as the ranger opened the passenger door of his truck and pulled out two stainless-steel travel mugs.
“It’s not Nespresso, but it should do the trick.”
Taffy stared at the cups. A rich, delicious scent of fresh-brewed coffee wafted toward her.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Just up the road.”
He held a mug out to her.
She reassessed her situation: Hunky ranger offering her coffee probably wasn’t an axe murderer. Crazy woman wearing yoga pants over her nightie really needed a cup of coffee.
She tentatively took the cup, sipped, and sighed. At least there was a decent coffee shop in this godforsaken edge-of-the-world town. She took another long, hot sip and exhaled with relief.
He pointed at her hand. “You’re bleeding.”
A trickle of blood spiraled along the outside of her palm. When she held up her hand, she saw the splinter gouging deep into the skin of her palm under her ring finger. Seeing the splinter made it hurt ten times as much.
“Let’s go inside and get that cleaned up.”
Taffy turned toward the house and froze. “I can’t. There’s a—”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s my fault.”
She coughed on her coffee.
“I was su
pposed to clean that up before you got here, but there was some confusion with the key. How’d you get in last night?”
“You knew I was coming?”
He reached into the passenger side of the truck again. “I’m supposed to give you this.”
He handed her an envelope. The same size and color of the other two from her Nana. Taffy grabbed it, smearing blood all over the address.
“We’ve got to get you bandaged up.” He started to lead the way toward the house.
“Hold on. Why do you know who I am but I don’t have a clue who you are?” He’d gone from irritating noisemaker to axe murderer to coffee angel to paramedic and messenger in a few flashes of Taffy’s imagination.
“My name’s Ethan McCoy. I’m the local park ranger. Among other things.”
“Other things?”
He looked at her hand. Blood was now dripping on her sock. He reached for her elbow to guide her toward the house.
“Right now, I’m your doctor. And then I’m going to play housecleaner and get that awful mark up off your floor, which I meant to do yesterday, but the house was locked, and the key wasn’t under the flowerpot like it usually is. How did you say you got in?”
“Climbed through a kitchen window.”
He laughed. It was such a nice sound it made Taffy smile.
Now that she was ninety percent certain he wasn’t going to chop her into bits with an axe, she decided she quite liked this Ethan McCoy. Or maybe it was the coffee working its morning magic.
She followed him across the porch and into the house.
The black and yellow tape fluttered out of their path, and the birds resumed a less ominous chirping.
CHAPTER NINE
“It was an accident,” Ethan said as he rifled through kitchen cupboards in search of a first aid kit. “And a damn shame. Janet added a lot to this community. Rest her good soul.”
Taffy could see the edge of the body outline from where she sat at the long kitchen table with a cold, wet tea towel wrapped around her hand.
“What happened to her?”
Ethan set the first aid kit next to a few cleaning supplies he’d discovered in his search. Then he glanced toward the foyer and shook his head sadly.
“She was knocked out by her own bowling ball.”
Taffy pictured an old woman getting knocked over like a bowling pin.
Ethan said, “For a few days it was a questionable death. One of our local deputies got a little overenthusiastic and speculated murder, but Janet was well-loved by everyone. She had no enemies.”
The thought of someone dying, even accidentally, in this house was still intolerably creepy to Taffy.
“How could she have been killed by a bowling ball?”
Ethan removed the wet towel and dabbed iodine on her wound.
“Apparently it rolled off the closet shelf and hit her on the head. Purely accidental. The police found the bowling ball in the corner of the living room.”
He pulled out a pair of tweezers. Instinctively, Taffy jerked her hand away.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle,” he said. “But you can cry if you want.”
“I don’t cry.”
He gave her a questioning look and then turned his attention to the splinter, grabbing hold of it and deftly easing it out. He pressed gauze against the new trickle of blood, and then he stretched a bandage over Taffy’s skin.
Tossing the stained towel into the sink, he said, “That should clean up in the wash.”
“There’s no hot water. No power either.”
“Guess you’ll have to go to the town hall and set up a new account.”
“Will they do that for just a few days?”
Ethan raised an eyebrow.
“Of course, I can’t stay,” Taffy started to explain. “This has all been a misunderstanding. I’ve got to get back to New York.”
“Guess you gotta do what you gotta do.” He looked around the kitchen. “But this is a nice place. A bit of a fixer-upper, but it’s got good bones. I’ve always loved this house.”
“But someone died here!”
Ethan seemed surprised by her outburst. He got up and put the first aid kit back in a cupboard. “Look, by the time you get back from the town hall, that outline on the floor will be gone. I’ll make sure of that.”
He pulled out a pot. “Since the power’s out, I’ll stoke up the woodstove and boil up some water to use for cleaning.”
Taffy looked at the freestanding black metal contraption for the first time. “That’s what the firewood is for?”
He nodded. “Offsets the heating bills when the weather starts to cool off, which it will do soon. I knew Janet’s supply was getting low…” His voice trailed off for a second. Then he turned to Taffy. “And I thought the new tenant would appreciate the gesture. But turns out I was wrong about that.”
He winked, and she felt embarrassed by her overreactions earlier.
“I know it sounds crazy, but I thought when you came back up the driveway that you were going to kill me.”
“With coffee?”
“With the axe. I just got so spooked by…” She pointed toward the foyer. “It’s been a stressful few days. Sorry. Just a bad first impression.”
He turned away to put kindling in the stove. “Who knows? Maybe your hunch was right. Maybe the coffee is poisoned and it’s just taking a little time to freeze up your veins.”
Taffy held her breath. Ethan turned back to her with a grin on his face.
“Kidding. Just kidding.”
Then he broke out into that wonderful, deep laugh. Taffy let herself breathe again. His laugh was infectious, and soon she had relaxed enough to join in, laughing at the absurdity of her crazy assumptions. She snort-chatter-laughed along with him, and surprisingly, he didn’t flinch. In fact, their combined laughter seemed like the most natural sound in the world.
CHAPTER TEN
The envelope Ethan had given her contained a note, which was not written in her grandmother’s familiar cursive script, but nonetheless conveyed her wishes:
Once you arrive, meet with Lionel Davenport, Esquire.
There was an address and a time, which happened to be in an hour.
Taffy was dying to have a shower and wash and blow-dry her hair, but that wasn’t going to happen without electricity, so she tied her hair into a chignon and dug around in her hastily packed suitcase for something other than lingerie and yoga pants.
She changed into designer jeans, Louboutin heels, and a pink leather jacket. She dolloped on lip gloss and donned a pair of fat Kate Spade sunglasses.
Ethan helped her retrieve her car keys from the bushes. Handing them to her, he appraised her outfit and said, “You’ll fit right in.”
She was pretty sure the lopsided grin meant he was being ironic, but she didn’t care. Fitting in, in Abandon, Oregon, of all places, was hardly a priority. But getting back to New York was. Whatever game her Nana was playing, Taffy was ready to cash in her chips and go home. Perhaps this lawyer could help.
She tucked her dead phone and charger into her purse and headed to town.
Guiding her tin can Aveo up the road away from the house, she kept an eye out for the coffee shop Ethan had said was ‘just up the road’ because she could really use a double-shot skim-milk latté with unsweetened vanilla syrup right about now, but no luck.
The road wove past homes and lawns and rolling hills. On the left she caught glimpses of the sea. A large black rock rose up from the bay. It was flat-ish on top and had sharp angular edges that reminded her of castles and battlements. Was that Castle Rock?
Clouds raced and broke in the sky, revealing patches of blue. With the windows rolled down she could smell the salty air. She also smelled something sweet, but she couldn’t identify what that was.
The main street of Abandon was lined with several boarded-up storefronts. Taffy kept an eye out for a stone building with a slate roof, which was how Ethan had described the town hall. When she spotted it, she
pulled over to park. She had just enough time to stop in and request a power hookup before her lawyer’s appointment.
The utilities department on the second floor had a large waiting room with rows of screwed down chairs.
After Taffy had stated her business, the woman behind the high counter peered over her cat’s-eye glasses and said, “The old Harken property? Some of the wiring isn’t quite up to code. You might want to fix that.”
Taffy had no intention of fixing anything, except a date to get out of town.
“I only need power for a few days, one week tops.”
“One week?" The woman chuckled. “One month is the minimum, Hon.”
Taffy had to pay for a minimum of one month’s power plus the activation fees, which added up to over $350. When she held out her bank card, she had a hard time letting it go. There was only $500 left in her account.
“Is there any way to defer part of the payment to the next month?”
“After the power is cut off again? No, Dear.”
Taffy released her card. She needed electricity. To power her phone, hair dryer, and flat iron, especially.
“So when will everything be hooked up?”
“Depends on Bill,” the clerk said, completing the transaction. “On his schedule, and, honestly, his mood. He has good days and bad days.”
Taffy was not interested in a moody utilities technician. She just wanted her power switched on.
“Maybe you could put in a good word for me?”
The clerk offered a tight smile. “Maybe.”
Leaving the utilities office, Taffy kept her fingers crossed that whoever this Bill was, he was having a good day with nothing better to do than hook up her electricity.
The town hall clock gonged. It was time for her appointment with the lawyer. Maybe he’d be able to shed some light on Nana’s strange mission.
* * *
The Davenport and Sons office was directly across the street from the town hall. Taffy didn’t feel like going to the end of the block to the crosswalk. She slid on her sunglasses and looked both ways before striding into the street. About halfway across, she heard a police siren. She scurried across the road and out of the way. A police cruiser drove up and double-parked outside the lawyer’s office. The siren stopped blaring, but the red and blue lights continued to spin.