Chapter 16
The room was hushed when she entered, the little desks lined up in neat rows, all facing the front of a room where a larger desk and chair stood gleaming. It was quiet and empty. These students were dismissed a very long time ago. Small touches had been used to give it a homey appearance while maintaining the Shaker ideals: a wildflower arrangement was on the teacher's desk, colorful rag rugs distributed around the floor, someone had drawn a rainbow on the chalkboard. There weren't any pictures on the walls; Shakers had not only shunned ornaments for simplicity reasons but because they gathered dust and made cleaning harder.
Although Taryn could see all of these things, they weren't quite solid. There was an otherworldly look to them, like she was gazing at the scene through goggles that had just been underwater. She yearned to reach out, run her fingers over the little chairs and down the freshly-painted walls, but was afraid. She didn't even want to breathe, so afraid she was of making it all vanish as quickly as it had appeared.
Her trembling fingers ached to turn Miss Dixie on, to try and capture everything her eyes refused to believe. She'd been given an incredible gift, she knew this a long time ago, but this went far beyond anything she'd ever imagined. Had she stumbled back in time? Was she dreaming? Was she dead? Had she accidentally doubled a dose of her pain meds and this was the end? Or was it all just an illusion Miss Dixie was helping bring to life for her?
She didn't care. She just wanted to enjoy it.
The situation was an odd one, to say the least, but fear was the last thing Taryn felt. The adrenaline rush was just too great.
She took a tentative step forward, testing the floor underneath her. It felt solid and real. Another test step put her closer to the middle of the floor and now she spun in circles, looking at everything in awe. Oh, if only she'd lived back then, she sighed. It all looked so much simpler, so beautiful. She ached to be a part of it all.
The door opened then and Taryn startled, panicked that her vision was going to waver and send her sprawling back into the modern night.
The woman walked through the door, however, and Taryn gasped as Evelyn moved right through her and went to the head of the class. She seemed not to notice Taryn and as she slid through her body, she moved as easily as if she were walking through steam or fog.
Evelyn's soft dark hair was piled on her head in a neat and tidy bun, the Shaker-style cap pinned firmly atop it. Her dress was long-sleeved with an apron over it. It was buttoned to the top of her neck, proper-like, but Taryn smiled a little when she took a quick look around the room and then loosened the top two. This revealed pale, creamy-smooth skin that was obvious even through the haze that Taryn watched her in.
She had a soft look about her, a beautiful girlishness that didn't come through in the stern, period photo she'd seen of her, or of the more recent one taken at the turn of the century when she'd been much older. This Evelyn was light on her feet, almost graceful, but Taryn knew this from having watched her in the meadow before. Up close, though, she had slender hands that moved as lightly as feathers as they stacked up leather-bound books, and tiny feet that looked no bigger than a child's. In fact, Evelyn herself couldn't have been more than five feet tall, and that might have been pushing it. She was a small, delicate woman and seeing her in this manner, knowing what she knew about her fate, made Taryn ache to protect her.
Evelyn glanced up once, and then again, watching the back of the room. Although her eyes landed on Taryn each time they didn't see her. They were seeing something there from a long, long time ago.
Another noise filtered through the scene (it was the only way Taryn could think of it) and made her turn to the window. The mood in the room immediately changed. When Evelyn looked at the window as well and saw the form of the tall, curly-haired young man standing in the opening, an electric smile on his face and a hopeful look in his eye, Taryn felt like the room was going up in flames. How could anyone have missed the look that passed between them? The love, the bond, the kinship? There was a closeness between them conveyed in that one simple glance that Taryn knew wouldn't have been missed by anyone around them.
And oh, she was burning. The flames of jealousy cut through Taryn and stung her. There was a passion in the room now that Taryn couldn't remember having ever felt. It wasn't the strong bond of almost supernatural friendship she felt with Matt or the loyalty and comfort she'd had with Andrew, but a burning desire of love and devotion that somehow managed to cut through time and death. Taryn yearned to feel the same, felt her insides turning over.
Neither figures said a word, but they didn't need to. He bowed once, tipped his hat to her, and then moved away as quickly as he'd appeared. Evelyn turned back to her desk, a light fading from her eyes. She frowned then and sighed. That sound cut deep into Taryn and she felt for the young woman. Morgan's appearance had been the highlight of the day for her and Taryn suspected she'd probably looked forward to those visits and brief appearances as much as she'd looked forward to entering that long-ago classroom of her own, her eyes fixated on Joey Moody.
When the air changed again, the feel of the space did as well. Now it was charged with something hateful and powerful, as hard and burning as the jealousy she was feeling. Taryn knew that force well and knew what was about to happen. She could feel it moving through the back of the room, towards her and onto Evelyn. Evelyn looked up, panic flitting across her face. She tried to cover it with a smile but the smile was forced, panicked. The coldness and anger grew and threatened to choke Taryn again. Although she knew it would be the end of the gift she'd been given, she couldn't stand to watch the young woman suffer. It took every drop of energy and power she could possibly muster but at the top of her lungs she yelled, “Evelyn, RUN!”
And, for a split second, right before she was violently thrust back into the twenty-first century, she saw Evelyn's eyes meet hers and the two women held on to the other's gaze.
There wasn't enough alcohol in the world for what Taryn had just experienced. In many ways, it was far more unsettling than some of the “scary” things that had happened to her in the past. She'd literally seen the past come alive, had watched Morgan and Evelyn in action. They were no longer one-dimensional figures in old, blurry photographs or names carelessly passed around–they were living, breathing people with passion and heat.
Taryn was still shaking as she climbed the stairs to go up to her room. She fumbled with her key and took three tries to get it in the lock. Once she was inside, she collapsed against the door and slid down to the floor.
Evelyn, or maybe it was Morgan, had wanted her to see that. She had no doubt in her mind that one of them had led her there, intent on her seeing the past and witnessing them in action. Maybe they'd wanted to show her that there was love between them, that neither could've possibly hurt the other.
And Taryn couldn't possibly forget the look in Morgan's eyes as he'd looked at Evelyn. There had been such tenderness, such joy, like just being in her presence had given him life. Taryn didn't think anyone had ever looked at her like that. Andrew had looked at her with love, with respect, and with admiration at times. Matt looked at her with a little bit of awe and reverence. She was, after all, the girl who'd scared off the bullies, protected him, and treated him like a real person. (The way he'd treated her.)
But now she found herself jealous of the ghosts. What they had was something else. And it wasn't fair. They were dead. Why did they still need it?
The jealousy formed in her stomach, a hard emotion she didn't recognize. It filled her with a coldness that ate at her and gnawed at her insides. It was an awful feeling and angered her. As though in agreement, a picture of a Shaker woman at a loom fell off her wall, the glass shattering on the floor into a million pieces. The curtains swirled and billowed out, like before, and as Taryn quickly rose to her feet, her closet door slammed to with a bang. Her hand crept behind her and found the knob. It was ice red hot under her touch and her delicate skin instantly blistered and burned. “Dammit!” she
hollered, clutching it to her stomach and holding it there with her other one.
She was feeding it, whatever “it” was, and she knew it. As images of Morgan and Evelyn flashed through her mind and the jealousy grew, the dormant power in the room had festered. It had been waiting for her all along, just waiting for that moment when she provided it with enough ammunition to set it free.
And yet she couldn't stop herself. Horrible thoughts flew through her mind, thoughts about leaving Matt, of going far, far away and starting over on her own. Thoughts of being glad that Evelyn had been attacked, had given birth to a child who hadn't lived, that Morgan had been murdered...The more these thoughts gathered in her mind, the more ferocious the activity in her room became. Her makeup scattered off the sink in her bathroom, tubes of lipstick and fingernail polish flying onto the tile floor. Her paintbrushes, drying on the bureau, were tossed into the air one-by-one and dropped to the ground like little toy soldiers marching off into battle. The bed banged against the wall, the headboard loosening from the frame with each movement.
Taryn had zero control over any of this. She couldn't turn her mind off, she couldn't turn the activity off.
Painfully, she raised her still-throbbing hands to her eyes and covered them. “Stop,” she sobbed. “Stop. I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it.”
A low guttural noise filtered up beside her, slipping through the floorboards. Menacing and threatening, it growled near her feet, lapped at her waist, and pulled harshly at her hair much like the dirty fog by the ice house had. “No, just go away,” she cried. She turned her thoughts to Matt, then, trying to forget what she'd been thinking just moments before. His eyes, his face, his hands...but the growling continued and now the pillows were flying off her bed, flying across the room and smashing into the wardrobe.
Panicked, her mind raced as she sought to find something to focus on. Her parents, her Aunt Sarah, Andrew...the names and faces flew before her eyes and with each one the cry grew louder, mocking her. She could feel its bites on her legs, on her lower back, on her thighs. And then, on her burning hand, she felt something hard, something she'd forgotten about. It was the ring that had belonged to her grandmother.
“Oh,” she sobbed. “Oh!” Clutching the ring in her sore fingers she let it press into the burn, searing the blisters and cutting her flesh. Her grandmother's face appeared before her eyes, her sad smile and careworn face encouraging Taryn to keep trying, to keep moving.
When the last blister popped, the fluid spilling out over the old stone and faded gold band, the noise in her room stopped. One lonely paintbrush rolled off the bureau and fell with a “plop” to the floor and then rolled across the floor. It finally came to a stop by her foot, the red of the paint the color of the blood that spilled from her fingers and stained the ring she still clutched.
Chapter 17
To Taryn's disappointment, Matt didn't seem to appreciate Shaker Town nearly as much as she'd expected him to. She didn't count on him having her exact same interests, but sometimes they felt so far apart on the spectrum that she worried they wouldn't have enough to sustain them in old age, if it got that far. At the moment, their bond seemed to be rooted in a shared childhood and the ability to read one another's minds. She supposed other relationships had been built on less, but it felt like a slippery slope.
He ignored most of the quick tour she gave him on the way to her room, although he did express interest in her work and complimented her on that, and the only thing he cared about in her room was throwing her on the mattress, being careful of her hip, to “test it.” But she supposed that was probably a guy thing.
“How was the flight up?” she asked. He'd already started unpacking his clothing, hanging his bathrobe on the hook behind the door, lining his toiletries out on the sink. In comparison to her things, his things were military-neat.
“It was okay. I had that layover in Charlotte and it lasted nearly three hours. I could've driven here in that time,” he grumbled. “But I met a man who was reading Terry Pratchett in the rocking chair next to me and we talked about that for over an hour. It passed the time.”
“Restaurant is busy today so I made us dinner reservations at 8:00 pm. They're doing barbecue tonight and it's very good. They've lit up the big grill thingie outside. It's why that side of the park smells like meat.”
Matt's eyes lit up at this. There were few things he enjoyed talking about more than food. “That sounds very good. The last barbecue I had was at one of those chain places and it might as well have been shredded hot-dogs with ketchup.”
“Well, you'll like this.”
“By the way, I checked out that store you were talking about. That salvage place? On my GPS it looks like a fairly straight shot from here to there. If you want to go to Lexington tomorrow or something we could check it out.”
She wanted to tell him that Lexington might have been a “straight shot” as far as the crow flew but navigating the roads, and then the traffic in some of the heavy areas of town, was anything but convenient. Still, it was sweet he was trying to think of her.
“I think that sounds good,” she declared.
Taryn took him to some of her favorite places in the park and as the day wore on her mood elevated.
The whole time she'd been waiting for Matt to drive up in his rental car she'd been giddy, restless. She missed him tremendously and had visions of throwing herself at him, wrapping her legs around his waist, planting a long and passionate kiss on him. Sitting under the maple tree at the pond she'd daydreamed about the two of them barely able to make it back to her room, pawing one another shamelessly until they'd fallen through her door in a passionate heap.
Reality was a bit of a disappointment.
Rather than attacking each other in a fever the distance and time seem to have made them timid and shy with each other. The man she'd had a quickie with on the front seat of his car because they couldn't wait to get inside his house after a movie one night now stood and looked at her with nervousness, not knowing whether to kiss her or shake her hand. The dirty emails they'd shared over the past month or so seemed to have been written by other people.
It got better, however, the longer he was there. They'd worked up to holding hands as they walked, and after not touching for a long time even that felt erotic.
Although she'd become friendly with some of the employees, and even formed friendships with a few, having someone with her who was expressly interested in her was different. It gave her added confidence and made her feel more daring. Alone, she often walked quietly, not making eye contact, lost in her own head. With Matt, she chattered incessantly, stopping to point things out, and waved at people she'd come to know. They all looked at Matt expectantly, curiosity burning their faces. She'd only mentioned him to a few people, although a simple Google search would have connected him with her through some of the paranormal blogs, and they were probably wondering where he'd come from.
“I think I'm going to start telling people you were a tourist I picked up on the side of the road and had my way with,” she teased him after a brief conversation with Eddie Jay.
“I'll go along with it,” he shrugged, slipping his arm around her shoulder. “You want me to pretend to be a biker?”
Taryn pulled back and studied his pressed khaki slacks, golf T-shirt, and loafers. “Dear, I think they'd buy me as a biker before you. Unless you mean mountain biker.”
When they got to the school Matt stopped and studied it. “Doesn't look like much from the outside, does it?”
Taryn shook her head. “No, not yet. But it will. They're very good at fixing these things up.”
“What do you think caused the doorway opening?” Matt asked her as he walked up to the old window and ran his finger along the cracked wooden frame.
Taryn looked down at her feet. Her bright blue toenail polish was chipped. She'd forgotten that. She should've made more of an effort for Matt since she hadn't seen him in weeks. Her hair was still damp from the shower, too, not
styled at all. In her mind she looked beautiful and becoming and in her “natural” state. In reality, without makeup, her hair styled, and her fingernails groomed she looked like she'd just walked out of a women's prison.
“I've been thinking about it,” she admitted, “and now I can't help but wonder if I might have just been dreaming.”
“Why would you say that?” Matt asked with interest. “You said you felt the floor under you, heard the noises, could see detail in their faces.”
“I was also on some heavy drugs,” she pointed out. “I had morphine in my system. I've looked at a ton of pictures, studied this building for weeks, and learned a lot about the Shaker schools. And, as you know, I have a very vivid imagination and create story lines in my head when I paint. This could've been the result of all those things mixing together in my head.”
Matt didn't answer as they left the site and strolled to the pond. Taryn led him to the bench under the Maple tree and they sat together, hands touching, while they watched the water. There were children down there, throwing scraps of bread to the ducks. The ducks were skittish, wading off from the kids as quickly as they could, and a toddler charged after them, shrieking in a high-pitched babble that wasn't composed of real words.
Taryn thought Matt had forgotten about her comment back at the schoolhouse but, in typical Matt-style, he had just been thinking about it and trying to choose his words wisely. It often took Matt a while to process things. It's what made him a good scientist.
“Why would you talk yourself out of what happened?” he asked quietly. One of his fingers ran gently over her grandmother's ring, turning it around and around on her small finger. The blisters on her hand were gone; there was no sign she'd been in a struggle.
Shaker Town (Taryn's Camera Book 4) Page 15