Autumn
Page 1
Table of Contents
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
About the Author
Coming Soon: Winter (Dog Days #2)
Copyright
eBooks are not transferable.
They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Autumn
Copyright © 2013 by Ashley MacLennan
ISBN: 978-1-939291-00-4
Edited by Sasha Knight
Cover by Kanaxa
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Sierra Dean. electronic publication: June 2013
www.sierradean.com
Autumn
Dog Days - Book 1
Sierra Dean
For Adeline Leia Cote
My dearest Addie, I haven’t been able to dedicate any books to you because you’re much too young to read Auntie’s other work. This one is for you. You are my favorite person in the world, my dear. Please know that you can and will achieve greatness in your life.
Love you always.
Chapter One
If Eloise Whittaker had to narrow down the worst things ever in her life to a list, the top three would go as follows:
3) Uncooked chicken. When it’s all, like, pink in the middle? Gross.
2) Her father dying. Which was really tied for number one with…
1) Moving because her dad died.
She’d honestly rather eat a thousand raw chickens than be stuck in the front of a stupid U-Haul, driving for a million miles with her mom from Fresno to Texas. Texas. It was like moving to Jupiter. She was going from having a life that involved sun and easy access to Starbucks, to living in a town called Poisonfoot.
Poisonfoot.
Seriously, what kind of name was that? It sure sounded like a red-carpet, welcome-wagon kind of place. Welcome to Poisonfoot, Texas. Get out.
Lou propped her bare feet up on the dash of the car and pushed her pink Wayfarer sunglasses onto the top of her head. She’d been struggling for hours to find a comfortable position but was finding it impossible to get into a groove. The seat of the rental moving truck was lumpy, and the air conditioning didn’t work, making her sweaty and miserable.
More miserable than the move alone.
They were barely halfway through Nevada, and already she was missing things. Their house, her used RAV4 they’d had to sell before the move, and all the friends she’d grown up with who would be moving on to their junior year next week without her.
Who was going to veto Priss’s texts when she wanted to tell Bobby Fletcher his hair smelled good? Who would Kel and Anthony turn to for insight into the female mind? And who would Parker Davenport take to junior prom now that she wouldn’t be there?
Everyone promised to keep in touch with texts and Facebook, but Lou knew the reality of her situation. Out of sight, out of mind. Soon enough they’d be saying, “Remember Lou?” and not long after that, “Lou who?”
She sighed, bumping her head against the seat.
“You okay, sweetie?” her mom asked, not looking away from the dusty highway in front of them.
“Real answer or smiley answer?”
“Real answer, of course.”
“This sucks.”
Her mother frowned and tightened her grip on the wheel. “Eloise, we’ve talked about this.”
“I know, but you said real answer.”
“I suppose I did. But you know we had to do this. We couldn’t afford that house, not without your dad’s income, and especially not after the hospital bills.”
Lou didn’t know all the details. She was only sixteen, which was old enough to drive but not old enough to decide if she got to keep her car. From what she’d gathered listening to her mother’s tense phone conversations with lawyers, her father’s six-month stay in the hospital had very nearly bankrupted them. At least badly enough they’d had to sell the house and didn’t make enough money from it to buy another one.
It wasn’t bad enough her dad had died, she’d had to lose her home and everyone she knew, too.
She was grateful to still have her mom, but sometimes she resented everyone involved with this stupid move. Why didn’t her mom have a real job? Why didn’t they have better insurance—wasn’t that the whole point of insurance? And more than anything, why had some stupid, idiotic, pointless higher power decided to give her dad cancer and not provide him the strength to beat it?
The world sucked.
And now they were moving to Poisonfoot to live with Lou’s grandmother—her father’s mother—who had been “kind enough” to invite Lou and her mother to live with her. “Kind enough” was her mom’s phrase for it.
Sounded more like perpetual punishment to Lou.
She hadn’t been to Poisonfoot since she was six. Ten years was a long enough absence she had only the foggiest memories of the place. She recalled sweet tea with lemon and her grandmother making grits—not a fond memory, that one—and the dark, musty staircase she hadn’t been allowed to explore. Everything else was snippets—blue-and-white china wallpaper in the dining room and a stuffed owl over the fireplace—things that didn’t paint a whole picture.
Lou had better memories of Granny Elle—the Eloise she’d been named after—from the visits she’d made out to Fresno. But Granny Elle, like Lou’s memories of Texas, sometimes felt more like a dream than a real thing.
She wasn’t the kind of warm and cuddly grandmother who snuck candies and dollar bills into Lou’s hands while no one was looking. That’s how Grandma J—her mom’s mom—had been before she got Alzheimer’s.
Both her grandfathers had died long before she had a chance to remember anything about them, even fragments. She had a picture of Grandpa Chuck—her mom’s dad—holding her as a baby, but that was it. Granny Elle’s husband, Ronald, was rarely discussed and usually in hushed tones.
Sure, all families were supposed to be crazy in their own way, but Lou got the feeling her dad’s family had been extra nuts. Why else would he have bailed after high school?
Oh, right. Because he’d lived in Poisonfoot.
Lou adjusted again, sitting in a cross-legged yoga pose on the seat, and pulled the elastic out of her hair, untangling the messy bun she’d made that morning. Her hair was getting long—maybe a bit too long now that it fell halfway down her back—and not for the first time she debated the merits of chopping it all off for some bold, edgy pixie cut. Maybe she’d dye it blue or something.
But her father had loved her hair, always doing it in long braids for he
r as a child and telling her it made her look like an elf from Lord of the Rings. Whenever she considered cutting it, she thought of his last attempts to braid it, when he was so weak he could barely lift his hands off the hospital mattress, and she chickened out.
Like cutting it off would strip away those memories.
Her hair was still damp—both from the morning’s shower and the sweat beading on the back of her neck—so she finger combed it then pulled a Dodgers baseball cap out of her bag and plopped it on her head, cramming a messy ponytail through the hole at the back.
The hat was another link to her father. He’d been a big baseball fan, which was how she wound up with her slightly too boyish nickname. Lou Whittaker had apparently been some impressive, famous baseball player a thousand years earlier, and her father had taken to calling her Lou as a kid. It stuck, and she liked it better than Eloise, so she began using it on herself, and after sixteen years the only people who regularly called her Eloise were her mother and her grandparents.
“Can we stop? I’m dying for a Coke.”
Her mother started to sigh, then stopped mid-breath, perhaps thinking better of it. “I saw a sign for a rest stop. We can pull in there for a break and to check the GPS, make sure we’re on track.”
Ten minutes later they pulled into a dusty gas station on the side of the road with honest-to-God tumbleweeds bumping up against a rusted old truck.
“I feel like we’re about to drive into a bad sequel for The Hills Have Eyes,” Lou muttered, kicking her feet into well-worn flip-flops before climbing out of the U-Haul.
“Which one was that?”
“Mutants who kidnapped tourists to make them into, like, baby-making machines.”
“Eloise. Who let you watch that?”
“Auntie Roan.” Lou smiled, knowing her mother shouldn’t be shocked. Auntie Roan was Lou’s only aunt and her mother’s younger sister. She had a bad habit of treating Lou more like a buddy than a child, so it should have come as no surprise she’d let teenage Lou watch horror movies.
The stuff she watched by herself on Netflix was ten times worse, but she didn’t bother pointing that out to her mom, lest the parental controls be enabled.
“I need to pee, I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t go too far,” her mother warned. “I’ll gas up and get us some drinks. Coke?”
“Diet Coke. And Twizzlers. Oh, and maybe a magazine?” Lou was already halfway around the back of the building, so she didn’t hear any of her mother’s protests.
Blessedly, the women’s washroom was unlocked, but the space within was the most dismal, disgusting restroom she’d encountered yet on their trip. Discarded wads of toilet paper stuck to the filthy floor tiles, and the two sinks were stained reddish brown with rust from the leaky faucets. An overhead fluorescent bulb flickered on and off like a strobe light, swinging faintly from two chains on the ceiling.
“Ugh.”
At times like this she was jealous of boys and their ability to pee standing up. If the outer area was any indication, the toilets weren’t going to be terribly inviting to sit on.
She tiptoed over the mess, her feet sticking to the floor in places, causing loud squelching noises when she tried to move forward.
Pee fast and get out, she told herself, angling into one of the stalls. As expected it was disgusting, with broken white tiles on the back wall and a large dent on the inside of the metal door like someone had kicked it with a lot of force.
Weird.
Lou did her business in a hurry and got out of the stall, touching as few things as possible. As she was washing her hands, the overhead light began to flicker more erratically before shutting off completely. Lou froze, the water in her sink still running, and wasn’t sure if she should keep washing or just get the hell out.
The metallic shriek of the stall door swinging settled it for her. There was no breeze or air conditioning in the bathroom, so the only thing that could set the doors swinging was someone else.
Since she’d been alone the whole time, she didn’t want to know who—or what—could have snuck in without her noticing.
Lou pivoted to grab the outside door, but when her hand touched the metal knob, the overhead fluorescents snapped back on, flooding the room with light. This time they were brighter than ever, painting the walls in a sickly green hue.
Unable to resist the pull of her curiosity, Lou looked back.
Empty.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she scolded herself.
She stepped back to the sink to finish washing her hands, making a mental promise she’d run like hell if the lights went off again, and splashed some cold water on her face.
Maybe she’d been stuck in the car too long and was starting to get a bit stir crazy. That was a thing, right?
She looked up and screamed.
Her father—her very, very dead father—was standing right behind her.
Chapter Two
Lou jerked her head around, but the space behind her was empty, and when she turned back to the mirror, he had vanished there as well.
Her heart was hammering, and her hands trembled violently. She took one last look over her shoulder, but he was gone. A figment of her imagination, perhaps, but a cruel one.
She knew for a fact her father was dead. She’d been sitting next to him at the hospital when the machine that monitored his heartbeats had stopped making its sad mechanical beeps and settled into a flat line.
Flatline.
One green measure that signified the distance between life and death, and she’d seen her father succumb to it. She’d been holding his hand when he simply ceased to be.
So there was no doubt in her mind he’d passed. She didn’t harbor any fantasies that he’d be walking back into her life. Yet she’d just seen him standing with her, and that had felt as real to her as his passing had.
She staggered out of the bathroom and into the too-bright sunshine of the Nevada afternoon, blinking away her tears by staring right at the sun. Her hands were still damp because she’d been in too much of a hurry to flee to bother with a paper towel.
Wiping her hands on her pants, she turned back to look at the unassuming wood door with a Ladies sign on the outside, half-expecting her father’s ghost to burst out and start howling at her.
Nothing happened.
This had to be a sure sign she was losing her mind. Leaving Fresno had been the last straw, and her fragile psyche had decided to abandon ship. That was a totally valid explanation.
“I was starting to worry you’d fallen in,” her mother called out, leaning against the hood of the U-Haul and inspecting their new GPS.
Lou plodded towards her, still too shaken up to manage a quippy retort. “Sorry.”
“Can you read this thing? The only thing I managed to do was change the voice setting so now it’s William Shatner.” Her mother grinned, squinting at the small screen as if it was written in a different language. For all Lou knew it was, since her mother had once accidentally switched it to Mandarin.
Taking the small box from her mother, she tapped the screen to zoom out so they could have a better look at the road ahead.
“Another sixty miles, then we start going south,” Lou translated.
“Thanks, baby.” Her mother placed a kiss on Lou’s cheek and climbed back into the truck, reattaching the GPS to the dashboard mount. Captain Kirk told them to turn right as soon as possible.
When she opened the door, a plastic bag was waiting on Lou’s seat containing a bottle of Diet Coke, a big bag of Twizzlers, some sugar-free gummy bears and a new issue of National Geographic. Normally Lou might have sneered at the magazine and asked why her mother hadn’t gotten her Cosmo, but she took it gladly, without argument. There was an article on a lost tribe of villagers in Borneo that sounded like just the thing to distract her from what had happened in the bathroom.
She kicked off her shoes, propped her feet on the dash then tore into the plastic package with the Twizzlers, handing
her mother one before popping a second in her own mouth and gnawing on the artificial strawberry sweetness.
“You good?”
Lou wondered if her shaky fear was evident on her face, and tried to focus harder on the magazine. “Sure, why wouldn’t I be?”
“Well…you didn’t complain about the reading material, and you offered me candy without my having to ask. Since you are still a teenager—last I checked—this might be a sign of serious head trauma. So again, are you okay?”
Lou shifted uncomfortably under the new scrutiny. She hadn’t argued about the magazine because she hadn’t wanted to talk. Now that plan had backfired by arousing her mother’s suspicions.
“I’m fine. Just stir crazy, I guess.”
“I hope you had a decent stretch. I want to get a good long way before we take another break.” Her mom started up the U-Haul and made a big show of carefully backing away from the pumps, still not all that comfortable with the giant vehicle.
“I’ve got this now.” Lou waved the yellow magazine and continued to chew on her licorice. She rifled through her messenger bag and wrestled her iPod out, untangling the veritable string theory her headphones had transformed into. Popping the white buds into her ears before her mother had an opportunity to complain, she cranked the volume up just loud enough she could claim to be ignorant of anything said around her.
Before she’d moved, Priss had made her a playlist with enough songs to last the whole trip. Everything from sixties-era pop songs to eighties hair metal, with a bit of Jack Johnson and sad-boy-with-guitar songs mixed in to create a perfect sort of chaos.
As they pulled onto the highway, Motley Crue sang “Kickstart My Heart”, but Lou didn’t think she needed any extra assistance getting her blood pumping.
She closed her eyes and saw her father’s face in the mirror, his cheeks hollowed from the ravages of disease and his skin an ashen shade that marked him somewhere between the living and the dead. It was how she remembered seeing him last when he’d still been alive.