Autumn
Page 3
“Are you calling Granny Elle a witch?”
Her mom snorted and held her hand out for a handful of Cheetos. “Pretend I didn’t laugh at that.”
“Then I’ll pretend you didn’t imply it.”
When they finally pulled into Granny Elle’s driveway, it was near sundown on Saturday night. The house was situated on the outskirts of town and set back in the woods, so it was impossible to see the road from the house and vice versa. When they wound up the gravel path, Lou was sure there should be flashes of lightning in the background and a howling, moody soundtrack on the radio.
The place looked like it had fallen out of a Gothic horror novel and been transplanted into West Texas.
It was Victorian in style with a big wraparound porch that was at complete odds with the two turrets on either side of the house’s front wall. The turrets rose to points, with pristine green shingles blending into the color of the surrounding trees. One roof had a weather vane shaped like a howling wolf, and the other had a tall spire sticking up into the air.
Juxtaposed with the old architecture was the satellite dish mounted under a window on the turret wall.
The white paint had faded to a gray shade over the years, but it didn’t appear to be peeling. Considering the house was owned by a woman in her eighties it was in remarkably good shape.
Lou swung her messenger bag over her shoulder and tucked her hair into her Dodgers cap. She followed her mom from the truck up to the front porch, but before either of them could knock, the screen door swung open and the familiar figure of Granny Elle filled the frame.
“Well ahn’t you two dahlings a sight for sore eyes,” she drawled, drawing them in for a tight hug, showing surprising might for someone of her stature. Granny Elle was short and plump, her white hair framing her face in quintessential grandma curls. She hadn’t yet started using glasses, claiming her eyesight was still perfect. But otherwise she might as well have been the photo in the dictionary next to grandmother.
Dress her in red and white fur and she could have easily passed for Mrs. Claus.
“Are y’all hungry? I wasn’t sure when you’d arrive, so I’ve just been cooking all day.” She chuckled and wiped her spotless hands on the apron she had strung around her waist. “Oh my, Miss Eloise. Take off that nasty cap and let Granny Elle have a good look at you.”
Lou obliged, removing the hat and shaking her hair loose so it tumbled around her shoulders.
“My my my.” Granny Elle looked her over, pinching her chin so Lou was forced to turn her head side to side. She felt like one of the dogs at those silly exhibitions on TV. Like she was a pug whose full name was Lady Princess Whittington Rosebud Arabesque the Fifth or something. She smiled politely at her grandma. “Well, you’ve become a beautiful young woman, you know.” She said beautiful as bee-oooo-tiful.
“Thank you, Granny Elle.”
The smell of fresh bread wafted out from the kitchen, and Lou’s stomach growled.
“Mary Anne, haven’t you been feeding this girl?” Granny Elle scolded.
“More often than you could possibly imagine,” Lou’s mother countered, mirroring Lou’s patient smile.
“Well come on in, ladies. Food’s ready. We’ll unload you once we’ve eaten. I asked some of the gents in town to stop by in the morning to help with the furniture. It simply wouldn’t do to have us girls doing heavy lifting.” She clucked her tongue at the very idea. “And Miss Eloise, don’t you worry. I called that new school of yours to make sure your records came through, and they ahh just so excited to have you. I made sure the nurse knew what to expect.”
Lou frowned. She knew Granny Elle meant well, but she didn’t like the idea of her grandmother discussing her health with a total stranger. Provided she took good care of herself, the nurse never needed to be involved in the situation, so why was Granny Elle making such a big deal out of it?
“Elle, you didn’t need to do that. I’d already confirmed the transfer weeks ago, and I spoke to the nurse about her medical needs.” Lou’s mom was trying to keep her composure—Lou recognized the strain around her mouth—but if Granny Elle noticed the annoyance, she didn’t acknowledge it.
“Thanks,” Lou said again, hoping to diffuse the pressure brewing between her mother and grandma.
After Granny Elle had stuffed them with homemade buttermilk biscuits and pulled pork—and her grandma had applauded her for not being one of those vegetarian hippies—they started hauling bags and small boxes off the U-Haul. Or, more specifically, Lou and her mom unloaded bags and boxes while Granny Elle offered them suggestions on how to best use their knees when lifting.
Since it was already getting dark, they focused primarily on boxes labeled Necessity, and the rest could wait until Granny Elle’s manly assistants arrived in the morning.
The big house was three stories tall and contained dozens of rooms, so Lou was grateful to learn she and her mother wouldn’t be staying in side-by-side bedrooms. Her mother’s suite was on the second floor at the top of the stairs and had its own small bathroom. She helped her mom dump some duffle bags and small boxes inside the door but was too anxious to see her own space for her to focus on what the décor looked like.
“Eloise, I thought—seeing as you’re a teenager and all—you might want a little privacy from us silly old ladies.” Granny Elle was redeeming herself by the minute. “I had Russell put up some drywall in the attic. Made sort of a loft space. That’s still hip, right?” Her grandmother winked and started up the stairs. At the back of the main hall on the third floor was a small, narrow wooden door. Granny Elle cracked it open to reveal a wrought-iron spiral staircase.
She stepped back and let Lou go up first.
Lou jogged up the steps, each footfall ringing against the metal, until she emerged in the attic. The stairs were built into one of the two turrets, and someone had done a remarkable job remodeling the space to keep it from looking too much like an attic.
The walls were newly painted in an off-white color that reminded Lou of the inside of fresh bread, and along the inner the curve of the turret, a window seat had been built with a bookshelf underneath it and a stunning view of the woods surrounding Granny Elle’s home.
“Oh, Elle, are you sure this space isn’t too big for her?” Mom asked, surveying the room.
“Nonsense. I have so much room, and she deserves a space of her own. Besides, I had Russell install an intercom system, so we can holler on up whenever we need her.”
Easily half of the existing attic had been used, meaning the room ran the entire front length of the house, giving Lou not one but two turret views—the second had a big, overstuffed armchair in it facing out to focus on the woods. There were built-in shelves and dressers, and in the center of the room, under a bank of windows, was a brand-new queen-size bed in a wrought-iron frame, just like the stairs.
For someone who had spent her entire life sleeping on a twin, the bed was the most inviting thing in the whole room. Lou had no idea how someone had gotten a mattress that size up here, but she didn’t care. It was hers now.
Lou flopped facedown on the bed, breathing in the smell of line-dried cotton sheets, and for the first time this trip she thought, Maybe this will all be okay.
The next day while her mom and grandmother caught up over coffee, Lou started hauling more of her boxes from the truck up the three flights of stairs to her new room. By the time Granny Elle left for church at noon—giving them a pass just this once—Lou was already dirty, sweaty and winded.
She was also seeing things. Whenever she passed the mirror in the stairwell up to her bedroom she swore she caught a glimpse of someone in the glass. Every time it happened, her heart leapt to her throat and scared the crap out of her. But when she stopped to check, it was just her own dust-smeared face.
After her encounter in the rest stop bathroom, she was probably letting her already overactive imagination get the best of her. But all the same, she figured it couldn’t hurt to take the mirror down.
Granny Elle introduced Lou and her mother to several of the “nicest, most respected men in Poisonfoot” and showed the men to the U-Haul. She explained that Mary Anne’s items would go in the green bedroom while anything marked Lou belonged in the attic. She gave Lou a scornful look when she saw the nickname scrawled over half the boxes.
As far as Lou was concerned it was still better than Wheezy, which was what her middle-school crush Brian Fowler had called her when he learned her real first name. Needless to say she didn’t have a crush on him for long after that.
To make her grandmother tone down the evil eye she quietly said, “Lou was what Dad called me.”
Granny Elle’s expression softened immediately. “It’s not terribly ladylike,” she commented, but said nothing else. Granny Elle wouldn’t be calling her Lou any time soon, but perhaps now she wouldn’t look like she was sucking on a lemon whenever someone else said it.
Several hours later the U-Haul was empty and the boxes had all been stowed in their designated spaces. Lou’s bedroom looked like a cardboard fort, and she marveled at how she’d managed to accumulate so much stuff in only sixteen years of living.
She stared at the piles of boxes and felt all her motivation from earlier vanish. Just so she could claim she did something, she dragged a box of books over to the window seat and started sorting them onto the shelves below.
Outside, the early evening sky had clouded over, and a light rain pattered against the windows. So much for her idea to walk into town. When the last book was out of the box, she climbed into the seat, loving the squishy cushions Granny Elle had chosen, and looked into the surrounding woods.
Lou was half lost in her absent thoughts of Fresno—she would need to email Priss photos of her new room—when something on the ground outside caught her eye.
At first she thought she was imagining it because of the way the raindrops were sliding down the pane. She didn’t think any larger animals would wander so close to the yard. Lou leaned nearer to the window until she fogged the glass with her breath. Frustrated, she unlatched the lock and opened the window, letting the frame swing in towards her.
Raindrops dampened her face and hair, plopping loudly on the cushions. She squinted to see through the sheets of raindrops pummeling the dirt with increasing ferocity. Lou was almost willing to admit she’d imagined the whole thing, when a small brownish-gray creature emerged from the tree line and glanced upwards.
A wolf, she thought first.
But this animal was too small to be a wolf. It was more slight of build, looking a lot more like a pet dog gone wild.
Coyote, her brain offered.
Yes, that seemed more accurate, though she couldn’t recall ever seeing one in person before. The coyote looked up at her, and for a second Lou was positive it was staring at her, judging her, if such a thing were possible.
“Get,” bellowed Granny Elle from the porch. “You know you ain’t allowed here.”
The coyote shifted its attention from Lou to her grandmother, and raised its lip in a sort of half-threatening dismissive sneer. Lou had never seen an animal act so human before.
The sound of a rifle being loaded made the animal’s ears flatten, and once again Granny Elle warned, “You go on now. Get out of here and don’t you come back.” She fired a shot into the ground near its feet, showing it she meant business.
Growling at her, the coyote took off running into the woods.
Lou watched it go, her face wet with rain. She waited until she heard Granny Elle retreat from the porch and shut the door, waited until the last traces of the coyote were gone and Lou was just staring at the swaying trees.
She’d heard people yell at wild animals before, but never with such anger. And why had her grandmother said the coyote wasn’t allowed here?
What the hell was going on?
A dark path unfolded before her, and Lou followed it without much thought. Her bare feet sank into the spongy moss and peat along the forest floor as she wandered along beneath the moonlight. The forest gave way to a small clearing, and Lou stopped in her tracks.
There in the tall grass was a woman wearing an old-fashioned purple dress, her dark brown hair wound in a crown around her head. Her eyes shone with tears, and cradled in her arms was a young boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, his pale face still and the front of his shirt coated in blood.
The woman was sobbing, shaking the boy gently, and he lolled in her arms but made no sign of responding.
He was very clearly dead.
Lou sucked in a breath, the cool dew of the grass feeling like shards of ice under the pads of her feet.
The woman buried her face against the boy. When she sat back, wailing, her cheeks were smeared with the child’s blood, giving her a feral, inhuman look.
When Lou jerked awake in the safety of her bedroom, she could still see that wild, half-mad expression like a hazy memory imprinted on the inside of her eyelids.
Chapter Five
It won’t be so bad, Lou told herself, parked in front of the brick edifice of Poisonfoot High School. Students were milling around on the front lawn. Granny Elle had explain that PSH served as the main high school for several surrounding small towns, so some of the students might not have seen each other for months.
Lou shifted nervously in the front seat of her grandmother’s Oldsmobile. They weren’t sure when she or her mother would get a car, and the Cutlass was in pristine condition since Granny Elle rarely used it. For the time being it would serve as a family car.
A very short time being, Lou hoped.
She wanted her own car again. She knew it was selfish, and she understood why she’d had to give it up, but she missed the freedom of being able to move around on her own.
Though Poisonfoot was so small, a bike would probably serve that purpose just as well.
It wasn’t like she had any friends to pick up.
Her mom patted her knee for comfort. “You have your insulin?” she asked.
Lou rolled her eyes. “Yes.”
“And test strips?”
“Mom.”
“I wouldn’t be a very good mother if I didn’t ask, Eloise.”
“You’re a very good mother,” Lou replied. “And yes, insulin, test strips, and even a granola bar. I’m good, I promise.”
Her mom kissed her cheek. “That’s my girl. Have fun today.”
“That’s highly improbable.”
“Well, at least try.”
Lou climbed out of the car, hugging her messenger bag to her stomach. She’d tried leaving the house with her Dodgers cap on, but Granny Elle had put a kibosh on that plan before she was through the kitchen.
“Young ladies don’t wear ball caps. And they most certainly don’t wear ball caps for non-Texas teams,” she’d scolded.
Lou would root for the Astros or Rangers over her dead body, so she’d left the hat at home and allowed her grandmother to remove her ponytail holder as well. Her hair hung down to her lower back in waves, and she felt the urge to tie it up. Or braid it. Anything to make it less obvious.
But Lou was pretty sure no matter what she did with her hair, she was going to stick out like a sore thumb.
Her mom had just pulled away from the curb when the first person noticed her. She saw the awareness spread like a ripple until the entire population of the school currently on the lawn was staring at her and doing a poor job of pretending they weren’t.
She was about ready to lower her head and make a dash for the entrance when a tall girl—really tall, like pushing six feet in flats—emerged from the group and blocked her path.
“New girl,” the giantess commented, as though this was Lou’s new name. “You’re Elle Whittaker’s granddaughter, right?”
“Yeah.”
The girl offered her a hand, which was something Lou was more accustomed to adults doing when they introduced themselves. “I’m Marnie Jackson.”
“Oh.” Lou shook her hand firmly, remembering her father’s wisdom to never give a limp handshake. “I think your dad helped move some of my boxes on Sunday.”
Marnie nodded enthusiastically. “The implausibly named Jackson Jackson. He probably said his name was Jake.”
“And I’d thought Jake Jackson was bad,” Lou replied, hoping it wasn’t the wrong thing to say.
Marnie was pretty in a nonstandard way, and looked more like an athlete than a typical Texas pageant girl. Or at least what Lou had imagined a pageant girl to look like. Admittedly most of Lou’s notions about Texas were from TV and movies, so she wasn’t sure what to expect from anyone.
With straight, white-blonde hair and big blue eyes, the only thing that kept Marnie from being stereotypical were her hard features. She had broad shoulders and a strong nose and chin, making her look tough instead of dainty.
Her handshake would have done Lou’s dad proud.
“Do you have a name, New Girl?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. I’m Lou.”
“Lou?”
“It’s short for Eloise.”
“Ahhh, now Lou makes more sense. Well, Lou Whittaker. Welcome to your new school. Don’t mind the gawkers, they should get used to you at some point before graduation.”
Lou noticed with Marnie’s arrival people had stopped staring so boldly and were now casting surreptitious glances at her while whispering.
Marnie looped an arm around Lou’s shoulder and guided them both towards the entrance of the school, waving to the group she’d been standing with prior to this surreal interaction.
“Tell me about yourself, Lou-not-Eloise.”