by Etta Faire
“What?”
“I think you should call me when you find that recorder. I might have a few select passages to read yet.”
I never ransacked my house faster looking for something.
I decided I shouldn’t interrupt her as she read each entry into my speakerphone. But it was really hard not to, especially with entries like this one, written the day before the accident:
“July 19, 1957,
“Dear Diary, I am so mad I could scream. The woodcutting shed burned down this morning with all of Daddy’s moonshine in it, and I know why. I should tell someone. I should. But I can’t.
“I’ve never seen Daddy so upset. He used every curse word in the book about a hundred times. I feel so heartbroken for him. All his hard work.
“And it’s all because Freddie and Myles were mad at me. I saw Freddie sneaking out of the shed last night. So I confronted him. I know. Dumb move. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was mad.
“He denied getting moonshine and even had the nerve to say no one else was in that shed, but I could hear Myles sneezing on the other side of the door. Freddie must think I’m stupid.
“And this time, they’ve gone too far. Apparently, those two killed a deer off-season. Freddie admitted it. He didn’t even care. He said it was an accident, that he was just shooting at cans and trees, but who knows? I told him he didn’t own this country club and he needed to stop acting like it, just because his family’s rich and one of the town’s founders. I told him I’d had enough. I was going to tell on him, to his father and the board.
“And then the shed burned down. I guess he showed me.”
“Wow, Mildred,” I said. “So, the good ole boys club already knew how to intimidate people and shut them up, even as teenagers.” I suddenly remembered I was still recording, and made a mental note to take my comment out.
“You wanna know what really burns my butt?” She didn’t give me time to respond. “That was the last time I saw Freddie. I looked for him at the dance because I was getting up enough nerve to confront him about that shed and the fire, but I never saw him.”
Could it be because Freddie and his father were already dead? Or already in the Caribbean?
“I tried to tell that to the board when they went to fire my father. I never saw Freddie at the party, much less getting drunk. I tried to get Debbie to tell them that too. But she said she couldn’t remember. That she might’ve seen Freddie there.”
I gulped. This was why they didn’t talk for years.
“Next thing I know, town’s getting that library she always wanted. I think she’d saved all of 150 dollars before the generous, anonymous donors stepped in. They broke ground pretty much right after the accident.”
My stomach sank. It was true. The library had been built on lies. Mildred’s shaky voice echoed through the room. “She was going to be my maid of honor that fall. But I couldn’t. I rescinded the offer and uninvited her to my wedding.” Her voice broke when she said that last part.
“Wow. I’m sorry. How’d you two ever make up?”
“It’s a long story, but when Debbie’s husband got sick, I guess we both decided life was too short. We were different people then, too.”
I’d heard Mr. Nebitt passed away in the 1990s from cancer, which meant Mildred and Mrs. Nebitt hadn’t spoken from 1957 t0 199o-something. Those women could hold a serious grudge.
“I should read you the stuff I wrote when I got home from the dance. Hold on,” she said. I could hear her turning pages.
“And boy was Mr. Donovan mad. He grabbed my arm after the dance and twisted it. He said he had a boat full of drunken teenagers now. And that his friend Mr. Linder was especially mad about how drunk Freddie was. He said if anything happened to them it was my fault for being a poor chaperone.”
I interrupted her. “So, after establishing that Freddie Linder was at the dance, even though you say he wasn’t, and establishing that he had drunken teenagers on his boat, even though he probably didn’t, Mr. Donovan even went so far as to imply that something terrible might happen, which it did. That’s pretty suspicious.”
Mildred stopped reading. “You know what? Benny wants to check up on Parker anyway. Boy’s in his thirties, but he still treats him like he’s seven. When’s this seance?”
I told her all the details, except the most important one: that it had been canceled, or I was assuming so. My two days had passed, and no tickets had been sold.
“And the whole town’s really showing up? I heard you had a lot of people last time.”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” I lied again. “All the locals. All of them… us,” I corrected myself, forgetting for a second that I was a local.
“I’ll be there with my diary. There are things that need to be said all over again, in person. My dad’s reputation still matters to me.”
As soon as we hung up, I threw my head back into the cushions of my couch and closed my eyes.
How on earth was I going to get the seance going again, and the whole town to show up?
As soon as I opened my eyes, I realized Gloria was hovering by the fireplace. I could tell by her vibrant coloring that she was more than ready for our second channeling. I wondered if I was.
I gave her the one-minute sign. “After dinner and a shower,” I said, dreading the whole routine I had to go through to shower, which still included a swimsuit. I needed to figure out how to hang Rosalie’s stinky strands, and fast.
Chapter 20
Birds of a Feather
After finishing the freezer-burned pizza I found wedged behind the ice cube bin and the discolored frozen vegetables I threw in just to say I was eating healthy, I made a fire and plopped onto the couch cushions in front of it. It was only 9:30, but with my pajamas on, it felt like midnight. I tucked my feet under the throw and waited for Gloria to materialize again, allowing my eyes to close and my brain to relax until she did.
Was I awake enough to do this channeling tonight? I was about to see the birds up close, see the things that had terrorized this town. I needed to concentrate.
Jackson appeared by my side. “You don’t have to do this. I know you’ve been having eyesight flickering problems and dizziness.”
“I can handle it,” I said. I didn’t tell him that I was also having hallucinations. And that I kind of liked it.
“You need to take care of yourself in order to be strong against this curse. That eyesight problem you’re experiencing is a sign that something’s not right.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said in much the same way Gloria had to Mrs. Nebitt just before she guzzled the punch in 1957. “I’m well aware of the consequences, Dad.”
Gloria appeared. “If you want to do this some other time, that’s totally fine. No rush. I have all the time in the world.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I have a seance coming up a week from Saturday and I need you there, too, as well rested as you can be.” I turned to Jackson. “I’ve already decided. After the upcoming seance, I’m taking a break from channelings and seances. At least a full month. I hate to admit it, but you’re right. Connecting with the other world is having a toll on me. I need to start eating better, getting more sleep, maybe find a good therapist or use my new gym membership…”
“Spin classes sounding good, huh?” Jackson asked.
“Please stop with that,” I said. “You want to cause a rift between Justin and me. And it’s not going to work this time. I’m not a stupid, impressionable girl anymore, and you… you’re not even a person.” I turned to Gloria. “I’m ready.”
I closed my eyes and let my mind go blank. The clock in the dining room ticked in the background and I tried to focus on it and my breathing. Tick. Tick. Tick. Inhale. Exhale.
I never even felt her entering this time. I opened my eyes when the ticking of the clock finally turned to something tapping against a glass somewhere. The air felt warm now, humid and stagnant. Hot, actually. Didn’t they have air conditioning in the 1950s?
I was in a dark green accented bedroom with pale white furniture and orange shag carpet. I shuffled over to the window where a little gray bird thumped the glass again and again.
“Hello there,” Gloria said to the bird. “You birds sure are strange on the lake this year. Why is that, huh?”
The bird tapped out an answer onto the glass, making Gloria giggle.
Gloria’s window overlooked the lake. An already loud motor got louder in the background as a couple of speedboats whooshed by.
She touched the window and the bird flew over to greet her hand. It must’ve been close to a hundred degrees outside. A chubby brunette bounced in from the hall, wearing a bright red swimsuit and carrying a striped beach bag. “Come on,” she said. “My dad said we can watch the ski show.”
I looked at the 15-year-old in front of me, round face, freckles, braces, no makeup. I barely recognized her. Nettie, before her Marilyn Monroe phase. “I bet there’s gonna be a lot of boys there.” She let out a little squeal and held up her bag. “I brought makeup. We can put it on in the boat. Come on. Hurry.”
Pulling Nettie into the bedroom, Gloria pointed toward the little bird still sitting at the window. “You have to see this, Nettie. I think this bird is trying to communicate with me. I feel like Cinderella. Watch.”
Nettie scrunched her face. “You’re acting like weirder-ella. Stop noticing birds like my mother and go get dressed. You’re starting to worry me. Of course there are birds. They’re all over the place. Geez.”
Nettie left after telling Gloria to hurry.
Gloria pulled open a drawer and riffled through the neatly folded pants and shirts until she found the largest floral swimsuit I’d ever seen out. Thick and heavy, the suit made the $169 one at the Knobby Creek look like a controversial Sports Illustrated cover. “This awful thing was my mother’s old suit,” she said to me. “I was too busy with finals and didn’t have time to get a new one. So now, I’ve gotta make due.”
She locked the door before slipping out of her clothes and into the suit. It was just as scratchy and heavy as it looked. She stared at herself in the mirror and I was amazed at how different she looked than she did three years later at the dance. She was shorter and thinner. Her hair hung flat and lifeless, her face free of makeup. She puffed out her chest and turned to the side. The awful bright green and red flowers seemed to hang off her almost non-existent curves like they were trying to slink away from a bad idea.
Gloria took a deep breath and walked out into the hallway where Nettie quickly fell into a long, hard laugh, stumbling against the back wall. She made a twirling motion with her finger and Gloria spun around to show her the droopy butt part too. “Okay, good one. Now go take off your mom’s swimsuit and get dressed into your real one, you goof. And be quick about it.”
“My mom’s making me wear this one,” Gloria said.
Nettie yanked Gloria down the hall by the arm, the carpet scratched at our bare feet. She practically threw me into her room, which was small and bright yellow with the same shag carpet as the hall. Without speaking, she yanked a gray hard plastic suitcase from under her bed, plopped it onto the mattress and unlatched it. There were only a few items in there.
“My secret stash,” Nettie said, pulling out a black bikini with its sales tags still on. It was large compared to the bikinis of today, but very small compared to what Gloria had on. She snatched it and hid it behind her back.
“You’re not serious,” she said.
“Our mothers don’t have to know everything we do, you know?” Nettie winked.
Gloria’s heart raced. I could tell partly because she was thrilled and excited and partly because she was so nervous she was going to puke.
Nettie went on. “When it comes to moms, you gotta start them out slow, like boiling a frog. This summer, a bikini. Makeup by fall, that we don’t have to sneak. And by next summer, they’ll be ready for us to get a dye job.” Nettie’s smile was broad, already straight from her braces.
As Gloria got dressed, I heard something just outside the window again. This time it sounded like a low growling sound. I wanted Gloria to rush to the window and look, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“This trip was different,” Gloria said to me in her head as she examined her bikini in the mirror, sucking in her stomach so much her ribs protruded. “I saw a lot of birds, everywhere. Weird ones. Ones that seemed to watch you and try to communicate with you. Others that were large and scary. Nettie’s mom said they were probably mutants.”
The bikini bottoms were pretty much shorts and the top was a large bra-like thing, but she felt very self-conscious, almost as if she’d rather be wearing her mom’s suit; I could tell. Blood rushed to our shared cheeks. She opened the drawer and took out a short striped cover-up that seemed a lot like a long, sleeveless shirt. When we came out, Nettie made us take it off so she could see the suit.
“You look good,” she said with a slight tone of jealousy Gloria enjoyed. “Better than I do in it. Man, don’t let me eat anything else today. I’m going on diet pills as soon as we get home.” She pinched a large chunk of her stomach in her fingers. “Stupid baby fat.”
“You look cute,” Gloria said, snapping up her cover-up all the way to the top again.
It was a short walk down to the pier where we carefully stepped into a large green pontoon that was tied to the dock. I realized where we were immediately. Just a few houses from Mildred’s, around the bend from the country club.
A small, skinny brunette about ten with short cropped hair and freckles ran down the backyard’s hill to the dock and over to the boat. “Mom says to take me with you.”
I knew the girl had to be June.
Nettie shook her head at her cousin. “Liar. Your mom’s playing cards next door, same as my mom. She didn’t say anything. Scram. You’ll watch the fireworks with them.”
The girl stuck out her lip at Gloria. “But I want to see the ski show too.”
“Then talk your mom into taking you,” Nettie said, backing the boat out.
“Glor-i-a, you always say we’ll do stuff and then we never do,” June yelled, arms folded. “Us against the world, remember?”
“It’s okay, Bug. We’ll get ‘em next time. I promise,” Gloria yelled over the boat engine.
“You always say that,” the girl yelled back, kicking her shoe along the planks of the pier.
Gloria talked to me in her head. “That’s the part that hurts the most. The night of the accident… I never got a chance to say good-bye to Bug. All she ever wanted was to hang out with me.” Her voice trailed off. “We should’ve done more together.”
The pontoon was loud and slow, and we lazily made our way over to the country club with the warm summer breeze blowing lightly along our cheeks. The smell of mud, gas, and pollen surrounded us. The lake was so different. Only a few larger houses even existed, most were modest-sized two-stories. I tried to look over at Mildred’s when we passed it, but I could only see where Gloria's eyes went that day, and she was checking the trees.
“There they are. Look,” she shouted to Nettie, pointing. I screamed a little in my head as four large black birds with crusty, thick, yellowish white beaks swooped down by the boat. They were huge, bigger than I expected.
One was as big as a large cat, only thinner and mangier looking. And another had a twisted, thick beak with a sharp jagged end.
“My mom can’t stop talking about these mutant ravens,” Nettie said, pushing the lever on the boat. The motor hummed and picked up speed. “Just don’t do anything stupid like feed them.”
“Like I want to lose a finger today,” Gloria replied, making her cousin smile.
The boat went faster, but not by much, and the birds had no problems keeping up. They were very good flyers, easily maneuvering around with the boat. We were close enough to see the pock marks along their beaks and their cold, dead black eyes that seemed to look straight through Gloria, to me, like they knew I was there.
An especially mangy look
ing one next to me squawked loudly by my side growing dangerously close to Gloria’s face.
She screamed and laughed as the boat went around the bend, heading for the country club at a high speed, losing the birds once again.
The birds did a final inspection of our boat and flew off toward the crowd that was starting to form along the pier.
“Those weren’t even the biggest ones,” Gloria said to me. “You’ll see later.”
Oddly, the country club looked largely the same as it did today, except in 1954 it also included a large wooden building to the side that resembled a cross between a warehouse and a barn.
“You remember the dance hall,” Gloria said to me in our head when we passed it. A shiver went up my spine as I remembered that night. They would be dead in three short years from this memory. “Over there’s the ice cream shop and the record store.”
It was like a casual tour of a place I knew well but hardly recognized. Like a page out of Mildred’s book, Landover: Then and Now.
Much of the water was roped off with buoys. And the piers were mostly outlined with boats and filled with people sitting on lawn chairs, sporting sunglasses, oversized hats, and zinc noses.
Nettie was an expert driver. She easily pulled the boat into a small spot along the dock next to the ice cream shop. “Perfect,” she said. “We can get ice cream on the way out.” She winked as she tied the boat up. “Don’t say it. My diet doesn’t start ’til we back.”
Nettie pulled off her cover-up, sucking in her stomach and puffing out her chest. “Come on,” she said. She tugged on Gloria's shirt-dress as soon as she stepped off the boat. “We can’t attract boys without a little bait.”
Gloria unbuttoned the first button while Nettie rolled her eyes and strutted through the crowd of people, practically pushing her way through. “At least hurry up, already. We only have until dinner.”