“What’ll you have?” Nora the waitress asked. It used to be she would chat up Grace about music and boys and movies. Nora was in her late thirties, unmarried, but still desperate to seem young, and to that point, Grace had indulged her. But since Grace was blamed by the whole town for Debbie and Phil’s deaths, all wells of friendliness had dried up, and Grace wasn’t in the mood to pretend anymore that Nora was anything but a spinster trying to recapture the past.
“Hot chocolate and a slice of pumpkin pie,” Grace said.
“To go?” Nora asked.
“I’ve taken my jacket off, haven’t I?” Grace sniped. “What do you think?”
The two older men who worked at the feed and farm supply store down the road were sitting at the counter. They both looked back over their shoulders after the exchange between Grace and Nora, lingering on Grace when Nora walked off to complete the order.
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Grace growled at them.
The two men quickly turned their attention back to their cups of coffee.
Nora returned with a plain cup of hot chocolate, no whipped cream or marshmallows, depositing it in front of Grace with such force that a little sloshed out the side onto the saucer. “I can’t have you antagonizing the customers, missy,” Nora said.
Grace ignored her, touching her hand to the side of the cup placed in front of her. It was ice cold. “I said hot chocolate,” Grace said. “This is cold.”
“Aren’t you just the queen of everything?” Nora snatched the cup from the table, spilling even more of the lumpy, room temperature liquid in the process.
“You’re old enough to be James Dean’s mother,” Grace snapped back. “It’s pathetic for you to carry on about him the way you do.”
Nora fled from the exchange with the lion’s share of hurt feelings. Grace stood and began collecting her things, certain Dennis would be on his way out of the kitchen to ask her to leave. The portly chef was more than a little in love with Nora, even though she was a good seven years older than him and not remotely interested, but Grace had seen him throw a punch or two to defend her honor and didn’t doubt he’d throw her out once Nora told him what Grace said.
“Can’t blame the clients,” one of the two old men at the counter said, loud enough to be heard by everyone in the diner. “Who wants to buy dairy from a man who has a sexual deviant for a daughter?” Both older gentlemen turned to look at grace in unison, as if to make sure the comment had landed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Grace furrowed her brow at them in a withering glare that didn’t seem to faze either of them.
“The way I heard it,” the other old man said, “the Corker girl wanted to sabotage the relationship because she was in love with the Poole girl.”
Before the comment could even sink in, Dennis and Nora emerged from the kitchen. The heavyset cook grabbed her by the arm and the back of the coat, roughly escorting Grace to the door held open by Nora. “She kissed me!” Grace shouted back at the two old men before being shoved roughly back onto the street.
“You want me to split so bad? You’ve got it, squares,” Grace shouted at the diner and street in general. “You couldn’t pay me to stay in this dump.”
She was starving in a way that only a big bag of movie popcorn could feed and needed her jets cooled in a way that only a double-feature matinee would. The movie theater wasn’t any nicer to her than anywhere else lately, but she just needed to get past the ticket booth and concession counter without blowing her stack at anyone and she’d have it made in the shade for four hours of cinematic bliss.
2.
Grace watched the double-feature, a few news reels, and some animated shorts for good measure, polishing off a large popcorn and some Milk Duds during. She walked out to the satisfying darkness that she came to associate with a day well spent at the movies. The clock on the top of the courthouse let her know it would still be another half hour until her father would be done with work, possibly even an hour considering he tended to stay late on Fridays as though he was going to miss the place until Monday.
Grace strolled the streets back to the office building of her former employment. She was a little chilly, but otherwise content in her new life direction and even a little glad for the firing from a tedious job she despised. Perhaps she would look for work in a flower shop or as a perfume counter girl at a department store when she got settled in New Haven. Rather than stand idly in front of the site of her former employment, she wandered across the street to the little park she used to eat lunch in. The benches all had a smooth sheen of ice from the melt off of the day refreezing when the sun went down and the fountain in the middle of the park, the one with the bronze statue of an angel blowing a trumpet called Vigil’s Hope, was drained and tented-over in translucent plastic sheeting to protect it from the ravages of a Vermont winter.
Grace sat on one of the benches ringing in the fountain, slipped her pack of cigarettes from her purse, and lit one up, blowing the smoke mixed with the steam of her breath up into the clear night sky. She cocked her head to one side, gazing at the statue of Vigil’s Hope in its plastic prison. When she’d first move to Vigil’s Rest she thought the bronze angel was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. The years hadn’t been kind to Vigil’s Hope though and she was beginning to show in spots of oxidation and weathering.
Grace glanced back over her shoulder to the front of the office building, lit up by the streetlights. Her father’s car wasn’t there yet. Sweeping her gaze back to front, she almost missed the figure standing on the edge of the baseball field. She glanced back quickly, but couldn’t be sure of what she saw. Grace flicked her cigarette into the snow beside the bench and began walking toward the fence separating the main body of the park from the playing fields and the woods beyond.
The figure, whoever it was, didn’t seem to be wearing winter appropriate clothes. The girl was kicking her way through the snow along the edge of the fields and the tree line with what looked to be bare feet. Grace glanced back to the street to look for her father’s car, again, finding it not there. She sighed and pushed open the wooden slat gate to allow her access to the trampled snowy field where boys had been having snowball fights until the snow became too dry and powdery for the activity anymore. Her shoes, already allowing far too much cold in for her taste, slipped along the packed snow, slowing her progress into the field. She didn’t know why she should care who was giving themselves frostbite; she was leaving town and that girl’s toes weren’t any concern of hers. Grace was so engrossed in watching where she was placing her own feet that she didn’t notice the girl had danced her way quite a bit to the right until she finally looked up.
“Hey!” Grace shouted to the girl, cupping her hands around her mouth. “You’re going to end up in Germsville skipping around in just a nightshirt.”
This caught the girl’s attention. She snapped her head around unnaturally fast, locking her eyes directly on Grace. Terror shot up Grace’s spine. It was Debbie. Grace turned to run. Her shoes slipped. She kicked them off to run across the snowy field in just her nylons, completely heedless of the cold. Her skirt restricted her from making full strides and her bare feet covered by quickly icing over stockings wasn’t significantly better than the shoes she’d abandoned. She didn’t know how it could be Debbie or what she was doing out, but the look of pure, animalistic rage painted across her former friend’s features scared the willies out of Grace. “Help me!” she screamed at the top of her lungs as she passed through the gate she’d left open leading back into the park. “Help…” was all she managed on her second try to scream as a white hand with a grip like steel clapped over her mouth.
Grace felt herself pushed forward with such force that she couldn’t even scramble to keep her feet under her. She hit the icy ground on her side and slid, coming to rest against the snow piled around the base of the fountain to hold the plastic sheeting down.
“You killed me,” Debbie snarled. When she spoke, her mouth
opened enough to show off a ghastly set of sharpened daggers where once there had been such lovely, perfect teeth. “They were going to commit me, run electricity through my brain until there was nothing left, and all because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut.” On the final word, Debbie’s eyes took on a demonic red glow that grew with every step she took toward Grace.
“I’m sorry,” Grace pleaded. “I’m so sorry. Please…”
“I begged you to forget it,” Debbie said, nearly upon Grace; her hands were clenched in fists at her sides. “You betrayed me and now I’m dead.”
“I’m sorry!” Grace shielded her eyes from the increasingly monstrous appearance Debbie was taking on. With every word and every step the beautiful girl she’d known looked more and more like a monster from a creature-feature. “I did it because I was scared of what I felt when you kissed me!”
Debbie stopped in her tracks. “What?”
“I liked it, I didn’t want to, but I did,” Grace said. “I got scared and when I get scared I get mad, and I took it out on you, and I’m sorry for that—I shouldn’t have. After I left your place, I thought people could see it in me. I thought they could see that I liked it. I went to Phil because I thought if I did it with a boy, maybe even got pregnant, that people wouldn’t suspect me. He’d have to marry me, which would fix everything since you didn’t even want him anymore. I didn’t even know about the drifter until the next day. I’m so sorry he killed you.”
“He didn’t kill me,” Debbie said. Her voice sounded like the soft, sweet tone Grace once knew; she opened her eyes and looked up to find Debbie’s face had returned to human. Her former friend was every bit as beautiful as she once was, perhaps even more so with the lightening of her eyes and how flawlessly white her skin looked.
“Are you a ghost?” Grace asked.
“I don’t know what I am,” Debbie said. “The only person in a position to tell me what I am doesn’t like talking about it. I’m frankly a little lonely right now.” Debbie looked to be on the verge of tears, absently running the ends of the fingernails on each hand against each other.
Grace regained her feet, shaky at first, and took a step toward Debbie. “I know how that feels. I may as well be a ghost in this town now.” She took a step closer to Debbie, tilting her head a little to try to catch the other girl’s down turned eyes. “Were you going to hurt me?”
Debbie shook her head. “No. I was just frosted and wanted to yell at you.”
“Oh. That’s fair. I deserve it,” Grace said. “I miss you though. Nobody will catch a flick with me anymore.”
“I shouldn’t even be talking to you, talking to anyone really.” Debbie turned to walk away.
Grace, acting on some strange instinct to grab and hold something she’d thought she lost, reached out and caught Debbie’s wrist. “I mean it. I’m sorry,” Grace said. She let out a little nervous laugh and shook her head. It didn’t even matter what she said or who she told the truth to now; she’d told the truth before and was still punished for it, so she really couldn’t see how it would make a difference if she told one more truth to the ghost of her friend. “I meant the other part too. You’re the most, Debbie Poole, the absolute most, and when you kissed me, you spun my head.”
Debbie turned back, demurely tucking a few strands of strawberry blond hair behind her ear. “Really?”
“You were a radioactive paper shaker, a teen idol, and you wanted to make out with me,” Debbie said. “It was like crazy—like total wow. If I didn’t think we’d both get the royal shaft for the whole thing, I would have told everyone it was the most unreal thing that ever happened to me.” Grace let go of Debbie’s wrist and tried to sniffle back the growing tears with a nose already runny from the cold. “Like it matters now. I’m a total oddball fream, and you’re dead.”
Debbie ran an ice cold digit along Grace’s chin to turn her head back for eye contact. “It matters to me,” she said.
The honking of a big Cadillac horn tore Grace’s attention away back to the street. “My dad’s here,” Grace said. “I’ve got to split before…” When she turned back to where Debbie had been standing, she was gone. The crashing of emotions against one another, the adrenaline still coursing through her, and the time spent in the cold combined to make her shake all over. She had no idea what was happening to her, but she suspected she couldn’t take another day like that and survive it.
She left the shoes in the field with a dismissive wave of her hand. She wouldn’t need office girl work shoes anymore and there wasn’t anything Mr. Cavendish could say if she wore warm, comfortable shoes the following week since he’d already fired her. She turned and walked briskly to the blue Cadillac waiting for her. Inside the warm, comfortable cabin of her father’s car, she finally felt safe. He apparently took her makeup smears from stress crying as proof she had indeed been fired; his lack of comment on her shattered emotional state confirmed what she already suspected—he knew all along what was going to happen.
She reached over to the dashboard and slid the bar for the heater to the right until it blew hot air from beneath the dash over her frozen feet. She glanced up to him as he pulled away, practically daring him to say something to her about touching the precious controls on his Cadillac’s dash. He didn’t even look at her. She shook her head and resumed her normal position of leaning against the door, looking out the window as they drove.
3.
Grace struggled to sleep that night. She awoke repeatedly, rushed to the window, and looked out over the serenity of the rolling hills and woods leading down into the sleepy town. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see outside, but something kept drawing her to the window. When she awoke the final time, the sun was nearly free of the horizon, ending any interest in what might be outside.
Grace made her exhausted way downstairs. Her parents were already in their usual posts in the kitchen with her father at the head of the dining table, back to the bay window, paper in hand and her mother flitting through the kitchen, singing gospel songs to herself while she prepared breakfast. Grace took her spot at the other end of the table from her father, waiting only a moment before her mother deposited a cup of coffee in front of her and placed a kiss on the top of her head.
She loved her mother’s feminine charms, nearly eternal spring of optimism, and caring maternalism; Grace hated that she personally possessed none of these qualities. She was far more like her truculent father, which nobody, least of all Grace, thought was a good thing for a young woman to be.
She sipped her coffee, thinking about the day before, staring blankly at the black and white checkered pattern of the tabletop. She’d never really considered the question of whether or not she believed in ghosts. To that point, she hadn’t really had much experience with death. In truth, she’d always counted herself among the handful of people in town, along with Debbie’s parents, who believed Debbie and Phil were still alive somewhere, so she’d never taken the time to properly grieve. Their heated conversation the night before sure got the point across that Debbie thought she was dead though, which Grace figured probably wasn’t a put on. If she was in fact dead, ghost was the best explanation Grace could think of for why they were still able to talk.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” her mother asked. “You’re making some very strange faces.”
“I was just thinking about something,” Grace said, quickly returning her full attention to her coffee.
“Thinking too much will give you wrinkles,” her father said without lowering his newspaper.
“I guess it’s good that I’m thinking the right amount then,” Grace replied.
“Don’t sass your father,” her mother scolded her. “Eat your breakfast and get dressed. You’re helping me with housework today.” Her mother set a half a grapefruit and two soft poached eggs in front of her garnished with a single slice of toast.
“That’s it?” Grace said. “What’s he having?” She stood a little in her chair to see what was on the plate her mother was s
etting in front of her father. The dish was practically a platter it was so large and contained ham, bacon, hash browns, and three eggs over easy.
“He’s having what he’s having and you’re having what you’re having,” her mother said. “You need to keep your weight down and he needs to keep his energy up.”
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 4