Grey Lore

by Jean Knight Pace

  His glassed neighbor said he’d seen two hairy men crawl onto his property last night on all fours. Which was just what you said when you ran a drug factory from your white trash trailer and were spooked by stories of wolves coming to your town. The farmer wasn’t thrilled about the wolf news either, but he knew that people got stoned or scared or both; and soon enough there were crazy rumors running around like chickens without their heads—no brain, no direction, plenty of speed.

  He’d bury the mutts before the school bus got here. He shook his head—it would have been awful if any kids had seen the torn up dogs; he was glad he’d found them first. Later that week, he’d head down to the Humane Society to see if they had any good dogs for cheap.

  The Silver Shooting—that’s what reporters were calling it on account of the silver bullets used, probably from some type of antique gun. It was all over the national news. And this time—the third silver shooting in the last three months—it was all over the local news as well. It had happened in Indy—the hospital where her mother had died.

  Ella couldn’t get away from it. But she had to. Pictures of the hospital, images of the trauma rooms. Empty. White. It was just like Vivi’s house.

  Ella had to be where there weren’t clean white walls. She ran to the bus stop and then from stop to stop until a bus finally came. She got on.

  It had been the lab administrator at the hospital who’d been shot. The lab administrator who handled the blood work—found in a pool of her own blood, vials of other people’s blood knocked to the floor around her. Blood, blood, blood on white, white, white.

  And no teeth of course. All gone. An empty gaping mouth of blood. Her mother’s hospital. All over the news.

  When Ella had found out, she had suddenly, perversely, needed to know if her mother had had her teeth. She’d called Dr. Murray’s office, but he was gone—not out, but gone. Dead. Killed in a car accident almost exactly one month ago.

  Ella put her head against the bus seat in front of her. Above her, the radio played.

  The lab administrator had been born and raised in Napper. The locals were shocked, mourning. The victim had been a couple years ahead of Vivi in school. The town was reeling, services planned in a large stone mortuary at the edge of town. Vivi had texted to say she was going and wouldn’t be home until late.

  Ella tried to feel their pain—the collective sorrow for this small town daughter. But all she could feel was her own pain. White walls, red blood, death.

  About an hour out of town, her hysteria stilled. The woman who’d been killed wasn’t her mother. It wasn’t anyone remotely like her mother. Just the same hospital. A terrible murder. But her mother hadn’t been murdered. Her mother had been in an accident. Those were different things. Same result, but different events. Ella took long, deep breaths. The radio played dull music.

  When Ella finally got back into town, she got off at the hardware store, bought brushes, a roller, and a drop cloth. There was one thing still that she couldn’t face.

  Vivi might ground her for the rest of her life, but Ella didn’t care. By the time her aunt got home, the flawless, white walls in Ella’s bedroom would be replaced by a color as blue as the sky.

  Chapter 17

  Ella felt, with a perverse sort of pride, that Vivi must have called Jack as soon as she’d come home to find one room of her perfectly black and white house had been painted blue. But Ella couldn’t be sure. Vivi had looked at the room with not much more than a blink while Ella had stammered about how she’d just wanted a color change. Vivi had nodded. And that was that.

  Now Jack sat in front of Ella for their second session. If that was her punishment, it could have been way worse.

  “So,” he was saying, as he nursed the soda water Vivi had brought out. “Do you go to the local high school or has Vivi hooked you up with one of the private schools?”

  “Oh, no,” Ella muttered, not touching the gross fizzy water. “I go to the normal high school.”

  “Normal,” Jack said smiling. “If normal means all white, rich kids.”

  Ella giggled. “Yeah, well, Indy was a little different. But they’re not all rich, white kids.”

  “Eh, mostly,” Jack said, still smiling. “My little brother goes there, so I should know.”

  “Oh,” Ella said a little surprised.

  “Not that he’s particularly little,” Jack added. “He’s probably four inches taller than me and broad as a horse.”

  Inside Ella kind of gagged. Definitely not her type.

  “What’s his name?” Ella asked, to be polite.

  “Brant,” Jack said. “Brant Sanderson.”

  Ella hadn’t expected to know the name, but she did. Everyone did. And Jack was right—he was huge, probably 6’4” and all muscle everywhere. He played football and usually spoke at the pep rallies.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said out loud. “He plays football, right?”

  “Yup. Wide receiver.”

  “Oh,” Ella said.

  “You don’t know what that is, do you?” Jack said.

  “Not really, no,” Ella said with a weak smile.

  “It’s okay,” Jack said. “Neither did I till he started to play.”

  Ella’s smile widened.

  “He’s the guy that catches the ball, then runs as far as he can until he gets tackled. I go watch him every Friday since my mom’s usually out of town for her job. You should come sometime.”

  Ella stopped herself just before saying, With you? Of course not with her twenty-six-year-old grief counselor. Oh my gosh, she was a freak.

  “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Maybe.”

  “Or not,” he said, still smiling. “But it really is pretty fun. There’s a lot of energy at the games. Even if you don’t like football.” He winked.

  Ella felt the blush burn at her neckline. Maybe she would go to a game. The question was, with whom? Because you didn’t have to know the rules of football to know you didn’t just show up in a packed stadium all by yourself and take a seat.

  Sam had been in a lot of schools, but he’d never seen a kid get hit so hard that a tooth flew out. He saw it now, even from a distance, as he was walking past the football field where the football team ran along in sloppy formation banging into the practice sleds like an army of zombies. Although right now, the kid who looked most like a zombie was the one by the bleachers, dripping blood onto the grass—black eye, red mouth. Sam was pretty sure it was a scraggly kid from his science class, Howard Simms. The other kid—tall, fast, strong—was one of the football players. He laughed as he hit the kid again.

  Sam hopped the fence and started running toward them. Across the field, the football coach was turned away, not moving a muscle—visor over his face. The rest of the team was running through their drills, oblivious to what was happening past the bleachers.

  Sam felt his feet pounding into the hard summer soil, gaining ground as the bigger kid pummeled the other one in the back, then neck, forcing him down to the ground before kicking his ribs, then stomach. The kid screamed, rolling over to cover what was left of his face, as the bigger kid gave him one last kick in the neck before trotting off to the football field like he’d just been out for a drink of water.

  Sam came up on Howard Simms as he rose to his knees. Howard’s whole body was shaking, trembling in a way that Sam worried looked a lot like a seizure. His bloody, bruised face was stoic, eyes blank.

  “Here, wait just a minute,” Sam said, groping through his bag until he came up with a scraggly pack of old tissues. He held them out for the kid, trying to flag down the football coach.

  “You got a phone? I’ll call somebody,” Sam said, opening the tissue packet that the kid was just holding in his hand.

  “Screw you,” Howard Simms said and then threw up.

  Sam jumped back. “I’ll go grab a teacher. You’ll be okay.” But the kid flipped him off, stood up, and staggered away toward the field. Sam ran back to the school and banged on the locked door. A janitor finall
y opened up and asked what he wanted.

  “Some kid just got beat up outside,” Sam stammered. “He was bleeding all over the place.”

  The janitor nodded to Sam. “I’ll call someone. We’ll get it taken care of.” He looked at Sam. “And calm down, kid. You look like you’re going to faint.”

  Sam kind of felt that way too. He sat down on the cool hallway floor and leaned his head against a locker while the janitor went into an office and mumbled into his walkie-talkie.

  “Alright son,” the janitor said when he came back. “I got stuff to do and you look a lot better, so head out.”

  “Did they send somebody out there?” Sam asked.

  “Don’t you worry about it,” the janitor said, dipping his mop into a bucket. “Ain’t nothin’ for a kid to stick his nose into.”

  But Sam did worry. When he felt like he had his legs back, he ran back to the field. Strangely, it looked like everything had been all cleaned up, including the puke. And the kid was nowhere to be seen. Sam promised himself that he’d find Howard the next day at school, and try to talk to him.

  But the next day at school, Howard Simms was gone. Not absent, but gone. His locker sat empty and the desk he’d had at the back of Sam’s physics class was given to a new kid.

  Maybe he’d wound up in the hospital. Or his parents had sent him to a private school. Maybe he’d died of a brain hemorrhage for all Sam knew.

  And that was the craziest thing.

  In this little, upper class high school, gossip floated when a girl got a new pair of earrings and exploded when somebody found a cigarette in the boy’s locker room. Nobody mentioned the fight. The kid who’d thrown the punches—some senior named Brent or Grant or something went to his classes smiling like nothing had ever happened. And even though Sam nudged a couple of his classmates with questioning comments about the scrawny kid, no one ever said anything at all about him. It was like he hadn’t been here. It was like he’d never existed.

  Ella pulled out her mother’s old jewelry box. On a blank slip of paper, she jotted the word “Jack” and dropped it into the box. She sat next to the window and looked at herself in the little jewelry box mirror—she could sometimes see her mother in her features and definitely in the pale skin that would never tan. But the mouth and brown eyes—they belonged to somebody else. She would give almost anything to know who.

  She pulled out her mother’s wedding ring again. Her mother had never said a bad word about her father. Not one. Of course she hadn’t said any kind words either. Her father’s name was Patrick—that’s all she knew. Not even a middle initial. So where was he? Why had he left? Who could she ask? Vivi couldn’t produce so much as a wedding invitation.

  Ella rubbed the ring between her thumb and forefinger, and then she remembered the strange sound it had made when it had dropped into the box a few days ago. She leaned over. There was definitely not another drawer or opening. She let the ring fall into the box. And there it was again—the plink that should have been a plunk. Ella emptied the jewelry box of the quarters, papers, and rocks, and tapped on the bottom. Still sounded hollow.

  “Weird,” she said, and then she did something she never would have done if she’d taken a moment to think about it. She peeled away the cheap velvet from the inside of the box to see if anything was underneath.

  The wood beneath had a tiny inscription with the initials P.P. and a small silhouetted tree. Ella ran her hand over it. The inscription was etched into the wood and beautiful. Still, Ella couldn’t see that there was any compartment underneath—it just looked like a wooden box. But somehow she felt positive her mother had glued that velvet on to hide something. Which made Ella more confused than ever.

  Something was in the bottom of the box. But Ella didn’t want to tear her mother’s only keepsake apart to find it.

  Absently, Ella picked at a line of glue left from the velvet and when she did, the wooden piece that looked like the inside bottom of the box lifted just a bit.

  “Oh my gosh,” Ella said. She picked at the glue again, and again it lifted. This time, she picked at a corner of the glue so she could hold it between her fingernails and use it as a teeny tiny glue handle.

  She lifted and up came the bottom of the box. She caught the edge—an edge that was so well fitted to the box that it had looked as though it connected to the wood on the sides—and held it there, shivering with excitement.

  She removed the square of wood and there underneath she found…paper. Several sheets. They weren’t treasure maps either. Just plain, white paper with plain, black words.

  Ella was still pretty sure it was a treasure because there on top of the pile was a slip of paper folded four times with her name written neatly in her mother’s handwriting.

  “Ella.”

  She read her name over and over before unfolding the note. It wasn’t a letter as Ella expected it to be, just a simple story, the kind her mother used to tell her before bed.

  Once upon a time in a world filled with howlings and madness, a child sought a stone that had fallen through the cracks of her life, now lost in a wood of rock and ashes. Each day the child wandered through the petrified trees—the trunks cool against her fingers, their leaves brittle as they fell to the earth. Each day the child grew colder, her skin losing color, her eyes growing in pallor.

  “A ghost,” the child thought. “If I don’t find my stone again, I will become a ghost.”

  And so it was that as the waif-like girl wandered the woods, she heard a small voice through the trees.

  “You cannot hear me,” it said, “but you must follow me if you wish to live.”

  “But of course I can hear you,” the girl said.

  “Then you must not,” sang the voice in a rumbling baritone. “Now come.”

  The girl stepped toward the voice, and when she did, the howlings began—deep, feral, threatening.

  “Quickly,” the voice said, and a dog ran forward, leading her away as the howling ones trailed behind.

  Outside it had started to rain. Ella looked out the window at the damp sky. She leaned her cheek against the windowsill as the rain began to hit the glass, trickling in bent lines down the panes. It was a comforting sound—the sky mourning with her, releasing its tears.

  Ella realized she had never seen one of her mother’s stories written down. She held the paper against her skin. It was soft and creased all over from having been pressed into her mother’s own hand.

  Ella put it in her lap and picked up another paper from the stack, but just as she did, she heard Vivi open the front door. Ella stopped. She didn’t want to uncover her mother with her aunt nearby. Ella re-folded the note, re-covered the jewelry box, and replaced the box in her closet before Vivi’s voice came echoing up the stairs.

  “Ella…Ella are you home?”

  Ella looked into the full-length mirror and realized she’d been crying. Which made sense. Her mother had died two months ago. As she hurried to the bathroom to wash her face, Ella realized that she hadn’t seen her aunt cry. Not once. “Must have been some feud,” she mumbled. It made her mad. Could her aunt not find enough forgiveness in her heart to grieve just a little?

  When Ella went downstairs, her aunt was making tiny little pieces of meat that Ella realized were some kind of animal innards.

  “Hearts,” Vivi said without looking up. She plunked one down on Ella’s plate. “I got them for a steal today at the farmer’s market.”

  Ella must have looked as grossed out as she felt because her aunt quickly added, “They’re really nutritious.” And then, “I made gravy.”

  Vivi’s gravy was definitely not good enough for Ella to choke down her repulsion. She ate the potatoes and even the soggy asparagus, but for the first time since she’d come to Vivi’s house, she didn’t graciously finish what was on her plate.

  Vivi didn’t say anything. Of course. But Ella thought she noticed the shadow of a scowl as Ella rose from the table, put the meat in a Tupperware, and left the kitchen.
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br />   Chapter 18

  Sam had found her—Ella. Well, sort of. At least he’d found the reason she looked so familiar to him.

  All he’d had to do was chase a mouse into the hall closet. There, behind his father’s coat, two ratty boxes with vacuum parts, and an old pair of boots, he’d found—not the stupid mouse—but a dusty, green suitcase he didn’t even know they had. An old, yellowed tag hung from the handle with his father’s name—Robert Calhoun—scribbled across it in fading ink.

  Maybe Sam wouldn’t have bothered to look inside, except for the dust. His father may not have been able to match his socks to his shirt or cook a decent meal, but he was meticulously neat. Besides, they moved every few months. Most of their stuff never had the chance to get dusty. Yet, there it was—lines of dirt stuck in the creases and latches of the suitcase.

  Sam lifted the suitcase out of the closet. He could think of only one reason his father would keep a thing but never touch it.

  The suitcase contained mementos of his mother.

  A dried bouquet of flowers, two framed pictures from their wedding, and at least one letter written in a swooping cursive. Sam didn’t dare read the letter and he didn’t care about the flowers, but he could have looked at the pictures for hours. Maybe he did.

  His stomach had started to growl by the time he began to put everything back. It was then that he saw, at the bottom of the suitcase, an unframed picture, old and yellowed. His mother’s mother. She was young in the shot—dark hair, fair cheeks, brown eyes.

  It was like Ella had stepped into a dress from 1970. “Wow,” Sam said.

  In the picture his grandmother stood in the woods—a bright bonfire burning beside her, a big smile on her face, and a large dog at her side.

  He stared at it until he heard his dad’s key in the door. Sam thought about shoving all the stuff back in the closet, but he felt soldered to the floor, unable to move.