A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1

by Shannon Wendtland

  “Hello, Othello,” I said.

  “I know.”

  We darted inside and closed the door just as a car drove past. My heart was thumping, but Mel? She was a woman on a mission. I darted up behind her, not wanting to be left in the front all by myself.

  We tiptoed into the main area of the garage, which was nearly pitch black except for shafts of light from the bay door windows that created square patches on the floor. It was enough for us to keep from tripping over something but not enough to clearly make out each other’s faces.

  Melody stopped on the left side of the garage and squatted down on the floor, feeling along the wall with her left hand. I heard her fiddle with the black light, and then suddenly the room was filled with a faint purple glow.

  “Oh, Melody,” I breathed in dismay. “Don’t turn around.”

  On the floor behind her, the black light had illuminated several ethereal drops and smears, clearly residue left over from the last night Matthew was alive – his blood trail. My stomach twisted at the thought. Of course she had told me all about it, but I hadn’t really been able to grasp what it meant. This eerie glow must be nothing compared to the blood spatter in living color as it was when Melody discovered it.

  She ignored me, of course, and turned around to see what I was looking at. She gasped. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Finally, “That’s not the worst of it,” she said softly. “The puddle where he must have died is over there,” she gestured with the light and a large area a little further toward the back of the garage lit up with violet remorse.

  I felt very queasy. My hand went to my mouth and I fought back the urge to vomit. My mouth was watering, a sure sign that a puke was coming on, and then I saw it. On the whiteboard above her head. More glow-in-the-dark blood spatter glowing. Oh my God. It was everywhere. Now I understood why they buried an empty casket. I couldn’t conceive of anyone living through something this horrendous. And Melody discovered it here, all alone. And she had kept it to herself all this time. Sorrow welled up within me, but not before my roiling stomach got the best of me. I ducked behind a tool chest and heaved my guts up. I spit a few times to get the taste out of my mouth and then I turned to apologize to my friend. But she wasn’t there.

  20. MELODY

  “Melody?” Tara was calling from the front of the garage.

  “Just a minute,” I said, carefully feeling over the tools on the workbench with my hands. I needed a medium Philips screwdriver. Surely this guy had one lying around within easy reach? Aha, found it.

  I tiptoed carefully back to the circle of violet light near the whiteboard, and when I got close enough, I motioned Tara over. I resolutely ignored the splashes of glow-in-the-dark, promising myself a good long cry when I got back home and climbed in my bed. Right now I had a job to do and only a limited amount of time to do it in. “Hold the light up over here so I can see,” I said, pointing to the top left corner of the oversized whiteboard.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m taking it down, of course.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because my brother pointed over here. And I don’t think there was anything interesting written on it at the time of his murder, so then there must be something interesting behind it.”

  “Like a wall safe?”

  “Something,” I said, stepping up onto the stool and putting some elbow grease into turning the screwdriver. Backing out the screws was more difficult than I thought it would be; I had to really press into them to keep from stripping the heads. Some doofus must have gorilla-torqued these things with an air wrench or something. Then I grinned to myself. That doofus had to have been Matthew. And that meant I was onto something – why go to such effort to make sure the white board didn’t fall down if he wasn’t hiding something?

  Finally I got the two screws in the upper left hand corner out, and then I instructed Tara to sit on the stool and use her back and shoulder to keep the board in place while I worked on the lower left-hand set. These were not screwed in as tightly, which was a relief. My hand was starting to hurt. Now it was time.

  Tara backed away and I swung the board away from the wall about six inches. I didn’t want to take the screws out of the other side if I was wrong and there was nothing back there. Tara shone the light into the between space that the wall and whiteboard made.

  “There’s a hole,” she said.

  I peeked around and looked into the crevice between the wall and the whiteboard. She was right, there was a hole, about six inches wide, chiseled into the cinder block. A tattered corner of something was peeking out of it.

  “Reach in there and get it,” I said to her.

  She gave me a look and then gingerly reached her hand into the space between the whiteboard and the wall. After a brief moment, she put down the black light and buried her arm in the crevice up to her shoulder.

  “I can’t get it,” she said, pulling her arm out. “I can feel the edge of the hole with my fingertips, but my arms are just too short. I’ll hold the board, and you try. You’re a lot taller than me.”

  We switched places and I took over. One plunge of my arm into the crevice and I could feel the ragged edges of the hole, and then some sort of fabric-wrapped bundle brushing my fingers. I snagged the torn edge and pulled the bundle out. As I palmed it and began to retreat, something else slid out of the hole and onto the floor. It made a loud clack! on the concrete, and I cringed, hoping that the noise wouldn’t carry outside the garage.

  We got the whiteboard hung back in its original spot, though the urge to stop what we were doing and take a closer look at the fabric-wrapped bundle and the object on the floor was very hard to resist. We gathered our things and snuck back out to Tara’s car across the street. By the time we got settled in the car and headed back to my house, our hearts were pumping and we were giddy with laughter and excitement. I wasn’t going to open the bundle until we were sitting around the kitchen table with plenty of lights on, but I didn’t have to even guess about the object that had fallen on the floor. As soon as Tara handed it to me, I knew exactly what it was. Four-sided, square bottom, pointy corners, it was a stone pyramid exactly like the one Esme tried to give me the other day.

  What was Matthew doing with something like that? And why was it buried in a hole in the wall of his garage?

  #

  Well, it wasn’t exactly the same as the one Esme handed me—this one was black, not malachite, and it had a carving on the bottom of it, a symbol I had never seen before. Tara had never seen it before, either.

  She took a long drink from her can of soda. “What’s in the bundle? That’s what I want to know.”

  I took a deep breath. “Let’s find out.” I untied the twine that was holding the bundle together and folded back the fabric, which looked like it had been part of a flannel shirt at some point in its past. There wasn’t much there: a brownish tan feather, a dried, pressed flower, and a photograph of the last time Matthew, Gram, and Gramps went camping. On the back were two dates, one from six years ago, when the photo was taken, and the other in the future --a couple of months from now. Weird.

  Three smiling faces in the photo; I felt a brief pang of loss. Matthew had hidden this stuff, it was obviously important to him, and thus to me. “I don’t know anything about the stone pyramid, except that it reminds me of the one Esme tried to give me, and I know nothing about flowers, except what grows in Gram’s garden. The feather looks familiar though. Maybe these are clues.”

  “Clues to his killer?” she asked, giving me a long look over the top of her glasses.

  I looked at her without meeting her eyes and shrugged. What else could they be?

  After a moment, she spread the items out on the table and took some photos with her phone. “I’ll look these up on the Internet and see if I can find anything that matches.”

  A cloak of sadness settled on my shoulders. The escapade hadn’t turned out quite the way I had planned. I’m not sure what I thought we would find but instead
of getting answers, we now had more questions.

  The silence drew out between us. “I guess I’ll go and get some sleep,” I said, finally.

  “Talk to you tomorrow?” she asked, reaching over to put her hand on my arm.

  “Yeah. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  21. G.

  Sweat poured down my face as I waited for someone to answer the door. Sam had called earlier asking me to come by and look at something, and like an idiot, I thought that it would be a good idea to go for a run. He only lived about a mile from me, but even at eleven a.m., it was still too hot for a northern boy like me. Damn, I was thirsty. Why hadn’t I brought a bottle of water?

  There wasn’t a lot of shade in Sam’s front yard, there being only one tree (and it was scrawny) and no overhang above the modest brick stoop, so I bent over at the waist to wipe the sweat from my eyes, ducking into the shadow my lower body had carved from the glare. I decided I would hang out down there for a while, splattering the stoop with perspiration. The door opened, and a pair of Vans and legs covered with artfully ripped jeans came into view.

  “Dude, you actually ran over here?”

  I stood up and scooted into the dark, air-conditioned foyer. “I told you I was going to.”

  “I thought that was just a figure of speech. You’re an idiot, you know that? You didn’t even bring a bottle of water.”

  I refrained from grumbling since I knew he was right, and followed him into the dingy kitchen. Dishes on the counter, crumbs on the table, open can of pork and beans on the stove next to an old pot. There were a couple of flies buzzing; I decided not to look too close and accepted the glass of tap water gratefully. The glass was clean. I had seen him get it down from the cabinet.

  “Sorry. My mom’s been out of town on a job and I’m batching it. I’ll clean up before she gets back, but until then, no worries, right?” His grin had a challenge in it.

  “Right,” I grinned. What’s that all about? I shrugged mentally. It wasn’t like Sam and I were best buds. He probably just expected me to judge. If he only knew. “So what’s the big secret you wanted to show me – so big I couldn’t mention it to my girl?”

  “I didn’t want you to mention it to Tara because she wouldn’t be able to keep it from Melody… and I’m not ready to share it with Melody yet. Because…. Well, just come on and I’ll show you. Then you’ll understand.”

  We sat down in his smaller-than-average bedroom, him on his desk chair in front of his computer and me on his hastily made-up bed. There was no mistaking that this room belonged to him. Posters of bikini-clad babes vied for space with giant robots of doom and random covers of Vibe, Rolling Stone and Details magazines. There was hardly an inch of wall space that didn’t have some paper or sticker or something covering it. All in all, the space made me kind of dizzy, but I could dig it. Sam definitely had more to his personality than I gave him credit for.

  Sam hit some keys on his keyboard and a complicated looking dashboard came up on his computer screen. He reached over to grab his headphones and turned to look at me. “You remember the night of Melody’s party?”

  “How could I forget?” Seriously?

  “When Melody and I were in her house getting candles and matches, I remembered I had some EVP app on my phone, and I decided I was going to turn it on and use it while we were doing the Spirit Board thing. The thing is, I forgot all about it until you and Tara showed us what came up on your camera. So when I got home, I downloaded it onto my computer…”

  “And…?”

  “And I sampled the audio, scrubbed it, tweaked the gain, and I think I found something. Maybe a little more than something. Here, put these on.” He thrust the headphones out to me.

  I took them and tried to resist the urge to wipe them off first. I took a discreet look at them as I slid them over my head and was surprised and relieved to see that they were pretty clean. It must have just been the kitchen he hated cleaning. “Okay,” I said when I had them situated comfortably.

  Sam nodded to me, moved the mouse on his computer and clicked the play button on the screen.

  There was static of course, people shifting on the couch, the scratching of the planchette as it moved over the board, Tara’s voice as she called out the letters. Then there was the crash from Colton and the collective screaming and laughter… so far nothing new. I shrugged, about to take the headphones off.

  Sam held out his hand, gesturing for me to wait a moment.

  And then I heard it. The same voice as before, only louder, clearer.

  “Melody,” it said. “Melody.”

  There was a long pause, I looked at Sam, and he held up a finger, pointing to the graph on the screen. There were two more spikes coming as the line moved down the graph. The line hit a spike and I heard the voice again, raspy, further away. “Help me,” it said.

  I got the chills. Sam gave me a very hard look, holding his finger up one more time and pointing to the last spike on the graph. “Stop Orla,” the voice said in my ear. It sounded like fear.

  #

  “Who the hell is Orla?” I asked, pacing back and forth in Sam’s living room, a can of soda in my hand. “How do we stop someone when we don’t even know who he-she-it is?”

  Sam shook his head and slumped on the couch. “I don’t know, man. It took me a couple of days to get the guts up to listen to the recording, and once I heard it, I knew I couldn’t just call Melody over to listen to it. It’s going to open up all kinds of wounds with her. Maybe I shouldn’t even tell her.”

  My mind was spinning. I was feeling very agitated, like I wanted to jump up and punch something. What had gotten into me? The idea of Melody being upset was actually making me angry, like I needed to do something about it. I made a fist with my free hand. Screw it. Who gives a crap if Sam makes fun of me? I put my can down and decided to drop and pump out some push-ups. I was well past twenty a day; now I could do fifty.

  I huffed a little when I got up. Sweat had broken out on my forehead again.

  “Hell of a time to exercise,” said Sam, irritated.

  “Sometimes I just get these surges of energy and I don’t know what the hell to do with them. After that recording, I’m really on edge. So, push-ups.”

  Sam nodded as if he understood. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, because of – whatever. Then my brain is agitated and I can’t settle it down.”

  “So you do push-ups?” I asked, grinning.

  “Nah man, I watch Tom & Jerry cartoons.”

  We both laughed; it helped to relieve some of the tension and finally, I was able to sit down without my knee jumping up and down. I grabbed my soda and was about to take another swig when I looked at the caffeine content. Maybe I should let off the caffeine, too.

  “So what do we do?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” said Sam.

  22. MELODY

  The poor dill plant lost the fight before it started. I was weeding Gram’s garden with wild abandon, the kind of abandon that said, “So what if that herb plant got caught in my handful of weeds?” Yank. “It shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

  Most of my anger was directed at Sam. But G. too? What was he thinking? Just because we used to be friends did not entitle him to some sort of conspiracy to keep information from me. Yank. Oops, oh well, a little less parsley to cut later.

  At least I could trust Tara. She had told me what was going on. Granted, they had told her first, and then she told me, but I supposed she might never have told me about the EVP recording if G. hadn’t opened his big mouth to her in the first place. Yank. Oh, sorry tarragon. Next time you should watch where you’re growing.

  “Now what did those herbs ever do to you, to deserve such rough treatment?” said Gram, coming up behind me with a basket of folded laundry on her hip. We still line-dried most of our items in the summer, as Gram said that a little sunshine and fresh air in the bedroom kept the shadows away. Until recent events I had assumed she meant it figuratively.

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sp; I paused and loosened the grip I had on a handful of grassy weeds and purslane. “My friends are jerks.”

  “I see. And why are they jerks?” She set down the basket and stooped down nearby to help me weed.

  “Keeping secrets. They said they didn’t want to make me feel bad, but really, it’s a big fat conspiracy to keep me in the dark.”

  “In the dark about what?” Gram said, reaching for another sprig of offending grass.

  “About M—”, I started to say Matthew’s ghost, but remembered who I was talking to. “The boy I like is, uh, dating someone else.” I didn’t look up to see Gram watching me because I knew if I met her gaze I would spill my guts. She wouldn’t believe my lame explanation for even an instant but as long as I didn’t say anything else and contradict myself, she wouldn’t press for details.

  She didn’t say anything for another moment or two—just kept pulling sprigs of grass—and we settled into a companionable silence. Finally, when her little patch of garden was free of weeds and grass, she got up, dusting off her knees.

  “I have a batch of sage bundles that are ready to deliver to Esme. Would you mind taking them over to her shop? Just bring the money home and drop it on the kitchen counter. I’ll use it for groceries later.”

  I stopped what I was doing to smile up at my grandmother, grateful that she hadn’t pushed for more information. Maybe I would tell her about Matthew’s ghost one day, but right now, I wanted to keep it to myself. The afternoon sunlight was a little harsh on her older, lined face, and for the first time I could tell she was losing that ageless quality that she’d had for so long. She was getting old. Caring for Gramps was hard on her, and I felt a stab of guilt that I didn’t try harder to help with that.

  “Sure. I can do it after I wash up.”

  “Lovely. I’ll go put them in a bag and set them on the kitchen table.”