by Tim Pratt
“She’s got…a lot of personality.”
“Ha. She does at that. She used to go around to the schools when I was a kid and teach us about making pottery and candles and wood carvings, and she leads classes in…oh, what is it…‘Storytelling for Self-Enlightenment,’ something like that, mostly for the tourists and retirees. There are a lot of people like that out here, semihippie sorta-kinda-artists who cobble together a living one way or another.”
I bristled a touch. “I’m a sorta-kinda-artist, you know.”
“Really? You don’t strike me as a sorta-kinda woman, Bekah. Seems like you’d go all out.”
That was better. “I do my best. So Melinda’s not likely to murder me and harvest my eyeballs or anything?”
“You big-city women are paranoid. Melinda’s harmless, unless she thinks your chakras are out of alignment, and even then she’ll just talk you to death.” He took out his phone, consulted the screen, and said, “Back to more important subjects, regarding that drink—how’s tomorrow work for you?”
I laughed. “I’ll have to check my calendar, but I don’t think I have any big plans.”
“Good. If you want anything stronger than beer or wine, we’ll have to head outside of town—there are some good bars in Blowing Rock.”
“You’re telling me this is a dry town?”
“You can buy hard stuff at the liquor store, which keeps pretty much the same hours as a bank, but no, there’s no liquor by the drink in Boone. Just beer and wine in restaurants. I assume the city fathers are afraid the college students would turn into a drunken murder-mob if they could order shots at a pool hall.”
“You should have mentioned this in the letter you sent me, Trey.” I gave him my best mock-stern look. “No liquor! I’m pretty sure you could be disbarred for an oversight like that.” I plucked the phone from his hands and put my number in his contacts list, then passed it back. “I have to go do some grown-up stuff now, as a responsible homeowner and impending pillar of the community. You still willing to show me around the property later?”
“I live to serve. But inviting me to your house before we even get a drink together? This is starting to move way too fast for me, Ms. Lull.”
“I just don’t think your grandpa’s going to want to tromp around the fields with me, is all.”
“‘Tromp around the fields?’ Is that what the kids are calling it nowadays?” He grinned when I rolled my eyes, making me want to roll them even harder. “But you have a point. The long grass is hell on his Italian loafers. How about I come over after lunch today, say around two?”
“I’ll clear my schedule, Mr. Howard, Esquire. Oh, I forgot to ask your gramps—are there any more keys? There’s at least one lock I can’t open.”
He shook his head. “Afraid not. You’ve got all the keys I know about. Could be more somewhere in the house, I guess. If you hired a crew of ten or twenty guys to sort the place, you might even find them in a year or two.”
“You’re more helpful every minute. Now, if you’d kindly get your ass off my car door…”
He popped up onto his toes, gave me another grin, and sauntered off, the picture of cool—only slightly spoiled by the smear of dirt from my car across the ass of his pants.
It wasn’t bad, though, for a dirty ass.
#
The rest of the morning went smoothly. The bank manager was happy to have me open an account and bring back some of the money Archibald Grace used to keep there, but he couldn’t tell me much about my dead relative, either—kept to himself, only met in person a few times, the usual. The manager set me up with a book of counter checks—paper checks, pretty quaint; next I’d get a buggy whip and a valet—and a temporary ATM card while I waited for the real stuff. I’d have to do something about my bank account in Chicago sometime, but the three-digit balance back home wasn’t so pressing now that I had a fat five-figure one here. The manager really wanted to talk about moving my money into high-yield blah-di-blah but I told him I’d get back to him about that, because I had another appointment.
What I didn’t tell him was that appointment was with a cheeseburger at a brewpub. The beer was only so-so and the burger was just a little better, but the hand-cut fries gave me reason to be cheerful.
I made one other stop, spending a good chunk of the money I’d taken from the bank in cash, and filled up my trunk in the process.
After that final errand was done, I returned to the house—let’s make that “I returned home”—around one o’clock and briefly wrestled with my pernicious ingrained cultural conditioning before deciding I wasn’t going to take a shower and put on makeup just to go walking around a field with Trey. Boots and jeans and a flannel shirt would do.
That settled, I contemplated what to do while waiting for Trey. I realized there were still rooms in the house I hadn’t seen—there was apparently a tower, too—and I decided that was pretty messed up, and I should know if there was a room full of human hearts in bird cages or a meth lab or a room painted black except for all the red pentagrams. I decided to circle the house and look for external doors, or, failing that, windows I could crawl through. At the front door, I plucked the sword cane on a whim—I’d probably need a walking stick, and why not take one I could brandish at Trey later if he turned out to be a secret creep? (I didn’t get that impression, but nobody’s evil-bastard detector is foolproof, and I believe in playing it safe.) I went outside into the sunshine and breathed deep, grudgingly willing to admit there was something to this whole fresh-country-air thing. While I was basking in the glow of nature’s embrace and all that, my phone rang. Charlie.
“I’m confused,” I said. “It’s not dark yet, and you’re conscious. Unless you rolled over on your phone and dialed me in your sleep—”
“Maybe I haven’t even been to bed from last night. Did you ever think of that?” There was a lot of laughter and clinking glass in the background, and I felt a sudden stab of homesickness. He was probably out on the patio of a restaurant, probably with various people I knew and maybe even a few I liked, and they were all very far away. “So how’s Hicksville?”
“It’s got its charms. You really have to see this house. It’s unreal. I can’t decide if it’s amazing or terrifying.” I was strolling as I talked, walking past the Studebaker, around the ancient washing machine, through a pair of notched and splintery sawhorses, stepping over an upside-down steel washtub with a hole in the bottom, approaching a rickety tin-roofed shed that stood in apparent defiance of gravity. I peeked inside the shed and saw various implements of yard care and home repair: hoes, rakes, pipe wrenches, sacks of fertilizer, a toolbox…and a pair of long-handled bolt cutters. Ah-ha. I’d just solved my locked-room problem.
Charlie said, “Tempting as it is to visit you, I’m not sure I want to throw rocks at a hole in the ground or whittle a bar of soap or whatever people do for fun down there. I’ve never been to the Deep South, and I’m not sure I’m missing much.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s awfully pretty. Plus only one person has been super-racist to me so far, and I’ve been here almost a whole day.” I closed the shed door and walked toward the woods, whacking at long grasses with the sword cane, appreciating its heft. I considered drawing the blade and slashing back some of the scraggly bushes, but I’d probably end up lopping off my own foot or something. “Besides, we could just light things on fire in this giant field I’ve got for a backyard, and avoid all other human contact. I’ll even buy you a plane ticket for fall break. I’m halfway rich, for a little while. And I met this cute boy—”
“Cute boy, you say? Sign me up.”
“Seriously, I could use some company—”
I heard a noise then, from the woods, and it shocked me into silence. Even now I’m not sure entirely how to describe it: like a screaming woman, but with this deep, growly level of vibrato underneath it, and something piping like flutes, and maybe even the blat of a trumpet. Except that makes it sound like it was a bunch of sounds, and it wasn’t, i
t was singular and unified and absolutely otherworldly. Also loud as hell. But it rang out only for a moment, and then a whole cloud of birds—bright-blue wings, so I’m guessing blue jays, but I’m no ornithologist—burst from the trees, squawking angrily, before turning like a creature with a single mind and flying off toward the west.
“What was that noise?” Charlie said. “Did an orchestra fall out of an airplane and land on your house?”
“I, uh, wow. I have no idea.” I backed away from the woods, remembering some book I read as a kid—a Nancy Drew mystery maybe—where the scream of a woman turned out to just be the cry of a bird. Or was it a mountain lion? Did they have those here? I should have researched the native fauna. “Something in the woods.”
“Something like…a marching band?”
“Maybe some kind of animal.”
“Country living is definitely not for me. Your house is literally in the woods?”
“There are also fields. But yes. A fair bit of woods.”
I heard the rumble of an approaching car, and looked over to see a plume of dust rising from the dirt road, and Trey’s oncoming car. “Sorry, Charlie, cute boy arriving, gotta go, I’ll text you later.”
“Oh, so I’m not a cute boy now?”
“This one is actually interested in girls, which gives him an advantage over you in this particular case. I’ll text you later.”
I ended the call and walked over, waving. Trey pulled up next to my car and emerged, same easy smile, same clothes, though he’d put on a light black jacket.
“Are there monsters in the woods?” I said. “Or, if not monsters, big loud animals?”
He frowned. “Monsters? Not that I’ve heard of. We’ve got black bears, but they’re not loud. The park service started reintroducing elk around the turn of the century, apparently, though I’ve never seen any.”
“No, like…big cats?”
“Every once in a while somebody claims they saw a mountain lion, but most people think they’re long gone around here. We’ve got bobcats…sometimes coyotes…Why, did you see something?”
I shook my head. “Heard something. Sort of like a scream, and sort of like music…”
“Hmm. Probably some kind of bird. I can ask my dad—he’s a bird-watcher.”
It didn’t sound like any kind of bird I’d ever heard. But this was a different world from the one I knew, and maybe living in the middle of nowhere meant hearing weird-ass noises you couldn’t explain sometimes. I’d reserve my freaking out until I was sure it was warranted, but I was going to keep my eyes and ears open. “Sure. Ready to give me the grand tour? Assuming it doesn’t lead into those haunted woods over there?”
He laughed. “It looks like you’ve got a sword cane there, so I’m sure you can take out whatever loon or woodpecker you heard. But, sure, we can start going this way.”
We began walking east, through the side yard, and he pointed out the well and the septic tank, making me realize: yes, I was a homeowner in a rural area, oh boy. He pointed out various stumps where trees had been cut long ago, and then we hit the actual woods on that side, mostly pine trees but a few other things, too. (We established I’m not an ornithologist? Also: not a botanist. All I can say is, lots of trees had needles, but some had leaves instead.) We walked along a trail he said was probably a deer path, and after a few minutes of quietly crunching along we stepped out onto a ridge, and the land dropped away beneath us—there was a creek way down there, glinting in the sun through the underbrush—and I had a panoramic view of smoky blue mountains that looked like they’d never been stomped on by human feet.
“There’s a bench,” Trey said, and so there was, made of a split log sanded smooth, with legs and a backrest attached. “I guess Mr. Grace put it in.” We sat down, and he didn’t sit too close to me, but I could tell he wanted to, and I sort of liked that; I let the matter rest there for the moment.
You know how sometimes you meet someone, and you know they like you, and you kind of like them, and you think if they turn out to be as cool as they seem initially—and there are no jealous spouses lurking on the outskirts—you’ll probably make out with them, and you might even sleep with them, but there’s no rush, because having that possibility before you is a shimmery, anticipatory thing that’s a pleasure in its own right?
I was feeling that. I liked it.
“So I’ve got acres.”
“Acres and acres,” he said.
“Forgive me for revealing myself as a creature of the city, but how big is an acre, exactly?”
“Exactly? 4,840 square yards.”
“Oh. That helps.”
“I thought it might. Put it this way: you’ve got forty-two acres, and a forty-acre square is about a quarter of a mile long on each side, so one mile all the way around.”
“Ah. Is my property square?”
“Not even remotely.”
“Okay then.”
“Portions of your property are basically vertical.”
“I noticed that.”
“There’s a boundary fence, though. And most of the surrounding land is Christmas tree farms or horse pasture or undeveloped mountainside, apart from Melinda’s cottage—it’s not like you’re going to get shot if you stray over the line someplace.”
“I grow more comforted with every passing second.” I got up and stretched, and noticed him notice me doing it.
I liked that, too.
We continued the property tour, and it was basically just a pleasant walk in the woods. Oh, he showed me a few things—crumbling outbuildings that used to be barns and icehouses, creeks, another couple of scenic overlooks—but I got the distinct impression he’d mostly wanted an excuse to spend a couple of hours with me. I welcomed it, too, partly because I was socially starved, partly because he was pretty interesting on his own merits.
Especially as he started telling me a little about himself: growing up in one of the Grand Old Families of the county and always knowing he was going to be a lawyer (luckily, he liked the work fine; I didn’t know if I believed him), being pressured to go straight from college to law school, escaping for a year abroad in Europe anyway. I told him about the semester I’d spent in Florence studying Renaissance art (and being harassed fairly often by men on the street, one of the wonders of city life that doesn’t tend to make it into the guide books), which entailed confessing my art history major. I did my usual preemptive defense: “Yes, Art History. Because I love it. I know it’s mostly useless. Lots of wonderful things aren’t obviously useful.”
“You don’t have to tell me that—I’m a football fan. I went to a lot of museums in France and Italy, and I liked it, but I don’t know too much about art. I’d love to learn more.”
“I’m happy to ramble on about art, as long as you submit entirely to my judgment and recognize the essential rightness of my opinions.”
“I’m in your hands,” he said.
“You wish.”
He chuckled at that.
Okay. So maybe I wished. I hadn’t had a regular boy in my life for a while, and was pleasantly surprised to find a hot prospect in the Carolina mountains.
After a while we reached the little house where Melinda lived, and it was lovely—a lot cozier than the Grace house, a sort of miniature witch’s cottage hidden among a stand of trees, all dark wood and eaves hung heavy with vines and creepers, surrounded by beds of herbs and flowers. We knocked, but Melinda wasn’t home, and the only sign of life was a couple of scraggly cats that fled from our presence, so we shrugged and went on our way.
After about two hours of rambling around the property, we emerged on the far side of the house—from the same stand of trees where I’d heard the bizarre scream-trumpet-flute sound. There was no sign of whatever had made the noise. I saw a couple of those blue birds fluttering in the branches, but not the vast flock that had been frightened away. I pointed at one with the sword cane. “Blue jays, right? They’re pretty.”
“Blue jays are just crows with a coat of p
aint,” Trey said. “Same family. Noisy, aggressive, and kind of a pain in the ass. See if you still think they’re pretty when they crap all over your car…”
I laughed. “Good clean country living.”
“We’re all salt of the earth down here.”
I snorted, then froze—there was someone standing on my porch, and I had a sudden surge of irrational anger, like my personal space had been invaded, which was odd, since the house had only been mine for a day. I gripped my sword cane tightly.
“Huh, I think that’s Melinda.” Trey raised his hand in a wave, and the woman came down the steps, holding something in her hands.
“Trey! Of course you’re handling the estate, I should have realized. And Bekah, it’s so nice to see you again, I was just about to leave you a note, I brought you a housewarming gift.”
“Oh, that’s…how nice. It’s, ah…”
“A sculpture. I made it myself.” She held what looked like a bird’s nest, or at least a basket woven of twigs and vines and leaves, with three eggs nestled inside, strangely jewel-toned, blue and green and red. “The nest is made from things found on your property, and the eggs are sculpted and polished stone. The nest is a home, and the eggs represent a future full of possibility—they could hatch into anything, dragons or phoenixes or griffins, you see?”
I resisted the urge to say, “There’s no such thing as ‘phoenixes,’ there’s only ever one phoenix, and it’s born from fire, not hatched from an egg.” Not that she would have heard me—probably—as she kept rattling on.
“I call this piece Three Unborn, and it’s all about the power of art and the human condition, and how we have the potential to reinvent our own lives…”
I nodded, my brain starting to glaze over, hoping it didn’t show in my eyes. One thing you learn when you study art history: don’t trust anything an artist says about their work. I’ve always felt if a piece doesn’t make sense (or at least an impact) without a whole lot of contextualizing, that’s a good sign that it doesn’t work, full stop.