Cursed: Paranormal Women's Fiction (Mid-Life Haunts Book 1)

by Nhys Glover

  “Lastly, I bequeath to Cleo my personal library, in the hope that she will find the answer to the taint within it and be able to save Channing and the mountain. As I write this will, I am only too aware that every attempt I have made to heal the heart of the mountains has come to naught. I feel so incredibly guilty for not heeding the prophecy and not protecting my daughter more fully. You, Cleo, were always so much more sensitive than I, and I underestimated the damage an uncaring boy could do to you. For that I am so terribly sorry. As I am so very sorry for sending you away when you needed me the most. As if you were to blame for the calamity.

  “You weren’t, my darling girl. You were never at fault. All blame lies with me. But I am confident that you will be the one who can heal the heart of the mountain, if anyone can. Remember, Nature is very resilient. It can always be healed by a willing heart.”

  Tears were pouring down my cheeks by the time Mr. Mc Dowerty came to the end of the document. Hilary was crying too, I noticed. Even Michael appeared moved by my mother’s declaration.

  The lawyer cleared his throat and put aside the will. In its place he took up a spreadsheet. “The investments and savings currently run to about three million dollars. Your majority holding in your mother’s company is worth another seven million. The value of your children’s shares is approximately a million apiece, if they choose to sell. You all have the right to join the board of directors, although you may give voting rights to anyone else you so allocate.

  “Do you have any questions?”

  I blinked a few times to get it clear in my mind. I had ten million dollars, as well as Channing Manor and its lands which, if I remembered correctly, ran to about a hundred thousand acres of mostly forested land. The forest was regularly thinned, bringing in more money per year. Only fifteen hundred of those acres were currently laid waste.

  It made the hundred thousand a year alimony Paul had settled on me seem like a pittance. A pittance I could now throw back in his face, or give to my daughter, I wasn’t sure which.

  “Mrs. —”

  “Ms. Channing. I will be taking back my maiden name,” I told the old lawyer with a confident heart.

  Channing Manor belonged to Channing women. Every matriarch had adopted that name, no matter what her last name had been before she inherited it. It was an acknowledgement of our heritage.

  “Ah, yes. I assumed you would be following the tradition. I have the paperwork for the formal change of name here.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, Hilary, Michael and I were heading back to my car, all of us in shock.

  “I could buy a new sports car,” Michael muttered distractedly.

  “Your dad bought you a new car for college,” I said tersely as I unlocked my five-year-old Prius that had seen better days.

  I could buy a new car, too. Maybe not a sports car, given the terrain around Grand Haven, but something bigger and more powerful for the occasional off-road jaunts I might have to take. A bright red SUV?

  “You’re a multi-millionaire, Mom,” Hilary breathed as we headed for home.

  Home. What an oddly familiar word for a place I’d left behind so long ago.

  “And you’re a millionaire. Of course, a million dollars isn’t much these days. But if Mom’s company continues on as it has been doing, your dividends will be enough to help you and Clay get a new start. I was thinking I could give you my alimony, seeing you don’t have a trust fund. It could get Clay started in a business.”

  “I was wondering if Clay could work for the company. There’s sure to be some role he could fill. And after you fix the mountain, maybe you could bring a part of it back to the States so you could inject life back into the community again…” Hilary said thoughtfully.

  “Would he want to do that?” I asked cautiously.

  My fondest hope was that Mom’s business might become truly a family-run concern. Back when I was adrift, a new baby to care for in a home that was not my home—no matter how luxurious it seemed from the outside—I dreamed of working for Mom’s burgeoning company. It was small back then, barely having enough staff to meet the orders. It was the reason why she’d gone overseas in the first place. Manufacturing costs were so much less when you could pay staff a fraction of what you would have to pay homegrown employees. And every one of those people had degrees and experience that I didn’t have as a teenager who’d barely scraped through high school.

  Mom had wanted to support me so I could be a full-time mom, but my Channing pride wouldn’t let me be financially dependent on her or anyone. So I took jobs waiting tables for a pittance, leaving my aunt to mother my daughter when she wasn’t mothering her own kids. It wasn’t ideal by any stretch. Especially when Aunt Lucy’s antagonism was such a palpable part of my existence. The mountain, which she’d grown up believing she had to protect, was dying because of me. And I just acted out, angry at the world, at Jake, at my mom and her.

  Until Hilly came along. Oh, the sweet relief from my negative emotions she brought into my life. I hadn’t realized how eaten up inside I’d become until I began to feel love for the innocent child I grew in my belly. It didn’t matter what drunk college kid had fathered her, she was mine. She proved to the world, and to me, that I wasn’t a total loser.

  Then Paul came along, my aging knight on his very expensive steed, all thoughts of becoming part of mom’s company ended. In its place were dreams of my own perfect family that had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with a blighted mountainside thousands of miles away.

  Now, though, after the failure of that dream, I found the other re-emerging. My family could run my mother’s company. Together. Maybe even one day Michael might choose it over Paul’s company. Or maybe he’d opt to go out on his own. I was not one of those parents who sought to control their child’s life. Paul would have been one of those, but I’d kept his pressure marginalized over the years so Michael could breathe. So Michael could be his own person.

  “What are you thinking?” Hil asked me as we traveled the ten minutes between town and home.

  Jerked out of my daydream, I smiled at the oh-so-familiar road I was traveling. I could have driven it blindfolded.

  “Just daydreaming about a family-run business that can save an ailing town. Nothing like having a super-hero complex.”

  Hilary and Michael both laughed, the elation at discovering just how wealthy we all were still with them.

  “Maybe we could find a way to merge Dad’s company with your mom’s. What’s it called again?” Michael asked from the back seat where he was lounging, his feet up so his duffel could occupy the foot well.

  “Nature’s Haven,” I told him softly.

  Just saying the name filled me with bittersweet memories.

  I remembered sitting around the kitchen table with Gran, Mom and Casey brainstorming names for the business Mom wanted to start. She hated how many chemicals were included in even the most natural products available on the market. Her knowledge of chemistry was phenomenal, and when combined with her magic, she had breakthrough after breakthrough. Her natural aid for asthmatics had won her awards not long after she went public.

  But on that day, sitting around the kitchen table, it was all still just a dream. And we gave that dream a name, based on our home and our philosophy of life. No, not just a philosophy, our reason for being: Nature. We were part of Nature and it was an intrinsic part of us. The source of our magic.

  “Nature’s Haven. I like it,” Michael said after a moment.

  “Why the sudden interest? You’ve got Dad’s business to play with,” Hilary said tersely, her sibling rivalry coming to the surface once more.

  “I’m as much a part of this family as you are,” he snapped back, both kids falling into the habitual arguments of their childhoods.

  If Paul had just not been so obvious in his preference for his own child. If only he’d maintained the mask of doting father he’d donned for Hilary when she was little more than a baby. If only he’d continued to let her thin
k the big male person in her life was really hers, my children might have been better friends.

  Paul wasn’t an awful father. Hilary was given everything a child could hope for in the way of material things. Paul even paid for college and gave her a stipend to live on. And he didn’t tell Michael he had a trust fund until after Hil had married. It was supposed to be kinder that way.

  In Paul’s eyes, he had given Hilary the best possible start in life. But once she married, he considered his responsibility to her finished. Which would never be the case with his son. He never knew how gutted Hilary was by the favoritism. He didn’t understand the wedge he’d driven between my kids.

  “Can you two both grow up a bit,” I spoke over their bickering. “I have to fix the problem before we can have this happy-ever-after.”

  “It can’t be that… Oh, shit!” Michael exclaimed, as we came over the rise and he got his first glimpse of the problem.

  Nearly a mile out from the Channing Manor the blighted land started. It was roughly fifteen hundred acres or a little over one and three quarter miles across, with the house sitting dead in the center, pun intended. Though the border was not precisely drawn, as if by human design, there was a roughly circular appearance to it from above. Like a ragged patch torn out of a pair of jeans, as Mom had once described it.

  But at the border only a few feet of land merged life with death. The transformation was so fast. The death so sudden.

  Now, as we drove that last mile home, Michael stared around him, silent and open-mouthed in horror.

  “Wow, no wonder those people are so crazy,” he finally croaked out. “This is scary stuff. Really scary stuff. And I can see where the fire went through. Did those lunatics really try to burn Grandma out?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t know about that. Mom never mentioned it. But then, I didn’t know how bad it had become, either. Mom kept it all from me. I kind of knew it was spreading, but when I left, it was only a few large strides from the house. I couldn’t imagine it being like this. So much of it. So very much of it.”

  “But the house didn’t burn?” Michael went on, a dog with a bone.

  “Not that I could see. I don’t know how Mom saved the place, but she obviously did. Maybe it was her magic that did it. She may have been able to call a storm to put it out. I know she could do that at a pinch. It was the farthest reach of her particular kind of earth magic. I was always so jealous of her way with Nature. My ghosts were more hindrance than handy.”

  “I think the Channings were sexist. I mean, just because I’m a boy I can’t have magic. Now that’s not fair,” Michael whined.

  “No one said you can’t have magic,” I explained patiently. “It’s just that males don’t have the same kind of affinity to the magical energy as females do. Maybe it's because male and female brains are wired differently. There are more connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain in women. I think it’s those extra connections that make it easier for us to verbalize our feelings as well as tap into our magic. I think magic inhabits the right hemisphere, along with emotions.”

  “So, it’s harder for us grunts, but it is possible,” Michael pressed, never liking to be left out.

  “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I’ve always kept an eye out for any magic you might have displayed, ready to foster it as I did Hilary’s. You just haven’t shown an aptitude for it. But then, Hilary and I don’t have the aptitude for picking up heavy objects or programming a remote. Different strokes for different folks. Not better or worse, just different.”

  We’d had this talk a dozen times over the years, but Michael never seemed to get it. I wondered if, now he was becoming a man, he would finally see the advantages of his masculinity. For one thing, he’d looked pretty damn good stepping up to protect me. Give him a few more years to bulk up a bit and he’d be an impressively strong specimen.

  We reached the turnoff and headed down the well-paved private road that led to the house. With no foliage to block the view, the mansion, in all its glory, could be seen set against brown, scorched earth.

  “Fucking A!” Michael exclaimed in horrified wonder.

  “Language, Michael!” I rebuked, although I couldn’t blame him.

  It was quite the sight. A mansion of white sandstone that could easily have graced the South in its heyday. Yet it was more gothic in design than those antebellum mansions. It surprised me that the Victorian architect didn’t include a tower or widow’s walk to finish off the picture. The pale stone was an anomaly, though. It should have been built with brick or dark stone. But with a sandstone quarry on the property there was never a question about what would be used in its construction.

  I pulled up at the front door, still not ready to use the garage at the back. It had once housed a horse and carriage when it was first built, but as times changed, so did the upgrades to the property.

  Michael’s mouth was still open as he looked upward at the exterior facade glowing softly in the midday sunshine. Hilary threw me a smug, knowing look. She’d known Michael would fall in love with the house the moment he saw it. The grounds were a drawback, sure, but the mansion… was glorious!

  Hilary unlocked the front door and we all tromped inside. Michael gasped in just the same way Hilary had, the day before, at the first sight of the foyer. My heart lifted to see both my children so enamored with my old home.

  Paul’s place was an ultra-modern steel and concrete construction that had more edge than beauty. It was the sort of place I’d expect a tech guru to buy, not a man with a family. Of course, Paul’s first wife had picked it, and in the divorce settlement Paul had kept it. It had never suited me, for all it had every comfort and luxury known to man. There was no place bigger or fancier in all of Austin.

  “Who was the architect?” Michael demanded. “It’s gothic in design but… I don’t know. It’s got an almost art nouveau flavor, don’t you think? But art nouveau didn’t flourish until the last decade of the nineteenth century. Look at all those flowing curved branches of the wrought iron rose bushes in the banister. The elegant flowing lines of the banister itself. The use of light from the stained-glass inserts at the side of the door and the skylight of wrought iron and glass in the ceiling two stories up. Magnificent! And the green stone column… Corinthian column. Is that malachite? Do you know how expensive malachite is?”

  The more Michael talked, the more excited he became, rushing from one place to another, talking all the while.

  “I don’t know the architect. But I think he was reasonably famous at the time. It's probably written down somewhere in Mom’s library.”

  “Your library!” Hilary contradicted.

  As if mentioning her summoned her, I felt a cold chill brush over my skin. I instantly recognized the feel of my mom and her joy at seeing Michael so enraptured by her house.

  I chuckled. “Yeah, my budding architect is very taken with the place, as you can see.”

  “Huh?” Hilary said, frowning.

  “Mom’s here. She likes seeing Michael so impressed. We both do. Call us house proud, but this place has always been special to us. To all the Channings, I bet.”

  Michael’s eyes lit with a different fire. “Grandma? I’m glad you stayed to help. Any insights from the Other Side on how to fix the land?”

  His natural charm had always made him a favorite with my mother. The fact that he looked a lot like her, except for the brown hair and eyes he’d inherited from Paul, didn’t hurt either. They had chattered like magpies from their first Skype call when Michael was about five years old. I bet he’d want to keep it up now, using me as the conduit instead of Skype tech.

  I felt my mom grow troubled and passed on her communication. “No, she’s as worried as always about what is happening here.”

  I turned to stare into space to address her myself. “Dad was at the funeral. He gave the eulogy. It was wonderful. He really did love you, you know. I never knew that before today. Not really. And he tried to protect Hilly from the religious n
uts who waylaid us after the funeral.”

  A longing that was soul deep filled me, as the scene of a young, handsome Dad twirling Mom around and around filled my mind. She was sooo happy. So free and hopeful. The world was her oyster back then.

  The emotion shifted to distress as she questioned the incident.

  “Pastor Herbert and his crew decided to voice their wishes for me and mine to rot in hell. I gather you know the man? And that his people were responsible for the fire?”

  A sense of shock followed by fury. I took that as a no, she hadn’t suspected those people of setting the fire.

  “Sheriff Killian came to our rescue!” Hilary added, wanting to see how Mom would react to news of my arch nemesis.

  Regret consumed me as well as a little heart-ache.

  “Thanks for what you said in the Will. I always thought you blamed me. I know you said you weren’t sending me away because I did something wrong, that it was just to remove the ‘taint’ from the land the only way you knew how, but I did feel it was my fault. So, yeah, it was nice to hear that that wasn’t how you saw it. I just wish… I don’t know. I wish I’d known what was at stake. Maybe I would have done things differently back then.”

  I realized my kids were staring at me, wide-eyed. Shrugging, I looked away.

  “It's been a day of revelations. Now you have another,” I told them. “I always felt responsible for all this, and believed Mom did too.”

  “We always knew you blamed yourself,” Michael said. “I didn’t understand what the deal was. So some guy got a bit carried away. It’s not like sex is some sacred communion or something. Nobody believes that anymore. As long as you use protection, it's just meant to be fun.”

  “How do you treat the girls you bed? After, I mean?” I asked, wanting to check that my son was not behaving like that asshat Killian.

  Michael looked embarrassed for the first time and rolled his eyes. “I say goodbye and tell them it was fun. I don’t thank them or anything. I give as much pleasure as I get, I assure you. I’ve watched enough porn to get it right.”