“You’ll want me then…” she screamed over the noise, almost in relief. “JIMMY!”
Within moments, a young man in cutoff jeans came to the door—shoeless—and conferred with the woman. He smiled at Taryn, then took the baby and gently pushed the dog away from the door. The woman eased herself away and gingerly stepped out onto the porch.
“I am so sorry,” Taryn said again. “I’m trying to get some information about this house and the people who used to live here. I’m doing some work on Windwood Farm and just talked to the Historical Society…Hi, I’m Taryn.”
“Melissa,” the young woman said warmly. She was about twenty-eight, Taryn would guess, and average height and build. She wore a pair of navy blue shorts and her short hair swung around her face in a sleek rain. Her gray T-shirt had a dark stain down the front, but her toenails were painted pink inside her sandals and her lipstick matched. She carried a bright, sunny smile and big blue eyes and Taryn instantly liked her. “Actually, I’m just excited to get out of the house. Want to sit down on the swing? And don’t worry about not calling. I’ve lost my charger anyway. And a few minutes of peace and quiet? This is like a vacation to me!”
It was nice sitting on the front porch swing with a view of the valley around them and Taryn felt a gentle rapport with the stranger. Bees buzzed around them and she could almost forget why she had come out there in the first place.
Melissa kicked off the swing and started a rhythm as she began talking. “My great, great, great grandfather built this place so it’s been in my family a long time. Of course, back then it was just a one room cabin. It was almost five hundred acres, too. Now we just have a little over one hundred acres. We like it, though. Hard to keep up, of course. And it’s a big house. Sally Anne was his wife,” she said conversationally.
“It’s beautiful out there,” Taryn said sincerely. It didn’t have any of the oppression that Windwood Farm suffered from. The woods didn’t look as menacing and dark on this side, even though they were obviously the same ones that backed up to Windwood. The barns out in the distance were well maintained and their red paint shone in the afternoon sun. A couple of horses grazed peacefully in the fields.
“Our sons love to ride, even though the oldest is only seven. I grew up here. Wouldn’t live anywhere else. I suspect you want to know about my great Uncle Donald, though. That’s probably why the women down there sent you here. That’s what most folks want to know about,” Melissa smiled.
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
Melissa shrugged. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, it was such a long time ago, but when it comes to tragedy and family, it might as well have happened yesterday. I mean, I didn’t know him and you didn’t know him, but here we are, talking about it like it’s all recent events and relevant to today.” Melissa smiled because it was all true.
Taryn smiled as well. “That’s true about the past I guess. It’s never too far away. You just can’t really escape it. It’s one of the reasons I think I was called to painting it. Sometimes I feel more connected to the past than I do to the present. I’m a painter, by the way, an artist. I paint the past.”
“I know who you are,” Melissa said. “I Googled you when I heard you was coming in. You do nice work. And I think it’s great, what you’re doing over there. That old place is kind of creepy, but I always liked it.”
“Do you have a ghost story for me? About everyone else does.”
“Nah,” Melissa answered. “Not me. I’m too scared. I’ve only seen it from a distance to be honest. I’ve lived here all my life but I’ve never even been inside. Now, my husband, he’s been on the porch, but he don’t believe in those things. He’s not from here. We met in college. I guess we’re kind of boring.”
“That’s okay,” Taryn laughed. “It’s actually kind of refreshing, to tell you the truth.”
“About my Donald, I can’t tell you much more than what you probably already know. He was supposed to go out and feed the horses. It was right before supper. He kissed his mother, which was a little unusual, but he was said to be a thoughtful son anyway, and he went out. When he didn’t come back in for supper, his father went out looking for him. He couldn’t find him. Then he didn’t come back in for bedtime. His brothers went out and helped look. They looked all night. Some neighbors were called and they looked for the next two days. They even looked over at Windwood Farm. Looked everywhere. Nothing. He was never seen again. His father, that would be my great grandfather, died about a year later. Supposedly from a heart attack but everyone assumed it was from a broken heart, which I guess he did really. My great grandmother died a month later, same thing. My grandmother was ten at the time.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Yeah, just part of my family history. Of course, I’m a little cynical. After watching a lot of crime shows and Lifetime I figure he could have taken off. Met up with someone and gone up to Ohio or out west somewhere and just started over someplace new.”
“Do you really think that?” Taryn asked.
“Why not?” Melissa shrugged. “It’s possible. I mean, I love my family and my kids. And, I can’t believe I’m even saying this to you since I don’t even know you, but there are days when don’t think I don’t daydream about walking off into the sunset. Just think about how life must have been back then, before machinery replaced all that manual labor. Life on the farm was hard. And who knows, maybe he was having an affair with someone around here. Maybe there was someone on the side. Maybe he was writing letters to someone and nobody knew about it. I’d like to think about the bright side of things. Better than thinking about a drifter killing him or being sold to the gypsies.”
“When I was little, my parents always threatened to sell me to the gypsies.”
Melissa laughed. “Mine too! I thought that was a real thing.”
“It probably was!”
“He was supposed to start college that winter. Or maybe it was the following summer. Anyhow, he’d been accepted. They didn’t have a lot of money, though, and he was working to earn more before he went. That’s how come he was still around here. Maybe if he hadn’t done that and had gone on when he was supposed to, he wouldn’t have disappeared.”
It had been a productive weekend and she’d eaten better than she had in weeks. Between the lunch she’d scored at the Stokes County Historical Society and the supper she’d more or less invited herself to at Melissa’s house, she figured she’d gained a good three pounds. That was good while it lasted. In addition to the headache she had now she’d developed a bout of nausea that kind of killed her appetite and she hadn’t been eating much. She was chalking it up to all the fast food she was consuming, but if she ever made it home for more than a few days, she really needed to go in for a checkup. She would Google it all but since all roads led to cancer that was just a direction she didn’t want to head down.
Today was the day she was devoting to the missing section and she was far more excited than the day probably called for. She’d worked on it a little bit the night before and done some sketches in the hotel room after going for a swim in the pool and she felt alert and refreshed. The combination of the good food and much needed companionship and conversation helped reinvigorate her.
Feeling empowered as she breezed through the front door this time, she held her camera up in front of her and sang out into the living room, “Okay guys, things are going to change around here!” It was completely quiet. Indeed, she thought she thought she heard birds singing outside. Nodding her head in approval, she did a little bit of a two-step shuffle, and bobbed her head. Skipping a little bit, she headed back to the kitchen and aimed her camera. “I’m working on the part of the house that’s gone today, and I need some interior shots of the house to help me along. Anyone got a problem with that?” Again, total silence.
“Yeah,” she sang. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Satisfied she’d gotten the best shots possible, she skirted back to the living room and then took the camera
from around her neck and turned it on playback. And stopped dead in her tracks. Where there should have been empty rooms, she saw the faint outlines of pictures, tables, and chairs. “Well, here we go again.”
Then, she had an idea.
“What else can you pick up for me, Dixie?”
Ignoring the slight chill that was starting to fill the air, Taryn slung the camera back over her neck and began snapping pictures of every corner of each room she encountered. She paid little notice to where she aimed the camera and to artistic integrity, she just pointed and shot and did it as quickly as she could, before things got bad. She knew she might not have much time. The air around her thickened and turned tense but she kept moving, moving; her heart rate accelerating. She didn’t take time to look at her screen, she didn’t even look through her viewfinder, she just kept her eyes straight ahead as she walked from one room to the next first on the ground floor and then up one set of stairs to the master bedroom, devoid of any furniture, and the other set of stairs to Clara’s bedroom.
By the time she made it back outside, the air inside the house dropped several degrees and she was shivering from the cold, despite the fact the temperature outside was close to ninety. Her heart was racing from the adrenalin and she felt as though she had been walking through molasses. But she made it and nothing had flown at her, shouted at her, or cried. That was an improvement, at least.
With shaking hands, she jumped in her car and sped off toward the hotel, anxious to look at the pictures on her computer. It wouldn’t do to see them on her camera. She needed to see them in the largest size possible. Certain that she’d wreck along the way or that something crazy would happen— like her camera would grow wings and fly out the window or something—she was shocked when her car arrived at the hotel in one piece.
With trembling hands, she stuck the memory card in her adapter and waited with nervous anticipation as the images loaded. She couldn’t believe her eyes at what she was looking at. “Holy mother of God,” she whispered.
“Good grief!” Matt shouted into the phone.
She hadn’t been able to keep it to herself, of course. She’d sent them to his Dropbox right away. Now, they were looking at them together.
“I’m about to fall over, Matt. I mean, what the hell is this? Am I going out of my ever-loving mind?” Taryn paced back and forth across her hotel room, periodically going back to stare at her computer screen again, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
The downstairs pictures were crazy enough: the chairs in the living room, the settee in the parlor, the bookshelf filled with what could only be leather-bound volumes, the area rug, the shoes waiting for someone to come back and slip them on at the bottom of the staircase…They looked like stills from a movie. These weren’t faded images or holograms. Yes, there were some images that were a little blurry, as though they might be double exposures, but many of them were as strong as though the articles in question had actually been there when the pictures were, in fact, taken. Most people wouldn’t doubt that they were.
It was the pictures taken upstairs, specifically the ones in Clara’s bedroom, that raised the most questions. There were seven in total and six of them were similar to the ones taken downstairs. They showed a bedroom much like the one that could be seen today; the only difference being the addition of a full-length standalone mirror next to the bed that had since disappeared. But in the last image, an image Taryn could not take her eyes away from, in the center of the tousled bed, amidst the blankets and pillows in what looked like a heap of sadness and torment was the unmistakable outline of a stunning young girl.
Her figure wasn’t as strong as the rest of the images. It was fragile, as if touching her might make her disappear. Parts of her were transparent, and that was disturbing enough. But the shape of her body and the sagging of her shoulders conveyed the grief Taryn heard from her cries and seeing it somehow made it even worse.
“Oh, Matt, that’s her. Just seeing it, you have no idea. That’s Clara, that’s her. Now I’ve captured a ghost on film. I’ve gone and done it.”
“It’s a sign, Taryn. It’s a sign you’re supposed to finish it. She obviously needs your help. Look at the poor thing. Maybe it’s about finishing your painting. Maybe that’s all you need to do.”
Taryn snorted. “Riiight. Because this ghost cares about oils. Clearly.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the mirror. It’s the only thing missing from the room. When mirrors are facing one another, it’s supposed to open the door to the spirit world. Why is that one in her room gone? Where did it go?”
Taryn rubbed her temples. “I don’t know, Matt. I’m not the ghost whisperer.”
“Dear, you are now, apparently.”
Chapter 8
“Well, of course Mama thinks that the old loon on Windwood Farm had something to do with that boy’s disappearance,” Tammy confided.
The diner was deserted and Tammy was helping herself to a scoop of ice cream, her feet propped up on a chair she had dragged over to the booth. It was late and she was pulling a double shift. The jukebox was playing early Randy Travis and Taryn couldn’t sleep. She was staring at her waffles and sliding the butter around and around them, dipping it down into the little holes and back out again.
“Sounds about right, doesn’t it?” she murmured.
“Sure, why not?” she agreed. Her perky ponytail bobbed on her head. She might have worked all day, but she looked fresh as a daisy. Taryn, on the other hand, felt as though she’d been dragged through the mud. Her head was pounding, her skin was oily, and she couldn’t stop going to the bathroom. She must have eaten something bad.
“What’s the motive though?”
Tammy shrugged, scraping the side of the ice cream dish. “I dunno. Meanness. This ain’t a crime show. Sometimes folks don’t need a motive. Maybe he was just mean and wanted to kill someone and that kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Sorry, be right back,” Taryn apologized and jumped up and headed for the bathroom.
When she returned, Tammy was still sitting in the booth. “You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I made myself some sweet tea in the hotel room this morning and took it with me when I went to the house to work. Either it went bad, or it was something in my sandwich. My stomach’s been off all day. I could be coming down with something, too. I’ve had a headache for over a week.”
“Could be the heat. You outside every day, you’ve got to feel it the most,” Tammy said sympathetically. “I don’t know how you stand it. The best thing about this job is that it’s air-conditioned in here. That and the music. I rigged the jukebox so that it plays for free. Well, and I can eat. I looove to eat.”
“So did your mom have anything else to say about it?” Taryn was desperate for more information and would take anything she could get. She hadn’t had any more experiences at the house since she took the pictures inside and saw whom she could only assume to be Clara in the bed. She visited her grave that morning and hoped to feel something but hadn’t heard a peep or felt a thing. It had actually been peaceful and even enjoyable to visit the headstone, especially since it was now cleaned off. Of course, now that she wanted to pick up on something she couldn’t. It apparently didn’t work that way.
“Just that she thought you were nuts for going out there every day and that she thought they just ought to tear the damn thing down be done with it. She thinks the house is evil. She and Dad used to go out there and make out, and probably screw around, when they were dating in high school, and she saw all kinds of shit. I’m not naïve. She said she heard screaming, saw black shapes flying around, heard crying. I don’t know. One time she heard a man yelling ‘help me’ and then heard someone shoot an old timey shot gun. It was right near the car and she could smell gun smoke. They thought it was real at first but there was nobody there. That was good enough for them, though. They never went back.”
“Houses like that, though, usually t
hose are the kinds of places kids would go to and hang out at. You’d want to see things. I grew up outside of Nashville for the most part and there were ‘haunted’ houses around. Everyone wanted to see them,” Taryn mused. “It was fun to be scared.”
“But don’t you feel like this one is different?” Tammy asked. “It’s not just scary. It’s sad. I don’t feel good there. Being scared is fun. I love horror movies. Me and my boyfriend, we go to scary movies and I cover my eyes and scream and watch through my fingers. He makes fun of me, but I love them! And we go through haunted houses at Halloween. But it’s fun! This is not fun. That house is not fun. It makes me want to cry. YouknowwhatImean?”
She said it all in a rush, like one big word. And Taryn knew exactly what she meant. Windwood Farm was more than a simply horrifically spooky place, it was crushing. And as she drove back to the hotel and parked her car under the flashing vacancy light, she finally knew that she needed to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t because the ghost was asking her to, like in a movie. It wasn’t because it was a pressing mystery that demanded to be solved. It was because the sadness was so overwhelming that it might have gotten inside of her and was making her ill. She was convinced that’s how much of an effect the house was having on her.
She meant to get an even earlier start than usual the next morning, but the overcast morning erupted into a strong thunderstorm and it didn’t let up until after three o’clock. That ended up being just fine with her because her upset stomach never really did ease up and she was violently ill all morning from both ends until she collapsed in bed and fell into a fitful sleep until early evening.
With nothing in her room but a package of crackers and a jar of peanut butter, she made herself a snack and watched episodes of “Boy Meets World” while she dealt with her fragile tummy and moaned into her pillow. Where in the world had she picked something up? She considered painting in her room, as she didn’t really need to see the house after all, but she didn’t trust herself to sit up for very long.
Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) Page 12