Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera)

by Rebecca Patrick-Howard

  “Me too. When I was a kid and the teacher asked us all what we wanted to be when we grew up, everyone else said doctors, lawyers, teachers…I said I wanted to be a time traveler. Joke’s on me, right?” she smiled.

  They laughed.

  “Doesn’t it freak you out, though?” he asked. “Matt, he’s real worried about you. Said someone tried to kill you. That’s not a ghost, you know.”

  “No, that’s a person. And I have no idea who’s doing it. And yeah, I’m scared. A lot. But mostly I’m curious. The noises, the scents, the sounds…But when I’m looking through the camera and seeing the pictures, it’s like watching a movie, like viewing it through another time period. Like I’m not really there.”

  “So you’re kind of detached from the scene.”

  Taryn felt herself grow slightly uncomfortable at the thought, but couldn’t understand why. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Well,” he said, bringing a paper bag up from behind the counter and handing it to her. “Here are some things that will get you started. Some sage for your hotel room and car. That will cleanse them, purify them, get rid of any bad mojo you got hanging around. A pentagram to wear around your neck, I blessed it myself. Some black candles to light in your room to help ward off negative energy…”

  By the time she left the shop, she’d spent $75, had more New Age paraphernalia than she knew what to do with, and was the proud owner of a new 22-inch flat screen television.

  Lexington was a nice town. She treated herself to the Fayette Mall where she shopped at Macy’s and bought herself some new boots and spent several lovely hours people watching and then went to the movies and laughed at a silly comedy that she promptly forgot. The countryside with its horse farms and ornate mansions were intermixed with an eclectic, hip downtown area filled with Victorian houses and urban restaurants with outdoor seating areas. She thought she could spend time in a town like this, she found herself thinking on more than one occasion, especially when she was settled at the enormous bookstore, sipping on a mocha and relaxing in an overstuffed chair.

  It was good to get away from Vidalia and Windwood Farm where she was starting to feel a little stuffy and even paranoid. After all, someone had tried to make her very sick, if not altogether dead. She actually liked small towns and figured she’d settle down in one sooner or later, but so far, what with ghosts keeping her from her work, surly librarians, and poisons being tossed into her tea, this one wasn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat. Although the hospital had been very nice and she had built a good rapport with the diner waitress and Donald’s descendent.

  Soon, it was time to pack it in and head home. She stopped at the artists’ supply store on the way back to the interstate and picked up what she needed and waved a fond farewell to the glimmering lights of the city before heading south. She’d get started again first thing in the morning. It wouldn’t take her much longer to finish the painting now.

  Back in the hotel room, Taryn set everything from New Age Gifts and More out on the dresser and took a good look at it all. She had no idea where to start. One was a book entitled “Candle Magic” and the clerk had helpfully dog-eared and highlighted a page entitled “gaining vision and clarity on a situation.” Well, she guessed she needed it, although she wasn’t sure if it was in regards as to who poisoned her or what was going on in the house. Either way, clarity would be nice.

  There were an awful lot of candles involved in this ritual. She hoped she wouldn’t burn down the hotel room with them or set off the smoke alarm. That would be bad. She felt kind of silly setting them up: seven white ones and seven light blue ones. She lined them up, little votive candles, in two rows on the dresser. Before she lit them, she turned off her lights and then knelt down in front of the dresser. It would have to do as her altar, since she had nothing else. Matt made sure she had a big thick white candle to work as her “altar candle.” She lit it first and then lit the sage incense she’d been given.

  Next, she rubbed the carnation oil from all the candles’ wicks to their ends and then lit them, one by one. In front of the row of candles, she placed three stones: a chrysoprase, geode, and tiger’s eye. (She thought the tiger’s eye sounded prettier, but it was kind of a dull stone in comparison to the geode.)

  Lastly, she closed her eyes and said the chant the clerk told her to say. That was the worst part about it. Honestly, she believed in this stuff. It was one of the reasons why she and Matt continued to have the bond they did. Neither one ascribed to any kind of organized religion, although she did sometimes attend church services, but she did like the idea of an earthy kind of religion that looked to nature. But saying chants with rhyming words sounded Dr. Seuss to her, and not in a good way. It felt silly.

  Still, if it helped…

  She tried to clear her mind and imagine her heart free and open to clarity and truth. It was hard. Meditating was always hard. Just as soon as she told her mind to clear, it wanted to fill with every single commercial jingle or holiday song it had ever heard. It was particularly fond of the Muppets’ version of “The 12 Days of Christmas.”

  Finally, when she felt like she had given it enough time, she opened her eyes, blew out her altar candle, and turned on the lights. The votive candles she would leave to burn out through the night and would then dispose of the wax the next morning. She wasn’t quite sure what was supposed to happen next. Would it come through a dream? A phone call? A billboard?

  Oh well, she thought, as she drifted off to sleep, the flickering candles making crazy patterns on the ceiling and walls. At least she tried.

  Chapter 11

  Since someone had slit her tire and tried to kill her, Tammy refused to let her pay for her breakfast anymore. She insisted that her manager agreed that all future meals were to be on the house and Taryn was no fool. She didn’t argue. She did, however, tip very well.

  “Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” she asked Taryn with real concern. “I’d offer you tea, but…”

  “It’s fine,” Taryn laughed. “My taste for tea kind of comes and goes right now. I’m good with the water.”

  She was able to joke around about her hospitalization and tried to go along with the police’s theory that it had just been a vicious prank, but inside she was scared. She knew she’d been poisoned more than once and that was no joking matter. Reagan offered to send some men over to stay with her while she was painting, but she had waved him away. The last thing she needed was a bunch of people all up in her business. Besides, she could usually get at least one bar on her cell phone while she was out there, despite the fact it was supposed to be a “dead zone” and Melissa was less than a mile away. She was going to finish this job, crazy people and ghosts be damned.

  “Nothing like that has ever happened before, not around here anyway,” Tammy said. “I mean, we’ve had people kill other people, but it’s mostly been when they were drinking or something. Sometimes drugs. Always a knife or a gun. I’ve never heard of anyone trying to poison somebody.”

  “And I just thought I made bad tea,” Taryn smiled as she drank down the last of the water. “Really, though, I’m fine.”

  She was about to get up and start the early morning paint session when a soft voice carried across the room and called out her name. “There’s our star artist!”

  Taryn turned around and saw Phyllis, the bird-woman, seated in a corner booth with a middle-aged man in suspenders and a baseball cap.

  “Hello there,” she waved. The man flashed her a quick smile and then went back to his biscuits and gravy.

  “How are you feeling, sweetie?” she asked with what appeared to be genuine concern. “You still look a little pale yet.”

  “I’m feeling a lot better,” she replied honestly. “I have my appetite back. They said that’s good.”

  “Just awful,” Phyllis shook her head in disgust. “And so embarrassing for our town, too. This is my son, Roger, by the way. He lives over in Fitz and takes me to breakfast once a week.”

 
Taryn said hello and then excused herself from the diner. It hadn’t escaped her attention that the other patrons were holding on to every word in the exchange. Between that and the write up in the local paper, everyone really was going to know what had happened to Vidalia’s newest resident.

  With her easel under her arm, Taryn set up with a new resolution. Nothing was going to stop her today. She was ready. Miss Dixie was ready too, armed and ready with a fully-charged battery. Taryn took a few test shots of the house and looked at them in the LCD screen. Nothing but decay and ruin. Well, clarity wasn’t coming yet. Maybe the poison had weakened her sight. Maybe it was something she couldn’t control…yet, anyway.

  It didn’t matter right now. She did have a job to do, after all.

  And do it, she did.

  For the next several hours, Taryn was a whirlwind of oil and color, painting with a ferocity that sometimes surprised those around her who didn’t know her well. It probably would have been easy for someone to have come up and slipped something into her tea, but this time she wasn’t taking any chances—she brought Ale-8s, the locally-produced caffeinated drinks, and they had pop caps on them.

  Nearly four hours had gone by before she stopped and took a break. She was covered in sweat and grime and specks of paint, but she felt good. It was almost completed. Another day and it just might be. And then she could do some touch-ups and present it to both Reagan and the Stokes County Historical Society and be on her way. Except, of course, she couldn’t really be.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  With a sigh of frustration, she put down her paintbrush and picked up Miss Dixie again and aimed her at the house. “Oh, come on,” she complained. “Give me something I can work with. How am I supposed to help you if you don’t give me something?”

  Barely paying attention at where she was pointing the camera, she aimed it at the general direction of Clara’s window and took a shot. When she turned it back around and looked through the LCD screen, the faint outline of a woman stood there, looking out into the yard. “Hot damn!” Taryn hollered. “Stay there, stay there, stay there,” she chanted as she took off into the house.

  Sprinting toward the front door it occurred to her that it would be ironic if it were the camera that was the one with the “sight” and not her after all. But then, that would have been ignoring all of the other experiences she’d had in her life-experiences she’d tried to push away and forget. Maybe the camera was just the conduit.

  “I can’t rush it,” she breathed quietly. “Stay calm.”

  She began on the first floor again, this time starting with the living room. Standing in the middle of the floor, she turned in a slow circle and took pictures as she moved, watching the screen. Again, the room came to life with furniture and knickknacks and signs of life from the past. A few items were different in these images: a new clock here, the shoes that were in the last set of pictures were now gone, but otherwise the room remained unchanged. In the kitchen, breakfast dishes were left out on the table. Signs of bacon, eggs, jam, and biscuits could be seen. But nothing appeared out of the ordinary. The table was set for two. That told her that Clara’s mother must already be gone.

  The dining room was empty and bare. Fearing that she might be losing whatever power the house had, she quickened her pace and headed up the stairs, careful not to run, but aware that the energy around her was changing again, becoming crushing. Please let it last, please let it last, she chanted to herself. On some level, she knew that this might just be her last shot.

  Propitiously, with the first shot, she saw that the past was once again alive. Although no signs of Clara were apparent this time, the wardrobe door was open, revealing a small array of cotton dresses inside. They were shorter, but not girlish. Clara was not quite a little girl then, but not as old as she was when she died. A teddy bear was placed in the middle of the bed, something Taryn found sweet and sentimental considering Clara’s age, which had to be at least early teens. The mirror, now gone, was still there. Clara’s own reflection didn’t appear, although she was standing in front of it. Interesting, she thought, so I don’t show up in this time period. That means they can’t see me and aren’t aware of my presence then. The keys, which were on the dresser in real life, were not on there in the past.

  In disappointment, Taryn sat down on the floor and stared at the LCD screen. She had so been hoping the ritual last night would help her. Maybe those things really were just bogus P.R. Maybe she didn’t take it seriously enough. But she had tried.

  Closing her eyes, she tried in vain to think of something else she could do. What was she missing? Missing. Missing…

  Missing!

  The mirror was missing.

  Opening her eyes, she looked back at the picture of the mirror again. From its vantage point, it had a perfect view of the dresser. Although it didn’t catch her reflection in it, she herself wasn’t there in the past, and it didn’t show the keys, it did show something else—something that wasn’t there in the present: a small leather-bound book.

  “I know a diary when I see one,” she laughed almost hysterically. “Now where the hell are you?”

  She might have been afraid to open things before, but sheer adrenalin and intrigue motivated her now. She’d been a teenage girl once and while her mother hadn’t been a big snoop (she hadn’t cared enough), Taryn kind of hoped that she might be and had come up with some glorious hiding places. On her hands and knees, Taryn searched under the dresser, inside the wardrobe, in the trunk, and under the mattress (disturbing a family of mice). She made a bad scrape on her knee from a really big cut in the floor while searching under the bed and a trail of blood dribbled down her leg. She barely noticed it, such was her excitement.

  “I know you didn’t take it out of the room…”

  Walking to the low window, she squatted down to peer outside and her foot slipped on a loose board that nearly came up and hit her in the head. “Shit!”

  Looking down, a small bundle of cloth peeked out at her inside a hole under the floorboards. “Oh, well, there you are. The classics never really die, do they?”

  It was so fragile she was almost afraid to touch it but she handled it gingerly and reverently. A quick look through it showed her that the pages were shockingly dry, considering it had been hidden under an open window for more than seventy-five years. Unfortunately, only around twenty-five of the pages were written on. The rest were empty.

  “Oh, honey. I was hoping you’d given me more to work with than this,” Taryn complained. “But I’ll work with what I’ve got.”

  Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, she took her precious cargo and camera and went back downstairs, the forgotten blood drying on her leg.

  Chapter 12

  May 21, 1921

  Sometimes I can’t even remember what my mother looked like. I slip down to the parlor and look at her portrait, but it’s as though I’m seeing someone from a fairy tale or a book. I can’t envision her face or bring her features to my mind anymore. I can’t even remember her scent. Papa won’t speak her name. He says she’s with the angels now, when he speaks of her at all. He has stopped attending church, too. I go alone, when he lets me go. I barely remember the way he was when she was alive. There are days when I miss Papa even more than I miss her.

  May 28, 1921

  Jonathan Fitzgerald came over today and we went riding in the back field. I was surprised Papa allowed me to go alone but he encouraged me and said Jonathan is a “fine young man.” He is a very nice man but he seems old—not because he is several years older than myself but because he rarely laughs and his humor is deprecating. He felt old to me even when he was the age I am now. I don’t think he has ever been young. He is quiet and polite and always asks me what I am thinking and what I want to talk about, however, and that is nice. I get flustered because sometimes I just want to be quiet, and not always speak so much. He and Papa talk business, mostly about the railroad. I prefer my books and have little to add to these conve
rsations, but they do appear to be very happy together, and I enjoy seeing Papa happy. It happens so rarely these days. Papa spends much of his time angry and hostile. Nothing I do seems to please him much.

  June 3, 1921

  I was so lonely today. I went for a walk along the ridge alone and I watched the sunset after dinner. Papa was in town and didn’t come home until quite late. I don’t mind being alone, I do prefer it to his heated temper and periods of agitation, but I do wish I had someone to laugh with and talk to. On the ridge I saw the Sally Ann Farm with its smoke and running children and horses. I heard laughter and I wanted to run down the hillside and join them. If only I could! Papa said Mr. Adkins is terrible with money and is selling their farm, piece by piece, and I think perhaps we should as well. Papa refuses, although I know we are in debt. He says unkind things about Mr. Adkins, but I’ve always thought him to be polite and Donald is a terribly sweet and sensitive young man. We were in school together before I had to stop going to tend to the farm full time. When we were children, we played together as well, back when Mama was alive.

  June 25, 1921

  Donald Adkins came to visit Windwood Farm today. Papa was in town and Donald came to see him about a business matter. I don’t know its nature, but he said he would return. We spent an hour together on the front porch, and I was surprised to learn that he had read many of the same books that I have. We used to attend the same school, but I haven’t been in school for going on three years now, not since Mama died and Papa needed me here at home. Donald is going to college next year and is excited about it. To hear him speak of getting a degree is exhilarating. He is so lively, with his rosy cheeks and thick hair and sparkling eyes. Almost everything he says, he says with a laugh. On his way off the porch, he tripped and fell over the steps and instead of getting mad, he laughed and laughed and then did a little bow. If I were to attend college, I like to think I might become a teacher. Of course, we don’t have the money for me to go, but I do think I would do very well at it if I could.