Dark Hollow Road (Taryn's Camera Book 3)

by Rebecca Patrick-Howard

  “Oh, sweetie, my little love,’ he patted her affectionately on the cheek. “You do need to get yourself to the doctor. I think there might be something wrong that could easily be fixed. But what you’ve been going through with the spirits has nothing to do with your physical health. Unless you’re bringing me into it by some sort of weird mass hallucination deal.”

  Taryn felt a wave of relief wash over her, followed by another nagging concern of finding a physician. “But, haven’t you noticed things are different here?”

  “How so?”

  “I’m seeing more, I guess you could say. Or hearing more. It’s not just in the photos anymore. I feel like Cheyenne has found me and is trying to talk to me. Or something. Why have things changed?”

  “Didn’t you know?” he asked nonchalantly, picking at an invisible piece of lint on her black sweater.

  “Know what?”

  “It’s because I’m here.”

  “Oh Matt,” Taryn giggled, giving him a slight push on the shoulder.

  “I’m serious,” he vowed and she could see he was. Her smile faded. “I’ve always known we’re stronger together, that we can create our own energy. You’re my soulmate, Taryn; together, we’re a force. The other world knows it, too.”

  Chapter 16

  Thelma, at the risk of sounding weird, I want to ask you something.”

  Taryn was sitting with Cheyenne’s mother in her sunroom. The bright October sun offered warmth through the windows, although the day was deceivingly cold. The temperature was hovering around 35 degrees and the weather man had even called for snow flurries, although nobody thought it was cold enough to stick.

  “What is it, dear?”

  Taryn fumbled with her mug of hot chocolate and delicately wiped at the lipstick smudged she’d left behind. Elvis’ face from the 1968 comeback special smiled at her every time she took a drink. Thelma, on the other hand, was drinking from a chipped mug that boasted an image of two cartoon girls with the words “A Sister is a Forever Friend” inscribed on the side.

  “Have you ever felt like Cheyenne was trying to communicate with you in some way?” It was a sensitive question because, no matter how Taryn phrased it, it alluded to the idea Thelma’s daughter was dead.

  Rather than looking upset, however, Thelma cocked her head and studied her drink. Finally, she answered. “There are times when I feel like she is near me. I’ve prayed to God she would give me a sign, either way, and let me know she’s okay. I’ve seen her in my dreams, I’ve even heard her voice when I was almost asleep. But nothing concrete. I wish I could. Why, have you?”

  She asked this last bit hurriedly, with a dash of hope Taryn found sad and pitiful. She couldn’t tell her about the vision in her bedroom; that wasn’t the Cheyenne Thelma would want to know about. But maybe she could offer her something.

  “I don’t know,” she replied honestly. “I mean, I don’t know how much of it is Cheyenne and how much of it is just my over-active imagination because she’s on my mind. But in my first few days here I heard a woman scream. Before I even knew about your daughter. And I’ve heard it since then, too.”

  “But Cheyenne’s not on the farm,” Thelma protested.

  “I know. And that’s what I don’t understand. Maybe I am just picking up on her energy there. I’ve dreamed about her a lot, too. I can’t tell you what that means–if she’s trying to communicate with me or I’m just wrapped up in her story. I mean, in her life.” Taryn corrected herself since, to Thelma, this was not a story but her daughter’s life they were speaking about.

  “It would make sense to get a feel for her in the cabin,” Thelma agreed. “She loved it there. Used to go with us and stay when it was hunting and fishing season. She’d take her books and read, play with the dogs, just kind of run ragged. Then, when she got older, she didn’t care for it as much. You know how teenagers are. She didn’t like staying out so far away from her friends. The last couple times we went she stayed with friends.”

  “I’m enjoying being out there,” Taryn assured her. “The break-in excluded, of course.”

  Thelma leaned forward and, in a conspirator’s whisper, confided in Taryn. “I haven’t been sleeping real good lately. Been staying up late, sometimes all night. I found this website, see, where they post pictures of people who have been found dead but they don’t know who they are? Well, they ain’t real pictures; they’re artists’ renderings of the bodies. I look every night, going over the images and ages and heights of all them girls. They’ve got ‘em from all over the country. I keep thinking I might see her. Maybe she went to another state and someone found her and she’s out there, laying in a morgue, and nobody knows who she is.”

  The awfulness of it struck Taryn cold. The idea of Thelma, wrapped up in her housecoat, glued to her computer night after night, staring at images of dead bodies, hoping and not hoping one of them might be her daughter was horrible.

  Taryn could hear the front door open and what sounded like the stomping of boots on the laminate floor. “My husband’s home,” Thelma explained. “Jeff. Excuse him. He works foundations and always comes home covered head to toe in mud and concrete.”

  A few moments later, a middle-aged man with a stubby beard streaked with gray and a paunch belly walked out to the sunroom. He’d taken off his boots and his once-white socks were dingy and gray. A big toe poked out on the right side. Like Thelma had said, he was covered from top to bottom in muck, but he was a nice-looking man and had a friendly smile.

  “How’s it going over there? Any more trouble?”

  “No, it’s been quiet,” Taryn replied.

  “Your man back there with you now?”

  Taryn reddened at the question, embarrassed. “Yes, he’s there with me.”

  “That’s good. You don’t need to be staying out there by yourself. Need yourself a gun, too,” he grunted, crossing his arms in front of his chest.

  Taryn badly wanted to point out that she’d lived by herself for a long time, traveled alone, and had spent more time in the isolated countryside than in the city. And then there was the fact she was more masculine than Matt and could probably kick someone’s ass before he could. But that wasn’t the point. In his own way, he was showing concern.

  “Taryn just asked me if I’d heard or seen Cheyenne’s ghost since she disappeared,” Thelma explained.

  Taryn opened her mouth to protest, since that’s not exactly what she’d asked, but Jeff waved her off. “Naw, can’t say I have. Wish I did. When she up and left I ain’t seen hide nor hair since. Not a trace of her. Like she disappeared off the face of the earth. I still think she’s going to come back. I have to, you know.”

  Taryn used her time to try and study the man whom, by some accounts, Cheyenne hadn’t particularly liked. He was friendly, likable, but what would it have been like to live with him? Was he really that tough on her? Was there something more? Had she really watched too many episodes of Law and Order?

  “You know, some people didn’t like the way we handled things,” he continued.

  “What do you mean?”

  Jeff shrugged and a cloud of dust fell from his shoulder. “Some folks thought we ought to be more active, get on that Nancy Grace show or talk to Oprah.”

  “We tried,” Thelma cut in. “We contacted all the big shows. Nobody cared about a girl from the middle of nowhere in Georgia. Never even got any replies.”

  “We did some TV interviews, but I did the talking. Some folks thought it ought to have been Thelma here pleading for her little girl to come home.” He spat this out, disgusted. “Said if there was a kidnapper the mama would appeal to them more. But like hell I was going to put her in front of the TV like that. When we married I vowed to take care of her. And I meant it. She was in no shape to talk to reporters. I’m the closest thing that girl had to a daddy. It was my responsibility.”

  “I wasn’t doing too good at the time,” Thelma confessed, gazing up at Jeff with veneration. “They gave me this medicine that was sup
posed to take the edge off. Made me feel like a zombie is what it did. Some people said I was on drugs. And I was! I had to be, just to get through the days. He was doing me a favor by taking over.”

  “When it’s not happening to them, everybody’s got an opinion on how you should be handling things,” Jeff hissed. “Unless they’ve been through it themselves they can kiss my ass.”

  “I know what you mean,” Taryn agreed, trying to break the tension. “When my husband died people kept telling me I needed to move on, get out more, do this and that. And that was just a few weeks after it happened. My real grief took months to kick in, almost a year. Before, I was just in shock, a zombie.”

  Jeff nodded, relief on his face. “Yeah, well, you get it then. You never know how you’re gonna act until you’re in the situation. And we’d never knowed anyone to lose a child before, at least not like this. We didn’t know what to do or how to act.”

  After he went off to get changed, Thelma turned back to Taryn. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “He gets worked up a little. Some people even think he had something to do with her missing. But I don’t believe it. They might not have seen eye to eye regularly but he loved her. He’d never hurt her.”

  Taryn had no idea what to say. The more she thought about it, the more awful it sounded. There in the sunroom, she was surrounded by memories of Cheyenne. Pictures on the wall painted her life, from the row of school photos to the senior portraits of her standing in a field of daisies, her red cowboy boots gleaming in the morning sun. Cheyenne might not have been dead, but Taryn was in her tomb and everyone around her in a wake they hadn’t yet left.

  Although it was chilly, and growing colder by the minute, Taryn sat on the ground in the middle of the farmhouse’s front yard. The grass was dry, but the cold earth below it still managed to numb her bottom and legs. The wind whipped icy fingers around her face and down the back of her neck. Her feet, always cold regardless of temperature, ached from the walk over. Her hands, snug in gloves, were about the only things that still had feeling left.

  The old house set stoically behind her, watching her. The air was still and quiet. In just two weeks the sounds of laughter, music, and clinking of glass and plastic would fill the air. It would be a whole lot like what Cheyenne had heard on her last night. Would Miss Dixie pick up on anything then? Would it feel like recreating that fateful party? Taryn didn’t know.

  If I do have something, she thought to herself, then let me feel it now. She sat cross-legged, her hands on her legs, palms up. Willing herself to be open to any energy surrounding her, she took deep breaths, in and out, tried to clear her mind. Maybe it was true that being with Matt made her stronger but it didn’t negate the fact that whatever she saw and felt originated in her. If the trees or grass or house knew anything, they weren’t giving up their secrets. The fire pit was dry as a bone, lifeless. The last fire it had seen was a long time ago. The wood pile was stacked and ready to go, waiting for slaughter. There was nothing around her offering any clues for Cheyenne.

  “I’m losing it,” she finally giggled when nothing happened. “I’m freezing my ass off and losing my damn mind.”

  Nothing had ever happened to her by sheer will before; she didn’t know why she expected this time to be any different. Still, she’d tried.

  As she was rising to her feet, the sound of the screen door behind her slapping against the frame with a “bang” startled her. She nearly lost her footing and tripped a little before catching her balance and straightening up. When she turned around, she half-expected to see someone standing on the front porch, watching her. But the porch and doorway were empty; the front door was closed, too. It was only the wind making the screen thrash back and forth.

  But then it happened again, only this time, as she watched, the door opened slowly, deliberately. It held itself open for a few seconds before, once again, banging shut with a force. Maybe it was the wind, and maybe it wasn’t. Taryn couldn’t be sure something was trying to send her a message but since it was the only thing she had to go on, she turned Miss Dixie on and aimed her at the house.

  A few clicks later and she was studying her LCD screen, hoping she might have caught something but not holding her breath. She’d taken dozens of pictures of the farmhouse and had so far been unlucky. This time, though, she’d found something.

  While it was still daylight now, in the picture it was nighttime. Blaze from a fire cast shadows on the front of the house and she caught these pretty vividly with the camera. The house was dark, except for a faint light glowing from the downstairs left window. A candle, maybe? Flashlight? It wasn’t the shadows or the light she focused on, however. Standing in the doorway, peering out at her with the same pale eyes she’d seen at her bedside, was Cheyenne. Only this time she was very much alive.

  Chapter 17

  Taryn was depressed.

  She’d ordered a new Allison Moorer CD off Amazon and was excited to see it had arrived in the mail. When she’d taken it inside, though, she’d found Matt blaring Beck and dancing in the kitchen, baking bread. Ordinarily Taryn would’ve shrugged it off, taken her laptop upstairs, and done her own thing. She’d have been thankful that there was actually someone in the house baking bread.

  But for some reason today it just ticked her off.

  Except for brief periods in the car when she was on her own, and that wasn’t often since Matt usually drove her in, she barely had a minute to herself. He dominated the radio in the car and, because he took charge of the kitchen and cleanup, he also dominated the musical entertainment segment of the show in the house. She hadn’t been able to crank up Allison or Tift Merrit or Iris Dement or any of her women in weeks. And she depended on music to keep her going, to be her soundtrack to her work. She might not have possessed a musical bone in her body and couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but music was important to her. When she did try to listen to hers, Matt would politely put on a pair of earbuds and go about his business. And that pissed her off.

  Then there was the matter of the kitchen.

  It was no secret: Taryn didn’t like to cook. However, just because she didn’t like doing it didn’t mean she couldn’t do it. She was actually pretty good at it. After being on her own for so long, though, she’d just gotten used to eating out. Most boxed items and packages vegetables were too much for one person and she didn’t like to waste.

  It sounded whiney to complain, and she loved that Matt cooked for her, but she hated feeling like he thought she couldn’t. She listened to him ramble on about new recipes and new cookbooks and new things he’d discovered. She even listened to him brag about how his blueberry cobbler was the best he’d ever had and how he could replicate any food he tasted at a restaurant.

  Sometimes, she didn’t want to eat at home. Sometimes she didn’t care that he could make O’Charley’s brown bread in his own kitchen. Sometimes she just wanted to go to O'Charley's!

  It was on the tip of her tongue to storm into the kitchen, announce that she didn’t like Sade and her weird music and that she was going to order a pizza. But that was wrong and weird and it would hurt Matt’s feelings.

  It wasn’t about him, anyway. It was about her. Taryn craved people and attention like anyone else but she also worked best alone and had gotten used to being on her own. She just didn’t know how to deal with always having someone around. Andrew was different. They’d been so much alike in so many different ways. Although he was much more sociable than her, he’d been perfectly content on his, too. They often spent their afternoons in different parts of the house, working on their individual projects, or even in the same room without speaking, alone in their comfortable silence. She figured that eventually she and Matt would be like that, too. They were still trying to find their footing.

  Her bedroom balcony was cool and inviting. Now that the morning rain had cleared up she was able to set up her easel. People called her talented when it came to her art, but she didn’t feel like it came easily to her; she worked hard at it and ha
d to keep up with it or else she’d lose whatever skills she had.

  In one of her college art classes her old professor, regionally acclaimed artist Ron Isaacs, had showered praise on a sketching she did of a live model. It wasn’t very good. In fact, she’d started over and changed things so many times that she’d actually made a hole in her sketch pad and had charcoal up to her elbows. Sheila Griggs, the student on the other side of her, was having no such problems. Her sketch was beautifully rendered, had taken her half the time it took Taryn, and was so realistic Taryn thought you could practically balance a glass on the model’s perfectly apple-shaped rump.

  Still, Dr. Isaacs had praised Taryn’s work and not Sheila’s. Indeed, he’d even criticized Sheila’s work, something that shocked Taryn so much she’d nearly made another hole in her paper.

  Later, as she was packing up to leave, she’d overheard Sheila arguing with the wired-hair, quiet professor. “I don’t understand,” she’d whined, on the verge of tears. Taryn knew a good cry coming on when she heard one. “I worked really hard and my drawing was good. Taryn didn’t even finish hers and it has all kinds of mistakes. Why did she get a better grade than me?”

  Taryn had to admit, her sympathy for the budding artist dropped a couple of notches after that but, for curiosity’s sake, moved slowly. She wanted to hear his reply, too.

  “Your rendering is superior,” he’d replied in that slow, steady way of his. His bushy eyebrows rose in an arch, the white threads of hair in them shining in the overhead light. He was so frumpy in his wrinkled khakis, oversized sweat shirt, and cheap loafers with a hole in them that the average person would have never thought his last painting sold for five thousand dollars. “But your work, your work was lacking.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the difference?”