Forever Finley

by Holly Schindler

  The steering wheel pivoted yet again. White stones shone against the moonlight. Kelly was being driven against her will to Finley’s National Cemetery, an austere burial ground filled with a sea of identical white headstones. Her car slipped right through gates normally closed and chained at dusk.

  Kelly was being kidnapped by an unknown force she had no control over.

  And there was not a soul left at the cemetery, not at this time of night.

  Natalie’s apartment building is across the street, she reminded herself. A whole building full of people who will surely hear me if I scream. Who will come running to help me.

  Her engine died, even though she hadn’t turned the key. The headlights behind her went black. The wind inside her car intensified, turned angry—making her eyes sting. Even though her windows were all still rolled up.

  In the darkness, a figure emerged from the Model T. In silhouette.

  Who is he? Kelly thought. What’s going to happen to me?

  The back door of her car flew open; she watched in stunned silence as the Model T driver reached inside and tugged the crouching figure from the floorboard.

  Voices erupted—angry and frightened.

  Her driver’s door flew open and she felt herself being lifted out.

  Kelly managed a wordless, desperate cry. Startled birds snapped their wings against the black sky. The silhouette had hold of her. She felt her legs begin to give way.

  “Ma’am—ma’am,” a smooth, low voice said. “Take a breath. You’re okay, you’re okay.”

  Kelly cracked her eyes—she wasn’t sure when she had closed them—and found herself staring into a man’s face. A flesh-and-blood man, not a silhouette. She could see his eyelashes. The hairs in his wildly overgrown beard. The fraying collar on his coveralls. The threads in the cursive “Caretaker” embroidered over the left breast pocket.

  Another voice begged for forgiveness. “I didn’t know it was her car.” Kelly recognized him as the construction worker from the Powell farm. The same man who’d given her a feather. “I thought it was yours,” he told the caretaker. “A car is a car, as far as I’m concerned. They look the same to me. I was waiting for you. So we could go look for the shawl. After dark. The two of us. When the car started moving, I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe she wouldn’t see me, and when she finally stopped driving, I could sneak back out.”

  Tiny white apparitions slipped in and out of the cemetery’s burial rows.

  Kelly fought for air. Fear and confusion and relief all gripped her at the same time, shaking her roughly.

  The cemetery caretaker motioned for her to lean against her own car door.

  But how could she calm down? The cemetery was full of ghosts.

  Seemingly oblivious to what was going on around him, the construction worker continued to try to make his case, insisting, “So much was happening at the Powell homestead. The river hopping beds. The shawl gone missing. I couldn’t leave, not if something else were to happen. I haven’t been of use—real use—to anyone in so long. Well—besides getting rid of that intruder the other night.”

  “You were there. At Miriam’s place. She did see two men,” Kelly said. “She saw you. She’d want to thank you. Both of you—”

  “No,” the caretaker insisted firmly. “We don’t require any thanks.”

  “But we—”

  “Why don’t you wait for me inside?” The caretaker motioned toward the security office.

  The construction worker nodded reluctantly. Before he’d taken as much as a single step, though, he paused to say, “We really should keep looking. We shouldn’t lose a single night.”

  The caretaker flashed a look that implied the construction worker needed to get inside the office—out of sight.

  Kelly’s eyes panned across the cemetery again, taking in the parade of figures emerging into the security lights. These weren’t ghosts at all. They were children. In white sheets. And cowboy hats. Carrying plastic swords and sacks.

  The construction worker seemed not to notice any of them as he walked past a golf cart—just the kind of vehicle an aging caretaker would use to get from one side of the cemetery to the other. Just the kind of vehicle that, in the total darkness, could have almost resembled a Model T.

  Especially when a story about a ghost-driven Tin Lizzie had recently been planted in a girl’s brain.

  Had Kelly simply been the victim of the power of suggestion?

  Kelly squinted in the general direction of a new burst of voices. And noticed, for the first time, a group of grown-ups tossing items into the children’s sacks—but only after the children cried out, “Trick or treat!” Probably, she figured, they were all children who lived in Natalie’s apartment building.

  Above, the security lights had been adorned with witch cutouts. The outlines of black cats stood on the stone perimeter of the cemetery.

  “Happy Halloween!” The greeting tumbled through the air.

  She’d lost track of the date in the midst of her search for Mary’s shawl. But it explained why the main streets had been empty—everyone was walking their own neighborhoods, ringing doorbells, showing off their costumes.

  Kelly snorted a breathy laugh as she turned her head skyward. Some of the parking lot lights had also been replaced with green and purple bulbs, giving the cemetery an eerie glow—and also offering an explanation for the sheen that she’d seen on the figure in her backseat.

  Relief flooded her, filling her with a sense of utter euphoria.

  “Don’t be mad at your friend,” Kelly told the old caretaker, who had obviously left the cemetery open for the holiday. “He was as afraid as I was. It’s okay now. A bit of Halloween excitement.” She could have forgiven anything at that moment. “I—”

  “—shouldn’t be worried,” the caretaker finished.

  “About?”

  “The shawl. We’ll find it. You can go home and get started on that fancy wedding dress.”

  Kelly slumped against the side of the car. “No. I don’t believe you or anyone else ever will. The trunk got carted off to the dump by accident. There’s no getting it back. Not now—hey. How’d you know about the wedding dress? Did your friend tell you?” She pointed in the direction the construction worker had gone.

  The caretaker leaned toward her—and rubbed the tip of her nose.

  She let out a short, surprised bark of a laugh. “What was that for?”

  “You rubbed Amos’s statue for good luck, didn’t you?”

  “Why not? Everybody does. I’m not very lucky, though. I’m not even superstitious. I’m usually…” She paused, searching for a word. “A skeptic,” she finally whispered. “Wait. How’d you know I rubbed the statue? Or did you just guess?”

  The caretaker smiled and gave a reassuring pat to her arm. Above them, the parking lot light buzzed, flickered.

  “We’ll find it. The shawl,” he promised, and turned away.

  The lights above flickered again. The caretaker flickered too, at the same moment—alternating between his human form and a solid black figure. A silhouette. The darkness of night and the caretaker seemed to melt into one another.

  She was overwhelmed by the sensation of being engulfed in something unseen and unverifiable. Something almost—ghostlike. This time, though, it didn’t feel menacing. It felt comforting. Oddly so.

  Her fingers banged against the handle on her car door; her hand was locked into a fist, she realized. She was holding something. She raised her hand into the light. A feather. Black. Like the one the construction worker had given her. Where had it come from? Had she slipped it into her pocket back at Mary’s place? Why was she holding it now?

  A murder of crows settled on the branch of a nearby tree. She shivered as she counted. Seven. What did that mean? Did you simply start repeating the rhyme and counting all over again, or were they foretelling something else entirely?

  She turned her eyes down again at the feather in her hand. She had far more questions than answers: Wh
y were the construction worker and the caretaker so concerned about the shawl? Why were they so sure they could find it? Were those two men the same silhouettes she had seen when she was driving her car? Or were those silhouettes something else? Had her car really turned the steering wheel on its own, or had Kelly simply been so scared she couldn’t remember how she got to the cemetery? Had the statue of Amos brought her some kind of luck? The same luck, perhaps, that had come to Miriam out there in her fields?

  All she knew for sure was that a renewed sense of well-being draped across her, wrapping her like—well. Like a shawl. At that moment, staring at the feather—the symbol of trust—she could have believed anything. That tomorrow, the river would have hopped right back into its original bed, as easily as a girl playing hopscotch. That the house would be entirely, magically finished by dawn. That in December, the sun would shine and it would be eighty degrees.

  She needed to get home. She needed to finally cut into that bolt of ivory silk. It was going to work out—the wedding, her business. She was not going to be torn to shreds online by carrion creatures. Everything was going to be made right with Mary. She did not know how—only that it would. The word she’d just used—skeptic—began to fade into the darkness of night, just as the caretaker’s figure had a moment ago.

  Even non-superstitious Kelly knew, somehow, in the midst of a hundred logical explanations to prove otherwise, that on this particular night, things she did not fully understand were obviously at work all around her.

  Was there a word for that?

  She smiled. Yes, there was.

  Finley.

  Pale November

  Miracles often happen when you least expect them.

  Recently retired Patricia Steele has always been strong enough to start and complete any task she’s taken on—including the April’s Promise Couples Race last spring. But the discovery of a lump reminds her, in stark brutality, that she is, in fact, human—and mortal. While Patricia prepares herself to hear the bad news that her tumor is malignant, a mysterious young nurse steps in, with plans of her own.

  Mark stood at the edge of the football field fingering the small spiral notebook in his shirt pocket. And staring at the incline of metal bleachers long enough to forget to blink. Usually, he liked to sit on the top row—he lived in a tree house, after all. He felt most at home hovering a good ten feet or so aboveground. Today, though, he wanted to climb all the way up for different reasons—reasons involving his (largely, these days, unused) notebook, being able to keep an eye on the Finley residents who had gathered beneath the towering stadium lights for this special Friday night game, and what he had witnessed last August while sitting on the front porch that overlooked Founders Park and the neighboring river.

  Mostly, it involved what he’d witnessed last August.

  For a moment, though—Mark told himself to just breathe and absorb the entire scene before him. He’d always loved homecoming—though not necessarily out of a sense of nostalgia for Hargrove High, his alma mater, and its perpetually floundering football team. The Hargrove Heroes. Instead, Mark loved that time had a way of stopping, for a moment, for the homecoming game. Or maybe the right way to phrase it was that he loved the way homecoming could make so much about the world look timeless.

  Because they were all round him, just as they always were, every single year—the sixteen-year-old hometown stars. Looking every bit as corn-fed and Midwestern-tough as ever. On the field, taking a pre-snap formation. On the sidelines, making a pyramid of cheerleaders. Muscular and beautiful and achingly young. They arrived without fail, the same constellations lighting up the same autumn sky.

  Former Hargrove High stars had settled into the bleachers, too. Mark knew that, even if the kids on the field didn’t want to recognize them. The stars of 1986, of 1956, of 1941. This year was Hargrove High’s seventy-fifth anniversary—the diamond anniversary. Didn’t the poets all like to say stars were diamonds in the night sky? Of course they did.

  The school’s mascot had changed slightly over the years, as the idea of what a hero needed to look like changed—an Indian chief originally, a cowboy in the ’50s, a Superman knockoff in the ’80s with a red flowing cape. These days, the kids were going with the lighthearted pun: a sandwich. Tonight, their mascot wore a giant sandwich costume and danced along the sidelines (much to the chagrin of the current principal). The game of football had changed a bit, too—the pads and the helmets had all been modernized. But the rules were identical.

  The same, Mark thought, could be said of being sixteen. The high school kids sprinkled through the stands carried computers in their pockets now. They had a modern exterior, a different cut of jeans. Fashion had changed. But the excitement and the struggles were the same: Learning to drive, first dates, first shaves, the simple joys of sharing an evening with your buddies, just you and the guys, finding out who had gotten an acceptance letter from which university. Timeless. Somehow, it was comforting to see those rites of passage still in action, here at the homecoming game (the only football games he ever attended). It made him feel as though his own youth was not a bygone thing—it was alive and well, existing on the same terms as it had for him. Yes, that way of life was all very much still evident, even if Mark himself was no longer living it. It made his own younger years seem not so far away.

  Jo nudged Mark, announcing that she had made it through the winding line at the concession stand; in one hand, she held a paper plate covered with corn dogs, in the other, one of those drink caddies with two large Dr. Peppers. Time to make their way through the crowd to find a couple of seats.

  He nodded, leading her—Hargrove High class of 1979—toward the spot he—Hargrove High class of 1978—had focused his eyes on since their arrival. He guessed, judging by the looks on the faces the two of them passed, that he was not the only one who had such strong feelings about homecoming. Everyone in the stands wore funny faraway looks in their eyes, a wistfulness. Here but also somewhere else. Or maybe that was somewhen else. Watching and reliving all at once.

  “Did you go to many games when we were in school?” Jo asked—a little breathlessly—as they sat on the top row. She fought the evening breeze to tuck her silver hair behind her ears.

  They had not known each other then—Jo the serious one and Mark a boy who had not quite understood why his classmates seemed so anxious to get rid of childhood, put all of it in a garage sale with a giant sticker on it. Whole box for a buck. It wasn’t like he wanted to remain seven forever—but the joy, the wonder—that was good. Why toss that out for a more “adult” outlook, the kind of outlook that said all the great mysteries had already been solved? Where was the fun in that? No, Mark wanted to marvel at the world around him every single day of his life. It was another reason—maybe even the most important reason of all—why he’d chosen a tree house: it reminded him to maintain a boyish outlook. To believe that he still lived on a planet of unknowns. It reminded him to keep his eyes open, take nothing for granted. Learn and change his mind a hundred times every day.

  That outlook had served him well as he had pursued a career in botanical science.

  Over the years, it had also earned him the title eccentric. These days, he mostly felt like he was himself a piece of Depression glass on a garage sale table: a green Doric-patterned dish with a giant chip along the rim. Marked “25 ¢” and “As-is.” Take me as I am.

  “I didn’t go to one,” Jo admitted. “I spent most weekends in Mom’s bookshop. Well. I spent most everythings in Mom’s bookshop. Which helped when I took over the helm, of course, but…” She took her first nibble off the top of her corn dog, staring out at the field. “Stories surrounded me then, in the shop, all of them feeling far more interesting than my own.”

  Mark reached for her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “Fictional perfection? How bourgeois!” he blurted as a tease, anxious to make her feel better, maybe even soothe the ache of an old scar. A few heads swiveled his way, frowning slightly. He lowered his voice, leaned in
toward Jo to murmur, “Besides, real-life imperfection is far more interesting. Look at Annie down there. Annie Ames.” He pointed at the mid-twenties young woman, their hometown artist. “Look at how she stares at the spaces between the rows so she can see beneath the bleachers. Look how, when Justin scoots closer to her, her eyes get farther and farther away. She’s thinking about something that happened between the two of them—”

  “—just friends. Childhood friends,” Jo tried to argue.

  Mark shook his head. “Not anymore. Remember? How we keep seeing them in Founders Park, taking Sunday strolls? A couple now. But the way she’s looking…Something happened down there. Under the bleachers. The old high school cliché. The Van Morrison ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ hidden teenage moments, stolen kisses, that sort of thing. Only—whatever it was didn’t lead to a romance then. But look at them now. Wouldn’t you like to know what it was, that not-perfect thing that happened there?”

  He could see the wheels of Jo’s mind start to spin.

  “And Norma,” he went on, pointing out one of the newer residents—the owner of the town’s antique store. “She didn’t even go to Hargrove High, and yet, she’s staring down beneath the bleachers, too. Thinking about something. You know, she told me a little about her husband once. Charlie. She met him in high school. In the era of ‘Scarborough Fair’ and bubble flip hairdos, of waiting for the boy to call first. She told me that. We were in your loft, the four of us—you and me, and her and Gary—double dates for dinner one night, and you and Gary had gone into the kitchen for something, and the wine had gone to Norma’s head, and she’d said it had been an era in which being a woman meant being strategic about all things in life. Having to set up a relationship the way you wanted it to play out. One part conniving, one part matchmaker. It had been the kind of youth in which a girl took her smarts and wore it somewhere underneath, like a slip beneath the skirt. You knew it was there, but it was never something you wanted to stick out below the hem.”