Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1)

by Renee Bradshaw

  Jordan was outside the circle of friends I finished high school with; he was the one thing from here that seemed like a mystery.

  I didn’t want to think about him. And definitely did not want to talk about him. Two weeks. I didn’t want to see him either. I slid my backpack off and let it fall to the floor, but I wanted to throw it across the room. Working at the garage? What the hell had happened?

  “We should go to dinner.” Cecelia clapped like she’s never had such a splendid idea. “I got the feeling we’re going to run into all sorts of people who want to see you if we go out. You ever get like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know...the intuition.” She winked.

  “Um, no, usually I’m pretty off about everything,” I said.

  Weirder by the minute, Cecelia played with the long chain at her neck, a purple rock hanging from the end. She watched me, quietly, waiting for me to speak. I busied myself picking at a cuticle.

  “Well, what do you say, Meg? Let’s go eat.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” My face heated. “I’m super tired, and not hungry.” I closed the box of crackers. “Just gonna eat from the garden while I’m here. Maybe some of the canned stuff. I’d hate for all of it to go to waste.”

  “What? Fruits and vegetables for every meal? You’ll starve to death,” Cecelia said, her hands on her hips. “I’d offer to buy, but I bet you’re above charity. Just like your Dad.”

  I choked back a laugh. I would take whatever people offered me for free. More importantly, Dad had never been above charity.

  “He used to keep meat in the freezer out in the garage.” I shuddered. Dad’s garage and workshop was a frightening mess. Always felt the eyes of all the mounted animals on me. All those damned moles.

  Go get a pound of Venison. I startled and looked at Cecelia. She didn’t make any indication she had heard Dad’s voice. In my head, again.

  “The garage?” She screwed up her face. “I don’t know about that. I don’t like going out there.”

  “Yeah.” I snorted. “It’s fucking scary.”

  She looked surprised for a moment, but then laughed with me. “You know, if you carry Rosemary out there with you, I’m sure it’ll all be fine.”

  I nodded, pretending like I understood what she was talking about. Something to cover the smell?

  “But,” she added, “just about anything would work. Long as you put a little thought into it. A pouch of basil has always been my favorite. But it turns fast. And doesn’t dry out very evenly does it when it’s all mushed in a pouch? But a fresh leaf in your wallet—”

  O-kay. I nodded and turned my attention back to the tin collection while she talked.

  Money. I’d spent the remainder of what had been in my purse my last few days at Tracy’s. And the lawyer hadn’t bothered to send me anything except the bus voucher. It wasn’t even a voucher. A voucher I could have used to blow this thing off. He sent a ticket to Cedar Valley, leaving a specific date and time.

  Dad used to store cash in a tin on the shelf. The week I ran away to California with Bobby, I dumped the contents into my backpack. I wondered if Dad still used the same can after that.

  I looked at her, that inflated version of Mama, and decided there was something I didn’t trust about her. She might come off like some kind of southern sweetheart, but something hid just beneath the surface I couldn’t see yet. Call it intuition. I smirked and decided to search for the money after she left.

  “So, I guess I’m going to check out the house.” I stared at Cecelia waiting for her to move, but she stood still, expectantly staring back at me. “I guess I’m going to...”

  “Oh,” she said. “You probably want me to go?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, pretending to be polite. “I haven’t been here in 10 years.” I went to fake a little quiver and realized my lip was already twitching on its own. Odd. “I just need to sort through some things.”

  “Don’t say another word.” She grabbed a yellow purse off the counter and threw it over her shoulder, and when she turned back she was still smiling. I wonder if her lips hurt. “What’s your phone number?”

  “I’m in between phones right now.” I’d been using that line for a while. And it was so odd, not many people questioned me.

  “Do you mind if I stop by tomorrow and check in on you?” she asked, squeezing my upper arm. “Your dad — Rodney — he really was a good guy. He did so much for me, I feel a little responsible for you.”

  I gritted my teeth and tasted blood at the corner of my mouth again. She didn’t know anything. “Yeah, I’ll be here. Just figuring things out.”

  “Okay.” She reached out gave me a hug, and I let her. I don’t know why. Maybe because she looked like Mama? Maybe because she looked like me? Or maybe because I couldn’t remember the last time someone touched me, and she felt comforting, like a body pillow.

  She went outside, and I reached for the wet cloth to clean the corner of my lips again. I swore I had laid it on the corner of the sink, but it was gone. I shrugged and licked at the blood instead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The first tin I opened held pebbles, not an uncommon find at our house growing up. Who collected rocks? One of the boys did, and I bet the tin housed a leftover childhood collection. Dad sentimental? Doubtful. More plausible, he didn’t bother emptying containers if they had no use. I moved on to a few more.

  A tin with a black and white dog sitting over a box of cigars had unreadable writing all along the bottom in purple marker, and baby teeth filling the bottom. “Vomit.”

  A hot chocolate tin with the image of a nun with a tray was dented and had a loose lid. When I lifted the top the rest of the way, I nearly dropped the container. A quarter-sized spider scuttled across the bottom, dragging a dirty cotton ball behind it.

  Not a cotton ball. A nest. I slammed the lid back down and ran out onto the porch, sending the spider and her unborn children flying across the air. It smacked into the side of a tree and fell into the wildflower patch.

  Flowers thrived with a spider in the grass, right?

  My heart leapt at the unmistakable howl of a wolf, distant and echoing through the woods. I remembered howls from the woods as a common sound, but never in the middle of a hot day. They seemed more of a dark winter beast.

  Something crashed in the forest and I ran back to the house, flipping the small latch on the screen door once safe inside. Keeping watch from the kitchen window, I studied the tree line. There should have been five dirt paths leading into the thick, but I only counted four. The other must have grown over with time. Two of the remaining lead to dead ends, and two were the same giant loop around the edge of the entire property. I couldn’t remember where the fifth and missing led.

  As soon I was positive nothing emerged from the woods after me, I started my search for money again. This time slower and cautious.

  Bingo.

  “Geez, Dad. Did you lose all your trust in banks by the end?” There had never been more than pocket money as a kid. Aunt Dee would dig through it on the weekend mornings searching for change for her little booth. Then as I got older, they would keep emergency cash in a tin, saying it would be there if we ever needed something in a pinch. I’d stolen the entire hoard on my way out to California, only getting away with two hundred dollars. Including quite a few rolls of quarters.

  I dumped the full Saltine tin on the magazine covered table and flattened the bills and organize them into piles.

  Four hundred and thirteen dollars. It would be enough for gas and groceries until I left.

  A thought struck me. It was enough for a plane ticket to Angela’s if I could get to Portland. She wouldn’t turn me away if I appeared on her front porch. Or right outside the base. Would she?

  I jumped as the sound of a tin dent righting itself came loud from the wall. I peeked in the remaining ten tins, finding all random trinkets and pieces of junk in the rest except in two. Those had almost as much money squirreled away
in the first tin, ending with a little over a thousand dollars.

  I hadn’t had that much money at once in... “Never.”

  I smashed a handful of twenties into the bottom of my purse. Then I dropped the rest back into the tins, arranging them all back on the shelf according to dust marking sizes.

  “Now what?” The last thing I wanted to do was clean, but something in that refrigerator made Cecelia gag. The situation needed to be accessed.

  After I dragged the half-full trashcan to the fridge, I hopped up and down on my toes. Like a boxer, working up the energy I needed to get it over with.

  “Let’s do this.” I pulled the door open and let the relief sink in. It wasn’t the worst smell I’d ever cleaned. Mostly, I smelled onions and past their prime boiled eggs. Aside from a few mystery containers, and a green gel on the top shelf that probably used to be a head of lettuce, there wasn’t much to the fridge. I gingerly slid everything into the trashcan, listening as each container hit the plastic with a thud.

  Empty, but the refrigerator still needed a good wash and wipe down. Under the sink turned out to be void of cleaning chemicals, as did the remaining cabinets. The cabinets were bare, except for chipped dishes that appeared to have weeds painted on them. Where did the plates come from? We used paper plates after Aunt Dee died.

  I turned to the pantry to continue the search for bleach and picked up a murky can, the label reading ‘stewed tomatoes.’ Canned almost two years ago, I didn’t know the expiration on home goods anymore. Maybe Cecelia would. I should have just thrown it all away. If Dad was the one teaching Cecelia how to can, who knew how sanitary of a process they used?

  The garbage can was almost filled to the top. Just from clearing the surface of the kitchen. That’s when I remembered; there was no trash pick up out there. Aunt Dee threw the bags away at the nursing home where she volunteered. And when they would stop by, my brothers would grab bags to drop in the dumpsters at work. I would wait until I found out what the current trash situation was out there before I would do a big clean out.

  “Which is the entire reason I’m here,” I told the can of tomatoes. The vegetables shifted as if something moved inside, pushing them around and swimming through the darkness. “What the?”

  I leaned closer to the jar, my eyes intent on finding some kind of creature crawling through the glass. A tomato pressed against the glass. Rolling like it was attached to a wheel, the tomato blinked, revealing a bloodshot brown eye.

  I shrieked and dropped the jar on the floor. The glass shattered as I jumped into a crouch position on top of a rickety dining chair. Skinless tomatoes squirmed towards me, sticking and suctioning to the floor. Blinking, enflamed eyes on each of their backs, they left a trail of red behind as they climbed up the chair legs.

  “Stop!” I screamed, squeezing my eyes closed. “Aunt Dee. Aunt Dee. Make it stop. I don’t remember the words.”

  Dad’s house had a way of doing this to my mind. Aunt Dee said my illusions were created by the energy of all the bad things, and as a kid I believed my kooky aunt. But in the years since Angela had taught me about PTSD, I’d learned how it reacted differently in various minds and bodies. Slosh. The life we suffered through in that house. The anger. The screaming. The beatings. The locks on the doors. We lost two mothers. And rapidly, everyone else left and I was alone with him. Slurch.

  I see everything you do. There’s no hiding from me. I got friends in every corner of this town, slut. Don’t act so surprised. I know what you do when you’re not home.

  Slosh. That was what made me experience odd things that no one else did at Dad’s house. Not the energy, but the distress created in my mind.

  Just a child. Ha! Dee, a child doesn’t do the things she does. Doesn’t dress like that. Staying at a friend’s house? She isn’t staying at a friend’s house. She’s a goddamn slut. They call you two for a dime bag, Meg.

  PTSD backed off imaginary sights and sounds in California, unless a tremendous amount of stress fell my way. But, it had still only been a few times there. Sleach. Not sleeping. Not eating. Not having a place to call home. Rational thinking. Aunt Dee taught me a melody to hum to chase it all away. But I couldn’t remember it now.

  Just like your mother.

  “Shut up!”

  Angela told me, it was all in my mind. Fake visions brought on by fear. It was all coming back to take over my senses. Claim it. Tomatoes were not capable of blinking. Or climbing a chair.

  “All in my goddamned head!” I screamed.

  I took a deep breath and looked down. The tomatoes lay still in shards of broken glass. “In my head.”

  I grabbed the broom and dustpan, cleaning the mess the best I could. Some of the tomato juice was already settling into the cracks between the linoleum. Staining it like a child’s activity book maze, drawn in with red crayon.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The wind picked up that evening, playing songs of the forest. Leaves danced while creaks from ancient branches announced an earthly struggle to stay connected. The scampered occasional crash of a squirrel through the thick. The ethereal wind chimes conducted and held every sound together.

  I dropped the full trash bag outside in the rubber can, closed my eyes and leaned against the garage. The cleansing forest sounds rolled through my head and over my body. My eyelids closed as if a magnet pulled them. No wonder the vision in the kitchen had happened; no sleep and the stress from seeing Dad’s house had gotten the best of me. I sunk into my heels, and considered letting sleep take over, and engage in a short nap outside.

  Sleep won out, but only for a moment before a crash ripped it away. Something moving through the woods startled me. A howl rang through the trees, sad, hungry, and much closer than it had been earlier. I stood and looked to the forest.

  No matter how many times we heard them, we never saw a live wolf out at Dad’s. The story went, wolves had been hunted, basically extinct from Oregon. Think you got a wolf? It’s only a wild dog. But Aunt Dee never believed they were gone. She told us you don’t have to see everything to know it’s there. Thanks to a few Facebook friends obsessed with off trail camping, I knew wolf sightings were common now in certain areas, including a state park right behind Poena.

  The crashing through the brush grew closer, and without thinking, I twisted the garage door handle, happy to find it unlocked, and barreled into the darkness. The heavy door slammed behind me.

  Darkness enveloped me, and I threw my hands around in the air searching for the pull light chain. Had I stepped far enough into the garage?

  “Probably all in your head,” I whispered shakily, worried about what my voice may awaken in the pitch black. I had to convince myself there was no danger outside. A wild dog. I could be just like those other people. “No such things as wolves.” Or it could have been the wind whistling through branches creating the cry.

  Nope. That was stretching it. There was a wolf out there. The question was, would I be more comfortable with a live animal? Or in the garage with a thousand glass eyes?

  Outside. So what was the plan? If a wolf waited for me, I would clap my hands at it. Scream and run for the house, scaring it straight back into the woods as I tore across the driveway. I’d be fine.

  Only I couldn’t open the door. My hand sat on the handle, but refused to move. I guessed I would let the garage scare me before I dealt with the outside world. I held my breath and stepped further into the pool of black; my arm still extended for the light.

  My arm passed through a thick cobweb; I shrieked again and smacked my hand clean on my shirt. Why was it so damn dark? I stumbled and tripped over something short sticking up from below and fell hard onto a dirt floor.

  It was then I realized the workshop was not unfamiliar to me with the passage of time, but because of a new extension. The ground should have been concrete, not dirt. I had thought the outside looked a little different. Hoping I did not go face first into another spider web, I walked toward the main room. My eyes adjusted soon enough, than
ks to a boarded window at the back of the shop missing half of its boards.

  I tripped over something else, but caught myself before I fell. I took a cautious step and reached the concrete floor. Dusty familiarity. I raised my arms in the air. A few more steps and I found the chain and yanked. A dim bulb lit me up like a pathetic spotlight.

  My brothers’ friends used to love coming to our garage; a living history museum. Instead of stuffed saber-tooth tigers and dinosaur fossils, we had cats, dogs and moles, along with the random deer, bobcat and one year, taking up the center of the room, an elk. The wild animals were hunting trophies that had never been collected from their owners for one reason or another. My favorite was an unfortunate gray wolf I named Wolfy. Aunt Dee said he was all the proof we needed that wolves still roamed our mountain.

  Everyone came for the moles, a collection started by my great-great-grandfather, passed on to my great-uncle, then Dad. At least a hundred little creatures, stuffed, groomed and perched to look as though they were completing regular mundane human tasks. Reading the newspaper, mowing the lawn, preparing dinner, sitting on tiny couches, enjoying family game night; these moles lived the perfect life we never did.

  The memory that materialized instead, revolved around the movie My Girl. Angela had shown me the movie after Mama left, and I got the idea to charge the neighborhood kids five dollars a head to tour our garage of death. But, with the closest neighborhood kid living almost half a mile away, business did not boom.

  The garage was full of wonder and excitement at that age; the animals were possible friendships, imaginary or delusional. It didn’t matter to a kid younger than ten, but the older I got the more death lost its intrigue. Death morphed into the dark end it actually was. The garage lost its excitement and mystery, and I began to sing at the top of my lungs when Dad sent me out to get meat from the freezer. Another trick picked up from My Girl.

  I wasn’t a little girl anymore, and should have been able to walk all the way in, check the freezer, and then go back outside. No problem. I’d even have something to throw at the wolf if he materialized from the woods.