Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1)

by Renee Bradshaw

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Cedar Valley was ever the quintessential sleepy town that afternoon; few cars on the street, fewer people coming in or out of the police station. Those who moved about, carried briefcases or paperwork that needed ‘Just one signature, please. Don’t forget to initial by the X.’ Not a single interesting person in handcuffs walked in as I waited on the hard bucket chair for Ken to return from my house. I studied my nails and tore at a cuticle.

  After a while, a guy with scuffed black boots settled in the seat next to mine. Asshole. An entire row of empty seats lined the wall across from me, and this guy had to sit here. I glanced over.

  “Hey,” Jordan said, strumming his grease painted fingers on his knee.

  “Well, suck my dick and call me Sally.” I should have figured out Ken would call Jordan. Somehow, I thought we had a cop and damsel in distress confidentiality thing going on. I grunted. “What?”

  “I wanted to see if you’re all right. Ken called me from your house—”

  “Rodney’s house.”

  “Whatever.” He twisted his fingers together. “He called and told me what happened.”

  “Sucks, huh?”

  A woman walked through the glass doors and down the hall, high heels clacking as she passed us. I attempted to imagine myself wearing a polyester suit, nylons, and tan high heels. Growing up and working in a job that would require a dress code such as that sounded fatal.

  “What are you going to do?” Jordan asked.

  Apparently, not daydream about ugly clothes. I crossed my arms and sank back in the chair. Why had he come? I felt like I had time traveled back to high school, waiting outside the principal’s office — in trouble again.

  “Meg?”

  What could I do? This had nothing to do with me. I didn’t create this mess; it landed in my lap. “Kill Bobby?”

  “Bobby did this?” he asked, no surprise in his voice. “How do you know?”

  “Who else would go out there and do that? We don’t get much random crime out there, and no one else hates me that much. No one else calls me...donkey face.”

  “Why does that sound familiar?”

  “That’s what my dad used to call me.”

  Jordan didn’t say anything, and I was glad. I worried that he might try to talk me out of blaming Bobby for ruining my life. Twice he’d ruined it. If I hadn’t followed him after graduation, would I have done something with my life? Instead of the brilliant decision to go down the crap hole that became our go-nowhere-be-nothing lives?

  Jordan might have been the last person who would try to talk me out of blaming Bobby.

  “So, what are you going to do now?” he repeated.

  I sighed. “I guess I can’t really kill him, can I?”

  “No. Especially not when you tell the officer of the month’s fiancée your plan.”

  I scoffed. “Is Ken seriously police officer of the month?”

  “It feels like that sometimes.” A tiny smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “There have been a lot of things I wanted to tell you since you’ve been back.”

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “You’ve kind of been a bitch.”

  I sat up straight. “I’m waiting for the police to inspect my destroyed house, obviously in a moment of need here, and you’re calling me a bitch. That’s nice.” I swear, everyone always put me on the backburner.

  “You know you deserve it. And, you’ve been a bitch before today.” He turned his knees, facing me as much as he could in chairs attached to a wall. I thought about all the glares I’d tossed his way, ignoring when he called my name the first time he saw me, reminding him what a coward he had been, not giving a shit that Bobby and his friends tagged the back of their building.

  “Maybe a little,” I said, tearing the cuticle I’d been working at off of my finger. Blood started to pool at the corner of my nail. I wanted it to be like a movie where I would admit I was horrible and we would both laugh, reminisce, hug, and walk off in the sunset together. Best friends until the end.

  He nodded and sat back in his chair. No movie endings for wicked girls who leave town for ten years and come back. Real life, not a movie life.

  “Good, now that we’ve settled that. Bitch, what are you going to do with your life?” And in the minutes that followed, it was just like a movie.

  After waiting another ten minutes, we walked two doors down to a coffee shop that used to be a morgue, grabbed iced lattes and made ourselves comfortable at an outside table with an umbrella. The rain dried to a memory as the sun dried the chairs, but leaving the air humid.

  “You’re still mad at me about ninth grade; aren’t you?”

  “We fixed that, remember?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I’d tried not to be angry every moment since we’d talked on his couch. What did he expect? You can’t erase fifteen years of feelings in one conversation. “Okay, still a little mad.”

  He turned his head to the side, and I heard it pop. “Okay, I’m still mad at you about my locker.”

  “That was in retaliation to exhibit A.”

  “You wrote ‘Jordan Dieter sucks balls’ down the entire row of lockers.”

  “That wasn’t about you being gay or anything. That was in reference to you being a big asshole who sucked balls.”

  He chewed the inside of his cheek. A black truck full of teenage girls pulled up to the red light. A brunette girl in the backseat leaned out the window, and shouted at me, “Your boyfriend is hot!”

  I laughed along with the rest of the girls. At least one whistled while another asked for his phone number. A tinge of red appeared at the tips of Jordan’s ears. The light changed, and the truck sped off.

  “A hot asshole apparently,” I said, smiling.

  “You already knew I was hot.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not supposed to.”

  “You’re not blind. Everyone knows it.” He gave me a cocky smile.

  Jordan never had that awkward phase most people muddle through. The phase I still muddled through. He transformed from a thin kid, to a muscular and tall teen, to a calendar worthy adult. He would probably become one of those men in their sixties that are sexier than sin.

  Of course, with all the other insecurities he had to deal with, good looks were an incredible luck of the draw. I had been born insecure it seemed, and still had two years with terrible acne in high school, adding to my ‘I hate myself’ struggles. Watching my beautiful sister become prettier every day did not help either.

  Angela. I remembered something.

  “Jordan, do you remember hiding underneath the porch steps one night, spying on Angela making out with her boyfriend?”

  “Which time?”

  “Right? We were like twelve. They caught us, and her boyfriend chased us. Something came out of the woods.”

  Jordan scrunched his brow. “I don’t know, I think so.”

  “My dad came out with a blow torch and ran it off.”

  He burst out with laughter. “I forgot about that. But nothing came out of the woods; it was just your dad chasing the guy with a blow torch. He’d been sealing that big living room window and kicked us outside. That’s when we saw them.”

  “There was something else. Like, a muddy woman.”

  Jordan pinched his brow and closed his eyes. He didn’t remember, or he didn’t want to remember. Had the memory been yet another hallucination? I guess I was still alone in this spiral to insanity.

  “A dream,” he said. I shook my head in answer. “How long has it been since you’ve been having the nightmares while you’re awake?”

  “Since always.” I crossed my arms. “I lied when I said the dreams ended in California. They slowed, never stopped.”

  He nodded. “So, what are you going to do now?”

  The question would keep coming back until I had an answer.

  “Let’s go back to talking about how much we sucked in high school,” I said.

  “No
pe. That’s over. What? Are we going to keep rehashing how much we fucked each other over almost fifteen years ago when we were in school? We are certified adults now. No one else even remembers or cares about any more about who we were then. Why do we?”

  A bird landed on the table next to us, and it released a little turd on the old metal.

  “White out,” I muttered.

  “Mmm?”

  “Okay. We’ll pretend it never happened. Cover the memories with white out.”

  “No, it happened all right. It turned us into these supreme adult human types. But, let’s just get over it.”

  “Sure,” I said. I watched a line of traffic go by, an ice cream truck in the mix.

  “So, a plan? You don’t have to map out the rest of your life, but a few months wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  I laid my head on the table and whimpered. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re going to stay here.”

  I sat up. “No way in hell.”

  “Why?”

  “Cedar Valley. All these crappy memories about Dad—”

  “Dead.”

  “—and high school—”

  “Forgiven. And over.”

  “—and Bobby,” I finished.

  “Hopefully getting arrested as we speak.”

  “One can only hope,” I said.

  “So, if he gets arrested, there’s no reason you can’t stay. Right?”

  “Why do you want me to stay?”

  “Meg, there was a time we were like brother and sister.” He put his hand on my upper arm and squeezed. “I want you to be better. I want to help.”

  I pushed the idea around in my head. If I was going to be friends with Jordan again — if Bobby was not going to be an issue — if I had no money to leave town with, none to put down first, last and deposit on an apartment — was there a reason I had to leave so soon?

  Aunt Dee’s face flashed in my mind. Wolfy moving his head. Here were the reasons to leave Dad’s house once and for all.

  But...what about the diner, and the girl made from dirt? Aunt Dee’s voice on the radio? Was there a chance that when I left town, they would all follow me? I took a long sip off my coffee, disappointed to discover it tasted like iron.

  Jordan’s phone chirped, and he pulled it out of his pocket. His smile faded. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Cecelia. She’s in the hospital.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Oregon, 1995

  Geraldine, 34 years old

  I swatted a fly with my blue towel, killing and flicking it out of the door in one sweep.

  “Angela,” I called, watching the children play by the garden. “Shut the screen door when you go through, girl!”

  She shouted something back, my tall raven-haired beauty of a daughter. Seven. Where had the years gone? My youngest would be seven next year. Meg always chasing a year behind her big sister. The boys lost them both in their dust.

  I stepped out onto the porch. The little Dieter boy played in the dirt with Meg, the two of them glued to the hips whenever he came over. They’d even invented their own language of a sort this summer, keeping the rest of us from understanding half of what they said. Dee saw their auras, reaching out and mingling with each other, their souls happy to have found each other. Destined to be in each other’s lives. They reminded us of Dee and myself.

  I looked at the clock; his mama would be there for him soon. I’d need the basket ready to go.

  Certain that the children were all occupied outside destroying nature, instead of inside destroying my house; I slid the empty glass jar crate from the floor of the pantry. I kicked over the woven rug and pulled the key out from under my blouse.

  Not that Rodney would keel over in surprise that he married a witch. Everyone came to my mama for potions and such back in the mountains. He knew who I was. What I was. But that didn’t mean he was happy we brought it with us. We worked more at the Sunday market, and less from our home, and that kept him off my case most of the time. That anger still reared, not his fault, born elsewhere and fed into him. I was working on fixing him, but it was hard when it was his eyes one minute, someone else’s the next.

  I turned a jar of full moon rain in my hands. Most of our supplies and jars of working spells stayed in Dee’s cabin. She moved away from the house after Angela had been born, seeing we needed to move the boys into the attic.

  She wanted her air anyhow, she said, needed to live how she lived with Granny Darling. Even if we hadn’t moved the boys up, it was time for her to put space between us.

  That wasn’t all it was; she needed the dirt between her and Rodney. She couldn’t ever look at him the same after I gave birth to the twins. They became a daily reminder of Aaron’s death, Rodney’s twin, all those years ago. Not too long after their marriage, he’d fallen into the river on a fishing trip. Never came back up.

  It got confusing with the love neither one of them was looking for, brewing right between them. I was more than happy to help build the cabin. In the years since the move, Rodney’s soul had grown darker. Something was in him that I didn’t need to read auras to see. It wasn’t his fault though, a sickness fell over the land, a darkness reaching out and pulling him down. He fought, did he ever. The days he won that battle grew fewer and further between.

  I touched my cheek, feeling the thick crust of makeup covering the pain. We all feared the day he would sink completely into the darkness would be sooner, rather than later.

  The sound of tires on gravel came through the kitchen window. Jordan’s mother had arrived. I reached into the hole and pulled out a bundle of dried herbs Dee had arranged the night before for Leanna Dieter. I placed them in my basket and then added the tiny jar of full moon rain, covering it all with my blue towel. Rodney couldn’t make a scene as long as he didn’t see it.

  It wasn’t that he was a Christian man; his brother’s death in West Virginia ensured that he wasn’t to be a magic man neither. Wouldn’t even entertain the thought of our lives being filled with more than he could see. Even if he knew the thing moving into his mind had nothing to do with mundane, and had all to do with magic.

  I took an extra lavender stalk before I closed the floorboard and righted the pantry.

  After Leanna left with Jordan and the basket, I checked on the kids one more time. Angela directed her siblings playing in front of her. The second youngest, Angela was tall and chubby, with dark hair, eyes, and a natural olive tone about her skin that she got from neither Rodney nor myself. The rest of the kids were blond, the three boys athletic and tall, while Meg was short and thin. The wiry metabolism of a five-year-old that never stopped running. The boys roughhoused and Meg did her best to join in.

  Angela stood by, hands on hips, barking directions. “Megan! You have to go low, no that’s not right. Will you just listen? Low! Lower! Watch out for Todd’s—”

  “Dammit, Meg!” Todd yelped.

  I laughed, watching the children roll around on the grass, narrowly avoiding a few pieces of scrap metal the twins had collected from friends to add to their fort in the woods.

  I didn’t bother asking anyone if they wanted to come with me to Dee’s as I set out. The boys didn’t think about her staying in the woods most of the time; too wrapped up in their own little worlds. Todd had a girlfriend, and the twins played football. They lived on a different planet than Angela and Megan, but the girls missed her when she didn’t come by the house. Not enough to make the trek into the woods while they were getting attention from their brothers.

  I played with the beaded necklace at my neck as I walked up the path into the woods. The boys wouldn’t wear the beads anymore, instead spraying themselves and walking around smelling like a cleaning aisle. I slowed, feeling Dee approach. The forest would let you know when she came, paths appeared long enough to let her move, then vines and leaves swallowed the clearings back up.

  “Geraldine,” Dee said, appearing on my left. Her wild hair shimmered with streaks
of red in the black that afternoon, and a long feather tied into her locks rested on her shoulder.

  I looped my arm into hers. “Leanna came by. She’d love to see you.”

  “Mmmm.” She patted my hand, and we walked on to her cabin in relative silence. In the beginning, I thought the forest aged her faster than the passing of the moon, but I was certain these days it only quieted her. A fox hopped in the leaves beside us, scampering along so not to be left behind. The birds above fluttered from branch to branch, keeping up with our every step.

  “You’re like Snow White with all these animals following you till the ends of time,” I said, leaning my head onto her shoulder.

  “Sorry to disappoint, but I’m no Snow White.”

  We reached her cabin, which we’d made from a wooden build-it-yourself shed kit. The open-air kitchen at the front was an addition we had muddled through building without many plans. “I wish you’d move into town. You’d have electricity and a real stove. No one cooks over a fire anymore. You’re like a witch from a fairy tale, god forbid anyone ever—”

  “God has nothing to do with it.” She looked at her cast iron pot hanging over the fireplace. I never thought much about it myself until Rodney mentioned forest fires during the drought last year. “And I like cooking over a fire.”

  “There’s a new trailer park not too far from the property—”

  “You and yours are my family. I could no sooner move further from you than I could pluck my own eyes out.”

  “It won’t come to that.” I snorted. But it wasn’t us she couldn’t be without. It was our land that kept her going. “At least we all know who Angela gets her dramatics from.”

  Dee added more sticks to the fire, and I sat down at the wooden picnic bench we’d dragged down from the other end of the property. That day, three taxidermy club members came to help move everything out. Dee and I spent the next month building it, Meg in my belly, Angela on my back or in the bouncer. The days were quieter now with just the two of us.