by John Everson
“Can I git ya anything more?” she asked, in that syrupy Southern lilt that Scott loved. It wasn’t hard to melt a Midwest guy. Just talk with a mint julep drawl and he’d be drinking whatever you’re pouring. And he’d probably start talking that way himself to boot. A Southern drawl was addictive. He’d already said ma’am once tonight.
“Nope,” he said, still chewing a mouthful of the most tender beef he’d ever eaten. It disappeared quickly down his throat. “I think this is going to put me into a coma.”
Her eyebrows raised and Caroline put a slim hand on his shoulder. “Well, I surely hope not,” she said. “We haven’t even shown you the grounds yet.”
“Well, if you think that’s worth sticking around for…”
“Oh, I do,” she said. Her eyes widened with earnest feeling.
“I’ll tell you what’s worth sticking around for,” Jerry offered from the side. “Just a few hundred yards into the woods out back, you’ll find the start of the Imperial Trail. Take that to the top, and you can tell anyone that you’re a real Sir. Hiking that sucker even got Rocky here winded, and never mind her husband.”
“He watched,” Rocky offered, chewing a mouthful of stew. “As usual.”
“Some things are worth watching.” He shrugged, picking up a roll and dousing it in dirt-brown gravy. “You should come with us for a hike. You’ve never been out here before, right?”
Scott nodded. “No,” he said. “And we don’t get a lot of hills in Chicago.”
Jerry slipped a heavy arm around Rocky’s back. “She could show you the ropes. Literally.”
Between the overly friendly hand on his left side and the overly generous man on his right, Scott suddenly felt uncomfortable. He smiled and decided to dedicate his gaze on his plate. There were things swimming in the gravy around his potatoes that he couldn’t identify, and after a couple hesitant mouthfuls, he decided that it was best not to look there either. Just eat. He stared down the table at Ellen instead.
She noted his gaze and answered it with a nod. A moment later, she called the table to attention as she lifted her glass.
“A moment,” Ellen said. “Today is a special day for our family. Not long ago, we lost one of our own. Maximilian Belvedere was a man who lived for this inn. He ran this place for more than twenty years, and I’m proud to say that I knew him when he was just a kid, running in the back fields and shooting skeet. He grew up to bring home dinner for our pot on many a night, and it was his own momma that taught me what to do with it when he did. But tonight, we have with us Maximilian’s great-nephew, Scott Belvedere. Scott doesn’t know anything about this inn, or our ways…but I hope that by the time he leaves—if he decides to leave—that we can make him understand and appreciate the legacy of his great-uncle. Of his family.”
“Of the Family Tree,” the woman with the well-lined face echoed. Emmaline, he thought her name was.
“Welcome, Mr. Belvedere,” Ellen finished, and Caroline’s hand suddenly squeezed his shoulder, as around the table, people raised their glasses in answer to hers.
He felt uncomfortable as the center of attention, but Scott forced a smile, and raised his glass in answer. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m looking forward to learning about my roots!” He hadn’t touched it before, but as he brought the wineglass in front of him up to his lips, he smelled a faintly metallic scent. As he tilted it up, along with the rest of the table, the heavy blanket of honey smothered the sharp smell, and Scott couldn’t resist letting the liquid trail across his lips. He already knew the vintage; this wasn’t wine, despite the glass. This was the elixir of the tree. He’d tasted the Family Ale earlier, and the strangely earthy, malty aroma was unmistakable.
Of course they were drinking from the Family Tree for Family dinner.
From the way Ellen and Caroline talked, the tree literally gave everyone here life.
Down the hatch, he thought. I could use some extra hours.
By the time dessert was served—some kind of rum-drenched cake—Scott was threatening to nod off. The quiet and subtly erotic humor of Rocky nudged him periodically, and with a cool hand, Caroline pressed him to describe his life in Chicago; she’d never been outside of the hills, she explained…so she was curious about the big city.
Despite the naps, the travel had caught up with him. It had been a thirteen-hour drive, and after he took the last sip of the “Family” beverage, Scott pushed his chair back and excused himself.
“It’s been a really long day,” he apologized. He thanked Ellen and Caroline and turned towards the door.
“Can I help you find the way back to your room?” Caroline offered, but he shook his head. “I’ve got it.”
He quickly moved out of the room before any argument could rise, and turned to the left after the door.
The warmth and low chatter of the room quickly faded as he walked down the hall towards his room. His belly felt bloated, but there was a heat that suffused his bones. Blame it on the “tree ale” or the hot stew, it didn’t matter. He felt warm all over; sweat beaded on his brow. All he wanted to do was to strip down and lie down.
But when he reached the end of the corridor, his eyebrows furrowed. He had thought that this walkway led straight to the place where his room was. And now he couldn’t go forward at all.
This wasn’t the right way.
Crap.
He looked at the wood paneling that barred his way and took a deep breath before turning to retrace his steps. There was a door at his left, and he put a palm on it, curious if it was the locked entry to a private room, or an open access to another hall.
The handle turned until the door creaked inward.
Open. And it was not the entry to another hall.
Huh.
He’d expected the door to be locked if it was to a guest room, but now that he had access… Scott couldn’t help but look inside. Hell…the room was his, really. Right? He owned this place now, he might as well see what was here.
The light from the hall filtered in around him as he stepped inside. His hand searched the wall for a switch, but he only felt smooth paneling. He pushed the door as far open as it would go and he could make out the edge of a bed on the far corner of the room, and the now-familiar rough twine of tree bark protruding from the left wall. The damned tree trunk seemed to intrude everywhere in this place. There was a dark spot, a shadow on the floor at the base of the trunk, and Scott stepped inside the room, intending to see what it was. He knelt down next to the dark stain, and passed his finger over the top.
The stain was still wet. And sticky. There was a damp, metallic odor to this part of the room.
“Hey!” a voice called from the hallway. “There you are!”
Scott looked up from the dark smear on his finger to the radiant smile of the girl in the doorway.
Caroline.
“I wanted to make sure you made it home after dinner,” she said. “These halls can be confusing.”
“What with the tree popping out everywhere,” he said.
“Exactly. You didn’t think this was your room, did you?”
Scott shook his head. “Nope, I was just curious what was in here.”
“Just an old room,” Caroline said, stepping inside. “This used to be Maximilian’s room actually. It’s been empty for weeks now though. We have a lot of rooms here that don’t get used except during the high season.”
She reached down and took his arm. “C’mon, I’ll show you the way back.”
Scott opened his mouth to ask about the stain on the floor, but instead, a long, painfully obvious yawn emerged. He stood, and let her lead him from the room and down the hall to where it branched…. And then they were at his room. He didn’t know how he’d gone the wrong way before.
“Thanks,” he said, after keying open his room.
“Don’t mention it,” Caroline said. “I’m a
lways here to help.” She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Now you go and get yourself some rest, and we’ll show you around the grounds in the morning. Breakfast is at the Family Table from seven to eight a.m., if’n you’re hungry.”
“After that dinner, I don’t know if I will be.” He smiled. “But I’ll always drink a pot of coffee as long as it’s hot.”
“We can warm you up anytime,” she promised. Caroline winked and then without warning, stood on her toes and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Sweet dreams,” she said and then dashed quickly around the hall corner and out of sight.
“Huh,” Scott said to the empty hall. He put a hand to his damp cheek and suddenly felt warm all over.
Just as she’d promised.
He’d heard of Southern hospitality, but Caroline seemed to take it just a little too far. Not that he was complaining…he just didn’t understand it.
Shaking his head, he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He turned the lock, but thinking of Caroline’s easy access earlier, he wondered if there was much point.
Despite the fact that he’d been yawning for an hour thanks to the heavy dinner, Scott found himself struggling to doze off once he climbed beneath the covers. He lay there, staring at the black of the ceiling beyond the faint stream of moonlight that slipped in around the edges of the window shade. Now and then, he heard a floorboard creak somewhere in the inn. Sometimes above him, sometimes far away down the hall. The old building seemed to moan; the noises were faint, but frequent. He supposed it made sense really—there was a giant tree in the center of it all, and the thing probably moved and shifted with the wind, grinding against the inn with every breeze.
Weird was what it was.
“I can’t believe you never mentioned this, Dad,” he murmured. “It’s not the kind of place you could forget.”
Chapter Four
Scott hadn’t set an alarm, but when he stirred and looked at the clock, it was only 7:20 a.m. He tried to roll over to drift back to sleep, but after a few minutes, he had to admit that it wasn’t happening.
“So much for sleeping in on vacation,” he murmured, and rolled out of bed, still stifling a yawn. After a quick shower, he pulled on his well-worn, pale green Revolution Brewery T-shirt and a pair of shorts and stepped into the hall. The inn sounded quiet, but as he listened, he thought he heard the faint clink of dishes somewhere. He followed the hall around a corner and suddenly there were voices, and a familiar one, in particular.
“Hey, sleepyhead, ’bout time you meandered down here.” It was Jerry from dinner the night before. The hiker was clad in khaki shorts, a loose gray T-shirt (Climbers get it up!) and a Boston Red Sox cap. The straps of a brown backpack wound around his shoulders. “You’ll never hit the trailheads if you sleep in. Gets too hot.”
“Jerry can’t take the heat,” Rocky said, stepping around her husband. Her voice was just as quiet as the night before, but it made him shiver when she stepped closer to him and said even more quietly than before, “Can you?”
Scott met and held her eyes for a minute. They were soft and brown and wide…and she didn’t blink. It was almost as if she was daring him to act. Even though her husband stood inches away.
Scott finally dropped his gaze, and unconsciously followed the V of her pink Climbing U. T-shirt down the small but provocative swell of her cleavage. When he realized he was staring at her breasts, he looked up with a jolt and saw that she was grinning.
“Maybe you can hike my favorite trail sometime and we’ll see what you’ve got,” Rocky said. “Right now…”
“We’re late to the trailhead ourselves,” Jerry finished for her.
“I hate getting a late start,” Rocky said, the smile slipping from her face. “I like to make a day of it and I don’t like to rush things.”
“Rocky always says to walk fast but climb slow.”
“Only if it’s hard,” Rocky added teasing a ring of dark hair around her finger with a devil smile. “The climb, I mean.”
She raised an eyebrow and brushed past Scott’s shoulder. “See ya.”
“Have a good hike,” Scott offered, and Jerry clapped him on the shoulder as they passed.
The Family Table was almost empty when Scott stepped inside, but the old woman, Emmaline was there, still nursing coffee in a delicate white china cup. And the other new check-ins, the Thornes, were just pushing back from the table. The wife, a thickset woman with heavy waves of chestnut hair that hid half her shoulders, caught Scott’s eye. “We’re going into town,” she said. “But Ellen said if we needed eggs or anything, to stop at the front desk. Should I send her down here for you?”
There was a small buffet filled with muffins and biscuits set out next to a silver pitcher of coffee and another glass pitcher of orange juice.
“No thanks,” he said. “I’m just having coffee this morning.”
He poured himself a cup as they left the room and sat down across the long table from the older woman. He nodded at her with a smile and then picked up the morning newspaper that someone had left behind, and leafed through the first couple pages as he sipped his cup. But as he was trying to read an article about a woman who had drowned in a nearby lake, he kept feeling the hair on the back of his neck rise. When he looked up, he saw that Emmaline’s hazel eyes were staring directly at him. She didn’t look away when he “caught” her, but neither did she say anything.
Scott wasn’t really in the mood to talk, so he chose to ignore her attention and looked back down at his paper. But now the feeling of being watched was palpable. Why was she just sitting there looking at him? After a couple more minutes of unsuccessful reading, he looked up at her again.
She was still staring at him. Brazenly. She lifted the thin cup to her lips and sipped whatever was within with the faintest of slurping sounds…but her eyes didn’t leave his face.
Scott shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and cleared his throat. Still she watched him.
“Nice morning,” he said finally.
She nodded, slowly, but didn’t answer.
The silence in the room stretched and now he felt even more weird than before. “Can I get you anything,” he asked, not sure what else to say. What he wanted to do was to yell, “Stop looking at me!”
Emmaline set her cup on the table without a word and pushed her chair back. When she stood, it was with the careful dignity of the aged. Yet again, Scott thought her eyes looked out of place amid the wrinkles of her forehead and cheeks. They were bright, and alive. And seemed to be boring right into his forehead.
“It should have been your father who came back for this, not you,” she said.
“Dad’s dead,” Scott began, but as he turned around to explain, he realized that she had already left the room.
Scott poured himself another cup after Emmaline left, and sipped it alone, taking in the old portraits and pictures that lined the walls in ornate frames. The place was like a history gallery, only he didn’t know the meaning of any of the events they depicted. There were old black-and-white photos of the inn from the previous century, and even back then, the canopy of the tree rose like a mountain from the midst of the mélange of slanting roof angles that circled its trunk. The tree dominated everything, and apparently had for as long as people had come to the inn. There were many photos of people standing in the center garden around the main trunk, and old faded paintings of men and women with severe expressions, standing with hands touching the folded runnels of its bark. In one pose, Scott looked at how the women—with pulled-back dark hair and long, light-colored country dresses—were touching the bark almost…lovingly.
The Family Tree, he mused.
Free-kee.
Scott suddenly got a chill, standing there alone in the old room, looking at all of the faces. The eyes in one of the black-and-white photos…they were piercing, even in the faded image. He steppe
d closer and confirmed his suspicion. The woman was much younger, but there was no denying those eyes. And the face was really much the same decades ago as it appeared to him just a few minutes ago, staring across the table. The woman in the black jacket and long skirts was definitely Emmaline. And as he leaned in closer to see the people she was with, he saw that her hand was on the shoulder of a young boy. Her son Billy Dean? They were standing with a group of others in front of the tree, in the central courtyard. And the woman to Emmaline’s right…really still a girl, but… Scott nodded. Ellen. It had to be.
He lifted the photo off the wall and walked closer to the light, staring at the grainy features of the two women. He knew they’d been here for a long time but…there was something written in the lower right corner, and he tilted the photo to see it better. Just a pencil scribble on the matting. But in the light, dead-on, he could make it out.
1928.
He looked at it again. That couldn’t be right. He did the math in his head and scowled. That would make Ellen and Emmaline more than one hundred years old, judging from the look of their ages in the photo. Someone must have dated it wrong. 1948 might make sense, though he didn’t really think Ellen looked eighty. He stared again, but the 2 did not become a 4.
Scott took the photo back to the wall and rehung it. He decided that “breakfast” was done. He set down his mug and left the Family Table to find the front desk. It was probably time to speak again to Ellen. He wondered if he could get in a question about her age without sounding completely out of line…
Nobody was at the front desk when he arrived in the lobby (without getting lost this time) so Scott decided to take a walk outside. Despite the admonitions of Jerry and Rocky, it was still barely past 8:30 a.m., which to Scott was plenty early to be up and around on a vacation. The air was still crisp with the cool dew of the night, though he could feel the heat of the coming day whispering through the rays of the direct sun, when he stepped out of the speckled shadows thrown by the surrounding trees. He took a deep breath, and smiled. There was no way to describe the taste of fresh mountain air in the morning, but to a boy from the big city…it was nothing short of intoxicating.