by R. R. Banks
“Right now, what I need is to convince that angry old man down there that the man who knocked up his granddaughter on a one-night stand and then showed up a year and a half later is not only not someone who he should string up in the orchard, but the person who is going to make the farm profitable again. Once we can accomplish that, maybe I’ll think about the air conditioner. How does that sound?”
I felt my jaw twitch.
Really hard. Really, really hard to get along with her.
Except she isn’t wrong.
I sat down next to my mug of coffee and took a sip, hoping it would be a gesture of truce. She reached for the box and dumped the contents out onto the floor in between us. I was hoping for a much larger pile, but I figured I was going to have to be satisfied with whatever we had if this plan was going to work, so I reached for the first envelope.
“What’s with the scribbling on the front?” I asked.
“Coy said that he had to do a little bit of editing, and some people refused not to put their names on them so he crossed them out for us. You know…to maintain neutrality.”
I decided to let that one pass.
“Editing?”
“Apparently your stories were a little more intense than some people around here like. Who would’ve thought?”
“It’s a Halloween haunt,” I said, repeating the same argument that I already had. “It’s supposed to be scary. I would think that people who beat the living hell out of people piñatas with loaves of bread would be less squeamish about violence.”
“That’s a cherished celebration of our independence and the bravery of those who protected the Hollow from the encroaching enemies.”
“I thought it was about the people who freaked out when the police came to arrest the bootleggers and threw bread at them.”
“Like I said.”
“Alright. Well, that was the whole point of publishing the stories. We got people talking. You’ve heard the saying ‘there’s no bad publicity’. Same idea. Whether people are excited about the haunt or infuriated about the stories or just want to prove that they are brave enough to face it, they are talking about it. That’s what we want. The more they talk about it, the more they’ll think about it. The more they think about it, the more chance that they will want to come out and see it for themselves. If we can keep them talking, we have a chance at this haunt being a success.”
There was a pause and I didn’t know if I had been convincing enough, but then I saw Bitsy’s eyes brighten slightly.
“Let’s get them talking then,” she said.
I smiled at her and opened the envelope in my hands. I unfolded what looked like a sheet of lined paper raggedly torn from a notebook and looked down at it. My smile faded.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” I read.
“Those poor women.”
I looked at Bitsy and saw that she was reading a postcard. She looked up at me with disappointment in her eyes and we both dropped the notes in our hands and reached for others.
“Is this true? Did this really happen? Did you find the killer?” I read.
“Oh, sweet lord, are we in danger?” Bitsy looked at me. “They might have been written by the same person.”
We each got new notes.
“I think the creepy kid who likes Halloween so much did it.”
“Is that girl sleeping with her stepbrother? That’s just not right.” She shook her head. “I told you that there was something wrong about that one.”
“That’s the point,” I said, looking at the postcard in my hand. “Why can’t you just grow pumpkins?”
“How about that story of that girl who up and chopped up her parents and then hid in the sewers dressed like a clown so that she could inspire that Paint It Black song?”
“Someone’s been doing some confusing and wildly inaccurate research,” I said.
We continued through the pile, finding notes of varying degrees of understanding and anger, and the further we went, the more deflated I saw Bitsy getting. Tears were forming in the corners of her eyes and I knew that in her mind she was seeing her hopes of her grandfather not selling the farm fading away.
“Hates it,” she said, tossing a note aside. “Hates it.” She tossed that one and continued through the stack. “Doesn’t understand it. Still thinks that there’s a serial killer running around in the Hollow even though there was absolutely no mention of it in the news. Hates it. Hates it. Hates it. Loves it. Well, that’s a refreshing change of pace. Hates it. Hates it. Hates it.” She held up a postcard for me to look at, her face contorted with exasperation and frustration. “This one just says ‘Jesus’.”
She dropped the cards to the floor and lowered her face to her hands.
“It’s going to be alright,” I said, trying to comfort her. “Don’t lose hope. I’m sure there will be more responses. Those’ll be better. We just got the first reactions from people who didn’t really know what was going on. They’ll figure it out and start getting into it. We’ll get better responses and in a few weeks, we’ll get started. OK?” She didn’t look convinced and I crawled toward her, cupping one hand under her chin and tilting her face up so that she would look at me. “OK?”
I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to draw her into my arms and hold her and discover the same delectable pleasure that I had had with her that one incredible night. But I knew I couldn’t. Instead, I lightly stroked her face with my thumb and continued to look into her eyes, trying to convince her. Finally, Bitsy nodded and I smiled.
“Good. It’s going to be fantastic. Trust me. This farm is going to have business like you’ve never seen.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Bitsy
Well, he wasn’t wrong.
The next day the farm was definitely getting business like I had never seen, but it wasn’t the stream of money that I was hoping for. Instead, it was the Ladies League. The religious equivalent of a lynch mob. Of course, since it was the Hollow Ladies League it was only five women, but it is important to never underestimate the power of an offended woman bearing a Bible and a casserole.
“Oh, shit. I mean shoot. I mean…”
I let out a sigh and let the curtain drop back into place from where I had been holding it so I could peek out the parlor window to see whose footsteps were crunching gravel up the walk.
“What is it?” Roman asked.
He had come over with the small handful of new responses that he had picked up from Coy. I was hoping for something better than what we had already gotten, but the oncoming storm of self-righteousness dressed up in pastel didn’t seem to bode particularly well for me.
“The Ladies League of the First and a Half Church of the Hollow.”
“First and a Half?” Roman asked.
I nodded as I tried to smooth out my hair and make myself as presentable as cotton shorts and a tank top could make me in the twelve seconds I had before the group made it to the door.
“The actual first one had a fire a bunch of years back and they built the rest of a building around what was left of the first one.”
“First and a Half,” he said.
I nodded just as the doorbell rang.
“Yeah.”
I opened the door and smiled wildly.
“Bessie! Sage, Sarah, Julia, Norma! It’s so good to see you. To what do I owe this surprise?”
“I think you know exactly why we’re here, Beatrice.”
Oh, damn. It was more serious than I thought.
It seemed funny that for years I had struggled to shed the nickname that had come to define me in the Hollow, to redesign myself under the title of my actual name, and had bucked against anyone who insisted on continuing to call me Bitsy. Now, though, I was so accustomed to it that hearing these women call me Beatrice felt like I should be standing in the corner of a classroom wearing a pointy cap. It reminded me of being a little girl and getting caught with my fingers in the caramel when my mother was making caramel apples for Halloween in Granddaddy’s kitchen. Th
e thought brought a sudden and unexpected wash of emotion over me. I hadn’t thought about that in so long. It would only be a few weeks until the weather cooled, the leaves changed, and my mind started searching for the smell of caramel in the hallways of the house. It was a smell that I hadn’t experienced since before I was even a teenager, and now I was worried that this would be the last year that I would even get to walk the hallways.
Bessie was talking, but I had missed everything that she had said. I blinked away the tears and shook my head hard before looking at her again.
“I’m sorry—” I started, but Julie cut me off before I could say anything else.
“I’m sure you are,” she snapped.
I looked at her, my jaw set and my heart aching.
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t hear what you were saying,” I said.
“I was saying that we came to offer our counsel to you in your time of need.”
“My time of need?” I asked, looking at Bessie again.
“Well, it’s no secret that it was a scandal that brought you back here after you left, and since you’ve come back we’ve all done our best to welcome you, but now we are really concerned about your mind.”
“And your soul,” Sage said matter-of-factly.
“Oh, you are?” I asked, my dread at being judged now replaced with growing anger at being judged.
“Yes,” Sarah said softly. “We are very concerned about this man who has come to stay with you. Especially with all this gory, shameful Halloween nonsense.”
“Not to mention how you are raising your little one.”
“Excuse me?” I said, unable to hold back. “What’s wrong with how I’m raising my daughter?”
The women exchanged glances. They were all shifting uncomfortably, obviously thrown off their game by being left to stand on the front porch rather than being invited inside and plied with tea and cookies like the official social representatives of the lord should be. I wasn’t about to bring them into my home and go out of my way to make them comfortable. If they came here to cast stones at me, I was going to show them just how trashy I could be.
“We haven’t seen you at church,” Bessie said. “You haven’t even had her dedicated.”
She spoke the words as though she were describing me murdering someone and running through the Hollow naked except for a bikini made from the person’s entrails.
Another option for the haunt.
“I’m sorry,” I said, the sarcasm coming out in my voice now. “Did I neglect to have my daughter dedicated? How could I be so neglectful as to forget to bring my newborn to get dunked in the baptismal that has seen the likes of Jeb Montaigne and his standing bi-weekly dunk to keep himself ahead, Mitzi Delacroix and her parade of children, each with their own personal daddy to spread out their weekend activities, and Vint Addleton and three out of his four wives. I’m sure that we could include his fourth, but nobody’s heard from her in a while, have they?”
The women all looked at me as if I had run down the row of them and slapped each across the face end-of-the-baseball-game style. Not that that would have been such a bad approach.
“That’s not what…” Julie started, but I shook my head.
“You know what? I don’t really care what you think you are here to do. I’m not listening to it. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go inside with my illegitimate baby daddy and think of all of the gruesome ways that we can terrify anyone who will come out here. Maybe we’ll even throw in some gratuitous nudity just because we can. You know what? I don’t even care if you mind.” I took a step back into the house and closed the door. I opened it again and looked out at them. “In fact, I hope you do mind.”
I slammed the door and closed my eyes, counting to ten to try to calm myself down. I let out a growl of anger and stomped my feet like I had seen Rue doing at the post office.
I always knew that counting bullshit didn’t work.
“What’s wrong?” Roman asked, coming into the hallway.
“Who do they think they fucking are?” I shouted, halfway hoping that they would hear me from where they were slinking away – or still standing on my front porch trying to figure out what they were going to do now that their usual routine had been completely thwarted.
“What happened?”
I looked at him, shaking with anger, and tried to formulate a way to explain what had just happened without having to delve deeply into the history and legend of Whiskey Hollow and the complex often tumbleweed-like networks of family and associations that defined it. I realized then that there was really no way for me to do it, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t vent.
“How dare they judge me? What makes their panties so damn white that they can fly them on the clothesline?”
“I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“They actually accused me of being a bad mother. That little baby in there is my whole world and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.”
“Of course, you wouldn’t.”
“So where do they get off implying that I’m not raising her properly? Just because I came back here pregnant and wouldn’t tell anybody who her father was and now you’re here living in the old house and we’re scaring the living bejeezus out of everybody.” I sighed. “Shit.”
“No,” Roman said, coming toward me. “No. None of that justifies them judging you. From some of the stories you’ve told me about this place, you’re almost boring.”
That was so close to both a multilayered insult and a compliment that I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. I stared at him, my mouth opening and closing a few times without any words coming out. Finally, I stomped past him.
“Where are you going?” he called after me.
“To read through these responses so we can get started on this haunt. If they are already thinking the worst of me, I might as well just fling myself into it full-ass.”
He had been following me, but I heard his footsteps stop and I turned around to look at him.
“What is full-ass?” he asked.
“Full-ass,” I repeated, thinking that he just hadn’t heard me. “As opposed to half-ass.”
“Assed,” he said.
“What?”
“Assed. There’s an ‘-ed’ at the end. Assed.”
“Really?”
“I’m fairly certain.”
“When did ‘ass’ become a verb?”
“I don’t think it’s a verb.”
“But you just said that it has ‘-ed’ on the end. That makes it a verb. Like yelled. Or judged. Or flailed.”
“No, it’s an adjective. Like angered. Or confused.”
“You know what? It doesn’t really matter. I just want to do this the way that it should be done. Do you still think that it could work?”
“Yes,” Roman said confidently. “I do. If we do it right, it could really be something amazing.”
I nodded.
“Then that’s what we’re going to do. I want to create the scariest, most detailed, most successful haunt this area has ever seen.”
“I thought that you said that there hadn’t ever been a haunt around here.”
“Not the point.”
I started toward the office again, filled with even more vigor than I had had the day before. The disdain from the women had only given me more fire in my belly to prove them wrong and achieve the success that I knew would convince my grandfather that it wasn’t time yet to let go of the farm.
Unfortunately, no amount of vigor or belly-burning could make up for the responses that we got that day. The little stack that Roman had brought over seemed like just a continuation of the day before, if even a bit more vehemently against both stories. This general idea repeated twice more and by the time the middle of the next week arrived, I was beyond thankful that the response deadline had come because it meant that I wasn’t going to have to read through any more.
I carried the last of the responses into the house and immediately realized t
hat Roman was already there. It was almost as though I could feel him there, like his presence changed the environment of the house. I didn’t like to admit that even to myself, and was certainly not going to say it to him, but as I walked into the living room, I felt my heart flutter.
Roman was standing in the center of the room with Lorelei cradled in his arms. She rested her head against his chest, one little hand up on his shoulder, as he murmured something into her ear. His head was turned away from me and I couldn’t understand the words that he was saying, but the serene look on the baby’s face was enough to tell me that whatever it was, was soothing something deep within her. I stood watching them, feeling a cold piece within me melting slightly at the sight of them bonding. As if he could sense that I was standing there, Roman turned around and looked at me. I tried to pretend as though I had just come into the room, not wanting him to know that I had been watching them. He smiled at me and lifted the baby slightly as if presenting her to me, showing off that she was happy and comfortable in his arms.
“She was crying when I came in,” he said. “So, I picked her up.”
“Where’s Granddaddy?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.
Roman’s smile lessened.
“He stepped outside for a minute when she calmed down. I can handle holding her.”
I felt guilty for making him think that, but I couldn’t help but be worried. He had barely held Lorelei since getting to Whiskey Hollow and to find him in the living room walking around with her like it was second nature and Granddaddy missing had startled me.
“I know you can,” I said, trying not to let the frustration that Roman so easily created in me build up.
I resisted the urge to take the baby from his arms, reminding myself that he deserved to spend time with her, and that she deserved a father, and rushed through the house toward the back porch. Granddaddy had always loved standing out here in the early mornings, looking out over the farm in the first misty moments of the day, taking in the fresh air and thinking about all of the possibilities and potential that the day ahead of him held. I could only hope that that was what he was feeling now, starting to experience the excitement of the upcoming fall season like he always used to and thinking of ways that he could draw in the crowds again. It might even be the time for me to tell him about the idea for the haunt.