by A. J. Aalto
Gillian had been at her house every night this week. For that, Frankie was eternally grateful. She often thought of Gillian as her own personal pit bull, small and savage, fiercely protective. When they were growing up, Gillian would walk her to school, holding her hand when crossing the street, giving bullies the stink eye until they afforded both girls a wide berth. After their mother died, Gillian took over. Even now, if Gillian was unwell, she would take her to doctor’s appointments, or intervene on her behalf with lawyers and Henry when they got too greedy. Gillian had rallied in her defense so many times that sometimes Frankie couldn’t imagine dealing with life in her sister’s absence.
She’d mentioned this to Travis once, when they’d first started dating. Gillian the champion. Gillian the pit bull. Travis had laughed hard and long, not bothering to hide his disbelief. (“What does she weigh, a buck and a quarter?”)
Later, when Travis had taken to mocking Gillian behind her back, Frankie had warned him, “You don’t want to get on Gillian’s bad side.” Again, he’d laughed, delighted by how ridiculous he found this.
“What’s she ever done?” he’d asked.
And Frankie had blurted it out, or half of it, The Big It, if only to wipe that smug, superior smile off his face. Blurted it right out, she thought, recalling the dread she’d felt after the words escaped.
But he hadn’t believed her. Not for a second.
Now, Frankie regretted ever telling him. She wondered if he remembered. He seemed to remember every goddamn thing, like each slight was written in a mental log book, counting against her on some relationship scorecard, hash marks tallying her failures or his grievances, real and imagined. She was always letting him down, falling behind, making him wonder aloud, “Why am I with you?” and “Why do I put up with this?”
She’d never had an answer. She hadn’t been aware that she didn’t need to answer, that she didn’t owe him an explanation, that she didn’t owe him a damn thing. That her answer could be “Go, then.” That hadn’t occurred to her until Gillian pointed it out.
Once again, Gillian to the rescue. The pit bull chomping at the bit to defend her. Frankie had always been quick to laugh, quick to love, quick to cry. If someone stubbed their toe, Frankie’s eyes would well up before theirs would. Too soft, Frankie thought about herself; maybe she had a bold and fearless heart but she also had raw nerves. Maybe she didn’t give enough thought about tomorrow in her rush to love today.
Gillian, on the other hand, had a strong outer shell which Frankie admired and longed for. Nothing fazed Gillian. Gillian was careful to withdraw and analyze, to take things slowly; if you weren’t willing to wait for Gillian, you’d miss the depth of a heart that had decided to commit, to give its all, for better or worse. Gillian took time to decide whether or not to be devoted to you, but once she was, you could depend on her for anything, forever.
How could I ever repay her? Frankie thought. And then she heard her sister’s voice, very clearly: You don’t have to. We’re sisters.
Frankie took a look around the messy room with its litter and low light and locks done up tightly, and shook her head, dangling earrings tinkling pleasantly. She lifted one fluttering, nervous hand to push her wild hair back from her face.
Her sister shouldn’t have to come here and play nursemaid. She had a job and a new business and her own life to live. This is silly. Turn your phone off and get back to it, Miss Frankie. After three hours curled up sweating and nervously picking her face and snapping her hair on the couch, Frankie finally got up, and set about putting things right again. Her first order of business was to text her sister good night and then turn off her phone.
Chapter Nine
Monday, October 27. 10:15 A.M.
Dozens of questions go through the mind when digging up bones. The first time, people assume it’s just an animal; a family pet, perhaps, buried in a shallow grave near the honeysuckle. The second time, suspicions arise about the size. Around the ninth or tenth time, though, start putting them right back where they were found, and quickly; superstitious or not, it's unwise to muck about with bones or otherwise disrespect the dead.
Gillian knew all about digging up skeletons, or planting flowers to mark their place. To honor the dead, whether they deserved to be remembered or not. Her work at the cemetery was peaceful and she took great pride in beautifying and remembering. She patted the earth back over the last bone — probably just a beef bone Mrs. Blymhill never got around to turning into broth, she told herself — and picked up the garden shears to trim an invasive peppermint plant.
“The old Italian lady next door watches me,” Frankie said abruptly, using the back of her gloved hand to wipe sweat off her forehead and sweep some stray bangs off her temple.
Gillian snort-laughed, sounding a lot like their father. “She does not.”
“Does. Her husband brought us grapes the first day, remember? But she yelled at him to come away. Now he ignores me, and she stares at me funny.”
“Well, you’re funny-looking, can you blame her?” Gillian asked.
“Maybe she wants me,” Frankie said, winking.
“Doesn’t everybody?” Gillian drawled, only half kidding.
“Only the ones with good taste,” Frankie said, and waved at the fence line. The neighbor’s curtain twitched closed. “Oops. No waving allowed, apparently.”
Gillian heard a crash inside of what she still thought of as Mrs. Blymhill’s house, and rested on her haunches in the herb garden to survey the back door, propped open and spilling some classic rock from a battery-powered radio into the yard. She’d asked Bruce from the cemetery planting crew to help haul out some old pieces of furniture to the curb for garbage pick-up and to tear down a few old cabinets and toss them into the construction dumpster she’d rented. He swore at something gruffly and there were two more thuds, then the crackling of wood giving way. Gillian peeled off her gardening gloves and gave her sore fingers a rub, noticing without surprise that her sister hadn’t so much as tugged a weed or clipped a dead bloom.
The wind stirred the foliage and the dull glint of something metal caught her eye. She squinted, parting the mint with her gloved hand, cocking her head. “Hey, Frankie?”
Frankie made a half-interested hmmm? She stepped closer and leaned over, peering at the rusty metal object barely peeking through a thick patch of herbs. “Huh.”
“What is that?” Gillian asked.
“Looks like an old bear trap,” Frankie said, standing straight and demonstrating with her clawed hands snapping shut. “You know?”
Frankie’s ex-husband was an avid hunter; she enjoyed shooting, whether it was at game or in the shooting range with one of his many handguns.
“Take a picture and send it to Henry, ask him how to disarm it so I don’t accidentally tear my arm off,” Gillian said. “And hand me that solar light. I’ll use it to mark the spot.”
Frankie handed her the little solar powered lantern. Gillian stuck the pointy end in the ground near the trap, if that’s what it was, to mark the danger zone. She looked around more carefully and spotted another one lurking between two hybrid tea roses, their limbs heavy with rose hips.
“It’s not the only one. Looks like a couple more by the back fence,” she told her baby sister. “I’ll mark them with more lights. But better not wander into the garden off the path in case there are others, okay?”
Frankie rolled her eyes, and the gesture said as-if-I-would. She got a picture on her phone and texted it to her ex-husband with their question. “Mrs. Blymhill was a weird old coot, eh?”
This place had been their dream since they lost their mother to the bottle and their father to depression. They envisioned a retreat where writers and artists could get away and pursue their creative pursuits without interruption. Frankie, an artist working in both oil paint and stained glass, wanted a studio. Gillian, who dabbled in poetry and pottery, was charmed by the idea of helping other people in the creative community. Hearth House wouldn’t be the only
bed and breakfast in the quaint lakeside village of Derby Harbor, but it would be the only one jutting into the lake on Higgins Point, and it would be theirs.
Frankie answered a call on her cell, giving an exhausted-sounded puff into the phone. “Absolutely, no, I could use a break. I’m wiped out!”
Gillian rolled her eyes as she put her gardening gloves back on and examined the stubborn, overgrown mint plant before her.
Frankie said, “See ya Saturday? Yeah, you gotta see this place. The dining room walls are legit old growth dark walnut, floor to ceiling. And what a ceiling. Pressed copper. Fucking gorgeous. Yeah, it’s dark, but it’s just stunning. Same thing up the big staircase, and in the hallways. The granddaughter left all sorts of antique furniture to go with the house. Hopefully, the throw rugs can be salvaged, because they look like genuine Turkish beauties. I’ve got a guy coming to look at them.”
She’s got a guy coming to look at them, Gillian thought wryly, noting it had been an hour since they discussed the possibility and it had been Gillian’s idea.
Frankie went on excitedly, “Oh, and it’s full of weird shit. I’m talking taxidermy-level weird, monkeys in little clown outfits, a beaver on the mantelpiece. The bedroom I liked most came with a bonus: creepy dolls! About three dozen of them. Those are going, ASAP, I don’t care what my sister says. I’m tossing them right in the damn dumpster before we have a full-blown Chuckie incident on our hands. I’m not sleeping in this house with century-old dolls staring at me from the shadows with their glass eyes, no thank you.”
Gillian rolled her eyes again and this time directed a sigh at her sister.
“Yeah, no,” Frankie rambled on, “even the back yard is loopy. Crazy old bat must have really liked cooking. Half the yard is a maze of overgrown herb plants. Dried herbs hanging in bundles in the kitchen. You can barely walk in there.”
Gillian thought this an overstatement, but not by much. Mrs. Blymhill had been a bit of a hoarder. Gill was equally dismayed to find the once-manicured yard overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle and trumpet vine and spider webs, but she saw as much potential here as she had three years ago when she stumbled upon the big Victorian house on a boat cruise along the shore of Lake Ontario. As the boat had slipped through silent, midnight-dark waters and the other partiers sipped champagne, nibbled finger foods, said a goodbye to the man they’d come to mourn and celebrate, Gillian had leaned on the boat's railing and watched the passing lights in the homes and the few lighthouses along the coast and wondered where her husband’s ashes would wash ashore. The big house had loomed in the darkness at Higgins Point, only a single light on in a main floor window, and Gillian thought it seemed a lonely place, as lonely as she’d felt since her husband Greg had been killed in the line of duty. It was there, she decided, that the current would probably take his ashes, having been spilled into the lake not fifteen minutes before. And it was there, in that old, rambling house with its peeling paint and wrap-around porch and its broken-down dock and its boulder-strewn shoreline, that she wanted to live.
Frankie was still chatting on the phone, strolling toward the house, wrapping one long curly blonde lock of hair around a finger. A clean finger, Gillian noted, certainly untouched by dirty work.
You haven’t been down to that shoreline, something teased in the back of her mind. She fought it off by taking her garden shears to the mint and trimming it unforgivably short.
Frankie gasped and insisted, “Stop it! You’re horrible!” But her tone was teasing and delighted.
Gillian cleared her throat. “Bruce could use a hand, I’m sure.”
Frankie didn’t entirely ignore her. She shot her a do-you-mind look and continued to gab. After a few minutes of watching her sister battle mint while taunting her latest boyfriend about various naughty outdoor shenanigans they might get up to at the new place, she hung up and sighed. “You’re going to get heat stroke.”
“In October? I'm fine,” Gillian insisted while the sweat rolled down her spine. “See if Bruce wants a cold drink, eh? And check my phone? I’m expecting a call. Forgot to bring it out.”
“You’re always ‘forgetting’ your phone,” Frankie accused. “Convenient. It’s almost like you don’t want to talk to anyone.”
Almost, Gillian thought, trimming the last edge of the mint and shuffling carefully to the left to take on the lemon balm. Warring scents were heady in the unseasonably hot afternoon air.
Frankie looked at her phone display. “Henry says you were right; it's a bear trap. He’ll come take care of them. He says hi, and you need to make sure you’ve kept up your life insurance if you’re really going to live somewhere booby-trapped. Ha!”
Gillian smirked; Henry had worked in insurance for decades and was often on her case about keeping her bills paid up and her policies current. “Tell him we’ll get house insurance once the rest of the paperwork is sorted out,” she promised.
Frankie laughed and swept in through the back door, which led into the kitchen, an extra-wide entrance compared to all the strangely narrow doorways in the big old home. Gillian heard her exclaim, “It’s gorgeous. We have to leave this here. This is amazing. So intricate. Gills, come see!”
“What is it?” Gillian called, getting to her feet, dusting her knees off, and trundling inside to have a look. When she walked through the door and into the living room, she saw that under the worn, stained Berber carpet that Bruce had been pulling up was a scuffed hardwood floor painted with a room-sized circle. She was forced to repeat, “What is it?”
“What do you mean?” Frankie laughed. “It’s nothing, it’s just… Beauty. Randomness. It’s perfect, look at it.” She was down on her hands and knees, now, tracing the faded brush strokes. A merman. A centipede. A lock of hair tied in blue ribbon. “I can’t believe she covered this up, and yet she kept those hideous black and white sketches just stabbed on nails on the wall in the hallway.” Frankie shook her head and her earrings tinkled. “Gosh, just look at it. Have you ever seen something so striking?”
Bruce looked, but from a distance. “It’s not random,” he said. The old wood planks creaked pleasantly under his weight. “There’s a pattern.”
“You and your patterns,” she teased, but she did give him the benefit of humoring him. She stared at it for a full minute, circling it, cocking her head, before shrugging. “I don’t see it.”
“Water creature,” Bruce pointed out. “Earth creature, Fire, and Air.”
“You’re nuts,” she said, but she stared still, feeling vaguely mesmerized.
“Maybe whoever painted this was nuts,” Bruce allowed, “but not me. Look, dolphin-centaur-phoenix-storm. Water, Earth, Fire, and Air. First clockwise, then below that, curving counter-clockwise, over and over...”
“Deosil,” Frankie whispered on an exhale, and her stare deepened. “Widdershins.”
“What?” Gillian laughed in surprise.
Frankie jerked. “What-what?”
“What did you say? What’s a deostill? Watershins?”
“Witchy stuff…” Frankie shook her head, frowning. “Never mind.”
Bruce scowled, his nose wrinkling. Frankie was too lost in the painting to answer. The room felt uncomfortably silent for a moment. Abruptly, the fridge behind them began to hum loudly and Bruce, leaning nearby, started, and then swore at his own foolishness.
“Fancy words for clockwise and counter-clockwise, is all.” Gillian swiped her forehead with the back of her hand, stepping into the kitchen and placing her gardening gloves on the butcher block counter top. She opened the fridge for a cold bottle of Pepsi. “All the furniture at the curb?” she asked him, handing him a bottle, too.
He nodded and grunted affirmatively. “Just got the last cabinet here to drag out and the rest of this carpeting, and then you’re on your own, Boss.”
Gillian smiled and tilted her pop bottle in thankful salute. She was in a junior supervisory role with the cemetery planting crew, owing to seniority, but it was not all that official. Still, the
guys on the crew went to her first with their questions when the orders came in. “We’ve got to remember to bring a camp chair, Frankie, or something so we can sit for a rest.”
“Feeling okay?” Frankie said, still distracted by the painted floor. “Overheated? It’s so close in here. Have to get central air put in before we open for clients. There’s no way anyone could sleep under those eaves in this kind of heat.”
“It’s almost winter. Give it a month. By the time we’re ready to open in April, it’ll still be cold as a witch’s tit,” Gill promised.
Bruce opened the freezer for a chunk of ice and plopped it in a glass, which he handed to Gillian. “Here, pour that Pepsi in here and drink up, missy. If I let you get heat stroke, your sister will never let me marry you.”
Her smile tilted. “Oh, I’m marrying you, now? Since when?”
“I’m after your big money, honey,” Bruce said with a smirk, and hauled his impressive bulk out back into the living room to finish yanking up carpet. He was a broad-shouldered bear of a man, heavily bearded, thick of neck and stern of face, with eyes that softened with humor quickly and easily. Bruce had been faux-proposing to her for seven years, even while she was married, pretty much on a daily basis; Gill was certain he was joking. Mostly.
“Seriously, Gill, it’s like a hundred and eight degrees in the shade,” Frankie said. “You know how you get.”
“It’s only eighty-two. I’ll take it easy,” she reassured, barely refraining from an eye-roll.
“Heat’s gonna break soon, anyway,” Bruce called back to them. “Check that storm front.”
Frankie got up, her skirts jingling, and hurried ahead of Gillian to the living room window. Bruce was a formidable shape in the big bay window, the place where Gillian could picture pots and pots of trailing orchids and Frankie’s colorful stained glass framing the wide view of Lake Ontario. A shadow had fallen across the west horizon, and the lake, which had been glaringly blue this morning, had gone grey and rough.