by JL Bryan
"Visitors!" she snorted.
"Again," I said. "If I could get your name, and maybe some form of identification—"
"Hey, watch it, kid!" Hayden barked. The girl of six or seven, dressed in a patched and frayed dress, had picked up a stick and was jabbing it at Hayden through the gate.
"Oh, look, you made a new friend!" the woman said. I wasn't clear whether that was directed at the little girl or at Hayden, but it seemed a less than accurate assessment of the situation, either way.
Over in the high weeds, the toddler boy was seated on the ground, frowning as he methodically smeared dirt into his hair.
"We can't allow anyone through the gate," I said to the woman. "I'm sorry."
"I'm not just anyone!" she snapped, bouncing the baby in her arms. The little one had rejected the bottle and resumed screaming again. "Don't you know who I am?"
"Well, no," I said. "But I've actually been asking you to tell me—"
"You call my sister up and tell her I'm here. Tell her Tammy's come early for Thanksgiving. Kids, too. And you tell her if she don't like it, maybe she can call up one of her fancy Hollywood lawyers and sic him on my ex-husband, because child support's about eight months behind...and rent got a couple months behind...so here we are. I got nothing left. Unless you can track down Ephraim Kater and squeeze money out of his bank account...which there probably isn't any...we're gonna have to go ahead and accept our Thanksgiving invitation a little early. You tell her that."
"Tammy, you said?" I glanced into her car. It was packed full of clothes, some of them folded and crammed into plastic grocery bags, plus blankets, and a plastic storage tub full of dishes and framed pictures. It looked like the vehicle of someone in the middle of moving, or maybe living out of her car.
"Tammy Kater, used to be Tammy Starch," she said. "My sister is Lisa Starch. Or I guess you probably call her by that trumped-up stage name." She shook her head. "I guess our real name was too ugly for her."
"Starch?" I immediately thought of Callie Verish and her marriage to a man named Starch. They'd drifted westward after losing her family's traditional post at the old lighthouse. "Did any of your ancestors live here at the lighthouse?"
"Of course they did!" Tammy said. "All of them did, back to forever. Well, maybe not all of them. But yeah. A whole line of grandfathers. Right up until they betrayed my great-great-grandmother and took it from us. My grandmother still talks about it all the time."
"Callie Verish?" I asked. “Was she your great-great-grandmother?”
"So you do know about me!" Tammy snapped. "Why you been standing there acting like you don't know who I am?"
"I'm sorry, I'm just putting this together," I said. "So you and Alyssa...Lisa...are descendants of the Verish family. The light-keepers?"
"That's us," Tammy said. "The rightful keepers of this place. And I guess Lisa went and used all that movie money to get hold of the place again somehow. She ain't talked to me in five years, and out of nowhere decides to invite us all to Thanksgiving at her new beach cottage. It's the old family place." Tammy shook her head. "I don't know how she did it, but I suppose she can't wait to rub Mama's face in it. And mine. And everybody's."
"Okay," I said, suddenly eager to hear everything she had to tell me about her family history. I took a quick snapshot of her and messaged it to Zoe—I had her cell number, nothing direct to Alyssa—with the shortest explanation I could type.
My phone erupted a couple minutes later. It wasn't a message response or a voice call. It actually took me a second to realize I was getting notified by FaceTime, an app I'd installed, used maybe twice, and totally forgotten about.
I looked and saw an image of Zoe's face. I accepted the video call.
"Hey," I said to Zoe.
"Please hold for Alyssa—" Zoe began, and then the viewpoint bounced, and Alyssa's face snarled out at me from the phone.
"Let me see her," Alyssa said.
"Sorry?" I asked.
"Turn the phone so I can see her."
"Okay..." I did as requested, letting the two sisters face each other over my small phone screen.
“Well, look who washed up on my doorstep,” Alyssa said. “I told you to come for Thanksgiving. I guess the calendar at Schmookie's Tavern is a little off.”
“I ain't been to Schmookie's in months,” Tammy countered. “Too many bad memories. Too many of Ephraim's friends.”
“Aw, did we get another divorce?” Alyssa asked. “How many does that make? Four?”
“Two,” Tammy said. Her baby started crying again—not that it had really ever stopped, but it came back with a renewed volume and wailing and wriggling, as though it had caught a whiny second wind.
“What are you after, Tammy?” Alyssa asked over the phone.
“We just need a place to stay for a little while,” Tammy said. “Nobody's been paying child support and my little check don't go too far. I can get back on my feet. Just need a new job, enough to pay for an apartment...And you got this big old house out here that you ain't even using.”
“I am using it,” Alyssa said. “I've been remodeling it and now I'm having it decorated for the holidays. You know, the ones that start a couple weeks from now? Not today?”
Tammy glared at the phone in my hand, then looked at her small girl, who was now pretending to shoot Hayden through the gate as if her stick was a machine gun. The even smaller boy stood near the trees, gaping at a ladybug that crawled along his snot-smeared arm. He seemed amazed at first, then broke down crying again, apparently having decided the ladybug was a horrible thing. He shook it off.
“Come on, Lisa,” Tammy said. “My kids and I really don't have nowhere to stay. We need a little help, just for a little while. And here you got the old family place all fixed up now—”
“That's enough,” Alyssa replied.
“Don't make me beg,” Tammy said.
“You know, that's just what I'd like to see,” Alyssa told her. “I'd like to see you beg.”
“Come on—”
“Come on isn't any kind of begging,” said Alyssa, her deep south Georgia accent creeping into her tone, just as it had done when she angrily instructed me not to investigate her family history and connection to the property.
Now it looked like that connection had landed right in my lap. I wanted Alyssa to let her sister stay at the house, at least long enough for me to learn what I could from her. Plus, it sounded like Tammy had nowhere to go, and those three kids needed a roof over their heads.
“You really want me to beg?” Tammy asked. “In front of my kids.”
“Just the way you made me beg you not to steal Jimmy Hubert from me back in school?” Alyssa asked.
“Oh, come on, we were just kids—”
“I had ugly glasses and uglier braces,” Alyssa said. “He was my first boyfriend.”
“He was cute.”
“He was twelve,” Alyssa said. “I was twelve. You were fourteen. You only wanted to take him from me. You broke up like a week later? Remember?”
“Did we? Lisa, who remembers all the boys they dated in high school?”
“Well, Jimmy and I were in middle school,” Alyssa said. “But I remember all three boys I dated growing up. I know it must be impossible for you to count all of yours from your teenage years. Probably faster to count all the boys you didn't hook up with—”
“Lisa! My kids can hear you!”
“What did you make me do when I begged you to stay away from him?” Alyssa asked. “I remember kneeling on the floor of your bedroom. Kneeling and crying. And you laughing and telling me beg more, to beg with my face on the floor.”
“Lisa, you can't be mad about something that happened that long ago. We were just—”
“If you say 'we were just kids' then you can turn around and leave my front gate,” Alyssa said. “Find yourself a Motel 6.”
“I can't even afford a...”
“What's that? Are you begging yet? If I don't see you down on your knees in th
e middle of the road, I'm having my security people throw you off my property.”
I was starting to feel more than awkward by this point in the conversation. It was amazing how much humiliation was pouring out of the little screen in my hand, all over Tammy. I hoped for a peaceful resolution here, since I didn't want to be throwing what sounded like a homeless mother and three kids out into the street. Especially not when her sister owned a sprawling, barely-used estate just a few feet away.
Tammy looked at the phone in my hand, then gave me a desperate, pathetic look, as if searching for guidance.
I muted my phone, keeping it pointed at her.
“If you ask me, Tammy,” I said, “You may as well do what she says. The house has plenty of room for you and your kids. And you need a place to stay. Personally, I'd do it, in your place. No doubt in my mind at all.” Maybe I was motivated by knowing she could help with the case, but it wasn't totally selfish. Those kids needed somewhere to go.
Tammy nodded and sighed. I took the phone off mute.
“All right,” she told Alyssa. “I'm gonna do it. Then you'll tell 'em to let us in?”
“Sure,” Alyssa said. “Let's see what you got.”
Tammy swallowed, then slowly sank to her knees, still holding the baby in her arms. I tilted my phone to follow her down as she knelt on the blacktop, like a medieval supplicant begging a wicked queen for mercy.
She waited for Alyssa's response.
“Lower,” Alyssa growled. “Until your face is on the ground. I want you prostrate, sis, like I'm a goddess in an Eastern temple, and you're just a miserable wretch who worships me. Or you can go starve in the street...which, I have to tell you, would be pretty amusing. Especially after all those years of calling me fat, telling me I needed to throw up everything I ate or I'd turn into a blimp. I wasn't even that overweight, Tammy. I just wasn't a walking blond skeleton like you.”
Tammy seemed close to tears, her lower lip trembling. I felt dirty and low just witnessing this, never mind being literally at the center of the situation.
“Could you...” Tammy looked up at me. “Would you mind grabbing Chesterly' s car seat?” She pointed.
“Sure, sure.” I hurried to grab the detached car seat from where it sat in the shade, next to the little boy. He stopped crying now, the ladybug gone, his eyes fixed on his mom where she knelt with the baby in her arms.
Tammy placed the baby into the seat, then stretched out on the road, facedown, arms extended in front of her. Showing complete submission.
I glanced at Hayden, who was watching the scene, shaking his head. Even the little girl had stopped attacking him and the gate long enough to watch her mother stretch out on the ground, begging the small digital face on my phone for a place to shelter her children.
“What's wrong with Mommy?” the little girl asked. She walked over slowly, with plenty of wary looks for me, the strange woman who stood over her prostrate mother, holding my phone out like an emblem of power. It was power I definitely didn't want and didn't enjoy.
The more I saw of Alyssa, the less I liked her. But I was more than happy to take her money.
“I'm just playing a game with Aunt Lisa,” Tammy said, from where her face lay on the road. “Everything's okay, Steffy.”
“Is Aunt Lisa here?” the little girl, apparently named Steffy, asked. I supposed it was short for Stephanie, but I've learned not to assume anything. She looked at the phone in my hand. “Oh. She's just on TV again.”
“Hi there, Steffy!” Alyssa chirped from my phone, as though she weren't in the middle of humiliating the girl's desperate mother. “Do you remember me? You were just a tiny baby last time I saw you.”
“Mommy says you think you're better than us,” Steffy said. “Because you're famous. That's why you never visit.”
“That's not true, sweetie,” Alyssa said. “I never visit because your mother, and your aunt Penny, and your Grandma Starch...they're all horrible, mean people who treated me like an ugly dog they liked to beat.”
“Lisa, don't say things like—” Tammy began, but Alyssa cut her right off.
“They used to call me a stinky fat pig,” Alyssa continued. “Your mommy and Aunt Penny. And your grandma laughed when they did. Your mommy and Aunt Penny made me suffer all the time, because they thought I wasn't as pretty as them. They said I was an embarrassment. But now your mommy and Aunt Penny are the ones stuck in that hopeless death trap of a town, with stretch marks, with crow's feet, with stupid mean trash for husbands—I mean, ex-husbands.”
“Lisa, please—-” Tammy groaned.
“And, just as a little side note, which of us was on People magazine's list of the hundred most beautiful people in the world last year? Was it Penny? Was it your mommy?” Alyssa asked. “No. Because they don't give those awards to Wal-Mart clerks and hairdressers, especially not ones who've already started to lose their looks. Too many nights smoking Virginia Slims and downing whiskey at Schmookie's will do that to your face. Your mother used to be called the prettiest girl in school. Hard to believe it now. No, People magazine decided to pick me instead. The chunky, lumpy stinky pig, the one who was never going to look good in a cheerleader's skirt, the weirdo drama kid who just wanted to be somebody else. And now I am. And you're just the same, Tammy. You haven't changed since you were fourteen. Look at what you're wearing! A pink leopard-print dress, really? Did you scavenge that out of a dumpster behind the zoo?”
Tammy muttered something. Her face was turned to the side, her cheek resting on the blacktop. Her eyes were squeezed shut, dripping tears, and her face was blood-red, maybe from shame, maybe from humiliation, maybe anger. Maybe all three.
“What do you say?” Alyssa asked, her voice sharp and full of glee. The phone felt hot in my hand. “Sorry, Tammy, I didn't hear that at all.”
“I'm sorry,” Tammy said, louder this time. “I said I'm sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Alyssa asked. “There are so many things.”
“I'm sorry for everything!” Tammy looked up at the camera, road grit clinging to her tear-soaked face. “I'm sorry we were mean to you, Lisa. We were just kids. We didn't know any better. I'm sorry.”
Alyssa smirked quietly at her from my phone.
“Please, Lisa,” Tammy said. “We really ain't got no other place to go. My kids, Lisa. Don't make us stay at a shelter.”
“Why don't you go to Mama's house?” Alyssa asked.
“Mama's in a duplex now, with a roommate. She can't have us.”
“Penny's house, then?”
“There ain't no room, and her husband won't allow it, anyway,” Tammy said. “You think I'd come here and beg you if I had some other place to go?”
Both kids were staring at the phone now, at their movie-star aunt that they apparently barely knew, waiting for her to decide the family's fate. Even the baby had fallen quiet in her little seat. I was letting her grip my finger with one tiny hand, so maybe that helped.
“All right, then,” Alyssa finally said. “But only because of your kids, Tammy. I mean it. Ellie, let 'em in. Give them the nicest room in the house. Well, not the master suite, of course, but the nicest guest room. Let them have a good look at everything I've done.”
“I'll take care of it,” I told her.
“Go on, Tammy,” Alyssa said. “Enjoy your visit to the old home place. Don't let your kids break anything. We'll be flying back in a few days.”
“There's bad weather on the way,” I told Alyssa. “Possibly a hurricane. Just something to consider when you're planning to fly.”
“I'll check with my pilot,” Alyssa said. “The Lear feels gentle as a hammock inside, even in rough weather. You'd be surprised.”
“Sounds nice,” Tammy muttered from her place on the ground.
“All right. Just make yourselves at home.” Alyssa's voice had shifted to airy and upbeat, as though she hadn't just tried to verbally crush her older sister. “I'll see you soon. I just can't wait.” She smirked one last time before ending the
video call.
“Can I get up now?” Tammy asked me.
“Yeah, let's get you settled in.” I gestured for Hayden to unlock the gate. The heavy rain clouds were starting to return, and we were all going to get soaked if we didn't head straight inside.
The first raindrop fell onto my arm, large and cold. More followed.
Tammy herded her kids into the car. The smaller two had to be secured in car seats in the back. I did my best to help, but I had no idea what I was doing. Story of my life, really.
Chapter Twenty-One
We managed to get everyone into the house before the deluge arrived. Hayden helped carry in the luggage from the car, much of which included clothes crammed into old grocery bags.
“I can't believe it,” Tammy said over and over again. “When Grandma brought us here, it was just a little old wreck of a house. I guess Lisa really wanted to impress everybody. It wasn't enough to get the place, she had to make it look like a rich person's mansion. It never was this big before, not by half.” She shook her head. “No wonder she invited us all for Thanksgiving. She really wanted to rub our noses in it. Guess she got an early start on that today.”
The kids cheered when they saw their guest suite, which included a king-size bed, a little sitting room, and a balcony looking out at the ocean and the lighthouse. All the furniture looked upscale and polished, fitting the theme of authentic restored antiques running through the house.
“Look, we're on the beach!” squealed the little girl, Steffy, pushing her nose against the glass door to the balcony. She grabbed at the handle and tried desperately to open it, but it was locked.
“You can't go swimming out there,” I said quickly. “It's too dangerous.”
“Dangerous to swim?” Tammy asked. “It looks all right to me.”
“Well, it's not,” I said. I hurried to cobble together an explanation that didn't involve unhappy dead spirits trying to drown children. “Something about the river current hitting the ocean tide...we've just been warned. You'll have to keep your kids out of the water.”
“But I want to swim!” Steffy punched the glass with her fist. “And Kyle wants to swim, too, don't you?”