May I Go Play?

  My mother, the cliché.

  “Who did this?” she barked, her bobbed hair swishing as she turned a withering glare on us.

  Beside me, Izzy jumped. She wasn’t exactly a good daughter. She got caught a few months back half-naked under the bleachers at school during a football game. With another girl. Oh, and just a couple of joints.

  I love my sisters—they give me such great fodder for abuse.

  “We noticed it on the way up with Izzy’s last box,” I told her. “It wasn’t us.”

  Mom’s jaw clenched. “We just moved in and already the boys are destroying the house.”

  “Might have been the movers,” I suggested.

  “They haven’t been upstairs. And the prints are too big to be Cam’s.” Mom eyed the drying mud, and I followed the trail. The steps began at the top of the stairs and ended in the middle of the hall, halfway between Izzy’s bedroom and mine.

  “Odd. Why is it only on this section of the rug?” Mom whipped around and stared down the stairs. “There’s nothing on the stairs.”

  I stepped out into the hall, the hair prickling at the back of my neck. She was right. “That is weird.”

  My mother turned her dangerous ‘squinty’ eyes in my direction. “Are you playing a prank?”

  I almost growled. Almost. “No! Why would I do that?”

  “Jeez. It has to have been your brothers.” She waved at the footprints in disgust. “I’ll find them and send them upstairs to clean. Isabella, you have one more box sitting on the front porch, and your father wants it gone. Now.” With that, Mom turned on a heel and descended the stairs.

  “Way to back me up, Iz,” I said wryly as Mom’s footsteps faded.

  “She scares the hell out of me when she’s like that.” Izzy laughed, and then clomped down the stairs for her millionth box.

  Chapter 4

  After I unpacked my meager belongings, I decided to comb the lay of the land. Granny owned a vast forty acres—significantly vast compared to our old house in the suburbs, where our microscopic veggie garden had to be planted in the flowerbeds out front and our chicken coop took up the entire backyard.

  A meandering dirt path cut a swath through the woods. I walked it in bare feet, my green flip-flops swinging from one hand. I liked the feel of the cool, shaded ground beneath my skin, and the way the sun tried to beat through the trees in patterns on my arms. It was secluded and quiet. We couldn’t even hear traffic on the highway—it was ten miles away.

  I figured I’d give it a couple days and then borrow Mom’s car and go into town. I’d need to look into getting my own vehicle so I didn’t have to rely on my parents, and then I’d find a job. My degree was in business, and I had a minor in the French language, though what good what that do me in the real world? I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life, though I knew I didn’t want to get stuck working at a grocery or in retail.

  We weren’t poor by any means. Dad was pulling disability for a bad back, the same reason he lost his old job in construction back in Kentucky. He’d said something about doing some freelance contracting, and Mom was talking about going back to work, too. But I was twenty-four and mooching off my parents; I seriously needed to find a job, and fast, so I could at least feel like I was contributing.

  I had only walked for maybe a dozen minutes when I came upon a small gap like an alcove that led into the trees to my right. I peered in, curious, and jumped as I recognized the tell-tale sight of gravestones.

  I patted my pocket for my phone but rolled my eyes at my stupidity. My phone was conveniently back at the house lying on my bedside table—smart, I know. Take a walk in unfamiliar woods without a way to contact someone in case of emergency. I had a college degree, but that didn’t make me logical.

  So, not only did we have a huge house on a huge farm, but we had our very own cemetery. After all the ‘non-excitement’ of last night, I was hesitant to venture in on my own. I stood, wavering between a desire to explore and a desire to not piss myself with fear. Finally I made a decision and set off in search of a sister.

  I found Rachel—the nerdiest yet bravest of us all—idly swinging in an old hammock in the front yard with a can of soda propped on her chest. She had her bushy red hair pulled back in a ponytail so that her pretty face was on display. I constantly nagged her to do it—she was too damn pretty to hide behind all that hair. Her long eyelashes fluttered open at the shuffling of my feet in the tall grass, and she turned her green eyes to me.

  “Hey.” She lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

  “Hey,” I answered, climbing awkwardly onto the swing beside her. As I rolled into the depression made by her body, I said, “Busy?”

  She gestured to the bright blue sky and perfect, fluffy clouds. It was one of those lazy summer days that made a girl want to close her eyes and drift. “Does it look that way?”

  I turned to lay face-to-face with her, my cheek pressed to the scratchy white ropes and our legs intertwined. “I figured you were buying stock and taking names.”

  “From the comfort of my home swing.” She winked.

  “Did you get unpacked?”

  “Yeah. I tried to help Mom in the kitchen and she just kinda grunted at me. So ended up here. I guess if she wants me to help, she can come find me.”

  I laughed. “I found a cemetery. Wanna check it out?”

  Her eyes lit up. “You know it.”

  I led her back the way I had come, down the dirt path worn into the copse of trees behind the house. It was darker and quieter inside this time around; cooler even. We walked in companionable silence, my sister’s hands shoved in the pockets of her baggy corduroy khakis and my arm looped through the V made by hers.

  “Why do you think Granny never invited us down to see her? To visit this house?” Rachel asked me quietly, her eyes on the path at our feet.

  “Jesus, what is it with you and Izzy? She was just bugging me about this earlier.”

  Rachel raised an eyebrow. “Just answer the question.”

  I shrugged, my shoulders brushing hers. “I don’t know. Maybe she liked to travel. She liked coming to us.”

  “It’s just…odd.” Rachel glanced over at me, her teeth digging into her bottom lip. “That house is odd.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” I answered with a sharp laugh. “I’m sleeping beneath the ghosts of slaves.”

  Rachel jerked away from me and came to a stop, her jaw hanging open. “What? Did you see something?”

  “Calm down,” I chastised as I grabbed her arm and pulled her back to me, leading her on down the path. “I’m speaking metaphorically. Because of the weird noises Iz heard, and then what happened last night.”

  Rachel sighed. “I just hate to think that Granny died here, alone in this creepy house in the middle of nowhere.”

  I leaned against her. “It’s just a house, Rach.”

  “I miss her.”

  I pulled her to a stop as we neared the almost-hidden path to the cemetery. I didn’t really know what to say, so I settled for, “Me too.”

  The forest had long since started reclaiming the trail to the cemetery. I slid my feet back into my flip-flops and shoved through some tall weeds as Rachel trailed along behind me. We passed through the open iron gate that surrounded the plot.

  “Wonder when the last time someone bothered to come out here was,” I said softly. There was a somber stillness to the air; it made me not want to speak over a whisper for fear of waking the dead.

  There sure were a lot of memories of the dead situated around that damn house and property.

  The plot wasn’t large by any means. Stones, worn and tilting, scattered the tall grass like ships in a rough sea. I leaned to rub dirt and age from a barely readable, gray headstone. I squinted, trying to make out the long dissolved letters. It said Mary Magdalene Marshall.

  Across the graveyard, Rachel was doing the same thing. Her voice carried too loud on the oppressive silence. “Wow, Sue, this is Mom??
?s fam.”

  I nodded, my eyes still on Mary Magdalene’s sedate grave marker. Last name notwithstanding, I had no idea who she was. “Yeah.”

  “Hey, come here. Didn’t Granny have a brother named Jeremy who died in the sixties?”

  I picked my way through the overgrowth. “I think so.”

  Rachel was bent over a larger grave, pulling weeds from around the peach-colored monument. It was topped by a dour, wind-softened angel. The marker looked older than a mere fifty years, but it was right there, etched into the stone—

  Jeremy Matthew Marshall

  b.1942 d.1963

  Beloved Brother, Dearly Missed

  Rachel touched the angel’s curled hair once more before glancing at me. She had rubbed dirt across her pale cheek. “Do you think Granny found him? In heaven?”

  Shrugging, I yanked another clump of weeds from behind the marker and tossed them over the wrought-iron fence. “I don’t know, Rach. I don’t really believe in heaven.”

  “Why?” There wasn’t disbelief or dismay in my little sister’s voice, just curiosity. We weren’t raised religious. Hell, we weren’t raised to talk about religion at all, even though I know Dad had been brought up Catholic.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but we were interrupted by the sound of scuffling footsteps. We both turned towards the main path, waiting to see which family member would walk by the tiny opening in the trees, only to be met by a stranger.

  I studied him curiously, wondering if he was a neighbor. He was tall and muscular, wearing blue jean overalls and a white T-shirt with stains on the sleeves. His dark hair was short beneath his Irish cap, and his skin was tanned and dirty.

  “Excuse me,” I called, my hands landing on my hips. I might have come off a little snotty. “Do you realize you’re on private property?”

  His eyes were shadowed by his prominent brow, but his face turned to us for a second before he looked away, moving towards the house. He didn’t speak.

  I exchanged a glance with Rachel, a little unnerved that a strange man was wandering around our property. He disappeared beyond our range of vision from the cemetery, and I pulled Rachel’s phone from her pocket to text Dad.

  man in the woods. coming towards house. rach and I alone in cemetery.

  My dad was always prompt with his texts. k will check.

  “Dad’s going to find him,” I whispered to Rachel, tucking her phone back into her pocket.

  She gestured with her head for me to follow. We tiptoed through the weedy graveyard, past the gate—dangling like a broken arm—and back down the side path. It had gotten incredibly quiet in the forest. Without the deafening music of bugs and birds, it was deathly as a tomb.

  Rachel put out an arm to stop me and leaned forward to peer around the edge of the trees in the direction the man had walked. When she turned back to me, her eyes were wide and alarmed. “I see Dad.”

  We stepped out onto the path. Dad’s form hurried towards us, his loafers making a steady pit-pat on the packed ground. It was a straight shot from us to him—beyond him, the wooded path stretched neatly like a dark and forbidding tunnel all the way to the house.

  The man was gone.

  Chapter 5

  “He must have taken off into the trees,” Dad repeated for the fourth time, his large hand gently navigating me towards the house by the shoulder.

  I tried to shrug him off but his grip was iron tight. And sweaty. The bare skin at the top of his head was pale pink from the sun and there was dirt beneath his fingernails; he’d probably been working on a plot for the vegetable garden.

  “Where would he go, Dad? That underbrush is outrageous. You’d need a freaking machete to get through it. We’d have heard it, at least.” Rachel wasn’t buying it either, tripping over her flip-flops as she stumbled after us across the front yard. She was about as graceful as a frat boy in high heels.

  Dad just sighed and mounted the steps to the crooked front porch. I noted the enigmatic bouquet of white daisies still sat where it had been yesterday afternoon, though a little more wilted from the humid day. I was dying to know why on earth a bundled bouquet rested on our porch, and why my parents hadn’t moved it.

  The door was wide open, cool AC pushing outside from the dim interior. Dad groaned. “Who left the door open?” he yelled into the house.

  Rachel and I stepped inside behind him. There were tools spread about the floor just inside, and I caught sight of shiny new hinges on the old-fashioned door.

  Dad nudged a hammer closer to the wall and said, “Girls, leave it. It was probably a neighbor passing through. Go find something to do.”

  I wasn’t satisfied with his answer. Rachel and I exchanged irritated looks as he headed for the kitchen.

  “Dad, wait,” I called, and hurried forward as he turned back around irritably. “Those daisies on the porch. Did you put them there?”

  He lifted the hem of his t-shirt and swiped sweat from his face. “No. Your mother said there was an identical bouquet there when she came down two weeks ago.”

  “Oh.” I watched him push through the swinging door, and a moment later heard the kitchen faucet running. The bouquet wasn’t from any of us. I had a stark realization that I knew nothing about my grandmother—who was leaving her post-death offerings?

  Rachel grabbed my arm, pulling me from my thoughts. “That was weird, right?” she asked in a hushed voice. “That guy—he was there, right? He was definitely there.”

  “He was there,” I agreed.

  “Right. He was there. And then he wasn’t.”

  I motioned for her to follow me, and we cut through the dim, silent dining room and out the side door onto the screened porch.

  Mom had come through and opened the windows earlier in the day, and the floor fan was whirring in one corner. Three of the four walls were nothing but windows from around knee-high up to the ceiling, and since the whole porch sat a little above ground-level—to account for the gardener’s shed beneath—it had a spectacular view of the land around the house.

  Rachel plunked into a chair at the black iron table and leaned forward on her elbows, staring out into the trees. “How far would you say the closest neighbor is?”

  I took the chair next to her so I could look outside, and let out a deep breath. “I don’t know. A mile?”

  “Not within walking distance, though?”

  “Sure,” I said with a laugh. “A mile isn’t that far, Rach.”

  “Oh.” She turned her gaze to me, her brow in a squiggly line. “Maybe it was a neighbor.”

  I shrugged. “But, why wouldn’t he say something?”

  “Maybe he’s shy.”

  “And we don’t even know what he looks like. I only got a glimpse of him,” I said, talking right over her as I leaned back against the thick cushion. The warm air brushed across my bare arms, and I realized I was sleepy. “Maybe he just likes taking walks, and Granny didn’t care if he came on her land.”

  “Kind of a strong jaw, I think. Really dark-skinned. Mocha-colored, even. And those clothes…”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “Weird.”

  The door flew open, and Cam appeared. “Momma says we’re going into town ‘cuz we need stuff.”

  “Where on earth have you been all morning?” I asked her, twisting in my chair to raise an eyebrow.

  “The attic.” Cam popped her gum, a devilish grin on her face.

  “Why?” Rachel asked.

  My baby sister shrugged her skinny shoulders, one hand still resting on the doorknob. “I like it.”

  Ah, the simple logic of children. What a freak, though.

  “Mom said she already has some kind of imaginary friend up there,” Rachel informed me with a slight roll of her eyes. “They played dress-up this morning when she was supposed to be unpacking.” She wiggled her fingers at Cam playfully.

  Cam made a face at her, and then snapped her gum as she used the door to swing back and forth. “Are you coming or what?”

  “Yeah, I a
m,” Rachel said, getting to her feet. The chair scraped across the wood with a jarring screech. “I need some bath stuff. We’ll talk later.” This last was directed at me.

  Cam’s dark eyes shifted to inquire of me, “Coming?”

  I smiled and reached out to ruffle her patch of short hair. “Nah. I don’t need anything, because unlike your other big sisters, I think ahead.”

  *

  I was in the hammock. Again.

  My eyes had been alternating somewhere between open and closed for I didn’t know how long. It was nice, this feeling of no responsibility. That framed diploma that said ‘University of Louisville’ —still shoved in the bottom of an unopened box in my room—officially pardoned me from any further work until I dug my claws into a job.

  For the first time in a long time, I could sway in the breeze and listen to the birdsong without anything to frazzle my mind.

  Well, almost. I was actually on the verge of convincing myself to sleep in the hammock as opposed to that tiny bedroom with so much…unrest above it. I probably would have if I thought my mother wouldn’t flip out, but knowing her, she’d worry about robbers and mountain lions. Or gators—whatever it was that stalked the state of Florida.

  I was sliding into blessed unconsciousness when the crack of a twig forced my eyes open quicker than a gunshot. I turned my head toward the house, eyes searching the yard. My family hadn’t been gone very long at all, so there was no way they were home.

  I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The tall grass of the lawn swayed in a hot, oven-like breeze; I was surprised Dad hadn’t forced Matt or Sam—or both—to cut it yet. Through hooded, sleepy eyes, I did a cursory scan of my surroundings, lifting my head to check behind me.

  Nothing.

  I settled back into the cradle of the hammock and stared up at a pale blue, cloudless sky. The hammock swung gently on the wind and it was lolling, though I wished it were cooler.

  I looked to my right, gazing up at the house. The red brick seemed dingy against such a happy sky. At the top of the house, just under the hanging eaves, was a small round window. I watched the reflection of a distant white cloud moving slowly across the glass, my eyes getting heavy again.

  A black shape moved across the window, inside the house.

  Suddenly awake, I squinted at the window, heart pounding, but didn’t see any further movement. What had that been? Had I fallen asleep and dreamed it?