Still, she unbuckled her seatbelt, slid from her seat and out her door, and stood like a newborn foal on wet asphalt next to the sweet smell of country grass, glad to be out of the SUV.
“Now what?” she asked when Karrie, Dave and Amy got out and looked at their new home.
“It’s not very big,” Dave said.
“It’s big enough for now,” Karrie said. “When your father’s insurance comes, we’ll find a place of our own. Until then, I don’t want to hear any negativity from any of you.”
She crossed the driveway and headed to the house as Grandma Evelyn, a shorthaired, red-haired woman wearing a white blouse, blue jeans and pink tennis shoes, stepped out of the front door and called to them. Karrie climbed the concrete porch steps and stooped to embrace her mother. The plump and rosy-cheeked Evelyn took Karrie by a hand and led her inside. Dave and Amy followed.
Gathering her land legs, Vree followed, too, stopping inside the center of a rectangular living room filled with plush brown and leather furniture on a sea of cream carpeting. She quickly checked the bottom of her purple and white Nike tennis shoes for dirt, saw that they were clean, and breathed a sigh of relief.
She moved out of the way of two men carrying cardboard boxes into the room from a side door. They wore green and white uniforms and moved gracefully over newspaper someone had strewn across the carpet.
Dave and Amy followed the newspaper into the dining room and beyond while Vree stood in the living room, uncertain of her role until Karrie entered from the dining room, shooed her upstairs, and told her to find her bedroom and unpack any of her boxes that may be there.
Vree climbed the squeaky but polished wooden stairs slowly and discovered that the first room at the top contained Dave’s secondhand bed and nightstand that Karrie had purchased at Goodwill. The room was smaller than his old one. A lot smaller. And it was wallpapered in pink and white roses on a blue background. A smile threatened to curl the corners of her mouth.
Oh, well … SOL, dear brother … what are you gonna do?
Down the hall, she passed another small bedroom. This one had cream-colored wallpaper with blue floral and butterfly patterns on it. A dismantled queen-size bed lay on the cream-colored carpet inside. A tall, thin man wearing a black T-shirt and brown coveralls stood at the walk-in closet with a screwdriver. He had bushy but well-groomed gray hair, frowning brown eyebrows, serious looking brown eyes, and an upturned nose above a pinched mouth on a clean-shaven face.
Jack Lybrook stopped working a screw in the doorframe and asked, “Will you help me lift this door?”
Vree sidestepped past cardboard boxes and lifted the wooden door until her grandfather told her to stop.
“Thank you, um … are you Amy or Verawenda?” Jack said, squinting at her a moment while he turned another screw to adjust the track of the closet door. “You two look so much alike.”
“I’m Verawenda, the blonde one.”
“Yes, of course.” Jack finished turning the screw. He rolled the door back and forth on its track. “How was your trip?” he asked. “Uneventful, I hope. Your mom says it’s time to trade in that van of hers.”
“It was hot the whole way without the AC. Mom tried to call you at our last stop for drinks, but no one answered.”
Jack grunted. “Phone reception is lousy here,” he said. “All of Myers Ridge, for that matter, depending how the wind blows,” he added, “ever since that sinkhole appeared at my farm and forced your grandmother and me to move.”
A noise at the open window next to them kept Vree from asking what a sinkhole had anything to do with phones. She looked and saw that someone had erected an aluminum extension ladder. A boy in a white T-shirt appeared and caulked the top of the window. He was almost featureless behind the gossamer film of dust on the glass, but Vree could tell he was good looking.
Jack went to the window screen and said to the boy, “I’ll pay you an extra twenty if you wash all the dirt off these windows when you’re done caulking. I have glass cleaner and towels in a box on the workbench in the garage.”
The boy rubbed dirt from the glass with his fingers and peered in. He had an unclouded, intelligent looking face, although caulk marked his high forehead and the left side of his slender nose. He glanced at Vree from beneath a head of thick, burnt sienna hair, and looked to be her age or a little older.
“Yes sir,” he said. His full lips thinned as he grinned at Jack.
Jack broke Vree’s attention from the boy as he excused himself and headed for the stairs. When he stopped and turned back, she saw a thoughtful look cross his dark brown eyes.
“Your mother tells me that you like to paint pictures,” he said.
She felt her cheeks flush. “I dabble,” she said. “I’m not that good.”
“She says you’re very good.”
Vree raised an eyebrow. “My mom really said that?”
“Says you’re very talented.”
Vree heard the boy descend the ladder. She glanced at the empty window.
“His name is Lenny Stevens,” Jack said, nodding at the window. “I bought this house from his father, the high school art teacher. They live up the road.”
Vree turned back to her grandfather and asked, “His dad is an artist?”
“When he’s not teaching it. Both he and Lenny are very good at drawing animals.”
Vree returned her attention to the window and heard the aluminum ladder quiet. Then she heard her grandfather clear his throat.
“Anyway,” Jack said, “I set up your easel next to the north window of your bedroom. I’ve heard north light is ideal.”
Vree looked around and saw no easel.
“You and your sister have the attic,” Jack said when Vree asked where her bedroom was at. “Your grandmother fixed it up pretty. I think you girls will really like it.”
“Is it as pretty as Dave’s room?”
Jack smiled and winked. “Prettier,” he said. He turned and headed to the stairs once more.
Vree went to the window and watched Lenny on the ground below. He hiked up the waist of his khaki pants and looked up. Their gazes met for a second before he moved the ladder to the next window. Vree went to that window and waited at the screen.
When his face did not appear, she looked down and saw that he was gone.
“Good grief,” she mumbled, “get ahold of yourself. He’s just a boy.” She went to the hall and found the doorway of the attic stairs. Someone had removed the door and taken it away, along with the hinges and strike plate from the doorjamb.
So much for privacy, she thought.
As she climbed the squeaky wooden steps and entered the middle of a vast A-frame loft, she smelled fresh paint. Someone—probably her grandmother—had painted the A-frame ceiling pink and the floor lavender. The stairs and a pink throw rug at the top separated the loft and divided the room. Her artist’s easel, which survived the fire because it had been in her garage studio, sat in front of the tall window on the right. Her Goodwill bed sat to the right of the window and her Goodwill dresser to the left. Either the movers or her grandparents had set her box of paints and brushes on her Goodwill desk and the black plastic and metal chair next to the dresser. Lavender curtains—not from Goodwill, she hoped—hung at both sides of the window.
Vree looked out the window and down at the road. Something moved in the dark green shadows of bushes and young trees on the other side. She tried to see what sort of animal foraged there when someone knocked at the attic door.
Before she turned from the window, a pair of beady red eyes peered from the shadows. With a gasp, she took a step back. When she looked again, she saw no red eyes peering at her.
The person below knocked again at the door.
Vree left the window and looked down the stairs. Lenny Stevens knocked at her door one more time.
“I came to introduce myself,” he said and introduced himself from the bottom landing.
He looked puzzled when Vree told him her name.
“Your grandmother called you Verawenda,” he said.
“Vree’s a nickname from my initials: VRE.”
“I see. So, do I call you Vree or Verawenda?”
“Vree will do.”
Lenny smiled and asked to enter.
“Oh, good grief,” Vree said, though not too unkindly. “Just come on up already.”
Chapter Three
VREE LOOKED AROUND for her box of pre-stretched canvases when Lenny entered. She saw it next to Amy’s Gibson acoustic guitar (her electric one burned in the fire) on the other side of the room, so she skirted past him and retrieved the box.
Lenny still stood at the top of the stairs, looking around at the room.
“I used to play up here when I was a little kid,” he said as he stepped aside and let her pass. He followed her to the desk where she unpacked the canvases. “This was my fort, my pirate ship, my galactic spaceship, and even the Temple of Doom mines from Indiana Jones. I had maps and all kinds of drawings taped to the ceiling.”
Vree sorted her canvases by size while she listened to him talk about his early childhood spent playing in the attic, as though it had happened a long time ago. His friendliness toward her along with his willingness to share his past relaxed her. And he made her laugh when he told her that he had buried treasure in the floor.
“Seriously,” he said. He went to Amy’s side of the room and got on his hands and knees, inspecting the floor. “The new paint has sealed the loose floorboards, but I sometimes stashed my allowance beneath the floor, along with bits of silver and gold Gumpa gave me … and my GI Joes and Hot Wheels cars.”
“You hid money, silver and gold up here?”
“Just the stuff that fell from my pockets … and the toys I didn’t want to lose.” He peered up at her. “You have a knife or scissors?”
Vree fetched an X-Acto knife from her box of art supplies. Lenny carefully took it from her, extracted the blade, and cut at the seams of paint around a board. Vree watched and wondered what lay beneath.
“So, why did you and your parents move?” she asked. “This seems like a really nice place for a country home.”
“We never lived here. This was my grandparents’ home until Gumpa died. Gam Gam moved in with us until she died last year.”
“I’m so sorry,” Vree said.
“Don’t be. They’re still here in spirit.”
Vree raised her eyebrows. “You see their spirits?”
Lenny laughed. “Of course not … don’t be silly. I meant figuratively. They still live in my memories.”
He stopped cutting and said, “But I have seen my great-grandfather’s ghost. It happens every year around this time at the property next door. He used to live there a long time ago. Do you wanna see?”
“The property or his ghost?”
“Both.”
Vree shook her head. “No thanks.”
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Lenny said quickly. He looked away from Vree, glanced at the floor, and coughed.
Vree noticed his body had tensed. She said nothing. But she wondered why his mood had changed.
When Lenny’s shoulders dropped and he returned to cutting at the paint, she relaxed.
Lenny used the blade to lift the board until he could grasp it with his fingers. He lifted the wood and said, “Voila!”
Vree tried to peer inside but Lenny blocked her view as he reached inside. The space was deep enough to swallow his entire arm. He grunted and withdrew a book larger than her largest coffee table art books. Its dusty cover was black, hard leather, and its pages were askew.
“I forgot I had this,” he said.
“What is it?” Vree knelt next to the book and looked for a title. There was none, even after Lenny blew away some of the dust, which made her sneeze.
“I found it one day while playing up here. It’s filled with numbers and strange figures, like a secret code.” He pulled a loose page from the book. The page was thick and yellow; someone had written numbers and figures on it with a quill pen. He ran a finger over the page. “The whole book is like this. None of it makes sense, but I thought it was pretty neat.” He set the book and page aside and rummaged inside the floor for more treasure.
Vree picked up the page. The numbers and figures shifted and coalesced into letters that became words.
The transformation startled her and made her dizzy. She closed her eyes and told herself that she wasn’t crazy, that she was okay, that
The lightning did something to me.
“It changed you,” her father had said.
She took a deep breath, told herself again that she was okay, and looked at the page.
“Free the dancers of truth so that you may know their poetry,” she read aloud.
Lenny ignored her while he continued rummaging.
She opened the book.
“It’s poetry and something else,” she whispered after some of the numbers and figures on every page she turned to became words. She sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor, placed the book on her lap, and read while Lenny extracted money, toys, and comic books from his old hiding place.
Ten pages into the book, one poem stood out from the others.
Born from lightning on edges of flame
She finds herself in the heat of shame
The last of three born in the city
She travels far the path of pity.
Her dead father lives in the distance
Gone from her life of false existence
Only in truth is she noumenon
Who gives her life to save Roualen.
“Do you know what the word noumenon means?” she asked Lenny.
He looked up from skimming the pages of a Batman comic book.
“Noumenon?” He shrugged. “I remember it as a spelling word at school, but … oh, wait. It’s something not tarnished by perception, like how things really are no matter how we think they are. The word was on my English final from studying philosophy last year. We had some tough subjects to learn, but I managed to pass with a B.”
Vree looked again at the poem. “Only in truth is she not tarnished by perception,” she said.
Lenny peered at the page of numbers and strange figures.
“Are you reading that?” he asked.
Vree ignored him and asked if he knew who or what Roualen was. But no sooner had she said the word, a memory struck her. The words came to her in a shout, as they had downtown.
Can it see row ellens?
She shuddered at its ferocity, and from the memory of seeing two beady red eyes staring at her from the shadow at Sam’s Pub—and from the shadows across the road outside her window.
She nearly screamed when a toy red Ferrari sports car struck against one of her tennis shoes.
She glared at the intrusion, but Lenny didn’t seem to notice.
“I used to have a track that went all over this room,” he said to her. “Roll that Hot Wheels back to me and I’ll show you the Trans Am that won almost all my races.”
Vree picked up the Ferrari. Dizziness and the buzzing sound of bees overwhelmed her.
She closed her eyes and waited for the moment to pass. When it did, she opened her eyes and saw—
The sun had set. Twilight made it difficult to see detail along the side of the road where her car sat. The dark red LeSabre had a flat tire and she knew she would be late to her son’s birthday party. She had managed to jack up the front of the car and remove two of the five lug nuts holding the tire to its wheel. But the other three wouldn’t budge no matter how hard she wrenched on them. She shook the can of WD-40, sprayed them again, then stood from her crouch at the edge of the road and waited for the smelly grease to do its magic.
The flat was on the driver’s side and that meant she had to work partly in the road. She looked up and down the empty highway and listened for the sound of any approaching traffic. The fields of countryside brush were quiet around her. She pushed her bangs from her eyes and knelt again next to the tire,
resting her knees against a blue plastic tarp she had found in the trunk. She brushed away some dirt from her black pantyhose and the hem of her navy blue skirt, and pulled again at a large piece of amber glass from the tire. This time it came out. She replayed in her mind the sound of the beer bottle exploding under the weight of the tire. She hadn’t seen it until the last second before driving over it.
She looked up and down the road for any oncoming traffic. The fading sunlight behind the thicket of trees on the car’s passenger side made her nervous. She headed back to the trunk to find the road flares. She had set the spare tire on the ground next to an oversized box wrapped in blue and white HAPPY BIRTHDAY paper near a ditch of still water. Green scum had collected on the water’s stagnant surface and she thought she could make out the mostly submerged bulging eyes of a frog. It made her think of snakes, so she high-stepped her black high heels away from the car. She could hunt and field dress any wildlife, but she couldn’t stand being around snakes.
She thought about trying to call her husband again, but she knew the phone wouldn’t work. So she returned to the gaping trunk and looked inside for the box of flares.
She heard the sound of an approaching vehicle behind her.
She stood up and looked.
Nothing.
She bent over the box and heard the sound again.
She stood up again and looked.
Again, she neither saw nor heard any approaching vehicle.
She brushed at her bangs and saw the false nail had broken from her right thumb—a chubby right thumb. All her fingers were chubby. So were her hands and arms … and the rest of her as far as she could see.
She had never been thin. But she had always been pretty. And tonight, she wanted Howard to see she could look sexy. After their son’s party and the kids were in bed, she had a special present for him, which was still in the black plastic bag next to the German chocolate birthday cake on the backseat.
She brushed away a fly that had landed on the breast of her yellow blouse. Then she scanned the ground, hoping to see her missing blue nail.
Behind her, a dog howled nearby.
Another dog joined in. Then another until there was a chorus of howls coming at her.
She looked at the road and saw a Rottweiler sitting on the median. It vanished as an engine roared behind her.
She spun around to see a white van come fast over the crest of hill and at her. And she wondered why it was partly off the road and not pulling into the next lane to go around her when it slammed into her.
Margga's Curse: A Vree Erickson Novel, Book One Page 3
