After Midnight

by Lynn Viehl

  When Sali and I finally caught up to it, I saw that it was flying, not running, and its wings were coal black and edged with tiny silver stars. I reached out and caught some of its feathers, only to see them dissolve into dark gray smoke that puffed out through my fingers as the shadow flew on ahead of us.

  I knew I could catch it; I just had to ride faster.

  Toward the end of the dream, I pulled my feet out of the stirrups and crouched, my boots somehow balanced on two flaps that had grown out of my saddle, ready to spring as soon as Sali closed the gap. She held steady, her hooves pounding in a staccato four-count beat, her sides bellowing in and out beneath me. I heard another rapid thumping sound in my ears and thought it might be my heart, rocketing out of control. Just before Sali’s nose touched the edge of the shadow I jumped—

  —and landed on my bedroom floor, yelping as my hands and knees smacked into the wooden panels. The wild tangle of my hair blinded me for a minute until I freed myself from the twisted mess of my sheets. As I sat up, I squinted at the window, saw the sun hovering over the treetops and groaned.

  “Cat?”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see Trick standing in the doorway. “Morning.”

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “But it’s after eleven.”

  “No problem.” The thumping sound I’d heard in my dream must have been him knocking on the door. I got up, wincing as my knees let me know how sore they were. “I guess I forgot to set my alarm last night. Can you write me a note for school?”

  “You don’t need one. It’s Saturday.” He came around the bed and helped me up. “You sure you’re feeling okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why do you smell like Sali?”

  I was glad my hair was hanging in my face. “I also forgot to take a shower last night.”

  He nodded. “Put that at the top of your to-do list.”

  “Sure.” All I wanted to do was fall back in bed and sleep, but Trick would want to know why I was so tired. “Sorry I overslept.”

  “You deserve a late morning every now and then.” He put me in my robe and tied the belt as if I were still six years old and all thumbs. “Just don’t make a habit of it, or I’ll think you’re trying to avoid my cooking.”

  I managed a weak smile. “I’d never do that.”

  Trick had saved me some slightly mushy, under-done pancakes, which I finished cooking in a skillet during a pretense of warming them up. Once I finished my belated, repaired breakfast, I washed all the dishes and fed the cats waiting on the back porch. Soul Patch and Terrible had a brought another friend with them this time, a small, delicate-looking orange-and-white marmalade kitty with one green eye and one blue.

  “You’re telling the other cats about the free food here, aren’t you?” I asked Soul Patch, who tried to make himself into a furry ankle bracelet.

  I sat down on the edge of the porch to watch the cats eat. At once all three abandoned the food I’d brought out and tried to climb into my lap.

  “Do I look like a couch?” I protested. The little marmalade marched over the much larger, meaner tabby and promptly sat on his head as she nudged my chin. “Okay, Princess.” I lifted her up on my shoulder to make room for the other two, and sighed as she licked my cheek with her sandpapery tongue. “You’re welcome.”

  Princess tugged something out of my hair, and the mangled remains of a moonflower fell on to the ground.

  Your skin … it’s almost the same color as the petals.

  Gently I removed the cats, stood up and went back inside. I was not going to spend my weekend moping about Jesse, the wonderful things he’d said, or the awful way he’d shut me down. I’d solved the mystery of who he was, I’d returned his ring, and now I had to pay for the privilege. After I stole what Gray wanted from my brother’s desk, I’d never have to think about Jesse Raven again.

  If I kept telling myself that, I might even stop reliving every second I’d spent with him last night.

  I took a shower, got dressed and threw myself into my chores. It was my weekend to vacuum and dust, but that hardly took an hour. To keep busy I went ahead and did my brother’s chores, too, and by the time I cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom and mopped the floors I felt a little less Jesse-obsessed.

  I saw that I’d worked through lunch, and went into the kitchen to see what I could put together for dinner. By the time my brothers came in I was putting the finishing touches on a big salad and toasted roast beef and cheddar sandwiches.

  “That smells great,” Trick told me as he washed up at the sink. He glanced down at the spotless counters and floor. “Kitchen looks nice, too, but I thought it was my turn to clean it.”

  “I was bored.” I didn’t look at Gray, who was setting the table. “The bathrooms are also done.”

  “You’ve been busy.” Trick tugged at the end of my ponytail. “Keep this up and I’ll let you sleep in every weekend.”

  I made a scoffing sound. “That’ll be the day.”

  My brothers plowed through dinner with their usual enthusiasm while I picked at my salad and listened to Trick talk about repairs to the barn stalls that had to be made before he bought our new breeding stock.

  “I spotted some dead patches of what looked like Johnson grass while I was riding today out by the west pastures,” Gray said when he’d finished eating. “You should take a look at it tonight.”

  Eating Johnson grass—a toxic weed that grew on cultivated land—gave horses serious bladder infections and weakened their hind legs, making them stagger as if they were drunk. When the weed died it became even more poisonous, and had been known to kill cattle, horses, and other grazing livestock.

  Trick frowned at the window. “We don’t have much daylight left.”

  I was about to agree when I caught Gray looking at me. He was giving me the time to steal for me glare.

  “You should go take a look,” I said to Trick while I kicked my idiot brother’s shin under the table. “I’ll clear and do the dishes.”

  Now Trick eyed me. “What’s gotten into you? You hate house work.”

  “Temporary insanity,” I assured him. “Enjoy the madness while it lasts.” That sounded awfully harsh, even to my ears, so I softened it with a sigh. “I’m just feeling restless.”

  That seemed to reassure him, and he patted my cheek. “Don’t repaint the house while we’re gone.”

  I carried my dishes over to the sink, and Gray met me there with his plate. As he handed it to me, he slipped a key into my hand. Trick kept his key ring on a rack in the kitchen; Gray must have slipped it off while our brother was out working in the barn. “We’ll take care of the horses when we get back, Cat,” he said, loud enough for Trick to hear.

  That meant they’d be out of the house for at least an hour; long enough for me to do the dirty work. “Take your time.”

  Once my brothers left the house I shoved the key in my pocket and finished tidying up while I watched through the window. I didn’t relax until I saw Trick and Gray ride away on Jupiter and Flash.

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” I waited another minute just to be sure they weren’t coming back for some reason, and then left the kitchen and walked down to hall.

  Trick’s bedroom was easily twice the size of mine, but since he also used it as his home office it was much more cramped for space. In addition to his king-size bed, night stands and bureau, he had his computer station, printer stand and four bookcases packed with manuals and boxes of printouts. I knew he worked with codes to design programs, but nearly everything he did was so beyond me that his papers might as well have been written in Sanskrit.

  Beneath the only window was his desk, where he had a phone, a big calendar blotter, a can filled with pens and pencils and an accordion file where he put bills and things. The desk had five drawers; two stacked together on either side and one long, narrow one in the center. All of them had individual locks, and for the first time I wondered why. My brother didn’t keep a lot of money
in the house, and other than the horses, Trick’s motorcycle and Gray’s truck we didn’t own anything that was particularly valuable.

  I pulled out the key and unlocked the center drawer first. Inside were some boxes of pens, extra keys to the truck and the bike, a bunch of rubber bands and a couple of books of stamps. Feeling foolish for holding my breath, I closed and locked it before I sat down in the swivel chair and turned to the right stack of drawers.

  “Please,” I told the desk. “Make this easy on me.”

  The top was half-filled with envelopes stuffed with credit card receipts, utility bills that had been paid and copies of old tax forms dated by year. There were also some newspaper articles Trick had cut out, folded and bundled together with a rubber band. The one on the outside showed a grainy photo of a bunch of cop cars parked along a wooded area and had a headline that read, “Hikers Attacked on Trail.”

  I took off the rubber band and sorted through the articles, all of which were about other wild-animal attacks. Forest rangers, campers, farmers, joggers and even some homeless people had been found injured or killed during the night in remote, wooded areas. The articles mentioned the authorities blaming bears, cougars, boars and even wild dogs for the attacks, which seemed logical given the circumstances, but I couldn’t understand why Trick was saving the grisly reports. Then I started looking at the locations, and realized that the attacks had happened in or around the country towns where we had lived.

  Had he been worried about something like this happening to me or Gray? Was this the real reason he’d been so adamant about me not riding at night?

  I put aside the articles to finish looking through the drawer. I found an envelope all the way at the back marked “Deed” in Trick’s scrawled writing, and I peeked inside. The address on the deed was for the farm here in Lost Lake, but it was old and yellowed, and dated 1949. Then I saw the name on it: not Trick’s name, Patrick Robert Youngblood, but Thomas Patrick Youngblood.

  Our father’s name was Thomas Patrick. Dad had owned this farm?

  In the envelope with the deed was a letter dated less than a year ago from a law firm in Orlando. I didn’t understand all the legal jargon, but it mentioned a title search and transfer of ownership from our father to my brother.

  Things that hadn’t made sense before now began clicking in my head. Trick had gone to see a lawyer in Chicago right before we’d moved to Lost Lake, and he’d had to get a bunch of documents notarized. I remembered because I’d gone to the bank with him that day, and he’d made me sit in the lobby and wait while he got them signed. Now I knew why.

  So we hadn’t bought the farm; my brother had inherited it. But why hadn’t he told us this place had belonged to our father? What reason would he have to keep something like that a secret?

  I loved knowing that our dad had once owned this land. It instantly made the farm feel more like my home instead of just another place in a strange town surrounded by people who didn’t know us and didn’t care about us. Lost Lake must have meant something to our father or he wouldn’t have lived here.

  Had he lived here?

  Slowly I put the documents back in the envelope and replaced it in the back of the drawer. Trick might be an ex-biker computer geek with the heart of a cowboy, but he wasn’t a compulsive liar. If he’d kept this from me and Gray, he had to have an excellent reason. At least now I understood why he kept his desk locked up all the time.

  I opened the lower drawer to find it packed with file folders, and began thumbing through them. Each label had an alpha-numeric code and contained contracts, schematics and other computer program specs that must have been from his job. Toward the back I found three files with our names on them, and copies of our birth certificates, shot records and other medical reports. I found Gray’s most recent physical and took it out, placing it on the desk before I closed the drawer and locked it.

  I did what I promised, I thought, looking at the last two drawers I hadn’t opened. The sensible thing to do would be to just walk out of here now and forget about this.

  When had I become so sensible anyway?

  The left-hand-side top drawer held a jumble of tabs and labels along with some plastic boxes filled with tacks, paperclips, ink cartridges, and mechanical pencil leads. Nothing scary about them.

  In the drawer beneath it were reams of blank paper, a couple of notebooks and a battered metal box. I looked at the box for a long time before I took it out and lifted the lid, making the rusty hinges creak. Inside the box were a pile of school photos of me and Gray, and some older black-and-white pictures of my mother and father. Beneath those I found an old-fashioned iron key and a large bundle of envelopes tied together with a faded purple ribbon.

  The shamrock-shaped end of the key had been stamped with the letters AVH and stirred a vague memory of an old black trunk that had been lost during our many moves. The topmost envelope in the bundle of letters had the name Thomas written on it in beautiful hand-written script. I slid it out from under the ribbon and lifted the open flap, which was embossed with a scrolled letter F. As soon as I took out the delicate pages I smelled roses.

  My mother’s name had been Rose, and she had always worn rose-scented perfume. Cliché, maybe, but kind of sweet. The embossed F on the flap must have stood for her maiden name, Fanelsen. She’d written these letters.

  A gossamer sorrow wrapped around me. I always felt a little fragile and sad whenever I thought of Mom.

  As the youngest I had the fewest memories of her, but when I thought hard I could recall a blurry image of her face. She’d had a gentler version of Trick’s dark eyes, and wore the golden hair she’d passed along to Gray in curls she’d piled on top of her head. I was pretty sure I had her mouth, which I mostly remembered being pink and smiling. My mother had always been so happy, right up until the day she and my father had died.

  To have something that belonged to her in my own hands made my heart ache.

  The first letter was dated thirty-one years ago, I saw as I began to read the first page.

  Dear Thomas,

  I dreamed of you last night, and it felt so real that when I woke up I expected to see you there, sitting beside me and telling me another story about Rio or Paris or London. You’ve traveled to so many wonderful places, and hearing you describe what you’ve seen there makes me feel as if I’ve visited them, too.

  Despite the formal language my mother sounded so young and sweet, like a girl from a Victorian novel. She’d used a fountain pen, judging by the appearance of the ink, and her fine handwriting reminded me of the calligraphy on fancy invitations.

  As wonderful as it was to meet you, I’m frustrated because there is still so much that I don’t know about you. You never said why you came to Virginia or how long you plan to stay. Do you have family here? If my parents know them, then I think we can arrange to be properly introduced.

  “Proper introductions required,” I murmured. “You really were old-fashioned, Mom.”

  I know, that sounds horribly quaint, but my parents are from Holland, and I guess over there they were very strict about that kind of thing. I keep telling my mother that because I was born here so I should go to school and be like other American kids, but she says the old ways are best for us.

  My grandparents had been Dutch? Trick had never told me that. Once, when I’d asked about them for a school project, he’d told me that our grandparents on both sides of the family had passed away before Gray and I were born. Our parents had been their only children, so we had no other living relatives. The next day he’d called the school and my teacher had given me a substitute project that didn’t involve family.

  It seemed odd that the sum total of what I knew about the Youngbloods and the Fanelsens would have barely filled half a sticky note.

  I wanted to read the rest of what Mom had written, but a glance at the desk clock told me that my brothers would be returning from their ride soon. I put the old trunk key back in the box, and almost added the letters, but I hesitated. Tri
ck had no reason to check the box; because he kept it locked up he probably never looked in it anymore. Besides that, my mother’s letters belonged to all of us, not just to him. It wasn’t fair that he’d hidden them for so long.

  I left Trick’s room and went to mine, where I put Gray’s report in a school folder and tucked the bundle of letters under my mattress. Just in time, too; I heard the kitchen door as it opened and my brother’s voices drifted down the hall.

  I sat on my bed and pretended to read while I waited for Gray, who knocked and came in a few minutes later. As soon as he closed the door behind him, I handed him the folder and the key to the desk.

  “Thanks.” He frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Everything. “How much did Trick pay for the farm?”

  “He never said.” His shoulders hunched. “Not a lot, I guess. Why?”

  Gray could do a lot of things, but lying well was not one of them. His reaction told me that he probably knew the farm had belonged to our father.

  Which meant both of my brothers had kept it from me.

  “I just wondered if he has enough money left to buy me a decent car.” Now I didn’t feel so bad about taking Mom’s letters. “Maybe when he grounds you for life I’ll ask him if I can have your truck.”

  He scowled. “You’d better not tell him.”

  “In case you forgot, I’m your accomplice, blockhead,” I reminded him. “Telling on you means I also have to confess to my part. I still can’t believe you made me do this for something as stupid as football.”

  “It’s not stupid,” Gray said flatly. “It’s important to me.”

  “Whatever you say.” I shrugged. “I hope it’s worth spending a year or two in your room.”

  “Someday you’ll understand.” Without explaining that, he left.

  Eight

  Once I heard my brothers go into their rooms I tiptoed over to the door, listened, and gingerly turned the button lock. Then I took out the bundle of my mother’s letters and began reading them.