In the Shadows of Fate

by Rick Jurewicz

  “I‘ll be right there Mom!” Miranda yelled, and hurried to the door. As she opened the door wide, a man in a blue uniform stood in the doorway in front of her, and at that moment both of their eyes widened in surprise. Miranda closed the door halfway as to not feel so exposed in front of the stranger, who she at first had not even noticed was holding a box in both of his hands.

  “Uh…good morning,” said the man, with an awkward pause. “Sorry if I caught you at a bad time. I just needed a signature. I couldn’t just leave it on the front step without a signature.”

  “It’s fine. I can sign for it.”

  The man handed her the box and she placed it on the chair beside the front door, and turned back to him to sign her name on the electronic tablet that he had strapped to his leg.

  “Thank you! You have a wonderful day!” he said with a huge smile, and she knew full well that she had probably just made his whole day.

  She closed the door and started back to the bathroom before she was struck with a sense of curiosity as to what someone may have had delivered. Was Mom playing the Home Shopping Network game again, or perhaps ordering new quilting materials from eBay? New video games for Steven? She peeked at the label and was immediately shocked as to what the address read:

  Miranda Stratton

  4319 Sherwood Trail

  Native Springs, Michigan

  Miranda picked up the box once more and took it to the dining room table. There was a lot of tape on the box, so she found the junk drawer in the kitchen and pulled out a pair of orange handled office scissors. Her only guess was that maybe she had left something important behind that Lydia had overnighted to her, but there was no return address on the package label. Cutting away the packaging tape she pulled the flaps open, and with what she saw that moment she was overtaken by a feeling as if all of her breath had just left her body at once. Her hand came to her mouth as her sharp blue eyes kept their gaze on the object sitting in the box in front of her.

  Inside of the cardboard packaging box was another box, slightly smaller in size than the one it was shipped in. Made of dark wood and intricately carved with small, flower like designs throughout, it was roughly the size of a small attaché case or an oversized cigar box. Miranda sat slowly down into the chair by her side as her mind began to focus and comprehend the fact that the same box that she had been dreaming about for nearly 18 years was sitting before her, delivered right to her very hands.

  CHAPTER 2

  Miranda sat for several minutes in the kitchen just staring at the box. The sound of a car pulling into the driveway snapped her out of the dreamlike daze she had fallen into. She took the box inside its packaging and went downstairs into her room in the basement, broke down the cardboard box, and placed the wooden box beneath her duffel bag from inside of the trunk.

  “Miranda, could you give me a hand?" Lorri’s voice called out from upstairs.

  “Just a second mom, I am getting dressed!” Miranda called back to her.

  “No wonder you’re slipping behind in classes if you are sleeping in this late!” Lorri called back, trying and failing in an attempt at humor.

  Miranda came up in jeans and a t-shirt and took the two grocery bags her mother had in her arms from her second trip through the door from the car. She placed them on the table, and picked up the scissors that she had left out and put them back in the drawer as her mother went out to get the last bag of groceries.

  “You don’t have to try and figure out where everything goes just yet,” said Lorri on her way back inside. “I am still trying to figure out what works best where.”

  “I put the cold stuff away already,” Miranda responded, trying not to show her anxiousness. “I am going to go and lie down for a little while. I have a headache…I don’t know if it’s from the drive yesterday, or just not getting enough sleep.”

  Lorri sighed and pursed her lips. “I was hoping we would get a chance to sit down and catch up a bit. I’m worried about you, Miranda. I know how hard this is for you. Coming home like this. Ever since you were very young you seemed like you were like a little bird in a cage, waiting for that door to open so you could fly out and never look back. When you did, I was sad. But I have always been so proud of you. I would just like the chance to get to know you again.”

  “I know, mom,” she said, relieving herself of some of the tension she was feeling. “I just need some time to catch up with myself here. We can talk later this afternoon.”

  “Alright. You take your time. Whatever you need. I’m always here for you.”

  Lorri kissed her daughter on the forehead, and Miranda went back down the stairs and into her room. She drew the curtain closed, and pulled the box back out from under her suitcase.

  Holding the box in her hands seemed surreal to her. It almost felt as if the immaterial had just become material, which didn’t seem rational to Miranda. She prided herself in her sense of rational thought, especially when it came to trying to understand the unknown, mysterious or even supernatural. She kept an open mind to all things, but chose to look at things with keen scrutiny. This, holding this box in her hands at that moment, didn’t feel rational on several levels.

  The box was heavy for its size, but she didn’t know yet if it was just the weight of the box itself, or of the contents inside. She lifted the lid, and the box was lined with a deep hunter green felt, both in the compartment of the box and the underside of the lid. The only thing that sat inside the box was a VHS-C videocassette. Miranda recognized the type of tape it was because her parents had a video camera like that when she was a child. Many home movies had been made with that handy little camera. There was a plain label on the tape with the handwritten words “M. GALE – 3 years”.

  Miranda crossed the basement and stopped near the bottom of the stairs to turn the basement lights on. She listened for a moment to her mother busily moving about in the kitchen, probably still trying to arrange the groceries in a way that pleased her. She was very particular about her sense of order, and Miranda had no doubt that even after a few months, she still wasn’t completely satisfied with the new kitchen.

  The boxes were everywhere in the basement, many stacked against the walls, some in seemingly random piles around the room. But she knew that the things her mother deemed more important, such as personal keepsakes, family photo albums and home movies, would be kept in a place on top of other things for their safety, and most likely close to the stairs to be arranged at a later time. These are what Miranda was looking for, and surprisingly, they were easier to find than Miranda had anticipated. Three boxes sitting on top of milk crates just beneath the stairs.

  The top box was all photo albums and scrapbooks her mother had made over the years of Miranda and Steven growing up. She found herself distracted for just a moment looking at the scrapbook pictures of the day they had brought Steven home from the hospital; his big sister holding him while sitting in a large recliner in the old house. She put it aside, and moved on to the next box.

  This box had several VHS and VHS-C tapes of old home movies, “Miranda’s 5th birthday”, “Stevie’s First Christmas”, and so on. Packed alongside of the tapes was the old nylon video camera case. Miranda took the case from the box, turned the lights back off in the basement, and returned to her room. These cameras were some of the first to have a flip out screen to view and review what you filmed, so even though she didn’t have a television to watch in her room, she could watch the tape right on the camera screen to see what was on it.

  The camera battery was dead, but luckily all of the original components were still with the camera, including the wall plug in power cord. She slipped the tape into the camera, and carefully pressed play.

  At first, only blue popped up on the screen, which made Miranda feel a slight jolt of panic that she would find nothing on the tape. Then, a date popped up in the lower right corner that read “6/12/1993”. On the screen she saw a dark haired toddler wearing a white dress, and a woman with equally dark hair holding t
he hands of the little girl overtop of her head as she walked towards the camera. Miranda realized that the volume was turned down, and quickly turned it up. A woman’s voice came from behind the camera.

  “Hey there little girl! Are you dancing with your mommy?” said the voice.

  “Yes she certainly is,” said the child's mother as she held the young girls hands, moving steadily closer to the camera now.

  Miranda could hear piano music in the background. She watched the little girl's face light up when she looked up at her mother, whose face could not clearly be seen on the tape because the long and dark curls of her hair obscured the view. The woman was always looking down at her daughter.

  Then a realization occurred to Miranda that there was something familiar to her about what she was seeing. She backed up the tape to the beginning and watched it again, and then again.

  The video itself was short, but its content spoke volumes. The room that this little girl was walking in towards the camera, with its white marble tiles and oak trim along the background walls, was definitely the room that was in her dream, just as the box the tape had arrived in was certainly the same one from the dream. Miranda was seeing this film from the opposite direction that she saw it in the dream. But what shook her far more was the fact that she somehow knew that she was the little girl on the tape. The woman that had been called the girls mother on the tape did not look anything like the mother she knew moving about upstairs in the rooms above.

  She went back across the basement and brought the box of photo albums to her room. As she dug through the pictures for the next hour, she realized that she could not find any pictures of her before she was four years old. No baby pictures. No scrapbook of her coming home from the hospital. After age 4, there were tons of pictures from every year, up through high school graduation and the day she left Native Springs for college. 'Miranda – First Day of Kindergarten'. 'Miranda – Fourth Grade Camping Trip'.

  She replaced the albums and photos in the box and returned the boxes to their place under the stairs, and spent the next couple of hours lying in her bed staring at the ceiling, which was basically the exposed floor joists of the main level of the house.

  If she thought she was coming home to get her head back in the game, and to find some peace of mind, this wasn’t nearly what she thought would get her to that place. There were a few things that had become clear to her, even without talking to her parents. First, although the people that she had always loved and looked up to that had raised her and cared for her, her parents in the truest sense of the word, were not where she originally came from. And even though her rational mind fought against this thinking, she felt that the arrival of this box and tape the day after she had come home from being away from Native Springs for almost a year was no coincidence. Whatever it was that was haunting her mind and manifesting in her dreams was somehow connected to the arrival of this new revelation, and even if these dreams were somehow repressed memories related to something from her past, this was something that she still could not just let go of. She needed answers as to why these dreams have started again, and suddenly intensified, and those answers may lie only in a place that existed before her earliest memories. Where was this place on the tape and in her dreams? Who sent her these things and knew when she would be coming home? The only clue she had as to where to begin was written on the label of the tape. “M. Gale – 3 years”.

  Miranda’s head was swimming with thoughts and questions. Had there been some reason why her parents had never told her that she had been adopted? For a moment, the thought had crossed her mind that there may have been something shady or deceitful about how she came to be with her parents, and maybe that was why it was never revealed, but she quickly dismissed this thought. Her parents were as straight-laced as they come, and she knew there was no way they could involve themselves in something like that.

  After considering the whole of the situation, Miranda felt it best at this point to keep everything to herself for the time being. Not knowing the truth had not made any difference in her life, at least until now, and they must have had their reasons for never revealing it to her. But she also knew that they wouldn’t understand what to make of the dreams and the mysterious arrival of the box, not to mention the timing involved with both. She needed to slip out of the house to both clear her head and start digging to see what she could come up with on her own.

  Lorri was watering plants in the living room when Miranda came upstairs with a messenger bag slung over her shoulder.

  “I’m going to go into town and see if anything has changed since the last time I was here,” Miranda told her mother.

  “Did you want me to come along? Not that much changes around here very fast, anyhow,” said Lorri.

  “No, it’s alright. I shouldn’t be too long. I’ll be back before dinner,” she said.

  Lorri was anxious to sit and talk to her daughter. Her worry had been evident in her face since Miranda arrived home the day before. But she knew Miranda was an independent spirit and moved at her own speed, so she didn’t want to put too much pressure on her to talk, fearing that it might push her away. Lorri just forced a smile instead of saying too much.

  “Okay. Well, have fun. I did forget to pick up coffee creamer at the store, so if you remember, could you stop and pick up a bottle?” Lorri asked.

  “Yeah, I will,” said Miranda, as she moved her way through the front door. “Is there anywhere in town that has free Wi-Fi?”

  “I think the restaurant down by the river has it. I forget what the place is called now. It’s changed hands so many times in the last few years. I think it might be called the Creek Ridge Tavern and Restaurant now, or something like that. And, of course, there’s Burger King.”

  “I’ll try the restaurant. The child play areas in fast food places frighten me!" said Miranda.

  Out the door she went, and just over five minutes later she was in the parking lot of the Creek Ridge Tavern. The place was a very casual, family oriented eatery on one side. A separate room definitely had a bar's appeal, with beer mirrors, a pool table, gaming pull tab lottery machines and a large screen television on the wall, which no doubt was either always tuned to whatever the sporting event of the moment was, or CNN the rest of the time.

  The smell of fresh, home cooked breakfast was still in the air, but it started to mingle with the smell of burgers on the grill. She had come in just before the lunch rush started, and found herself a table in a far corner of the main family dining room near a large stone fireplace. The atmosphere here was pleasant and rustic, with large dark stained log beams high above, braced beneath a vaulted ceiling. The walls were all log sided, with framed prints of deer, bear, and waterfowl scenes - all creatures native to the northern parts of Michigan. She had been here before when it was a pizza place in years past with her family, but it was nowhere near as nice looking as it was now.

  She placed her laptop on the table as the waitress brought her a cup of fresh brewed hot coffee that she had just ordered.

  "Be anything else?" asked the young girl, notepad in hand, pager clipped to her waist alongside the pale blue Creek Ridge Tavern t-shirt, worn by all of the floor staff members.

  "No, thank you. I'm fine."

  "Just coffee then? I'll bring you a carafe."

  "Thank you. That would be great."

  The girl nodded and walked out of the dining room through a set of swinging doors that looked like extra wide wooden window shutters.

  The Wi-Fi connected and she was surprised how fast it was. Her first search attempt in Google started simply with the word “Gale”, which brought many results as she expected, but nothing that immediately gave her any help in what she was looking for. That is, as far as she knew what she was looking for. She was going in blind, looking for any clues as to the tape’s origin, so really any shot in the dark that brought back results would be a good thing. Next, she tried “M.Gale”, with still no apparent relevant results. She browsed a few sights that she
hoped would spark something in her mind and memory, but still there was nothing.

  Finally, the thought occurred to her that perhaps the combination of the name on the tape and the date on the recording had some significance. She was running out of options, she typed in “M.Gale 06/12/1993”.

  The result came back at the top of the screen, “Did you mean ‘Gale – June 13, 1993?’” A number of results came back suddenly, so Miranda clicked on the top result, an archived article from the online version of the Upper Peninsula Herald Times:

  Tragedy Strikes Prominent U.P. Family

  GALESTONE, Michigan – June 14, 1993

  Surviving members of a beloved Upper Peninsula family, as well as friends and the townspeople of Galestone, are still reeling today from the loss of several members of the Gale family in a house fire in the early morning hours Friday. At this point, the exact cause of the fire is still unknown, but sources close to the Michigan State Police have informed us that the fire is being handled as suspicious, and are not ruling out foul play.

  The Gale family has lived in the home since they first came to the area in the late 1930s. Francis Gale first brought his family from the UK to the United States with dreams of investing family money in the prosperous Michigan iron mining business, and helped develop mining operations in the area of Pointe Ridge, Michigan, which brought several people and jobs to the small town. As the town quickly grew and business was strong, the people of Pointe Ridge in the late 1940s changed the town’s name to Galestone, after the family that breathed life into a once sparse and depressed area.

  When the mines became too dangerous to dig any longer in the mid-1970s, they had to be sealed for the safety of the community. No longer producing, many of the townspeople whose families had been there for decades had to leave Galestone, leaving only a fraction of the population. The Gale family stayed, living off the remaining fortune that had grown during the mine’s glory days, but in recent years it had been rumored that much of the old wealth had dried up. The overall appearance of the once beautiful Gale Homestead had increasingly looked in decay in the past several years, and much of the house staff had been cut back to a mere handful of people. The Gale’s tended to stay to themselves in the recent months, rarely being seen in the community, which has caused even more speculation as to what may have happened in this once peaceful and prosperous home.