Dan laughed softly. He plucked a few dead leaves from the marigolds.
“You came back and got your five bucks for doing the deed, but everything changed. Not that any of us knew, back then. She got under my skin, is what you told me after I asked why you were hanging out with her instead of us. I never got it, Henny. Girls. Women. I saw my dad smack my mom around and never got why she didn’t toss his ass out. Then my sister with Paul. Damn idiot, she is. Was. I never got that under-your-skin feeling for anyone. But Benny?” He chuffed. “She’s way under. I never told her I asked you if it was okay that I take her out. I was afraid she’d think it was creepy. Maybe I should have. Told her, I mean. Not that you answered me. You and me, we were tight. Better was me than some other asshole, right?”
Dan chuckled softly, fought the tightening in his throat.
“Now she’s making up a boyfriend. How’s that for a do not disturb sign? I think he’s pretend, anyway. If you got any sway in things, I’d sure appreciate some help.”
Dan rose to his full height and brushed his hands clean. Colorful and profuse, the garden was nevertheless as safe as it was pretty. Pansies and marigolds. Forget-me-nots and snapdragons. Only annuals that didn’t have to survive harsher weather, never any perennials that did. As a landscaper, it had struck him as strange Benny would only plant flowers requiring a complete re-do, year after year. As a man who cared for her—and a smarter one than most gave him credit for—Dan understood all too well.
Chapter 6
A Silken Skirt of Breeze
A full tank of gas, jeans, a high-necked T-shirt and the faithful Grim Reaper hoodie for when it got cooler, Benny went to the cemetery prepared this time. In the milk crate she had a sandwich, a thermos of lemonade, and an old blanket to sit on. Despite the prior night’s provocative comment, or perhaps because of it, Benny was looking forward to her visit with Augie. Maybe she was nuts-o. Maybe he was real. After tonight, she would have proof one way or the other. She would make sure of it.
Riding through town, Benny didn’t resist the urge to stop in CC’s for something sweet to go with her otherwise non-exciting dinner. She pulled her scooter up onto the sidewalk where customers sat at the bistro tables. The weather was cool and dry, the air scented by sunshine and cut grass and the briar roses currently growing rampant along every rock wall and roadside. A welcome respite after a few days of humidity.
If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait an hour.
“Jo? Anyone here?” Benny rang the bell on the counter. Nearly empty racks on the wall disheartened, until Benny spotted the tray of her favorite chocolate mud cookies.
“Oh, hey, Benny.” Caleb, Charlie McCallan’s middle son, came out of the back room with a broom. “I thought I heard the bell ring. Can I get you something?”
“A mud cookie. Make it two.”
His face colored. “I’m supposed to bring two dozen over to a graduation party as soon as I close up, but I suppose Johanna wouldn’t mind, seeing it’s you.”
Graduation party. Dan’s niece. She’d forgotten all about it.
“No, no. Don’t do that. How about one of those big tollhouse cookies instead?”
“You sure?”
“Positive. I was torn between the two anyway.”
Caleb slid the cookie into a waxed-paper sleeve and set it on the counter. Benny handed him a dollar and took a bite.
“Didn’t you graduate this year?” she asked him.
“Next year.”
“You look into any schools yet?”
The cash drawer dinged closed. “I’m pretty set on going to the Culinary Institute, like my sister. I love working in the bakery. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
“Fantastic, Caleb. Really great.” Benny took another bite. “Johanna must be thrilled.”
“Just a little.” He grinned, and in that instant looked exactly like Charlie. “Charlotte wants me to come south for the summer.”
“She really likes it down there in Cape May, huh?”
“Loves it.”
“You going to go?”
He shrugged. “Maybe for a couple of weeks. I don’t want to be gone all summer. It’s my last one as a high school student. I kind of want to hang with my friends.”
“She’ll understand.”
“This is Charlotte we’re talking about.”
“True.” Benny put the last bite of cookie into her mouth. “I can’t believe I just ate that whole thing. You’d better give me another. It was supposed to be for later.”
* * * *
Her cookie tucked safely into the milk crate, Benny zipped out of town. It would remain light for a while yet. She had time to visit and still be able to get home before dark. She wasn’t a teenaged-goth-chick anymore. There was only so much time she could spend casually hanging out in the cemetery before other people started questioning her sanity.
Scooter parked, she gathered her picnic supper from the milk crate. Henny’s plot looked pretty from a distance. Welcoming. Harriet’s too. Benny laid her blanket between the two, put her food on it, and went first to her husband’s grave. A hand placed upon the stone, she bowed her head and searched for words that never sufficed even if she did find them. The dream still spooked her. It hadn’t been the first time her Henny turned into zombie-Henny within the confines of her mind. All the other times, she woke in a cold sweat. This time he’d spoken—It’s not me. It’s you. I’m sorry, Benny—and his words spooked her more than his altered form.
Letting her hand fall, Benny turned to Mrs. Farcus’s grave instead.
“It’s no use. I’m a mess.”
Nothing.
“Augie asked me to come back. He said he’d show me where he’s buried. Anyone there? Augie? Mrs. Farcus?” She swallowed hard. “Harriet?”
Still nothing. She went back to her blanket, sat down, and opened her sandwich. The giant cookie had robbed her appetite. She ate anyway, washed it down with the lemonade. The second cookie taunted her. She picked it up, nibbled at the edge.
“I am eating for two, you know,” she told it, and ate the whole thing. If she couldn’t have one of Johanna’s mud cookies, two of her tollhouses were ample compensation. She felt a wee bit queasy, though she licked her fingers clean. Leaning back on her elbows, she looked up at the darkling sky. If she wanted to get home before dark, she had to leave soon.
She rose groaning to her feet, gathered the garbage, and started for her scooter. Stopping at Harriet’s grave, she noted a few marigolds ruining the orange and yellow tableau with their withered brown-ness. Benny deadheaded them, grimaced at a bare spot she hadn’t noticed before. She would bring something to fill it with, next time she visited.
“I guess I’ve been stood up,” she said, brushing her hands clean and re-gathering her garbage. “Could you tell him I was here? Augie, I mean. Not Henny. I’m pretty certain he’s not here. Not like you, or Augie. Hell, I don’t even know if you are here or I’m just wishing so hard that—”
The cookie wrapper whipped out of her hand and fluttered away. Benny grabbed for it. It dodged. It actually dodged. She dropped the rest of her what she still held and she gave chase. The wrapper caught on a tombstone, a tuft of grass, a branch, a bouquet of flowers long-since wilted, skipping, lifting, rolling on a non-existent breeze Benny wouldn’t think about until she caught it, lest she think too hard and decide she was completely nuts after all. She followed it all the way across the cemetery. It obliged by waiting until she caught up, winded and slightly annoyed to be chasing animated garbage. It finally splatted against the face of a tombstone, in an older area of the cemetery, and there stuck. Panting, Benny swiped it, and read:
Katherine Weller Fiore
September 13, 1919 ~ January 28, 1976
*
August Fiore
July 4, 1908 ~ July 7, 1980
Benny shoved the wrapper into her pocket. She knelt at the grave, traced his name with the tip of a trembli
ng finger. Looking back the way she had come, she found no splash of color to mark Henny’s grave. Beyond the row of tombstones, a wrought-iron fence, and trees dotted with lightning bugs. She rose and moved to the fence, gripping it with both hands, and remembered a summer evening like this one, when she was fourteen. These woods. On the other side of the fence. And Henny.
“On the dramatic side, but it worked.”
She caught herself before spinning to his spectral voice. “Augie?”
“Who else would it be?”
“I hardly know anymore. You have no idea—”
“Hold that thought just a minute…”
A sensation like a breath gasped made Benny blink, but she didn’t look at it.
“There,” Augie said. “Is this better?”
Less spectral. More real. He was getting better at making the transition. Or she was only wishing. “I suppose,” she said.
“Something wrong, Benedetta?”
Yes. No. “I’m assuming it was you, with the cookie wrapper?”
“It was. Impressed?”
“Annoyed is more like it. I’m not in the best shape for running across a cemetery.”
“You look quite shapely to me.”
“Stop that.” She bit at the insides of her cheeks to keep from grinning. “Why didn’t you just talk to me?”
“I haven’t quite mastered moving from depth to depth yet. Forgive me, but it was easier to get you here this way.”
“Depth?”
He chuckled. “My own notion, ah? The best way I can describe it is that going from the place I mostly exist in to here, where I am with you now is like kicking off at the bottom of a pool. It is fast, at first, and slows as I get to the top. From deep to shallow. From dark to light. That is why it’s easier for me to move about when in the deep place. See?”
“Kind of. I guess. Not really.”
“Well, you are here now. You wanted to see my grave. This is it.”
Benny let it go and instead focused again on the marker, the names and dates there. “You were married.”
“Katherine. Wonderful woman. Love of my life.”
“Kids?”
“Two sons, Philip and Victor, and a daughter, Adriana.”
“Where are they now?”
“They moved out of Bitterly a long time ago. And I am still here. Perhaps they, too, are no longer among the living.”
“But your wife died before you did. Wasn’t she waiting for you or anything?”
“No. She died a several years before I did, so—”
“So, then we don’t all find one another after death.”
“That, I cannot say. All I know is it is not so for me. Yet.”
Benny bit her lip. She wanted this to be real so badly it made her teeth ache. Since Augie first tapped her shoulder, she had something to look forward to again. Weird, perhaps, but Benny once prided herself on weird. Was he real? Or was he wishful thinking gone haywire?
“Augie?”
“Yes, Benedetta?”
“I need something. Something physical.”
“If I could do that for you, cara mia, I would be happy to oblige, but as far as I know, such a thing is not possible.”
Benny bit the insides of her cheeks again. “You are a fiend.”
“I think you like fiends.”
She used to. Now she liked…
She cut off the thought before it fully formed. “I meant something physical as proof I’ve not lost my mind completely. Everything happening, even talking to you now, could be memory forcing itself out of my head. The woods right there”—she pointed beyond the wrought iron fence—“is where Henny kissed me for the first time. Maybe that’s where I got your name from. Maybe I saw it all those years ago and now my grief is pulling it out of my brain. I need to know you’re not a figment of my imagination.”
“Sure, sure. Any ideas?”
“I was hoping you’d have one.”
Benny paced, keeping the sense of him ever in her periphery. Perhaps because it was getting dark, there was something different in the glow she imagined him to be, tempting her to look. Was that shadow the faded image of an elbow? The slope of a hip? She squeezed her eyes shut tight. “You said you lived in Bitterly for forty years, right?”
“More or less.”
“Did you do anything noteworthy that might have made the papers? Win some prize at the Fourth of July picnic, or save a puppy from drowning or something?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Hmm, well, maybe you took out a permit to put up a shed or something I could look up in the town records?”
“Permit for a shed? Ha! Benedetta, you could build a whole house in this town back then without a permit, and there were no building codes. I should know. I built my house from…”
“Augie?” She shielded her eyes as she spun to where she last heard his voice. “Are you there?”
“I am,” he said. “I just remembered something, and if it’s still there, it will give you the proof you wish.”
* * * *
Benny switched the headlight of her scooter off as she rounded the corner of Division Street. When Bitterly was first founded, and the Green sat closer to the river, Division Street marked the middle between the northern and southern ends of town. Commerce wisely moved to higher ground after the annual flooding in 1855 devastated the town one time too many, taking the Green and municipal buildings with it. Now it was a strange name for a road out in the middle of nowhere, and clutching the past too determinedly to let go.
Three of the original structures survived—Bitterly Congregational Church, the Bossy House and the Weller house. Benny wondered if Augie’s Katherine was one of the Wellers. Considering she and Augie had built their home on the same street as the original family homestead, she figured she must have been.
Benny’s stomach flipped. Of all the houses in Bitterly, why did the one Augie build have to be 105 Division Street? Why couldn’t it even have been one hundred eight, or two-eleven? Nope. One. O. Five.
Evelyn Taylor’s house.
Dan’s sister.
With whom he lived since her husband skipped town four years ago.
Of course, it was the house Augie built back in 1935. More proof it was all in her head. Benedetta, you idiot.
But she glided to a stop at the bottom of the drive, parked the scooter and took off her helmet anyway. During the week she stole from Dan, she had never once been in the house. Benny could count on one hand the number of times she had been on Division Street in her life. At least there was that in her favor if she found what Augie had sent her to find.
She skirted the shadows along the driveway, hunkered down behind the big rock with the house numbers on it. There were only two lights on inside—one upstairs and one in the back visible because of the picture window without curtains. The light went out. Moments later, another went on upstairs. Benny checked her watch. After eight o’clock. The party must have ended on the early side. Though she had come prepared to crash with apologies, she was happier skulking in like a thief.
She crept up the driveway and slipped around back. Even in the dark, the landscaping was lovely. Stone walls, not the farmer-walls cutting through every property in New England, but carefully constructed and meticulously placed stone walls, lined the yard. Plantings accented the walls. A grape arbor, heavily vined and currently lightning-bugged, stood back against the trees. Somewhere, lilies bloomed. Their scent was sweet, heady, and unmistakable. Benny sighed softly, bit her lip, and started her search for the proof Augie said would be just off the cellar doors.
* * * *
The sound of feet crunching on the gravel driveway lifted Dan’s head. He listened, but it didn’t come again. Instead of unbuttoning his jeans as he’d been about to do, he re-did the first one and headed downstairs barefoot.
He looked out the front window, then the back. Nothing but a quiet yard, and maybe deer. Pretty as
the gardens were by day, Dan preferred them at night when all the night-bloomers popped. The hedge of four o’clocks, the evening primrose, night gladiolas, the copse of snow-white moonflowers and, his favorite, Casablanca lilies that cost him a small fortune his sister didn’t know about.
Pride swelled. Winters in Bitterly were long and white. Plowing had always brought more money in than landscaping, but creating whole worlds in miniature, of color and scent with living plants and native stone, made him the artist he would never claim to be. The New Yorkers currently buying places in the country brought more work than he could handle this summer, and it wasn’t even July yet. If Bitterly didn’t depend upon him and his plow, Dan wouldn’t even have to work next winter. It would be nice to spend the cold months scouring seed catalogs, maybe even building a greenhouse to—
Metal scraped on stone. Dan grimaced. Something was in the little alcove off the cellar. Raccoons after party leftovers that didn’t get cleaned up, more than likely. Scaring them off was easy enough, but they’d be back as soon as the lights went out. Someone had to clean up whatever they were after. As always, that someone was him. Dan grabbed a garbage bag and went to investigate.
“Dammit!” A hissed whisper came from the alcove as he opened the back door. Not raccoons. He craned his neck. Big as he was, Dan Greene was no fool. Even Bitterly had its delinquents. Reaching slowly for the light switch just inside the door, he caught sight of the intruder’s shadowed silhouette. And knew it instantly. Having memorized it one stunned and sleepless night watching her dream beneath the stars.
Dan treaded carefully. He didn’t want to scare her off. She was sitting at the wrought iron bistro table, in a chair still tied up with balloons. Head in her hands and grumbling, she didn’t hear him approach. Neither did she hear him clear his throat.
“You are not making all this up, Benedetta Marie Grady,” she whispered harshly. “You are not losing it. You’ve believed in this shit all your life and now it’s actually happening and—”
Dan stepped on what felt like a bottle cap. “Oh! Ow-ow-ow!”
Dreaming August Page 6
