by Sharon Sala
Amalie Pope was going home. Yesterday morning she’d left Jasper, Texas, for her grandmother’s house in Louisiana—most likely for good. It was a safe bet that she wasn’t going back to teaching—at least not there. The memories of Jasper’s recent high school graduation still haunted her. She had yet to get through an entire night without reliving the sight of Pauly Jordan coming into the high school auditorium with a gun. Four students, two teachers and two parents had died that night, while six others were wounded before Pauly was taken down.
Amalie was one of the six.
Momentarily stunned by the outbreak of shooting, she had frozen in place, thinking that there had to be a rational explanation for what was happening. It wasn’t until Pauly swung the gun toward a student who was standing right beside her that she’d jumped in front of the boy and taken the bullet meant for him. The miracle was that she lived to tell the tale.
But after her release from the hospital weeks later, staying in Jasper was no longer an option. All she could think about was going home.
Now she drove with one eye on the blacktop and the other on the sky. Hurricane-spawned storms were moving across the state but weren’t predicted in this area until mid to late afternoon. She wanted to get to Nonna’s house before any bad weather hit. It made her sad to know that her grandmother would never be there to greet her again, and she was still struggling with the guilt of how Nonna had died.
Upon learning Amalie had been shot, Laura Pope had suffered a heart attack and never regained consciousness. Being the only living relative, Amalie had inherited everything: the family home—a three-story antebellum house in need of a little TLC—and enough money to never have to work another day in her life. It hurt to think that Nonna had been buried without her knowledge or presence, but she knew it couldn’t be helped. And after the month Amalie had just lived through, she was trying to turn loose of guilt, not add to it.
Her healing shoulder wound was beginning to ache from the long drive, and she glanced at the time, trying to gauge how much longer she had to go before reaching her destination, when something flew across her line of vision. Before she could react, it hit the passenger side of the windshield with a loud, shattering thump.
She ducked on instinct, and as she did, the car swerved toward the ditch. At the last moment Amalie thought to hit the brakes before she ran off the road, and as soon as she skidded to a stop she quickly slammed the car into Park.
Except for the heartbeat hammering in her ear, everything was quiet. Adrenaline was still rushing as she started to shake.
“Oh, my God…oh, my God,” she whispered, then leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, fighting the urge to throw up. This was not the way to get over PTSD.
Frustrated by this weakness she couldn’t seem to control, she looked up, combing shaky fingers through her short dark hair as she began to investigate.
There was a crack in the windshield, along with a good-size amount of blood and feathers. Upon closer examination, she could tell that the large bird now lying on her hood—it looked like a hawk—had just flown into the windshield. When her focus shifted to the blood and gore, the view began to morph. In a panic, she covered her eyes, but the memory was too strong. As she shuddered violently, the flashback overwhelmed her.
The auditorium was filling rapidly with graduating seniors, and their friends and families, anxious to mark this rite of passage into the beginning of adulthood. Normally Amalie Pope was the high school art teacher, but tonight she was handing out programs at the door as people filed through to get a seat.
The superintendent, Jacob Strand, was walking into the auditorium to take his place on the stage. The hall was full of people laughing and talking and snapping pictures, anxious to commemorate this night. There was nothing out of the ordinary to warn her of what was about to happen.
When she saw Pauly Jordan walk in alone, she frowned. He would have been graduating tonight along with his classmates, except for the fact that he’d been caught dealing drugs on the school grounds and expelled a month earlier. It occurred to her that he might try to make trouble, but that thought didn’t prepare her for the handguns he pulled out of his pockets.
Before Amalie could think, he took aim at the superintendent and fired. Blood splattered on the wall behind Jacob as the bullet went through his chest. He was dead before he hit the floor.
The shot was still echoing when everyone began to scream.
After that, Amalie’s memory became vague. She remembered seeing people falling and blood splattering, and vaguely remembered jumping in front of another student as Pauly screamed his name. After that, all she remembered was the impact of the shot and being knocked off her feet. Then she was falling…falling…as everything faded from sight.
She’d awakened the next day in a hospital. Four days later, when the doctors thought she could handle it, she was informed of her grandmother’s death. After that, her world had come the rest of the way undone.
A distant rumble of thunder dragged her back to the present. She could hear her psychiatrist’s voice telling her to focus—focus. She opened her eyes, then looked away from the window.
Still trembling, she put the car in Reverse and backed away from the edge of the ditch. Her stomach lurched again as she caught sight of the window.
“You are not a woman who faints at the sight of blood,” she muttered, although it had been happening lately with some regularity. Even a paper cut made her stomach turn.
She got out of the car, pulled the dead bird from the hood and tossed it in the ditch.
“And you are also not going to throw up,” she added, as she eyed the blue Chevrolet Impala, making sure nothing else had been damaged.
Satisfied, she got back inside the car, turned on the windshield washer and kept it running until the blood was gone, then put the car in gear and drove away.
Two
Even though the rest of the drive was uneventful, by the time Amalie reached her destination the pain in her shoulder was constant and she was fighting a headache.
She’d been coming to her grandmother’s house her entire life and knew the road as well as she knew her own name, but as she began to slow down to take the turn, she realized the kudzu vines had become so thick that the house was no longer visible from the road. It gave her an eerie feeling, as if the old plantation house had disappeared along with Nonna.
She hadn’t been here since Easter, and the overgrown property was an obvious reminder of Nonna’s age and declining health. In years past her grandmother would never have let the grounds go in such a way. Guilt rose as she took the turn. She should have come back sooner, not settled for phone calls and letters.
But her guilt and her tension disappeared as she drove closer to the house. All she could think about was crawling into bed and sleeping for about a week. Even if the landscaping had been let go, in a way it wasn’t such a bad thing—at least for the time being. She’d come here to recuperate, not to fill up her social calendar. If Nonna’s neighbors knew she was here, they would all want to come pay their respects. A formal welcome-to-the-neighborhood and so-sorry-for-your-loss kind of thing. Something she wasn’t ready to face. She wanted the first few days to herself.
Then she rounded the curve and the old three-story antebellum mansion came into view at last. Breath caught in the back of her throat as she hit the brakes. Still imposing, even though its splendor was slightly fading—and it was hers. The Vatican.
She rarely thought about the name, a presumptuous, if somewhat understandable, choice given to the place over a century ago. The house had always belonged to the Popes—from Joaquin Pope, who claimed the land in 1804, to herself, Amalie Pope, the latest heir. The name had seemed fitting.
Amalie’s fingers curled around the steering wheel as she thought about the loneliness she was about to face. Then she stifled her self-pity and continued up the driveway, passing live oaks dripping with gray Spanish moss, unruly azalea bushes and wildly blooming crepe myrtles i
n various shades of pinks and reds, all of them sadly in need of a seasonal trim.
She drove around to the back, choosing, for the time being, to keep her car out of sight. As she got out, she glanced up at the sky. The clouds were building as the sky continued to darken, but that didn’t matter to her now. The Vatican had weathered two-hundred-plus years of weather. Today would be no different.
She got her suitcase out of the trunk, unlocked the door and set the suitcase just inside the kitchen before going back to get the groceries. She’d brought enough food to last her for at least ten days, which should be long enough for her to settle in before she made the fifteen-mile trip into Bordelaise to set up a bank account and formally announce her arrival.
By the time she’d carried in the last of her things, her shoulder was in serious pain. As she shut the door behind her, she paused, admiring the stainless steel appliances, the white kitchen cabinets with china-blue knobs, and the salt-and-pepper colored granite on the countertops. But that was where renovation ended. The wide plank floors were still the original cypress, the hooks and nooks lining the walls still bore the marks of generations, and the kitchen table and chairs were antique cherrywood. To a designer, it would appear to be a successful blending of eras, but to Amalie, it was simply home.
Refusing to acknowledge the lump in her throat, she stowed the groceries—meat and dairy in the refrigerator, bread in the old breadbox, and the rest of the stuff in the pantry. Someone had obviously come in and cleaned out the refrigerator after Nonna died. Probably one of her grandmother’s quilting friends. The only items still inside were the things that wouldn’t spoil, like pickles and jam.
All the while Amalie was working, she caught herself listening for Nonna’s footsteps, half expecting her to show up in the doorway with a big smile on her face and a welcoming hug. But that wasn’t going to happen. Amalie slid the last can onto the pantry shelf while blinking back tears, then retrieved her suitcase and left the room.
As she paused in the hallway, she cocked her head to listen—something she’d seen Nonna do a hundred times, claiming that the creaks and groans, the pops and scratching, were just signs of the old mansion telling her things needed to be done, things ranging from something as simple as the grandfather clock needing winding to water leaking somewhere. But today the house felt different—even hollow.
Had it lost its voice when Laura Pope died?
Amalie felt as abandoned as the house appeared. Even when her parents had died in a wreck when she was eleven, she’d still had Nonna. Now the old matriarch was gone, and Amalie Pope was the last surviving member of a once prolific and thriving family.
She allowed herself another moment of regret, then proceeded up the hall to the grand foyer. She paused at the foot of the old staircase, remembering the countless times she’d come down the sweeping banister backward—to her parents dismay and Nonna’s laughter—then considered her choice of beds.
There was a bedroom on the ground floor. It would be convenient but somewhat sterile. Nothing of her grandmother’s personality would be there. The other bedrooms, including Nonna’s, were upstairs on the second floor. The third floor, which had once been servants’ quarters, was vacant of furnishings and no longer in use except for storage.
Amalie thought of all the times she’d awakened in the middle of the night and gone to her grandmother’s bed for comfort. All the times she’d spent under the covers at Nonna’s side, listening to her reading chapters of The Wind in the Willows and Watership Down. As the memories flooded in, Amalie realized her decision had been made. She chose the stairs, pulling the suitcase up behind her as she went.
When she reached the landing she paused again, gazing down the wide expanse of hallway toward the half-dozen bedrooms beyond. She had learned to roller skate down this hall, taking care not to bother the huge bouquets that always stood on the marble-topped tables standing sentinel midway down. Now the tables were as empty as the house.
For a moment she thought she smelled jasmine, Nonna’s favorite scent, then chalked it up as a fantasy. A muscle jerked near the side of her mouth—a small but physical sign of her fragile hold on her emotional stability. Weighted down with a feeling of malaise, she moved to Nonna’s room, opened the door and walked inside.
The room had not been redecorated in Amalie’s lifetime, and the familiar sight of off-white walls and cypress floors polished by centuries of wear were more than comforting. Nonna’s four-poster cherrywood bed seemed huge without her in it, but the mauve colored duvet with bolsters to match reminded her of Nonna. White lace curtains hung over a pair of long narrow windows, and across the room stood an ancient wardrobe, also made of cypress and now used to store linens. Part of the room had been remodeled during her grandfather’s time to include a large walk-in closet and a private bath. A perfect room for the lady of the house.
It didn’t take long to unpack her one suitcase. All the rest of her belongings, including her computer and art supplies, were still in Texas in storage. As soon as she had her things put away, she dug out her pain pills and headed for the bathroom. Her movements were mechanical as she downed the meds, used the facilities and then kicked off her shoes before climbing into bed. Once her head hit the pillow, she began to relax, comforted by the familiar in a world that kept letting her down. After a while, she slept.
Outside, the sky continued to darken as the storm front moved inland. Intermittent rain began to fall, dotting the dust in sparse polka dots that quickly turned to muddy rivulets. The sound was somewhat muffled by the third story of the house. But when the wind began to rise, causing tree branches to thump against the walls, Amalie woke abruptly, thinking she was hearing gunshots.
Heart pounding in a hard, erratic beat, she broke out in a cold sweat as she gave the room a panicked sweep. Although nothing seemed amiss, her stomach roiled. Overcome by the sudden onset of nausea, she threw back the covers and bolted for the bathroom.
By the time the feeling had passed, her legs felt like rubber. It wasn’t until she was washing her face that she began to realize there was more to the storm than a little rain.
Still shaking from the adrenaline rush of the flash back, she ran to the windows.
Wind was whipping the limbs on the trees as if they were nothing but tiny twigs and the rain was coming down in sheets. As she watched, a huge limb suddenly broke from one of the larger trees and went flying across the yard. Before she could react, more debris came flying past the window from another direction.
She’d lived in Texas long enough to know that winds coming from more than one direction at the same time meant a vortex. And that likely meant a tornado. Getting to the ground floor and an inside closet as fast as she could was paramount to survival.
Without taking time to get her shoes, she flew out of the room and down the stairs, unable to believe she was already facing another life-or-death situation. The moment she hit the ground floor, she took an immediate right, running for the closet under the stairs. The last time she’d hidden in there she’d been ten and hiding because she didn’t want to go home. She grabbed the doorknob and gave it a twist, but the door wouldn’t give.
“No, no, no, this isn’t happening,” she muttered, as she continued to tug, but the wood was swollen from the ever-present humidity.
Suddenly something crashed against the house with a loud thud. Panicked that the next object might come through a window, she began to tug harder and harder until, suddenly, the door was open.
Amalie fell backward, landing hard on her elbows and jarring her healing shoulder and back. Ignoring the pain, she scrambled to her knees and crawled into the closet, pulling the door shut behind her.
She wouldn’t let herself think about the possibility of spiders as she hunkered down inside. Outside, the wind had turned into a roar. She curled up into a ball and began to pray, although she’d already tempted fate by living through being shot. She couldn’t help but wonder if her last free pass was already gone.
Amali
e had no idea how long she stayed in the closet, but it was the absence of wind that gave her the courage to finally come out. When she did, all she heard was rain on the roof. Relieved that the storm had passed and she was still in one piece, she began going from room to room, then up through all three stories, checking windows and ceilings to make sure nothing was broken or leaking. To her relief, the house and windows seemed solid.
She was counting her blessings as she entered the kitchen, but when she glanced out a window and saw her car, her relief was dashed. A huge limb from one of the older live oaks was lying across the back half of it, crushing part of roof.
“Well, perfect,” she muttered, then stopped and counted her blessings. If this was all that was damaged, she wouldn’t complain.
She thought about going to inspect it more closely, then eyed the muddy yard and rain and changed her mind. So there was a tree on her car. It already had a crack in the windshield. That was all the information she could handle today.
With a slightly dejected sigh, she turned away. This wasn’t how she’d pictured her first night at the Vatican. Thinking she should notify her insurance agent, she ran back upstairs to get her purse and his number, but when she tried to use the phone, there was no dial tone. No problem. She still had her cell. But that call wouldn’t go through, either.
Tossing her cell on the bed, she glanced at the clock. It was almost 3:00 p.m., and she hadn’t eaten since early morning, so she headed back downstairs. But when she opened the refrigerator and the light didn’t come on, she realized the power was off, too. Hoping it wouldn’t stay off so long that she lost her perishables, she got out stuff to make a sandwich, and then filled a glass with ice and Pepsi. As she sat down to eat, she took comfort in the fact that it was still daylight. If the power wasn’t back on by nightfall, she would be digging out Nonna’s hurricane lamps and candles.
