“Long day today,” Dustin sighed, leaning back on his forearms and gazing at the sparkling water before them. Lydia nodded, taking care with her voice. Despite the great acoustics, the sheer amount of talking she had do to throughout the day left her throat raw.
“I’ll say,” George grunted, tossing a rock into the water and watching it make small ripples.
Taryn hadn’t made up her mind about George yet. He was built like a truck–solid and strong with broad shoulders and the longest arms she’d ever seen. He seemed friendly enough but had a perpetual scowl on his face and she couldn’t tell if he was angry or just had a natural resting bitch face.
“Hey, at least you guys can go home now,” Julie grumbled. “My day’s just getting started.”
Lydia patted the younger girl’s arm in sympathy and then laid her head over on Dustin’s lap. Lydia was pretty in a hardened way. Her hair, though tucked in a neat little bun, was dry and brittle from too many colorings and perms. (To be honest, though, considering what they all put their hair through in the 1980s they were lucky any of them had any left. Taryn shuddered at her old routine which consisted of holding one side out with a large pick, vigorously spraying it with Aqua Net, and then blow drying it until her head burned…all in the name of creating “wings.”) Lydia had the skin of a smoker but her eyes were bright green and sparkled when they landed on her husband.
“You get a fun job, though,” Dustin teased her. “You get to pour the booze.”
“Dude, drunks at Shaker Town are still drunks,” Julie lamented and they all laughed.
Being with these folks, who were much closer to her age, was a far cry from being around the kids she’d met in Georgia. Taryn had been sucked into that world, allured by the attention and youthful energy that made her feel alive and excited. She hadn’t had many friends in high school (just Matt, really) and the temptation to hang out with a group who wanted to have fun and hung onto her words was tantalizing, even if they were much younger than her. These guys, however, had all graduated from college, been in the workforce for awhile, and had real lives. They made her nervous since she’d always had trouble talking to people her own age, but she was trying to fit in with them. It was her loneliness that had gotten her into more than one scrape in the past.
“I, for one, didn’t think this day would ever end,” Dustin moaned. He slipped off his shoes and Lydia’s head shot up from his lap. While she pretended to gag and choke, everyone laughed.
“A little warning next time there buddy,” she sputtered.
“Sorry. Feet hurt,” he shrugged. “I must have been on the plant tour today because I swear every single person who came over to the farm just wanted to know what all the plants were.”
“I have everyone beat,” George grumbled. “Between the horse shit, the oxen shit, and the kid vomit I cleaned up today I could fertilize the whole south field.”
“You need signs,” Lydia pointed out to Dustin. “And George, you need a new job. Not enough money in the world...But if Dustin was hosting the vegetation tour then I must have been hosting the haunted one.”
Taryn, hearing her calling, perked up. “Yeah? You telling ghost stories? What did they want to know?”
“The usual,” Lydia shrugged. “Which buildings are haunted, has anyone been murdered here, have I ever seen a ghost? Etcetera, etcetera.”
“It's all stupid rumors,” George said, rolling his eyes. “I've been here five years and never seen a thing. Nothing that's scarier than a kid throwing a temper tantrum, that is.”
“Any place that’s been around this long, there are going to be ghosts,” Lydia retorted. “I’ve never seen anything, but I’ve heard some stuff.”
“I saw something once,” Julie shrugged. “I think I did anyway. After the kitchen closed down one night and we’d brought everything back in from the patio. I was carrying the cups back inside and saw a woman kind of, I don’t know, dancing I guess you’d say. In the road.”
“Couldn’t it have been a guest?”
“I thought so at first,” Julie said hesitantly. “But then….Oh, you all are going to laugh at me!”
“Probably. But tell us anyway,” George prodded, interested in spite of himself.
“You could see through her. It was only for a second or two and then she disappeared.” Julie's face was bright red, embarrassment flooding over her. Taryn could understand that. She also grew embarrassed talking about her experiences–and many of them were now well-documented for posterity's sake.
“I’m staying over there in the north forty in one of the shops,” Taryn added. “That building meant to be haunted?”
“We don’t want to scare you,” Lydia chided, frowning slightly at Julie.
“Oh good,” Taryn smiled. “Then you clearly haven’t heard of me or what I do. That’s refreshing.”
“Are you a ghost hunter?” Dustin asked, intrigued. “You can’t say something like that and not share.”
Taryn felt her face blush. She really hadn’t been trying to open that door. “We’ll talk later. I’ll save all the gory details for another day. But seriously…any stories I should know about?”
Lydia shrugged. “Well, you know. People did die here. Old age, sickness, suicide.”
“Shhh!” Dustin warned. “You know we’re not supposed to admit there was discourse amongst the Shakers!”
“Just one murder and it was a long time ago,” George said, breaking up the laughter. “I don't think the killer is still out there. He'd be more than one hundred fifty years old.”
“What happened?” Taryn asked.
“Oh, God, it was awful,” Julie shuddered. “Got whacked to death or something. Nobody knows. But the story is that he was found in pieces all over the park–an arm here, a leg there...And a big pool of blood in the–“
“Julie!” Lydia hissed.
“What?” Taryn asked, looking from one woman to the other.
“She doesn't want me to tell you that there was a big pool of blood in the bottom floor of your building,” Julie replied smugly. “They couldn't get it up. Been there, like George said, forever. Finally just replaced the wood.”
“Good Lord,” Taryn said, leaning back on her forearms. “So am I going to wake up to some guy wandering around my room, trying to find his head?”
They all laughed, breaking a slightly tense mood, and the subject was changed. As Taryn walked back to her room, however, the padding of tennis shoes hitting the sidewalk came up behind her and made her slow down. It certainly wasn't a ghost, unless the ghost wore Nike's.
“Hey,” Julie called. She was winded and Taryn realized she’d been running after her. “I know who you are and what you do. I Googled you on my phone after you left.”
“Yeah?” Taryn smiled nervously.
“It’s okay. I believe in ghosts. And to answer your question, there are a lot of stories about this place. A lot. Guests stay here all the time and report things. And I think the old cemetery is pretty creepy myself. But the woman I saw? I’m not the only one. She seems harmless enough, but that wasn’t the first time I saw her. Or the last.”
“Who is she?”
Julie shrugged. “Don’t know. I’m guessing she died young here, though. Maybe she got sick. Or something. There’s some books about the Shakers and the ghosts but nothing like her.”
Taryn assented, chewing on her bottom lip. “If I hear or see or learn anything, I’ll let you know.”
“Awesome sauce,” Julie laughed. “Well, I have to go mix drinks. Come down later if you want. Happy hour will start soon!”
Taryn was left standing alone on the sidewalk, just the sound of the bees buzzing in a hive on one of the buildings filling the air. They need to remove that, Taryn thought absently. Someone is going to get hurt.
Chapter 4
The sun was beating down on her legs, the rough linen of her dress pulled up to her knees to allow the rays more access. They were reddening, and she’d pay for it later if they burned, but for now
she enjoyed the luxury of the warmth. The feel of the sun above her and soft grass under her lulled her into a dreamworld, a place where she was only a small part of the world around her.
Suddenly, the world was blocked out by a shadow above her. The darkness spread over her, blanketing her with its sudden coolness. She looked up, startled, but smiled primly and covered her legs with her hem.
The man smiling back at her had large, brown eyes and dark hair with just a hint of auburn. His straw hat shaded his face but she knew it well enough.
As he squatted down next to her his britches, beaten soft from too many washings, brushed against her hand. The feeling of being so close to him, of touching him, sent hot lightning bolts coursing through her arms and legs until they settled into a not-unpleasant knot in her belly.
Neither spoke but remained together in silence, the sounds of the outside world forgotten. There was content unlike anything she'd ever known, the peace of knowing she was exactly where she was meant to be. It was that perfect moment she'd always dreamed about, read about before arriving, and she longed to grasp it, put it in a little box, and carry it with her everywhere she went.
Then, he reached over and plucked a long stray blade of grass from her face, grazing her cheek with the pad of his thumb. She lifted her hand to touch him, he was just inches away, but he was descending quickly into an invisible hole; tumbling farther and farther from her reach until all she could do was scream out his name.
Taryn was a sweater when her nerves got to her and nothing set her off like a bad dream. Although nothing bad technically happened in her sleep, the feeling of reaching out to the man and being unable to gasp him bothered her more than a legion of zombies or vampires. She woke drenched with sweat. A sniff under her arms told her she didn't stink but she'd still need a shower, and her heart was pounding. Her duvet and pillow were wet and cold as well. They'd need to be washed so Taryn stripped them off and placed them outside her door for housekeeping.
She chewed on the images of the man slipping from her grasp all morning until, at last, she took a break with her sketching and called Matt.
“I had a bad dream last night,” she complained, feeling like a little kid running to her parents’ bed. (Well, perhaps not her parents’ bed, but a normal one. Her parents would've shooed her out and sent her back, scientific explanation for bad dreams in hand.)
“Yeah, what was it?” Matt was at work now, as she knew he’d be, and she could hear the quiet tapping on his keyboard. She must have caught him in the middle of something. He was distracted and, of course, she was keeping him from something.
“Oh, nothing I guess,” she replied, feeling silly. “Probably just my overactive imagination here at the village. Combined with too many romance novels.”
“Yeah? What about?” he asked, not realizing he’d already asked that question. He really must be distracted, she thought.
“Nothing,” Taryn assured him. “I’ll call you back sometime after dinner.”
“Okay!” he called cheerfully.
Taryn stuffed the phone back in her pocket and looked down the gravel road. The stones had picked up a cloud of dust, covering her brown Walmart sandals in white powder. She didn’t know where she was heading; she just knew she needed a walk. There were already a few tourists out and she smiled as a young mother walked by, holding the hands of a five-year-old boy and toddler girl. The little girl was barefoot and Taryn had no idea how she was able to walk comfortably over the rocks. They looked happy, though, and it made something inside of her melt just a little.
Was her biological clock starting to tick? Maybe. Her doctor back in Nashville had told her that pregnancy would be difficult with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, that she might experience more muscular and joint pain than normal as the pregnancy hormones kicked in and her weight increased. And then there was a chance of uterine rupture or placenta problems. Pre-term labor and other things that made her shudder.
But Taryn liked kids and if she wanted to have them she wouldn’t let health issues get in the way. She wasn't sure she liked the idea of her kids inheriting something painful and as symptomatic as her EDS was, especially from her, but Taryn was realistic enough to know that in this day and age everyone was bound to end up with something anyway.
She just wasn’t sure she was ready to have any. She and Matt had barely talked about the future. She still wasn’t even sure she could call what they were doing “dating.” At the moment it wasn’t any different than what they’d been doing since they were kids, only they were having sex now. And she wasn’t doing it with anyone else.
The gravel road ran past the old stone shop, carpenter's shop, and west family dwelling then rounded a small bend. She hadn’t realized she’d walked so far and was about to turn around when something up ahead on the left past the corn crib caught her eye; she’d found the old cemetery Julie spoke of.
With Miss Dixie slung around her neck she proceeded, intent on checking it out. Taryn loved cemeteries; she always thought of them as safe places and especially loved the old ones with their crumbling stones sticking haphazardly from the ground and ancient wrought-iron fences.
This one, positioned on a little hill overlooking the valley, didn’t have nearly as many stones as she would have expected. There were perhaps a dozen or so and the dates stopped after the turn of the century. Maybe, she thought, family members who lived on the outside had taken their loved ones away to bury them. Or maybe there was another, newer, one on the other side of the park. She needed to dig out her map again.
She could hear the sounds of the cars whizzing by on the main road below her, and somewhere off in the distance was the vague chatter of school children on a field trip, but she had the cemetery to herself. No other tourists had made it up there, yet, so she felt less awkward about walking around and talking to herself.
“Don’t make a real point of cleaning you guys off, do they?” she asked one stone, perched at a kind of jaunty angle and covered in weeds. The stone had crumbled too much for her to read the name or date. She had online friends in her Abandoned Places Facebook group who loved to go trekking in the mountains and countryside and find old, forgotten cemeteries. They'd do rubbings on the stones. Taryn loved the way they looked.
“How come I never do anything like that anymore?” she asked herself aloud. “How come I don't get out and explore, or have fun like I used to?”
Suddenly, she was inexplicably angry with herself. Since the whole ghost thing started with Miss Dixie a year ago she hadn't felt like herself. And now, with these EDS symptoms getting more and more prevalent (seemed like something new every day) it felt like she was living in someone else's body. She barely recognized herself anymore. It had been so long since she'd spent the day as she wanted without thought to pain, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, whether she was too hot or too cold, blood pressure spikes (or dips), and fainting. On her bad days it was hard to get out of bed. And she was someone who used to go hiking, had camped out near the Grand Canyon with Matt in college and hiked five miles in the blazing heat of the desert!
On her good days she worked nonstop, from the minute she woke up until she went to bed, trying to squeeze in as much as possible just in case she didn't get another chance for awhile. The only reason she was doing so well at Shaker Town now was because her orthopedist had given her injections in her back and hip before she left and she'd found a decent combination of nerve pain meds and ant-inflammatories to take. But who the hell wanted to be on pain meds for the rest of their lives?
Sighing in frustration, Taryn continued on among the headstones, trying to read names when she could and bending over to pull up weeds when they were as tall as her. To a taller monument, nearly her size, she peered down and studied the inscription. “Hello, Morgan,” she introduced herself. “What did you do to deserve a few extra inches?” Then she giggled at her own small joke, a foreign sound to her since she wasn't normally the giggling type.
The crabgrass scratched at her feet and she was s
neezing from the goldenrods when she stumbled over something thin and papery. When she looked down Taryn jumped a mile and screeched a little, the sound echoing off the hill. Sure, the snake was already out of the skin but the sucker had to be at least three feet long. “Okay, that’s enough of that,” she muttered.
Taryn didn’t do snakes.
She walked back through the field, gingerly watching her step and studying the ground beneath her, just waiting for a pissed off rattler or Copperhead to come slithering after her, armed with revenge. He had to have a brother somewhere. As her grandmother always said, when it comes to snakes where there's one, there's two.
Ironically, she could handle a few ghosts but the idea of things that could strike or sting her just scared the hell out of her. Eh, she never claimed to be logical.
After being at the park for a few days Taryn realized that if she didn't do a supply run soon she'd go out of her mind. She would need to make a town run, for everyone else’s sake if not her own. Nobody deserved to be around her without chocolate or caffeine in her system. The small refrigerator she’d lugged to her room (very un-Shakeresque but a girl had cravings) was empty. She couldn’t afford to keep buying drinks from the vending machine. While she was out she’d try to throw in some fruit, too, just to make it look good. Taryn had no idea why she thought she needed to impress the store clerks but she did.
Shaker Town (Taryn's Camera Book 4) Page 4
