I let out a breath, forcing my consciousness back to the bright, beautiful world around me, allowing it to separate the past from the present.
Yes. Elmcreek was the perfect escape for all of us this summer.
“Oh man, my hat just blew off.” Angie broke the quiet. “And—augh—I can’t reach it. Could one of you guys help me?”
“I volunteer Riley,” announced Lauren.
Exhaling, I stowed the cob I held in my hand in my sack. “Yeah, okay, shortie. Coming.”
I waded through the field, batting away flies and pushing aside leaves until I reached her. The five-foot-five girl with curly blonde hair was standing on her tiptoes, the hem of her short blue dress hiked high up her legs as she stretched for a floppy pink sun hat that was ridiculously out of her reach. She turned around to face me, her hazel eyes meeting mine. She had a smile on her round, impish face, and her light blonde eyebrows, so fair in the daylight they were almost invisible, rose in expectation.
I eyed the hat again and tried to reach for it myself first, given that I was a fair bit taller than her, but I couldn’t, so we ended up coordinating a balancing act with her on my shoulders, knocking my own hat to the ground in the process.
“Wo-hoah, it’s like a whole other world up here,” Angie gasped as her head rose above the jungle of corn.
“Just be quick,” I muttered from between her chunky thighs. “Your butt is breaking my shoulders.”
“It’s all muscle and you know it,” she retorted, before stretching out.
Then she stilled.
“What’s taking so long?” I asked, squinting in the glaring sunlight.
“Hey, I thought the Churnleys didn’t have neighbors on that side of the woods.”
“What?”
“Looks like there are people over there, sunbathing on logs.” She pointed northward, toward the direction of the woods that bordered the Churnleys’ portion of land. I realized she had grabbed the hat already, and was now just staring straight ahead.
“Okay—I’m glad you’re having a nice time up there, but if you’re finished I’m gonna—”
Angie’s knees suddenly clenched around my head. “Wait, Riley. They’re dudes… Four of them. They look like lumberjacks or something. Here, you can see too.” She dove a hand into the side pocket of her dress and slipped out her phone. “That’s what a zoom lens is for… Still got a bit of battery left.” A sharp click sounded as Angie’s phone camera went off.
“Okay, geddown now,” I growled, tugging at her ankle.
She acquiesced, sliding down me with a self-satisfied look on her face. She squinted down at her phone to check out the photo she’d just taken, but it was far too bright to see the screen properly.
“Well, now we all have an extra incentive to hurry up and get back to the house.” She winked at me, before donning her hat and continuing to pick corn.
Smirking, I rolled my eyes and picked up my hat, then moved to return to my spot in the field, when Lauren suddenly materialized out of the bushes in front of me. Her faded blue dungarees looked decidedly grubbier than when we had started, and her coffee-colored ponytail was a tangled mess, but her brown eyes sparkled with mild interest. Adjusting her spectacles primly, she flashed us a sardonic smile.
“Did I hear someone say ‘lumberjacks’?”
Water was more than enough of an incentive for me to finish the job quickly. After my little break, I worked at twice the speed and managed to pick enough corn to fill all three of our sacks within the next fifteen minutes. Then, lugging each sack over our shoulders, we traipsed back to the wooden two-story house that stood at the edge of the cornfields.
We mounted the steps to the porch, passing the Churnleys’ three lazy golden retrievers, who barely raised an eyelid as we reached the door. It had been left on the latch, and Angie pushed it open with a creak. We stepped directly into the kitchen/dining area, where we were met with the pungent smell of Mrs. Churnley’s cooking, and the short, podgy lady herself standing in front of a stove, her bouncy gray hair cooped up in a brown bonnet, while her bald husband sat at the dining table dutifully peeling potatoes.
Their eyes shot to us as we strode in and planted our sacks down on the wooden floorboards.
“Where should we leave these, ma’am?” Angie asked, panting.
“Oh, good girls!” Mrs. Churnley left the frying pan she had been monitoring and bustled over to examine our finds. “You got some real beauties here! I’ll have Mr. Churnley skin some for lunch.”
Mr. Churnley, who was of a similar height and build to his wife, waddled over to join her in examining the corn with his monobrow furrowed, while Lauren, Angie, and I hurried to the sink. We each grabbed a metal cup from the drainer and quickly served ourselves water from a large pitcher. Once we’d swallowed two cups in a row, Angie remarked to the couple, “Seems like you might have new neighbors, by the way.”
Mrs. Churnley turned, her rheumy eyes widening as she made her way back to the frying pan. “Hmm?”
“Yeah,” Angie replied, “we—or I—saw four guys lounging around in the field next door. They were shirtless, so I assumed they were sunbathing…” She set her cup down and dove her hand back into her pocket to retrieve her phone. But as she navigated to her photo app and touched the screen to zoom in, she frowned. “Huh. That’s real weird.” Her eyes narrowed to slits as she squinted at the screen.
“What?” Lauren and I asked.
“I can’t, uh, make them out in the photo,” she replied, still looking befuddled. “There’s just logs. Odd. I could have sworn I saw dudes there too.”
Lauren’s lips twitched in a wry smile as she took the phone from Angie. “Yup,” she confirmed. “Logs.”
I peered over Lauren’s shoulder to take a look at the photo for myself. A cluster of four logs lay near the edge of a flat field, right near the woods’ border… Definitely no shirtless lumberjacks.
Mrs. Churnley chortled, nudging Angie in the arm with her elbow. “Seems we all react to the heat differently, eh? The only ‘shirtless dude’ I’ve seen around here in the last twenty years, other than Mr. Churnley, is Mr. Doherty, our neighbor on the southern side of the fence, and I wouldn’t say he’s anything to get excited about—unless curly white chest hairs are your thing.” To our alarm, she threw us a salacious wink.
“Now, Nora,” her husband spoke up in a gruff voice, “don’t get the ladies too excited.”
I felt myself turn as red as the tomatoes on the kitchen counter as Mr. and Mrs. Churnley erupted into raucous laughter. Angie, Lauren, and I cleared our throats in an attempt to join in, before inching toward the door.
“We’re just gonna go and rest a bit before lunch if that’s okay,” Angie said with a plastic smile.
“Of course!” Mrs. Churnley replied, and the three of us swiftly took our leave. “It’ll be ready within the hour!”
I let out a breath as we entered the narrow corridor. They were definitely an unusual couple. Apparently they used to live in the city, and worked as bankers before they got so burned out on metropolitan life that they had a midlife crisis and swung the other way—completely the other way. They bought this patch of land decades ago, and judging by the state of the house, they probably hadn’t renovated it since they moved in.
We climbed the rickety staircase that led to the second floor, where the three of us shared a bedroom fitted with three single beds. Although the Churnleys had space for guests, it was quite obvious they weren’t used to having any. There were two other bedrooms on our level—one belonging to the old couple, and another that had fallen into disrepair. Angie suspected the latter had belonged to their only child, a boy who had died at the age of thirteen from a rare form of cancer.
Angie’s grandmother was convinced they were terribly lonely, but would never admit to it, since they’d “rather rot” than go back to living like the rest of the world. So when she learned that Angie, Lauren, and I wanted to do something memorable this summer, she had been quick to t
hink of her old friends, and had contacted them by snail mail.
Lauren was the first to use the en-suite bathroom when we entered our musty-smelling room, while Angie and I flopped back on our creaky beds. The shower started, and we sniggered as Lauren stepped in and sighed to herself, “Ah, luxury.”
It was kind of amazing the things you appreciated when everything got stripped from you. I imagined I’d feel utterly spoiled when I returned home in a month.
Angie blew out softly, staring up at the bare wooden beams strutted across the cobwebbed ceiling. “I could have sworn I saw dudes there,” she mumbled.
I smiled to myself. “It was an illusion, Angie,” I said in a dreamy voice. “A mirage… Where normal people would see an oasis of water in a desert, you would see an oasis of, well…” My tone dropped. “I do kind of worry what that says about you.”
She chucked a pillow at me. “Shut up.”
“Hey,” I said, changing the subject, “why don’t we go visit the creek this afternoon? After lunch, we can gather the herbs quickly, and then have the rest of the day free.”
“Suits me,” she muttered. “We’ll see what Lauren thinks.”
I stood up to stretch out my arms and, yawning, caught sight of myself in the stained mirror near the window. My brown hair was hardly in better condition than Lauren’s or Angie’s, even though I’d braided it and then wrapped it in a tight bun, and the corners of my blue eyes were tinged reddish—they were feeling a little irritated, come to think of it. I wasn’t used to being so close to nature.
The shower stopped abruptly. Lauren emerged from the bathroom a moment later, clutching a towel around her bare body, her shoulder-length hair foaming with shampoo. “So, the water just stopped,” she announced, her toes curling on the wooden floor as water pooled around her feet.
“Ah.” Angie threw her an amused, yet apologetic look. “Maybe—”
Before we could hear her speculation, Mrs. Churnley’s voice boomed up from the bottom of the staircase. “You used too much water at one time, dear—whichever one of you was in the shower just now. I’ll have Mr. Churnley come up and show you how to manually work the pump—”
“Oh, don’t bother, ma’am,” Lauren replied quickly. “I’m sure Mr. Churnley has enough to do.”
She looked back at the two of us with tight lips, and I frowned, assessing our options. “Maybe we should just save our hair washing for the creek and use this bathroom only for quick showering—Angie and I were gonna suggest we go there this afternoon anyway.”
Lauren blinked, taking a moment to process my suggestion. “Hair washing in the creek,” she repeated, almost robotically. “Right. Okay. So, I’ll just… wrap up this sticky slop of hair and wait then. That’s fine. No problem.”
With that, she turned and marched stiffly back into the bathroom. Exchanging glances with Angie, I laughed. It seemed Lauren was getting past the stage of expecting things to work and surrendering to the experience. And that was good.
It was the first step toward us all having a lot of fun.
Chapter 2
“So where is the creek exactly?” Angie asked Mrs. Churnley. We stood on the porch after eating as quick a lunch as we could manage, with the couple for company, and finishing our duties in the greenhouse.
Mrs. Churnley prodded a chubby finger toward the tractor path that ran in front of the house. “Just take a right turn once you’re out of the gate and follow that track. It’ll lead you to the creek after about a thirty-minute walk. Do make sure you’re back before it’s dark, since there won’t be any lights to lead you.”
“Sounds simple enough!” I said brightly.
“Thanks, ma’am,” Lauren said, adjusting her towel-turban, beneath which the shampoo had mostly dried and turned her hair into a curious blend of stiff and sticky.
As we turned to leave, passing the lounging dogs and heading down the steps, Mrs. Churnley added, “Oh, and watch out for leeches in the creek! Neither Mr. Churnley nor I have been down there since last summer, but they’re usually around at this time of year.”
Lauren’s jaw tightened. “Thanks.”
“Leeches beat snakes though, right?” Angie snickered as we stepped through the gate and began our journey along the track. Breathing in through her nose and setting her gaze straight ahead, Lauren chose not to comment on that.
I was carrying a large bag stuffed with towels, two jumbo bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and enough drinking water (I’d made sure of it myself this time), and we all wore our bikinis beneath our clothes. Lauren, being Lauren, was also sporting green jelly shoes.
“This place really is in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?” I remarked, both admiring and feeling kind of intimidated by the endless sprawl of no-man’s land that surrounded us. Having been brought up in the city and not traveled much in my life, the largest stretches of nature I was used to seeing were city parks. This was something else. It made me feel small and insignificant, like a tiny piece of a far greater existence that really didn’t care about my life plans or problems.
“Ya know,” Angie said, her tone taking on a distant quality as she joined me in gazing out on our surroundings, “I wish we were here for longer than four weeks.”
A melancholic silence fell between us. Even Lauren didn’t remark. None of us had to ask why Angie wished for that. Despite our proclamations that our friendship would stay the same in spite of the distance, deep down I was sure we were all doubtful about how the next stage of our lives would really affect it. If I was honest with myself, I didn’t see how our dynamic wouldn’t change. It seemed inevitable that we would drift apart, no matter how much we loved one another. We would meet new friends, be exposed to different ideas, and the little quirks we’d come to know each other for would change along with our habits.
We would grow into different people; there was no escaping that. The friends Jean and Roger were closest to now, in their mid-forties, were not the same as those they’d had in high school.
The thought made me feel insecure, but also all the more fiercely grateful that we had come to this place, so stupidly cut off from everything that could distract us from us.
Glancing at my friends, whose eyes, like mine, had turned to the gravel crunching beneath our feet, a renewed determination rolled through me to make the most of the next four weeks that we possibly could.
I allowed a toothy grin to spread across my face as I set my gaze on the entrance to the woods, where the track was leading us.
“Last one to the trees is a roach dropping,” I announced, before rocketing forward. Lauren yelped as I caught her arm and dragged her along with me, her jelly shoes slapping on the ground. Angie didn’t need an assisted head start—she might have been the shortest of the three of us, but she was the fittest. She quickly caught up with us, and it was, predictably, Lauren who earned the unfortunate title, Angie and I just about tying in first place.
We skidded to a stop once we were over the woods’ threshold, and looked around. It was cooler and darker than I had expected it to be in here—I was surprised by how thick the trees were. Faint birdsong drifted down from the canopy of branches overhead, and the air was still, with very little breeze.
“Kinda creepy,” Angie said in a hushed tone.
“Beautiful creepy,” I replied, just as softly.
We walked on in silence, and I relished the peace, the woods’ quiet energy thrumming around us. Direct sunlight touched our faces only intermittently as we followed the path straight ahead.
Then Angie stopped abruptly. “Hey,” she whispered. “Do you hear that?”
Lauren and I halted and listened. I was confused at first as to what exactly Angie was referring to, but then I heard it—a distant thunk, thunk, thunk. Like the sound of metal against wood.
We met each other’s gazes, and I knew exactly what Angie was about to say from the triumphant gleam in her eyes before she said it.
“Lumberjacks!” she whispered. “Maybe I wasn’t imagining th
em after all! They could’ve spotted my head above the crops and just rolled off the logs before I took the picture, or something…”
Lauren frowned at Angie, looking dubious, but then shrugged. “I would’ve done the same if I noticed some perv watching me.”
Ignoring Lauren’s comment, Angie strayed from the track and began to creep through the undergrowth toward the noise, leaving the two of us staring after her.
Lauren’s thick eyebrows rose high above the rim of her glasses as she exhaled. “So, are we going dude hunting now, or to the creek? Because they’re in two opposite directions, and as much as I would—”
Lauren faltered as Angie turned around and held a finger to her lips.
The noise had stopped.
There was a pregnant pause as we waited another thirty seconds to see if it would start again, and when it didn’t, Angie let out a sigh and ambled back to us.
“Seems they’re shy,” she remarked with a droll smile.
“Okay, let’s keep moving,” Lauren said firmly, taking the lead. “Some of us have crap to scrape off our heads.”
As Mrs. Churnley had promised, the creek was easy to find. We heard gushing about five minutes before we reached it, and quickened our pace to arrive before a beautiful, gently flowing basin of water enclosed by stooping tree branches and bordered by bushes of white and purple wildflowers.
A Shade of Vampire 51 Page 24
