by Theresa Weir
Now that it was over, now that she could think a little more clearly, she figured out why she’d blacked out. It was easy. Hardly a morsel of food had passed her lips since her arrival in Egypt. And what she’d seen was a continuation of her old nightmare. Once she got out of Egypt, once she got out of that awful motel, things would return to normal.
Everyone was waiting for an answer. Aware of Daniel just behind her, Cleo said, “I did see something.”
Jo let out a gasp. The twins clapped their hands and bounced a little. Harvey let out a snort. Parker said nothing, and Dr. Campbell took her by the elbow. “Sit down and tell us about it.” He led her to a cozy spot in the corner of the room, where she took a seat on a soft, fabric-covered chair, the séance group gathering around her, all but Daniel, who perched a hip on the corner of Parker’s desk, arms crossed over his chest.
“I saw a road,” Cleo began. “A gravel road.”
“Yes?” Jo asked.
Cleo knew she could have made up anything, but she went ahead and stuck to the dream, hoping to convey its eerie mood, thus lending credibility to her story. “The road turned to dirt.” She concentrated, trying to remember. “Dirt with grass growing in the middle, and weeds on either side.” In her mind, Cleo pictured the road. She remembered her red toenails. And something she hadn’t seen in the dream-dry dust from the road sifting over them, covering her feet in a fine powder. Through the tangle of weeds was the peak of a barn.
“A barn,” she said. “I saw a barn.”
Behind her, Daniel let out a low curse. Jo waved her hand at him, irritated by his interruption.
“An old red barn. I don’t think it was being used, because it had a feeling of abandonment about it.”
Her heart raced.
“On top of the barn was a weathervane.” She remembered the way it had creaked, turning slowly one direction, then another. “It had a pig on it.”
She remembered going inside, remembered the shovel, remembered digging, remembered the horror that gripped her.
“Is that everything?” Jo asked.
Fifteen seconds ticked by before Cleo answered. “That’s everything.” The rest was too personal. The rest had nothing to do with them. It was her nightmare, the nightmare she carried with her.
“Well, that gives us a place to start,” Jo said, for the first time sounding not quite as enthused. “I must admit I was hoping for a little more detail. Are you sure you didn’t see anything inside the barn?” she asked hopefully.
Cleo shook her head.
“This has gone far enough,” Daniel said. “Can’t you see she’s scamming you? She’s going to send us off on a wild-goose chase so she can skip town. A barn? Come on. There are hundreds of abandoned barns around here. And the weathervane. Half of them have pigs on them.” He made a pleading motion with one hand. “Come on, Jo. Open your eyes.”
Dr. Campbell cleared his throat, then offered his opinion. “I have to agree, Jo. It’s a little vague.”
“I thought you were all for this,” Daniel said.
“I was, but that was before. We don’t want to end up on the national news with the entire country laughing at us.”
Jo was quiet, her brow furrowed in thought. She turned back to Cleo. “You wouldn’t skip town, would you?” It was apparent that her confidence in Cleo was slipping fast. Her question was more of a plea. She was begging Cleo to say no. “You wouldn’t run out like that-would you?”
Cleo swallowed, her gaze going from Jo to Daniel. She could see in his eyes that if she didn’t tell Jo, he would. “Actually,” she said, not looking at anyone, drawing small nervous circles on the arm of the green paisley-print chair, “I already skipped town once.” Her voice dropped. “Daniel came after me and brought me back.”
“Oh.”
With that one word Jo managed to convey just how crushed she was.
Cleo felt horrible. How could she have done such a thing to such an open, trusting person?
“Was anything that happened here real?” Jo asked.
“The barn. I did see a barn. I swear.”
“Well,” Jo said, still obviously trying to take in the extent of Cleo’s deception, “I guess that’s something.”
Cleo couldn’t stay there any longer. She pushed herself out of the chair. Without looking to the left or right, she aimed herself in the direction of the door. People fell away, letting her through. Without stopping to get her belongings, she headed for the door, shoving it open, stepping out into the bright sun, the smothering heat. She hurried down the steps, then turned left on the sidewalk, knowing Beau and Daniel lived over there somewhere. She would leave. How, she wasn’t sure. She had approximately thirty-five cents to her name, give or take a few pennies. She didn’t like to hitchhike-it was dangerous and degrading-but she would do it.
She’d gone perhaps two blocks when she heard a car pull up beside her. She didn’t look to see who it was. Instead she kept walking, her eyes focused straight ahead. The car slowed, keeping pace with her. Daniel. She felt sure it was Daniel.
He honked. Ass.
She kept walking.
The car stopped. She heard a door slam, then Daniel was running to catch up. He jumped in front of her, walking backward as she continued to walk forward.
“Hold up,” he said, a little out of breath.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to put up a tent and open a palm-reading shop on Main Street.” She had to get Premonition. She needed Premonition. How could she have ever thought of leaving him? She must have been temporarily insane. “I’m going to your house to get my dog, and then I’m leaving.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Jo doesn’t want you to leave.”
She stopped.
He stopped.
“She wants you to stay. She wants you to try it again.”
“That’s ridiculous.” She shoved her way past him to continue walking. He fell into step beside her.
He pulled out his billfold, extracted two twenty-dollar bills, and handed them to her. “Tomorrow. She wants to try it again tomorrow. In the meantime-” He held the money in front of her. “Take it.” He shook it, but she still refused. “You have to eat.”
Truer words were never spoken. She snatched the money and stuffed it into the front pocket of her jeans.
“I want to get my dog.” She’d left him behind once. She couldn’t do it a second time.
The sun was so bright that stepping under a shade tree plunged them into cool darkness.
“Let me give you a ride back to the motel, then I’ll pick you up later to get your dog.”
“What’s wrong with now?”
“Beau’s not home. He should be there when you get the dog. I don’t want him to come home and find him gone.”
She could understand that. What she didn’t understand was why Jo wanted her to stay after everything that had happened.
“I don’t get it,” she said, looking up at him. “Why does she want me to come back?”
“That’s the way Jo is. She believes in giving people second chances.”
“Unlike you.”
“That’s right. Unlike me.”
Chapter Thirteen
Cleo sat on the edge of the bed staring at the stained wall with its greasy handprints. She tried to make sense of her feelings, but like so many things in her life, it was too hard, too complex. She found herself thinking back to a time she didn’t like to remember, to a past that hadn’t been photo-album perfect…
People said they were the ideal family. A mother, a father, two children-a boy and a girl. They went to church as a family. They went to Bible school and the county fair as a family. They were involved. But it was all a carefully constructed front.
Cleo’s father, Ben Tyler, had been born into wealth, coming from an impressive lineage of town founders, state politicians, and businessmen. But unlike his outgoing father and grandfather, Ben Tyler had possessed a crippling shyness, making him a perfect target for Cleo’s mother, R
uth Dixon.
The Dixons were the most undesirable of the undesirables in the tightly knit community of Norfolk, Indiana. None of the Dixon men worked. They were too busy lying and cheating and drinking.
Marrying Ben Tyler and old money gave Ruth the respect and the community status she craved. And while she worked to continually upgrade herself, Ben dissolved into the background to become the shadow Cleo always thought of as her father.
Ruth’s standing in the community became an obsession, a driving force behind everything the woman did and thought. So when Cleo came home from college that first Christmas with a boyfriend who wasn’t from that shining inner circle, who wasn’t even from the community of Norfolk at all, things got ugly. Her mother turned on her, and on poor unsuspecting Jordan. Jordan, who made Cleo laugh, who was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
Ruth pulled her daughter aside and told her Jordan wouldn’t do at all.
The longer Cleo lived, the more she came to realize that everybody had an agenda, some more self-serving than others. At the moment when Ruth had taken Cleo aside, a fog lifted and Cleo finally understood her mother-and was horrified by what she saw. Ruth Tyler’s agenda had always been for her children to make her look good to her friends and the people in the community. Her children existed for the purpose of upgrading her social standing. And of course, dating someone from beyond the community did nothing toward that end, because in a small town, outsiders didn’t get you any points.
“That’s too bad,” Cleo had answered when her mother told her Jordan wouldn’t do. “Because we’re moving in together.”
“B-But-” Ruth stammered, indignant, disbelieving. “I forbid it. You have to do what I say. I’m your mother. I’ve done everything for you. Everything!”
It was true. As children, Cleo and her brother had been embarrassingly pampered. Later, Cleo’s shrink had explained that spoiling was her mother’s way of keeping her children dependent, making them feel incapable of taking care of themselves. While Ruth had loved and doted on the children Cleo and Adrian had been, the adults they became were beyond her grasp. Ruth Tyler seemed to resent the grown-ups who had taken her children’s place.
“It’s Jordan or me,” Ruth had announced, confident of her rank.
For Cleo, the choice was easy.
Cleo walked out of her parents’ home that day and didn’t return until a year and a half later when her father slipped out of the world as quietly as he’d lived in it. After the funeral, Ruth tried to talk Cleo into moving back home, going through the usual guilt manipulations, but they no longer worked.
The funeral would have been easier to bear if only Adrian had been there. He would have come if Cleo had begged him, but the last thing she wanted was to make him do something out of guilt. He’d had enough of that in his life. They both had.
“I’m not going, Cleo,” Adrian had told her when she’d called with the news of their father’s death. “She’ll think I’m going for her. You know, I used to resent the way Dad wouldn’t stand up to her, but now I realize he couldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of person.” The conversation drifted back to the funeral. “No, it’s just between me and Dad. And that’s the way I want to keep it.”
Cleo cried right there on the telephone. But it wasn’t because she missed her father. How could you miss somebody you’d never even known? No, she cried because she hadn’t known him.
“I’m sorry,” Adrian told her.
“Make a lot of noise,” she said. What she meant but couldn’t say was, Don’t waste your life. “Just be sure to make a lot of noise.”
If Adrian didn’t understand her, that was okay. She could say things like that to him. She could say anything.
There might have been some harsh words spoken the day of the funeral, Cleo couldn’t remember. And when Cleo left, she wondered if she would ever see her hometown again.
She hoped not.
Six months later, however, she had the accident that left her with a broken arm and cracked pelvis. She had nowhere else to go after she left the hospital but home.
The thing that was the most difficult to take was her mother’s obvious pleasure at the turn of events. She was glad Jordan had died. She kept going on and on about how nice it was to have Cleo to herself, and how things never would have worked out for Cleo and Jordan. “In two years, you would have had a toddler with maybe another child on the way, and he’d be long gone,” she told Cleo one morning as they sat across from each other eating breakfast in the very kitchen where Cleo had played at her mother’s feet as a small child.
Cleo’s toast stuck in her throat. She looked at her mother, thinking she couldn’t have heard right. But she had.
“It was destiny,” Ruth said. “Destiny stepping in and taking charge.”
“Mother, I loved Jordan. And I’ll probably never be able to have those children you’re talking about. I had a miscarriage, remember?” The bleeding wouldn’t stop, and when the doctors were finished with her, she’d been told it was doubtful she’d be able to have any more children.
“The miscarriage was a blessing since you weren’t married,” Ruth said. “It was all for the best. There are other men out there. And children…well.” She gave Cleo a penetrating look. “Children are a heartache.”
For the first time since returning home, Cleo felt anger breaking through the numbness.
Seeing it, Ruth continued. “Of course, if you’re so set on having children, you could adopt. Then there’s that nice Grant Cummings, who owns the lumberyard. His wife left him with three kids to take care of. Still, I always imagined you married to a doctor…”
I have to get out of here.
It was the first clear thought Cleo had had since the accident. And when it came, she couldn’t let it go. She recognized it as truth, as a very important truth. If she was ever to find Cleo again, she had to leave.
Noticing that her daughter wasn’t eating, Ruth reached across the table, spooned a glob of strawberry preserves on her toast, and began spreading it for her. “Here you go. You always liked my strawberry preserves.”
“Mother, I’m full. I don’t want any more.”
Ruth kept spreading the preserves as if Cleo had never spoken. When she finished with the second piece, she put down the knife and pushed the plate closer the Cleo.
“There you go.”
“I can’t eat it.”
“Why?”
“I told you, I’m full. Don’t you ever listen?”
“Don’t you like my strawberry preserves? I made them just for you. When you were little…” Her face lit up, giving Cleo a brief glimpse of the love she had showered upon Cleo as a child. “I remember how you were always in the garden, eating strawberries. You used to pull that little wagon with a stuffed animal in it, and you’d go out and pick strawberries. And then you’d bring them back in, and we would wash them, and sit here at this table and have them with cream. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” Cleo said. They’d had this conversation a thousand times. Problem was, Cleo was no longer that little girl whose mother was her entire world. And then she spoke the words she knew would set her mother off. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” Cleo stated, not a trace of emotion in her voice or in her heart. It was just something she knew she had to do. “I’m going back to Madison.”
Ruth shook her head. “What you need to do is move out of that apartment and come home. You can’t take care of yourself when you’re well-how are you going to take care of yourself with your injuries?”
“I’ll manage.”
“You can’t take care of yourself.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“I won’t allow it.”
Cleo pressed her lips together. There was no use arguing. She would simply leave. And she did.
She called a cab to take her to the bus station. All the while Ruth screamed at her, following her around the house as Cleo gathered up her things, following her out the door to the end of the walk where she went to wa
it for the cab. But never helping in any way. No, Ruth Tyler would never help her children leave.
The cab pulled up and the driver put Cleo’s suitcase in the trunk, casting nervous glances at both women as he skirted the car’s fender. And then Cleo was sitting in the backseat. Through the closed window, she saw her mother standing on the sidewalk, her face a mask of rage.
Yes, people said they were the perfect family.
Back in Madison, Wisconsin, in the second-floor apartment she’d shared with Jordan, Cleo opened the door to a pile of mail, most of it addressed to Jordan. Not far away was a piece of dried toast with a bite taken out. On the night of the accident, before they’d left to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Cleo had laughingly fed him. He’d taken a bite, then grabbed her and lifted her off her feet, the toast dropping to the floor unnoticed.
One day shortly after her return to Madison, Jordan ’s parents came by to pick up his belongings. They packed, grabbing things that weren’t Jordan ’s while Cleo numbly and silently watched. They asked about school and she said it was okay even though she’d dropped out. She decided not to tell them about the baby. It was too hard to find the right words, and it would just make things more unbearable for them.
Cleo got to the point where she left the apartment only to get her prescription pain pills. One of those times, when she was walking home from the pharmacy, she passed the library, stopped, and went inside.
She walked up and down the aisle, staring blankly at titles until she came across a book on clairvoyance, Talking to the Dead. And another one, Transcending Time and Space.
Cleo checked out both books, along with a few others on similar subjects.
She read the books, absorbing the information like a sponge. When she was done, she went in search of more knowledge. She found everything she could on the subject of speaking to the dead. It was what she needed. It was the reason she’d been drawn to the library, to find the books that would lead her back to Jordan. More than anything, she wanted to talk to him, needed to talk to him. She wanted to tell him she was sorry for the fight they’d had…
