Spellbinders Collection
Page 33
She checked her notes again, scribbled from the phone call. Followed the turns on the map, winding inland from Stonefort Village and its harbor nestled between curved points of land. No, she wasn't lost, rare though that would have been. The notes sent her on another half mile into blank white space, then said turn left into a driveway. The only "driveway" she'd seen in the last fifteen minutes had been the front porch of a fox den.
No money to be made here. That voice on the phone had been playing a prank. But Kate wore two hats. The hardhat of carpenter-and-stonemason-turned-contractor said to find a space between the trees, turn around, and write the morning off as a nice drive in the September woods. The part-time cop hat with the tarnished shield said "bullshit."
She was still in Stonefort Township, still in her territory as town constable and general all-around nosy fishwife, paid by the selectmen to follow gossip and know about anything odd or illegal that happened over several hundred square miles of moose and antisocial people who'd barely heard of government and didn't much care for the concept, mister man. She ought to find out what was at the end of a road that didn't show up on her map.
A road that somebody used, often enough to keep the scrub cherries and alders from taking over, and that looked like it had been here for decades if not centuries. She knelt and dug at the roadbed, finding cool coarse washed gravel of a made road, not the scraped dirt of loggers swamping out a clear run at their prey. Something definitely smelled fishy.
She climbed back in and cranked the truck, crossing fingers on both hands, and the engine roared to smooth life and then settled into a purr, surprising her again. Not even a cloud of oil smoke in the rear view mirrors. New engine, old habits. And the mirrors weren't cracked anymore, either. Kate shook her head.
Alice Haskell. That girl knew what was good for you, and did it whether you wanted it done or not. "Hey, Charlie, could you hitch a ride out to Ayers Island and bring Kate's truck back on the ferry? Here's the keys. While you're at it, rebuild the bastard from winch to tow-hitch." Probably would have cost less to buy a new truck, but Kate had turned that down. Twice.
So Alice went around to the back door, applying the magical touch of Haskell money. Stopping her was like trying to argue with a glacier.
Kate called it "Haskell money" out of habit, less than a drop in the bucket of a considerable fortune. Alice seemed to think of it more like a trust fund for her tribe, and apparently Kate had become an honorary Naskeag Wabanaki when she moved in with Alice.
Anyway, Alice had handed her back the keys when they both got out of the hospital, done deal. Take it or leave it, and a contractor needed a truck. One that could haul its rated load of a full ton of lumber or Sheetrock for the first time in ten years was a real plus. It even started and stopped when she asked it.
She eased the truck into gear, the clutch smooth and reliable and strange, and used the engine to brake her down the slope, four-wheel-drive and low range engaged. Only a fool explored roads like this faster than a walk. Washouts lurking under drifted leaves, high-centered rocks sitting in ambush, bog holes that looked like innocent puddles from a recent rain — the Maine woods had their ways of eating old roads and careless trucks. And she didn't feel up to limping the miles back to civilization for a tow.
Down in the hollow, those cedars were old, old and tall and straight-grained and heavy with fragrance, and someone should have fed them to a shingle or clapboard mill a century ago. Headed up the far slope, the truck rumbled into a grove of thick-boled white pines that would have left a timber merchant drooling, three and four feet through and the trunks shooting up fifty feet clean to the first limbs.
Hairs stood up on her forearms and the back of her neck. This road was a time-warp into another century. She pulled up to another crest, an opening with mossy old oaks to the south and blueberry barrens rising away to the north, and stopped. Blueberry land usually meant dry fields, sand and gravel and bare rock, should be a safe place to turn the truck. Her odometer and the phone message said there should be a driveway . . . .
She sat and studied the sweep of low bushes red and purple with the touch of autumn, the stone outcrops scattered on the crest, the clear blue sky. Something still set her teeth on edge. There was a lot of commercial blueberry land tucked away in the wilds of Sunrise County, but those roads showed up on the map.
Kate grimaced, shifted, winced again, shifted again — settling into a position that minimized the aches from her hip and shoulder. Wounds from her own gun, fired by her own daughter. Half of the ache was memory. She couldn't forget. Kate shook her head and fumbled for a cigarette.
Jackie. She stood in the middle of the trail ahead, a faint and wavery ghost, tall and muscular with short blonde hair like her mother and grandmother, a teenage scowl glooming her face. Kate kept seeing her daughter around town, all the places she'd used to be, all the places Kate expected her to be. Memories of pain and failure, haunting Kate.
The damnfool child had run away from home. Moved in with friends, Pratts, an old Stonefort family with mucho money from the import/export business. Drugs. Turned out Jackie had been involved in that for years. Not using, selling. Kate had been too busy keeping food on the table and a roof over their heads to see the signs.
Alice had gone out to the old Pratt place on separate business of her own, and Kate ended up there because of a vision of fire and death right out of one of Alice's Wagnerian operas. End result, the brat shot Alice in the back, turned and shot her mother, then ran 'round a corner and got her own self killed in a shootout with a rival drug gang. Kate concentrated on lighting the cigarette, hands shaking the flame on her late ex-husband's battered Zippo.
Let's hear it for the modern American family.
The first cigarette in an hour or so, she drew deep and held the nicotine in her lungs like the kids held each toke of their demon Weed. She couldn't smoke in the House, Alice's house.
Not that Alice told her she couldn't. She'd quit her nagging when Kate moved in, dropped her standard RN's coffin-nail rant about the threats of lung cancer and heart disease and yellow-stained teeth and smoker's breath in their kisses. Not that there'd been much of that, the condition both of them were in.
And the House didn't seem to mind her smoking, either. Rather otherwise. That was the problem.
The House, the Haskell House, ancient home of the Haskell Witches, much more aware than any pile of stone and wood ought to be and with some very strong opinions on the way the world should work, seemed to consider tobacco sacred. And anyone who crossed its worn oak threshold lived by the House's rules. It had unpleasant ways to enforce them.
More from James A. Hetley…
THE WILDWOOD SERIES
About The Summer Country:
Maureen Pierce works the night shift in a convenience store, carries a .38 Smith & Wesson in her pocket, and talks to trees. She knows enough clinical psychology to think that when the trees answer, it proves she's crazy. She can live with that.
She manages to get by in a world where she doesn't really fit, until the truth reaches out to touch her as she slogs home through the slushy midnight sidewalks of a February sleet storm. That truth offers a seductive promise of warmth and sun, green growing things and trees that really do answer when she talks to them. It tells her that she isn't truly human.
Now her blood heritage drags her from Maine into ancient myth three steps away from the modern world, with all the claws and teeth and cruelty intact. Camelot is dead. Arthur is dead. Law is dead. Power rules the Summer Country of Celtic myth, behind the Old Blood faces of beast-master Dougal, dark witch Fiona, and her cunning, treacherous twin brother Sean. Their plots entangle and threaten Maureen's sister Jo, Jo's human lover David, and Brian Albion -- the enigmatic Old Blood knight of the warrior Pendragons, who Maureen trusts about as far as she can throw him.
Maureen can become either a slave or a mighty witch, but her own dark past may be her worst enemy.
About The Winter Oak:
"Ha
ppily ever after" doesn't always work, even in fairy tales. Maureen Pierce has won her castle, her man, and her powers, after terrible suffering in The Summer Country. She has won a host of fierce enemies as well — among them, the powerful dark witch Fiona and the deadly black dragon Khe'sha, who plot vengeance. Many of the Old Blood fear the change that she brings to the Summer Country of Celtic myth, and the warrior Pendragons believe that her lover, Brian Albion, has betrayed their secrets.
If that wasn't bad enough, Maureen hates her castle for the pain she suffered there. She fears her new-found powers. The ghosts of old trauma still haunt her and those close to her — Brian, her sister Jo, and Jo's lover, the human bard David.
Against that, Maureen has the love of the Wildwood, the tangled, dangerous, above all magical forest surrounding the castle she won. She and those with her have honor -- a strange and rare and powerful concept in the Summer Country.
Holding her place turns out to be as hard as winning it, and she's going to need help.
Author Bio
James A. Hetley is also known as James A. Burton. He lives in the Maine setting of his Hetley-authored contemporary fantasy novels The Summer Country, The Winter Oak, Dragon’s Eye, and Dragon’s Teeth. His residence is an 1850s house suitable for a horror movie, with an electrical system installed while Thomas A. Edison still walked the earth, peeling lead-based paint, questionable plumbing, a furnace dating back to Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, a roof perpetually in need of shingling, and windows that rattle in the winter gales. He's an architect. Not just any architect, but he specializes in renovation and adaptive reuse of old buildings. Go figure.
Other diverse connections to his writing include black belt rank in Kempo karate, three years in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, a ham radio license, and such jobs as an electronics instructor, auto mechanic, trash collector, and operating engineer in a refrigeration plant. He continues a life-long fascination with antique crafts and the hand-tool skills of working wood and metal.
The Summer
Country
The Wildwood: Book One
by James A. Hetley
Copyright Information
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author‘s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2002 by James A. Hetley
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
eISBN: 978-1-937776-37-4
Also by James A. Hetley
The Wildwood Series:
The Summer Country
The Winter Oak
Stone Fort Series:
Dragon's Eye
Dragon's Teeth
Visit James online at www.JamesHetley.com.
Follow him on Twitter @JHetley.
Table of Contents
THE SUMMER COUNTRY
Copyright Information
Also by James A. Hetley
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Special Excerpt from The Winter Oak, The Wildwood Series Book #2
Author Bio
Dedication
To Merle, my "enabler," and the RECOG folks
who helped to polish this and patch the holes.
Chapter One
That man was still following her.
A gust of sleet stung Maureen's face when she glanced back into the night. Winter in Maine, she thought, you'd at least think the weather would have the decency to dump snow on you.
February had been a run of sleet and freezing rain, no damn good for skiing or anything--it just made the sidewalks into bobsled runs and the roads into skating rinks. People always pictured New England with those picture-postcard mounds of fluffy white stuff. Instead, most winters plastered the city with yellow-gray ice full of freeze-dried dog shit and dead pigeons.
She hated it. She ached to be out of it.
And that bastard had followed her through four turns to head right back towards the Quick Shop. He kept his distance, but he was still there. It wasn't chance. She hadn’t seen another person or even a car in the last fifteen minutes. What were her options?
The midnight streets vanished in a vision of green grass and trees, sunshine, warm breezes, and streams of peat-stained water the color of fresh-brewed tea. She breathed summer country, a cabin-fever dream she wanted so much she could smell the clover.
Wish, the whisper came, out of nowhere. Wish. And hard on the back of the thought came a memory of Grandfather O'Brian's voice, "Be careful what you wish for, my darlin'. The gods just might be givin' it to you."
The thought brought tears to her eyes, or maybe it was the sleet. She had been far closer to the old man than to her own father, and now Grandfather was fifteen years dead. Funny such a devout Catholic should talk of the gods in plural. Funny she should think about him, slopping through the dark streets of Naskeag Falls and thinking dark thoughts about the entire male race.
Maureen's nightmare still followed her, half a block back--a squat black shadow under the streetlights, framed by the double rows of dark storefronts and old brick office buildings. Everything was closed and silent, brooding over her search for someplace warm and dry and public.
The scene reminded her of a hodge-podge of old movies--Peter Lorre stalking the midnight streets with a switchblade in his pocket. For some reason, the movie image relaxed her. Maybe it made danger seem less real, the sleet turning the night into grainy black-and-white flickers on a silver screen.
Maureen pulled her knit cap down tighter on her head and went back to concentrating on the ice underfoot. She was reading her past into the future. No self-respecting mugger or rapist would be out on a night like this. The voices in her head could just take a fucking hike.
Besides, her mood matched the foul weather. She’d had a rotten evening at the Quick Shop, and the chance to blow some scumbag to hell carried a certain primitive attraction.
Maybe while she was at it she should put a slug through the carburetor of that damned rusty Japanese junk-heap that had refused to start and left her walking. And pop the night manager with the roving hands who had reamed her out and docked her pay for being late, before suggesting they could maybe arrange something if she chose to be a little "friendlier."
Hell, go big-time and shoot all the paper-mill cretins from upriver who stomped in for their six-packs of beer, steaming their wet-dog smell and dripping slush all over the place so she spent half her shift mopping up after them.
Definitely blow away the oh-so-precise digital register that had refused to tally when she closed out at midnight. She'd ended up putting in ten bucks out of her own pocket, just to get the hell out of the place. Two hours pay, before taxes.
CONVENIENCE STORE CLERK GOES BERSERK, MURDERS 20.
Again, Maureen checked on her shadow. He was still there, still h
alf a block back. The way she felt, she almost wished he'd make a move.
She kicked a lump of slush and yelped when it turned out to be frozen into place. Adding insult to injury, her next limping stride found a pothole in the sidewalk, and she sank into ankle-deep ice water.
Screw this psychotic winter weather, she thought. Psychosis: a mental disease or serious mental impairment, a medical term not to be confused with the precise legal implications of the word "insanity." Psych. 101, second year elective for distribution requirements in the forestry program.
She had reasons to remember the definition, reasons for such a personal interest in the ways and means in which human minds deviated from the norm. Fat lot of good college was doing her now.
A snowplow growled around the next corner and headed in her direction, fountaining out a bow-wave that washed up over the curb and sidewalk to break against the dark line of buildings. Maureen ducked back into the entryway of the nearest storefront, trying to dodge the flying muck. It spattered icily across her jeans, and she stepped back out into the storm, elevating her middle finger at its retreating yellow flashers.
"Naskeag Falls Department of Roads and Bridges," the sign on the dump gate said, "Your tax dollars at work."