“Were you the one with the song lyrics?” Taryn asked. It was one piece of the puzzle she hadn’t fit in yet.
“Just the one. ‘You’ve Got a Friend.’ That was one of ‘our’ songs, you know. Told us all that, I found out later,” Jamey added wryly. “I cringe whenever it comes on. It makes me want to throw the damn radio through the roof.”
“I bet,” Taryn snorted. “What a…”
But she found there wasn’t a word strong enough to describe her feelings towards the man.
“You know, it was a long time before I realized that he was just a monster. I was screwed up about it for a long time and had skewed ideas about what it meant to be different. We didn’t have much diversity here in Haven Hollow back then and I just thought, well, some men were like that.”
“Oh,” but Taryn said, “but this was about control, about a sickness. Not a person’s sexuality or sexual preference or…”
“I know, I know,” he agreed. “But as a little kid without anyone to talk to I thought it was because he was a man who liked men. I thought it must mean that I liked men, too. It wasn’t until college that I learned it wasn’t like that at all. That there was something wrong with him. I guess that’s why, with my job now, I try so hard to promote equality and education and diversity. To teach kids about difference and anti-bullying. If I’d known at the time… It’s strange, after all this time. When I think of him, I can’t help but think of the good stuff. I know he ruined a lot of things, but he also did so many other good things. Like encourage me to go to college one day.” Jamey shrugged. “It’s confusing.”
“Abuse is confusion,” Taryn agreed. “Naomi?”
“She didn’t make it,” Jamey said sadly. “They tried. You tried. If you hadn’t gone for that gun, she would’ve taken you down with her.”
“It was my fault. If I hadn’t…”
“Not your fault, not Lucy’s fault, not my fault. Only one person’s at fault here and he’s gone,” Jamey said.
But Taryn knew Naomi was her responsibility. And she’d carry that with her.
“So many people,” Taryn sighed. “Were there others in other years?”
Jamey shrugged. “Probably. He was only there for two years, though. After he left Mrs. Evans took over his classroom. None of us knew where he went. We didn’t see hide nor hair or him until that reunion, more than twenty years later. The article in the paper, the mention of him. That was my trigger, why I went to Lucy. I’d had many over the years and Heather helped me deal with them as much as she could. But that time, I don’t know. It was worse. Knowing he’d be back here, at the school, it just made it all feel too real.”
“So you’ve talked to Lucy since?”
Jamey bowed his head and sighed. “Off and on, yes. I’ve spent most of my life trying to apologize for the way we treated her. We were children, of course, and he was encouraging it, but it still wasn’t right.”
“Jamey,” Taryn began as she struggled to sit up in her bed, “I have to ask you something. I kept seeing this circle of desks. Do you remember that? What it means?”
She didn’t think Jamey’s face could get any rosier, but it did. She thought he might even burst into tears.
“At the end of that school year. I reckon now he was afraid that she was going to talk and he wanted to make damn sure she didn’t. So he put all our desks into a circle. He stood in the middle and went around to each person. Made each one of us tell her something we didn’t like about her. If there wasn’t anything to say, then we were supposed to ‘use our imaginations’ and make something up.”
“Oh. My. God.”
Jamey nodded miserably. “I know. They were saying all sorts of petty things. Making fun of the way she walked, the way she ran, how smart she was. Telling her she was ugly. And she just had to sit there and take it. I have never forgiven myself for that. Never.”
When Jamey left, there was nothing for Taryn to do but cry.
Thirty-Five
“Well, it looks better in your painting than it ever did in real life,” Lucy laughed.
Taryn had propped the painting against the headboard, and now she stood back and took a good, long look at it. “I think it came out okay,” she smiled.
She was still sore, and it was still difficult to move around at times, but she was healing. Matt had been a tremendous help, of course. He wasn’t going to have a job if he didn’t start going to work. They only had two more days left there, though. He’d be driving her back to Nashville and flying home from there.
“How are you doing these days?” Taryn asked.
Lucy shrugged. “Okay mostly. I have a new book coming out in the spring. Agent is pretty happy about that. And I’ve been thinking about taking a vacation.”
“Ready for the new trial?”
Lucy smiled grimly. “That’s all still up in the air. We don’t know what they’re going to do yet.”
“May I apologize again?”
Lucy perched on the corner of Taryn’s bed and lifted her shoulders. “You know, it’s okay. I am glad it’s all out in the open. Hell, I’m the one who encouraged you to look deeper. Subconsciously I wanted someone else to know. Your reporter friend did a wonderful job on the story. For the first time in a long time, we were able to tell our story. No clichés, no ‘gay men are pedophiles’ nonsense. No stereotypes. Just the truth. That he was a monster who preyed on young children in a place that nobody cared about at the time.”
Taryn nodded.
“When did you figure it all out?”
“Well,” Taryn replied, “when I saw that last picture, of course. That sealed the deal. But also, the song. A song everyone else loves. You were talking about two things at the same time.”
“Music will take you right back. He would play that song sometimes and I would listen. The length of the song was about as long as it would last. It was the only way I could time it.”
Taryn nodded. She’d wondered. And then there were Jamey’s eyes. The ones she’d seen in her dream. Lucy had been haunted by more than one thing in that classroom. “I realized that you only thought there were going to be six people on that reunion tour. You hadn’t planned on the seventh. That I just kind of knew from instinct.”
“Mrs. Evans,” Lucy said sadly. “She came at the last minute.”
“Not the monster everyone thought?”
“Oh, she was a terribly imposing woman. Everyone was scared to death of her. But she loved those students. She loved me,” Lucy swore. “The fact that I had something to do with her death…I will never forgive myself for that. I deserve to be punished. You know, she was the only one who tried to help? She didn’t know about the sexual abuse, of course, but she did know about the other. I heard her arguing with him in the teacher’s lounge one day. Shouting at him, threatening to go to the police.”
“I wish she had,” Taryn said.
“Me too. At the time, however, it scared me. I was afraid of Mr. Scott, but I loved him. He made everyone feel so alive, so hopeful. And then he’d turn around and make you feel less than human in a heartbeat. For some of us, though, that little bit of goodness was all we had in our lives. It was in mine. I didn’t want to see it go.”
Taryn looked sadly at Lucy. It was such a complicated thing, her past.
Lucy smiled again. “You know, on my last day of school at Muddy Creek Mrs. Evans came up to me. ‘You are a bright, talented young lady,’ she said. ‘Do not ever let anything that happened to you here hold you back.’ I think she knew then. I believed then that she knew the other things that had happened, too. But that maybe she felt powerless. I have always suspected that she asked for that other classroom so that she could take it over and wipe out the memories.”
“Why Jamey, though?” Taryn asked. “Were you all great friends?”
Lucy stood and began pacing around the room. “No, never friends. He was as bad as the others. But at the end of the year, something happened that he couldn’t live with. It had all been escalating. I wasn�
�t even going to school half the time. I just hated it. My birthday was that last week, though. I came into school one day right there at the end, and there was a bouquet of flowers on my desk. They were pretty things. I picked them up and started to sniff them, but Jamey knocked them out of my hands. Was a real jerk about it. I cried and cried. It was only later, years later, that he told me the truth–that they’d been full of poison ivy. The other kids had meant it as a cruel joke.”
“Oh dear Lord,” Taryn cried.
Lucy shook her head. “I believe it was Mr. Scott who gathered it for them.”
Taryn rose and walked over to where Lucy stood. She put her hand on the other woman’s shoulder and looked down at her, for the first time seeing how small she truly was. “You’re not the guard anymore,” she told her. “It’s not your place. You don’t have to stay here and protect them. It’s time for you to get out. You no longer have to watch over the school or the kids. Please.”
Lucy took her hand and squeezed it. “You know, I have fought and fought now for most of my life, trying to find my way out of that classroom. And most of the time I succeed. Only…” She looked away, and Taryn watched as her face seemed to fixate on something in the faraway distance. “Only sometimes I wake up at night, and I am right back there. I think, in the end, none of us escaped that classroom. We all eventually find our way back some time or another. And one day it will just be impossible to leave.”
That rectangular-shaped light at the end of the dark tunnel did not always turn out to be a door, Taryn realized. And sometimes the monsters were real.
* * *
“ARE YOU GOING TO BE OKAY?”
Taryn knew Matt wasn’t referring to the long, and probably uncomfortable, ride that stretched out ahead of them.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Probably.”
“I can’t take another one like this,” he tried joking.
“Nor can I.”
“Do you think they’ll be okay?”
But Taryn didn’t know that either. She wanted to say yes, but only time would tell. Jamey was doing what the others in his young life had failed to do–he was protecting children. And Lucy was writing for them. The others, the ones they’d lost along the way, would never get another chance.
“I am hopeful that Lucy will get the mental health counseling she needs,” Taryn said at last. “The rest of them, too. Misty, Jamey, Heather…”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Matt said, “is that if the angry ghost was the Scott fella then who was the other one? The one crying? The one in the hall? What was all that?”
Taryn rested her head in her hand and stared out the window. “It was Lucy,” she said at last. “Lucy was right. None of them ever truly made it out of that school. A part of her will always be there.”
“Would you have killed him?”
Taryn shrugged. “No, I wouldn’t have. I believe in the justice system too much. But then, look what happened to Lukas Monroe. His father got five years, and Lukas ended up dying as well. There are no winners here.”
“And the other teachers? Did they deserve it?”
“No. But they deserved something. They allowed something terrible to happen.”
Matt pulled out onto the main highway and laid on the gas, wanting to put as much distance between them and the town as quickly as he could.
“You know,” Taryn laughed, “Lucy told me something about her teacher that’s a little ironic.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
Taryn could hear Lucy telling it even now.
“My grandmother had died right around Christmas. A few weeks later, after winter break, I went back to school. I was feeling sad and upset. But, that night before, I could have sworn I heard her singing in the living room by the Christmas tree we still had up. I wanted to tell someone but I didn’t want them to think I was crazy. Mr. Scott was decorating a bulletin board and I volunteered to help him. I don’t know why, but I ended up telling him what had happened. I expected him to tell me I was nuts or laugh but, when I was finished, he turned to me and said, ‘Why Lucy, I think that is just beautiful. And I firmly believe that ghosts are here to watch over us, protect us, and love us.’ I know he did a lot of terrible things but when I am feeling at my best, I think about that, about how he made me feel. It was a gift.”
About Rebecca
Rebecca Patrick-Howard is the author of more than a dozen paranormal books, including several true haunting accounts. She lives in eastern Kentucky with her husband and two children.
Visit her website at www.rebeccaphoward.net and sign up for her newsletter to receive free books, special offers, and news.
Abandoned Places Coloring Book
Love to color and like old houses? Check out Rebecca’s grayscale coloring book of abandoned places. All pictures are Rebecca’s own images (though, unfortunately, NOT taken by Miss Dixie).
http://www.rebeccaphoward.net/coloring-book-pages.html
Let’s Connect!
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/rebeccapatrickh/
Website: www.rebeccaphoward.net
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebeccaphowardwrites
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RPHWrites
Instagram: https://instagram.com/rphwrites/
Coming Halloween 2016!
Want MORE Taryn?
Want to learn about Taryn’s beloved grandmother and get a glimpse of Taryn when she was a child? The companion novella to the Taryn’s Camera series entitled Stella is 100+ pages and available in the Ghost Children anthology.
For more information visit:
http://www.rebeccaphoward.net/haunted-ghost-children.html
Other Books by Rebecca
Visit Rebecca’s website at www.rebeccaphoward.net for ordering information.
Taryn's Camera Series
Windwood Farm
Griffith Tavern
Dark Hollow Road
Shaker Town
Jekyll Island
Black Raven Inn
Muddy Creek
Taryn’s Pictures: Photos from Taryn’s Camera
Kentucky Witches Series
A Broom with a View
Broommates
A Broom of One’s Own (Coming Soon)
Coloring Books
Forgotten Houses: An Adult Grayscale Coloring Book
True Hauntings
Haunted Estill County
More Tales from Haunted Estill County
A Summer of Fear
The Maple House
Four Months of Terror
Two Weeks: A True Haunting
Three True Tales of Terror
The Visitors (Coming Soon)
Other Books
Coping with Grief: The Anti-Guide to Infant Loss
Three Minus Zero
Estill County in Photos
Haunted: Ghost Children Stories from Beyond
Haunted: Houses
Reviews for the
Taryn’s Camera Series
Windwood Farm
"This is an absolutely wonderful book and I didn't want to put it down. It was exciting and sad but it was uplifting too." (Kim @ The Open Book Societyopenbooksociety.com/)
"I won't spoil anything but this book has great characterization, loads of atmosphere and is never dull. The first book in the Taryn's Camera series so roll on number two!" (A Drunken Druid's Reviews the-drunken-druid.blogspot.com/)
"The author does a great job painting just what life in a small town in Kentucky is like. She also writes a great mystery." (Lisa Binion @ The News in Books thenewsinbooks.com/)
“while I do not believe in ghosts and such, this book was written in a way that I was able to enjoy it and go along for the ride and "believe" the story.”- online reviewer
“a great chiller that was perfect summertime reading!”- online reviewer
Griffith Tavern:
“I actually love Rebecca's descriptive style of wri
ting which kept feeding my imagination and continuously created images and pictures in my mind”- online reviewer
“If you like old houses, historic preservation, AND creepy ghost stories, it's right up your (darkened, cobwebby) alley”-online reviewer
“This was a book that was an absolute pleasure to read. A book that I couldn't wait to get back to”- online reviewer
Dark Hollow Road:
“Her characters are rich, her story lines are enticing and as a reader these combine to make for a lovely journey through a small southern town”- online reviewer
“I've enjoyed all of the Taryn's Camera books. They have so many things I love - old houses, ghosts, a likable main character I can relate to, and realistic descriptions of small town Southern life. But this one goes a step further, addressing real life issues with a depth of emotion that can only come from someone who knows this region and its issues firsthand. Highly recommended.”- online reviewer
Shaker Town:
“a paranormal whodunit with lots of surprises”- online reviewer
“As always wonderful thorough research was done. Great presentation. I did not want to stop reading until I finished”- online reviewer
“Wonderful story, history, background and my favorite characters! You won't be disappointed with this newest adventure of Taryn and her camera!”- online reviewer
Muddy Creek: A Paranormal Mystery (Taryn's Camera Book 7) Page 22
