by P. R. Frost
Sport fencing fit me better.
“Teresa!” Mother rushed to greet me at my own door with a fierce hug. She squeezed the breath out of me, as if she hadn’t done the same thing ten days ago. “Come in, child, come in.” She took the lightest of my carry-on luggage from me, leaving me with two heavy suitcases and my laptop case. Each one was loaded with books—research and my own personal reading.
I lugged the bags into my kitchen and dumped them in the middle of the floor. The previous owner of the house had run a bed and breakfast. The oversized kitchen and casual eating area gleamed with modern colonial-style furniture and lighting.
“You really should stay home more, Teresa. You haven’t come to family game night in ages. You will be there tonight,” Mom prattled. After being away for a while I noticed her French accent more than usual.
Great, another excuse to spend “quality” time with my harpy, control-freak sister Cecilia, bachelor Uncle George who couldn’t tell the truth if you paid him, Mom who talked endlessly about everything and nothing whether someone listened or not, deaf and forgetful Grandma Maria, and Auntie Em… er, MoonFeather, as she preferred. She was from Dad’s side of the family and thus not named for a saint. In fact MoonFeather was a card-carrying member of Wicca (if they have cards and membership and such) and the only relative I could describe as close to normal. We played Trivial Pursuit® for about four hours every Sunday so we wouldn’t have to talk to each other, or have to feel guilty for totally ignoring each other the rest of the week.
Dad and his much younger partner Bill, tennis pro at the local country club, had a life and therefore avoided family game night.
Why had Dill and I decided to settle on Cape Cod and not in the Pacific Northwest? We’d given up wonderful coffeehouses on every other corner for this?
We’d traded his eccentric family of D. B. Coopers for my dysfunctional family. Every one of his clan, parents and siblings, were named some variation of D.
B. Cooper.
I’d often wondered if his parents were related to the infamous D. B. Cooper, the first successful airplane hijacker who had disappeared with his ill-gotten gains into the Cascade wilderness back in the seventies and become a local folk hero. In the decade when baby boomers sought new and unique ways to defy authority, D. B.
Cooper had bested them all at the game.
Dill had liquidated his trust fund for the down payment on the huge old house. He’d offered to sell his share of the family furniture store, too, if we’d needed it to put three thousand miles between us and his family.
My brother Stephen had been smart enough to move to Indiana as soon as he graduated from college. He’d finished his master’s in organic chemistry and worked for a pharmaceutical company. Last Christmas he’d announced plans to begin work on a Ph.D. I talked to him regularly, but I don’t think he called Mom or Dad more than twice a year.
“I need a nap and some exercise, Mom.” I dove for the oversized steel fridge, looking for a cold drink. I grabbed the last bottle of beer. Either Mom had really cleaned house or she’d thrown a party in my absence.
More likely, Uncle George had pilfered five bottles.
Mom is the only person I know who can clean more thoroughly than Scrap.
“You have time for a nap before we gather at eight. You can go for a walk tomorrow. All that fencing nonsense isn’t good for you. It isn’t ladylike.” Mom stood in front of the center island, between me and the bottle opener in the drawer.
Fortunately, her back was to the racks of cooling cookies. Scrap scarfed up three of them. Then he disappeared—probably into the cellar.
“I have to work tomorrow.” I pushed her aside to open the drawer for the church key. Where the bottle opener should be, it wasn’t. I rummaged deeper, thrusting aside a myriad of cooking utensils I couldn’t name and rarely used.
“Mom, you rearranged my kitchen!” I wailed.
“Well, if you’d stay home more often, you could clean your own house and keep it more efficiently arranged.”
She stood with hands on hips in affronted outrage. “I don’t see why you have to travel so much. You never traveled this much before you met that Dillwyn person.”
“Dill was my husband,” I ground out for the umpteenth time.
“Humph,” Mom snorted. “A quickie ceremony in Reno with no family or friends when you’d known him less than a week? I don’t call that a wedding. Then three months later he takes off, just disappears. That’s what you get for hooking up with a man you met at one of those weird conventions. I don’t see why you can’t write something normal, like romances, or histories.”
“Mother, Dill died. He was horribly burned in a motel fire. I barely escaped alive. He was burned to death. TO DEATH, Mom.”
“So you say. It’s easier to tell people that he died rather than admit to being a grass widow like me. And he left you with this huge mortgage and tremendous debts, so you have to work too hard and can’t spend time with your family.”
Back to family game night.
“Dill and I bought this house together. His life insurance paid off the mortgage.” Double indemnity for accidental death on the life insurance, plus mortgage insurance.
I had money left over to live off of until I finished writing Imps Alive and started earning money of my own. “No mortgage means I can afford to let you live in the guest cottage rent free. Mom, I’m tired of this argument.”
Tired of the memories. Tired of remembering how Dill and I had planned to fill this rambling old house with children.
I worked too hard in an effort to avoid remembering.
I ran miles every day and worked out at the salle so I’d sleep without dreaming.
This old house had ghosts aplenty, so far none of them Dill. Would he haunt me now that I had been to his grave?
I almost hoped he would.
She cleaned with bleach! Scrap screamed in my ear. He flickered from deep orange to red and back again. I don’t need bleach to clean. She dumped all of the mold I was cultivating. The whole house reeks of bleach—even the cellar, he wailed.
Then eat cookies, I snarled back at him. No one else will.
Then a new thought struck me. Did she get into the armory?
Only I had the key to the secret room in the cellar filled with all kinds of weapons, most of them very sharp, pointy, and lethal. One hundred fifty years ago it had hidden runaway slaves as part of the Underground Railroad.
I didn’t check. Scrap popped out again.
“Mom, I’m going to take a bath. Lock the door behind you.”
Without looking to see if she actually left, I made my way through the butler’s pantry to the dining room, then into the oldest part of the house to the steep stairs up to the suite of rooms I kept above. This was part of the original five-room New England saltbox that dated to the pre-Revolutionary era. I loved this part of the house; three rooms downstairs and two up, all clustered around a central chimney.
“Oh, and, Teresa,” Mom called after me.
I froze halfway up the stairs, the part where I had to duck to keep from banging my head on the support beam. That tone of voice never boded well for me. On top of that, the base of my spine itched and my heart beat at double time.
“You might want to watch the news in a few minutes. Your face is all over the media about a strange incident in Oregon yesterday. Something about you rescuing an Indian girl from a rabid dog.”
“Shit!”
Mom fairly danced out the front door at the base of the stairs.
I scrambled up the remaining steps, practically on all fours, to keep from knocking myself out on the beam.
The attack of the monster dog wasn’t the first item on the news. That belonged to the latest drive-by shooting in Providence. But the dog and I were second. The local anchor showed a composite sketch of the dog that looked more like the mastiff from the Hound of the Baskervilles than the brindled mutt that was taller than a wolfhound and broader than a rottweiler.
Then they showed my publicity photo, since no one had captured any shots of me in action. Someone in the crowd—probably that snoopy Guilford van der Hoyden-Smythe—had recognized me. At least they only talked about how I had subdued the beast with a skateboard, not how my invisible imp had become a fireplace poker.
The newscast went on to say that a similar attack had taken place near Puyallup, Washington, three days before.
An adolescent Native American girl had also been the object of the dog’s attention, and had not been hurt.
At last the news went on to say that the Colville tribe had filed suit for custody of Cynthia. The Stalking Moon clan claimed her even though the closest blood relation was a second cousin of her father’s.
Chills ran all over my body. The name was just too much of a coincidence for me to not take heed.
Cynthia: Greek for moon. Kynthia: the name of the Moon Goddess in my books, based upon the Sisterhood of the Celestial Blade Warriors. My Sisterhood. The women who had rescued me from a raging infection and uncontrollable grief.
Stalking Moon: her clan. My Sisterhood worshiped a Goddess who manifested in the stars defined by a crescent moon.
The base of my spine tingled and itched. I forgot my need for a bath. Leaving the TV on, I prowled through the sitting room of my suite and the long addition over the dining room for reference texts on Native American folklore.
Nothing. All of my work so far had been based upon European myth and legend. The American tribes had never interested me before.
Time for an Internet search and probably a hefty order from some rare book dealer.
Chapter 6
“TESS, ARE YOU AWAKE? We brought game night to you,” my sister Cecilia called as she tapped on the door to the sitting room, one of the two small rooms in the original part of the house. Soft Celtic ballads sung by a friend of mine from cons played on the stereo system.
I stifled a groan. I’d decided to deal with game night by ignoring it. I was curled up with a book on the overstuffed sofa in front of the fireplace. A fire crackled and lent a lovely golden light to the shadowy room. The comfortable presence of Maggie, one of the ghosts, dissolved, leaving me cold and alone with my family.
“Chicken,” I muttered under my breath.
“Really, Cecilia, I am too tired,” I added, slamming my book down on the end table. This was my house, damn it! Why couldn’t my family respect that?
“Maybe you just need to get laid,” Cecilia chirped.
“Then you wouldn’t be so snippy.”
“A lot easier to just buy a vibrator and rent some porn.”
“Merde, we did you a favor bringing game night to you.” Cecilia stomped out toward the dining room.
Don’t you just wish you could ignore them, babe? No such luck tonight, dahling, Scrap chortled from his perch on the spider—the wrought-iron swinging arm in the fireplace designed to hang pots over the flames for cooking. He always sought a heat source. I’d often wondered if his home dimension was hotter than hell and ours too cold for him.
“Sorry,” MoonFeather, Dad’s sister, mouthed as she bustled in behind Cecilia. She headed into the dining room—one of the first additions to the original saltbox.
I rolled out of the armchair and stretched my back until it cracked. I wasn’t going to get out of this easily, and burying my nose in the book wouldn’t work. I’d tried that before.
“Where’s the beer?” Uncle George demanded, heading directly for the kitchen, inconveniently at the other end of the house.
“Mom, I told you I couldn’t make game night. I’m too tired,” I protested.
Mom flitted her hands in dismissal as she placed the game box on the long table that could seat twelve comfortably.
“Someone close the door. It’s cold in here.” Grandma Maria shivered in the open doorway. Stepping out of the way and closing it herself seemed beyond her faculties tonight.
But I’d almost be willing to bet my new hair comb that she’d trounce the lot of us in the game. The space in her brain she used to store vast amounts of trivia must crowd out the room she needed for short-term memory.
Since no one else seemed to think it prudent to close the door, I performed the chore myself. Fluttering shadows from the old oak tree out front sent deep chills through me and robbed me of breath. I had to make sure they were just leaf shadows and not bats.
Uncle George returned with a beer in one hand and a bag of chips in the other. He took the place of honor in the captain’s chair at the head of the table with his back to the fireplace and looked around as if startled that the rest of us hadn’t set everything up in his absence.
My sister Cecilia began laying a fire without permission.
“I’ll make coffee.” I escaped to the kitchen.
“Make it decaf, dear. It’s evening and we don’t want the caffeine to interfere with our sleep,” Mom called after me.
“Unleaded, my foot,” I grumbled and started making a full pot of the real thing.
While the filtered spring water from my own well dripped through freshly ground gourmet beans, I rummaged through the luggage I hadn’t taken upstairs or unpacked yet.
In the mesh bag, wrapped in your dirty underwear, Scrap said, reading my mind again. I wasn’t sure I liked this new ability of his. He appeared inside the big suitcase, clawing the drawstring of the mesh bag open with his talons.
“Thanks, buddy.” I retrieved the antique comb from deep inside the protective wrapping.
An argument between Uncle George and Grandma Maria erupted over possession of the captain’s chair and its placement closest to the fire. I took the time to rinse the comb in cold water and let the moisture ease its way through my tight mop of curls rather than intervene in the argument.
I kind of liked the glamour of elegance the new hairdo gave me.
Then I switched the carafe of coffee for my favorite heavy ceramic cup shaped like Earth with a blue dragon circling the center while it still dripped from the coffee maker. One sip and the room seemed brighter, warmer, and friendlier.
A tap on the glass half of the back door interrupted my savoring of the second sip.
“Dad!” I opened the door and hugged him tight.
He’d kept much of his rugged blond handsomeness as he approached sixty; even if Chuck Noncoiré was a serious-minded accountant who peered at the world over half glasses. Living with a tennis pro kept him lean and fit.
“MoonFeather warned me of your mother’s plans. Want me to chase them off?” He stepped into the breakfast nook alone. A rare occurrence.
“Nah. They’ll only gang up on me worse next time I’m home on a Sunday night. Where’s Bill?”
I peered through the glass top half of the back door for signs of Dad’s partner. I didn’t mind Dad being gay and had accepted Bill Ikito as a member of the family long ago. But Mom had never forgiven Dad for preferring a male tennis pro—younger than herself by fifteen years—to her. I couldn’t remember her being in the same room with Dad except for an occasional Thanksgiving dinner at my house since I was twelve and the scandal erupted all over Cape Cod.
“Bill’s coming down with a cold. I tucked him into bed with a cup of lemon-and-honey tea and a romance novel. I’m serious, I’ll send them all home if you aren’t up to company. You’ve been on the road a lot this year.”
He placed a thick hand on my shoulder, squeezing with gentle affection.
“If I get too tired, I’ll call Maggie to chase them off.”
I grinned at him.
“Tess, I don’t mind that you let your overactive imagination take off in your books, but believing in ghosts is pushing the limits of true sanity.” His blue eyes looked tense behind the magnification of his glasses.
“Don’t worry about me, Dad. It’s all a family joke,” I hedged. If I ever mentioned Scrap and everything his existence entailed, Dad just might find a way to commit me.
“Besides, what am I supposed to do? When Dill and I bought this house, the earnest mone
y agreement specifically left possession of three ghosts in the house along with the appliances and the dining table with twelve chairs.” The table had come into the house through an open picture window during remodeling and was too big to get out any other way.
“I guess it is only significant that your mother believes in the ghosts. Go ahead and sic Maggie on her early. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’ll have lunch at the club before you take off on your next junket.” He kissed my cheek and went back to his loving partner.
I was left with my… possessive, obsessive, wacky and… and yes, loving family.
We exchanged a few comments about me attacking rabid dogs. Mom muttered that should include her ex and his partner.
“Hey, Tess, I heard there was a bigfoot sighting out in Oregon. Same newscast as that dog fight. We wondered if the monster had kidnapped you,” Uncle George said.
He pronounced it ore-ee-gone rather than orygun. I didn’t correct him. He wouldn’t have listened.
He wasn’t lying that the family worried I’d been kidnapped.
Uncle George couldn’t tell the truth if it hit him in the face. But right now I knew he spoke it. I knew it in my heart and my head.
How?
“Bigfoot might be preferable to you lot,” I quipped.
They call themselves Sasquatch, Scrap hissed in my ear.
“And the proper name is Sasquatch,” I added. “How many points do I get for that?”
“That isn’t one of the questions, dear,” Grandma Maria said, patting my hand. “We haven’t started yet. We were waiting for you. Have you done something to your hair? It looks lighter, blonder.” She cocked her petite head like a little bird, her soft curls looking like a halo. I’d inherited her hair and hoped mine became as soft and silky when I was her age.
“No, Grandma. I just changed the style a bit. I might let it grow out.”
“That would be nice. Long hair is more ladylike.”
Mom patted her own coil of medium brown hair atop her head.
Bill, I might add, kept his straight black hair buzzed so short it looked like a dirty shadow on his skull.
“I’m worried about that Sachey-foot guy,” Uncle George grumbled as he grabbed the dice to begin the game. “You’re going to California next weekend where they had that sighting. You watch your step and don’t get caught by one of them monsters.”
