Chapter 6
Late that Saturday morning, Opal Peabody sat in her pajamas and robe, slumped back on her sofa. Sleep had been elusive the night before. She had thrashed about in her bed sheets like a catfish caught in a net until the first rays of the amber dawn pierced through her blinds. Now, as the day edged towards noon, she felt as helpless as one of those limbless and clumsy bottom-feeders, trying to figure out what to do about the spirit that likely killed Virginia.
When the brave side of her mind told her that she needed to go over to the Blake house and investigate, the small part of her brain that housed the primitive but powerful emotion of fear took over. She imagined finding the old house looking quiet and peaceful on the outside, but going in and finding a maelstrom of ghostly entities swirling about.
What if...in her ignorance during the séance...she had opened a door to the other side that couldn’t be closed? The house could have become a vortex, bleeding out dozens or hundreds of lost souls and demonic spirits. Could she have done the equivalent of opening the gates of a hellish prison into the unsuspecting sweet little town of Calathia?
In the best-case scenario, she figured that she might investigate the Blake house and find nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe, the birds would be singing in the trees and the house would simply look charming, quaint, and empty. Then, she could leave with a sigh, feeling foolish for worrying so much.
But, when the black cloud of despair reigned, she envisioned her worst nightmare. She pictured the handsome spirit meeting her at the door with eyes blazing like lit coals. Then, without speaking a word, he would grab her by the throat and squeeze the life out of her as if she were little more than a wet dishrag.
These scenarios paralyzed her, and she found herself avoiding the urge to make any sort of plan by muddling around her house, tidying up piles and making busywork.
When she paused from sweeping dust bunnies out from under the bed and washing streaks off the windows with vinegar, she knew she was going to be unable to function and go back to her normal life if she didn’t go to the Blake house and deal with the spirit and any repercussions from his conjuration.
After mentally flogging herself all morning, she propped her broom against the counter and plopped down at her kitchen table. She sipped hot coffee, made stronger from two extra scoops of French roast, and then she thought back to that first fateful event when she became interested in becoming a psychic. Of course, that it had been that magic day so many years ago had led to this fiasco.
It all began one mid-summer when she was a girl—just fourteen. A gypsy carnival passed through town. Despite her parents’ admonition to stay away from the carnies, one day after school she found her feet trekking their own wayward path toward the candy cane tents and colorful flags on the east side of town.
So, I’ll be a little late, she told herself as she rehearsed the story that she planned to give her mother about her tardiness.
The next thing she knew, she was at the edge of the field where the carnival had made their home for the night before beginning their circus of rides, games, and fortune telling.
No one seemed to pay her any attention as she wandered between the stands and portable machinery. She wound through the busy workers hawking trinkets and taking coins from the local farmers and cowboys as they tried to win stuffed animals to impress their wives or girlfriends.
As a warm howling wind came up, she ducked around the side of a tent and saw a golden flame lighting up the insides as if it were on fire.
She crouched down to avoid being seen and peeked through an open flap. Inside, she saw a woman seated at a small wooden table across from a large gruff man wearing dusty boots.
Her eyes remained glued to the woman who she imagined was a member of the gypsy tribe that had come over from Eastern Europe to make their fortune traveling around the states. Opal thought she was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen—her long raven hair that looked as if it had been woven out of the strands of the darkest midnight sky, skin that was the color of raw wild honey, and cocoa brown eyes. She had never seen anyone so exotic in all her days in the white-as-snow Bread Basket of the mid-west.
She crept closer and hid amongst the cloth flaps of the tent.
The woman placed a small red bean under one of three cups that were made of some rough substance, so dark that they seemed to be made from an unnatural wood from a bewitched forest. She swirled them back and forth as the man’s eyes focused on them.
Opal followed the cups too, tracing their path as they moved left, right, and center. She was sure that she knew which cup held the bean when they stopped.
But, in the end, the man guessed wrong...and so did she. The woman had fooled them both!
At first, she felt angered by the trick. But then, she felt awe. What a magnificent magician this woman was!
The man’s sun-weathered face reddened, and it was obvious that he felt cheated.
The woman consoled him, covering his hand with her own as she seemed to offer him some sort of recompense for his loss. He nodded, then she procured a small silver bell from under the table and a deck of cards—cards that Opal later learned were Tarot cards—a tool of divination.
She dared to creep closer, so she could hear the woman’s words, but they were cloaked in a heavy unfamiliar accent.
Then, the woman took the man’s hands in her own, looked into his eyes and asked him something that made the furrows on his brow wrinkle like the earth between rows of corn. She saw a tear cascade down over the stubble on his cheek.
After a moment of hesitation, he drew a card from the fanned out deck.
She turned it over and studied it before nodding some sort of ascent. Then, she rang the bell and took his hands again, and they both closed their eyes.
She began a strange chanting, swaying her head from side to side, whipping her long locks up in the air and growing more and more frenzied with each swing.
At first, Opal had thought that it was all part of a performance, a choreographed dance meant to fool the man into thinking that she was doing something magical.
But then, the table, covered with a crocheted cloth, lifted off the ground and hovered several inches above the dirt floor. A strange mist formed in the air and began to swirl around the table, and she heard a third voice echo from within the tent—a soft woman’s purr. It said something. A name? She couldn’t make it out, but the man began to weep.
A few minutes later, she hid in the folds of the tent when the man tossed a pile of bills on the table and got up to leave. As he walked out, his cheeks were wet with tears, but underneath his gruff mustache, his face was radiant with joy. Pure joy.
Had the gypsy woman really contacted the dead? Opal wanted to shore up some courage and talk to her, but when she looked back inside the tent...she was gone.
She trudged home, dragging her schoolbooks behind her on a strap. All thoughts of becoming a teacher or a nurse someday were now forever gone. She was going to be a psychic! She would learn how to contact loved ones that had passed on. That would be more of a service to people than anything she could think of.
The next day, she snuck back to the carnival site but found nothing but an empty field where all of the tents and rides had been.
Nevermind, she thought. If I can’t learn from a real gypsy, I’ll just have to teach myself.
She checked every book out of the library that she could find on the paranormal and hid them under her bed where her mother was unlikely to find them. Then, she stayed up late at night reading them with a flashlight under the covers.
She made her own tarot cards out of the cardboard from cereal boxes and held practice séances in her bedroom with her teddy bears.
Then, one day, she talked her mother into letting her spend a few days with her Aunt Grace who was rumored to have the power of seeing spirits. Her aunt had gone blind in her later years. Opal’s devout church-going mother had said that it was God’s punishment for her delving with the dead.
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sp; But, Aunt Grace refused to talk about her spiritual contacts. “You don’t want to mess around with things you’re too young to understand. Besides...if your mother got word that I’d told you such things, she tar and feather me and run me out of town.”
Opal had left disappointed. But, never gave up her quest to hone her psychic skills. She eventually taught elementary school for a few years to make a living, but she always did card readings for her friends and those who asked on the side.
It wasn’t until her mother died, that she felt confident enough to turn her obsession into a career. This was despite that fact that in all of her studies, she had never had any great success with spiritual communication. She had learned to give powerfully emotional card readings, but every séance always seemed to end in frustration. She often told the client that the person had passed on to Heaven and was unavailable to speak or she knew enough about the deceased person to fill in the missing details and make them happy at the end.
But once, when she tried to contact her mother’s spirit, she succeeded in hearing her voice and seeing a brilliant white light fill the room. What had been different in that attempt? She figured that it was her own raw emotion that finally pushed her over the edge into the plane of the spiritual realm.
From that time forward, she had a little more success in her séances, grasping faint glimpses of the spiritual realm and hearing the voices of the dead, even if she wasn’t able pull them back into this world to visit with the living.
Fifty-two years later, she still emulated the gypsy’s look. Her hair cascaded down her back in long dark locks (that were now glittered with silvery gray). She wore long flowing skirts around her curvy legs. Her neck, arms, and ankles were adorned with silver and pewter jewelry to connect with the power of the moon. And, she carried her tarot cards and incense in her purse wherever she went.
She didn’t care what the conservative townspeople thought about her unconventional style or profession. Enough of them privately believed in the existence of a diaphanous unseen world to keep her in business. She knew many of them plowed their farms and went to church every Sunday on schedule, then snuck out to meet with her to have their palms read or a tarot spread done when their little ones were fast asleep.
Her clients were so appreciative of her efforts that they often gave her a generous tip and referred their friends to her.
She had never let any of them down. Never.
That is...until now.
VirginiaBlake’s séance had been the most successful (in terms of actually bringing a spirit back)...but the worst failure of her entire psychic career.
I have to go back there. For the sake of Virginia’s memory, I cannot give up on undoing what I’ve done.
She knew that she had opened Pandora’s box a little too wide that hot night in July. Though, if it was still open and spewing out terrible things, she wasn’t sure how she was going to close it again.
No matter…I’m going to have to go back there. I’m going to have to get into that house and find out if the spirit is still there.
But, what she would do if she found him—she didn’t know.
Chapter 7
“Vodka and cranberry juice, please.”
Georgia pulled a crisp ten out of her shiny black alligator billfold and handed it to the flight attendant. She poured the contents of the tiny bottles over ice and felt the cool liquid slide down her throat as she leaned back and closed her eyes.
She thought about how just last Sunday, Grammie had told her that the mums were coming into bloom, and the Virginia Creeper was turning a bright orange with dark berries that the birds were going nuts over. She complained about a little arthritis in her hands that made it hard to work the pruners, but she rarely complained of anything else.
Grammie called her regular doctor checkups ‘maintenance’. “I have to go in for a little maintenance next week,” she said as if it were like getting her oil changed or doing a tune up on her ’84 Lincoln.
Georgia knew that until her last day, Grammie could outwork any landscape crew in the garden. Though, she had resigned from the presidency of the Calathia Garden Club a few weeks back. She told Georgia that she was tired of all of the persnickety ladies that wouldn’t mind their own business and kept dropping by unannounced, wanting to critique the quality of her hollyhocks and roses and hint around for free snippets of perennials.
But, she also knew that for some reason, Grammie had been increasingly isolating herself. When asked about it, her grandmother replied that she preferred the company of squirrels and flowers to people and liked to spend most of her days poking around in the garden. To some extent, that had always been true. Even in the winter she’d say, “Oh...a little snow don’t bother me.” And, she’d be out there for hours filling the feeders with sunflower seed and stringing berries and popcorn onto the evergreen branches, so not a sparrow in the county would want for more.
Turbulence rocked the plane back and forth as if it were surfing on waves and jolted out of her memories.
The man next to her began to snore. She did her best to ignore the smell of stale scotch wafting out from his exhalations. With his tan corduroy jacket, dusty cowboy boots, and loosened rumpled tie, she guessed that he might be a salesman for farm equipment or fertilizer. She was glad that he was snoring instead of rambling on about combines or the importance of extra nitrogen for crops.
As the plane settled back onto smooth air, she fumbled for her compact. Instead of pressed powder, she found her fingers clasped around a small plastic bottle. The pills were yellow. Her doctor had prescribed them for anxiety during her divorce. She called them her ‘yellow bricks’, because they helped her to leave the real world and ‘follow the yellow brick road’ to the Land of Oz for at least a couple of hours.
And she was going to Kansas...just like in the story. She thought how nice it would be to take one. She could sleep the rest of the way, landing as peacefully as Dorothy in her bright ruby shoes.
Her fingers remained on the bottle as she drained the last drops from her glass. She knew better. Yellow bricks and vodka did not mix. She found her compact, powdered her nose and tucked the bottle back into her purse.
When the plane landed in Topeka, she still had a fifty-mile drive to Calathia. She picked up a blue Ford sedan from the rental desk and hit Highway 70 at full speed.
Smoky dark clouds loomed in the sky ahead of her, threatening rain. As she passed a semi-truck, the road ahead looked like a winding black ribbon with no end. The cool gray sky melded into the soft beiges of wheat stalks and prairie grass. Every few miles she passed a farmhouse or a herd of cows.
The hypnotic unchanging scenery made it hard to stay awake. She fiddled with the radio knob as static-filled radio stations droned out farm reports, country music, and the fading signal from an oldies rock station. She bashed her hand on the dashboard.
Some jazz would be nice.
But, the god of radio merely responded with more static and a shrill whine as she flipped to the AM band.
She realized that her bad mood had little to do with the dearth of big city music. It was more about Grammie’s death and the manner of her homecoming. It had been almost three years since she her last trip out here. She had wanted to come back sooner, but the thought of limping back into town like an abandoned dog with her tail between her legs after the divorce was too much to bear.
She hadn’t wanted to return until she felt ready to portray the fantasy of a confidant, worldly divorcee breezing into town. The ideal day would be warm and sunny. She would be driving a convertible and wearing dark sunglasses with the wind blowing her scarf back as she flew down the highway. Once in Calathia, everyone would recognize her, ask her how she’d been, wonder about her glamorous lifestyle in New York. She would tell them fabulous stories about the gallery, and parties, and city life. They would widen their eyes and ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ over the exciting things she had seen and done.
She would tell them, “David was such a dolt. I n
ever really loved him anyway. It was all for the money, you know...” Then, she would wink, and the old men on the porch would sit back in their rockers chewing on a blade of grass while the ladies shook their heads and went back to knitting blankets for their grandkids.
But, as she drove, she realized that more than likely, people would whisper and point and stare. They probably wouldn’t recognize her at first. They would discreetly try to scrutinize her face from rows away in the grocery store wondering why she looked so familiar.
Then, of course, after a few minutes, they would put it together and reminisce about the little girl she used to be...before she turned her back on Calathia and ran away to become a big city girl. But, when they realized that she had come back for VirginiaBlake’s funeral, they would gush with sympathy.
After telling herself to get over her self-pity, she turned her attention back to reality, wondering what was going to happen to her grandmother’s house now that she was gone.
Her grandmother had lived in that old Victorian Queen Anne style house ever since she was born in an upstairs bedroom in 1922. Georgia had many memories from living there. She couldn’t bear the idea of seeing it abandoned or torn down. She half-hoped that her sister would decide to move back into it with her family and restore it. But, that was unlikely. Marsha would probably sell it off, the first chance she got. To her, the house would be irrevocably linked with her hatred of Grammie, and would be good riddance when it was gone.
She was anxious to see it again. Less than an hour later, instead of heading towards Marsha’s house, she found herself going in the other direction. She drove west on County Line road for another three miles.
As she neared the town center, she passed the sign saying, Welcome to Calathia: Population 3,062.
The Gardener Page 4
