by Ninie Hammon
She was telling the God’s own truth. She was not Dr. Jolene. She had not completed her dissertation. She had not begun it, either. Or a master’s thesis. Bachelor’s degree, yes, Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education, complete with a teaching certificate. Future laid out before her as clear as the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City — get married, teach school, have babies, the American Dream. Trouble was, it wasn’t Jolene’s dream. And she didn’t figure that out until she was a couple of miles down the road — not only didn’t go all the way to the Emerald City, but leapt off the road altogether and into the bushes. Consequently, she left some wreckage behind. A failed marriage. A disappointed father.
She had become somebody else entirely in the years after that. Several somebody elses. But a different hairstyle and color now, a pair of glasses, and fifteen pounds lighter and nobody cared enough to link her to all the somebody elses that came before. It appeared that she’d just shown up on the reality television show scene virginal, from academia, a scientist studying the phenomena of paranormal experiences. An objective viewpoint. A neutral observer who had a knack for pulling her viewers into her world, convincing them effortlessly that she wanted to know “the truth” about the subject just as much as they did, that she was partnering with them, that they’d take the journey right alongside her and see together what was on the other side.
Of course, what was on the other side was absolutely nothing. But Jolene understood, as her failed predecessors apparently had not, that everybody wanted something to be there. Not anything blatant that would require the High Court of Common Sense to call it into question. Just “something,” only enough to leave them wondering. A glimpse of the door with a light shining out beneath it, promising all manner of things on the other side.
That’s what she did and she was very good at it, thank you very much. But she had dropped it and everything else in her life and come running back home to Nowhere County, Kentucky because her father was dying.
That’s what she wanted to say when she saw him. Only the emotion was bigger than a simple statement. It begged a confrontation, conflict. She wanted to yell at him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were sick? If I hadn’t been forwarded your medical records, I wouldn’t have found out there was anything wrong with you until I got a phone call asking me what I wanted them to do with your remains. What a heartless thing to do to your only child!”
She had had many a “shouting conversation” with her father — in her head.
“My choice of a lifestyle and an occupation that doesn’t meet with your approval doesn’t absolve you of the obligations of simple human decency. Or, is that the point? Your final thumbing your nose at my life is exiting yours without even bothering to say goodbye?”
Saying goodbye.
That’s what she had come here for.
She sat for a few minutes in the driveway. Her father’s ancient Chevy pickup truck was nowhere in evidence. Not surprising. It had been a classic working its way toward antique-dom even before she left so it was likely nothing more than a pile of rust in some auto salvage yard somewhere. But he must have replaced it with some other vehicle. Did the empty driveway mean he wasn’t home? Or had he parked his whatever in the garage? He had to be home. She’d been screwing herself up to seeing him today — right now — and it would be miserable to have to wait.
Wait to say what?
It was absurd that she had had all this time to think about it and she still didn’t know.
How about, “Hi Dad. I love you.”
Maybe now wasn’t the time to say all the saved-up-in-anger things she longed to say. Maybe she should respond to her own better instincts, do the kind thing. Make amends and let it be over.
Just say goodbye.
Jolene took a deep breath, got out of the car and walked purposefully up the stone sidewalk to the house, her eyes fixed on the prize. She’d just tell him she loved him. Because despite everything that had happened, she did love him. If she hadn’t cared so much she wouldn’t have been so devastated by his response to her life.
She whispered the words to herself as she lifted her fist to knock.
“Hi Dad. I love you.”
Chapter Three
Eight-year-old Toby Witherspoon listened to his father banging around in the kitchen as early morning light filtered through his bedroom window, casting shadows on the ceiling. He didn’t get up, though, pretended he was still asleep. He wanted to put off facing his father as long as possible because he was certain the man would be in a foul mood this morning. Toby had gotten a good look at his father in the security light over the driveway when his father came home last night. It was obvious that somebody had beaten him up like his father beat his mother — hurt him bad. Oh, how Toby wished he could have watched! He wondered if his father had seen the beating coming, knew what was going to happen before it did.
Toby always knew, always wondered why his mother didn’t.
Why doesn’t his mother back down, let his father be right, just drop the subject and go on?
But she won’t do that and Toby doesn’t understand why because it’s clear what’s going to happen. What always happens when there is that awful tension in the air, like it feels outside sometimes as a thunderstorm rumbles on the other side of the mountain but the first bolt of lightning hasn’t struck yet — that awful knowing.
Why doesn’t his mother see?
Maybe she does see, but just doesn’t care. If that’s the case, Toby’s mother is either very brave or very dumb. He wants to believe she’s brave, just isn’t afraid of his father’s fists.
But the niggling knowing is there. Not to fear his father’s fists is stupid.
Tonight, it’s over bananas. His mother is making a salad to take to the get-together she has with some other women where they play some kind of game called Bunco and drink wine and talk about their husbands. Toby hid in the hallway when it was his mother’s turn to host the gathering and listened to their conversations. The more wine they drank, the more awful their husbands became.
Except his mother didn’t talk about his father and he couldn’t understand why not. The things the other women complain about are nothing. Mrs. Sandusky’s husband drops cigar ashes on the floor and always has stains on the front of his shirt because he “eats like a pig at a trough.” Mrs. Portland’s husband sits in front of the television in his underwear, drinking beer and farting and won’t take out the trash.
Toby’s father beats his mother! Often. It hurts. Oh, he is careful not to damage her face, only that one time when she accused him of going to see a … a prosecute. Toby didn’t know what that was but his father smashed his mother’s mouth and nose and she stayed in the house for a month and told people she’d been in a car wreck.
She never says anything about it to her friends when they gather to play Bunco, just smiles and says “her Howie” is a good man, a good husband.
When she realizes that her “good husband” has eaten the bananas that were supposed to go into the salad, she asks him to go to the store and get more. He refuses. She says he ate them, he should go get more. He tells her not to push it, that he’s had a hard day, a shoplifter in the Dollar General Store.
She says she’s had a hard day, too, and that’s when he punches her in the stomach.
She doubles over and falls to her knees. Toby wants so badly to go to her defense. To be big and strong enough to protect her. Only once did he try. It earned him a black eye and his mother made him swear he’d never again get between them.
So he watches from where he sits at the table, his dinner of pot roast and mashed potatoes getting cold on his plate.
His father shoves her over onto her side with his foot and she still can’t breathe, is doubled over clutching her stomach.
Then he unfastens his belt. Toby wants to cry. He sees the look of fear in his mother’s eyes, but he can do nothing.
The strap falls with a horrible slapping sound on her back, and she doesn’t cry out because
she’s not yet recovered from having the breath knocked out of her. She cries out the second time, though, sucks in a big gulp of air and shrieks, but he keeps hitting her, doesn’t fear the neighbors will hear because there’s only Mr. Hayes and he’s deaf.
She curls up in a ball, and still he hits her. On her back and her butt and her upper legs. Places nobody can see. Toby knows that later tonight when she sits together with her friends drinking wine and playing cards, that she will say she’s moving slow because she’s sore from working too hard in the garden.
And they’ll believe her.
Toby wondered what story his father was going to tell people to explain his injuries, though maybe he’d just admit he’d been in a fight. His mother always lied to people, covered up because … yeah, because what? Did she not want to get his father in trouble? Or was she just embarrassed to admit he was a monster?
Maybe his father would just tell the truth, but Toby didn’t think he would because if he’d been in a fight, he had lost, and he probably wouldn’t want to admit that. Somebody clawed his cheek, hit him in the face hard enough to break his nose, bust his lip and maybe break some teeth. His hand had been bleeding. And his father had probably hurt the other guy, too, and neither one of them could go to the emergency room to get patched up because of the Jabberwock.
Toby tried to grab hold of the next thoughts but they got away from him, leapt out of his grasp as they always did and he could never catch them. He never allowed himself to think about the Jabberwock because J-Day had been the last time he had ever seen his mother. And he had seen her that day. She had been here … not in Lexington. His father told people she had got trapped outside the Jabberwock and that’s why she didn’t come home. But that was a lie. It wasn’t the Jabberwock that kept her away. His mother didn’t come home because …
She was dead. And his father had killed her.
The truth of that elbowed its way out of the recesses of Toby’s mind and stood in the center in a bright spotlight, demanding his attention. And he gave up, stopped fighting it — the truth was always stronger than he was. It was a ritual he had gone through every day for almost two weeks. He would refuse to let himself know his father had killed his mother, wrestle with the truth of it. But he always lost and when he did he’d set out yet again scouring the house, looking for … he didn’t know what — just “proof” that his father was a murderer. He never found any, though, and who would he tell if he did?
Who was there left to enforce the law, to hold anybody accountable for breaking it? Toby didn’t know. He only knew he had to find somebody to care. Somewhere. Had to find evidence! Cop shows were very definite about that part. As soon as Toby had evidence, they would come and lock his father away for the rest of his life.
Chapter Four
Jolene knocked on the door of her father’s house but no one answered. Maybe he was gone to one of his chemotherapy appointments.
Chemotherapy.
Cancer.
She lifted her hand and knocked again, louder. Nothing but silence from inside. After a third unanswered knock, she tried to knob … and it wasn’t locked. No big surprise. The doors had never been locked when she was a child. But still. It was 1995 and hard to believe there was somewhere in America where people didn’t lock their doors at night.
Opening the door just far enough that she could call out, “Hello, hello. Anybody home? Avon calling.”
No response.
“Actually, I’m selling Girl Scout cookies and I can get you a great discount on snickerdoodles.”
Nothing.
She opened the door all the way but didn’t step inside because …
Yeah, because why?
Because she had suddenly begun to feel inexplicably anxious. Apprehensive. Her heart rate increased for no apparent reason.
“Dad,” she called out through the open door into a small foyer.
Her father had built this house after he retired, had apparently wanted to be the lone resident of the Middle of Nowhere. She hadn’t been consulted, given that they never talked, and she wasn’t sure why he had decided to move from their home in the North Fork Valley on the other side of the Wiley Bridge. In the early 1980s, the historic covered bridge had been declared unsafe for vehicles over 15,000 pounds, so she and the other children who rode a bus across it to school in Persimmon Ridge had to get out on one side of the bridge, wait for the bus to cross, then walk across on foot and get back aboard.
“I’m from the Publisher’s Clearing House with your check for a million dollars, and if you don’t claim it …”
Silence.
Clearly, no one was home.
But that was the thing — it felt like somebody was there. The air was heavy, stuffy. Even standing outside with the door wide open, it didn’t feel like there was enough air in the room.
“Dad?”
Silence gobbled up the word.
The plaintive, little-girl quality of her voice struck her and she realized she actually sounded, well, not scared, but at least creeped out.
What was wrong with her?
She forced herself to step into the house, but she didn’t close the door behind her and she didn’t like that she was unwilling to close the door behind her.
Two steps into the foyer where she could see into the other rooms of the house and she understood why nobody had answered. Nobody lived here. The dining room was bare, not a stick of furniture, nothing but a mirror and an old painting of a lighthouse in a storm on the wall. There’d been a lighthouse picture over the mantle in the house where she grew up — was it this one? She could see into the living room and kitchen from where she stood and there was no furniture there, either. Had she gotten the address wrong?
A sudden panic closed her throat — was she too late? Had her father died already? Fear threatened to carry her away but she made herself calm down. He’d been “stable” when he’d gone in for the checkup that had generated the next-of-kin report, with a prognosis of “months of treatment.” If he’d died, they’d have notified her. And they certainly wouldn’t have cleaned out his house without her consent.
She didn’t like that she had to force herself to walk farther into the house, and certainly didn’t like that every step was more difficult than the last. It was the odd feeling of … okay, call it what it was. The feeling of opposition. Like she somehow was not supposed to be here and was definitely not only uninvited but unwelcome.
When she walked into the living room, she stopped in her tracks and stared, shocked by what occupied one whole wall. It was a hand-drawn map of Nower County. But more than a mere map. It didn’t just have road names, creeks and mountains, towns and rivers. It had … everything. She approached it in something like reverence. The detail was stunning. The kind of details only a lifelong mailman would know. Her father had made this map. She was sure of it. No one else could have done it and there was no telling how many hours her father had devoted to the creation of it.
So this was her father’s house!
Then why wasn’t there any furniture in it?
Why had he left the map on the wall when he moved out?
And where was her father, the man who had spent — how long? Decades, surely — drawing that map?
In truth, what else did he have to do? Unless he had taken up golf or tennis in his old age, he’d had to come up with something to fill the hours of every day after he retired. He’d never liked movies and hated television, would turn it off when he came into the room even when she was watching a show. She’d get up, turn it back on, and he’d roll his eyes and curl up in a chair with his newspaper.
Which was why she was certain he hadn’t seen If You’ve Got it, Haunt It. He hadn’t likely seen any television show since she left for college. Even if he’d had a set, he wouldn’t have tuned in to that show. Why would he watch a show dedicated to tricking people? Why would he watch a “charlatan” play on people’s fears? Why would he watch a conman? Or in her case, a con-woman?
And that’s what he’d thought of her profession after she gave up the Little Miss Perfect job of teaching second grade and had dumped Little Miss Perfect’s perfect husband and became a psychic reader.
He’d thought she was a swindling fraud even before she started ghost hunting. In fact, he didn’t need to know anything more about how she lived her life than her profession to bestow upon her his unequivocal disapproval.
Game over.
But studying the map he had obviously spent years creating, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. The people who lived here didn’t care enough to keep their towns incorporated. They would cheerfully have moved away to somewhere that mattered if they could. Yet her father had “immortalized nowhere” with meticulous care in splendid detail.
It was hard to think of anything more pathetic.
“Pitiful,” she said aloud. And her breath frosted in front of her.
When — how? — had it gotten cold? Between one heartbeat and the next the air had turned frigid. The sun had risen behind a gray overcast sky this morning, but it was summertime outside. She shivered violently. The end of her nose felt frozen. Her body was covered in goosebumps. She shouldn’t be here.
Shouldn’t be here? Why not?
She should leave now. Right now.
Why?
Because you don’t belong here.
True that. This was her father’s house, not the home where she had grown up. It belonged to him and …
