Blood Harvest (Book 1): Blood Fruit

by Goodman, D. J.

  Blood Fruit

  By D.J. Goodman

  © 2014

  Book One: Ripe on the Vine

  Chapter One

  Until the day she died, there would be four moments in Peggy Sellnow’s life that she would remember with absolute clarity. The first two were the obvious ones, the ones she would mention if anyone ever asked her the question and she didn‘t want them to have any deeper insight into her character. She would say the day of her wedding and the moment her son had been born. Those moments had been important, special, but for different reasons than everyone assumed. For all her friends times like that were what their entire lives had been leading up to, the defining points of their existence. Peg didn‘t see anything wrong with that, and she certainly didn’t judge that their lives were defined by everyday domesticity. Indeed, she often wished it could be the same for her. But it was not.

  The third moment had actually happened first, eleven years earlier when she had been twenty-three and, like most twenty-somethings, absolutely convinced on some instinctual level that she was better than her elders, that there was something unique about the times that had created her to make her generation superior in every way and she had some secret knowledge that could finally fix the entire world for the better as soon as she finally figured out how to unlock it. On the night of June 23, 2002, however, she was given the first hint that such a way of thinking was deeply flawed and she did not in fact have all the answers. She had none, in fact. No one had them. Everyone was clueless, floating through life with zero direction while they mistakenly believed they were in control. That was the night her sister had vanished.

  Peg had loved her sister Zoey, but she had never really understood how much until the days following the disappearance. Before that Zoey had just been this strangely beautiful and fluttery creature. She had a tattoo of butterfly wings on her back, and that was how Peg had come to consider her in the intervening years, as a thing of beauty but ultimately almost insubstantial, something that blew away too easily on the wind. Peg could barely even remember anything about her sister other than that. There were so many times in the following years that Peg would go through Zoey’s things hoping for some further clue about what her sister had been like. Insights were hard to come by, usually. At times, usually when she was drunk or stoned, Peg thought that maybe some sort of cosmic force didn’t even want her to remember. Zoey had become nothing more than a vague ghost in the shadows as though that was all fate had ever intended her to be.

  On that night everything up until the moment was hazy, mostly because she had already been well on her way to drunk. Clarity came later, starting at the exact point where she began to understand that something was wrong. Before then all she had cared about was that she had someone to do shots with, preferably someone she knew. That wasn’t so hard considering how well she was known in the Sheboygan bar scene. She was even mostly liked, which was quite the feat considering how catty some women could get once they were drowning in vodka and whisky. Zoey, on the other hand, was rather new to the way of life. She wasn’t even supposed to be there with Peg, considering she was two years too young to legally drink. Peg had been the one to hook her little sister up with a fake ID, a detail that caused no end of trouble in the years of official investigation that followed that night.

  The last time Peg saw Zoey was just before midnight. She remembered that detail because several of the televisions playing in the bar, all but ignored by the patrons and drowned out by the blaring sounds of Marilyn Manson from the jukebox, were showing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Channel 9. Peg knew because she checked the TV listings later and it became another detail permanently burned into her head. It was one of the episodes from season 4, and near the end of the episode Buffy and Riley had been fighting. After slamming a drink with Peg and several other women at the bar, Zoey had looked up at the screen, shook her head in a vaguely woozy way, and then said, “God, I’m so glad she finally dumped him. Spike’s much hotter.”

  There were so many times that Peg wished their last words to each other were something more profound. Instead the words Peg left for history were, “Fuck yeah. James Marsters can do me any time.”

  Then Peg turned to talk to Angie Collett next to her, who was telling her about the latest girl Ronny Schimmel had tricked into his bed and knocked up. The drinks kept coming. The music kept playing. The drama kept unfolding. But unknown to Peg sometime in the next half hour her entire world stopped spinning.

  Sometimes in the later years Peg would try to convince herself that she wasn’t a horrible person, but it never worked. A decent person wouldn’t just fail to notice that her younger sister had vanished for more than half an hour. Such a person would keep an eye out, notice if there was trouble, make sure that the baby of the family didn’t just wander off aimlessly into a crowd of drunken assholes that might want to do who knew what to such a pretty and ethereal creature. Peg often wracked her brain for something she had lost among the alcohol-dimmed memories, just a vision of Zoey’s jet-black hair done up in its two tiny knots high up on the back of her head as they bobbed through the crowd, or the sound of her high-pitched squeak of a laugh filtering through the blaring nu-metal.

  But Peg could remember nothing of the sort. At the time, she hadn’t wanted to, either. She’d been vaguely annoyed that her kid sister had tagged along in the first place. For all the beautiful ghost images that came to Peg’s mind later when she remembered her sister, none of those had actually stuck with Peg when Zoey was still there. Zoey had been a vague annoyance at best and a raging nuisance at worst. And Peg wanted to bleach her mind from ever remembering her sister that way again.

  The fabled moment of absolute clarity started in mid-sentence. It was strange how memories worked, but whenever Peg thought back it was as though the recollection were the volume on a television, starting at mute and then slowing being dialed up. She didn’t remember what was happening five minutes beforehand. At around four minutes before she could start to remember the general flow of the conversations she had. At three the sensations she could remember were more than just sounds but specific sights, like the way a woman slightly too old for that night’s crowd writhed to the music by herself in the corner, her arms and legs moving to the beat in a way very reminiscent of a stiff marionette. At two minutes exact smells came to her, like the body odor of the guy trying and failing to drunkenly hit on her or the smell of peppermint liqueur her friend was drinking and the harsh and lingering odor of the cigarette smoke cloud that hung over the bar. One minute, and she knew the song that was playing—Linkin Park’s “In the End.” The drunk guy, a man named Benny Polaski who she would finally sleep with two weeks later and would go on to father her first abortion, was saying something incoherent but deeply negative about Bush Junior. Angie was on her other side slumped against the wall next to the dart board, and she was droning on about the psycho bitches that had been camped out in the bathroom doing God-knew-what in the stalls. Then it came to her, everything suddenly in sharp never-fading detail permanently burned into her mind as the realization suddenly arrived.

  Angie. “…what kind of shit they might be snorting…”

  Benny. “…right-wing wingnut. I mean, seriously, this man is going to drive us into…”

  And finally, Peg herself spoke up. “Wait. Where’s Zoey?”

  Benny kept droning. Apparently he didn’t even hear her over the music, or else he was too drunk to care that she wasn’t listening. Angie’s rant slurred to a halt, though, and she said something Peg couldn’t hear. Peg had to lean her ear close to Angie’s mouth before she could understand. “Don’t know. Thought she went to the bathroom.”

  For a moment Peg�
��s alcohol-drenched brain thought that made sense and the sudden urgent dread that had come over her started to subside. Then she realized how long it had been since she’d seen Zoey, and that she’d gone to the bathroom with Angie in the mean time. There’d been no sign of her anywhere in there.

  Peg didn’t believe in intuition or psychic forces. She was certain now that the dread she felt at that moment was purely a product of her buzz and had nothing to do with a deeper understanding that something had truly gone wrong. Nonetheless, she started to feel a panic as she looked around the bar and failed to see her little sister anywhere among the crowd. She stumbled up to the bar and shoved her way past several people who slurred at her in protest to ask the bartender if she had seen Zoey, but the bartender couldn’t help. Zoey hadn’t even been the one going up to get the drinks. That had been Peg, and somehow she’d been so absorbed in herself that she hadn’t even realized Zoey was no longer around asking for more.

  Peg turned back to Angie, who had lazily followed her up to the bar. Benny was close behind her, but Peg was pretty sure that had less to do with concern for the situation and more because he thought it was about time to try getting into Peg’s pants.

  “Help me find her,” Peg said. Every time she thought back to the memory she could clearly hear the note of panic in her own voice.

  “Just relax,” Angie said. “I’m sure she’s around here.” Her own tone of voice told Peg that she believed what she said, but she seemed disturbed by the way Peg was acting. Peg tried to tell herself that Angie was right, that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. This was a busy night in a popular bar. It wasn’t like misplacing your friends was an uncommon thing. But Angie’s tone changed in the next few minutes. Even Benny began to understand that something was wrong. Peg tried calling Zoey’s cell phone only to have it go directly to voicemail. They searched everywhere in the bar. They checked on the outside deck. They even looked out back by the garbage dumpsters to see if maybe she was out there puking. She wasn’t there. No one had seen her. No one could remember her going anywhere. At first all those they asked got annoyed at the three increasingly frantic people running around the bar with the seeming intent on harming their pleasant evening. After half an hour people began to truly understand that something bad was happening and this wasn’t just an overreaction.

  After an hour the police were called, but it wasn’t until the next day that any cop started to take this seriously. Even then, accusations were made that she had run off by herself, since Peg had already developed the reputation as being a bit on the wild side and was already known by the police. They simply assumed Zoey was taking a page out of her big sister’s book and taking a few days away. And she was nineteen, after all, so she was allowed to do that if she wanted.

  Her phone was discovered dumped at the bank of the Sheboygan River a week later, busted up from its journey through the water. Further up the river they found one of her boots. If there was anything else that had gone into the river it was never found, assumed by the authorities to have washed out into Lake Michigan. At that point the police finally decided this was not just a girl out defying her family and was in fact a true missing person, a kidnapping or possibly a murder.

  But all that came later, and many of those memories got washed out in the haze of grief, anger, depression, hatred, and recriminations that fell upon her family. The exact history of everything that happened in the years after would be a story in itself, and it was often one that Peg Sellnow chose not to tell. But the night itself, that one night, was the third moment.

  The fourth moment that Peg would always remember with absolute clarity happened eleven years later on April 24th, 2013 at right around one o’clock in the afternoon. That was the moment that Zoey Sellnow finally came back.

  Chapter 2

  The name Peggy Sellnow was gone, had been for going on four years. She was Peg Uttech, and she was just as happy to be rid of the name as she was to be rid of Sheboygan, Wisconsin. She’d also left behind her black and red dyed hair, her old clothing style, and half a dozen other things that she associated with that time of her life. She couldn’t even listen to the same music anymore without becoming nauseous, instead using country as her music of choice not because she actually liked it but because it was safe and predictable. That was what her life had become now. Safe, predictable, completely lacking in surprises. If it was occasionally boring she considered that to be a fair trade off for the thought that she would never have to go through the kind of things again that had defined her twenties.

  She even had a good-paying, secure job, something she would never have been able to predict for herself at twenty-three. She lived in Oconomowoc now, about an hour and a half south of Sheboygan, where she was a hostess at the Apollo Resort. She had to dress up every day, smile politely, lecture the new employees on the proper way to greet the guests, all of which went against every belief she used to have about non-conformity and sticking it to the man, whoever the hell that was supposed to be.

  The biggest surprise, though, the one thing she would never be able to get her younger self to believe, was that she was a devoted wife and mother. She’d always said she never wanted children. Even at her drunkest she would only admit to saying she would have a kid only if it was by accident and for some reason she couldn’t afford an abortion. But she’d had a child, and even did it in the “right order,” getting married first and having her son with her husband on purpose. She didn’t regret the decision at all, but there was always a part of her that felt like she had betrayed herself by becoming what others had always deemed responsible. Her husband Tony, a chef and also an employee at Apollo, had never even met her until she moved to Oconomowoc six years ago, and even then he couldn’t believe many of the stories (usually told without some of the more unfortunate details) she told about the way she used to be. To most of the people around her now she had always existed as this responsible, trustworthy adult and no one could believe any differently.

  They had a home on Lac La Belle, the sort of thing her parents had owned but she had always believed she wanted no part of. She’d always believed since she was a teenager that she would become part of some sort of artist’s commune, sleeping in hammocks or something and smoking weed all day long. Instead she lived in a three bedroom—one more bedroom than they needed right now but they wanted that extra room for when they decided it was time for their family to grow. It wasn’t a question of whether or not they would every have another baby but a question of when. Everything about her exuded domesticity.

  Tony was one of only two people in her circle that knew she still went to see a therapist on a bi-weekly basis, or that she attended weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and she never talked to him about that. Peg had gotten him to agree early on in the relationship that such things were holdovers from her previous life, necessary but not an acceptable topic for discussion. All of that was over, and must never come back.

  The afternoon that it did come back, whether she wanted it to or not, was sunny but slightly cool. They’d had an overly long winter and spring was having a hard time coming, but it was slowly arriving just the same. It was the kind of day where, years from now when her son Brendon was old enough, she would probably have to take him after school to some kind of sports practice. The mere thought of that made her shake her head with a crooked grin as she pulled into the driveway after coming home from work. Peg Uttech, soccer mom. It was another completely improbable transformation that she had never predicted for herself. Even her mother, on the rare occasions where they forced themselves to talk to each other, couldn’t believe that her only remaining child had actually turned so unbelievably domestic. Peg knew that there was an unspoken insult in there, the implication that Peg should have been in jail somewhere or in some run-down apartment somewhere doing any number of drugs. But Peg did her best to ignore it simply because she knew there was some level of truth there. She could have easily gone down that road. She’d even started. She turned aro
und and came back though, likely just in time. And now here she was, the very picture of a modern 21st century wife. Somewhere deep inside a suppressed version of her tried to gag at the idea, but that part had no control over her.

  Even though she finished her shift at one today she would still have the house to herself until after three. She paid the sitter extra to keep Brendon every day, just long enough for her to take some time to herself before the mad family life intruded back in. She loved who she was and what she had become, but that brooding introverted nature that had plagued her so much when she was younger still stuck with her, and if she didn’t give it some time to breath every day it would come out when she didn’t want it to. It used to be that she would take this time to read or watch something from Netflix all by herself, but more and more she found herself falling asleep on the couch and waking up just in time to go get Brendan. That was another thing she had never envisioned—she liked naps. The moody young girl inside wanted to call her a geezer and sneer at such a waste of valuable time, but that moody girl hadn’t understood what it meant to work an eight hour day and then come home to work even more.

  Of course, there were other ways to relax, too. As Peg unlocked the door she remembered that she still had some pot somewhere around here. She’d gotten rid of many of her vices— she’d even finally managed to stop smoking after a long struggle—but weed had been something she couldn’t get rid of completely. Tony knew about her habit and tolerated it, as long as she didn’t do it too often and absolutely never ever around Brendan. Those were terms she could live with, and it had probably been more than a month since the last time. She’d been a good girl. She figured she’d earned it.

  All thoughts of a relaxing bowl, however, vanished as soon as she opened the door. She stopped before entering, knowing something was wrong, but at first she couldn’t say what. Then she caught it and sniffed. There was a smell in the air, faint but unpleasant. She had a friend who’d once had a less than pleasant adventure with a possum in her attic, and when she’d gone to shoot the thing with a BB gun it had fallen down a crack into the walls and died. It had taken her days to get the thing out and it had infected the house with the most horrid rotting odor that had managed to hang around for weeks before they’d finally had to simply rip the wall open and clean it from the inside out. The idea that something might have died in the walls immediately put Peg on edge, but she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. There could be any number of things that might be causing that smell, and hopefully most of them would be easy to clean up.