Mr. Wheedle slid a short table over next to her desk and sat on the edge of it. His feet dangled down like a kid’s and she saw that his socks were a bizarre red plaid.
“Are you having fun at Moultrie?” he asked.
“Fun?” she said. “So much fun, I’d do it for free, but you are really not the person to tell that to.”
“I’ve been impressed with your lesson plans,” he said. “And I admit to some clandestine eavesdropping during the day and like your classroom control techniques.”
Laura smiled but grimaced inside. C’mon, she thought. Knock off the snow job. Just lower the ax so I can start packing.
“You remember that Mrs. Matthews was scheduled to be out for a few weeks while her leg healed.”
Laura nodded. She held back a sigh. What was she going to do when she woke up in the morning with no children to teach?
“Well,” Mr. Wheedle continued, “she realized the number of sick days she had accumulated over the years and decided to rest up completely and stay out the rest of the semester.”
“You mean…”
“I mean that the class is yours until then if you want it.”
“Want it?” Laura could hardly contain her joy. “Absolutely!”
“Now in all fairness, there’s something you need to know,” Mr. Wheedle said. “Your third graders have to take the TCAP at the end of the semester. That’s the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program exam. It’s their first state standardized test. It grades them but it also grades the school. A lot rides on the results and, fair or not, everyone will give you the credit or the blame.”
“Then they’ll just have to ace that test, won’t they?”
Mr. Wheedle smiled. “That’s what I knew you’d say. That’s why I didn’t try too hard to talk Mrs. Matthews out of her decision.” He got up and extended his hand. “Pleasure to have you here.”
Laura ignored his hand and gave him a quick hug. “It’s great to be here.”
Mr. Wheedle left and Laura’s mind began racing. So much to do. She needed to start reviewing the TCAP. She needed practice tests. She needed a TCAP prep plan. She would have to make months of lesson plans! Some kids needed tutoring. She knew which ones. Parent/Teacher conferences were this week.
Seconds ago she feared she was about to be unemployed. Now she was instantly weeks behind.
And it felt great.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It just stunned him sometimes. Over the last three weeks, Doug had turned his afternoons into a personal version of This Old House.
He had definitely bonded with the building. Maybe it was the hours he spent writing in the turret room that caused the feel of the house to seep into his bones. Whatever the reason, he had adopted this house like nowhere else he had ever lived.
He remembered the picture from the old newspaper, the one from the gala party, the one with lovely Sarah on the front porch. He remembered it with more detail than it could possibly have contained. Then as he walked around the property, he cringed at every sign of age the way a super model bemoans each facial wrinkle. The guy who paid a local kid to clean his gutters in New York was now out painting trim, replacing rotted boards and weeding flowerbeds. He’d even spiffed up the Hutchington graveyard, resetting all the headstones. An eighty-five-year-old house, a barn and fifteen acres of property made for a lengthy list of chores. He had become a regular at Randolph’s Hardware downtown.
He was on his way back from Randolph’s when he yanked his car to a stop at the end of the driveway. He jumped out of the car, furious.
An early project had been to replace the rusting, door-less mailbox at the road with a more respectable version. Doug had purchased a beautiful wooden version and painted it in the same contrasting colors of the house and detailed the top to match the shingles. Someone had turned it into a collection of shards and splinters. A few pieces clung to the wooden mounting post, but the rest lay in a pile at the base.
This hadn’t been some joyriding kids driving by with a bat. The destruction was deliberate and determined. Whoever did this had a serious grudge, and in his three weeks here, Doug only knew one person who did. Vern.
His first impulse was to drive up the hill and confront the son of a bitch. The sheriff said he had warned the redneck but apparently that hadn’t sunk in. Someone needed to explain property rights to him again.
But Doug had no proof. Vern would deny it. They would both shout at each other. In the end, Vern would see he had pissed Doug off and feel good about it. And he would not be deterred.
Doug got back in the car and slammed the door. He yanked the gearshift into reverse, spun the car around and headed back to town. One more trip to Randolph’s for a new mailbox. But he wouldn’t forget this. Someday Vern would get what was coming to him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Laura noticed the new mailbox as soon as she approached the house. The old one had certainly met her needs, but if this was part of Doug’s Home Improvement tear, she was fine with it. She parked by the side of the house and pulled her bags from the front seat.
She approached the house and stopped short of the front steps. She had thought about the ghost girls on and off all day, though it had been weeks since their last encounter. Now an idea struck her. They had come to visit her. Were they waiting for her to visit them?
The Hutchington graveyard was out there somewhere. She guessed it was in the cluster of trees at the far end of the open field. Doug could wait a few moments for her return. She dropped her purse and book bag on the porch and headed for the grove.
The deceptive expanse of lush grass disguised a ragged potholed surface. Laura’s ankles twisted awkwardly with every step. Flights of buzzing insects launched as she shuffled through the calf-deep growth. Minutes later, her slow progress and the rolling beads of sweat on her back made her question her impulsive expedition. But those girls had come to her… She slapped a mosquito and pressed on.
She stepped into the shade of the grove and it was like entering another world. The temperature dropped ten degrees. The drone of insects disappeared. In the shade she stopped squinting against the low-lying sun and her face relaxed. Far from being the haunted place she feared, the tiny burial ground had a calm, cathedral-like quality.
She saw the grave markers immediately since Doug had cleared much of the debris away. She made a beeline for the twin smaller headstones. She stood between them and read Constance’s and Elizabeth’s names.
The years engraved on the stones were so long ago. It was a different world back them when food was always fresh and electricity a rarity in rural Tennessee. The girls were probably quite different from the students she had now. They had no television and probably no radio to baby-sit them. Their imagination had to spin their entertainment out of the wisps of their experiences. Many of her students now had so little creativity that she had to jump-start their creative writing storylines or describe the locations they were going to paint. These girls wouldn’t have been like that. Building off each other’s ideas, they no doubt had hosted imaginary tea parties, played the roles of kidnapped princesses and envisioned secret worlds beneath the surface of the pond.
She knelt between the headstones and placed one hand on each. She felt that twinge at the base of her neck, the warning shot from the old Triple-S. But it was faint, not the jolt she got from the girls’ last visit. Were they farther away? Were they weak? Was it because it was daylight? The idea that they did not plan on returning crossed her mind and she was filled with disappointment. She gripped the top of each gravestone.
“You can come back anytime,” Laura said. “I’ll be here for you. You won’t be alone.”
The oak she was under shed two leaves. They dropped in two lazy symmetrical spirals like helicopters on a slow approach. One came to rest on the top of each of her hands with a soft caress.
Laura broke into an excited smile. She slipped the leaves into one hand and held them to her heart. The girls knew she cared. She was sure
they’d be back when they could. She would be waiting.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cast-off crap.
That’s what her rat bastard ex had called the contents of Theresa Grissom’s antique store, Treasured Things. Cast-off crap, salvaged shit, Dumpster debris. He was too stupid to know a business opportunity. Hell, he was too stupid to know he was being alliterative. But it wouldn’t have mattered if Theresa had planned to sell permanent weight loss pills, dollar-per-gallon gas or next week’s winning lottery numbers. Bobby would have told her every idea she has was retarded. Not because they were but because they were hers. To hear him tell it, marrying him was the only good decision she ever made. So once a day, Theresa Grissom stood in the front door of her successful store, scanned her inventory, smiled and said, “Cast-off crap.” She loved to remind herself of one more time that her jackass former husband had been wrong.
Theresa tucked her short red hair behind her ear. She was thin with fair skin and delicate features. A score of faint freckles brushed her cheekbones. Her petite height made her appear just over twenty instead of past thirty. But telltale wrinkles already creased the corners of her eyes and between her brows, vapor trails left by the public trials of marrying a jerk and the private burden of her psychic gift.
“Premonitions” her grandmother called them, though Theresa wished they were as precise as that name implied. Usually it was just a feeling, a vague fear, a wisp of foreboding. First one event would trigger the sensation, and then later another. Each was a sensory event (touch, smell, hearing) and she would experience them in a string over time, like putting extra letters on the little ledge from a Scrabble game. The problem was the letters were never in order and she never knew how many there were supposed to be. All she had was a nonsense word until the letters marched into the right order and her premonition made sense. But often it was too late to do anything about it.
Her gift first manifested at age fourteen. A colossal oak shaded the family trailer outside of Moultrie. She’d grown up around the tree, climbed in its branches with her sister, played in its shade in the summer and jumped in its leaves in the fall. Then one day, leaning her bike against the tree after school, the touch of the tree terrified her. The branches turned menacing, like a witch’s outstretched arms. The ripples in the gnarled bark of the trunk sneered at her. The leaves rustled in the wind like whispered warnings. Gooseflesh rippled across her arms and every fiber in her being said the tree was one supernaturally poisoned oak.
Try as she did to rationally douse the flames of this unsubstantiated fear, they only burned hotter all week. She avoided the tree, fearful even to cross its long shadow in the late-day sun. Of course she shared her trepidation with no one, afraid to sound like a scared child when she wanted to be considered on the edge of adulthood.
A few days later, her second Scrabble letter went face up. Her mother was making breakfast, frying eggs for all. She had a gift for cracking the egg against the edge of the cast iron skillet and pouring its contents into the pan while demolishing the eggshell. Other cooks ended up with two eggshell halves, but Mom had a handful of eggshell crumbs and none of it ever made it into the pan. At the crack and crush symphony from the first egg, Theresa felt a chill race down her spine. She wasn’t even watching her mother cook. All she sensed was the sound, one snap and crumble of the splintered shell, a faint noise that inexplicably pushed itself to the foreground, past her sister’s panicked rant about her fuzzy hair, the blare of the Today show on the kitchen micro-TV and the cascade of the shower running down the hall. Crack. Crush. Panic.
It wasn’t the eggs she was afraid of. When her mother slapped one sunny side up in front of her, Theresa didn’t flinch. It was the sound of the shattering shell, the concept of a durable surface instantly pulverized, that made the terror race through her like a thousand volts. Nothing else tripped her premonition sensors that day, or the next. But the image of her mother’s one-handed crush was never far from her mind.
That Friday, rain fell in sheets as the school bus dropped Theresa at the foot of her driveway. Thunder rumbled close by. She grabbed the mail from the mailbox and dashed through the torrent to the trailer. She entered dripping wet. As she moved to toss the mail on the table, she felt her hand grow cold, as if there were a chunk of ice imbedded in the mail. That same sense of impending evil filled her soul. She flipped through the sheaf of envelopes and tossed discards to the floor. Her fingers went numb as she held the last one.
The return address was the County Clerk’s Office. This was the registration renewal for her mother’s minivan.
Rain pounded against the tin roof of the trailer. Lightning cracked overhead so close that Theresa could hear raindrops explode in its path. The flash lit the envelope in her hand and the room went white.
A vision flashed through Theresa’s mind and all the clues fell into place. The tree, the egg, the letter, the storm. The vision lasted but seconds, but it was all Theresa needed. Her mother’s van, wipers slapping against the blinding rain, barrels up the driveway. Lightning strikes the tree beside the house, splitting the mighty oak in two. Half the tree shears away, too quickly for Theresa’s mother to react after the blinding flash. The oak lands across the roof and bends the car into a V around the driver’s seat. The windshield explodes outward, showering glass nuggets into the pounding downpour. No one survives.
Dread engulfed Theresa. She had no doubt that what she saw would come true. She had to act now.
She ran out the front door. The white minivan was yards from the driveway and closing fast. A snap of cloud-to-cloud lightning announced the thunderhead’s arrival. Theresa’s hair stood on end as the ground swelled with static electricity, ready to pull down the next lightning bolt.
There was no time for thought. The van had to stop. Theresa grabbed her bicycle from beside the door. The van turned into the driveway and Theresa ran.
The air was thick with the blinding rain. The van defroster wasn’t worth a crap and between the windshield fog and the worn wipers, Theresa’s mom would never recognize her daughter trying to flag her down.
Feet from the van, Theresa launched her bicycle in front of it. The van grill snapped as a handlebar speared the plastic. The bike rolled under the front tires. Metal twisted and the bike seat plowed wet gravel into a grinding pile. The van rolled over the bike and Theresa’s mother screamed. The van’s brakes locked.
A bolt of lightning two feet wide leapt from the clouds overhead. True to Theresa’s vision, it blasted the mighty oak down the middle. Sap boiled in the doomed tree and the trunk exploded. The right side of the tree crashed on the driveway with the staccato snap of dozens of branches. The tree missed Theresa by inches. She did not flinch.
Theresa’s mother burst from the van. At the sight of the mangled bicycle, she screamed Theresa’s name then cut it off midway when she saw her daughter standing in the pouring rain. Strands of Theresa’s red hair were plastered against her face like dripping candle wax. Theresa’s mother looked back and forth between the bike, her daughter and the exploded oak, unsure where to begin her questioning.
Theresa was never able to fully explain her gift to her mother, but saving her life was all that was important. Though her first experience at “prophesy”, as her mother took to calling it, let her change a horrible future, the gift was not always so generous. Sometimes the pieces only came together after the event transpired. Sometimes they never amounted to anything, as far as she could tell.
So the gift doubled as a curse. Theresa’s debilitating guilt at understanding too late about the impending fire at the County Animal Shelter was one thing. But the frustration from all the unsolved sensations of dread was even worse. Did the anxiety she felt when she touched an antique bowl mean something nefarious was about to unfold, or was it just a stray thought that coincidentally passed by? Most times, she never knew.
Another disappointment was her lack of control. She could not select what her premonition was about. The vision seemed to select
her. God knew, a few visions of her future with Bastard Bobby Grissom would have been nice the week before their courthouse wedding.
The good news was Treasured Things had been a hit from the start. And it was a good thing since Bastard Bobby’s child support was as reliable as his toilet bowl aim. Sympathetic folks had let her sell their heirlooms on consignment, so she needed little investment to get up and running. Most of the sales were to outsiders, folks passing through or out for a weekend drive. The visitors paid top dollar. Since the day the judge ordered Bobby to move out, Theresa hadn’t missed a mortgage payment.
The store fronted on the west side of Moultrie’s town square, staring at the main entrance to the county courthouse and it’s ever vigilant bronze son of the Confederacy. Rooting through the second-floor storage when she first opened up, Theresa found lost reminders of the shop’s previous lives as a shoe store, a sporting goods store, and even hat blocks from the bygone era when men would not dare go out bareheaded. The relics all joined the jumble of antiques that filled the narrow store to overflowing.
On the shelves, anachronisms abounded. Sewing machines, typewriters, hand farm tools (some with traces of dirt in their tines). Theresa made sure the store had the proper scent of mixed must and polish so the customers knew the items were old yet taken care of.
The bell rang at the front door of the store. Theresa looked up from behind the desk she was dusting. Ruby Broadway strode in, cradling a large open box in her arms. She wore a bright red dress that, over her three-hundred-pound frame, made her look a bit like a barn. Theresa knew that dress. Ruby did estate sales and auctions in this county and the next, and she always wore red when she was selling. She said she didn’t want the buyers to miss her. Her dark skin amplified her already dazzling white smile. Her hair had a new style, processed straight and pulled back and up, with ringlets at each ear.
“Girl,” Ruby announced as she muscled down the tight aisle. “Have I got some wonders for you!” Ruby made back the bulk of her investment in each estate from the furniture. Most of the remainder sold for small sums too small for her to worry about. Ruby donated these orphans to Theresa.
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