Red Heather Page 4

  Heart pounding, I looked toward the dimly lit yard and still saw nothing from my vantage point, my brain fumbling to rationalize what my body was already well into reacting to. I was halfway through telling myself that I’d imagined it when I looked down at Ed—his fur was standing on end and his tail had fluffed up like a raccoon’s. He stared wide-eyed toward the door, still as the windless night outside, waiting like I was.

  It was a cloud, I told myself, hearing my own uncertainty and finding myself willing to buy into it all the same. That’s all it was.

  Chapter 4

  After getting spooked by a cloud of all things, I’d taken Graham’s advice and dug into the stash of sleeping pills I’d not touched for a week after thinking I was becoming too dependent on them. Questionable? Maybe. But I actually got some decent sleep and, since then, I’d been scolding myself for being so goddamn paranoid.

  When I’d clawed my way back to consciousness the next morning, I’d felt traces of my awkward amble upstairs post-pill pop. I’d flipped the covers back and found notations of every surface I’d bumped into logged across my body in small, still-forming bruises. I didn’t remember hitting anything of course, but I also didn’t remember much after starting up the staircase. For getting the first full night of sleep since moving into the new place, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.

  I sat on the floor with Ed and nibbled on a piece of toast, and it seemed to ease whatever ill had fallen over me. I soon decided the “ill” was just stress made worse by unfamiliar territory.

  When I left the kitchen, Ed trotted along behind me, his tiny paw taps giving me a level of peace little else could. My boxcutter was still bafflingly missing in action, so I took the scissors from the kitchen and began hacking into boxes with much less caution than I probably should have, given the delicate contents of a few of them. After doing enough unpacking to reap a sense of accomplishment, I ended up scouting out my laptop bag to do a bit of 1 Red Heather Road background searching while I had a snack and a breather. Upon opening the laptop and pressing the power button, I discovered that the battery was dead.

  “Of course,” I murmured, plugging the charger into the wall and closing the computer for the time being. I took out my phone instead but promptly reconsidered. I looked at Ed. “Is it really smart to try and reassure myself with the Internet?”

  Ed mewed warily and began considering the possibility that I was projecting my own doubt onto him. I left the computer where it could charge on the floor, going upstairs again instead. When Ed’s paw-taps ceased, I glanced over my shoulder. He sat at the foot of the stairs, staring after me while his tail swished back and forth.

  “Can’t be bothered, huh?” I asked him. I realized then that he hadn’t followed me up the first time either when I’d gone to find my bag.

  Ed just continued to stare. However, when I followed his eyes, I realized he was actually looking past me rather than at me.

  “Dick move, Ed,” I murmured apprehensively as I tried to smooth the goosebumps from my arms and walked the rest of the way up the staircase.

  When I reached the top, I looked down the hall to my bedroom. I distinctly remembered leaving the door wide open. Now partially closed, it swayed delicately on its hinges, issuing a soft moan in the otherwise quiet house.

  I didn’t remember leaving a window open though.

  I cast a glance down the stairs to see if Ed had decided to join me, although I wasn’t sure what protection a cat could (or would) offer. He remained at the foot of the stairs, watching me now.

  Well, he doesn’t seem agitated, I reasoned with my anxiety as I took a deep breath and gave myself a shake, pushing myself to keep walking down the hall.

  The door continued to sway, and I continued to consider the movement pattern of the door—even if I had opened a window, which I hadn’t, that wasn’t how a breeze-bothered door swung. The angle was wrong and the actual movement seemed unnatural. If anything, it looked like how someone would deliberately try to move a door to look like it was blowing around with the wind.

  I steeled myself for something stupid to startle me as I made it within arm’s length of the doorframe. An old board beneath my right foot groaned and the door stopped moving.

  A heartbeat later, it slammed in my face.

  I half-shouted and immediately felt like a fool for being gotcha’d by a door. “Goddammit,” I muttered and opened my bedroom door to find that I actually had, at some point, opened a window and the drapes around it were fluttering gently with the wind moving in from outside.

  The formerly semi-reasonable symptoms of my fear—clammy, unsteady hands and hair that had risen on the back of my neck—suddenly felt extremely silly. By the time I’d made my way across the room and shoved the culprit to my almost-heart attack shut, my hands had stopped shaking and the only thing still amiss was the state of my pride.

  • • •

  “Just the wind” were famous last words, and I’d been saying them a lot lately. Just the wind that had caught the door and slammed it home. Just a cloud. Just the wind. Just a house.

  Yet once I’d left said house to go for a jog around a neighborhood I’d seen only fleetingly since moving to Grendling, I’d decided that it really was pretty windy out. The window had been open (inexplicably). And my degree wasn’t in meteorology or the like, so I wasn’t an expert on wind-to-door physics. Hell, the most likely scenario was that, in my drugged stupor the night before, I’d been hot and had thoughtlessly opened a window. It made sense and it would’ve also given me more opportunity to pinball around my new house, the layout of which I was still wholly unused to before—by some miracle, I believed at this point—I’d hit the hay and rejoined the dead.

  I jogged down past the small grocery store I’d visited the other day and was genuinely surprised when the clerk I’d gotten didn’t come outside and fling holy water my way in passing. I discovered a couple of antique shops, a bike store, a few restaurants, and a surprising number of tiny hole-in-the-wall bars on my route.

  When I wasn’t looking at places, I was looking at people—and the people were looking back. Everyone could tell I was new. It wasn’t my hair and it wasn’t the glances I kept throwing at just about everything I passed either. People in this town—and small towns in general, I’d found—knew each other pretty well or were at least familiar with the fishes in their pond, and well, I was the new fish.

  Or maybe it really was my hair.

  I’d turned around to head back after reaching a slightly rundown bar called Daisy Jill, which I thought was a strange name for a bar. Hell, it would’ve been a strange name for a person. Regardless, I found myself backtracking to the door, lured in by the odd name and the neon sign in the window that screamed ‘OPEN’ one letter at a time.

  A bell clanged above the door when I pushed it open, and I was surprised to see that “Daisy Jill” was actually pretty populated and looked newer inside than out. Just about everyone inside glanced over with the ring of the bell and either let their eyes linger or went back to their lunch. I let the door close behind me and went to take over an empty stool at the counter.

  The bartender, who was a somewhat heavyset man with a well-kept beard and no hair to match, walked up to greet me. “Afternoon, Miss. What can I get for you?”

  I checked the time, realizing it was still pretty early. “Good question. Is it socially acceptable to order a beer yet?”

  He chuckled. “It’s five o’clock somewhere, kid. You passin’ through?”

  “Just moved here, actually,” I said.

  “Oh, well, welcome to town then. If you’re new here, you’ll need a christening,” he told me, picking up a stein from the rack and filling it from a red-handled tap. The head nearly spilled over when he set it in front of me.

  “Christening, eh?” I repeated as I lifted the heavy glass. He didn’t explain, just waited. I finally took a sip, some of the foam dotting my nose. It had a crisp initial flavor that was complemented by a hoppy, but not unpleasant
bitterness in the aftertaste. “Is that rhubarb?” I asked after contemplating the overall flavor.

  “You might be the third person ever to guess that right on the first try,” he said. “It’s my own recipe. I brew it in the back.”

  “This is your place then?”

  “Sure is. For thirty years now. Jeff Sanders,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.

  I shook it. “Miri James.”

  “Quite a handshake you got there. And quite a name. That’s a rich name,” he teased as he wiped up some condensation from the counter.

  “Doesn’t fit me well then,” I remarked, taking another long sip.

  “I know what you mean,” Jeff agreed. “Business is good, but we’ve had our bad years.”

  “Where does ‘Daisy Jill’ come from?” I asked curiously.

  He chuckled. “Well, this place was a strip club in the eighties. Miss Daisy’s. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get those letters off the front. So I tried to put letters over it and my bar’s original name was Jeff and Jill’s—Jill is my wife—but a storm took out about half the letters five years after we opened. Didn’t feel like replacin’ ‘em since everyone around here just calls us Jill’s anyways.”

  “Quite a story,” I commented with a smile.

  “There’s always a story,” Jeff agreed. “That’s ours. What’s yours?”

  “Well, I grew up south of here in Indiana, but I’ve lived in New York for the past few years. I only just moved here a few days ago though,” I said. “Now I’m pretty sure I live in a haunted house.”

  “Where’d you move in?”

  “1 Red Heather Road,” I replied.

  “Then you’re definitely livin’ in a haunted house,” he laughed. “At least that’s what the word around town’s been since the Prices moved out.”

  “Great,” I mumbled, but I couldn’t help but laugh with him. It was nice to hear someone else be flippant about the rumors.

  “Hey, don’t let the local stories get to you,” he advised me. “There are way too many and they’re too different to be credible, in my opinion. In my opinion, it’s a sturdy, historical house with a bad reputation because people ‘round here have a hard time minding their business.”

  “I know. I’m just making myself anxious,” I confided after swallowing another mouthful of my drink, “but I keep hearing all this stuff about it and then there are these noises sometimes and doors shutting…”

  “Old houses complain as much as old people,” he chuckled. “They moan and groan and just about any draft or change in pressure will make things shift around.”

  “You’re right,” I relented, setting down my now-empty stein and feeling exponentially better. “I’m being silly.”

  “Hard not to in a new town and a new house. Well, new to you, anyway,” Jeff amended, taking the stein and setting it in the sink. “You’ll be just fine. You seem like you have your head on pretty straight for a kid your age.”

  “I really appreciate that. What do I owe you?”

  “Nothing. Christenings are on the house,” he said with a smirk.

  “Ah, the ‘first one’s free’ hook,” I laughed as I stood up. “Smart businessman.”

  A pleased blush rose in Jeff’s cheeks around his mustache. “You learn the tricks of the trade as you go. Take care and come by again—and try not to worry so much.”

  “Thanks, Jeff. It was really nice to meet you.”

  I left what I could scrounge up for a tip before exiting the bar and heading back toward home, noticing the wind had died down some while I was inside. I was one turn from reaching my driveway when a high-pitched yell broke the silence.

  “Mama!”

  I looked in the direction of the shout—toward the front yard of my closest neighbor’s house—and saw a little girl sitting down in the grass, facing toward the open garage.

  I hesitated at first, afraid a helicopter parent might charge out and accuse me of distressing their kid, but concern won out and I walked up the driveway, keeping my distance until I knew what was going on. “You okay?” I asked.

  The little girl—who I guessed might be around six—looked at me, her eyes immediately sweeping up me to my hair and lighting up, her distress gone temporarily. “Wow, you have mermaid hair!”

  I laughed. “Thanks! Where’s your mom?”

  “She was in the garage, but she went inside because Axil was crying. Can you get me a bandage?” she asked.

  “I can’t go in your house,” I hedged, “but I probably have one in my purse. Hold on.” I walked closer as I rooted through my bag for a bandage and saw then that she'd scraped her knee on something. The skin was flushed and a little raw but didn’t look too bad. “What’d you do?”

  “Oh, I tripped,” she said. “Is your hair real?”

  “It’s real, but I put hair dye on it to make it this color,” I told her as I finally found my little first-aid case.

  “Can you do mine like yours?”

  “That’s up to your parents,” I said, finding an alcohol wipe as well and deciding it couldn’t hurt to use that, too. “But if they’re okay with it, sure. This is going to sting a little, by the way.”

  “Oh, those are okay,” she said. “Mama’s a nurse. She always has those.”

  “Okay, good,” I said as I cleaned up the scrape and put the wipe back in the wrapper, stuffing it in my pocket to toss at home.

  “Oh, my god!”

  I froze at the startled shout from the garage. A petite blond woman was hurrying over, breastfeeding an infant in her arms beneath a blanket she had draped over her shoulder. I decided to label her Supermom until I learned her name.

  “She’s fine. She just tripped,” I said as she swooped in.

  “Oh, okay,” Supermom sighed with palpable relief, looking tired and a bit harried. “Who are you?”

  “Your new neighbor, apparently,” I said as I nodded toward my house, which was visible just over the hill behind theirs. I shook her hand after applying the bandage to her daughter’s knee. “Miri James.”

  “Rose Roberts. I’m sorry we haven’t come up to meet you,” she apologized. “It’s been crazy with the new baby and, well, everything else.”

  “Life is always a little crazy,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Did you introduce yourself to your rescuer?” Rose asked her daughter, smiling now.

  “Oh,” the little girl said as realization dawned. She had such a “tiny adult” sort of demeanor, I almost laughed every time she spoke. “My name is,” she winced a little, “Bethaline Roberts.”

  “Bethaline?” I repeated, trying out the name. She nodded, watching me. “I’ve never met a Bethaline before. I like it.”

  While Bethaline appeared shocked at this revelation, her mother explained, “We combined Bethany and Madeline because we couldn’t decide.”

  “Your parents made your name?” I grinned. “That’s so cool!”

  Bethaline was positively beaming as she stood up, scraped knee forgotten. “Mama, can I have mermaid hair like Miri?”

  Rose laughed. “We’ll see, sweets. Why don’t you go on inside? I made you some lunch.”

  “Okay. Bye, Miri!” Bethaline said enthusiastically.

  “Thank you again for stopping to see if she was okay,” Rose said sincerely as Axil started to fuss quietly beneath the blanket. “We’d love to have you over for dinner sometime if you’re interested.”

  “I’d love to. Thank you,” I said, waving as they both turned to go inside.

  Bethaline had taken two steps before she stopped abruptly and turned back around. “Oh, wait! Also, tell Jonah ‘hi’ for me, please!” she said as she waved goodbye and ran inside to eat her lunch.

  I blinked and looked to Rose for an explanation, but she just smirked and rolled her eyes. Once Bethaline was inside, she explained, “She has a friend named Jonah. He doesn’t live with us, he lives in Red Heather House. But he comes over to play with her sometimes or something like that.”
She shrugged. “She’s such an old soul, I figured she’d bypass the imaginary friend stage of things.”

  I smirked. “Well, I’ll be sure to deliver her message. She’s adorable.”

  “Thank you. And thanks for telling her you liked her name,” Rose added. “Everyone pulls a face at it around here. People are conservative about the silliest things… Plus, I’m pretty sure kids have teased her about it at school.”

  “I get that,” I said, pointedly smoothing a teal lock behind my ear. “Miriam didn’t exactly go over well either when I was younger. Kids are mean.”

  Rose smiled at that. “For sure. Have a good one, Miri. I’m looking forward to us being neighbors.”

  Rose followed her daughter inside and I walked the rest of the way home. As I made my way up the drive, I found myself glancing up toward the window that was open earlier. It was still closed, just like I’d left it.

  Get a grip, James. I walked inside the house and shut the door behind me, crossing my arms over my chest and surveying the bright interior. In the quiet that followed, I found myself mumbling, “Bethaline says to tell you ‘hi,’ Jonah.”

  I’m not sure what I expected to happen, if anything at all, but I was once again made a bit of a fool when the silence stretched and the house continued to be just an old house.

  Chapter 5

  With renewed ease the next morning, I ventured downstairs to sit on the couch with my laptop on my legs and my cat on my chest, typing with one hand because the heavy beast needed one arm’s support just to stay where he was. He purred loudly, stretching out his paws and closing his eyes.

  “I’d be tired, too, if I spent all night raking my nails across the walls,” I mumbled, pressing a light kiss to his furry head despite my attitude. His purring intensified and I found it difficult to stay mad at him.