Chapter Twenty-Two
KARLI
I wore a pair of comfortable jeans and a t-shirt when I left the house. When I got to Nick’s, the sun was already on its way down and it had cooled off a lot from the abnormal heat of the fall day. I grabbed a hoodie out of the trunk of my car and went up to knock on the door. He pulled it open before my knuckles made contact and then ran those beautiful, blue eyes across me from head to toe. It made me want to shiver.
“Did I dress okay?”
He smiled. God, those dimples kill me. “Perfect,” he said.
He was wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of jeans. I’d never known anyone that could make a white t-shirt look so good. The way the cotton fabric stretched over his taut muscles and the contrast of the bright white to the colorful ink covering his arms should be illegal.
He stepped out holding a duffel bag and locked the door behind him before taking my hand and leading me over to his big truck. As he was helping me up, I tried again,
“So, where did you say we were going?”
He laughed. “Nice try. It’s a surprise, remember?”
“I thought it was worth a shot. What’s the duffel bag for?”
He laughed, closed my door, and tossed the bag in the back before climbing in his side. “You’re not good with surprises, are you?”
I sighed. “Nope. I grew up with Charlie, remember? Does he seem like the impulsive or mysterious type to you?”
Nick laughed. “Um…no.” He drove toward the strip and the whole time, I was playing the guessing game.
“We’re going to the coffin show at Circus Circus?”
“Nope.” He bypassed the strip and got onto I-15.
“We’re going to Utah?”
He chuckled. “No. Do you want to go to Utah?”
“Not really.” I was wracking my brain trying to figure out where in the world…he merged onto I-95. “Reno!”
“No, but you seem excited about that.”
“No,” I said, disappointed. “I was just glad I guessed right.” He laughed.
We stayed on 95 for what seemed like a long time. I gave up guessing for a while and became mesmerized by the setting sun. In the desert, the sun always looks bigger, and as it sinks down behind the large hills in the distance, threads of red, orange, and yellow light linger in the sky and mingle with the rolling clouds, dyeing them with bright colors.
When it was almost completely dark and we hadn’t turned off yet, I said, “Rhyolite?”
“Not today, but I love that place.”
“I’ve never actually been there.”
“Really?” Rhyolite is an elaborate ghost town in the middle of the desert. Dad and I’d gone the other direction one weekend to one called Calico. Rhyolite is said to put that one to shame. “You have to go one day. I’ll take you, and we’ll make it a weekend trip and go to Scotty’s Castle, too.”
“What’s Scotty’s Castle?”
“Really?”
Laughing, I said, “Yes, really. I’m not from Nevada, remember?”
“You’ve been here for eleven years now.”
“Again, I live with Charlie. We didn’t get out much.”
He smiled and said, “Back during the gold rush days, a guy named Walter Scott, a con man, convinced this really rich guy and his wife to come out here to invest in his gold mine up in the Grapevine Hills in Death Valley. The couple moved out from Chicago, and at first, the rich guy was pissed because he realized there wasn’t any gold in them thar hills.”
I rolled my eyes and smiled as he went on, “Walter was good. Somehow, he convinced the rich guy he wasn’t such a bad guy, and they became friends.
“The guy bought some property, and he and his wife started building this big, 1.5-2 million dollar villa on 1,500 acres. They named the ranch and the main road that led up to the property after Scott. It was supposed to be their winter home to get them out of the harsh, Chicago weather, but they ran into some problems trying to get it built.
“That property was owned by the Death Valley Parks service. So, they moved all the pieces of the house up and started over. It wasn’t quite finished when the stock-market crash happened and the man and his wife had to open it up to travelers and rent rooms out to keep from going bankrupt.
“They didn’t have any heirs, so when they died, they left it to a charitable organization – the same one that took care of Scott until he died. The parks service eventually bought the place from the charity for something like $850,000.
“Now they offer tours, and there’s even one where you can do an underground tour on a bus to see all of the fancy tile and stuff they planned on using in the swimming pool and furnishings for other rooms that were never completed. It’s a cool place.”
“And it reminds you that being a con man can be a good retirement plan.”
He laughed. “I have a feeling Walter Scott was not your ordinary con man,” he said.
“Doesn’t sound like it. But you…wow! How do you know all of that? You sounded like a historian.”
He smiled and maneuvered the big truck into the middle lane and merged onto I-91. I had no clue where we were going, but I suddenly knew I could listen to him all day. Hearing him talk about history so confidently was kind of sexy. “History was my favorite,” he said.
“It sounds like it. What was the rich guy’s name?”
“Albert Mussey Johnson.”
“You’re like a walking textbook. Do you know other history, or just Nevada’s?”
“American history was always my favorite. It was one thing I never had to study. I just kind of absorbed it.”
“You could teach history, or write about it.”
When he pulled onto Tenaya Way and I saw a sign that said, Gilchrest Pumpkin Farm, five miles. “Are we going to the pumpkin farm?” He stayed silent. “Aha! I guessed it right!”
“Partly,” he said, “And, you only guessed it because there was a sign and there is nothing else out here.”
“True, but I have to say I’m a little creeped out by the fact the sign says they close at two p.m. Are you like one of those Halloween slasher guys and this was all an elaborate set-up?”
He grinned and winked at me. “We’ll see,” he said as he pulled the truck into an almost full, unpaved parking lot surrounded by bales of hay and strung with twinkling lights. After parking, he got out and a few seconds later, opened my door. He was holding the duffel bag.
“Are your slasher tools in there?”
He pet it and it actually did clink like there were tools in there. “Rope, duct tape, knives…everything any respectable slasher needs.” He startled me by putting his hands on my waist and lifting me down out of the truck. He sat me on my feet and took my hand, and in a scary voice, he said, “Let’s go get this Halloween massacre underway.”
We went past a small, wooden shack decorated with spider webs that had large, hairy, felt spiders crawling all over them. I cringed slightly at that. I don’t freak out over spiders, but the idea of a hairy one that was four feet in diameter gave me the chills. There was a line of people at the next little shack. We waited until Nick paid our entrance fees. The poster on the window said this was a haunted pumpkin maze.
As we walked away from the shack, I said, “Haunted pumpkin maze? Isn’t it supposed to be a corn maze or hay bales? How can you get lost in a pumpkin maze?”
Nick stopped walking and looked down at me with an evil grin. “You can’t get lost; that’s the whole point. The creatures will be following us and popping up out of nowhere…and there’s nowhere to hide.”
I was torn between being slightly nervous about that and overwhelmed by the emotions he was stirring up in me. I loved Halloween, scary movies, and haunted houses. I had casually mentioned my love of Halloween to him once. The fact that he remembered that and it was important enough for him to plan this was already more than any guy I’d ever been out with had done.
I reached up and put my hand on his face. He leaned down to kiss me and we kissed like no one was watching until we both had to come up for air. When we did, he only pulled his lips back slightly and I could feel the heat and vibrations as he said, “But don’t worry; I’ll protect you.”
I smiled. “We’ll see who protects who.”
********
After we got some hot chocolate and sugar cookies, we got onto a trailer filled with hay attached to a tractor for the hay ride. Nick propped himself up against the railing of the trailer with his long legs stretched out in front of him and I cuddled up next to him.
I decided quickly that I could skip the rest of the evening and do this all night. He smelled so good and for being hard as a rock all over, he made one hell of a comfortable pillow.
There were at least ten other people on the trailer with us, but it was easy to block them all out and pretend like it was just him and me until the tractor left the heavily lighted area and began to move slowly along a pitted dirt road underneath a thick umbrella of trees. The trees blocked out any small reflection of the moon and stars, and the only things not black were the reflectors obviously leading the tractor along the path and a scant few twinkling lights strung through the trees and dangling over our heads.
I was so relaxed and comfortable that for just a second, I closed my eyes. I tore them back open only moments later to the sounds of a blood-curdling scream. Some kind of creature had jumped up on the back of the trailer and was clinging on with one arm and swiping a fake knife at the people there with the other. Most of them moved toward us and I tightened my grip on Nick’s t-shirt. I felt his body shake, and I looked up at his handsome face silhouetted in the dim light. He was laughing.
“Careful, babe, or I might think you need me to protect you.”
“I’m not scared,” I countered. “The screaming just startled me.”
“Oh, okay. Look, it’s getting foggy.”
I turned and looked in the direction the tractor was taking us. Fog was rising up across the road and all around into the trees. It looked like there was a clearing about a hundred yards or so in front of us. It was surrounded by orange lights like the white ones in the trees overhead.
The tractor came to a stop and the man driving welcomed us to the, “Most haunted pumpkin patch in the world.” He went over the rules about following the guide, staying on the paths, and not touching the monsters before he turned us over to an actor dressed like a skeleton in a top hat and tails. He didn’t speak, but that made sense since he only had half a jaw. It was one hell of a make-up job.
He turned and led us toward what I could only assume was the pumpkin patch, but thanks to the darkness and thick fog, couldn’t really tell. I slid my hand into Nick’s big, warm one, and he threaded his fingers through mine.
We walked about five feet before the first scream erupted. It was a girl about four feet behind us. I turned and looked to see Michael Myers from Halloween walking along next to her. She was clutching onto her boyfriend, who also looked like he wanted to run. The actor playing Michael cocked his head to one side, as if he was confused.
It was my favorite of all the Michael Myers poses, and I was smiling when I felt something underneath my feet. I looked down and could just barely make out the outline of an arm reaching up out of the dirt. I screamed and jumped into Nick just as the body sat up, covered with dirt and looking like it had been buried for years. Decay spots were crafted on the face and long strings of white hair hung off of the head. I couldn’t see its eyes; they were small and dark.
Nick wrapped me up in his big arm as the thing reached out toward me. I buried my face in his chest and felt his lips brush against the top of my head as he whispered, “You don’t have to pretend to be afraid for my benefit, baby.” I punched him, and my fist bounced off his arm. He laughed.
The patch only got more terrifying from there. I screamed so much that my voice was hoarse and poor Nick actually had claw marks on one of his arms. When they offered pumpkin picking to us on the last leg of the scary tour I tried to refuse, but Nick seemed to have his heart set on it. At least they turned on the lights.
I followed Nick around and watched him survey every part of every pumpkin until he found two perfectly round ones with nice, thick stems. The tractor took us back to the main area and the fall-themed and well-lit festival came into view. A band was playing now on a small bandstand next to six long rows of picnic tables. People surrounded the tables and were carving their pumpkins. If I didn’t know already, I was about to find out how competitive Nick was.