Chapter Twenty-Nine

 

Bitsy

 

I felt Roman’s arms wrap around me and I buried my head in his chest, hiding from the sudden sound that had terrified me. He patted my back gently and I felt him lower his mouth close to my ear.

“It’s alright,” he murmured. “It was just thunder.”

I pulled back from him, glancing up at the sky. I hadn’t noticed until right then that dark clouds had rolled in, blocking out the sun and creating a heavy, ominous ceiling over us. The atmosphere around us felt thicker and almost like it had gone still. I turned my eyes to Roman and felt a rush of desire surge up in my chest. I pressed forward and met his mouth as if he had been coming toward me in the same moment. Our mouths caught and I felt his tongue plunge between my lips, searching. I pulled up onto my knees and aligned my body with his. My hands ran up over Roman’s shoulders and I found a moment of strength in them as we kissed.

One of Roman’s hands went to the small of my back and he pulled me closer to him, crushing me against his body. Our tongues tangled and I felt myself falling into him the way I had the first night I met him. All of the energy and adrenaline that had built up within me felt like they were pouring out of me and I could barely contain myself as I clutched at Roman’s back and arched to press harder against him. Overhead the sky opened and a rush of cold rain flowed down on us. I gasped and pulled back from Roman, the fire that had suddenly swelled up between us effectively extinguished by the rain. I climbed to my feet and he and I ran for the car, laughing as we hopped inside.

“I guess we should go get the baby,” Roman said.

There was a hint of regret in his voice and I felt it shiver in my belly, but I didn’t let myself dwell on it. The taste of his lips was still fresh on mine, but the moment was over. The impulsiveness wasn’t what I needed right then, anyway. There was much more that needed to be on my mind.

We drove in silence back toward Miss Daisy Pearl’s house, but exchanged a meaningful glance when we arrived. Part of me expected Roman to reach out and touch me, but he didn’t. Instead, he got out of the car and came around to my side to let me out. We walked up to the door and knocked on it, not wanting to startle Lorelei with the sharp sound of the doorbell if she was still sleeping. When Miss Daisy Pearl opened the door, she stared out at us like she couldn’t fathom that we were standing there.

“What are the two of you doing out there in a frog strangler like this? I don’t have time to make up enough chicken soup to fight whatever death you pick up out there. Come inside.”

Grinning at the scolding, I stepped inside the house and brushed raindrops off of my arms. I immediately saw that the baby was certainly not still sleeping. Instead she was scooting around the parlor, seeming to at once chase one of her toys and run away from it. She was smiling, however, and I felt confident that she would get through another few minutes of our research before we brought her home.

“Miss Daisy Pearl, we’re just going to go back down into the library for a few more minutes. Just shout down if the baby needs me.”

She gave a dismissive wave as if she truly couldn’t care less if I ever emerged from the subterranean stacks to claim my child as Roman and I headed back into the basement.

“So, just an update,” Roman said when we got back to the table that we had been using. “You got a letter suggesting that you research the history of your family’s land – apparently from a dead person.”

“A ghost,” I corrected.

“What?” he asked.

“A ghost. I prefer to think of it as a ghost wrote me the letter. It seems a lot less gruesome to have a wispy ghost being all mysterious and writing me a letter than it does to have a body doing it.”

Roman seemed to think this through for a moment and then nodded.

“Fair point. So, we know that apparently a ghost wrote you letter.”

“Yes. The ghost of a man who died in a house on my family’s property.”

“On Halloween.”

“And then had to have his grave moved three times because it was desecrated.”

“On Halloween.”

“Yes. So now we just have to figure out what he was talking about. Could the letter just be talking about himself? That it’s creepy that he died there and everything?”

“I don’t think so,” Roman said, shaking his head. “A guy dying really isn’t enough to build an entire haunted attraction off of. Besides, didn’t you say that your great-grandfather said that Steve McAllister was scared to death? Something had to do that. What could have happened on the land that could have literally scared a man to death?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t know.”

I went back to the shelf and pulled out the history volume that I had been reading earlier. I opened the cover to the beginning, where the family had recorded everything that they learned about the area when the Hollow was first established. The first few pages weren’t much. Mostly just sketches of the area and a few grainy pictures of the structures that were around, plus a truly awkward image of a few men posing with old bread over a prone police officer that I could only imagine was promptly followed by a lot of profanity and fighting. Finally, I turned the page and found a picture that looked familiar. I stared at it for a few moments before it clicked that it was a picture of the farm. My grandfather’s house wasn’t there and the trees looked smaller and younger, but it was definitely the farm. I pointed it out to Roman.

“Look at this,” I said.

He turned the book so that he could see the handwritten paragraph beneath the picture.

“Local Farm Owner Tells of Family Tragedy,” he read. His eyes scanned the paragraph and then looked at me, a blend of horror and excitement in them that was at once unnerving and intriguing. “It says that the McAllister family lived here for generations. When Steven was young, his brother had come back to the farm to take care of him for a few days while his parents went to a wedding a few towns over. On Halloween, Steven convinced his brother to play hide-and-seek with him even though Adam thought that they should stay inside. He went to hide in the big field behind the house and Steven grabbed one of the jack-o’-lanterns that they had carved to use for light while he searched for him. No one really knows exactly what happened, but Steven said that something scared him and he dropped the pumpkin. It had been a dry summer and even drier fall, and the field went up in flames in seconds. Steven was able to get out, but Adam was trapped. There was nothing that the volunteer firefighters could do. They got the flames down as best they could, but it was a couple of days later before it was fully extinguished and they were able to find Adam’s body. Most of it, anyway. For some reason, they never found his head. Some people said that the bones were so damaged by the heat that when the horses for the search party ran through, one accidentally stomped the skull to bits before they realized they had found the body. Others, though, aren’t so sure.”

I felt a shiver roll through me.

“That’s why Steven never left the farm,” I said. “He was too traumatized by what had happened to his brother. He must have blamed himself all those years. But what could have happened to Adam’s skull?”

Roman shrugged.

“No one knows. It wasn’t ever seen again. But I bet that Adam’s ghost wouldn’t have been too happy to see his brother carving a jack-o-lantern.”

“This is it,” I said, pointing down at the book. “This is the basis for our haunt. We’re going to turn this legend into a reality for the people who visit.”

I could see Roman smiling, his eyes sparkling at my enthusiasm. I suddenly understood what he had been so excited about when he first presented the idea to me. This could be amazing. All we needed to do was build it and find enough people with warped minds hungry to be scared witless.

No big deal.

“I think that we should go to the house.”

“And get started on some more plans?”

“Yes, but I don’t mean your granddaddy’s house. I mean Steven McAllister’s.”

I felt the smile fade away from my face. Until that moment I had pushed the thought of Steven McAllister and his apparent writing to me from beyond the grave out of my mind. Now Roman wanted me to go pay him a house call. I swallowed hard.

“Why?”

“If we’re going to design a whole haunt around his story, don’t you think that we should know as much about him as we can? That house was where he died, presumably because his dead brother scared the shit out of him. I want to see it.”

I stared at him.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the older, wiser one of the two of us? I thought that I was the one inflicted by the impulsiveness of youth.”

He laughed and took my hand, pulling me closer to him.

“I guess you just bring something out in me,” he murmured, lowering his mouth toward mine.

I had still been tasting our kiss and now it was fresh and hot on my lips again. Questions and second-thoughts started to creep into my mind, but I pushed them away, instead letting myself melt into the kiss. His hands moved to my hips and held them possessively, his fingers pressing through the fabric of my pants as if seeking me. He drew closer, his body touching mine, and I could feel the depth of his breath and the pounding of his heart coming toward me. Our kiss deepened. His teeth nipped at my lower lip and my fingers dug into the hair at the nape of his neck. The pressure of his hands on my hips led me back and I felt the table hit the back of my thighs, bringing me back into reality.

“We can’t do this,” I muttered, taking my mouth away from his.

“Why not?” he asked, trying to draw me back into his arms.

I shook my head, taking another step back to get myself safely out of his arms’ reach.

“We’re in the library,” I said. “Miss Daisy Pearl and Lorelei are right upstairs.”

And I still don’t know if I can trust myself with you.

I put the book back into its place on the shelf and rushed up the stairs before Roman could say anything else. By the time that he got into the main house I was safely in the parlor with the baby on my lap listening to Miss Daisy Pearl talk about the stories that her parents used to tell her about the Hollow before she was born as she held a delicate teacup, seemingly forgotten, in one wrinkled hand.

“Did they ever mention Adam McAllister?” Roman asked from the doorway.

I had been planning on easing that question into the conversation, not wanting to take the lift out of her reminiscing about winning county fair blue ribbons and the top secret official Whiskey Hollow moonshine recipe that was supposedly buried somewhere in the area. As soon as he asked the question, Miss Daisy Pearl’s face darkened slightly and she turned to look at him.

“Why would you be asking about Adam McAllister?” she asked.

There was a roughness in her voice that I had never heard before and I had the compulsion to brush the conversation under the rug like so many dust bunnies and just move on, but Roman seemed committed. He stood steadfast in the face of the tiny, crinkled woman and ventured onward.

“We’ve been looking up the history of the Galloway farm,” he replied. “We found Steven McAllister’s grave out there and wanted to know more.”

Well that was a little bit of storytelling creativity with the timeline, but I’ll go with it.

“If I had known that you were up to such things down there, I might not have been so quick to let you into the library,” Miss Daisy Pearl said.

If only you knew what other things he tried to get up to.

“It’s a public library, is it not?”

Miss Daisy Pearl bristled at Roman’s calm demeanor and I saw her eyes flicker to me. In those brief seconds that they were on me, I could see all the scathing comments that she wanted to make, but felt too much decency to say.

Couldn’t you have gotten pregnant by someone we all knew?

What were you thinking playing around with some guy twice your age?

Who does he think he is, traipsing around the Hollow dressed like that, asking questions like he belongs here?

I didn’t need to hear any of it. I could see it all in her stare, and it was enough.

“This is about that haunted thing you want to do on your farm, isn’t it?” she asked. “Does your granddaddy know about that?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t told him yet. I didn’t want to tell him until I had a plan and it was working out.”

“I don’t think that I like being a part of a lie like this.”

“It’s not really a lie, Miss Daisy Pearl. He never asked what I was planning on doing for this season. You know that when I was here, I was always the one who was responsible for the pumpkin season.”

“And then you left and it started going downhill fast.”

I felt the same wave of guilt wash over me that I had what felt like a thousand times before and nodded.

“Yes. I know. That’s my fault. And now Granddaddy is thinking about selling the farm and just settling into retirement because he doesn’t think that it’s worth trying to keep it going. I can’t let him do that. I can’t let him sell the farm and give up everything because I didn’t live up to what he wanted me to. I was selfish and I left, but I’m back now and I want to do anything that I can to make sure that he sees that the farm is still valuable, it’s still worth keeping and fighting for. That’s why I want to do this haunt. Times have changed. People don’t want to just go pick pumpkins anymore. They want something scary and exciting, and I think that we can give them that. Especially with this story. This isn’t something that we just came up with out of our heads. This is something that happened, and we can build off of it and create something truly horrifying that I think people will love.”

The more I talked, the more convinced I was making myself. The idea was forming in my mind and it wasn’t just feeling like a desperate stunt that I hoped would pull us through the year. Suddenly I felt like this could be something impressive, something that people really enjoyed and that could put Galloway Farm back on the map.

If they made a map of Whiskey Hollow.

Miss Daisy Pearl looked at me for a few long seconds and I had the uncomfortable feeling that she was slowly peeling me apart layer by layer and looking to see what she would find in between each. Finally, she nodded and I saw a smile come to her lips.

“There’s the fire that I’ve been missing in you. I started to worry that you gave it all up to that baby when you had her. I’m glad to see it back.”

I smiled at her and then turned to Roman. He took a step further into the room and perched on the edge of another chair, his posture stiff like he was unsure if the enthusiasm that she had just shown extended to him as well. He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his legs, and looked at her with rapt attention.

“So, what do you know about Adam McAllister?” he asked again.

His voice had dropped lower from the stern alpha tone that he usually used to something softer, something that said that he was interested in every single word that this little old lady had to say to him. I was starting to remember the little bit of Halloween trickery he had used to get me into bed.

Beyond him being as delicious as any treat that ever ended up in any of my trick-or-treat bags.

“Well,” Miss Daisy Pearl said, turning her chair to look at him, all of the animosity that she had previously held when looking at him apparently gone. “Now, this is all legend, mind.”

“Of course,” Roman said.

“And I’m not one to do all that gossiping.”

Roman closed his eyes and shook his head, holding his hands up like he was ridding her of any and all shame attached to spilling more tea than she was drinking. This was a man who had been to a good Southern church once or twice in his life. That was something I felt I needed to know more about.

“Of course, not. I would never think that of you,” he said. “But this isn’t gossip, Miss Daisy Pearl. You are sharing the treasured lore of your Hollow. You are in the unique position of being the one person in this Hollow who knows as much of this history as you do, and you can share it through an oral history.”

“Well, when you put it that way it sounds like a good thing.”

“A very good thing. It’s a proud tradition, passing down the history and knowledge of the people through their oral history. Without it, how are future generations to know what the people who came before them have been through? How are they to know who they really are and the responsibility that they hold to carry on the traditions and heritage of their home?”

Damn, he’s good.

Miss Daisy Pearl’s dark brown eyes were sparkling and the rich cocoa color of her skin had seemed to brighten up as he spoke.

“That’s right,” she said. “I have to make sure all these young people remember the Hollow as it was before all this new-fangled hippieness came about.”

New-fangled hippieness. Now those were not words that I would have ever thought that I would hear applied to the Hollow.

“Exactly,” Roman said. “So please, Miss Daisy Pearl, will you tell us what you know about Adam McAllister so that we can make sure that we honor him appropriately?”

It was master manipulation, but it worked. Miss Daisy Pearl was totally wrapped up in him and ready to tell Roman anything that he might want to know. She leaned more toward him and looked directly into his eyes, not paying attention to anything else around them.

“Well, to understand Adam McAllister, you’ve got to understand the whole McAllister family. They were strange people. Again, all I know is what was passed down to my family, but it seems to me any family that are the only people living anywhere near an area would have to be a bit off, wouldn’t you think?”

“I would,” I said, wanting to make sure that they remembered that I was still there.

They both glanced at me and then back to each other to continue.

“How were they strange?” Roman asked.

“There were rumors of all kinds of dark happenings up on their farm. Animals there one day and then just gone the next, no sign. Travelers coming through this area and losing their way, or stopping by the farm to get some rest or a bite to eat and disappearing. And those parents. My grandparents used to say that they almost never came out of their house, and when they did, they would bundle up into their wagon and leave, then come back a few days later. No one ever knew where they were going. That’s why when they up and left right before Halloween that year, it wasn’t any more strange than usual.”

“I thought that you said that no one lived anywhere around them,” I said. “How would your grandparents know them if they didn’t live near here?”

“They heard a tale of it from the Galloways when they moved onto the land and my family followed soon after. Of course, that was after the fire.”

My ears perked up and I saw Roman lean a little closer to her.

“Tell us about the fire.”

“Well, it’s all in the history,” she said. “Adam came to watch out for his little brother while his parents were away and while the boys were playing hide-and-seek Steven caught the field on fire with his jack-o-lantern. Those flames moved so fast, Adam never had a chance to get out. He likely died pretty much right where he was hiding. That field had been abandoned for some time and was grown up so thick, the smoke would have been impossible to see through within just a few seconds. The firefighters all commented on how odd it was that Adam would have gone out that far into the field anyway, especially just for an old game of hide-and-seek with his brother. He was out in the middle of the field, deep in the thickest growth. It took horses and scythes to get through after the fire.”

“Maybe he didn’t go out there on his own,” I said, meaning to say it to myself.

The way that the other two turned to me so sharply, though, I knew that I had actually said it out loud. And neither of them were very happy about it.

Outside the rain was dissipating and I knew that Granddaddy was going to be emerging from his room wondering where we all went. I stood and started gathering up all of Lorelei’s stuff, shoving it haphazardly back into the bags so that it didn’t fit and I had to go back and redo it, all while feeling Roman and Miss Daisy Pearl staring at me. When I had finally managed to utilize all of my Tetris skills to repack the baby’s belongings, I scooped her up and smiled at Miss Daisy Pearl in that “thank-you-so-much-now-we’re-done” way that I personally believe women are taught prior to birth. She smiled back at me in the sweet, accommodating way that was the only appropriate reciprocation for the particular look that I had given and rose to her feet.

“It was so nice getting a chance to spend some time with the little one,” she said. “You bring her right on back if you feel like you need to do some more research.”

“We will,” I assured her. “Thank you for your help.”

“Yes, thank you for your insight,” Roman said. “That will be very valuable to us.”

The elderly woman looked at Roman like he was the greatest thing to ever walk through her front door and reached out for his hand.

So much for propriety.

“I’m glad that I could help. Maybe I’ll come by and see what you came up with. I’m sure it will be wonderful.”

“I don’t know, Miss Daisy Pearl,” I said cautiously. “These things can get pretty intense. I don’t know if you’d enjoy it.”

“I’m sure that I could arrange for a special preview just for her,” Roman said. “She can tour the haunt during the day before the actors come.”

Actors?

Dammit.