Wild Orchids Part 13

"You and money," she said, but I could see she was laughing. "I hope it's okay, but I invited a few people over so we need to go."

The very last thing I wanted was more company. I wanted to go back to my library and- "Don't give me that look," Jackie said. "I invited nice people."

I have to say that she did. Allie came with her nine-year-old daughter, who turned out to be quite self-sufficient. She disappeared into my weedy garden and we rarely saw her again. "Probably inventing something," her mother said.

A couple my age, Chuck and DeeAnne Fogle, also came. They didn't live in Cole Creek, but had been driving through town, seen the party, "And crashed it," Chuck said. He was an engineer, so he was interested in the equipment I'd bought, and we spent some time together inside the house exploring what it could do.

When Nate and his injured girlfriend arrived, Jackie sent them off in my new truck to pick up pizzas while she and Allie and DeeAnne went for beer and wine. An hour later we were all outside, eating and laughing. Except for the two teenagers, that is. They disappeared into the house as soon as it was dark. I was a bit uncomfortable with whatever they were doing but not so Jackie. She stood in the entrance hall and shouted upward, "No clothes are to be removed. Got it?" After a few seconds' pause, Nate's voice came from upstairs. "Yes, ma'am," he said meekly.

It was a nice evening. When Tessa stretched out on an old-fas.h.i.+oned metal glider and went to sleep, Jackie covered her with a blanket and the adults kept on laughing and talking.

"So what was Miss Essie Lee on at you about?" Allie asked me.

Allie had a sharper brain than I'd thought when I first met her. Earlier, she'd told us that she'd grown up in Cole Creek and met her husband while he was in the area doing some soil testing for a mineral company. But when he'd been transferred to Nevada, Allie and Tessa hadn't gone with him.

Jackie asked, "Why not?" but Allie had shrugged in answer, revealing nothing.

"Edward Belcher," I said. "Miss Essie Lee was telling me about Edward Belcher and The Great Love Story."

At that Allie snorted in a way that made me sure there was a story there.

"You're in for it now," Jackie said. "You'll have to tell him every word of the story or he'll never let you go home."

"Is that where you get your ideas?" DeeAnne asked. "From real life stories?"

"He gets them from reading everything," Jackie said before I could answer." If it has printing on it, he reads it. He spends whole days locked in the library reading, then he goes upstairs to his bedroom and reads. If I want to ask him a question, I have to make sure there's nothing to read within fifty feet or he doesn't hear a word I say."

Chuck put his head back, closed one eye, and said, "Me thinks thou art trying to escape from something."

"Yeah," Jackie said. "Work."

Everyone, including me, laughed, and I noticed both Allie and DeeAnne looking from Jackie to me speculatively. Before they started matchmaking, I said to Allie, "So tell us about old man Belcher's saintly son."

"Saintly, ha!" Allie said, sipping her wine. "Edward Belcher wanted to marry Harriet Cole only because the town was named after her family. He seemed to think that uniting the descendants of two of the seven founding families would raise his status. He had his eye on the governors.h.i.+p."

I was thinking of this in writer terms. "Those seven families seem to be important here in Cole Creek," I said. "Besides old man Belcher and Miss Essie Lee, are many of them left in town?"

"Yes," Allie said softly. "Tessa and me." She looked at me. "And Rebecca is from one of the families."

DeeAnne looked at Allie. "It's amazing that any of you are still here."

The smile left Allie's face. For a moment she hid her face behind the big balloon winegla.s.s, and when she set it down, she was solemn. "There's a blood descendant of every family still in Cole Creek. Except for the Coles, that is. The most important family is missing."

Her tone seemed to take the joviality out of the party, and I started to ask what was going on, but Jackie nudged me under the table.

"So tell us about this great love story," Jackie said brightly.

"There's nothing to tell. Sometime in the 1970s, fat old Edward decided he was going to merge his family name with the Coles' through marriage, and rename the town Heritage. But Harriet eloped with a handsome young man and had a baby. The end."

"What happened to them?" I asked, watching Allie closely and wondering if she'd give the same answer as Miss Essie Lee had.

"I don't really know."

She's lying, I thought. But what was she lying about? And why?

"Edward died not long afterward, and I think Harriet did, too," Allie said at last. "And I think Harriet's handsome young husband left her."

"What happened to their child?" Jackie asked quietly and I hoped I was the only one who heard the odd tone in her voice.

Allie finished her gla.s.s of wine. "I have no idea. She didn't grow up in Cole Creek, that's for sure. No more direct descendants of the Coles live here, and I'd stake my life on that!" She said the last so emphatically that the rest of us looked at each other as though to say, What was that all about?

Except for Jackie. She was sitting very still and I was willing to bet that she was doing some subtraction in her head. Seventies, Allie had said.

Harriet Cole had had a baby, a "she," in the 1970s and her young husband had left her.

Jackie had been born in the seventies and her father had left her mother.

And they had lived in Cole Creek when Jackie was very young.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Jackie I didn't want to tell Ford but there was a big part of me that wanted to run to the nearest bus station and get as far away from Cole Creek as I possibly could. There were too many strange things happening to me, too many things that I seemed to remember.

On Sunday I put on a 1940s dress and walked to church. It was about three miles from the house but I "knew" a shortcut through the woods.

When I got there, I saw the charred stone foundation and brick chimney of what had once been a large building, and I felt sad that "my" church had burned down.

When I got back to Ford's house, he asked me if I'd enjoyed the service, but I just mumbled a response and went up to my room. I changed clothes and cooked a big dinner, but I couldn't eat much. How had I known my way through the woods? When had I been in this town before? Oh, Lord, what had happened to me here?

"Want to talk about whatever's bothering you?" Ford asked.

He was being sweet but I didn't want to tell him anything. What could I say? That I had a "feeling?" Kirk had laughed at me the one time I'd said I'd a "feeling" about something.

In the afternoon I puttered in the garden while Ford watched some long movie on TV, and I wished I'd invited Allie and Tessa over. Long ago I'd found that sticking my nose into other people's business made me stop contemplating my own problems. I could have spent the afternoon asking Allie why she didn't leave Cole Creek when her husband was transferred.

And in spite of my vow never to speak of it to anyone, maybe I could tell her what Kirk had done to me. But then, I was ready to talk about anything except how I was feeling in this little town.

When Ford spoke from behind me, I jumped.

"You scared me," I said, jamming the little trowel into the dirt around the roses.

"Why don't you call your old friends?" he asked as he sat down. "Have a few laughs."

"Maybe I will," I said. "Here, move your foot. You're on my glove."

He moved his foot the smallest distance possible to get it off my glove, then looked up at the sky through the trees. "It's nice here."

I stopped gouging out weeds and sat down on the ground. "Yeah, it is."

Mountain climate had always been my favorite: The sun was warm, but the alt.i.tude made it cool in the shade.

"What happened at church today?" he asked, making me look at him.

He had really intense eyes that could bore into a person. "Same ol', same ol'," I said. "You know what church services are like. Or do you?"

"I know enough to know that no preacher ever let out early. So what happened that you didn't stay for the whole service?"

I opened my mouth to emit some quickly-made-up lie, but I stopped when something big and heavy came sailing through the trees. As it whistled through the air, we both ducked for cover.

Actually, I ducked and Ford sort of did a swan dive out of his chair to land on top of me. I'll give it to him that he was protective of women.

"Sorry," he said as he rolled off of me. "I heard-Then I-" He looked embarra.s.sed.

When I got up, I had to take a couple of breaths. He's tall and he's heavy, but, worse, my trowel had been under me. I felt my ribs. I didn't think they were cracked, but I was going to have a beaut of a bruise there tomorrow.

Ford was searching through a th.o.r.n.y tangle of shrubbery as he looked for the projectile that had come sailing toward us. Wincing at my bruised ribs, I got up to help him look.

We saw it at the same time: a big rock wrapped in two-inch-wide clear tape so we could see the note underneath. Using his pocketknife, he cut the tape away.

Both of us held our breaths as we looked at the note. "Time Magazine," it read, "in July 1992."

For a moment he and I looked at each other in puzzlement, our thoughts reflected in each other's eyes. Who had thrown this rock at us? Why? Should we have gone after the perpetrator before we searched for the rock? And what did this date mean?

"Too bad it's Sunday," Ford said. "The library is closed today or we could -"

The same idea hit us both at the same time. There had been hundreds of old magazines- Time included-stacked in the entrance to the house when we moved in.

Ford looked at me in horror. "You didn't-?" he whispered, meaning, Did I throw them away?

No, I hadn't. I'd planned to give them to Nate's grandmother to sell over the Internet but hadn't yet. "Servant's bedroom. Attic," I said over my shoulder as I started running for the nearest door into the house.

Ford, with his longer legs, got there at the same time in spite of my head start. "Ow!" I yelled as he tried to push into the house first. "My ribs."

Immediately, he stopped pus.h.i.+ng, so I slipped under his arm to reach the stairs before he did, but he took them three at a time.

"Didn't anyone ever teach you not to cheat?" he called down to me when he reached the top first.

But I beat him into the room anyway because he was out of breath and had to lean against the wall. I stuck my finger in his belly as I ran past him and into the Room of Magazines. There were so many of them and so little s.p.a.ce to maneuver that it took us nearly an hour to find the four issues of July, 1992. And by the time we found them, we were both dirty and sweaty. I wanted to sit down on the stacks and go through the magazines instantly, but Ford had to have liquid, so we went downstairs, where I got us lemonade before we went outside where it was cooler. However, this time I suggested we sit on the round porch outside my second-floor bedroom, and Ford agreed readily. We didn't want any more missiles lobbed at us from above.

We split the magazines and I was the one to find the article. After I'd scanned it, I handed the issue to Ford as I didn't trust my voice to read it aloud.

The small article had been written as though it were a joke. "A Ghostly Cry for Vengeance?" the t.i.tle read. It seems that in July, 1992, a group of young people had been hiking through the mountains near the small town of Cole Creek, North Carolina. They'd made their camp near the site of a fallen-down cabin and had used the chimney to make their fire.

But during the night one of the campers, a young woman, had started screaming. She said she'd heard moaning, "a sad, deep moaning of a woman in great pain" coming from the old stone foundation of the cabin. No one had been able to quieten her, so when the sun came up, all the campers were tired and short tempered. One young man, in an effort to make his fellow camper stop crying, began to toss stones around to show her that nothing was there.

"And that's when they discovered a skeleton," Ford read, glancing up at me. "Her long, dark hair could still be seen, and bits of her clothing remained."

I pulled my knees up to my chest and buried my face. It looked as though my devil story-the crus.h.i.+ng part of it anyway-was probably true.

And I had an idea that I was here in Cole Creek as a young child and since my recall was so vivid, I'd probably seen it happen. That's why my father got so angry when he found out my mother had told-or, I guess, reminded-me of the story.

"You okay?" Ford asked.

I didn't lift my face when I shook my head no.

Ford didn't ask any more questions. He went on to read the rest of the article that said the police had been called and the skeleton taken away to a lab, where later testing revealed that the woman had probably died in 1979.

"'So who was she?'" Ford read. " 'A hiker who took refuge in an old house during a storm only to have a wall collapse on her? Or was it more sinister and she was murdered? Whatever caused the woman's death, according to the camper who "heard" her moans, the woman didn't die instantly, but lived long enough to cry from the pain.' "

When Ford put down the magazine, I could feel him watching me. "Long, dark hair," he said after a while. "The woman on the bridge."

I lifted my head and looked at him. I'd forgotten I'd told him about that- and I wished I hadn't. Right now what I wanted to do was crawl onto my father's lap and have him comfort me. But my father wasn't there.

"Listen to me," Ford said softly. "I'm beginning not to like this. Things are happening in this town that I don't like. I think you should leave."

I agreed with him. In fact I decided to get up, pack my clothes, and leave Cole Creek right that instant.

But I didn't move. Instead, I sat there with my knees drawn up and stared at the porch floor. I didn't say the words but we both knew that I didn't want to leave. I liked it there. And, besides, all we knew for sure was that I remembered things. And I'd had a vision of the future. The rest was speculation.

After a while, he gave a great, melodramatic sigh. "Okay," he said, "tell me everything you've told everyone about your connection to this town."

Scenes raced through my head like a video on rewind. I went over everything and everyone. "You," I whispered. "Everyone wants to know about you. No one asks much about me."

"Allie," he said. "What have you told her?"

"That I'm your a.s.sistant and you're working on ghost stories."

"Devil or ghost?" he asked.

I narrowed my eyes at him. "You called the librarian, asked about the devil and she hung up on you, remember? I wasn't about to have the same thing happen to me.

Ford stared out over the porch rail for a few moments. I didn't interrupt him because it seemed as though he was in a trance. When he looked like that, I would have thought he was in the preliminary stage of a pet.i.t mal, but I'd learned that he was "thinking."

After a while, he looked back at me.

"The kids made something up," he said, his mouth a grimace. "I was so P.

O.'d that I was stuck with the mayor and Miss Essie Lee that I didn't hear all of it. The mayor said the kids had-" Pausing, his eyes widened. "The kids had made up a story to explain what they'd found. That's what the mayor said."