Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (132 page)

It had been different before Mom died. When she was around, her house on Fourth Street had been our gathering place. Justine hadn’t liked me much better then, but she hadn’t been willing to snub her mother-in-law, so the whole family got together for dinner a couple times a week. I still lived in that house, but the family dinners were a thing of the past.

My eyes wandered down the row toward the kids, and Justine finally glanced my way. The anemic sunlight coming through the windows showed the lines around her eyes and mouth. She looked angry. Angry and mean.

I never could see what Ben saw in her. Maybe what he’d seen was that she’d gotten pregnant with Tiffany by accident, and he’d just had to make the best of it ever since.

The nasty thought was satisfying and left only the slightest aftertaste of guilt. When it came to Justine, I’d long since given up on policing my thoughts. Policing what I actually said was enough of an effort.

After the service, everyone trickled down to the community room for coffee. I got hugs from Ben and the girls and an oops-I-just-got-distracted-by-someone-who’s-not-you from Justine.

“Aunt Beth! Guess what?”

Little Madisyn was twisting around and hopping from one foot to the other. Either she was excited to tell me something, or she had to pee. Maybe both.

“What, baby?”

I reached out to tousle her hair, but she ducked away.

“I’m not a baby,” she said crossly.

“’Course not. What’d you want to tell me?”

“I forgot,” she said with a pout.

“Then tell me something else.”

“Okay, but it’s a secret,” she said in a semi-whisper, looking around. Our fellow churchgoers were standing about, chatting and drinking their coffee. No one was paying attention. Madisyn took a big breath.

“Nanny Hansen’s doggie has glass fur.”

I really wasn’t sure what to do with that. “Really? Wow.”

“Uh-huh.” She was grinning up at me excitedly.

I wracked my brain for a follow-up. “Does he talk?”

She looked surprised. “How’d you know?”

“Well, lots of dogs can, you know. But they only talk to the very nicest people.”

“I don’t think most of them can talk,” she said doubtfully.

“Tell the truth, Madisyn,” Justine cut in. “Dogs can’t talk at all.”

Her tone seemed unnecessarily severe to me. Then again, it often did.

Madisyn looked up at her mother with a strange expression. Then she looked at her feet, pushing at the floor tiles with one toe, then the other.

“The doggie says Mommy’s leaving us.”

Shocked, I glanced up at Ben. He just looked back at me, equally surprised. But Justine reacted with fury.

“Madisyn, shame on you! No lying! Go stand in that corner. Not a sound ’til I come get you.”

Madisyn burst into tears and ran to the corner. Practically everyone in the room turned to look. Justine flushed in embarrassment. So did Tiff and Jazzy, the older girls. Lia, who was five, just looked confused and scared. Her lower lip quivered.

I got mad. Justine was overreacting, as usual. Madisyn was a really sweet kid, and she wasn’t a liar. She just had a weird imagination and the impulse control of, well, a three-year-old. I took a breath to give Justine a piece of my mind, but she beat me to the punch.

“This is what comes of having your influence around,” she hissed. “Stay away from us!”

“Me?” I was totally taken aback. “What could I possibly have to do with it?”

Justine didn’t respond, but she stared at me with such unmistakable hatred that I backed away a few steps. I’d always known she didn’t care for me, but were her feelings that strong?

“Okay, okay, let’s all calm down,” my brother soothed. “That was a real humdinger, but it’s just attention-getting behavior. Let’s not make too much of it.”

Justine got a crazy look on her face. “Oh, ‘attention-getting behavior,’ is it? What, you been watching
Dr. Phil
in your spare time?”

This was the point where their arguments always devolved into the “why are you so jealous?” and “why do you always take her side?” stuff, only with more cussing. And a lot of screaming.

That’s probably where Madisyn’s comment came from, actually. I bet she’d heard Justine threaten to leave a dozen times. That’s got to make a kid anxious.

Ben and Justine were staring daggers at each other. Justine was too proper to have any more of the fight here in church, but she’d certainly be dragging the family out the door ASAP to get her licks in.

There was nothing left for me here this week. Feeling sad and angry, I murmured an excuse about having coffee with Suzanne and left.

M
y hands were still shaking
as I stirred a fourth sugar into my coffee. I wasn’t sure why Justine’s outburst had thrown me so badly. It’s not like I wasn’t used to her craziness. I’d been on the receiving end of it since I was a kid. I guess this time it had taken me by surprise. I’d thought we were in strained-but-cordial mode, and I got blindsided.

I looked up to see Suzanne studying me a bit too attentively as she stroked her pretty silver hair. I smiled sweetly and asked her what she’d thought of Pastor Ezra’s focus on the metaphor of rebirth in that morning’s sermon. Suzanne blinked at me, jolted out of the gossipy tidbit she’d probably been cooking up about how upset I looked after my fight with my sister-in-law.

Gossip about me generally dredged up my mental illness, dead mother, pathetic dating life, or failed try at college — or all four — so diverting Suzanne during her moments of creation was pretty important. It wasn’t that she didn’t like me — care about me, even. But for Suzanne, all things bowed before the god of gossip.

I reached for the creamer. Dorf wasn’t sophisticated enough to have an actual coffee shop, but the ownership of Pete’s Eats didn’t mind if you sat and talked over a beverage. Unfortunately, Pete’s coffee wasn’t good — especially the decaf. At home I drank my coffee black. At Pete’s I added enough cream and sugar to make it taste like coffee-flavored ice cream. Otherwise, it was too bitter to get down.

Suzanne and I chatted about the weather, which is where Wisconsin small talk almost always starts. From there we moved to the exploits of her son, Tommie, who was a forty-something Milwaukee lawyer and who probably hadn’t wanted to be called “Tommie” in several decades. We talked a bit about my work, but since I was always careful not to spread gossip about Dr. Nielsen or my best friend, Janie, who was his accounts manager, that part of the conversation didn’t last long.

Suzanne then filled me in on the latest goings-on about town. Samantha Werthauser had left her husband over his affair with Sandy Foley. Josh Smith was thinking of becoming a Catholic. Johnny Cooper, who read meters for the electric co-op, had been caught red-handed trying to steal Godfrey Dingle’s best hunting dog. Its collar had gotten caught on the fence Johnny was trying to stuff it over.

“That poor dog set up a yammering you could hear a mile away,” Suzanne said. “Even Godfrey could hear it, and you know how deaf he is. Came busting out his back door and nearly filled that boy’s ass up with buckshot!”

Suzanne blushed a bit as she laughed. I could tell she was a little proud of herself for saying “ass.”

The litany continued. Callie McCallister was trying to organize a boycott of Big Screen Video because they stocked a few NC-17 movies. At the same time, her boyfriend had moved in with her, which was pretty hypocritical. Someone had knocked down fourteen mailboxes over on Marsh Road. Tess Kreugger was in trouble with Animal Control again for putting peanut butter out for the raccoons in her back yard.

“She said it was for woodpeckers,” Suzanne said, “but how could woodpeckers eat six pounds of peanut butter? That gal’s gonna get rabies if she’s not careful.”

Dorf was going to levy an assessment on downtown property owners for new sidewalks. The Lakeshore Supper Club had a rat infestation. Sara Goshen was expecting twins. It went on and on.

Some of it was old news. For instance, everyone knew the old mill at Bilford Crossing was still burning — the column of smoke off to the northwest had been visible since Saturday morning. Everyone also knew that Kingston Brown, last year’s Frederick High homecoming king, was about to undergo a shotgun marriage to Carly Knavel. But some of Suzanne’s items were pretty surprising — the thing about Callie living with some guy amazed me. Others were infuriating. Some were surely untrue.

I rolled my eyes a few times and generally laughed along with her. Suzanne was a pretty good storyteller. Just so long as none of her stories were about me.

When she finally ran out of steam, there was an awkward silence. I could tell she was disappointed I wasn’t providing any new material. The economy of gossip worked on a barter system, after all. But that was how I justified my bad habit of listening to gossip — I never provided any and never passed on what I’d heard. Fortunately, Suzanne enjoyed the act of giving too much to let my stingy ways put a hitch in our relationship.

But then it occurred to me that, just this once, I did have something to offer. I didn’t know the person involved, so I didn’t feel honor-bound to silence. And maybe I could get some info that would set my mind at ease.

“So, I saw someone new downtown yesterday when I was taking pictures. Short, balding African American guy with a slender build. You know who he is?”

Suzanne shook her head, looking intrigued. “No, I haven’t run into him yet. Did he move up from Chicago?”

Folks here always seemed to think any black person they encountered was probably “up from Chicago.” It was one of those things that gave me Dorf-claustrophobia.

Then I remembered how the picture had creeped me out the night before. Maybe I wasn’t any better myself.

“I don’t know. I didn’t actually talk to him. I just saw him walking in front of J.T.’s.”

“Sure it wasn’t Grange Consecki or Bob Garter?”

Bob and Grange were the only African American men who lived in Dorf.

“No, he was way shorter than them, and he was really thin. And his skin was darker.”

“Like a Hershey bar?”

“No, more like licorice.”

I did not just say that. Oh my god, what’s wrong with me?

“Huh. Well, I’ll ask around and see who he is,” Suzanne said. Then she winked. “You know Twanda will want to hear if there’s a new man in town.”

Twanda Sullivan was the only single African American woman in town.

Great. Now Suzanne would talk to Twanda, and Twanda would think I thought she wanted to jump every black man who walked through town, no matter who he was. Why did I bring this up? I needed a fire alarm, so I could escape in the chaos. Or maybe a fistfight. Suzanne would forget all about the mystery man if that happened.

Unfortunately, no one chose that moment to faint or moon us or do anything else the slightest bit distracting.

“Well, we’ll just see,” Suzanne said, looking like I’d put her on the hunt.

Thank god I hadn’t included the nudity thing. That would’ve had her asking every person in town about him, for sure, and probably calling the cops, too.

It took another twenty minutes to get out of Pete’s. I drove home feeling especially shitty for reasons I couldn’t exactly put my finger on — some combination of acute racial embarrassment, Justine’s outburst, and a nebulous sense of anxiety.

Since the light was better that afternoon than it had been the day before, I picked up my camera and drove out to the old cemetery behind St. Mary’s. I shot a whole bunch of pictures. It made me feel better, tamping down my anxiety, as it often did. After that, I headed to the grocery store. There’d be time that evening to hit the computer and get a better look at the images I had taken.

I
stood there holding
a photo of a nineteenth-century grave marker. The eroded carving wasn’t legible in the picture, but I’d looked at the stone many times and remembered what it said: “Daught. Died Dec. 25, 1859. Aged 2 yrs. 9 ds.” It was such a strange, sad monument. It offered no name for the dead child, yet told us exactly how long she had lived and that she had passed on Christmas Day.

This time, I hadn’t noticed the problem onscreen. I’d printed the picture, expecting nothing unusual. But holding the print, I could see that someone had again walked right by as I took the shot. He’d passed no more than a couple yards in front of me, leaving the frame just as I opened the shutter. His foot, ankle, and a little bit of calf were plainly visible, flexed like he was pushing off for his next step.

There had been no one besides me in the cemetery, certainly not that close to me.

I went and stood right under the bright naked light bulb suspended from the ceiling near the washer and dryer.

The foot was huge and bare. Its pale blue skin was patterned with gray, donut-shaped blotches. It had jagged, horny toenails.

It was a monster foot. Strike that. It was a cliché of a monster foot. If someone had asked me to imagine a monster’s foot, that’s what it would’ve looked like.

It had to be some kind of joke. But how? I couldn’t think of any way someone could’ve gotten the foot into the picture.

I looked again at the print. I could see the tendons and muscles of the lower leg flexing. It wasn’t just some rubber Halloween-costume foot someone had dangled from a tree.

The basement walls started pressing in on me, and my breathing sped up. I backed up to the wall and sat down on the floor. I gave the rubber band on my wrist a hard snap and started focusing on breathing more methodically. In, out, pause. In, out, pause. Slowly, the room stabilized.

I groped for an explanation. There had to be one.

Someone had tampered with my camera. A joke, maybe. April Fools’ Day had been, what, a week ago?

But how? No one could’ve known I’d be taking pictures at the cemetery today. Besides, even if someone else had put the monster-foot image on my camera’s card, the one I took of the gravestone would be on there too.

Some kind of hacking thing, maybe? But I didn’t have internet service.

I looked down at my computer, which was Ben’s latest castoff. Someone could have connected it to the net wirelessly without my knowledge. Maybe someone was controlling it remotely at that very moment, grabbing my images and altering them as soon as I uploaded them.