Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) (13 page)

“I’m sorry to interrupt you, dearie, but I just had to come and see how you’re doing out here all by yourself. We’re all just so excited to have you here!” She said this all in a rush as she engulfed Taryn in a hug, nearly knocking her paints to the ground. She had a good six inches on Taryn’s 5’2” frame and she was instantly overcome by the scent of magnolias and Marlboros.

Before Taryn
could respond, Priscilla clapped her hands together and gasped. “Why, that is absolutely amazing! Just look at that! Lawd! That looks just like the house itself! They’re just going to love it!”

“I’m not finished, of course,” Taryn stammered. “There’s still a lot of work to do…”

“Oh of course, of course,” Priscilla assured her, bringing her fingers close to the painting and then snatching them away in awe. “It almost looks like a photograph! And the light…Are you sure there’s not a light bulb behind it?”

Taryn laughed. “I’m sure. I try to capture the light as best I can.”

“It’s better than I ever dreamed it would be. I think it looks better than the real thing!”

“I was about to stop and have a break,” Taryn lied. But she certainly couldn’t work now. “Would you like to sit down on the porch and take a rest and have a soda or some lemonade? I have a cooler in my trunk.”

“I’ll have a Pepsi or something of that nature if you have one,” Priscilla smiled. “It’s a hot one today.”

After she got them settled Taryn resigned herself to the fact that it
might take a while before her momentum was back on track again. “I told Reagan it would be about a week before I finished, but it might be longer. Is that okay?”

“Oh,” Priscilla waved. “That’s no problem. Don’t worry about him. He’s probably forgotten you’re even here. And we certainly don’t mind. We’re just happy you’re doing it! I am thrilled to see this old place coming alive!”

With the words “coming alive” Taryn couldn’t help but shudder a little, despite the fact that it was the same phrase she often used to describe her services herself.

“I wanted to ask you something about the family who lived here the longest, the Bowens?”

“Oh, yes, Robert Bowen,” Priscilla nodded.

“Where did they come from
? Before moving here, I mean.”

Priscilla closed her eyes before answering. “Let me think…Oh yes. Well, he was from the county north of us. I don’t know anything about his people. But his wife, she was from the other side of the river, over in Clark. Same county. About ten miles from here. They lived with her family for the first couple of years and then bought this house and moved here.
I reckon to be close to her family. Family was important back in those days, more so than now. Now, everyone’s spread from here to yonder. Back then, though, you wanted to stay close, stay in clans. Watch out for each other.”

“Why not to be closer to his family? I mean, why not move to his county?”

“Oh, well, I believe her family was the one with the money. And it was more than likely that it was her daddy that bought them this house and farm. Robert died deeply in debt; that is widely known. He farmed this land, but he wasn’t highly successful at it. Her daddy died not long after they bought this farm and it is my understanding that whatever money he left her Robert probably squandered quickly.”

Taryn nodded her head. “So they lived here in a nice house, and had a lot of land, but they weren’t wealthy.”

“Not by any means,” Priscilla agreed. “Now, the family on the other side of them,
that
was another story. They were the richest family in town. I’m sure that rubbed Robert the wrong way. Robert died a poor man, though. And his poor wife and daughter both died young. Just tragic, really. And now this poor house is going to be torn down. Just tragic all the way around.”

W
ith care, Taryn wrapped her brushes up and cautiously slipped her canvas into the back of the car, careful not to let it touch anything. The last thing she needed was to get paint all over the seats. The waxed paper and old sheets protected most of the upholstery, but she’d had accidents before, as the splatters attested. She considered them character, but tried not to let it become a habit.

Taryn was surprised
to discover it was almost six o’clock by the time she collapsed her easel and loaded it into the trunk. She had lost complete track of time. She packed everything up quickly, though, and was about to open her car door and slip inside when the air around her rapidly changed. Where it had been mild and even a little cool before, it became hot and stifling in a matter of seconds. Still. She found herself gasping for breath as the heat settled in around her, climbing down her throat and filling her nostrils. Like she did on the staircase a week earlier, she gasped for breath and fell back against the car, sliding down to the ground. Fumbling for her keys, with one hand she clutched at her throat and with the other and tried in vain to find the key that would start her engine, but her fingers wouldn’t quite work properly. They seemed to have swollen and wanted to stick together.

Off in the distance, a noise started. It was low at first, a faint thud. It sounded as though something
might have fallen. She thought she might have imagined it. The heat was so intense waves of heat shimmered in the air and the house itself appeared to glow. She dropped the keys on the ground and shielded her eyes to peer at the house and get a better look and, as she did, the screams began. There was no mistaking
this
sound. She knew screaming when she heard it. It was loud and strong and most definitely male. And the voice was in trouble.

Getting to her feet, Taryn rain the direction of the house but stopped short when she reached the porch. The sounds weren’t coming from the
house; the scream was coming from
under
her feet, from under the ruins, in fact. Stopping, she sank to her feet and put her ear to the ground, listening, the horrible heat piercing into her and sweat rolling down her face in streaks and gathering onto her stomach and back. There was nothing. Now the sounds were coming from her left, from her right, like an echo. They were everywhere. As loud as they were, they faded in and out, growing louder and fainter with each shout.

Taryn ran back and forth across the yard, pressing her ear to the ground, but each time she
thought she found the source, it moved. “What do you want?” she yelled. “I can’t find you! What do you want?”

Finally, in exhaustion, she dropped to the ground and cried. “What do you want,” she beat her fists on the ground, sweat pooling around her. Choking and gagging on hot air, dizzy and faint, she sobbed. “What do you want…”

As she cried, the screaming slowly died down as well. The blistering heat was replaced by the cool breeze and it soothed Taryn’s skin as it lifted her hair and swept over her, like a balm. She cried and cried, not only out of frustration but for her own perceived lack of sanity and for a whole list of other things as well. She was tired, her head was throbbing, she missed her grandmother, and she didn’t know what to do.

Soon, another sound joined her own cries. She became aware of the sobbing from the upstairs window almost immediately and as the weeping emanated through the afternoon breeze the two women cried together, each one in their own time, each one for their own reasons, and neither one able to help the other.

“
U
nder
the house? Well, that’s different,” Matt mused.

“Not just under the house,” Taryn explained, taking a bite of her McChicken, much to
Matt’s disgust (he really did need to go up there and make her some decent food). “More like under the
ground
. At least I think it was. It kept moving. And damn, it was fucking hot.”

Matt
cringed. He wasn’t big on her language, either. But he’d learned to live with it. “The obvious answer is that someone is buried either under the ground or under the house, right?”

“Of course,” Taryn shrugged. “I guess they’ll figure that out when they tear up the house. If there’s a mystery, Shaggy, then it will be solved.”

Matt slouched on his futon in his shorts and T-shirt with his skinny white legs glowing in the pale lamp light, ate his gumbo out of a Pottery Barn bowl, and tried not to imagine what Taryn looked like in her nightgown. It was difficult. The first thing she’d said when she’d answered the phone was, “I just put on my nightgown,” and the rest of the conversation was just too hard to focus on.

“So the daughter died of tuberculosis
—” Matt began.

“So Re
agan told me when I first met him,” Taryn interrupted him, “but Tammy-the-waitress said her granny thought that was suspicious. Apparently people in town weren’t really sure that’s what happened. It checked out with the coroner, I guess, but other people thought something else might have happened.”

“Okay, so Clara-the-daughter may or may not have died of TB
, but she apparently died of something that looked natural. And someone, we’re guessing a man, is buried under the ground. Or at least died under the ground. And we don’t think it’s Robert-the-bad-dude since he’s buried in the local cemetery. Wait, are we SURE it isn’t Robert-the-bad-dude?”

“What do you mean?” Taryn asked, popping a fry in
to her mouth. Matt would be mortified if he knew she was also drinking a large mocha. He just did not understand the beauty of McDonalds at midnight.

“Okay, if people really didn’t like him and hardly anyone showed up at his funeral, what if some folks came out to his house, killed him, or didn’t kill him, and buried him under his house. What if his casket is empty? What if they buried him alive? What i
f he murdered his daughter and years later someone found out about it and they sent a lynch mob out there to get him and his whole funeral was just a farce?”

Chills ran up and down Taryn’s arms. “Oh my God,
Matt. That’s it! That’s
perfect
. That’s got to be it. That’s why there’s so much anger in the house. And they said he died in debt. He owed money to everyone in the county, he killed his daughter, and eventually someone was bound to find out. Someone, or a bunch of people, came out and killed him. They buried him in the front yard, part of the house eventually collapsed on that part of the yard, and now his ghost haunts the house and is trapped in it. And his daughter’s ghost haunts the house because she was also murdered there. You got it!”

“Well,”
Matt grinned, “I do read a lot.”

Taryn wasn’t sure why she didn’t feel better.

L
ong after she’d hung up the phone and settled down into her red flannel nightgown, picked up at some secondhand store along the way because she always shopped cheap and always froze to death no matter where she stayed, she let her mind drift back to the first time she really knew something wasn’t right.

Obviously, the pictures of Windwood Farm startled her. Who wouldn’t be taken aback by them? She wasn’t crazy. She’d about had a heart attack when she’d seen them pop up on her computer screen and
she’d looked at them a hundred times since then, going over their details. And she’d taken even more since the first day, although her images since then had all been normal.

But
Matt knew her truth, her real truth.

This
wasn’t the first time something had happened.

When Taryn was six and still living in Nashville,
she’d lived in a perfectly normal subdivision on the west side of town. New houses were being built and the kids in her neighborhood liked to play in them, despite the fact their parents told them to stay out of them. Back in those days, it was perfectly safe to ride your bikes after dark, even in her neighborhood in Nashville. It felt more like a small town back then and everyone watched out for each other and she played with a group of kids that felt like a posse. They stayed out together until suppertime until someone stepped out on their front porch and cried for a kid to come in to eat and they all scattered. It was never one of her parents, but she’d always scatter with the rest of them, never wanting to stay out by herself.

One evening, a new kid joined the posse. He was skinny with dark hair and dark eyes and glasses. A head taller than the rest of them, the other
s made fun of him because he instantly started talking about the solar system and bugs. He introduced himself as Matt. She liked him immediately and felt a kinship with him but wasn’t sure why. When the others wanted to pick on him, she threatened to beat them up, even though she was nearly a foot shorter and a grade below most of them.

A family had just moved out of a house on the street and the front door was standing wide open. It was a big house and this was a change. Normally, they explored houses that were just being built, but this one was
different: it was already finished. Why not explore it? Taryn wasn’t sure. After all, wasn’t that more like breaking into it? It had a roof and everything. Matt felt the same way, but it was his first day in the neighborhood and he wanted to fit in.

Giving in to everyone else, and not wanting to ruin his chances at making new friends, he talked Taryn into going along with the gang. Silently, the ten of them crept into the foyer and
sneaked through the rooms. It was a large home, nearly 4,000 square feet. Taryn didn’t know the family who lived there before. They’d had two young children but the girls were toddlers, too young to play with her. She’d only seen the wife taking them in and out of the car. Once, she’d waved to Taryn but she’d looked nervous and frazzled. Not approachable. Taryn’s dad called her “skittish.” She thought the husband always seemed mad. She didn’t know what he did for a living, but his voice was always loud and he had a car phone. He was the only person she knew who did. It had only taken them one day to move and they’d hired a moving company to do it.