Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) (17 page)

“Dear, you are now, apparently.”

“Well, of course Mama thinks that the old loon on Windwood Farm had something to do with that boy’s disappearance,” Tammy confided.

The diner was deserted and
Tammy was helping herself to a scoop of ice cream, her feet propped up on a chair she had dragged over to the booth. It was late and she was pulling a double shift. The jukebox was playing early Randy Travis and Taryn couldn’t sleep. She was staring at her waffles and sliding the butter around and around them, dipping it down into the little holes and back out again.

“Sounds about right, doesn’t it?” she murmured.

“Sure, why not?” she agreed. Her perky ponytail bobbed on her head. She might have worked all day, but she looked fresh as a daisy. Taryn, on the other hand, felt as though she’d been dragged through the mud. Her head was pounding, her skin was oily, and she couldn’t stop going to the bathroom. She must have eaten something bad.

“What’s the motive though?”

Tammy shrugged, scraping the side of the ice cream dish. “I dunno. Meanness. This ain’t a crime show. Sometimes folks don’t need a motive. Maybe he was just mean and wanted to kill someone and that kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Sorry, be right back,” Taryn apologized and jumped up and headed for the bathroom.

When she returned, Tammy was still sitting in the booth. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sorry about that. I made myself some sweet tea in the hotel room this morning and took it with me when I went to the house to work. Either it went bad
, or it was something in my sandwich. My stomach’s been off all day. I could be coming down with something, too. I’ve had a headache for over a week.”

“Could be the heat. You outside every day, you’ve got to feel it the most,” Tammy said sympathetically. “I don’t know how you stand it. The best thing about this job is that it’s air-conditioned in here. That and the music.
I rigged the jukebox so that it plays for free. Well, and I can eat. I looove to eat.”

“So did your mom have anything else to say about it?” Taryn was desperate for more information and would take anything she could get. She hadn’t had any more experiences at the house since she
took the pictures inside and saw whom she could only assume to be Clara in the bed. She visited her grave that morning and hoped to feel something but hadn’t heard a peep or felt a thing. It had actually been peaceful and even enjoyable to visit the headstone, especially since it was now cleaned off. Of course, now that she wanted to pick up on something she couldn’t. It apparently didn’t work that way.

“Just that she thought you were nuts for going out there every day and that she thought they just ought to tear the damn thing down be done with it. She thinks the house is evil. She and Dad used to go out there and make out, and probably screw around, when they were dating in high school, and she saw all kinds of shit. I’m not naïve. She said she heard screaming, saw black shapes flying around, heard crying. I don’t know. One time she heard a man yelling ‘help me’ and then heard someone shoot an old timey shot gun. It was right near the car and she could smell gun smoke. They thought it was real at first but there was nobody there. That was good enough for them, though. They never went back.”

“Houses like that, though, usually those are the kinds of places kids would go to and hang out at. You’d
want
to see things. I grew up outside of Nashville for the most part and there were ‘haunted’ houses around. Everyone wanted to see them,” Taryn mused. “It was fun to be scared.”

“But don’t you feel like this one is different
?” Tammy asked. “It’s not just scary. It’s sad. I don’t feel good there. Being scared is fun. I love horror movies. Me and my boyfriend, we go to scary movies and I cover my eyes and scream and watch through my fingers. He makes fun of me, but I love them! And we go through haunted houses at Halloween. But it’s fun! This is not fun. That house is not fun. It makes me want to cry. YouknowwhatImean?”

She said it all in a rush, like one big word. And Taryn knew exactly what she meant. Windwood Farm was more than a simply horrifically
spooky place, it was crushing. And as she drove back to the hotel and parked her car under the flashing vacancy light, she finally knew that she
needed
to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t because the ghost was asking her to, like in a movie. It wasn’t because it was a pressing mystery that demanded to be solved. It was because the sadness was so overwhelming that it might have gotten inside of her and was making her ill. She was convinced that’s how much of an effect the house was having on her.

S
he meant to get an even earlier start than usual the next morning, but the overcast morning erupted into a strong thunderstorm and it didn’t let up until after three o’clock. That ended up being just fine with her because her upset stomach never really did ease up and she was violently ill all morning from both ends until she collapsed in bed and fell into a fitful sleep until early evening.

With nothing in her room but a package of crackers and a jar of peanut butter, she made herself a snack and watched episodes of “Boy Meets World” while she dealt with her fragile tummy and moaned into her pillow. Where in the world had she picked something up? She considered painting in her room,
as she didn’t really need to see the house after all, but she didn’t trust herself to sit up for very long.

Finally, she gave up and went back to bed where she slept through most of the night. Her underwear
lay in a crumbled heap on the floor. They were just slowing her down anyway. She hoped there weren’t any embarrassing streaks on her sheets for her maid to deal with. She was sure she was throwing up stuff she’d eaten weeks before. Her vomit was pure stomach acid at this point. In fact, she thought at one point she might have even thrown up Tammy’s ice cream. It was that awful. The worst part was definitely the cramps. They finally died down but during the reigning terror of hell that happened around 6:00 am, she would have happily thrown herself into the reigning arms of whatever deity presided over the afterlife just to have done away with them.

She thought she might have even called out to her mother, something she hadn’t done since she was a very little girl
—fat lot of good that had done her then. And then felt instantly sorry for herself and that made her cry.

Now she felt fragile but a little better. The thunder and lightning had stopped but there was still a drizzle. She didn’t feel like painting or drawing
, so she consoled herself by playing around on the internet. It didn’t tell her much in the way of ghost photography. Many people over the years had taken pictures of what they thought were ghosts in houses, but most of these looked like, to her anyway, overexposures or tricks of the light. There was one creepy baby picture of a little one by a grave and she couldn’t take her eyes off of it but nothing resembled the shots taken with her own camera and the furniture.

On a hunch, she tried Googling “Donald Adkins” and tried searching through the 1920s throughout Kentucky and the surrounding states. Maybe, just maybe, if he had up and left the county and settled somewhere nearby he hadn’t changed his name and just gone somewhere else and hoped nobody noticed. But no searchable death records or marriage records showed anyone with the name marrying or dying anywhere close. It was a long shot, but it was all she had. More than likely, if he wanted to disappear he would have changed his name. Even in the 1920s
, people could still be found.

Donald had
simply vanished like a ghost.

Clara was dead and Donald was gone and the connection between the two was too obvious.
At least to her it was. Had Donald known something he shouldn’t have? Witnessed something? Had a hand in killing Clara? (She still wasn’t buying the TB cause of death.) Was she completely out in left field here? So maybe it wasn’t so much of a mystery, after all. Maybe she was focusing too much on the “what” when she should have been focusing on the “why.”

Giving up for the night, she took the last
Phenergan she had left over from the last time she had the flu and propped herself back up in bed. It wasn’t that late, but she was tired and maybe one more night’s sleep would make her feel better. It couldn’t make her feel any worse. 

T
he next day didn’t prove to be any better, at least not weather-wise, but at least her stomach was on the mend. She decided not to take any chances on food, but did drive through Starbucks and got herself a latte. A girl had to have something to start her morning, or afternoon as it may be, off right.

Vidalia’s
library was in the middle of Main Street, a squat, yellowed stone building with a parking lot only large enough for ten cars (or seven pickup trucks, as it happened to be this morning). It consisted of one fairly large room with a line of computers along the back wall which boasted a couple of middle aged men and women who all seemed to be checking their Facebook status updates or playing Candy Crush. A few toddlers played in the children’s section with Curious George books while bored soccer mom-looking mothers played on their phones. She had seen this same scene in countless other libraries. It’s funny how some things just did not change. Still, the air conditioning was refreshing and the rocking chairs by the front door were a nice touch. An elderly couple occupied them and both were engrossed in new releases and barely acknowledged her when she walked in.

“Hi, I’m from out of town and I was looking for some information on the history of the county, from about the 1920s to around the end of the Depression,” she said brightly to the clerk at the desk.

The skinny sixty-something with a surprisingly hefty midsection and a shocking amount of black wavy hair and jowls that would rival Elvis’ gave a large sigh. She was sure it went against the library’s noise policy but he hefted himself off his stool and nobody seemed to notice. She was almost positive he rolled his eyes, although the
People
magazine he was reading was at least three months old and couldn’t have been that interesting. The couple on the cover, after all, had broken up and gotten back together at least twice since that issue.

“You’ll never find what you’re looking for unless I show you,” he complained as he marched her to the back of the room.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly.

The only other people in the library, other than the couple up
front, were the mothers in the children’s section and a few at the computers. But he was clearly overworked and she
must
have been a burden to him…

There weren’t many books to look at. One was a census report. The other was a book of photographs that the Historical Society released. That one ought to be interesting. The third was a biographical sketch about the town in general and focused in on several of the founding families. A quick glance through it showed that young Donald’s family, along with the Fitzgeralds,
were the primary settlers back in the early 1800s. She figured she’d start with that one, since it appeared to be the most inclusive of the bunch.

For the next four hours
, she pored over the books, taking notes when she found something of interest, stopping for tea (she’d sneaked in a thermos of it and kept it hidden under her chair) and bathroom breaks when she absolutely had to. Luckily, her stomach wasn’t bothering her as much as she feared it would, although it was still upset. For a county she didn’t know much about and didn’t have any ties to, Stokes County was far more interesting than she thought.

The original fort
was constructed on the river. The Fitzgeralds and Adkins were the founding fathers and owned the most acreage at the time, each with around one thousand acres. They sold a lot of their acreage off, and gave some of it away to build the current town of Vidalia. (The current county seat, she learned, was not in its original location and had actually been moved twice.) The Fitzgeralds eventually turned to the railroad and went on to become prosperous and invested in a neighboring town on the other side of the county. It became known as Fitz, fittingly enough. Other communities popped up throughout the county with names such as Fitz Mountain and Gerald. They obviously left their mark.

The Adkins also did quite well, only they went in the way of tobacco. Kentucky soil was quite good for tobacco and they
experienced several good seasons. They ended up with around 500 acres. Then, around 1919, they sold off 150 acres to a farm on the other side of them. It was a name she hadn’t encountered anywhere else, but it wasn’t Windwood Farm. This was a Jenkins.

The Bowens of Windwood Farm did crop up throughout the history of the county, but only as footnotes from time to time. They didn’t seem to have any historical significance, other than the fact that one of the
descendants did go on to become governor, although that particular one did not ever actually live in Stokes County. Much was referred to about the house, especially since the architect designed the governor’s mansion and the state capitol building.

Mention was made when Leticia passed away in 1917 from TB and again when Clara passed in 1921. Very little was said about Robert’s death later in 1933. She did find it interesting, however, that mention was made of Clara’s “suitor
,” a Jonathan Fitzgerald. A quick flip back through the census showed her that he was one of the sons from the neighboring Fitzgerald farm, but at the last census, would have been fifteen years her senior. Sure, things were different then, but that was a little old for Clara, surely? Did Daddy know about that one?