Donn's Legacy, page 8
Graham and I exchanged glances. Fred could have been describing the Donn’s Hill bed-and-breakfast strategy, especially during the Afterlife Festival.
“You don’t believe in psychics?” I asked.
“Well, I hope I’m not about to offend you here, but no. A lot of our summer guests try to read my palm or tell my future, and it’s a load of bunk.” He paused. “Don’t tell Lizzie.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
“Aliens, now—they’re all over this desert.”
I buried my nose in my coffee cup to hide my smile. I didn’t want Fred to think I was laughing at him, and I needed a moment to quash my knee-jerk desire to call Elizabeth and out her cousin as a skeptic. It was tempting to hear her launch into one of her trademark rants about true psychic abilities. But I liked Fred and didn’t want to spoil his close relationship with her. After all, when we came back, I was counting on more donuts.
“Anyway,” Fred said, “we thought Arcane Oasis would be the juggernaut around here and we’d have to pick up the crumbs when their rooms filled up. Then the disappearances started.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Disappearances?”
“Every year, one or two of their guests just up and vanished in the middle of the night. Skedaddled without a trace.”
“Seriously?” I stared at him. “They never found them?”
“Never. The owners couldn’t take it. Before long, they sold the land to a condo developer and went back to New York.” His eyes lifted to the portrait on the wall. “Lucy and I don’t have anywhere to go back to. This is it for us. We’ll do whatever it takes to hang on to this place.”
We sipped our coffee in silence for a few minutes. I didn’t know what was going through the men’s minds, but I was trying to decide what would be worse: knowing someone I cared about had died or only knowing they had disappeared and never finding out what really happened to them.
I tried to force the thoughts out of my mind. It was an unwinnable game of Would You Rather that I had no interest in playing.
After a while, Graham set down his mug and slapped his knees. “Well, we should head into the city. Ready, Mac?”
We made our goodbyes, and Graham stepped out onto the sidewalk, but I paused on the threshold. Something had been eating at me since before I snuck out of the Shamrock yurt, a question I couldn’t leave without asking.
I turned back to Fred. “This is going to sound like a weird question, but chalk it up to some psychic-power mumbo jumbo.”
He smiled indulgently. “Shoot.”
“Somebody had to pack up Camila’s things, right? After she passed?”
He nodded. “I took care of that. We’re still waiting on her next of kin to tell us where to send it.”
“Did you…” I paused. Was there a way to word this that wouldn’t tip him off to what I’d done? “There’s an image I can’t get out of my mind. I keep seeing it when I close my eyes, and I can’t shake the feeling it’s related to Camila. Did she happen to have a small hinged jewelry box? One with red velvet inside?”
Fred’s eyes went wide, and the hand holding his coffee mug slowly sank down to the desk. When he spoke, his voice shook ever so slightly. “Well, I’ll be. I figured with you being from Donn’s Hill, you might fancy yourself a psychic. But I didn’t think you could actually be one.”
“So she did have one?” I pressed.
“When Lucy found her, Camila’s body was hunched on the ground, curled around that box. We had to…” He swallowed. “We had to pry it out of her hands.”
CHAPTER TEN
I followed Graham to our yurt without processing the world around me. When he paused to open the door to our unit, I walked right into his back and stepped on his heel. He turned in surprise.
“Crap, sorry,” I said, steadying myself against the doorframe with one hand.
The minor note of irritation vanished from his face when his eyes met mine. He ushered me inside, eased me down into a chair, and poured a glass of water from the sink. “Here, drink this.”
He watched me take a few long, deep sips. The cold water helped bring the world back into focus and chased away the mental image of Camila Aster—whom I had never seen, which left my brain no choice but to substitute my own body for hers—dying in the desert while clutching a jewelry box in my hands.
“What’s going on?” Graham asked. “You’re really pale.”
“I need to tell you something, but you can’t get mad.”
“Okay.” He lowered himself into the other chair. “Is this about you going into that other yurt this morning?”
I whipped my head toward him. “How did you know?”
“You’re not as quiet as you think. After you and Striker went outside, I couldn’t fall back to sleep, so I sat here and started going through the rest of your mom’s mail.” He tapped the shoebox on the table. “A few minutes in, I glanced out the window and saw a very suspicious figure slink out of that yurt like a cartoon cat burglar. Then Fred knocked on the door, and I thought for sure he saw you and was coming to kick us out.” Graham would have been justified delivering those words in anger, but his voice was level.
“You’re not mad?”
“I mean, I am a little. I thought you were done barreling into everything alone. I thought you trusted me.”
“I do trust you.” I sighed. “But I don’t trust myself. That’s what I want to talk to you about. I don’t think I should be alone down here. I’m worried I might… I don’t know”—I gestured at the endless desert outside the window—“disappear.”
“Why?”
I told him everything that had happened inside the yurt. Graham’s eyes grew wider and wider behind his glasses. When I pulled the little jewelry box out of my purse and put it on the table, he recoiled.
“You took it?”
“I know what you’re thinking, but this isn’t like that first box. Look at Striker.”
She hopped onto the table and was rubbing her face along the box’s edges, purring enthusiastically as she marked it with her scent.
Graham stroked a hand down her back. “She likes it.”
“Exactly, and she hated the other one. But she did attack this one for a minute.” I opened the box and pointed to the scratched-up runes. “And as soon as she did, my head cleared. I felt like I was in control again.” My fingers found my necklace, and I squeezed the crystal tightly.
Graham’s eyes darkened. “Is that thing still working? Have you seen Horace?”
“I can’t feel him. But I can’t shake the feeling that he’s connected to this somehow. The box can’t be a coincidence, right? Or am I just paranoid?”
He considered the question for a long time. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “The box you brought back to Donn’s Hill didn’t look handmade or anything. I remember it looked weirdly new. For all we know, those boxes could be mass-produced in a factory somewhere and sold in every gift shop in America. There wouldn’t be anything special about them. But on the other hand, you wouldn’t be drawn to something for no reason, right?”
The best I could do was a half shrug. I honestly didn’t know.
He ran a finger over the runes. “These could have been added later. If Horace did have something to do with this box, he could have bought it and burned these in with a pyrography pen or even a soldering iron.”
I tried and failed to picture Horace, red eyed and black cloaked, hunched over a workbench. He didn’t strike me as an artist or crafting enthusiast, but my encounters with him left me with the distinct impression that he was a control freak. Whatever the purpose behind these boxes, whatever the meaning behind the runes, I could see him making—or at least modifying—them himself.
“In any case, I think we better assume the two jewelry boxes are related,” Graham said. “And after that story Fred told us about people just up and vanishing, I don’t really want to be alone either. So let’s just do everything together today, okay?”
A little bit of the tension left my shoulders, and I managed a weak smile. “Deal. I wanted to see those galleries anyway.”
It was a lie, and he knew it. Art was Graham’s world, not mine. He could lose himself in a museum or exhibition the way I lost myself in a good book, seeing stories and emotions in abstract works that completely eluded me. I had originally planned to drive over to the Albuquerque Main Public Library while he chatted with the gallerists he’d been emailing, but that plan held zero appeal now.
“And once I finish my meetings, what if we go here?” He slid a folded sheet of paper across the table.
It was a piece of stationery about the size of a paperback novel. The pale lavender paper and cactus watermark immediately evoked a memory of my mother writing grocery lists at our kitchen counter. But the handwriting on this sheet wasn’t in her sloping cursive; it was in the same painfully small print I had seen in Anson Monroe’s letter from Seattle.
And it was an address.
“Holy crap,” I breathed. “Where did you find this?”
“Pinched in a stack of old electric bills. We were sorting the clean envelopes so quickly at Darlene’s, we missed it.”
I stared at the address. “Do you think this is where he lived?”
“I don’t know. But I looked, and it’s only two hours away, so it’s worth checking out, right?” He glanced down at his watch. “Um, after my meetings anyway. The first one is in an hour, so we better hit the road.”
Before we left, I tucked Camila’s jewelry box back into my purse. We weren’t able to take our furry little good-luck charm with us, but something told me the box from the Shamrock yurt might bring us some good fortune.
Graham drummed his fingertips on the steering wheel and whooped with excitement as we got back onto I-25 that afternoon. His meetings had been in Albuquerque’s Old Town, a historic neighborhood populated by flat-roofed buildings with creamy adobe walls. And despite his anxious, philistine girlfriend hovering awkwardly nearby, he had managed to secure an invitation to submit his work for consideration from the first gallery. The second gallerist had previously met Graham at an arts exhibition in Chicago and fallen in love with his work, and she made an outright offer to mount a show of Graham’s sculptures after the new year.
Now, as he mused aloud about which pieces to recreate versus which sketches were worth finally bringing to life with clay, I thought about what a perfect day this was turning out to be. I hadn’t thought anything could balance the specter of Horace’s presence, but Graham’s artistic career was literally going farther than it had ever gone before, and we were on our way to meet my mother’s old mentor.
Every time the thought entered my mind, I tried to temper my own expectations. Our assumption that the address on the stationery belonged to Anson Monroe could be incorrect. He could have moved sometime during the last two decades. Even if he still lived there, his memories of my mother could be locked away behind the walls of Alzheimer’s or dementia.
My anticipation grew as the road took us through the dusty black vistas of the Valley of Fires. On any other day, I would have insisted we pull over to explore the ancient lava flow, but today I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking Graham to fudge the speed limit a little—or a lot—more.
We found the address among the low foothills surrounding a tall peak. Six letters stenciled onto a signpost at the foot of the driveway sent my hopes into outer space: Monroe.
Unable to tear my eyes away from the name, I groped for Graham’s hand, squeezing his fingers. “He’s still here!”
“Let’s just hope he’s open to visitors.”
Graham’s voice was strained, and I quickly saw what was making him nervous. A tall chain-link fence ringed the property, hung every few feet with rusted white signs reading Keep Out and No Trespassing. But the open gate did nothing to prevent us from pulling up the drive, a sign of hospitality that made me brave enough to step out of the truck as soon as Graham parked it.
Anson Monroe’s house was a wide, prefabricated building. A large propane tank sat off to one side, and sloping sheet metal covered the empty carport. The smell of burning piñon pine from a wood fireplace filled the air, but no smoke rose from the chimney.
Tall weeds sprouted and withered in the network of cracks in the driveway. As I picked my way through them, I looked for any sign of recent activity. I listened for the sounds of a television or a radio but heard only the wind rustling through the overgrown and untamed trees that grew too close to the house.
My heart sank. Nobody lived here. It had been empty for a long time.
“Maybe he’s just not great at keeping up on the yard,” Graham suggested as we climbed the steps onto the front porch.
I stepped around a rusted deck chair. “Maybe.”
“Well, only one way to find out.” He raised his fist to knock on the door, but before he could, a gust of wind knocked into us from behind.
The door creaked open.
I shivered. It felt like the house was inviting us inside. Part of me wanted to accept that invitation, but of course we couldn’t. This old abandoned place was probably condemned. The county could have put up the fencing and the signs to keep teenagers from turning a dangerous property into a party house.
But the name on the driveway post suggested Anson Monroe had been the last person to live here. I wondered when he had left and why. Had he left anything behind? Maybe a photo or something that could help us find his next address?
“Mac, hey.” Graham grabbed me by the arm.
“What?”
“You can’t go in there.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
But as I spoke, I realized I had taken two steps toward the threshold. I forced myself to reverse course and backed all the way off the porch and onto the driveway.
“This is what I’m talking about,” I said once I was a safe distance away. “I can’t trust myself.”
He followed me off the porch and wrapped his arms around me. “Do you feel the way you did when you were outside that other yurt?”
I tried to assess my own thoughts. It was a slippery sensation. Nothing felt wrong. And really, what would be the harm in looking around a little before we left? It’s not like we would ever come back here again.
This was our only chance.
“Let’s just check it out real quick,” I said.
“Are you serious?” Graham looked back and forth between me and the front door. “We can’t walk into somebody’s house uninvited.”
“This doesn’t feel like anyone’s house. Nobody lives here—that’s obvious. Let’s just take a quick look inside. Please.”
He shook his head. “No way. I’m not going to get arrested for criminal trespass in another state.”
A frustrated groan escaped my chest. Why was he being so difficult? “Listen, remember how pissed you were when I didn’t wake you up the night those two guys broke into the garage? You were furious that I went downstairs alone, even though I had no idea they were out there.”
An irritated frown settled onto his face. “Of course I remember. That’s why I was kind of ticked off you went into that other yurt alone this morning.”
“Well, my gut takes me places. Or maybe it’s not my gut. Maybe it’s… I don’t know.” I flicked the side of my head. “It could be the same busted thing in my brain that lets me see ghosts. But whatever it is, you have to admit it leads me to some pretty interesting stuff. And even though the things I find scare the hell out of me sometimes, I would rather know what’s out there than wonder.”
He opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. The muscle in his jaw twitched a few times. Finally, he said, “I think I know where you’re going with this, and I don’t like it.”
“Because you know I’m right. If you want me to tell you everything I’m thinking, all the irrational psychic urges or anxious worries, I need to know you’ll support me.”
He glared at me, rivaling Striker’s ability to pack twelve megatons of emotion into a single expression. Then he stared at the house for a while. When he looked at me again, I could see in his eyes that I had won.
“Okay, we can go inside,” he said.
I suppressed the urge to hold up my hand for a high five, sure he would leave me hanging.
“But when we get back to Donn’s Hill, you need to talk to Elizabeth about all of this. Whatever’s”—he spat out the next word like a bad piece of cheese—“calling to you obviously isn’t fazed by your necklace. There’s got to be something else we can do to protect you.”
“Deal,” I said, and I meant it. I hated not knowing if something was really my idea or not.
I hated it almost as much as I hated not knowing what was inside this house.
With Graham close behind me, I stepped inside.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My only prior experience with abandoned buildings was a dilapidated old cabin in the woods outside Donn’s Hill—a building with three decades of mold, mildew, rot, and vandalism added to its rustic charm. I expected to find some serious dirt inside the house, but it didn’t feel as abandoned on the inside as it looked from the outside. It felt more like an apartment that was between renters: a little dusty, a funky smell in the kitchen, and a living room carpet that could use a good cleaning.
Despite his reluctance to come with me into the house, Graham proved to be an able burglar. We moved quickly through the kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers to check for anything Anson Monroe might have left behind.
“Just plastic utensils and some fast food napkins,” Graham announced.
I gingerly peeked in the refrigerator, sure it was the source of the rotten stench that permeated the kitchen. The foul odor of spoiled milk exploded out into the air around me as soon as the door’s seal broke, and I spotted a chunky white substance oozing out of the top of a gallon jug. I slammed the door closed, hunched over the counter, and willed the bile back down my throat.
