Chapter 10

D anica hesitated, as she stared at Cameron’s face. “I was thinking that somebody might have attacked her,” she admitted cautiously. “Yet I saw no sign of anybody when I arrived and have seen no sign of anybody since.”

He nodded. “Of course you didn’t call the sheriff, did you?”

She shook her head. “It would take a lot for me to call the sheriff,” she declared, her tone formal.

He winced. “Vestiges of your time here before?” he asked.

“Absolutely. Plus, based on the most recent visit I just had here.”

“So tell me then. I don’t quite understand the motive behind the request to buy the land from me.”

“Because of my grandmother,” she replied, with a shrug. “I know it bothers her, and, if I can find peace for her at this stage of her life, I’m happy to do so.”

“Not for yourself?”

“Sure. I would prefer to live on it,” she replied.

He looked around at the house and again asked, “Why are you in the RV and not in the house?”

“Because I prefer it,” she repeated. No way she would try and explain how houses had memories, houses had energy, and, in her case, no good energy was attached to this one. She could go in during the daytime, but she certainly couldn’t go in once it got dark. She wasn’t sure whether that was her mother’s doing or not. Maybe it was still left over from her grandmother. So much pain was tied up in this location that Danica was okay to not have anything to do with it.

“I’m surprised you would settle here. There doesn’t appear to be much here for you.”

She gave him a nod. “You could be right,” she admitted. “Definitely a lot of energy is here, memories that I don’t feel great about,” she murmured, wrapping her arms around her chest, as she looked at the acreage around her. “My grandmother has always called this home, and, now that I’m back again, I realize how much this place, the land , feels like home to me. It’s just that the house itself is not necessarily comfortable.”

“I’m sure you would be happier in other locations, other states even.”

“Maybe,” she said, with a glance in his direction, “but something can be said about coming home. However, I might feel differently after she’s gone.”

“Coming home is one thing. Coming home to a place where you’re obviously…” He hesitated.

“Not welcome?” she added, her voice rising.

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“No, maybe you didn’t, but it doesn’t change the reality of it. That’s exactly what it is,” she retorted.

“They think you got away with murder,” he shared bluntly.

She laughed. “At least you call a spade a spade. I prefer that to people tiptoeing around, with veiled glances and sideways looks,” she murmured. “I did not kill anybody. I did not attempt to kill anybody, and, if you had been the visiting physician or one of the doctors at the hospital at the time, you would have realized it just wasn’t possible. But nobody would vouch for my injuries or clarify in any way what had gone on. So, everybody’s rumor mill superstitions just went into overdrive.”

“I never thought of that,” he noted. “I haven’t looked at your case.”

“Can you?” she asked, looking over at him.

“I don’t have access to the sheriff’s records, and I don’t really know that I would or should have access to your medical records,” he replied.

“Then it’s just the slight dubiousness about accessing somebody’s record for voyeurism versus an actual desire to help,” she pointed out.

He looked at her sharply. “The only reason I would be accessing those records is if I could find a way to reassure people, particularly those around us, that you could not have self-inflicted those wounds.”

“It wouldn’t help. Don’t you realize that, even though my wounds couldn’t be self-inflicted, as far as the locals are concerned, they were supposedly inflicted by my mother as I tried to kill her?” she asked, with a hard glance. “People will take whatever information they want, and they will twist it so it appears to answer the questions in the way they want at any given time. The truth isn’t what this is about. It’s about vilifying me, no matter what.”

“Right, but why?” he asked, staring at her, feeling troubled.

“I don’t understand why,” she murmured. “Because they’re afraid of me, I think. More than afraid, to be honest.”

“Because you died?” he murmured. “We have a lot of people who die on the table and come back.”

“Sure, but do they wake up in the morgue?” she asked.

He stared at her in shock and then slowly shook his head. “I’ve heard of that happening in various places,” he replied, “but not in North America.”

“Right. So that’s just one more of those little oddities that people don’t like about me,” she stated.

An awkward silence passed for a moment.

She looked to see him studying her carefully. She shrugged. “What?” she asked. “What is it you’re now suspecting?”

“I’m not suspecting anything,” he said defensively. “The questions running through my head are not really appropriate either, but I can’t stop thinking about them,” he admitted.

“Such as?” she queried.

“What did it feel like?” he asked. “To wake up in a body bag?”

“Suffocating,” she said bluntly. “It wasn’t a body bag though, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was in a cold-storage drawer at the morgue. I woke up, and I couldn’t get out, and I felt like I had been buried alive,” she murmured, staring at him, feeling the same remnants of fear running through her system. She shuddered and wrapped her arms tighter around her chest. “People don’t understand just how it changes you.”

“I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine,” he murmured. “When we were in med school, we used to fool around like that every once in a while. You know, get the experience of what it was like to be in a drawer. I hated it. It was pretty damn freaky,” he confessed.

“It is freaky,” she murmured, “but it’s more than freaky. It’s… life-changing, but that doesn’t even do justice to the feeling. When you wake up, and you are the one in that drawer, pounding for somebody to let you out—only to have the drawer come open and everyone run away because they realize you are alive? Instead of thinking that something bad had happened to you—like an accident, and you were pronounced dead in error—they take off, thinking that you’re a ghost, a demon, or some other godforsaken thing,” she muttered.

She glared at him, remembering the horrific looks she’d gotten, as she had been moved to the ER department, where the doctors could check her over. “Then to find out that nothing ,” she said, with air quotes, “nothing was wrong.”

“What do you mean by nothing wrong ? You were stabbed multiple times, weren’t you?”

“Oh, I was,” she confirmed. “Absolutely I was. But… You might as well just go read my chart. Then, if you have any questions, feel free to come back and ask them.” He hesitated and she shrugged. “You’ll do it to satisfy your medical curiosity. At least this way, I can give you permission, and you won’t feel like you’re breaking the law, violating my privacy or whatever.”

He winced and nodded. “You don’t pull punches, do you?”

“No.” She cast a lopsided look in his direction. “That’s never done me any good. I know that people do the shit they always do, bend the rules all the time. In your case, you do have a reason to check it out, and you have access,” she noted, with a grin. “So, you might as well look at it. Then you can tell me what you find. It’s not as if anybody ever tells me anything.”

“Right. You don’t have a copy of your medical file or the sheriff’s investigation, do you?”

“Nope, not exactly. It’s not something that’s easy to get.”

He nodded.

“Go,” she urged him. “I know you’re dying to run away.”

He hesitated. “You’ve certainly got my curiosity up,” he conceded. “So I would very much like to take a look and see what I can find. I’m not even sure how much of your file is there.”

“Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it’s been burned or something,” she noted, with a mock smile. “Believe me that the superstitions in this town are something else.”

“And yet you want to stay.”

“I want to stay for my grandmother’s sake. I’m not sure how I feel about staying overall.”

“Yet you are buying my land, and you will own the rest after your grandmother’s gone. She would leave it in your possession, I assume.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, and, in a way, it would be a good thing for me to have a home base, but I guess it also depends on whether that home base will be something I can live with or if it’ll be a place where I am never accepted.”

“I can’t imagine, given what I’ve seen for a reaction from the locals so far.”

“What if they found out the truth?” she asked, looking at him slowly. “If they realized that most of the rumor-mongering was coming from one specific corner, would that change things?”

He stared at her and then slowly nodded. “Over time, it would. Although I would have thought that a lot of these people would have forgotten what had happened already.”

“So would I,” she agreed, with an odd expression. “So, somebody, somewhere along the line, has kept a lot of this alive, and I just don’t understand why.”

“Did your mother have any other family here?” he asked.

She stared at him and then shook her head. “Why do you ask?”

“I just wondered if we’re missing another connection here, if your mother knew something or was related to somebody or something else. Was she here all the time?”

“She was here most of the time. A couple times she ran away, and we thought maybe she was gone for good. I do believe I heard something about her having disappeared for long periods of time before I was born as well,” she shared, with a shrug. “I know that sounds absolutely horrific, and I don’t mean it that way, but it was par for the course with Daisy. I do remember one particular time when I was still in school, but I don’t remember what grade.” She frowned, trying to dredge the memory from the back of her mind. “I really don’t know anything about it, but she was gone for quite a while.”

“Then she came back?”

She looked over at him and nodded. “Yes, she came back. As my memory serves, she was different in a way. But again, I was just a young teenager, so I’m not sure I have an idea of what different really means,” she said, with a laugh.

“Maybe it’s something we can ask your grandmother about, when she’s feeling better,” he suggested.

“Why?” she asked, looking at him intently. “What do you care?”

“I don’t like to see injustices like this,” he said, looking off to the side. “For one thing, your grandmother doesn’t have an easy road ahead of her as she ages, and you won’t have an easy road ahead of you as you try to make the rest of your grandmother’s life comfortable, all the while dealing with this level of prejudice from the townsfolk.”

She smiled. “If you really want to help, why don’t you start with your brother?”

*

Harriet listened to the conversation from the sanctuary of her bed, wondering how long she could hold off before everything blew up in her granddaughter’s face, through no fault of her own. Harriet wanted to trust the doctor, but they’d tried trusting doctors in the past, and it hadn’t worked out so well. She knew her granddaughter needed somebody to be there in her life, when Harriet was gone. It was interesting that Danica had talked about waking up in the morgue and that he felt compelled to look at her charts.

Harriet was sure that would be a HIPAA violation or two, something along those lines, but, Danica having given Cameron permission, that was a whole different story. An interesting twist too.

Her granddaughter typically avoided men like the plague. Harriet wasn’t even sure Danica had ever had a long-term relationship. It’s not something they’d ever discussed, and it wasn’t all that surprising. It’s not as if men had been very kind to Danica, particularly not since she’d woken up in that damn drawer.

If a single experience could take away her granddaughter, it would be that one. It would be bad enough to find out that you’d been declared deceased, but then to find out that you’d been locked up in cold storage, all ready for a grave, only to wake up trapped in that horrific metal prison? It was a nightmare that had kept Danica from sleeping for a very long time. Harriet couldn’t even begin to count the number of days, months, possibly even years that she’d sat at her granddaughter’s side, trying to convince her to go to sleep, reassuring her that she wouldn’t wake up dead again.

Sadly, waking up dead would have been a piece of cake, compared to what Danica has had to endure ever since. Her granddaughter had made that very clear. So much easier. She got teased, harassed, and pestered about it from the start. Nobody seemed to have anything but fascination for the young woman who had woken up, after being pronounced dead. Nobody looked at the incompetence of the doctors. Nobody ever looked at the doctor at the time, who had been more of an old fuddy-duddy than competent. That was the problem when everybody protected their own.

Even though Harriet and Danica had spent many, many years here—Harriet’s entire life, for that matter, and Danica’s childhood as well—they were still outsiders… because of Daisy’s behavior.

Then the family had been ostracized for a very long time. Harriet’s own mother had probably started the process, and, with Harriet’s own abilities, that hadn’t helped. Yet Daisy’s psychotic breaks, as Harriet liked to put them, had finalized the deal. From then on, they’d been that family ; the family everyone hated to be close to, hated to be around.

Of course Danica finding out that her mother was hell-bent on killing her because Danica was young, pretty, sexy—the epitome of everything Daisy wanted to retain, but she couldn’t rewind time—which must have been awful for Danica. Daisy had been ruled by sheer jealousy and greed. Or maybe it was just a weariness of the whole aging thing. Maybe Daisy had been planning on taking her own life the whole time. Just something else they wouldn’t know the answer to.

For all her abilities, Harriet had yet to speak to her daughter in the afterlife. To have that conversation would have helped her a lot, but her daughter wouldn’t give her that satisfaction. Daisy hadn’t been a hard child to raise, not until she hit puberty, and then she’d become impossible.

Slowly, with a sigh, Harriet pulled back the blankets and sat up, wishing the room wouldn’t spin quite so badly around her head. The last thing she needed right now was to show weakness. Not only would that make her granddaughter worry, but it would also show weakness on the ethers—something Harriet couldn’t afford to do.

She groaned as she sat up a little farther and made her way to the bathroom. “You can’t get old now,” she muttered to herself, ignoring the fact that, for many people, she already was old. Very old. Her daughter had been born to Harriet late in life, and maybe that had contributed to Daisy’s instability. Harriet couldn’t provide the world she wanted for her daughter. She couldn’t provide anything, apparently.

She’d been spending all her evenings working on healing her daughter while Daisy slept, and yet nothing ever seemed to work. Harriet had read that sometimes you couldn’t heal some afflictions, but she had refused to believe it. It was her only daughter, her only child, and this hadn’t been something Harriet was prepared to live with. Seeing the end result, even now, all these years later, still tore her apart. Yet no need for it. No reason for Daisy to have gone the way she had, unless it was a result of the energy work. And then, of course, she got into drugs.

When Daisy got into drugs, everything had gone wild. Harriet had tried to get help from the local sheriff’s office. She had also tried to get help from the parents of the other kids. But either nobody would help her or nobody knew how to help her. She blamed the lot of them for a long time, but, of course, it wasn’t their fault. Daisy had made decisions on her own, and Harriet couldn’t help Daisy with those any more than the other parents could help their children. Once Daisy had gone down that addiction pathway, it was just too hard to try and regain control of her.

After using the bathroom and slowly washing her face, Harriet studied her reflection in the mirror. Looking closely at her head, recognizing the wound that she had tried so hard to keep hidden, she realized no way Danica hadn’t seen it. She shed her nightgown, removed her pants and shirt from the hook on the back of the bathroom door, and got dressed. As soon as she stepped back into her bedroom, her granddaughter rushed through to see her.

Danica stared at Nana, surprised. “You shouldn’t be up,” she scolded her.

Harriet smiled. “Of course I should be,” she argued, brushing it off. “I fell. It’s really not that big of a deal.”

“So, if you just fell, how did you get that bump on your noggin?” Danica asked, staring at Nana.

Danica was always way too perceptive, that one. Too smart, too intuitive for her own good, and too strong energy-wise. Yet Danica didn’t really understand what she was doing on the energy level.

Because Harriet tried so hard to protect Danica, to not have her go off the rails like her mother, Harriet had withheld all the training and all the energy work knowledge from Danica, and now Harriet feared it was way too late.

Harriet’s eyes widened, when she watched Cameron walk in. “I don’t need a doctor,” she stated briskly, wiping her still damp hands on her pants. “What I do need is a cup of tea.” She brushed past both of them and headed for the kitchen.

In these moments, where she had to appear strong and decisive, were her downfall. She knew that, and it would make her more exhausted than anything. Yet the appearance of strength was everything, particularly in the eye of the enemy. She had yet to sort out whether Cameron was a friend or foe. His brother was definitely a foe, but that didn’t mean that Cameron was too, or that he even understood the war his family was involved in.

Harriet sighed as she put on the teakettle and then made her way to sit at the kitchen table. As she glanced at her granddaughter, standing there, arms crossed, glaring at her, Harriet smiled. “I’m just fine, you know,” she declared, catching sight of the tears in her granddaughter’s eyes. She sighed and opened her arms. “I know it’ll be a shock for you, but one day I will go.” She waved her hand at her granddaughter, trying to bring her in. “And there won’t be anything you can do about it.”

Danica nodded, as she gave her a hug. “I know that. I understand that completely, yet we don’t want to bring that time to us any faster than we should.”

“Says you,” she muttered, with a smile. “There are plenty of days when I’m more than ready to go.”

“If that’s an issue, then we need to talk about it,” Danica stated firmly. “I have no intention of dragging your life out longer, especially if you have no wish to do so. But neither do I want you becoming so morose that it becomes all you talk about and worry on.”

“I’m not worried about dying,” Harriet said, her gaze going from her granddaughter to Cameron. “I’m only concerned about leaving you behind.”

“Of course you are,” Danica agreed, and she sat down beside her. “I will be fine, Nana. You know that.”

“I do know that.” She patted her granddaughter’s hand. “You were always the one who would be fine. No matter what, you will always be fine. The trouble is, you never really let anybody in to help you.”

Danica laughed. “Other than you, nobody has been around to help me, as you well know.”

Wincing at her bluntness, Harriet stiffened and glared back over at Cameron.

He just shrugged and walked over to the now-bubbling teakettle. “How do we make the tea here?” he asked.

Harriet laughed. “What? Is this somebody who’s willing to help?”

He looked at her, surprised. “I’ve helped lots of people, and I’ve lived alone for a long time,” he shared, cracking a lopsided grin. “I can manage a cup of tea. I just didn’t want to open up every cupboard door and make you think I was being intrusive just because I don’t know where the tea is.” At that, he opened the closest cabinet. “But it’s right here. Where else would it be?”

“Exactly.” Harriet smiled. “Where else would it be?”

He made up a pot of tea and brought everything over to the table, then sat down beside Harriet. “Now I’m not sure how that bump didn’t show up in the hospital, or, if it did, how my esteemed colleague missed it.” A patent disbelief filled his tone. “But I would like to know how you got that smack on the head.”

She looked over at him and said casually, “Somebody hit me, of course. What else could it be?”