By the time she arrived at Hattie’s apartment, her mouth was set in an angry line and every other word out of her mouth was ‘fuck.’ Hattie stopped listening to her and Jude turned up her music to release some of her fury through song. Rather than sing “I can’t get no satisfaction,” she screamed it.
Jude parked the car on the edge of the estate in a thicket of dark ash trees, barely perceptible beneath the cloud covered moon. Jude wore black pants and a black turtleneck, her hair drawn into a tight ponytail. Hattie, less adept at sleuthing, had thrown on a pair of jeans and a loose-fitting blue sweatshirt spotted with little yellow daisies. Jude had stared at Hattie’s sweatshirt when she first got in the car but refrained from the insult clearly on her face.
Jude jumped out and pulled a duffel bag from her backseat.
“Flashlight,” she said gruffly, thrusting the heavy light into Hattie’s hand. She flicked on her own and cast the beam through the forest before returning to her bag.
“What else do you have?” Hattie looked over Jude’s shoulder, squinting into the bag.
“Just in case,” Jude said tucking a revolver into the waistband of her pants.
“What? No.” Hattie shook her head, dismayed at the small black weapon. “Where did you get that?”
“Peter,” Jude said, pulling it out and smoothing her hand along the oiled barrel. “Safekeeping while he’s in Vietnam.”
Hattie grimaced and shook her head.
“I‘m not going to use it,” Jude argued.
“I will not go with you if you have that,” Hattie protested.
Hattie hated guns. In fact, they terrified her. She had held one only once in her life. It belonged to her father, and she came upon it in his old bedroom at Gram Ruth’s house. It felt heavy in her hand and alive. She nearly dropped it and when she caught it, she knew if it hit the floor, it would have exploded a bullet into the room, maybe into her body. She placed it back in the bureau and went to her bedroom where she hugged her stuffed bear, Groucho, and tried not to cry.
Jude frowned, but took the gun and returned it to the backseat.
“I swear Hattie, if we end up needing this…”
“On who, Jude? Gram Ruth? Frank? Think about what might happen if you get spooked in the dark with that stupid thing in your hand?”
Jude cocked an eyebrow and smiled.
“Well I’m happy to see you get mad about something. I was starting to think you were a porcelain doll.”
Hattie shook her head and looked away, fighting tears.
Jude started into the forest, flashlight beam weaving between the trunks of trees. Somewhere far off a pack of coyotes shrieked and howled. Hattie remembered Daddy telling her they were the tricksters of the forest. He said, “Never trust a man who suddenly appears in the trees, he is probably a coyote in disguise.”
Branches snapped beneath their feet and leaves crunched. To Hattie’s delicate senses, they sounded like a troop of elephants in a stampede.
Through a break in the trees, the back of the barn loomed before them.
“We can go in through the old chicken coop,” Jude said, gesturing towards a mostly boarded-up back entrance.
Gram Ruth and Grandpa Andrew never had chickens. Long before they developed the estate, a wealthy farmer owned the land and raised chickens, cows, and had a stable of horses. Hattie remembered her daddy telling a story about wanting chickens as a small boy. His mother, Gram Ruth, refused and then made him go to a local farm to watch the beheading of chickens so he understood the chicken’s fate.
Hattie’s mind was overrun with thoughts of her daddy and like earlier that day, she felt his presence as they moved toward the barn.
Jude hesitated just outside the chicken coop opening. She stared into the inky dark and Hattie knew she thought of Daddy’s death. She doubted that Jude had entered the barn since his fall.
“Now or never,” Jude whispered and pushed through cobwebs into blackness, holding her flashlight out to illuminate the few steps ahead of them.
They moved slowly, careful not to trip over discarded rakes and rusted farm equipment. Far in the front of the barn, Hattie could see the ghostly silhouettes of Grandpa Andrew’s antique cars.
“What a waste,” Jude muttered, seeing them as well.
Hattie held her flashlight up as Jude climbed the ladder. At the top, Jude’s face appeared grotesque and misshapen in the strange orange glow. She shone her own light back down and Hattie climbed quickly, listening for sounds from the house.
She led Jude deeper into the loft. They navigated gaping holes in the floor. Each groaning board caused them both to pause and hold their breaths, as if that might keep the floor from falling through.
Hattie walked to the space where the crate had been but did not see it. She moved further in, and then circled back looking for the maroon curtain which she’d draped over the crate before leaving.
Jude stood with her hand on her hip, her own flashlight dancing across the boxes.
“Where is it?” she hissed.
“I don’t know. I swear it was right here.” But the spot held only bits of furniture and stacks of framed pictures. She walked back and forth across the loft and then along the perimeter, returning again and again to the space where the crate had been. It was gone.
Chapter 13
Late 1950s
The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane
Sophia
Sophia could not sleep. She never slept anymore, only lay tossing and listening and longing to race back through the years and make another choice.
Sometimes, she replayed that fateful morning when Ruth Porter arrived to whisk her to an isolated cabin where she would wait for her family and escape persecution by Margaret Bell. Instead, she fell into a deep, likely drugged, sleep. She woke as a prisoner in an insane asylum.
Through the window the pale moon smiled from its wide lonely face. She couldn’t imagine the grounds beyond the walls. Out there the moon would not feel sad, but wild. It would race across the lush grass and disappear into the thicket of forest that surrounded her like the cage it was. Beauty was therapy, they said. But nature alone could not cure madness. Not when even nature had been manipulated to control them.
There were patients who escaped the asylum and ran into the woods. They were brought back days, weeks later. Sometimes they were naked, shivering, terrified. What slept in those woods? Some creature of the forest or was it merely the demons in their own hearts they met out there in the emptiness?
“Sophia.” The whisper came from everywhere and nowhere and she thought about ignoring him. She had done it before when a spirit made contact. Eventually they went away. The room grew warmer in their absence and the thick, stagnant air dissipated. But here, she dared not turn them away. She preferred their company to loneliness.
“I hear you,” Sophia whispered.
“Sophia…” the voice said again draining from the room.
She started to sit and felt a shock, bucking violently in her bed, a sharp wave of pain sliced through her head. She rolled over and fumbled to sitting, clutching her head. Her heart beat fiercely beneath her hands and she heaved for breath. It came to her slowly, and she looked around the room for the apparition, but saw only bare walls.
“Sophia…”
“I hear you,” she said again. The man had died of a brain trauma, maybe an aneurysm. She had felt it in her own body and not for the first time. Sometimes the spirit could communicate a sensation.