Scratched into the surface of the floor, Hattie saw a tiny flower. She traced her finger over the image and knew her mother had created it. She wondered if she painted when she lived on the farm or if that came later in her life. A million questions danced through her mind - questions for Grimmel, questions for her mother, questions for Gram Ruth.
“Hattie?” Jude called from below.
“Coming,” Hattie said making her way back down the stairs oblivious to the soft boards bowing beneath her.
“Your mama loved to hide up there,” Grimmel told her. “She’d take a book and lie on an old horse blanket for hours and read. My mom would be calling for Sophia to do her chores and Sophia’d be tucked in the corner, her nose in a book.”
“Sounds like Hattie,” Jude said, cocking an eyebrow at her sister.
Grimmel led them toward the woods at the back of the property. Hattie trailed her hands over the tops of the tall grass. She bent and plucked a handful of milkweed, admiring the tiny purple flowers before allowing the wind to carry them away. Hattie imagined the forest in another month when the leaves began to turn. It would be a sea of gold and red, a beautiful painting.
As they moved from the tall grass into the forest, they grew quiet. Their footsteps were muffled by the dense foliage. The inner forest was dark, shaded by an enormous canopy of trees, and any path that used to exist had become overrun with goldenrod, nettles and ferns. Hattie would have liked to see rays of sun peeking through the darkness, but clouds prevented even that bit of light.
“Used to be a wide trail went in here from the far side.” Grimmel pointed in the direction they were walking. “But old Earl passed on and he was the one who kept it up. My daddy told me you’d find him in here every summer hackin’ away at the plants on his little road like they’d moved in just to spite him. He died when I was just a baby, so his cabin’s never been more than an empty shack. Us kids played in it sometimes, but everyone liked to say Earl might show up with his walkin’ cane to beat you out the door so that kept plenty of us away.”
“I’m amazed they didn’t destroy it after the girl’s murder,” Jude murmured.
“Couldn’t,” Grimmel told them. “This property belongs to some of Earl’s family in Kentucky or Alabama, southern folks. After the death, one of ‘em came up here and put No Trespassin’ signs on a bunch of trees. The townies were afraid the new owners might have money, and they’d get in trouble with the law if they torched the place like they wanted to.”
Hattie spotted an old, bullet riddled No Trespassing sign nailed to a tree.
Jude took out her camera and walked closer, taking several photographs.
They resumed their walking, and soon Hattie saw a squat hulking shape hunkered down in the forest ahead. The cabin reminded her of a sick animal sinking back and down, ready to attack if provoked. The roof, green with moss, had caved in the front right corner. If there’d been a door, it was gone - a black gaping hole in its place. Jude pulled up her camera and walked the perimeter taking photographs while Grimmel rambled on. Hattie had stopped listening.
A chill ran along her arms and traced her spine. She stepped to the doorway and placed a hand on the rotted wood frame. The interior of the cabin stank of mildew and mold and other dark decaying things that Hattie could imagine, but not name. Her legs shook as she stepped into the cabin. Terror coursed through her and she found it hard to breathe. In her mind, Grimmel and Jude had vanished, and she stood alone at the devil’s door stepping into a fathomless mystery that would swallow her whole.
Images assailed her, some of her own imaginings, others from… where? The girl in the yellow dress, ghouls in the shadows lapping blood from the floor, a hand reaching through the darkness to pull her inside, the glint of a knife rising and falling.
She stepped into the cabin.
Jude
“Hattie… Hattie!” Jude said, louder the second time, shaking her sister who stood in the center of the cabin, her blue eyes wide and glassy like a doll‘s, her mouth hanging open.
“Is she all right?” Grimmel asked, taking one of Hattie’s arms and pressing his finger against her wrist. “Her heart is racing.”
“Hattie!” Jude yelled into her sister’s face.
When she first entered the cabin with Grimmel, the sight of Hattie had given her a fright. She had only seen the strangely white silhouette of her sister and nearly dropped her camera, the precise reason she always left it hanging around her neck. Jude grasped Hattie by the upper arms and shook her.
“Wake up,” she bellowed. Her sister’s head snapped back and when she brought it forward she was blinking, her mouth closed.
She stared at Jude, dazed, and Jude felt guilty for shaking her so hard.
Hattie rubbed her hands over her arms where Jude saw red marks forming.
“Everything okay?” Grimmel asked. “You gave us a start, there.”
Hattie looked at him blankly, offered a little nod, and shuffled from the cabin. Jude noticed she avoided touching anything as she left.
Jude shook her head, feeling an odd mixture of frustration and protectiveness for Hattie. Why did she always have to lapse into one her catatonic crazy states? And why couldn’t Jude hold her temper when it happened? She shouldn’t have shaken her so hard.
Jude sighed and opened her hands at Grimmel.
“Hattie has… episodes. That’s the first I’ve seen in a while, but she sort of checks out,” Jude explained.
Grimmel nodded.
“Believe it or not, your mama did something kinda like that. My ma called it daydreamin’, but I could always tell it was more than that, like what Hattie was doin’. What does she say about the episodes after?”
Jude shrugged.
“A lot of times she can’t remember them, not why it happened, not even coming out of it. I’ll be surprised if she even remembers being in this cabin, which was her idea after all,” Jude said mildly irritated.
“Anyway, this is it,” Grimmel offered, waving a hand around the dark room. Jude’s eyes had adjusted and the bits of gloomy light that filtered through the empty doorway and windows revealed a dirt floor strewn with leaves, a beer can or two and the remnants of a wooden chair someone had smashed.
“Seems like an awful place to die,” Jude whispered, squatting down and holding her camera to her eye. She scanned the room through her lens, snapping pictures, but also taking in the other view. What had it been like for Rosemary Bell in the cabin? Had she followed someone she knew into a benign forest only to meet her death in that dingy little hovel? The walls were mottled with mold. Mushrooms grew prolifically in one corner, their fleshy white bodies perverse against the darkness surrounding them. They added an earthy rotted smell to an arrangement of odors that Jude couldn’t discern.
“I’ve tried not to think of it,” Grimmel admitted. “Makes me about sick, now that I have a daughter of my own. Doesn’t justify how they went after poor Sophia, but I can tell you I’d be out for blood too if it was my little girl stabbed to death in this shit-hole.”
Jude took a few more shots before following Grimmel out of the cabin. Hattie had walked a ways away, stopping near a tall maple tree she’d rested her palm against. She stared up into the maple leaves.
“Ready to go?” Jude called. Hattie turned and nodded.