The House Near the River

  The HOUSE NEAR THE RIVER

  The House Near the River published E-book edition, 2012 for Amazon Kindle, Copyright 2012 by Barbara Bartholomew.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The first stars were beginning to peer out as Angie drove up the narrow dirt trail that led to the weathered old house. “If I ever believed in haunts,” she said aloud, merely because the sound of her own voice was somehow comforting, “this would be the night.”

  She hadn’t planned it this way. As she’d listened to the country music that came in from the nearby radio stations, feeling that it was the thing to set the stage for this particular outing, she’d thought she’d get here long before dark. She had visualized the meeting with this cousin she had seen only rarely since she was a little girl. She and Amanda would stroll through the rooms of the old house, empty now for a long time, but full of memories of the days when they’d been best friends, close to the same age, and a day at Grandma’s house was to be treasured.

  She’d pictured this as happening in bright sunlit afternoon, but her Volvo had decided to indulge in a flat in the middle of isolated western Oklahoma farm country, the kind of flat where the tire was ruined beyond repair and needed to be replaced immediately. Only she hadn’t been able to loosen it from the wheel no matter how hard she tried and she was admittedly not very accustomed to even the simplest auto care. Back at home in Texas, all she ever did was call her roadside service and they put things right.

  But this was lonely western Oklahoma and service for her phone was spotty and tended to drop off before she could complete a message. Against all her teachings, she’d accepted a pickup ride from a friendly farm woman who didn’t have a cell phone, but took her into the nearest small town where she was able to have assistance sent to her stranded vehicle. All of this took a considerable amount of time, as did replacing the tire once she got to a town big enough to have a tire store.

  With decent cellular service once again available, she’d tried to call Amanda to inform her of the delay, but had to be contented with leaving a message and though she’d been tempted to look for the nearest motel—and they were few and far between—she hadn’t wanted to stand up her cousin, so she’d kept going.

  Now as she pulled up to the edge of the weedy yard, conscious of the shadows of sagging sheds not far from the house, she wished she hadn’t been so thoughtful. No other car was parked out here so she had to suppose Amanda hadn’t gotten her message about the hour she expected to arrive.

  She was accustomed to the risks of city streets, knew well enough how to look after herself in her usual environment, but visits to Grandma’s house were in her long-ago past. Angie enjoyed the presence of others, was comfortable at a crowded mall, but this abandoned farmstead, forty miles from the nearest town of any size, had been her grandmother’s home for many years. Last time she’d been here, she’d been thirteen and surrounded by friendly relatives. Now she was twenty eight and frankly spooked.

  “Might as well get out just for a minute,” she spoke aloud again. “Since I’m here, At least I can tell Dad I saw his old home.”

  She opened the door about an inch and then an eerie howling split the night air.

  “Wolves,” she whispered the word, feeling like a lost girl in a fairy tale until her good sense took over again. “Not here. Only coyotes, just like at home.” The difference was that at home she would have been safely inside.

  They sounded awful enough that she pulled the door quickly shut and proceeded to restart the motor. Only it wouldn’t start.

  She tried again, pressing hard against the gas petal as though sheer force could bring the engine alive. It gasped, choked, and then sputtered to silence. She tried again but only got a hopeless kind of whir, whir, whir that quickly died to silence.

  This couldn’t be happening. Her wonderful, relatively new car never gave her trouble. It was so dependable and it had carried her about day after day with never a problem more serious than the roadside service could quickly take care of.

  And now, when she most needed it, this happened. She slapped the dashboard in punishment, but, of course, that did no good at all.

  She just hoped cell phone service existed here in this remote spot down by the river. Surely it did. Amanda always laughed at her when in the midst of one of their long phone conversations, she said something about the backward rural area where her cousin still made her home.

  “Things have changed since you were a girl, Angie. We have running water and everything.”

  Not that Grandma hadn’t had running water. Of course she had, though she’d often told them of the days of cistern water, outdoor toilets, and oil lamps. She could take those amenities for granted, but good cell phone service? She hadn’t even thought about not having that.

  Almost afraid to find out, she reached for her phone and flipped it open. Absolutely nothing happened. Oh no! She’d charged it just before she left home, but she supposed she had used it quite a lot during the day-long trip, both in touching base with her dad and in calling friends back at home to occupy the boring hours of the drive. And then there was the time she spent trying to get help with her tire problem.

  She’d have to charge it . . . oops! She’d just bet having a dead battery in her car wasn’t a good sign when it came to charging the phone’s battery.

  After allowing herself five minutes to totally panic, ‘stranded here in the wilderness. If Amanda didn’t get my message, nobody knows where I am and there’s wild animals and who-knows-what else out here’ kind of panic, she forced her usually rational mind back into action.

  She was young and healthy and jogged regularly. Tomorrow she would walk and jog until she found help. She remembered Grandma’s stories of walking to town with her brother when she was a girl.

  And for tonight . . . she tried not to shiver at that shrill yapping that seemed to come from just behind the old two-story house.

  Tonight she would sleep safely if not comfortably inside the car. She had bottled water and fruit juice in the cooler and though she didn’t have blankets or bedding, she had plenty of clothing in the suitcase she’d packed for the weekend with her cousin. She would be fine, just fine.

  Which would have been all right if she could just go immediately to sleep and wake up to the bright light of morning. But it was early yet. She didn’t wear a watch, relying on the car’s clock and her cell phone for the time, but she knew the sun went down early at this time of year. She guessed it was only somewhere around seven.

  Angie couldn’t remember when she’d gone to bed at seven. And yet, there was nothing to do. She couldn’t see to read one of the books she’d brought, didn’t have her phone for texting, calling or any of the many other functions for which she used it. She’d pay a pretty penny right now to be able to watch a movie on that tiny screen, though, of course, if the phone was wor
king, she wouldn’t be in need of an emergency movie.

  She told herself she was so tired from the long day’s drive that she should take advantage of this opportunity to rest and leaned back in her seat to try to get comfortable. After shifting several times, she tried stretching her body out across the front seat. The controls on the door ate into her back.

  The back seat would make a better bed. Hurriedly she got out and this time she heard a yowling from the distance and rushed, her heart pounding, to get into the rear seat. Vaguely she remembered stories of big cats down on the river, bob cats and lynxes, and tried to tell herself she had nothing to fear.

  As she lay in a cramped position on the slick surface of the leather seat, she wished she’d thought to grab her suitcase from the trunk while she was out of the car. It was a chilly February night and getting colder quickly. She thought longingly of the heavy robe and flannel pajamas she’d packed for the slumber party night of snacking and visiting she and Amanda had planned, though her cousin had joked that at their current advanced age, neither of them was capable of staying up until four a.m. the way they did in their early teens.

  Angie decided she wasn’t quite cold enough to brave the world outside the car just now, but the creeping chill was sufficient to remind her that cars didn’t have the same kind of insulation as buildings and she was barely warmer than if she’d been trying to sleep on the ground outside.

  She finally drifted into sleep, her whole body aching from a day’s inactivity and the cramped position in which she lay. At first she slept heavily, but then began to rise into a familiar nightmare.

  Mom and Grandma were in the kitchen, canning blackberries she’d helped pick the day before. She was assigned the simple task of looking after her three-year-old brother. Ten years older than her only sibling, she resented being asked to babysit, something that happened way too often these days. After all, she hadn’t asked for a baby brother.

  Reluctantly she took the book she was currently rereading, Jane Eyre, with her and went to sit in the swing on the cool front porch while David dug in the dirt to make roads for his little cars and trucks. Even in the dream, she saw he was a handsome child with his wide blue eyes and angelic expression. Then he looked up and saw her watching him and scrunched his face into a look that was anything but heavenly.

  She couldn’t help laughing out loud. He was so naughty and so cute.

  After a while, she got thirsty and went in the house to get a glass of tea from the pitcher in the refrigerator. “Where’s David?” Mom frowned at her, sweaty and tired-looking from working in the hot kitchen, though Gran looked cool as a cucumber. But then Gran had worked on the farm all her life, while Mom was accustomed to an air conditioned business office.

  “I’m just getting him some juice.” As an afterthought, Angie added a little box of orange juice and picked up a couple of Gran’s homemade oatmeal cookies as a snack for both of them.

  “You can’t afford to take your eyes off a child that age for a minute,” Mom scolded.

  “Only two seconds,” Angie tried to reassure her mother. Mom was such a worrier. Poor David, she’d probably go along on dates when he was a teenager.

  It was only to make her mother happy that she picked up her step as she crossed the wide hall that led from the back to the front of the house and stepped out on the porch, expecting to see the little boy right where she’d left him.

  Angie woke with a sudden start, feeling sick inside in spite of the fact that it had now been fifteen years since that nightmare had been reality. David hadn’t been there and she was sure he’d just run to the side yard or out back where the chickens pecked in their yard. He was fascinated with the baby chicks.

  Nausea building in her stomach and heart racing, she’d dropped the drinks and snacks to the ground, hardly noticing that the cold tea splashed against her ankles and ran, searching at first with confidence that she’d see that small face at any second and then with rapidly building panic.

  It was when she finally accepted that David just wasn’t there, not anywhere, that she’d screamed and Mom and Gran came running. They’d searched the farm, called the sheriff’s office for help, and made Angie wait by the phone while they got into the farm pickup to drive the nearby roads looking for the little boy.

  They never saw him again and though it was never said aloud, Angie knew her mother never forgave her, not to her dying day. Now years away from that tragedy, that terrible moment when she’d found her brother gone still popped up in painful dreams at unexpected intervals. As it had tonight.

  Normally when one of these dreams disturbed her night, she got up and turned on the television, made hot cocoa or tea, and took on some active task, like vacuuming her living room or scrubbing the kitchen floor until she was so tired she could fall asleep again.

  Here, trapped in her car, she had no such options and the nagging sense of sadness and regret overwhelmed her. The loss of David and her part in it ached as though it had happened yesterday.

  She knew well enough that the thirteen-year-old girl she’d been when the disappearance happened didn’t deserve lifelong punishment for a brief interval of inattention that could have happened to anyone. No one had ever understood what had happened to her brother, how he so quickly vanished. They’d assumed a kidnapping and hoped for a ransom demand that never happened, even though it didn’t seem possible that anyone could have driven up and grabbed the child and left without being noticed by at least one of the neighbors.

  For Angie, the worst fear seemed the most likely. She spent whole days still trying not to picture the little boy stumbling down a crevice in the badlands down by the river, or wandering until he was swept into the river itself, his small body taken away in its waters or lost forever in quicksand.

  In vain did she try to comfort herself that whatever terror and pain the little boy had felt was long past. A print of a girl trying to see her small brother safely across a great chasm that had been on the wall at Grandma’s little church haunted her. In the picture, a guardian angel hovered over the two children, but on that February day in her thirteenth year, there had been no angel. She frequently wakened to the sound of her brother calling her name, “Ange, Ange!” as he did when he got in trouble.

  Perhaps in his distress he’d called for her and been puzzled when she didn’t come to his rescue.

  Abruptly Angie couldn’t stand it any longer. Better to face her fear of wild animals, most of whom were probably even more scared of her than she was of them, then this residual terror. She sat up, opened the door and climbed from the car into a breezy winter night.

  Beginning to chill immediately in the night with its cold wind, she hurried to open the trunk of her car, taking out the hooded winter coat she had draped across her single piece of luggage and gratefully slipped it on, enjoying the thick warmth it offered as protection against the cold night.

  The night was silent now. Perhaps the coyotes were off hunting across another pasture with more opportunities of game. She pictured them creeping up on her in the darkness and decided she was being foolish. No doubt the wild animals out there were more afraid of her than she was of them, and a whole lot less dangerous than the human predators to be found in the streets of any big city.

  She decided what she needed was to stretch her legs a bit before trying to sleep again. Going to look in the trunk, she brought out thick socks and running shoes and, with the door open, sat on the car seat as she put them on her feet.

  Starting off at a brisk walk that turned into a slow run as she began to loosen up, she ran, a pale silver path shown for her on the rutted road by the dim moonlight, as she hurried down to the road and back. Warmed by the accustomed exercise, she felt her confidence go up. She hated the thought of climbing back into the car, which made very nice transportation, but wasn’t much of a bedroom.

  Looking thoughtfully at the house which stood in forbidding shadows,
she contemplated using her coat as a pallet on the floor inside, but then decided that would be foolish. The poor old house was close to falling down, the porch torn away, the windows glassless eyes, the doors missing. The elements had taken a hard toll on it since the days when her grandparents had made it their home.

  Grandpa was gone now and Grandma lived in an assisted living center, where she was much beloved by the other residents and worked hard at managing their lives for them. Even tonight Angie came close to a smile at the thought of Gran.

  But what had she and Amanda been thinking when they planned to come out here exploring? The old house was no safe place to go tramping through. They could have crashed through rotten floor boards or had something fall through what had been the attic on to their brainless heads.

  Somehow she hadn’t guessed it would be this far gone and perhaps neither had Amanda, who had admitted she hadn’t been out here in years. They would have taken one look at the old house by the light of day and decided to drive down by the river for their picnic.

  “Ange. Ange.” The soft call of the name her little brother had called her drifted to her on the wind and she closed her eyes, telling herself she was really losing her mind this time. One counselor had told her that she’d failed to move on from that childhood tragedy and that until she had shed herself of it, she would continue to be haunted much as soldiers relived the long ago terrors of long ago battles. Of course she hadn’t heard a voice calling her name.

  Anyway the voice hadn’t been that of a little boy, but that of a grown man, his tone particularly deep and sounding as though it was harsh from the dust and wind that swept the farm.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Matthew strolled the pastures alone in the dark of the night and once or twice he called the name of the woman he had longed for these past few years. “Ange. Ange,” he whispered softly and without demand. After the years that had passed since his meeting with this woman with her soft, dark eyes and hair that glinted in the sun and the face that he could never forget, she had haunted his days and even more his nights.