From The Mists Of Wolf Creek

What on earth had ever caused her grandmother to make such drastic alterations to the kitchen, Hallie wondered, deeply puzzled, when she had plainly left the remainder of the house so largely untouched?

As she continued to stare at the many changes that had been made, Hallie was suddenly beset with the oddest sensation that there was something missing, something she ought to have been seeing, but that was no longer there in the kitchen. But try as she might, she could not think what it was, and at last, she gave up the attempt, realizing it was getting late and that she was truly hungry and exhausted.

There would be plenty of time in the weeks to come to explore the old farmhouse properly during the daylight hours—and when she had got the power to the lights restored.

Fortunately, Gram’s sweeping redecoration of the kitchen had not included switching from a gas stove to an electric one, so Hallie would be able to cook, at least. Now, if she could only find a tin of tea and something to eat.

She had planned to run up to the corner market upon her arrival and buy some groceries. She had not counted on oversleeping earlier at the motel where she had spent last night and, as a result, getting such a late start today. Nor had she accurately calculated how long the drive this afternoon would take or on being delayed by the storm and the wolf.

So much for the best-laid plans of mice and men, she thought, frowning.

Opening the icebox, Hallie was once more besieged with amazement and disbelief. For, instead of finding it completely empty, as she had expected, she discovered it was filled with food: a huge glass platter of cold fried chicken and large ceramic bowls of homemade baked beans, cole slaw and potato salad—precisely what Gram herself would have prepared for her homecoming.

At first, in her weariness, Hallie thought dimly that it must be victuals hospitable neighbors had made and carried over when her grandmother had died. Then she recognized how stupid that notion was, that there would have been no one here to provide meals for and that Gram had passed away last month, besides. All the food would have spoiled by now.

Adding to her confusion were the plates of biscuits and brownies she finally noticed sitting on the counter next to the fridge. Slowly unfolding the plastic wrap and examining them, she found they were fresh, probably baked that very afternoon, in fact.

At the realization, Hallie felt a sudden cold chill creep down her spine.

Someone had been in this house earlier—perhaps was even still here….

From the knife block perched on the farmhouse table, she carefully withdrew a sharp butcher knife for protection. Then, picking up the oil lamp, she embarked upon a thorough inspection of the house, determinedly pushing aside her nostalgia and grief at familiar sights that kindled long-buried memories to concentrate instead on some sign of an intruder.

Back through the ground floor, she progressed, her mouth dry and her heart pounding as she searched behind sofas and yanked open closet doors to peer inside, only to find nothing save emptiness. Then, stealthily, Hallie ascended the beautifully carved staircase in the main hall to the upper story.

Here, the tale was exactly the same as it mostly was below. Nothing had changed, except that just like downstairs, all the closets were bare. Much to her astonishment and heartache, even her old bedroom looked just as she had left it so many years ago, all her childhood books, dolls and stuffed animals perched neatly on their shelves, her robe still lying across the foot of the bed.

At the sight, Hallie felt more certain than ever Gram must have had a very good reason for sending her away. Her grandmother would never have left this room untouched like this if it had been nothing more than an annoying reminder of a bothersome child, or if Hallie’s resemblance to her dead mother had been more painful than Gram could bear.

Now there remained only the attic. But when she reached the bottom of the narrow staircase that rose to that dark space above, Hallie hesitated, all the strictly forbidden Gothic stories she had ever sneaked into her great-aunts’ town house and read as a teenager returning to haunt her. She had always thought those poking-and-prying heroines who had invariably crept up steep narrow attic stairs to investigate matters that really had not concerned them in the first place were exceedingly dumb. A deranged killer had always been hiding up there, lurking in the shadows, lying in wait to conk the heroine on the head as a dire warning for her snooping.

Most assuredly, Hallie did not want to suffer a like fate. She had already had more than enough for one day, and now, it belatedly occurred to her that Mr. Winthorpe’s wife, Blanche, had probably brought the food over and left it for her. It was just the sort of neighborly gesture Mrs. Winthorpe would have believed proper. Hallie did not know why she had not thought of it earlier, instead of leaping to the crazy conclusion that an intruder was in the house.

For pity’s sake! she chided herself sternly. An interloper wouldn’t have stocked the fridge and baked biscuits and brownies! She must be even more tired than she had realized.

Sighing with relief, truly glad she was not to be compelled up into the attic, Hallie returned downstairs to the kitchen, inordinately grateful she was not going to be forced to cook for herself, either. She even discovered a tin of Earl Grey loose tea in one of the cupboards and so was able to make a cup of hot tea.

Perhaps her luck was changing, after all.

Filling a plate, she ate mechanically, now so weary that she could actually scarcely eat at all. Still, she knew she needed something in her stomach if she did not want to awaken with a sick, hunger headache in the morning. So she cleaned her plate and drank her tea.

When she had finally finished, Hallie unconsciously did something she had not done since her childhood in this very kitchen: she swirled the remnants of her tea around clockwise three times, then turned her white ceramic mug upside down on its matching saucer to drain off the remaining liquid.

For an instant she waited expectantly for Gram to take the cup and turn it right side up again, peering into it to see what symbols the tea leaves left inside it had formed. But of course, her grandmother was not there, and so Hallie could not imagine why she had ever done such a thing, indulging in a long-forgotten gesture Great-Aunts Agatha and Edith had labeled “superstitious pagan nonsense” and a habit they had labored diligently to break her of.

“Aunts Agatha and Edith would surely not be very happy with me right now, Gram.” Hallie spoke in the empty room. “They said it was a good thing you sent me to them, that otherwise I might have lost my way and become a heathen and a sinner, just as you did. I know they meant well and loved me. Still, it was a long, hard path you set my feet on, Gram, when you sent me away to them. Did you know it would be? Is that why you did it? You always believed that kind of journey was the making of a person.”

There was no response save for the plaintive keening of the wind outside and the steady thrumming of the rain against the kitchen windows. But Hallie had not really expected one. In some dark corner of her mind she knew she was talking only to herself, that her grandmother had passed beyond the pale into another state of being.

Still, for old times’ sake, and for everything from her childhood in this farmhouse that she held dear, she closed her eyes, made a wish then upended her teacup to look inside.

She supposed there were symbols someone like Gram, knowledgeable about the art of reading tea leaves, would have recognized. But to Hallie, the dregs seemed like nothing more than a complete mishmash at the bottom of her cup.

Inexplicably, she felt a strange, bewildering sense of disappointment, as though she had believed her grandmother would somehow speak to her through the teacup—and had not.

Shaking her head at her own foolishness, she smiled wryly.

“What a silly notion, child!” she could hear Great-Aunt Agatha announce firmly. “If they are good, the dead go to Heaven. If they are evil, they go to Hell. What they do not do, missy, is hang around the world from which they have departed, carrying on in death just as they did in life! It was undoubtedly Henrietta who put such a heathenish idea into your head. She ought to be ashamed of herself! But, then, I’m certain she is not, no—for she has never suffered any shame at all at her wild behavior, no matter how grievous it has proved to her poor family!”

“Henrietta” had been Gram’s given name. Hallie was named after her.

Covering her mouth, Hallie yawned widely, dully realizing she was so thoroughly exhausted that she was about to fall sound asleep sitting straight up in her chair.

“Well, Gram, as much as I’d like to continue this somewhat lopsided conversation, I’m afraid I really do need to get to bed. I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

In fact, Hallie was so tired that instead of washing the dishes, as she normally would have done, she set her cup and plate to one side of the sink. Then, after extinguishing all the oil lamps in the back parlor, she turned on her flashlight to guide her in the darkness and trudged back upstairs, not even bothering with her luggage.

She would unpack tomorrow, when she was rested and feeling more herself. Right now, she had the most peculiar sensation that by coming back here to Meadowsweet, she had somehow been mysteriously transported back in time to her childhood. She was thinking, saying and doing things she had not thought of in years—and talking to herself, besides.

What she needed was a long hot bath, followed by a nice soft bed.

But in the end, Hallie skipped the former and, stripping off her clothes, headed straight for the latter in her childhood bedroom.

Her last thought as she drifted into slumber was that somewhere outside in the night, a lone wolf was howling in the storm.

Chapter 4

Reading the Tea Leaves

When Hallie awoke the following morning, it was to the raucous noise of a rooster crowing and a bell chiming.

For a moment, still half asleep and disoriented by the sight of the room that met her drowsy gaze, she mistakenly believed she was a child again, and she waited expectantly to hear Gram’s footsteps in the main hall below and the muffled sound of voices as the door was answered.

Then, abruptly coming to her senses, Hallie remembered she was a woman fully grown and that her grandmother was dead. Jolted into action, she reached for the alarm clock on the night table, only to realize she had never set it the night before, so that was not what was ringing. It must be her cell phone. But, no, she had left that in her purse downstairs last evening.

It really was the front doorbell chiming, then, just as she had initially surmised.

Leaping from her childhood bed, Hallie hastily dragged on the same crumpled clothes she had so tiredly discarded the night before, then combed her fingers roughly through her long blond hair. She supposed that even so, she looked a fright, and she wondered who could possibly be here at this early hour.

Then, glancing at the alarm clock, she realized it was half past ten, that the morning was well advanced, that it was she who was late, rather than the hour that was early.

Not bothering with her shoes, Hallie scrambled down the stairs in the main hall, reaching the front door just as the bell rang again.

“Gram!” she cried, stunned, as she opened the door and spied the elderly lady standing on the wide wooden verandah.

“Oh, dear, I fear it never even occurred to me that you would mistake me for Henrietta, child,” the older woman announced, obviously flustered by the error, shaking her hatted head and clucking with disapproval at herself. “How very stupid and thoughtless of me! What a shock it must have been to you to see me, then. No wonder your poor, lovely face has gone so very white. I’m so sorry. You’ll have to forgive me for being such a foolish old woman!

“I’m Gwendolyn Lassiter, Henrietta’s younger sister—and I do apologize if it seems presumptuous of me, child, but after all these years, well, I’m old and so I probably don’t have much time left, and I thought it was high time we finally met!”

“Aunt…Aunt Gwen…yes…yes, I can see, now, that you’re not Gram—although you do look a lot like her! I should have realized, but I—I just awoke, you see,” Hallie confessed. “So I’m afraid I’m not at my best.”

“Oh, dear,” Aunt Gwen reiterated ruefully. “I didn’t think about the fact that you might still be in bed, either. But I expect you were worn out from your long journey. I can’t believe you drove all the way here from back East—and all by yourself, too! You must be a very brave and resourceful young woman. Is that your little car I saw under the carport? But it must be, of course. It’s darling. Well, aren’t you going to invite me in, dear? Or did Aggie and Edie succeed in convincing you I am as dreadful a black sheep as they always thought Hennie was?”

As she spoke, the elderly lady’s faded blue eyes twinkled with delight, and a mischievous dimple appeared in one cheek, so Hallie got a glimpse of what she must have been like as a child and could not repress an answering grin.

“I think maybe you were only a gray sheep, Aunt Gwen!”

At that, the older woman’s laughter tinkled brightly.

“Well, I can’t say I find that very gratifying,” she declared stoutly. “For I think I would quite like to have been painted just as black a sheep as poor Hennie was. So scandalous and exciting, you know—although I daresay that in this day and age, one’s elopement with the fiancé of one’s sister would scarcely raise even an eyebrow, much less start a decades-long family feud!”

“No, I don’t suppose it would,” Hallie agreed, holding open the screen door. “Please forgive my momentary lapse in good manners, and do come inside, and tell me how you came to be here.”

“As to that, Hallie, for the past several years, since my husband passed away, I lived here with Hennie—right up until the day she died, of course. But at her death, Meadowsweet became yours, so I didn’t feel it would be right of me to go on staying here at the farmhouse—especially when you might not even know I still existed. So I moved into Wolf Creek’s one and only bed-and-breakfast.”

“Oh, Aunt Gwen, you needn’t have done that,” Hallie insisted as she led her great-aunt into the kitchen. “I wish I’d known you were here, but Gram never said a word about it to me. I wonder why.”

“That was my fault. I fear I’m a bit of a coward, child, and I simply didn’t want Aggie and Edie to learn I was here. They would have believed I had sided with Hennie against them, and they would have written me off, just as they did her.

“Such a real pity, it was, that they decided to go on holding their grudge against her for the rest of their lives, when we all might have been friends. But there it is. I suppose that in the end, they had simply held on to their bitterness for so long that they just couldn’t let it go—not that there was ever any true justification for it, of course.

“It was always Hennie, not Aggie, poor young Jotham Taylor had come to the town house to court, and it was only Father’s wholly archaic notions about the eldest daughters being married before the younger ones that caused him to try to foist Aggie off onto Jotham. But, then, Father had been born during an earlier century and era, so he was very straitlaced and highly principled, and he refused to waver. Eventually, he succeeded in maneuvering poor Jotham into offering for Aggie instead, but naturally, once that deed was actually done, both Jotham and Hennie were miserable. So, finally, they decided to cut their losses and elope.”

“I never knew that—the whole story, I mean…only bits and pieces,” Hallie said, fascinated by this peek into her family’s past. “It really was too bad of Aunts Agatha and Edith to hold such a terrible grudge, then. But, from the things she did impart, I feel quite certain Aunt Agatha, at least, was firmly convinced in her own mind that Gram stole Jotham away from her.”

“No, doubt.” Aunt Gwen’s voice was wry. “It’s just like Aggie to have deluded herself in such a fashion.”

“Have you eaten yet, Aunt Gwen?” Hallie asked, abruptly recalling her manners. “Would you like some breakfast? Oh!” She drew up short. “I’ve just now realized it must have been you who left supper for me last evening.”

“Good heavens! Don’t tell me I forgot to give you my letter, too!” The elderly lady fumbled in her purse, eventually withdrawing a crumpled envelope marked “Hallie.” “I did. Oh, dear, I’m so terribly forgetful these days. That’s what comes of growing old. Yes, it was I who brought the food, and I intended to leave you this note, explaining everything. You poor thing! No wonder you were so confused this morning and mistook me for Hennie!

“I’ll tell you what, Hallie—” Aunt Gwen removed her wide-brimmed straw sun hat, laying it on the old farmhouse table “—I ate at the bed-and-breakfast. So why don’t I make you breakfast instead, while you go upstairs and get cleaned up? If you don’t mind me saying so, child, it looks as though you slept in those clothes, and I noticed you hadn’t unpacked your baggage, either.

“There are a few other things that need to be taken care of here this morning, besides, which is one of the other reasons why I came. There are still some chickens here at Meadowsweet, which need feeding. I didn’t know, of course, what you would want done with them, whether you intended to stay here permanently, making the farm your home, or whether you meant to put it on the market. So I was reluctant to sell the chickens or even to give them away. But that’s why Old Bernard is still screeching his darned fool head off outside. He’s hungry.”

“Old Bernard?” Hallie raised one eyebrow inquisitively.

“The rooster,” the older woman explained. “I know it’s awful, but Hennie said he was so mean that she was going to name him after Father—and I’m afraid that’s just what she did!”

“Good grief,” Hallie rejoined lamely.

Still, she was unable to repress the laugher that bubbled from her throat, and soon Aunt Gwen was giggling as hard as she.

“I’m sure…poor Father…must have turned over in his very grave…when Hennie christened that old rooster,” the elderly lady said, in between bursts of merriment.

“Well, I don’t believe Gram was ever a highly reverent sort of person,” Hallie mused aloud, remembering. “I guess perhaps she had got her fill of that growing up. Are there still bees here at Meadowsweet, as well, Aunt Gwen?”

“Oh, yes, dear. Hennie would never have parted with her bees. In fact, right before she died, she said it was more important than ever to keep them going here at the farm, that for some unknown reason, billions of honeybees are dying all over North America. ‘Colony Collapse Disorder,’ it’s called, she told me. Without bees to pollinate our crops, many will be lost. I don’t know all the particulars myself, but I suppose it could lead to all kinds of food shortages and maybe even a worldwide famine. I don’t think anyone really knows for sure.”

“Well, we’ll continue to take care of the bees here at Meadowsweet, then,” Hallie stated firmly, “and see that they don’t die.”

“Are you going to remain here, then, for good, Hallie?” the older woman inquired.

“I’m…I’m not certain yet.”

“Is there some reason why you can’t? I mean, I know from what Hennie told me that you have both a job and a husband somewhere back East—”

“No.” Hallie shook her head. “Well, at least, not a husband…not anymore, anyway. In the end it…it just didn’t work out. Before she died, Aunt Agatha tried to tell me it wouldn’t. But I just thought she was so bitter about not ever having got married herself that she wanted to ruin my own happiness, too. So I didn’t listen to her. But I should have, because everything she ever said about Richard—that’s my ex-husband—eventually turned out to be true. He wasn’t the right man for me and was never going to be.”

“You’re divorced now, then, I take it?” Aunt Gwen’s tone was sympathetic.

“Yes…yes, we’re divorced now. In point of fact, I signed the papers just before I left to come here. But that didn’t matter. Our marriage had been over for quite a while. I guess I just hadn’t wanted to face it. But now, I think perhaps that’s one of the main reasons I decided to come back here to Meadowsweet. I needed some time to myself, a quiet place to lick my wounds. So I took a sabbatical from my job—I’m a graphic designer—and I packed my bags, and well, here I am.”

“And now I’ve thoughtlessly intruded on your solitude.” The older woman sighed deeply. “I’m so sorry, Hallie.”

“No…no, you needn’t be,” Hallie said adamantly. “In fact, I’m glad you’re here, Aunt Gwen. Naturally, I’ve heard about you now and then over the years, but with the family being what it was, most of them on such ill terms with one another, you and I just never seemed to have a chance to meet, to get to know each other.”

“Yes, I know, and of course, it didn’t help that until these past years, I was never around much, but usually traveling out of the country somewhere,” the elderly lady noted. “That’s why I always missed holidays, birthdays, weddings and funerals, and the like. My late husband, Professor Victor Lassiter, was an archaeologist, you see. So we were invariably off in some far corner of the world, digging up old ruins and artefacts—besides which, as you said, our family was never particularly close.”

“Still, what an exciting life you must have led, Aunt Gwen.”

“Yes…yes, I have. Still, I don’t mind telling you there’s a lot to be said for putting down roots and making a real home someplace permanent, instead of always living in a tent and out of a suitcase.”