Life Shadows

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Book excerpt

Chapter One

Nathan and Amelia Ryan were the heart of Barn-wood Builders.

As a matter of fact, they were all of Barn-wood Builders. Nathan, a forty-year-old, out-of-work carpenter and his sister Amelia, a thirty-eight-year-old internet marketer between positions were the Barn-wood Builders.

Amelia had used a few pieces of the distressed old boards Nathan had hauled home from a barn he was tearing down with their father to make some picture frames, plaques, and small boxes which she then took to a local swap meet. They sold so well Nathan got in on the action and built some tables and stools to add to Amelia’s display. They were soon seeing hundreds of dollars each weekend. Amelia expanded the business to include an online store and Barn-wood Builders had been born.

When Nathan and his father were hired to tear down an old Victorian house in Briarton, archeological salvage items such as doorknobs, moldings, and fixtures were added to the business. Amelia created plaques from embossed tin ceiling tiles or antique wallpaper framed in fancy molding material. Nathan was selling his tables, benches, bookcases, and chairs made from the recovered wood as well as the wood itself by the square foot to earn a healthy income.

“Where are we off to today, big brother?” Amelia asked as she poured her first cup of her brother’s bitter coffee. He always used four scoops of grounds rather than three and made the brew too strong for Amelia’s taste, but he always managed to beat her to the pot by five minutes, so she got used to drinking the strong coffee and didn’t complain—much.

“An old barn north of town by that dried up old lake.”

“Lake Hamilton?” she asked as she popped an everything bagel into the over-sized chrome toaster and waited for the savory aroma of onion to hit her nostrils and make her mouth water.

Nathan snorted. “Ain’t much of a lake anymore,” he said. “Just a mosquito-infested pond choked up with lily pads and full of poisonous water snakes. Nobody even fishes there anymore because it’s such a pit.”

Amelia smiled as she gingerly took the hot bagel from the toaster. “I remember Grandpa O’Connor telling me him and Grandma used to swim there when they were young and first dating. Lake Hamilton was like the make-out place to go when they were in school.”

Nathan curled his lip in disgust. “I don’t want to think about Grandpa and Grandma making out,” he said, shaking his head of thick brown hair. “It’s gross.”

Amelia grinned at her sheepish brother. “How do you think Mother got here—immaculate conception? I’m pretty certain Grandma was about three months along when they got married.”

Nathan swallowed the last of his coffee and winked at Amelia. “That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.” He glanced at his sister’s freshly buttered bagel on a paper towel. “Bring that with you. I’m ready to roll, sis.”

Amelia topped off her coffee cup, snatched up the bagel in the paper towel, and followed her brother out to his shiny new red pickup with Barn-wood Builders, Inc. and Amelia’s cellphone number stenciled on the doors.

She handled all the scheduling and general business aspects of the small company, and it was doing well enough for her brother to invest in the flashy new pickup. She still drove the Subaru she’d left her marriage with.

Amelia finished her bagel and coffee as Nathan maneuvered his truck through the small town of Briarton and into the verdant green countryside. The aroma of fresh-cut hay and newly plowed fields filtered in through the truck’s vent system and Amelia smiled. She’d been so eager to escape Briarton at eighteen when she’d graduated Briarton High with honors and gone off to a good state university on a full-ride scholarship. Twenty years later and she was back sleeping in her old room at her parents’ house with a curfew and ready to run again.

Amelia knew she’d disappointed her mother by not living up to her potential and landing a high-powered job in corporate America somewhere. Instead Amelia had gone into business for herself as an internet marketer and had failed miserably in her mother’s opinion.

After her last gig marketing for a group of independently published authors had dried up and her marriage had fallen apart, Amelia had returned to Briarton and the home of Matthew and Elizabeth Ryan— her parents. She hadn’t felt too guilty because her brother Nathan had moved back in about the same time after his divorce. Neither sibling had given their parents grandchildren—another disappointment in Elizabeth’s eyes.

“We’re quite the pair, aren’t we, sis?” Nathan said as he turned off the asphalt pavement onto a gravel road, almost sensing Amelia’s thoughts.

It was something they’d both been able to do since childhood, but nothing unusual for the sensitive O’Connor side of the family.

“Why,” Amelia smirked, “because we’re both a couple of out-of-work, divorced adult losers living at home again with their poor parents?”

“Hey now,” Nathan said with a chuckle. “They’re not so poor since we’ve been kickin’ in several hundred a month from what Mom calls our silly little hobby business.”

Amelia smiled as she emptied her cup of coffee before Nathan could slosh it all over her on the bumpy old road. “Yah,” she said with a sigh, “a four-year degree from one of the best schools in the state, and I make fucking picture frames and trinket boxes in my dad’s garage.”

Nathan grinned. “Fucking picture frames and trinket boxes that sell like hot cakes.” He reached across the seat to take his sister’s hand. “We’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, sis. We may be living back at home with our parents, but we’re not freeloading. We’re paying our way, and you should be proud of that.”

Amelia put her other hand atop her brother’s. “I am, Bubba,” she said with a sigh, “I am, but I’m getting tired of Mom’s sideways glances and snide remarks. She’s getting on my last nerve and I’m tired of it.” She saw the ravaged roof of an old barn up ahead through the trees. “Is that it?”

“Yep.” Nathan turned off the rutted track and parked in tall grass in front of the weathered old barn. “Doesn’t she look great?” He sounded enthusiastic and Amelia smiled. “The owner said we could have anything we found inside. This could be a real gold mine, sis. Just look at the colors on that wood.”

Amelia studied the faded paint on the leaning structure with the open wagon area stuffed with rusted farm equipment, old screened doors, and mouse-eaten furniture. She wished she could see what her brother saw with such enthusiasm. “It looks more like a death-trap to me,” she said, “I bet the next big wind could blow it over.”

“That’s what ol’ man Mathers is afraid of,” her brother said, “and why he wants it torn down before some kid gets hurt out here nosin’ through it during Summer break.” Nathan opened his door. “Let’s go have a look but watch out for snakes. The old man said the place is crawlin’ with ‘em because of the mice and bats inside.”

“Great, mice, bats, and snakes. You take me to the nicest places, big brother.” Amelia got out of the truck and waded through the tall green weeds, swaying in the warm May breeze. Amelia made her way to the opposite end of the barn from her brother, where she’d seen an old door hanging open. Something told her the interesting stuff would be in there and Amelia always listened to her hunches. It was something her grandmother had impressed upon her at an early age.

“You have the family gift, child,” Jenny O’Connor had told her granddaughter during one of her rare visits to Lockwood Asylum with her grandfather before his death. “Always listen to your inner voice.” Jenny had tapped Amelia’s temple. “It will never steer you wrong, child.”

As Amelia neared the old door made from eight-inch silver-gray planks held together by four-inch boards nailed together in the shape of a Z, she heard the sound of a girl weeping and hoped her inner voice hadn’t sent her on a lark. Amelia glanced around outside the old barn but didn’t see anyone. Who would be hanging out in this old rat trap?

Amelia felt the hairs on the back of her neck lift off her skin as she yanked on the old door and peeked inside the dark room. The raised hairs on her arms was never a good sign. She smelled damp, moldy hay from the loft, and the acrid scent of rodents and their droppings. She glanced around the dark room for snakes. Where there were rodents, Amelia knew there would be snakes. Thistle and wild mustard grew from the dirt floor around the rotted bottom of the old walls where some sunlight seeped through. It looked like every old barn Amelia had ever been inside.

The sound of weeping grew stronger as she stepped inside the dark space, and the tiny hairs on her arms stood up as if drawn by electricity in the air from a thunderstorm. Amelia’s heart thudded in her chest, and she flinched with a muffled yelp when barn-swallows swooped from their mud nests on the rafters to fly out the door above her head. She waited for a snake to fall and drape around her shoulders the way one always did in the old horror movies. She breathed a sigh of relief when none did and stepped with confidence deeper into the dark space.

“Is someone there?” Amelia called. “Do you need help?”

Amelia’s eyes were drawn to a blue glow materializing upon a platform built about six or eight inches off the dirt floor of the old barn. It looked to be an old feeding station for dairy cows. Amelia was no farm girl, but she’d grown up in farm country and recognized the slots where the cows would have been led to eat while being milked. She stepped closer and felt that electric buzz in the air lift the hairs on the back of her neck this time.

Seeing a glowing apparition might have sent most sane people running for their life, but this was nothing new to Amelia. Her grandmother, Jenny O’Connor, called them Life Shadows and Amelia had been seeing them since her first period at age twelve. Her grandmother had explained they were the energy left behind by a person who couldn’t move on to the next plane for some reason—usually a violent death or the refusal to accept they were, in truth, dead. She wondered what had happened to this poor girl to keep her stuck in this nasty old barn.

Grandma Jenny had told Amelia it was their responsibility as seers to help those trapped souls to find their way into the light when they came upon them. Jenny O’Connor had spent the majority of her adult life in a state asylum for the mentally ill because Amelia’s mother refused to believe in or accept her mother’s calling. Jenny embarrassed Elizabeth with her talk of communing with the dead, and Elizabeth had her mother institutionalized as soon as she was old enough to be recognized as an adult by the state.

“Who are you and what do you want?” Amelia asked with a brave step forward into the dark web-strewn room. Amelia was much more frightened of living spiders than long-dead humans and batted at the shimmering webs undulating in the room.

The girl turned to stare at Amelia with wide brown eyes in her pale bruised and bloody face. “You can see me?” the girl who wore no clothes asked. It surprised Amelia the girl didn’t try to cover herself.

“Yes,” Amelia replied with trembling lips. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

Tears slid down the girl’s cheeks. “I’m Peg,” she answered, “and I want to go home but I can’t.” The girl stood and walked toward Amelia but stopped abruptly at the edge of the raised platform as if held in place by an invisible a force field. “I can’t go any further than this and I want to go home to my mama so bad. It’s dark and the picnic’s been over for hours. She must wonder where I’ve got off to, and my daddy will be mad as hell and will beat her black and blue with his belt for lettin’ me go on the picnic after he’d said I couldn’t go because there would be boys there who might get me in trouble.” She glanced down at her nakedness for the first time and used her trembling hands in a futile attempt to cover herself. “I guess he was right.”

“Find anything good in here, sis?” Nathan asked from behind Amelia, startling her more than the apparition of the naked, weeping girl.

“Just her,” Amelia said, pointing to the spot on the platform where she’d seen and spoken with Peg. Nathan had never acquired the ability to see the Life Shadows, but Jenny had told them both it was a gift more common in females, and while Nathan had been curious, he’d accepted the fact he couldn’t see them the way they could.

Nathan stepped up beside his sister to stare into the dark room. “Her who?” he asked. “Is there someone squatting in here? Ol’ man Mathers was worried about that. If there is, I need to run them off before we start dismantling this thing, so no one gets hurt.”

Amelia whipped her head around to find the dusty platform empty with no footprints in the dust or signs the girl had ever been there. “She’s gone.”

Her brother scanned the empty room. “There’s only one way out and I sure didn’t see anyone run by me.”

Amelia ran a hand across her sweaty forehead. “I don’t think she was alive, Bubba,” she said uneasily, “and disappeared when you came in.”

“Aww, shit, sis,” Nathan said as he began to hum the X-Files theme and leaned back against the wall, “not more of that paranormal bullshit.” He grabbed Amelia’s shoulder and turned her to face him. “Don’t you dare bring that up in front of Mom or she’ll have your ass thrown in the nuthouse right along with Grandma Jen.”

Amelia cocked a brow. “Yah, Elizabeth Ryan would certainly never win any daughter-of-the-year awards. Would she?”

“She did what she thought was right at the time,” Nathan said in defense of his mother.

“She did it to look better to the snobs in Briarton, Nathan,” Amelia said with a snort.

“And she’d do the same with you if you start talking about seeing and talking to ghosts, sis. You know how she feels about that kinda bullshit.”

“I have no doubt in the least,” Amelia said with one last look at the empty platform. She rubbed at her aching temples. Encounters with the dead always brought on headaches. “Maybe I did just imagine it.”

Nathan put his arm around his sister’s shoulders to lead her from the room in the dark barn, and Amelia took comfort knowing her brother believed she’d seen the girl even if he couldn’t. “Let me show you what I found on the other end. There’s this great old porch swing I think I can take apart to use as a pattern.”

Amelia smiled. “Porch swings sell great, Nathan. I have people asking for them all the time.”

They stepped out into the sunshine and Amelia shielded her eyes against the glare. She rubbed at her temples. This headache was going to be a bad one, and Amelia wished she had some pain relievers in her purse.