Page 1 of The Party Line

Chapter One

Aunt Gracie wasn’t afraid of spiders, mice, or snakes, and there was no doubt in my mind that she would face off with the devil himself without blinking. Just that look she could give when she was angry would have him whimpering and running away with his forked little tail tucked between his legs. She taught me fearlessness, so why were my hands shaking and every hair on my head feeling like I’d just gotten hit by a lightning bolt?

As a child I had hunted ghosts in Aunt Gracie’s old two-story house lots of times—under the beds, where all I found was dust bunnies the size of baby elephants, and in closets where musty old clothing that had been stored for at least a hundred years made me sneeze. So why was this so different?

You are dreaming,an eerie voice whispered in my head. Holy smokin’ hell! I had finally located a ghost, even if it was in a nightmare. I opened my mouth to ask who was talking to me, but no words would come out. The thought went through my head that someone had drugged and kidnapped me, and this was one of those crazy reactions to whatever potion they had given me.

A loud noise brought me somewhere between sleep and fully awake. Was that chains I heard rattling in the attic? I blinked a couple of times, and a strange scent wafted across the room. Had whoever drugged me done so by putting something in the air vent? I shook my head and glanced over at the open window. Fresh morning air carried the aromaof a skunk somewhere in the neighborhood, or maybe someone was smoking weed in my yard.

I scanned the room, moving only my eyes. The door was open, so I hadn’t been kidnapped, but I was not in my apartment in Austin. I was in my bedroom in Aunt Gracie’s house, the one with the yellow floral wallpaper and the antique furniture. I sat up slowly and reached for my cell phone to see what time it was, only to find the bedside table bare of everything. Evidently, I had swiped it clean when I was dreaming about the ghosts that might know whatever secret Aunt Gracie had taken with her to the grave a couple of weeks before.

All the folks in Atascosa County had wondered about that secret for more than eighty years, and still today I didn’t know what it was. Aunt Gracie had most likely hung on to it so tightly that the angels in heaven—or ghosts down here—couldn’t pry it out of her hands.

The sheets were tangled up around me, holding me down tighter than if I’d been chained to the bed. Sweat popped out all over me as I fought my way free. When I was finally on my feet beside my bed, I tried to remove my ragged old sleep shirt, which was drenched with sticky moisture, but that was another fight. It was glued firmly to my body like it had taken up squatter’s rights. By the time I freed myself from the thing, I felt as if I’d fought and barely won a battle. I waved my hand above my head until I found the wooden thread spool attached to the string that turned on the overhead light bulb. The brightness almost blinded me when it lit up the room.

A coyote howled, and for a minute I thought the critter was coming right into the house. I rushed over to close the window and realized I was wearing nothing but a pair of white cotton granny panties. If anyone had been standing outside staring up, they would have caught sight of me, but at least a coyote wouldn’t crawl inside my bedroom. So it was a win.

When I moved to Austin to go to college, I had gotten so used to sirens going off every few minutes that I didn’t even hear them after a few weeks. Ditto, Texas, population less than twenty-five, didn’t havesirens, except when there was an ambulance arriving from Poteet to take someone to the hospital. The howling coyotes, barking dogs, and donkeys braying to celebrate the sunrise were something I would have to get used to.

“Coyotes cannot climb trees or sticky bushes to get into a second-story window,” I assured myself.

I took a step toward the nightstand and tripped over the base of the old party line phone. I fell face forward over the bed and into a big feather pillow that did its best to smother me to death. Damn, did my toes hurt.

The sun wasn’t even up and my day was already crappy. I rolled over on my back and stared at the ceiling until that bare light bulb put red dots in front of my eyes. Finally, I got up, picked up the base of the phone, and slammed it down on the nightstand with enough force to rattle the pictures on the walls. The receiver swung back and forth like a pendulum, barely touching the floor. My sweat-dampened hair hung in limp strands and kept getting in my eyes when I dropped down on my knees to search for my cell phone. It had skittered halfway under the bed and was lying in a pile of dust bunnies.

“I hope y’all don’t bite,” I whispered as I reached as far as I could and still couldn’t put my hands on the phone. Then the dang thing lit up and started ringing—startled me so badly that I jumped and hit my back on the bottom of the bed.

After several words that almost wilted the yellow roses right off the wallpaper, I finally freed myself and stormed out into the hallway, still wearing nothing but my sweaty granny panties. I forgot all about my phone and headed to the bathroom. The old pipes squealed like baby piglets when I turned the knobs and sent the water up to the showerhead. After what seemed like half an hour later, the water was finally warm enough for me to step around the end of the curtain into the claw-foot tub that probably was put into the house when it was built a hundred years before. I thought the disastrous morning was over when I’d finished washing my hair and started to step over the edge of the tub.

I was wrong.

I did not inherit Aunt Gracie’s fearlessness when it came to spiders, and one was sitting on the braided rug where I was about to plant my foot. I didn’t squeal or scream. What came out of my mouth sounded more like a screech—maybe from a two-hundred-pound owl from prehistoric times. The spider stared up at me with pure unadulterated evil in his beady little eyes. In that moment I was ready to move back to Austin even if the rent on my apartment doubled. The eight-legged critter pranced across the rug like he was the king of the house, and just to show me what he could do, he jumped on top of my towel, which was lying on an old ladder-back chair.

I didn’t care if he was one of those wolf spiders that could win a pole-vaulting contest. In my mind the only good spider was a dead one, so I grabbed a bottle of shampoo from the little shelf above the tub and, with one blast, sent him to that great spiderweb in the sky. I got another towel, because I wasn’t about to use the towel he had touched to dry my body.

I did not tempt fate by thinking nothing else could possibly go wrong that morning, just marched out of the bathroom with a towel around my body and another one wrapped turban-style around my head. I went to my room and dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt that had George Strait’s picture on the front of it—Mama brought it to me when she and her boss, Madge, had attended a concert.

The door to Aunt Gracie’s bedroom was open when I walked past, so I peeked inside. There was another of those black party line phones on her bedside table. When I asked her why the phones didn’t have a dial or push buttons on them, and why she kept something that didn’t even work, she explained the process to me. Seems like way before my time, back before Aunt Gracie was even a teenager, whoever wanted to make a call picked up the receiver, and the operator said, “Number, please.” The caller gave her three or four digits—Aunt Gracie’s line was 298—and the operator plugged in a cord on the other end that rang that person’s phone.

“And sometimes folks like us here in Ditto had to share lines. Our phone rang three short times when the call was for us, but we shared with two other folks. One of them got a long ring, the other got a short followed by a long one,” she had told me.

“But now you have a working phone in the kitchen, so why don’t you throw these away?” I asked.

She said that she kept them as a reminder of a very bad time in her life. Her expression when she thought about that experience was one I figured she used to freeze mice, spiders, and the devil’s horns. She had kept me from the time I was an infant so my mother could work at one of the cafés in Poteet, and I liked staying with her, so I didn’t pry any further.

A memory surfaced, and I tried to give that black phone the same look she did when she told me about it. I was a little girl back then, and overheard Mama telling Madge, who was her boss at the café where she had cooked and waitressed since before I was even born, that she didn’t understand how anyone could live in a house full of ghosts and secrets.

I thought it would be great to find a real ghost, so for a whole year, I prowled through all the nooks and crannies in the whole two-story house, looking for one. I’m not sure what I would have done if an eerie figure had popped out from behind a dresser or even from behind a door—probably turned tail and run, screeching like I did when the spider showed up in the bathroom.

I also never did find what the big secret was; it was only whispered about behind those fans at church with Jesus on one side and a big bowl of strawberries on the other. That morning, almost two decades later, I wondered if somewhere, hidden away safely, there might be a diary or a journal, or maybe even a piece of paper with SECRETwritten in big letters on the front and an explanation on the back.

“I think the secret is that there is no secret,” I said out loud as I walked down the stairs and into the foyer and the kitchen. The plastic strawberry slapped me right in the forehead as I crossed the floor. The thing was about the size of a golf ball and was attached to the chainthat turned on the lights. I grabbed it on the second swing and pulled so hard that it came off in my hand.

“Whydidn’t you have the electricity updated?” I groaned as I searched for the chain. I’d just found it and given it a tug when Mama came in, carrying a take-out container of soup.

She set it on the counter and headed across the floor. “The breakfast crew will be waiting at the café door to come in for their morning gossip session, but I saved you back some soup from yesterday.”

“Do you know what this big secret is about this house?” I asked. “I was having a nightmare and ...” I went on to tell her about my morning. “I figure it’s that there is no secret at all. That someone made up a rumor and it’s hung on all these years, like Bigfoot, Santa Claus, or that monster in the ocean.”

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