Page 6 of Missing Moon

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Not sure. Got a bad feeling is all.” I exhale slowly, letting my mind wander. “That said, it’s not even a tenth of the feeling I got last week from the Amber Alert.”

Anthony returns his attention to the game on his computer. “Well, that’s good. Probably means it’s going to be unpleasant but not horrible.”

“That’s not helping.” I rake my fingers through my hair. “Whatever’s coming, it’s probably only going to be moderately crappy. Get ready for strangeness, kiddo.”

“Always am.” He chuckles.

I back out of his doorway and meander to the kitchen. It’s too early to even start on making any sort of organized breakfast. There’s also no way I’m going back to bed, so I decide to make coffee and stand there watching it brew.

Fairly sure this has nothing to do with Shannon. The cops ‘found’ her in good health. She no doubt told them about her abduction and the crazy cultists who were going to kill her, but she somehow managed to slip the duct tape and run away. I think. No idea what story she actually believes or told them.

It bothered me a little to leave her to run down the hill to the gas station by herself, but it ended up being for the best. Much less complicated if the authorities do not connect the Moon family with the situation at all. Maybe they’ll go into the woods and search. They’ll find the altar and a whole lot of gore all over the place. No clue what the police will think of the cultists’ bones stripped of flesh and scattered around. Maybe they’ll think it’s part of the ritual and the cultists brought the bones there.

The more I think about that kid and the idiots who kidnapped her, the more convinced I am this current feeling of approaching gloom has nothing to do with her. No, that situation is almost certainly going to be fine.

An hour later, I still haven’t come up with any explanation for my sense of dread. Knowing something bad is coming and having no clue what to do to prepare for it is damn near the worst feeling in the world. I’d rather step barefoot on a Lego brick.

When the girls don’t show up to the kitchen, I start to worry… then realize it’s Saturday. No alarms will be going off.

A soft knock comes from the front door.

That’s odd. I set my coffee mug down and make my way to the door, unsure what to expect.

I’m more than a little surprised to see my sister, Mary Lou, standing there. As soon as I look at her, the imminent doom feeling that’s been hanging over me all morning bursts into a flurry of butterflies swarming my stomach. The grim expression on my sister’s face only makes it worse. My head starts spinning with possibilities about the meaning of my psychic hit. Did something happen to Rick? Did one of her kids end up in the hospital? No, can’t be. She doesn’t look anywhere near upset enough for all that.

I wave her inside and close the door. She fast-walks to the kitchen and goes straight for the coffee pot, helping herself to a mug.

She’s obviously bringing bad news, the kind of bad news one doesn’t give over the phone. She’s not crying, shaking, or seeming out of sorts, so I am hopeful the news isn’t horrible.

After fixing herself a cup of coffee, she sits at the kitchen table.

“Might want to sit,” says Mary Lou, gesturing.

“That bad?” I ease into the chair I vacated moments ago.

She lets out a long, slow breath. “I dunno. Surreal more like it. You know it’s coming, but you’re never quite ready for it when it does.”

Ugh. Damn. Something’s happened to our parents. It’s the only explanation that fits her mood and what she just said. Either that or her youngest wants to move out already at sixteen and she’s being melodramatic. It can’t be something sudden, so that rules out accidents or violence. Know it’s coming… That works both for kids growing up and moving out as well as parents getting old.

My gut’s telling me something’s up with Mom and Dad. There’s a very tiny note of revenge in my sister’s eyes. As amazing as she was for us growing up, there had to be at least a little resentment in her toward our parents. Dad was often away from home, first with the baseball thing when he played in the minors, and then with a job he had that kept sending him all over the place. Some sort of sales thing. I don’t remember, I was too little to care about that sort of thing. Eventually, he got the idea to open a strange store selling homeopathic remedies, crystals, and all sorts of various other hippie nonsense. I must’ve been around fifteen or so when that started.

As far back as I can remember, Mom’s been flakier than a two-week-old croissant. I used to think she was simply crazy, or suffering from some sort of early onset Alzheimer’s… or dementia. She’d sit for hours in her greenhouse garden, barely aware us kids even existed. Some days, she’d be entirely absorbed in a hobby like pottery or painting. Other days, she’d just stare into space for hours. Right now, looking back on it, I wonder if she might have had an experience with vampires or demons and it broke her mind.

“What happened?” I ask.

“Dad.” Mary Lou sips coffee, staring down at the table.

“How’d he die?” I ask, surprisingly neutral in mood.

It’s not like I hate the man. It would be closer to say I didn’t really know him. My memory of my father is about eighty percent ‘some guy who lives in the house with us’ and twenty percent one bad argument we had when I was eighteen. He didn’t think I belonged in college. But so much time has passed that I don’t really remember if he was being a jerk and saying girls didn’t need to get educated or if he simply thought higher education in general was some sort of scam—or government conspiracy. He’s never liked the government, or cops, or anything like that. The guy fancied himself some sort of counterculture guru, only nothing he did hadn’t been done before by someone else. We used to joke that we might come home one day to find a bunch of strangers there because Dad started up a cult.

Nothing creepy or dangerous… his cult would just sit around all day smoking weed, dropping acid, and wondering what the color blue tasted like. So, yeah. Dad really didn’t like that I was becoming part of the machine by going to college. Tried to call me stupid and everything he could think of to talk me out of it so that I would spend my entire life in or near Klamath, waiting freaking tables until I got too old to walk.

Sigh.

Maybe I am a little bitter.

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