Page 5 of The Sea-Mist Cottage Inn
The counties of Humboldt and Del Norte were ostensibly Bigfoot country. Most tourism-centered businesses made use of the folklore in their advertising. Not one cell in my mother’s body had been whimsical, but she’d understood her business. The people who vacationed in the Pacific Northwest wanted Bigfoot. So she’d had Bill Stokely carve that sign for her. I have no idea where she’d gotten the ridiculous statue.
A caul of memory wrapped around my head, threatening to choke out the past twenty years and drag me back in time.
“I’m pretty sure that’s a haunted cabin, Mom.”
Wyatt had carefully shaped his muttered words into a faux-somber ‘hate to break it to you’ tone that struck me at just the right place. The caul broke, and I laughed. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I threw myself back against the truck’s seat, slapped my hands over my belly, and absolutely guffawed. Wyattcaught the hilarity bug, and then we were both laughing like loons.
Eventually, we returned to sanity. For another moment or two, we sat in the cab, staring out the window at Wyatt’s new home and my old one.
This was it—the final moment of my life away from Bluster. When we opened the doors and stepped down from the cab, when my feet touched NorCal ground again for the first time since the night of my high-school graduation, my old life would wrap itself around my ankles and start pulling.
No. That didn’t have to be true. In fact, itcouldn’tbe true. I was a different person now; I’d lived a different life. I was a woman, and I’d been only a girl when I’d left. I was a mother now.
And my own mother was dead.
The life I’d lived as a girl would not fit the woman I’d become. I was determined to wear only the parts of my old life I wanted. Only the parts that fit.
“Okay, bud,” I said aloud. “We’ve got work to do before full dark lands. Best get to it.”
We got out of the truck. My feet landed on the gravel, and I stood in place for one more breath, my hand on the truck’s door, ready to close it. Or to jump back into the cab and flee.
NorCal ground. I was back.
When the earth did not split open and suck me into hell, I headed toward my old house.
And now my new one.
AT THE DOOR, AS I DUGthrough the manila envelope the mayor had sent, Wyatt asked, “Is there electricity? It’s so dark.”
Grabbing the keys from the bottom of the envelope, I answered, “I called PG&E and worked out a payment plan for theoutstanding balance, so yeah. They were supposed to restart the power a few days ago. Let’s see if they did.”
I unlocked the door and pushed it open. Solid darkness greeted us, and with it the stale stench of disuse and deterioration—as well as something deeper, like animal musk.
Wouldn’t have surprised me at all if some animals had found a way in, but I didn’t want to be surprised by them now. As I pushed my hand in, looking for the switches near the door, I called out loudly, “Hello! Anybody home? If so, GET OUT!”
Wyatt laughed. “Warning the ghosts?”
“Or demons. Or raccoons, whichever.” I found the switches and pushed them all up. Light exploded around us—on the porch, the big security lights around the lot, in the cabin.
“Power’s on,” Wyatt said.
“Those are some keen powers of observation you’ve got there, son.”
We entered the cabin, and my breath stopped in my chest.
Except for the thick accumulation of dun-colored dust over every surface, a liberal draping of cobwebs, and the black eyes of windows covered by boards, the front room, the business area, looked much as I remembered. Even the brochures arranged in a plastic holder on the wall seemed familiar—though quite a few were scattered across the floor.
“Totallyhaunted,” Wyatt said beside me, his voice full of eager wonder.
“Yep,” I agreed and moved more deeply into the room. I kicked something on the floor and looked down. A few inches before the toe of my sneaker was some plastic medical thing, a loop of tubing, still in its packaging.
The mayor had told me some about my mother’s passing. More than I’d cared to know—but now I did know, and I thought I understood about that plastic tube. A remnant of the night my mother had been taken away from the cabin in an ambulanceand had never returned. More than two years ago. Apparently no one had been in here since that night.
With that thought the loudest in my head, I walked away from Wyatt, past the reception desk and the small manager’s office area, and into the part of the cabin that was a residence.
The first room beyond the business space was the living room. The television was on, showing a blank blue screen and the words ‘No Signal.’ On the pine coffee table before the old mustard-colored plaid sofa sat a paper plate with a petrified corner of sandwich crust and a badly stained but empty coffee cup. Beside those were the TV remote and a crossword-puzzle book with a pencil marking my mother’s place. Here, too, several knickknacks had fallen from their places and landed on the floor. Most didn’t appear to be broken, though. Again I wondered about mischievous raccoons. Or poltergeists. Or poltergeist raccoons.
Despite the random scatter and the coating of dust, the room looked lived in. It hadn’t occurred to me that, but for the dust, the house would look as if my mother still lived here, as if she’d dropped everything to run a quick errand and meant to be back shortly. It had not occurred to me that the last moments of my mother’s life would be left for me to erase.
