Page 2 of Echo
The man raised his eyebrow as he knocked on my window, leaving a smear of blood across the once clean glass.
Fuck.
I rolled down my window.
“Don’t be peeling off on my property. You hit one of my kids, and I’ll make you regret it.” His deep voice was unforgiving and stern. He wore a backwards baseball cap over messy brown hair, and I estimated he was in his late twenties. Still his voice commanded respect.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Why are you here?” His cold brown eyes narrowed on me, as if to dare me to tell him a fib.
I glanced down at my GPS proclaiming I was ‘here’. “Maybe I’m lost.”
A boisterous laugh burst from the man, making me jump out of my skin. “If you’re following one of them things, I’d say you are lost. Where are you trying to go?”
“Rinah farm?”Please don’t kill me.There would be a fucked up irony in running so far, just to be murdered by someone else I never even saw coming.
“Old Pearl’s house, eh?” His laughter settled into a frown of thought that bordered on disapproval.
“Yeah.” I eyed the blood on him. “I inherited the land.”
He noticed my preoccupation and glanced down at himself. “Sorry about my appearance. I assisted a calving cow that was having complications.”
“I’m sure.” If he was murdering someone in that barn, that was their problem. I wasn’t digging my nose in where it didn’t belong. I had my own monsters to escape.
“Are you alone, Ma’am?” His brows scrunched together and the muscles in his mouth tightened until I was sure it made his face sore.
The question sent up every warning signal to exist. “No. I lost the others. The rest probably already made it there.”
I didn’t load up all my belongings, into the back of this beat up four-door car, while my boyfriend was gone to work, and flee halfway across the United States to end up in a slasher movie in the Appalachian mountains. If that's what I wanted, I could have stayed at home.
Ranger barked as if to back up my lie. My ride or die.
“Good.” He pointed back down the road. “You got pretty close. Turn around, hang a right back onto the main road, and take the next right up the road another couple miles. It’s got a white mailbox with black rocks around the bottom. Follow the dirt road for a mile or so, and you’ll be there.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Ma’am?” he said. I halted where I was shifting to reverse right out of this place. “I can assume you ain’t from around here.”
“No, I’m not.” Maybe I should have lied about that too, but with a community this small, I probably couldn’t have gotten away with that.
“Don’t walk the dog after dark.” He patted his hand on top of my car and walked back to his barn. “Be careful out there, ya hear?”
“Thank you, Sir,” I stuttered and turned the car around, ready to be literally anywhere else.
With a little luck, that was a well meaning piece of advice, and not a warning to watch myself. It sounded like he was basically my neighbor, and I really didn’t need him thinking I was going to snitch about any torture that may or may not be happening in his barn.
As I started thinking I missed my turn, a startling white mailbox came into view, loud and unmissable, against the green backdrop. I’d expected it to be weathered and worn, but it must have gotten a touch up recently. A mound of black, shiny rocks was piled around the bottom half of the mailbox. The rocks were out-of-place, like they didn’t belong there.
I liked that the GPS landed me in the wrong spot. That meant if someone got ahold of my address, they’d have trouble finding me. But I didn’t like that there was such an obvious landmark for my questionable neighbor, to lead my problems right to my doorstep, as a quick and efficient way to get rid of his own problems. I turned onto the drive, and it wasn’t a quarter of a mile before a strange feeling crawled down my spine.
I slammed on the breaks in time to come across a disturbed line on the ground. A mess of a line of lighter tanish dirt that popped loud against the dark ground.
I climbed out of my car and walked to the strange line. It went into the woods both ways, and on the section that wasn’t road it was clearly white rather than tan.
Stepping off to the side of the road, I grabbed a handful of the white powder, letting it run through my hands. “Salt.”
I hummed and rubbed my hands together to remove the excess from my hands. My family was fucking weird. My grandmother would pour salt all around the yard to ward off malicious spirits, and she did it almost every day.
