Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) (20 page)

“Can I help you with anything?”

“I’m not sure, really,” she stammered. “My friend sent me here. I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“Are you…Taryn?”

“Yes, that’s me!” she said brightly.

“A
h ha! I thought I’d recognize you. He said you’d have long, red curly hair and be knock-down gorgeous and here you are. Frankly, we don’t get many of those around here.”

“
Matt flatters me, I’m afraid.”

“Nah,” he laughed. “All true. But I have what you need. He says you’re having trouble with some vision and you also need a little bit of protection.”

“Protection maybe, but I don’t want to stop seeing things,” she hedged.

“Of course not,” he agreed, his eyes twinkling behind his black curly beard. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t need a little help.”

“So you don’t think I’m crazy?”

“Hell
, no. Are you nuts? I’d give anything to do what you’re doing. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me,” he said hurriedly at her protest. “I don’t have much of the sight myself, and nothing like what our friend Matt described is going on with you.”

“I studied Historical Preservation in college and to tell you the truth, this is a little bit of a dream come true for me,” she confided to this total stranger, happy to have someone new to share her secret with, someone who appeared to take her at face value. “
To see the past as it once was, well, I guess that’s the dream for someone like me, right?”

“I get you, I get you. I love old buildings, ruins, abandoned places. Me and my girlfriend, we’re urban explorers, you know what I mean?”

She nodded her head. “Break into old houses and stuff, walk around, take pictures?”

“Right on! We love to check out things from the past, imagine what it used to look like. Don’t get me wrong, I love modern technology. I have three TVs and an iPhone, you know what I mean? But give me an old farmhouse over a subdivision any day.”

“Me too. When I was a kid and the teacher asked us all what we wanted to be when we grew up, everyone else said doctors, lawyers, teachers…I said I wanted to be a time traveler. Joke’s on me, right?” she smiled.

They laughed.

“Doesn’t it freak you out, though?” he asked. “Matt, he’s real worried about you. Said someone tried to kill you. That’s not a ghost, you know.”

“No, that’s a person. And I have no idea who’s doing it. And yeah, I’m scared. A lot. But mostly I’m curious. The noises, the scents, the sounds…But when I’m looking through the camera and seeing the pictures, it’s like watching a movie, like viewing it through another time period. Like I’m not really there.”

“So you’re kind of detached from the scene.”

Taryn
felt herself grow slightly uncomfortable at the thought, but couldn’t understand why. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Well,” he said, bringing a paper bag up from behind the counter and handing it to her. “Here are some things that will get you started. Some sage for your hotel room and car. That will cleanse them, purify them, get rid of any bad mojo you got hanging around. A pentagram to wear around your neck, I blessed it myself. Some black candles to light in your room to help ward off negative energy…”

By the time she left the shop, she’d spent $75, had more New Age paraphernalia than she knew what to do with, and was the proud owner of a new 22-inch flat screen television.

L
exington was a nice town. She treated herself to the Fayette Mall where she shopped at Macy’s and bought herself some new boots and spent several lovely hours people watching and then went to the movies and laughed at a silly comedy that she promptly forgot. The countryside with its horse farms and ornate mansions were intermixed with an eclectic, hip downtown area filled with Victorian houses and urban restaurants with outdoor seating areas. She thought she could spend time in a town like this, she found herself thinking on more than one occasion, especially when she was settled at the enormous bookstore, sipping on a mocha and relaxing in an overstuffed chair.

It was good to get away from Vidalia and Windwood Farm where she was starting to feel a little stuffy and even paranoid. After all, someone had tried to make her very sick, if not
altogether dead. She actually liked small towns and figured she’d settle down in one sooner or later, but so far, what with ghosts keeping her from her work, surly librarians, and poisons being tossed into her tea, this one wasn’t exactly rolling out the welcome mat. Although the hospital
had
been very nice and she had built a good rapport with the diner waitress and Donald’s descendent.

Soon, it was time to pack it in and head home. She stopped at the artists’ supply store on the way back to the interstate and picked up what she needed and waved a fond farewell to the glimmering lights of the city before heading south. She’d get started again first thing in the morning. It wouldn’t take her much longer to finish the painting now.

B
ack in the hotel room, Taryn set everything from New Age Gifts and More out on the dresser and took a good look at it all. She had no idea where to start. One was a book entitled “Candle Magic” and the clerk had helpfully dog-eared and highlighted a page entitled “gaining vision and clarity on a situation.” Well, she guessed she needed it, although she wasn’t sure if it was in regards as to who poisoned her or what was going on in the house. Either way, clarity would be nice.

There were an awful lot of candles involved in this ritual. She hoped she wouldn’t burn down the hotel room with them
or set off the smoke alarm. That would be bad. She felt kind of silly setting them up: seven white ones and seven light blue ones. She lined them up, little votive candles, in two rows on the dresser. Before she lit them, she turned off her lights and then knelt down in front of the dresser. It would have to do as her altar, since she had nothing else. Matt made sure she had a big thick white candle to work as her “altar candle.” She lit it first and then lit the sage incense she’d been given.

Next, she rubbed the carnation oil from all the candles’ wicks to their ends and then lit them, one by one. In front of the row of candles, she placed three stones: a chrysoprase, geode, and tiger’s eye. (She thought the tiger’s eye sounded prettier
, but it was kind of a dull stone in comparison to the geode.)

Lastly, she closed her eyes and said the chant the clerk told her to say. That was the worst part about it. Honestly, she believed in this stuff. It was one of the reasons why she and
Matt continued to have the bond they did. Neither one ascribed to any kind of organized religion, although she did sometimes attend church services, but she did like the idea of an earthy kind of religion that looked to nature. But saying chants with rhyming words sounded Dr. Seuss to her, and not in a good way. It felt silly.

Still, if it helped…

She tried to clear her mind and imagine her heart free and open to clarity and truth. It was hard. Meditating was always hard. Just as soon as she told her mind to clear, it wanted to fill with every single commercial jingle or holiday song it had ever heard. It was particularly fond of the Muppets’ version of “The 12 Days of Christmas.”

Finally, when she felt like she had given it enough time, she opened her eyes, blew out her altar candle, and turned on the lights. The votive candles she would leave to burn out through the night and would then dispose of the wax the next morning. She wasn’t quite sure what was supposed to happen next. Would it come through a dream? A phone call? A billboard?

Oh well, she thought, as she drifted off to sleep, the flickering candles making crazy patterns on the ceiling and walls. At least she tried.

Since someone had slit her tire and tried to kill her, Tammy refused to let her pay for her breakfast anymore. She insisted that her manager agreed that all future meals were to be on the house and Taryn was no fool. She didn’t argue. She did, however, tip very well.

“Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” she asked Taryn with real concern. “I’d offer you tea
, but…”

“It’s fine,” Taryn laughed. “My taste for tea kind of comes and goes right now. I’m good with the water.”

She was able to joke around about her hospitalization and tried to go along with the police’s theory that it had just been a vicious prank, but inside she was scared. She knew she’d been poisoned more than once and that was no joking matter. Reagan offered to send some men over to stay with her while she was painting, but she had waved him away. The last thing she needed was a bunch of people all up in her business. Besides, she could usually get at least one bar on her cell phone while she was out there, despite the fact it was supposed to be a “dead zone” and Melissa was less than a mile away. She was going to finish this job, crazy people and ghosts be damned.

“Nothing like that has ever happened before, not around here anyway,” Tammy said. “I mean, we’ve had people kill other people
, but it’s mostly been when they were drinking or something. Sometimes drugs. Always a knife or a gun. I’ve never heard of anyone trying to poison somebody.”

“And I just thought I made bad tea,” Taryn smiled as she
drank down the last of the water. “Really, though, I’m fine.”

She was about to get up and start the early morning paint session when a soft voice carried across the room and called out her name. “There’s our star artist!”

Taryn turned around and saw Phyllis, the bird-woman, seated in a corner booth with a middle-aged man in suspenders and a baseball cap.

“Hello there,” she waved. The man flashed her a quick smile and then went back to his biscuits and gravy.

“How are you feeling, sweetie?” she asked with what appeared to be genuine concern. “You still look a little pale yet.”

“I’m feeling a lot better,” she replied honestly. “I have my appetite back. They said that’s good.”

“Just awful,” Phyllis shook her head in disgust. “And so embarrassing for our town, too. This is my son, Roger, by the way. He lives over in Fitz and takes me to breakfast once a week.”

Taryn said hello and then excused herself from the diner. It hadn’t escaped her attention that the other patrons
were holding on to every word in the exchange. Between that and the write up in the local paper, everyone really was going to know what had happened to Vidalia’s newest resident.

W
ith her easel under her arm, Taryn set up with a new resolution. Nothing was going to stop her today. She was ready. Miss Dixie was ready too, armed and ready with a fully-charged battery. Taryn took a few test shots of the house and looked at them in the LCD screen. Nothing but decay and ruin. Well, clarity wasn’t coming yet. Maybe the poison had weakened her sight. Maybe it was something she couldn’t control…yet, anyway.

It didn’t matter right now. She did have a job to do
, after all.

And do it, she did.

For the next several hours, Taryn was a whirlwind of oil and color, painting with a ferocity that sometimes surprised those around her who didn’t know her well. It probably would have been easy for someone to have come up and slipped something into her tea, but this time she wasn’t taking any chances—she brought Ale-8s, the locally-produced caffeinated drinks, and they had pop caps on them.

Nearly four hours had gone by before she stopped and took a break. She was covered in sweat and grime and specks of paint
, but she felt good. It was almost completed. Another day and it just might be. And then she could do some touch-ups and present it to both Reagan and the Stokes County Historical Society and be on her way. Except, of course, she couldn’t really be.

It wasn’t over yet.

With a sigh of frustration, she put down her paintbrush and picked up Miss Dixie again and aimed her at the house. “Oh, come on,” she complained. “Give me something I can work with. How am I supposed to help you if you don’t give me
something
?”

Barely paying attention at
where she was pointing the camera, she aimed it at the general direction of Clara’s window and took a shot. When she turned it back around and looked through the LCD screen, the faint outline of a woman stood there, looking out into the yard. “Hot damn!” Taryn hollered. “Stay there, stay there, stay there,” she chanted as she took off into the house.

Sprinting toward the front door it occurred to her that it would be ironic if it were the camera that was the one with the “sight” and not her after all. But then, that would have been ignoring all of the other experiences she’d had in her life-experiences she’d tried to push away and forget. Maybe the camera was just the conduit.

“I can’t rush it,” she breathed quietly. “Stay calm.”

She began on the first floor again, this time starting with the living room. Standing in the middle of the floor, she turned in a slow circle and took pictures as she moved, watching the screen. Again, the room came to life with furniture and knickknacks and signs of life from the past. A few items were different in these images
: a new clock here, the shoes that were in the last set of pictures were now gone, but otherwise the room remained unchanged. In the kitchen, breakfast dishes were left out on the table. Signs of bacon, eggs, jam, and biscuits could be seen. But nothing appeared out of the ordinary. The table was set for two. That told her that Clara’s mother must already be gone.