May 11, 1997
Not wanting to leave her sister alone after having so much to drink, Elisa spent the night on Beth's sofa. That combined with the disturbing night she'd had where she thought she had hit someone with her sister's truck, it did not make for a fitful night's rest. At some point she had managed to nod off, but then she had the same terrifying dream where she was being strangled, and after that, she decided to give up on sleep and got up and made coffee.
She was exhausted. She'd hardly had any sleep the last few nights. Perhaps that was why she was hearing voices and seeing things that weren't there? Sleep deprivation could do crazy things to your mind.
But she had gone without sleep for long stretches of time before without having any hallucinatory reactions to it, and the woman seemed far too real to her to be a delusion.
By the time noon rolled around, and Elisa had nearly drunk a whole pot of coffee, Beth was still in bed. So, Elisa decided to do the kind sisterly thing and loudly barged into her room.
"Rise and shine, Beth!" she announced, all but banging pots and pans together with her entrance.
There was a groan and Beth pulled the blanket up over her head.
"Come on. It's time to get up."
"No," Beth moaned. "I'm pretty sure I died. I'm dead. Leave me alone."
Elisa laughed lightly at her expense.
"You need to eat something and get some fluids into you. It'll make you feel better."
Beth pounded her fists against her bed several times in a mock temper tantrum before she eventually sat up, her short hair going in several different directions.
"Ugh, remind me to never drink like that again," she moaned, and she smacked her dry mouth several times like she had tasted something terrible.
"Yeah, you really overdid it," Elisa chided gently. "I put some water and aspirin on your nightstand. Take that first. Then take a shower. It'll help you feel more human."
While Beth was convalescing in the shower, their father called.
"Joseph has a bunch of things that used to belong to my dad, old photographs and mementos, things of that nature that he wanted me to take off his hands. I would have grabbed them Friday, but we were already running late to meet Beth, and there's a lot to go through. Anyway, I'm heading to the ranch today to get them. Your mother isn't really interested in going out there again. Can't say I blame her, Joseph was kind of…"
"An asshole?" Elisa offered.
"I was going to say he was a prick, but yeah. You gals can all have a nice day together while I'm gone. Grab some lunch together…do...girly things, I don't know."
"What exactly are 'girly' things, Dad?" Elisa laughed lightly at her father.
"Just keep your mother occupied, that's all I'm asking," he laughed in reply.
Elisa thought about agreeing, and then she thought about all of the strange encounters she'd been having. She knew her dad had seen that Hopi woman, and she had the strong impression she needed to go back to Joseph's ranch with him.
She heard Beth retching in the shower and grimaced. She was in no shape to go anywhere.
"I don't know if Beth is up for much today, she had a little too much fun last night, but I could go with you to the ranch if mom is willing to babysit Beth?"
"I think your mom would be ok with that arrangement."
In another hour, Elisa and her dad were off to Joseph's old sheep ranch again.
...
...
What Elisa had hoped would be a quick trip, turned into a massive undertaking.
There were dozens of boxes of Carlos's things stacked up in Joseph's unused bedroom. Apparently, he hadn't bothered to organize any of his brother's effects after he had died and just tossed them randomly into boxes. Peter was now carefully going through them and deciding what was worth shipping back home.
They had been at it for hours...
But Elisa did get to hear him speak more about his life on the reservation and his parents than she had ever heard him speak in her whole life, and that made it worth it.
Sometimes he would laugh or smile, but other times, he would grow morose as he recalled old memories. One photo in particular elicited a pensive, if not sorrowful, reaction from him.
"This is from the last day I ever saw my mother" he said somberly. "It was the day of the Bean Dance. It's a ritual where all the kachina dance to prepare for the next growing season. I was ten, and it was the first time I was initiated into the kachina. She and my dad told me afterwards that they were separating and...I ran off. I hid thinking if they were too busy searching for me, they wouldn't split and they'd somehow reconcile instead," he laughed deprecatingly at himself. "The naive hope of a child, I guess. My mother left while I was off sulking. I never got to say goodbye."
He handed the photo over to her. Elisa took one look at it and reacted to it like it had burned her.
The woman in the photo standing next to her father as a boy, was the same woman she had seen multiple times that weekend.
"Is something wrong?" Peter asked her.
"I…" she paused and then looked at her father. "I saw this woman at Beth's graduation…and I think you did, too."
Peter looked long and hard at her.
"It was probably just someone who looked like her," Peter said rationally.
"Perhaps, but…coincidences like this don't just happen...not to us," Elisa countered.
Peter sighed.
"I don't know who that was," he said. "If it was my mother, she wouldn't look young like this. She'd look more like Joseph."
"If she was still alive, yeah, but…what if she isn't?"
"What are you saying? We've been seeing a ghost?" Peter scoffed.
Elisa shrugged.
"Yeah. Maybe. I've seen weirder things, Dad, and so have you."
The furrow between Peter's eyes only grew deeper. He said nothing as he stared at the photo.
"Did she…say anything to you?" Elisa asked tentatively.
Peter's eyes met hers and they flashed curiously before they darted to the doorway.
"It's starting to get late. Are you two done in here yet?" Joseph said gruffly.
"Yeah, we'll finish up soon," Peter replied.
Joseph scowled and then shuffled off back to his bedroom.
"He's a real ball of sunshine," Elisa snarked.
Peter chuckled lightly.
"I should start boxing some of this up and haul it out to the car," he said.
"I think we left the tape gun in the kitchen, I'll go grab it."
"Thanks," Peter said as he carefully slipped the photo of him and his mother back into its album.
Elisa walked out into the kitchen and spotted the tape gun on the counter, she picked it up, and as she started to walk back towards the back room, she saw movement through the window in the sitting room.
The sun was going down, but she could clearly see the Hopi woman, the one who looked just like Carmen Maza, her grandmother, standing in the field by the barn. Her eyes locked on Elisa's, and she beckoned to her, and then turned and walked into the barn.
"That's it," Elisa said angrily. She set the tape gun back down on the counter and grabbed a large flashlight that had been left out, then she stepped outside and marched determinedly across the yard and to the barn. She was going to figure out who she was and what she wanted once and for all.
She lost nearly all her courage as soon as she stepped inside.
The light hadn't quite faded outside, but the darkness inside the barn was nearly oppressive. She flipped the switch on the flashlight, and was relieved when it turned on. The beam reflected off the millions of dust motes in the air as she swept it around looking for the woman.
"Whoever you are...show yourself," she called out.
There was no answer.
Not that she was surprised.
"I'm with the police, and you are trespassing," she added, mostly to hear her own voice and break the tension caused by the quiet and stillness.
There was no sound, no scurry of rodent feet or wings fluttering as birds settled in the rafters
There was just absolute horridly empty silence.
She slowly and cautiously looked around, sweeping the light methodically back and forth, searching thoroughly.
There were no signs of tracks in the dirt aside from her own. There were no signs of any tracks at all, not even mice or rats, which was a relief. The last thing she wanted to do was contract the hantavirus from mouse shit in an old rotting barn.
She started to wonder if she had been seeing things. This whole weekend was making her feel crazy, like someone was trying to gaslight her.
After everything she had been through, was her mind finally cracking?
But then why was her father seeing the same things?
She was about to give up her search and leave when she heard a crash. She whirled around towards the noise, her heart beating rapidly from the rush of adrenaline.
The flashlight landed on an old pitchfork and a shovel that had fallen over against the back of the barn. The curved edge of the shovel's blade rested on the dirt, and it was still rocking slightly from the fall.
She slowly walked over to the tools, her breathing quickening from fear as she swept her light back and forth, her hand shaking causing the light to dance. She felt the darkness close around her almost like a physical thing as she walked deeper into the barn. It was so quiet, she could hear her own ears ringing after the loud clang of the tools moments before. She could see no reason why they had fallen over unless they hadn't been put away properly to begin with, but they also looked rusted and worn with age. No one had used them in a very long time.
She stared at the tools for a while like she was trying to solve a puzzle. The woman, her grandmother perhaps, had repeatedly told her two things everytime she had appeared: Joseph, and the barn.
Well, she was in Joseph's barn. What the fuck was she supposed to do?
She swept the flashlight around again, and something else caught her attention. On the ground next to where the tools had fallen over, there was a large rectangular depression in the earth.
From her years working as a cop, she recognized what that could be. She glanced suspiciously towards the open barn door and towards the house, and then she picked up the shovel, and almost as if she was possessed, she started digging into the hard earth.
It was probably just a depression, she told herself. Water could have gotten in through the roof at some point, but there wasn't an obvious hole in the roof above, and the depression was more than five feet in length.
When a body was buried without a casket or some other way to preserve it from decomposing, the ground around it would sink as the body beneath began to desiccate once the flesh had rotted away. There weren't a lot of places to bury bodies in Manhattan, but she'd seen it once before in a community garden where someone had tried to hide a body.
She kept digging. She was starting to sweat, and it chilled on her skin. It got cold quickly out here after the sun went down, the dry air didn't hold heat well, and though it was May, the nights were still cold.
She kept thinking of the woman, and the words that had been said to her over and over.
Joseph.
The barn.
There was a reason. A reason she was here now.
When the shovel struck something solid, she set it aside and started using her hands to brush the dirt away from the object. She dug at the hard clay earth, scraping her fingers and knuckles against it, possessed by some feeling of urgency she couldn't justify or comprehend, but she kept digging. She dug until she had moved enough dirt and earth aside to reveal two empty eye sockets and the morbid grin of a human skull staring up at her from the shallow grave.
...
...
Joseph had hoped Peter would just come by and pick up the boxes and be on his way tonight, but unfortunately he wanted to peruse through them as he reminisced. Joseph did not have time nor did he care to remember the past. The past and all its ghosts were best left where they belonged. It was all junk to him, anyway, and he honestly didn't know why he had hung onto any of it.
He eventually had enough and wandered off to his bedroom to watch a program on his old television set, but when he realized he could no longer hear them talking, he decided to check and see if they had left, so he turned off the TV and shuffled off into the other room where he found only Peter, still rummaging through boxes.
"Where has your daughter gone off to?" Joseph asked him.
Peter looked up.
"She went to get the packaging tape in the kitchen, but that was a while ago, come to think of it," he said.
Joseph turned away and left Peter alone in the back room.
It was easy to see his nephew's nosy daughter was no longer in the house. The back door was wide open, and as he looked out towards the barn, he saw a faint glow coming out of the wide open door.
He scowled angrily and grabbed the shotgun he kept loaded on the table and stomped off through the yard and to the barn.
...
...
"What are you doing, girl?"
Elisa looked up from where she was kneeling on the dirt. She had uncovered most of the skeletal remains of what could only be the woman who everyone thought had left 45 years ago. After so long, only the bones and clothing remained. Elisa wasn't a forensic scientist, and could not be one-hundred percent certain of who was buried here, but the clothing was the same clothing from the photo taken of her grandmother the day she had left, down to the exact turquoise bead necklace she wore.
It had to be her.
Carmen Maza.
She looked up at Joseph with grim understanding.
Joseph had his shotgun in his hands.
"She didn't run off," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
"You shouldn't have gone snooping around," Joseph said coldly.
"What happened to her?!" Elisa demanded.
"Exactly what she deserved!" Joseph growled.
Elisa reached slowly for her gun and realized she hadn't packed it. She didn't think she would need it this weekend when she was supposed to be on vacation.
"Keep your hands up," Joseph barked, and Elisa complied.
"What did you do to her?" Elisa demanded.
"She made me do it!" Joseph spat as he walked further into the barn, closer to her, and away from the door where he could be seen.
"What did she make you do, Joseph?" Elisa asked calmly, trying to buy herself time. She had her own guesses, but she wanted to hear him say it.
"I found her over here in the barn, one day, snooping around. Said she was looking for your father, but I knew what she really wanted, what she really came over for. My brother had finally cast her off, and she came crawling to me. When I tried to give her what she wanted, she fought me. The bitch!" he spat, spittle flying from his lips. "But she got what was coming to her."
"You killed her," Elisa accused.
"I had no choice!" Joseph shouted, shaking the shotgun in his hands. "She said it was all my fault, that she was going to tell Carlos! She was going to lie and tell him I had forced myself on her when she had practically begged me to do it!"
"Joseph, why don't you put down the gun and—"
"You're all the same! Nosy whores who can't mind their own business," Joseph shouted, and he lifted the shotgun up.
Elisa went rigid. This man was a murderer, and she was alone with him in a barn without her gun or any gargoyles within two thousand miles to help her, and she suddenly felt very alone and very afraid.
She could scream or cry for help, but she would be dead before her father could run across the field from the house and to the barn.
This was not how she wanted to go, on her knees in the dirt, and her heart broke at the thought of her father finding her like that.
Murdered by the same man who killed his own mother in the very same place.
Though it was highly unlikely Joseph would let either of them leave the ranch alive now.
"You should have minded your own damn business, girl. This is your fault," Joseph said coldly, and he weakly aimed the shotgun at her head.
...
...
Peter had just picked up an old pottery bowl that had belonged to his mother when he felt something brush against his neck, making the little hairs stand up, and he looked up from the bowl and surveyed the room.
"Peter," a dry voice whispered, and his breath fogged as if the temperature had suddenly plunged, and he shivered.
Where had Elisa and Joseph gone off to?
"Peter," the voice said again, more insistently, and then a translucent figure, almost like a moonbeam and just over five feet tall, appeared in the doorway. For a brief moment, he thought it was Elisa, but the woman was much shorter than his daughter, and he could see right through her to the sitting room and kitchen beyond.
He dropped the bowl he held in his hands, and it cracked in two when it hit the ground.
"Help her," the apparition said.
He knew that voice.
It was a voice he would never forget even after all these years. The same voice that had sung him to sleep at night when he was frightened or sick. The same voice that had scolded him for running in the house and soothed him when he was hurt.
He felt his chest tighten.
He knew the woman who stood in front of him…but it couldn't possibly be her.
"She's in danger, Peter," she said.
"Who?" he asked tentatively, his voice shaking.
He didn't know how this was happening, how it was possible, but his mother was standing right in front of him, looking the exact same way she had on the last day he had seen her.
"Your daughter."
"Elisa?" Peter said, alarmed.
"The barn," she said urgently. "Go quickly! "
"The barn?" Peter repeated.
"GOOO NOOOW!" she cried loudly, filling the room with her voice, commanding him, and then she faded away.
Peter moved quickly, his heart gripped with the urgency with which he had been commanded, though his rational mind kept telling him this wasn't possible, his mother appearing to him and warning him that his daughter was in danger. A woman he hadn't seen in 45 years. But he ran anyway. He ran through the house and flew out the back door. He could hear raised voices coming from the barn, and he ran out into the growing dark.