Chapter 10 Time Out #2
There’s definitely a demand for rustic these days.
Faux rustic, that is. Like the lawyers she sold to last month, who paid a quarter of a million for a property so uneven and inaccessible that they weren’t even going to be able to build on it.
We’ll pitch tents, like our parents did!
It’ll be perfect! Yeah, give it two years and they’ll be begging her to buy it back for a fraction of that.
The people who want off-grid and remote are the ones who don’t truly understand what that means. They still expect cell signal and running water and to be able to hire a babysitter and pop out for dinner at some adorable wharf restaurant.
Millie’s land is ten times better than what she sold the lawyers. It’s accessible through interconnecting lakes from Blind Bay. It’s flat enough to build on. Materials can be flown or boated in for a proper summer home, complete with solar array and cell phone boosters.
Millie herself has none of that. The dock is rotted and half missing. An overgrown path presumably leads to a cabin, and Dawn isn’t sure she wants to even see it.
But she does want this property, and the more she thinks about it, the more she wants it.
Dawn paddles to the decrepit dock. She’s barely reached it when a shape rears up from the undergrowth and waddles toward her through the shade.
Dawn freezes. She’s encountered a black bear or two while inspecting a property, and she recognizes that short and squat shape and that waddle. But what emerges into the sunshine isn’t a bear. It’s a woman.
As Dawn had been paddling for the dock, she’d been psyching herself up to see the cottage. To show not one hint of revulsion. Now she has to draw on all that preparation as Millie makes her way toward her.
The woman is bear shaped—maybe five feet tall and shapeless in a faded house dress. Her face looks like unformed dough and her hair is a wild gray nimbus around it. She wears rubber boots and walks with a stick.
“Hello!” Dawn calls, trying for a smile. “Stu sent me!”
Dawn has more of a story prepped. Stu has a cold, and he didn’t want to infect Millie, so Dawn volunteered to bring the supplies. She doesn’t need the excuse. Millie’s features rearrange themself in a broad smile.
Looking at that gap-toothed smile, Dawn is half-tempted to keep the butter tarts for herself.
This woman doesn’t need more sugar. Dawn had asked Stu what she could bring Millie—her treat, of course—and he’d suggested butter tarts and mystery books, which was perfect because Dawn considered herself a connoisseur of both.
She’d driven almost an hour for the best butter tarts around and she’d loaded up a box at the used bookstore.
She reminds herself that this old woman doesn’t have much longer to live, which means those remaining teeth don’t need to last much longer either.
“Brought you butter tarts!” Dawn crows as she lifts the box like a hunter with a prize buck. “From Leander’s. Best butter tarts in the region.”
“Well, ain’t that a treat,” Millie says. “Come on in, child. The cabin’s just through here.”
Millie stumps off with her makeshift cane, and Dawn makes a mental note to buy her a real one. Pay attention, see everything the old woman needs—materially and emotionally—and supply it. The surest way to win someone over.
Dawn loads up her arms with supplies. As she heads down the path, the brush closes in on either side, and she chuckles to herself. Did she ever think she’d be following scary old ladies into their home, deep in the forest? It’s like something out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.
Mental note to bring tools and clear this out. Maybe hire a young man from town, if Millie will allow it.
As she draws closer, she stops smiling and starts resisting the urge to gag. What the hell is that stink? Not the outhouse. It’s more like…
The pile of boxes in Dawn’s arms hits something and she staggers back, only to see what she hit and nearly drop the stack in her backpedaling.
A chunk of raw meat hangs from a hook suspended in a tree. She stares at it and then sees the other chunks—a leg, a rib cage, pieces she can’t identify—all hanging from hooks.
“Whoops,” Millie cackles. “Should have warned you about the deer.”
“Deer?” Dawn croaks, looking for signs of hooves or fur and seeing none.
“I might not be able to row my old boat, but I’m still a crack shot, and God saw fit to leave near perfect vision in these old eyes. Well, during the day at least. Remind me to give you a piece to take back to Stu. He loves the way I cure my venison.”
With what? Flies? Dawn tries not to gag and imagines that Stu admires the venison the same way she admires his burgers.
Yum, yum, this is so good that I’m going to have to take it home with me for later.
She shudders and adjusts her pile of boxes.
When they reach the cabin, Dawn has to admit it looks better than she expected.
Of course, she’s made her living buying and tearing down places like this, so she has an appreciation anyone else from the city might lack.
This one looks decent enough. Still a teardown, but at least she won’t need to hold her breath going inside. That’s just for out here.
“Set those boxes right over there,” Millie says, pointing a doughy finger. “The house is a mess. We’ll sit outside.”
“I don’t mind a mess. You should see my place.”
“Sit,” Millie commands.
Something in her voice makes the hairs on Dawn’s neck rise, and she fights the urge to say she has to be going. Millie is an elderly recluse. Dawn can’t expect perfect social behavior.
She lowers herself into a surprisingly sturdy wooden chair.
When she looks over, Millie’s yanking an old knife from a block, and Dawn fights for a smile, ready with a quip, but the old woman doesn’t look her way.
She just toddles over to a leg of meat, pulls a rope to lower it and then removes it from the hook and takes it to a chopping block.
“I’d love a piece of that to take back, too,” Dawn says. “If there’s extra.”
“Oh, there’ll be extra. Plenty more where this came from.”
Dawn clears her throat, ready to start a bit of small talk. Before she can speak, Millie says, “Stu tells me you’re in the real estate business.”
Dawn freezes. Damn it. Stu didn’t warn her about this. She’d been planning to skip that for a visit or two.
“He tells me you bought the Porter place in Blind Bay last year.”
Dawn tenses. Stu hadn’t been happy about that particular purchase.
Sure, he’d asked her to take a look at it, because he liked the Porters.
He’d been afraid another real estate agent might take advantage of their daughter, who was distracted dealing with her parents in longterm care.
He wanted Dawn to pay a fair price. They apparently had different ideas of what constituted fair.
“I hear you got a pretty penny for it,” Millie says. “Triple what you paid.”
Shit. Was this Stu’s revenge? He was still upset about the Porter place, so he was going to dangle the delicious treat of Millie’s land in front of Dawn, after he’d poisoned it?
“Not triple,” Dawn says. “And I did a lot of work on it. The Porters’ daughter needed the money, and I made sure she got it. I undertook the work.”
“And what about Kenny Turpin?”
Now Dawn’s heart stutters.
“What about him?” she says carefully.
“Old man was as fit as an ox until you took an interest in his property. Then, suddenly…” She slams down the knife. “Drops dead of a heart attack.”
Dawn swallows the tremor in her voice and says, “If that’s a joke, it’s in very poor taste, ma’am.”
“Oh, I’m teasing. I’m sure Kenny had a bum ticker. All those years eating the way he did.” She shakes her head. “My husband and I knew him and Gertie, back in the day. Man put so much butter on his bread there was no room left for jam.”
“I didn’t know him well, but I do know he was a regular at Stu’s, and if I keep eating there, I’m going to have a heart attack of my own before I’m forty.”
“Too much grease and too much salt,” Millie says as she chops the venison. “I keep telling him to buy younger cows. Like my deer here. I know exactly the right age to harvest them. Enough to have some bulk on their bones, but not so old that the meat’s gone stringy.”
Millie puts the pieces aside. Then she heads for the other leg piece. When she tugs the rope, though, it doesn’t move. A few more tugs, then a frustrated grunt.
“Would you be a dear and grab that stool,” Millie says.
Dawn looks around. She spots the ancient folding stool leaning against the cabin.
Mental note: buy Millie a new stool.
Dawn heads over. She’s bending to pick it up when a shadow moves behind her. She turns just in time to see Millie swinging a bat at her head. Before she can even yelp in surprise, the bat slams into her temple, and the world goes dark.
Dawn wakes in Millie’s cabin, and her first thought is that she’s read this scene before—she does love her mysteries. The victim always rises in confusion. Where am I? What’s going on?
There’s no confusion. Dawn knows exactly where she is and exactly what’s happening. She’s seen this scene too, in horror movies, and she curses herself, remembering how she’d laughed coming through the woods.
Following the witch to her cabin in the woods. Ha-ha-ha.
Except it wasn’t that kind of story. No candy house here. Just one with pieces of goddamn meat hanging everywhere. Flyblown, unidentifiable chunks of meat.
Huh, that doesn’t look like deer.
She pushes to her feet. Or she tries to. When she stumbles, she immediately tugs her legs, expecting to find them bound. They aren’t but…
There’s something wrong with her legs.
No, there’s something on them. The cabin is nearly dark, but she can make out her lower legs, except they’re covered in something. Wrapped in something almost like…sausage skins? Lumpy and pales with blue and red streaks. Some kind of compress to tenderize the meat?
Dawn chokes back a hysterical laugh.
Don’t panic. She’s awake, and she’s not bound in any way, and this old lady is about to discover Dawn’s a whole lot more than a cut-throat realtor.
Kenny did indeed have a little help to his death bed, and he wasn’t the only one.
Old Millie might be a crazy bush lady cannibal, but she’s met her match.
Dawn reaches down to pull the compresses off her legs, but when she touches them, she feels skin. And what the hell is wrong with her hand? It’s pale and pudgy, the joints thick, aching as she moves them.
“You’re awake,” says a voice. Only it’s not Millie’s voice. It’s…
A figure steps forward and lights a lantern, and in the glow of it, Dawn sees a mirror. A full length mirror, reflecting herself back.
Then the “her” in the mirror steps forward, lifting the lantern.
That’s her.
Her.
And she’s…
The woman—Dawn—turns the mirror to show the reflective side of it, and in that shining metal, Dawn sees…Millie’s face. She falls back, hands flying to pat her face, feeling the doughy softness of it.
The woman cackles. Not an old lady cackle but a young one. Dawn’s cackle.
“Something wrong?” she says. “Seems you really did wake up on the wrong side of the bed. I know what that’s like. Did it myself five years ago, when the last one trapped me, just like…”
Millie waves down, and Dawn looks to see she’s standing in some kind of circle, drawn in blood on the cabin floor.
“Stu’s had his eye on you for a while,” she says. “He was my caretaker. Well, yours now. Don’t worry, I’ll pay him for his services. I’m sure you have the money, and I learned my lesson, just as you’re about to learn yours.”
“I…I don’t…”
“You don’t know what I mean. Think of it as a cosmic time-out.
You’ve been very naughty, and the world needs a break from girls like you, just as it needed one from guys like me, and it needed one from the woman before me, who tried to murder old Millie, hearing she had a fortune buried under these floorboards. ”
Dawn’s mind reels and all she can manage is, “I can’t…I won’t…”
“Can. Will. Unless you plan to built a raft and paddle your old bones to shore. I wouldn’t recommend it.
The one before me tried that. Spent a year in a psych ward.
Poor old Millie had a bit of a breakdown, ranting about being someone else, trapped in that body.
It happens. You get old, and you feel like you’re in the body of a stranger. ”
The person in Dawn’s body turns to go, and Dawn lunges, but her knees give way and she sprawls on the floor.
“Stu will be by in a week or so,” the body-thief says.
“As angry as you might be with him, I’d treat him with respect.
Otherwise, he’ll take his time bringing out supplies.
For now, just settle in and enjoy. You have butter tarts and books.
Stu made sure you had things you like. Remember that if you’re tempted to hurt him. ”
The thief pauses in the open doorway. “I won’t say it’s not so bad. It’s hell. But take some time to think, and when you’re ready to move on, Stu will find you a nice body to pop into, if you’ve been good to him.” The thief looks down at Dawn’s former body. “I guess I was.”
The thief smiles…and shuts the door.