A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1 (8 page)

20. MELODY

“Melody?”
Tara was calling from the
front of the garage.

“Just a minute,” I said, carefully feeling over the tools on
the workbench with my hands. I needed a medium Philips screwdriver. Surely this
guy had one lying around within easy reach? Aha, found it.

I tiptoed carefully back to the circle of violet light near
the whiteboard, and when I got close enough, I motioned Tara over. I resolutely
ignored the splashes of glow-in-the-dark, promising myself a good long cry when
I got back home and climbed in my bed. Right now I had a job to do and only a
limited amount of time to do it in. “Hold the light up over here so I can see,”
I said, pointing to the top left corner of the oversized whiteboard.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking it down, of course.”

“What? Why?”

“Because my brother pointed over here.
And I don’t think there was anything interesting written on it at the time of
his murder, so then there must be something interesting behind it.”

“Like a wall safe?”

“Something,” I said, stepping up onto the stool and putting
some elbow grease into turning the screwdriver. Backing out the screws was more
difficult than I thought it would be; I had to really press into them to keep
from stripping the heads. Some doofus must have gorilla-torqued these things
with an air wrench or something. Then I grinned to myself. That doofus had to
have been Matthew. And that meant I was onto something – why go to such effort
to make sure the white board didn’t fall down if he wasn’t hiding something?

Finally I got the two screws in the upper left hand corner
out, and then I instructed Tara to sit on the stool and use her back and
shoulder to keep the board in place while I worked on the lower left-hand set.
These were not screwed in as tightly, which was a relief. My hand was starting
to hurt. Now it was time.

Tara backed away and I swung the board away from the wall
about six inches. I didn’t want to take the screws out of the other side if I
was wrong and there was nothing back there. Tara shone the light into the
between space that the wall and whiteboard made.

“There’s a hole,” she said.

I peeked around and looked into the crevice between the wall
and the whiteboard. She was right, there was a hole, about six inches wide,
chiseled into the cinder block. A tattered corner of something was peeking out
of it.

“Reach in there and get it,” I said to her.

She gave me a look and then gingerly reached her hand into
the space between the whiteboard and the wall. After a brief moment, she put
down the black light and buried her arm in the crevice up to her shoulder.

“I can’t get it,” she said, pulling her arm out. “I can feel
the edge of the hole with my fingertips, but my arms are just too short. I’ll
hold the board, and you try. You’re a lot taller than me.”

We switched places and I took over. One plunge of my arm
into the crevice and I could feel the ragged edges of the hole, and then some
sort of fabric-wrapped bundle brushing my fingers. I snagged the torn edge and
pulled the bundle out. As I palmed it and began to retreat, something else slid
out of the hole and onto the floor. It made a loud clack!
on
the concrete, and I cringed, hoping that the noise wouldn’t carry outside the
garage.

We got the whiteboard hung back in its original spot, though
the urge to stop what we were doing and take a closer look at the
fabric-wrapped bundle and the object on the floor was very hard to resist. We
gathered our things and snuck back out to Tara’s car across the street. By the
time we got settled in the car and headed back to my house, our hearts were
pumping and we were giddy with laughter and excitement. I wasn’t going to open
the bundle until we were sitting around the kitchen table with plenty of lights
on, but I didn’t have to even guess about the object that had fallen on the
floor. As soon as Tara handed it to me, I knew exactly what it was. Four-sided,
square bottom, pointy corners, it was a stone pyramid exactly like the one Esme
tried to give me the other day.

What was Matthew doing with something like that? And why was
it buried in a hole in the wall of his garage?

#

Well, it wasn’t exactly the same as the one Esme handed
me—this one was black, not malachite, and it had a carving on the bottom of it,
a symbol I had never seen before. Tara had never seen it before, either.

She took a long drink from her can of soda. “What’s in the
bundle? That’s what I want to know.”

I took a deep breath. “Let’s find out.” I untied the twine
that was holding the bundle together and folded back the fabric, which looked
like it had been part of a flannel shirt at some point in its past. There
wasn’t much there: a brownish tan feather, a dried, pressed flower, and a
photograph of the last time Matthew, Gram, and Gramps went camping. On the back
were two dates, one from six years ago, when the photo was taken, and the other
in the future --a couple of months from now.
Weird
.

Three smiling faces in the photo; I felt a brief pang of
loss. Matthew had hidden this stuff, it was obviously important to him, and
thus to me. “I don’t know anything about the stone pyramid, except that it
reminds me of the one Esme tried to give me, and I know nothing about flowers,
except what grows in Gram’s garden. The feather looks familiar though. Maybe
these are clues.”

“Clues to his killer?” she asked, giving me a long look over
the top of her glasses.

I looked at her without meeting her eyes and shrugged. What
else could they be?

After a moment, she spread the items out on the table and
took some photos with her phone. “I’ll look these up on the Internet and see if
I can find anything that matches.”

A cloak of sadness settled on my shoulders. The escapade
hadn’t turned out quite the way I had planned. I’m not sure what I thought we
would find but instead of getting answers, we now had more questions.

The silence drew out between us. “I guess I’ll go and get
some sleep,” I said, finally.

“Talk to you tomorrow?” she asked, reaching over to put her
hand on my arm.

“Yeah.
Talk to you tomorrow.”

21. G.

Sweat poured down my face as I waited for someone to answer
the door. Sam had called earlier asking me to come by and look at something,
and like an idiot, I thought that it would be a good idea to go for a run. He
only lived about a mile from me, but even at eleven a.m., it was still too hot
for a northern boy like me. Damn, I was thirsty. Why hadn’t I brought a bottle
of water?

There wasn’t a lot of shade in Sam’s front yard, there being
only one tree (and it was scrawny) and no overhang above the modest brick
stoop, so I bent over at the waist to wipe the sweat from my eyes, ducking into
the shadow my lower body had carved from the glare. I decided I would hang out
down there for a while, splattering the stoop with perspiration. The door
opened, and a pair of Vans and legs covered with artfully ripped jeans came
into view.

“Dude, you actually
ran
over here?”

I stood up and scooted into the dark, air-conditioned foyer.
“I told you I was going to.”

“I thought that was just a figure of speech. You’re an
idiot, you know that? You didn’t even bring a bottle of water.”

I refrained from grumbling since I knew he was right, and
followed him into the dingy kitchen. Dishes on the counter, crumbs on the
table, open can of pork and beans on the stove next to an old pot. There were a
couple of flies buzzing; I decided not to look too close and accepted the glass
of tap water gratefully. The glass was clean. I had seen him get it down from
the cabinet.

“Sorry. My mom’s been out of town on a job and I’m batching
it. I’ll clean up before she gets back, but until then, no worries, right?” His
grin had a challenge in it.

“Right,” I grinned.
What’s
that all about?
I shrugged mentally. It wasn’t like Sam and I were best
buds. He probably just expected me to judge.
If he only knew.
“So what’s the
big secret you wanted to show me – so big I couldn’t mention it to my girl?”

“I didn’t want you to mention it to Tara because she
wouldn’t be able to keep it from Melody… and I’m not ready to share it with
Melody yet. Because…. Well, just come on and I’ll show you. Then you’ll
understand.”

We sat down in his smaller-than-average bedroom, him on his
desk chair in front of his computer and me on his hastily made-up bed. There
was no mistaking that this room belonged to him. Posters of bikini-clad babes
vied for space with giant robots of doom and random covers of
Vibe
,
Rolling Stone
and
Details
magazines. There was hardly an inch of wall space that didn’t have some paper
or sticker or something covering it. All in all, the space made me kind of
dizzy, but I could dig it. Sam definitely had more to his personality than I
gave him credit for.

Sam hit some keys on his keyboard and a complicated looking
dashboard came up on his computer screen. He reached over to grab his
headphones and turned to look at me. “You remember the night of Melody’s
party?”

“How could I forget?”
Seriously?

“When Melody and I were in her house getting candles and
matches, I remembered I had some EVP app on my phone, and I decided I was going
to turn it on and use it while we were doing the Spirit Board thing. The thing
is
,
I forgot all about it until you and Tara showed us
what came up on your camera. So when I got home, I downloaded it onto my
computer…”

“And…?”

“And I sampled the audio, scrubbed it, tweaked the gain, and
I think I found something.
Maybe a little more than
something.
Here, put these on.” He thrust the headphones out to me.

I took them and tried to resist the urge to wipe them off
first. I took a discreet look at them as I slid them over my head and was
surprised and relieved to see that they were pretty clean. It must have just
been the kitchen he hated cleaning. “Okay,” I said when I had them situated
comfortably.

Sam nodded to me, moved the mouse on his computer and clicked
the play button on the screen.

There was static of course, people shifting on the couch,
the scratching of the planchette as it moved over the board, Tara’s voice as
she called out the letters. Then there was the crash from Colton and the
collective screaming and laughter… so far nothing new. I shrugged, about to
take the headphones off.

Sam held out his hand, gesturing for me to wait a moment.

And then I heard it.
The same voice as
before, only louder, clearer.

“Melody,” it said.
“Melody.”

There was a long pause, I looked at Sam, and he held up a
finger, pointing to the graph on the screen. There were two more spikes coming
as the line moved down the graph. The line hit a spike and I heard the voice
again, raspy, further away. “Help me,” it said.

I got the chills. Sam gave me a very hard look, holding his
finger up one more time and pointing to the last spike on the graph. “Stop
Orla,” the voice said in my ear. It sounded like fear.

#

“Who the hell is Orla?” I asked, pacing back and forth in
Sam’s living room, a can of soda in my hand. “How do we stop someone when we
don’t even know who he-she-it is?”

Sam shook his head and slumped on the couch. “I don’t know,
man. It took me a couple of days to get the guts up to listen to the recording,
and once I heard it, I knew I couldn’t just call Melody over to listen to it.
It’s going to open up all kinds of wounds with her. Maybe I shouldn’t even tell
her.”

My mind was spinning. I was feeling very agitated, like I
wanted to jump up and punch something. What had gotten into me? The idea of
Melody being upset was actually making me angry, like I needed to do something
about it. I made a fist with my free hand. Screw it. Who gives a crap if Sam
makes fun of me? I put my can down and decided to drop and pump out some push-ups.
I was well past twenty a day; now I could do fifty.

I huffed a little when I got up. Sweat had broken out on my
forehead again.

“Hell of a time to exercise,” said Sam, irritated.

“Sometimes I just get these surges of energy and I don’t
know what the hell to do with them. After that recording, I’m really on edge.
So, push-ups.”

Sam nodded as if he understood. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at
night, because of – whatever. Then my brain is agitated and I can’t settle it
down.”

“So you do push-ups?” I asked, grinning.

“Nah man, I watch Tom & Jerry cartoons.”

We both laughed; it helped to relieve some of the tension
and finally, I was able to sit down without my knee jumping up and down. I
grabbed my soda and was about to take another swig when I looked at the
caffeine content. Maybe I should let off the caffeine, too.

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” said Sam.

22. MELODY

The poor dill plant lost the fight before it started. I was
weeding Gram’s garden with wild abandon, the kind of abandon that said, “So
what if that herb plant got caught in my handful of weeds?” Yank. “It shouldn’t
have been there in the first place.”

Most of my anger was directed at Sam.
But
G. too?
What was he thinking? Just because we used to be friends did not
entitle him to some sort of conspiracy to keep information from me. Yank. Oops,
oh well, a little less parsley to cut later.

At least I could trust Tara. She had told me what was going
on. Granted, they had told her first, and then she told me, but I supposed she
might never have told me about the EVP recording if G. hadn’t opened his big
mouth to her in the first place. Yank. Oh, sorry tarragon. Next time you should
watch where you’re growing.

“Now what did those herbs ever do to you, to deserve such
rough treatment?” said Gram, coming up behind me with a basket of folded
laundry on her hip. We still line-dried most of our items in the summer, as
Gram said that a little sunshine and fresh air in the bedroom kept the shadows
away. Until recent events I had assumed she meant it figuratively.

I paused and loosened the grip I had on a handful of grassy
weeds and purslane. “My friends are jerks.”

“I see. And why are they jerks?” She set down the basket and
stooped down nearby to help me weed.

“Keeping secrets.
They said they
didn’t want to make me feel bad, but really, it’s a big fat conspiracy to keep
me in the dark.”

“In the dark about what?”
Gram
said, reaching for another sprig of offending grass.

“About M—”, I started to say Matthew’s ghost, but remembered
who I was talking to. “The boy I like is, uh, dating someone else.” I didn’t
look up to see Gram watching me because I knew if I met her gaze I would spill
my guts. She wouldn’t believe my lame explanation for even an instant but as
long as I didn’t say anything else and contradict myself, she wouldn’t press
for details.

She didn’t say anything for another moment or two—just kept
pulling sprigs of grass—and we settled into a companionable silence. Finally,
when her little patch of garden was free of weeds and grass, she got up,
dusting off her knees.

“I have a batch of sage bundles that are ready to deliver to
Esme. Would you mind taking them over to her shop? Just bring the money home
and drop it on the kitchen counter. I’ll use it for groceries later.”

I stopped what I was doing to smile up at my grandmother,
grateful that she hadn’t pushed for more information. Maybe I would tell her
about Matthew’s ghost one day, but right now, I wanted to keep it to myself.
The afternoon sunlight was a little harsh on her older, lined face, and for the
first time I could tell she was losing that ageless quality that she’d had for
so long. She was getting old. Caring for Gramps was hard on her, and I felt a
stab of guilt that I didn’t try harder to help with that.

“Sure. I can do it after I wash up.”

“Lovely. I’ll go put them in a bag and set them on the
kitchen table.”

I finished the row I was working on, gathered the discarded
weeds and dumped them on the compost heap. My hands were dirty, despite the
garden gloves, and my knees were black. Maybe a shower and some of Gram’s
basil-bergamot soap would help me out of my funk. It didn’t mean I wasn’t still
mad at Sam and G., but maybe I could be mad at them and be clean and smell good
at the same time.

#

Tara was at the counter in the shop when I walked through
the door carrying the bag of Gram’s sage smudge bundles. Her face lit up to see
me, but she nodded toward the back of the shop, meaning for me to walk back and
give the bag to Esme herself. Tara was busy ringing up a sale, so I figured
what the heck? I had never been in the back of the shop before. Perhaps it was
like the Tardis a little bit – small on the outside, but like the Indiana Jones
museum on the inside.

I ducked behind the beaded curtain and to my disappointment
saw that it was really just a small room with a door at the back. A few
tapestries hung on the walls, and Esme sat in front of one of them, behind an
old wooden desk in the corner with a few candles lit and some incense burning.
She was writing in a ledger.

“Hi,” I said, uncertainly. I held up the bag. “Gram told me
to bring these over to you.”

“Hello, Melody,” she said. “Come on over and have a seat.
I’ll be with you in a moment.”

I sat in the vacant chair on the other side of Esme’s desk
and tried not to appear uncomfortable. I had always known that Gram sold herbs
and the like to Esme, but it had never occurred to me before that Gram’s garden
had any other purpose besides being seasoning for people’s food. I was just now
understanding that people who bought herbs from Esme were not buying them to
flavor chili, but for magic.
Magic
.
I hadn’t thought it was anything more than just a
grown-up version of playing pretend.

“Now, what can I do for you?” she asked me, closing her
ledger and pushing it away.

I held up the bag again. “Stuff from Gram?”

Esme reached for the bag and I handed it across to her, the
brown paper rustling as she dumped the contents onto her desk. Sage smudge
bundles rolled out, each one bedecked in pretty cotton embroidery thread, colors
contrasting gaily against the grayish green of dried leaves. Esme counted them
out and then pulled a small envelope from the bottom of the pile and opened it.
From across the way, I could recognize Gram’s spare scrawl.

“I see,” said Esme, folding the card and inserting it back
into the envelope. “Before I forget, let me give you the money for your
grandmother.” She counted out a modest stack of bills and handed them to me.
Then she folded her hands and arms across the desk and gave me a deep,
penetrating look. “Your grandmother seems to think that you have some questions
you might want to ask me.”

“Ah,” I
said,
my mind racing. “No,
I don’t think so.” I shifted in my chair. What does Gram think she knows? I
hadn’t told her anything about Matthew.

“Oh come on, Mel,” said Tara from the doorway, her voice
soft. “You know that’s not true.”

I turned to look at Tara, and then at Esme again. What did I
have to lose? “Ah, I guess. Maybe I, we, do.” I gestured back and forth between
myself and Tara. “We found something in my brother’s old garage, and we don’t
know what it means.”

“And we’ve seen his ghost,” Tara quickly added. “We even
have a couple of recordings of it.”

Esme was looking from one of us to the other, her eyes
slightly unfocused. “What did you find?” she asked, snapping her gaze back to
the present.

Tara pulled her phone from her pocket and moved to stand
beside me. “We found a small bundle of items, here I took some pictures.” She
thumbed her phone until her photo gallery was displayed and showed Esme the
pictures of the feather and the flowers.

“Was there anything besides this?” she asked.

“Not really, just an old family photo.”

“Oh, and the pyramid,” said Tara. “A little black stone
pyramid with some sort of symbol on the bottom.
Kind of
swirly?”

Esme looked up from Tara’s phone sharply. Putting the phone
down on the desk, she turned to dig around in one of her desk drawers. She
pulled out a small gray book with a ratty binding and yellowed pages. Flipping
through the first half of the book, she stopped on a page and pointed to a
small black symbol that looked kind of like a monogram you might see on fancy
hotel towels. “Something like this?” she asked, showing the graphic to first
Tara and then to me.

“It’s like it, but it’s not the same. Why?” I asked.

Esme pursed her lips for a moment and then shut the book
with a snap. “It’s a sigil – a way of marking your intention on an object or a
space. I can’t know for certain unless I see the pyramid for myself, but since
you say it’s made of black stone, I would assume it’s a sigil of protection…
Especially,” she continued, “considering that this dried flower is Angelica – a
very powerful and protective herb.” She paused to take a closer look at the
feather, frowning as she studied it. “But I have no idea what kind of feather
this is. However, the fact that it and the Angelica were included in the bundle
along with the pyramid suggests some sort of warding spell.”

Tara’s eyes grew wide, and finally my suspension-bridge of
disbelief just utterly collapsed. It was too much; I started to laugh. “What?
Why would my brother have a bundle of magic stuff hidden in his garage? I mean,
he was a
mechanic
.”

Esme wasn’t exactly offended, but she did turn just a little
frosty. “I’m just answering your questions. I’m sorry if it’s something you
aren’t ready to hear. Excuse me. I need to take these smudge sticks and put
them out for the customers. Thank you for your help today, Tara. You can go
home early.”

Tara socked me in the arm as soon as Esme was out of sight.
“Thanks a lot,” she said, gritting her teeth. “I hope I didn’t just lose my job
because of you. I told you
before,
when you talk to
Esme you need to be respectful.”

“Whatever, Tara.
I came here to
deliver something for Gram, not to have my head filled with nonsense.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said, turning over the card Esme had
received in the bag from my grandmother. She handed it to me and stared at me
while I read it.

The card said “It is time.” That’s it.

Disgusted by the cryptic note and what felt like another betrayal,
this time from my grandmother, I stalked out of the room and out of the shop. I
could hear Tara rushing to catch up but I didn’t stop. Screw them.