Page 24 of Spooked (31 Days of Trick or Treat: Biker & Mobster #13)

Emerald Sullivan. Matriarch of the family, my grandmother, as I came to know, didn’t know fuck about the family dynamics.

She hadn’t known how her elder daughter had poisoned her about her second child, had fed her lies for years, when the truth was that my mother’s only crime had been to fall in love with someone Emerald hadn’t approved of and had borne a child out of wedlock.

The money she was supposed to have stolen?

Siobhan had taken it herself, played on her mother’s gullibility. The motive? Jealousy.

Growing up, Mom had biased me against my maternal grandmother, bearing resentment herself for Emerald so easily believing Siobhan’s lies.

I might realise this is my only option to not be alone when Mom can’t be with me anymore, but I guard myself against getting too close to the woman who had wronged my mother so much.

While she indeed put a roof over our heads, I was standoffish over the first few months.

Mom was suffering, dying, and Emerald stoically did her duty to her and to me.

To this day, I believe it was the crumpled marriage licence she’d found among Mom’s effects that made her start to doubt Siobhan was the angel she’d always made herself out to be.

The first cracks appeared as the lies became exposed.

She began to soften toward Mom and me, and in turn, I began to feel affection for her.

After my mom’s time came and she was taken from us, hopefully to go to a better place, one with no pain, I’d come to love that old woman, and knew she loved me.

Grandmother, or Gramma, as I came to call her, was my strength, my rock.

When she realised the extent of Siobhan’s treachery, she said she was going to change her will and leave everything to me.

Trouble was, she’d lived a charmed life.

Her seventieth birthday came and went, and yet she still felt no urgency to put her affairs to rights.

Maybe her brain wasn’t as sharp as it was once, or she wasn’t as immortal as I think she believed herself to be.

But it wasn’t her health that failed her.

A fall down the stairs that snapped her neck separated me from the only remaining family I had.

Well, not the only person with whom I shared blood, but I’d discounted my aunt as an unpleasant and conniving woman from the first time we met.

I wasn’t surprised, nor was I particularly upset when Siobhan had stepped in to handle the funeral arrangements, happy to leave it to my aunt.

At eighteen, I barely knew enough about living, and nothing at all about the formalities that have to happen when someone dies.

I remember the church was quiet, the mourners numbering only a few.

Emerald, a star in her day, had lost touch with or outlived her contemporaries, and since her husband’s death, had become a recluse.

Siobhan had sat beside me, dry-eyed, as I failed to stop the tears rolling out of mine.

I excused her lack of emotion, thinking that age had probably hardened her senses and that she must have been grieving inside.

There was no wake. No point, the few other mourners had disappeared as soon as her coffin was laid to rest in the ground. Instead, there was a visit to the lawyer’s office.

After offering condolences that seemed routine rather than genuine, I waited to hear what provision my grandmother had made for me.

I’d lost my mom, and now I’d lost the next most important person to me.

I was alone in the world. My aunt and I had never been close, and I doubted she’d want anything to do with me.

Even though Gramma had said she’d leave everything to me, I hadn’t really thought she’d meant it.

But I expected at least some provision, a legacy that perhaps would kick-start and soften this abrupt thrust into adult life.

The will that the lawyer read out was simple. Aunt Siobhan had inherited everything. To me, there was zero. I was left to venture out into the world alone with nothing behind me…

A stick strikes the ground. “I know you’re awake, Maeve. The doctors told me.”

I hadn’t realised I still had my eyes closed. I open them blearily.

“You shouldn’t have come back to Tucson. There’s nothing for you here.”

Fifteen years ago, she’d said something similar.

Immediately after the funeral, she’d had no regrets at pushing me out of the house where both my mom and grandmother had taken their last breaths.

I had had a few thousand dollars in a savings account my mom had set up for me, and had been paying into it regularly before cancer had taken her down.

It was meant to have been my college fund, but I’d had to use it to get out of town and start out on my own.

Grieving and distraught, harbouring the feeling Siobhan had somehow bucked the system as there was no way in hell I’d expected my grandmother to have left her everything, and had given no thought to how I would survive, I took the first Greyhound bus with little care where it was heading.

I’d just turned eighteen years old. Even if I had suspicions, how could I prove them?

And young as I was, I knew I needed the funds that I had to survive, and not to use them to line lawyers’ pockets.

It was my knowledge of my grandmother that drove me to keep my head up and not to give up.

She’d had nothing but used the assets she’d been born with to become a celebrated dancer.

While I wasn’t looking for a man to raise me out of my predicament, I, too, had the urge to do anything I could to keep from going under.

While I didn’t have the physique or skill that she had, no job was beneath me, and her hard-working ethic was ingrained in my psyche.

I waited tables, flipped burgers, and cleaned more hotel rooms than I’d like to count.

I paid my own way through college, earning a degree in business.

In the end, I’d done alright for myself.

Until that night I’d had the dream.

Everyone sees things while they’re asleep, I know that.

The mind plays tricks, mixing scenes and people from the long past with those from the present, sometimes so real you doubt yourself when you wake up.

But that one had been different. Emerald, adorned in her famous peacock dress she’d always held onto, even though she’d been too old to wear it when I’d met her, had reached out across the decades, warning me, instructing me, to get back to Tucson and save her house.

Or rather, something in it. But exactly what, she didn’t, or couldn’t divulge, as she faded back into the mists of time.

I’d woken with a start, but unlike other dreams which disappeared as soon as I faced the new day, this one stayed with me.

My brain kept turning it over and over, unable to forget my grandmother’s face or wish to disobey the instruction she’d given me.

It played on my mind so much that I was distracted at work.

I had vacation time owing. While acknowledging the stupidity of it, I booked a week off, believing only a visit to Tucson and the house where I’d lived after my mom had died would get the dream out of my head.

Tap. Tap. Tap tap.

I open my eyes.

“You’re back with me,” Siobhan states. “Stay with me, girl.” I’m a woman, thirty-three years old. Not long returned to the waking world, I don’t have the energy to correct her. But when she continues, in that annoying nasally tone of hers, “Try to concentrate.” I snap.

“I was badly injured in a car accident, and have only just come out of a coma. Forgive me if I can’t pay you the attention you want. Best you spit out what you want to say before I decide sleep’s more important.”

She bristles. I doubt anyone’s ever called her out on her behaviour.

“Mind your manners,” she retorts, prodding at her coiffured hair that’s got so much spray on it, it doesn’t move.

“I want to know why you’ve come back to Tucson.

There’s nothing for you here.” She pauses a beat, but I don’t answer.

How can I? How could I admit a dream brought me here?

As to my desire to visit the house, it belongs to her, and I’ve no right to step one foot in it.

Then she surprises me. “You had it right. Taking what money you had and getting out of here. That house is nothing but trouble. I couldn’t afford to live in it.

No one wants to buy it. Now it’s structurally unsound, so my only option is probably to demolish it.

Not that the land’s worth anything much. ”

“When?” I ask sharply, her words bringing sudden clarity to my mind.

“As soon as possible.”

“I want to visit before it’s knocked down.

” I can’t admit I’m driven to search for whatever my dream tells me is hidden.

And there are those visions, dreams, and prescience that are nagging in the back of my mind, telling me in my coma that somehow I already visited the house.

That can’t be true, but it cements my desire.

“Impossible. The place is condemned. You’d risk your life if you stepped inside.”