On Emma's Bluff by Sara Elizabeth Rice, edited by davebccanada (audio ebook reader txt) 📕

The house was tremendous.

"It's one, two, four stories high. I always heard you can't build over a two story house in the delta cause of the clay."

"You can't," Cindy agreed. "And they don't anymore."

But there it was, all four grayed wooden levels of it. There were no frills to this house, just straight up it went, no awnings, no porches, no fancy scrolls, no shutters. The only odd thing about the plain structure was that on both the third and fourth floors there were doors where the middle windows should have been, opening up on to nothing. Emma looked for signs of old balconies; surely there would have been something there. There were no front steps.

Cindy looked at Emma and nodded toward the house. "Well come on. We've come this far."

From the front door Emma could see that there was a center hall that ran from front to back straight down the middle of the house. She could see the high weeds in the back yard through the broken glass on the back door. Four doors opened off the front hallway, two on the right side, two on the left.   It all looked too perfectly spaced for such a dilapidated old house. Looking up Emma saw the landing for the other three floors.

The stairs from the first floor went up from the right side of the hall and then leveled out onto a landing for the first floor before turning back, rising and completing this pattern all the way to the top. Right in the center one could see all the way up to what looked like thr underbelly of the roof.

"So, what are we looking for?" Cindy rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. She did not look so comfortable now that they were in the house. Emma was trying to hear over the squeaking that Cindy was forcing from the bowed floorboards.

"We are looking for a closet that has an old wooden chest in it."

"Let's try here." Cindy opened the closest door on their right. The room was perfectly square with long windows on the two outside walls. It was over bare, no debris at all. In the far back wall there was a small door. Emma walked cautiously toward it, while Cindy hung back.

"It's empty." Emma said. The echo of the hallow open room reminded Emma of something, like maybe from when she was just a kid, but she put that thought right out of her mind.

"What about this one?" Cindy pointed to the next room down the hall, again waiting for Emma to take the lead.

The door opened smoothly, too smoothly. Inside was another empty room, a mirrored copy of the first. Once again the closet was empty.

"I think the whole house is just divided into four identical rooms per floor, "Cindy whispered, "I think that is how I remember it."

"Don't whisper," Emma said in a voice not much louder than Cindy's had been. "What do you mean you think?   You were the one who was the big ‘ my daddy's deer camp’ expert."

"Well, I have been here lots of times. I just never liked coming in the house."

"I can see why," Emma muttered more to herself than out loud.

Only one room on the ground floor proved to be any different from the rest. In that room a long cabinet whose top was covered in cheap roll linoleum ran across the side under the window. A recessed white sink occupied the middle of the cabinet. A pump handle sat to one side of the stained sink. Except for these things it was another bare room.

As the girls took slowly to the stairs Cindy finally going ahead of Emma, reaching the top step first, and then freezing in her tracks. "Oh, my God," she stammered.

"What? What?" Emma could not bring herself to go any further up the stairs.

"Ha, gotcha." Cindy turned to offer Emma a grin. Emma did not return the favor.

Not talking, the girls entered the first door they reached. Another empty room, and then the second door, the second room and there it was. There was no need to open this closet; it stood wide open and plainly visible inside was a wooden trunk. As soon as they got close enough to inspect it though, they noted the problem.   The trunk was wedged tightly into the closet and could not be opened from this position. "Here, help me get it out of here, " Emma said to Cindy.

The girls struggled to get a hold on the chest.   The sides of the chest were so close to the closet walls the prospect of moving the trunk seemed untenable, but finally Emma managed to squeeze her fingers down one side and grab what felt like a handle. "Cindy, when I lift this edge up, you need to try to maneuver that other end down." After three small shifts of sliding one end up while the other tilted down, they finally managed to up end the chest in the closet and pull it from it's roust. "Whew!" Emma dragged the back of her hand across her forehead.

"Guess it's time to see what we got here," Cindy ventured. "You go first Em, I already ate."

Emma looked at the chest. She heard herself exhale. "Okay, let's take a look see." The lid opened with no problem and though both girls would not have been surprised to have found a short stumpy vampire inside, what they did see was almost a let down. The chest was filled with papers, letters, old newspapers, documents, receipts, sheets and scraps.

"Now let me get his right." Cindy stood beside Emma peering down into the chest, "We are suppose to be looking for one particular letter in all this mess?"   The more Cindy looked the more she noticed that there appeared to be nests of shredded paper among the rest. "Emma, are you afraid of mice?"

"Not now," Emma lied, "not enough time.   Now, get down here and help me." Emma pulled the redhead down so that they were both on their knees in front of the trunk. "Okay, you take these."   Emma handed out one pile, "and I will take these."

"Lot's of newspapers here," Cindy noted. "I thought she wasn't much on reading. Some of these are just a few months old. I wonder how she got them."

"I doubt it was home delivery," was all Emma would offer back.   Most of what Emma was reading made no sense to her.   There were all these lists she kept running across, sheet after sheet of hand written lists. They were like shopping lists, but they weren't shopping lists; birth announcements, death announcements, moon cycles, words that could not be pronounced.

"Okay, could this be it?" Cindy held up an envelope. "It's never even been opened."

"What does it say on the front?"

"It says, " she studied the writing , " to Missus Viola Grace, and then up here it says Addie Grace, St. Louis." Emma reached out for the letter. She held it in her outstretched palm as if to weigh it.   "Okay, we found it. Let's go." Cindy was already up wiping her palm on the legs of her jeans.

"Wait a minute."

"What for?"

"What about the rest of this stuff?"

"I am not about to clean this mess up and put that heavy old smelly thing back in that closet."

"No, I mean, I just want to take some of this too."

"Like what? "

"Just hang on."   Emma scooped up some of the lists and then grabbed a few of the papers as well.

"I am glad you are the one carrying them back to the jeep. This should be fun to watch."   Cindy was slightly uneasy with the way Emma was being unreasonable, she thought, about a bunch of trash. "Hey, did you forget?   Or were you lying? Isn't this the night of the supposed ‘date’?"

This worked, or it seemed to. Emma stood up, but she kept stuffing as many papers as she could into her pockets. Once there was no more room, she swept up an arm full to tote.

"You can not take all of those back through that thicket.   How are you going to pick your way through the briars with your arms full?"   Cindy just shook her head and gave in. "Here, stick them in my back pack.   You owe me now, you owe me big time."

Out on the landing, Emma stopped to look back into the room. "I guess it will be all right like that."

"What the?" Cindy was pointing up the stairs.   Emma jerked around to see. There was nothing there, clearly nothing there. "Ah, got you again,” Cindy said with only a sheepish smile.

"Not, funny."

"So let's get a move on. Let's go."

Outside, the sky was just a bit darker than when they had entered the house. "What time is it?"   Emma was suddenly concerned.

"Just a little after noon."

"We got to hurry."

"Sure, but when we get back to that jeep I am rolling a joint before we head out." Cindy had had all she needed of the thrill of adventure.   She was not even able to be witty about it at that time. "Nah, I couldn't have seen anything," she told herself.

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The clock over the fridge showed a little after five pm.   Emma stood with one hand on the counter top and the other wrapped around a glass of milk. She felt exhausted. A little over two hours before Bill would show up, he had just left a brief message. "Will pick you up at seven." What she really wanted was a nap, too strange. But after being gone for so much of the day she felt it might be wiser to at least offer to help her aunt with supper.

"So Emma, where was it that you and Cindy really went?" Liz slammed the screen door. In her arms was a blue enamel tub full of mason jars. Emma braced herself for the interrogation.

"Emma Lewis, I asked you a question."

"Yes, ma’am." There was no point in lying. Her aunt had taken notice of the burrs and weeds and mud when Emma had returned. Luckily it was only because of the preacher's wife’s presence that the scolding was delayed. "Well after we checked out the shops in town, Cindy had this idea that it would be neat to show me her father's old deer camp.”

“Good lord, Emma,” Liz looked as if ready to shake her, " are you not aware that there is a lunatic on the loose out there?" Her voice was getting louder and higher. "You are not going to tell me that two young girls took off alone in the swamps?" It was obvious that there was no answer required to this.  

" I just do not understand you, child. Every time it looks as if we have taken another step forward with raising you properly, you take two steps backward." Liz had a full head of steam now. "You do not seem to realize what your Uncle Roy and I have gone through to have you here with us. Your own Aunt Lucy told us not to take you in.   She said you would never appreciate a thing we did for you. She said you ought to be sent to some kind of institution. Are you just set in making her right?"

Emma could not, would not cry as she faced her aunt's torrent of words. Her throat felt dry, her ears were ringing, and she just wanted to lie down.

"I said, what do you have to say for yourself, Emma?"

Emma snapped back to focus on her aunt. "I'm.... I'm real, real sorry." She broke from the room as tears filled her. She ran up to her room. "No, it is not your room," she told herself, "You don't have any room. You don't deserve to take up space." She flung herself on the bed, praying that she could find a way to just cease to exist.

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The sun was just setting across the county as Red Humphries slid out of his green