Dawn in the Orchard Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  Also fromCooper West

  Copyright Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  382 NE191st Street #88329

  Miami, FL33179-3899, USA http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dawn in theOrchard

  Copyright ©2011 by Cooper West Cover Art by Catt Ford ISBN: 978-1-61372-182-7

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 382 NE 191st Street #88329, Miami, FL33179-3899, USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  Printed in theUnited States of America First Edition

  October 2011

  eBook edition available

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61372-183-4

  Dedication

  This novel is dedicated to my friend and inspiration, SarahMadison, who showed me that it canbe done! ChapterOne

  Gary Winston’s first trip back into Holden, North

  Carolina (pop. 5,000 ona good day), was to talk to the lawyer. Not his lawyer, but his Great-Aunt Harriet’s lawyer, Fred George. Gary grew up only twenty-five miles from Aunt Harriet, but this was Gary’s first trip into Marker County since he left the state twelve years before.

  He was not pleased with his inheritance, but he was back in North Carolina because his elderly greataunt did not have anyone else to inherit her house other than Gary, no matter how homosexual he was (which was very)—another one of the many good reasons he left the state in the first place to attend college in Chicago.

  It was midafternoon, and he did not want to pay money he did not have to spare for food or a hotel room, so he hoped to get the key to the house right away. As he drove into Holden and saw what his hotel options were, he decided it was going to be either Aunt Harriet’s house or the car that night, because he could not even pretend to afford the nice bed-and-breakfast tourist traps. It was early fall, and he knew he would not freeze to death in the car, if it came to that. He had a lot of experience fending off frostbite in Chicago, anyway. Every working musician did, he mused sourly, looking at street addresses while trying not to rear-end the car infront ofhim.

  Predictably, the law office he was lookingfor was in a nicely refurbished old mansion, stately overlooking a good portion of downtown from its perch on a small rise just off Main Street. Gary had only spoken a few times, long distance, with the person who seemed to be Fred George’s paralegal, who called herself “Marie with an I E, no Y.” She turned out to be small, perky, and young—the finely educated, delicately boned southern belle that Gary’s mother had hoped she would give birth to one day, but she got Gary instead. Marie wore linen slacks and a tailored shirt under a brocade vest that featured bejeweled paste buttons. She was polite in the practiced, distant way most professional receptionists were and ushered Gary into a conference room without wrinkling her nose once. Gary admired that, because even he was wrinkling his nose after driving for nearly three days straight in the same outfit. Jeans, T-shirts, and flannel were items that held up to wear and tear really well, but not to high society. Gary sat down gingerly on the leather seat, trying not to look homeless.

  Fred George was large and well padded but still young enough to be healthy. Gary figured he was probably close to forty, ten years older than him and about 10,000 times as wealthy. Or a million times. Literally. He smiled and laid out the paperwork for Gary to sign, assuring him that the inheritance was “by the books” before handing him the keys. He suggested putting the utilities in Gary's own name as soon as possible, since he could not justify the estate paying the bills now that Gary officially accepted the inheritance without further negotiations.

  “Formalities, youknow how theygo. But that’s it! The house is yours!”He smiled broadly.

  “Great.”

  “I really don’t expect anyone to step forward to

  laya claim. Do you?”He asked jovially, but Garyknew a professionalinquirywhenhe saw it. “Anita the Abjured is in Memphis, and my remainingthird cousins worthnotingare out inLA trying to be actresses, I think,” he sighed, fondling the key as Fred George grimaced.

  “Hollywood. Poor girls.”

  “Yeah, bright lights bigcity.”

  “Too many of our kids running off to live hungry

  and lonely in the Big City.” Fred George eyed him pointedly. Garyset about straighteninghis leather jacket instinctively under the scrutiny, although Fred George was unimpressed. “We all know Anita’s set up pretty well in Memphis. Part of me thinks Miss Harriet gave youthis house just to get youback here.”

  “Yeah? Well, it worked.” Gary figured Aunt Harriet had exacted her strange, inexplicable revenge against her family in the most effective way possible, leaving Gary to pay the taxes on it. “Seen a lot of ‘for sale’ signs onmywayin….”

  Fred George gave him an apathetic shrug of acknowledgement. “Market’s down, and we don’t have muchbywayofrealestate development here. The town itself subsists mostly on the tourist trade, antique hunters coming down from up North to look for a deal.”

  “I saw the shops.” “We do alright; Ragged Bottom, on the other hand, is practically a ghost town, has been since the plastics factory moved out. My father would get up out his grave just to die of shock if he thought there would be a daywe were gratefulnot to be a factorytown.” “See it allover. Makes for a bad economy.” “Especially for, ah, marginal properties. I’ve, ah,

  got a few buildings I couldn’t sell if they danced in hula skirts.” Gary nodded at him, understanding the “lowdown” of what he was being told: selling the house was unlikely, even in better days. “I guess I got me a house, then.”

  “And the taxes.” Fred George smiled understandingly, whichmade Garywant to punchhimin the face. His tolerance for rich-person pity was getting lower every year older he got, but he tried to be sociable and smiled back. From that point it was a quick wrap-up. Marie ushered him out the door while standing three feet back, practically throwing a map to the house at him.

  “Now you got any questions, you call right back, hear?” Marie said warmly as she shut the door in Gary’s face. Gary looked at the map, just to orient himself, because it had been years since he visited Aunt Harriet, and back then he did not do the driving himself. It was a straightforward path out of town, fortunately. Gary was grateful to realize that he would be on the propertybefore dark.

  Leaving Holden took less time than to drive through it, and thirty minutes later Gary was rolling his smallSUV downthe switchback private road out to the house. The drive there was full of beautiful rolling hillsides coated with well-tended fields featuring littl
e stands of trees and small ponds. Dirt-poor shacks and trailers piled up next to each other as breaks between the large swaths of property that belonged to the local gentry. With a start, Gary realized that he was now a member of the landed class, gentry by breeding and inheritance, if not by nature. The thought was not comforting as he pulled up in front of the two-story wood frame house, which in the dim light of sunset looked downright spooky. Gary remembered his rebel Goth years and thought it was ironic that he finally inherited something like The Addams Family mansion longafter he might have enjoyed it.

  He did not want the house—he had never wanted the house—and was furious about paying taxes because he inherited somethingagainst his will.

  Whatever else could be said for the ramshackle building, the romance of the grand Southern plantation tradition did not reach to Harriet Lee’s residence. It was once a workingfarm, and inlater years Harriet told Gary that she “rented out” the pecan groves to local families to work and maintain. Gary knew that netted Harriet enough to pay property taxes and the electric bill, while what was left of her husband’s military retirement covered basic living expenses. Harriet was a North Carolina farm girl and used to getting by, seeing no need to fixsomethingthat was not brokenor replace anythingthat did break but was never used. WhenGary walked into the house, for the first time in fifteen years and several months after Harriet had died, he found it layered in dust with most of the rooms upstairs shut off. Paint was peeling inside and out, something Harriet with her failingeyesight probablynever noticed anyway.

  Standing in the dusty, almost certainly moldy, old house with his guitar hanging limply off his shoulder and the rest of his life sitting outside in the back of his ancient SUV, Gary kept thinking the same word over and over:“Clunker.”

  He just was not sure if he was referring to the house or himself. The plumbing had no water pressure to speak of, whichmade sense whenGaryrealized the house did not have a shower, only a large bathtub in the only full bathroom. There was no way to miss water pressure that did not exist. It made even more sense when he traced it out to the electric well pump that was over twenty years old, long past its expected life span. As he watched water trickling out of the kitchen sink faucet, he was horrified to realize that he remembered the well pump being replaced during the holidays when he was five. His father, an electrician, installed it with his brother’s help on a Thanksgiving morning while the women yelled about trying to put a holiday meal together without running water. Gary and his cousins were sent to the barn to haul buckets of water after filling themat the hand pump, and Aunt Harriet laughed at their complaints, blisters, and sore arms. Gary never really got on with Harriet after that, and this, he decided, was Harriet’s last word inthe matter.

  In the end, though, he knew he was stuck with it, and it was stuck with him, because he was a penniless, starving musician with no career to speak of. Being an experienced barista here, in a farmhouse outside of Holden, was not goingto paythe bills. Or the taxes. His onlyother optionwas to returnto Chicago and continue bunking with friends and hope the farmhouse sold sometime inthe next decade, but thenhe realized he did not have the moneybanked to returnanywhere. He had counted onAunt Harriet leaving himsomething, and she did but not much more than the house. Fred George told him that the few bonds in Harriet’s name would take some time to get cashed out, but they did not amount to enough to cover more than a few months’ livingexpenses.

  The electricity being on was a small blessing. Night was falling quickly, and after unloading his car by stacking his things in the living room—three small mismatched suitcases, his bass guitar and amp, his electric guitar, and the acoustic guitars—he realized that he needed to figure out where he was sleeping. He crossed Harriet’s bed off his list of options, but of the other three bedrooms, Gary suspected that “the guest room” had been closed up for years. It was uninhabitable due to dust and spider webs. The two left were not much better, and the only one that even had a bed was packed full of boxes, which, for all Gary knew, might be empty of anything except bugs. He ended up in his sleeping bag on the old sofa in the wellused den downstairs, with the black and white thirteeninch television that he turned on and then off within seconds.

  He lay in the dark, a deeper and quieter nighttime than he had experienced since he left for Chicago so long ago. It reminded Gary of his childhood in his bed at his parents’ house, the moon spooky and dangerous outside his window. Now he was back home, in a way, with the same moon there to greet him. It was small comfort for the massive detour his life had taken over the past two years, and yet it was still familiar. Gary finallyfellasleep, deep inthe earlymorning, after tossing around restlessly for hours, sad and angry and confused, which was not too different from his life in Chicago

  The following morning he woke up near to noon, feeling particularly miserable and with the equally miserable realization that he needed to spend a few hours doing something like housework. He knew he would be hungry afterward, and since there was also a tragic lack of coffee in the house, he drove out to the small grocery store several miles down the road and bought coffee, chips, a package of cookies, and the makings for sandwiches. Gary tried not to groan at the various tasks spread out in front of himas he pulled his SUV up to the house for onlythe second time.

  Cleaning never made himfeel productive; it made him feel persecuted, but without elbow grease he was going to be on the lumpy sofa for a second night. He started with the spare bedroom. Harriet apparently had some kind of hard-on for her circa 1970 solid-steel Kirby vacuum cleaner, so Gary spent most of his energy sweating behind the torture device, slowly going deaf to its loud industrial whine. He knew the place had hardwood floors and wondered when (and why) Harriet installed wall-to-wall carpet everywhere. After vacuuming and dusting—in the reverse order, he realized dejectedly as layers of dust fell down to be absorbed by the freshly vacuumed carpet—he finally pulled a fresher set of linens out from the hall closet to put on the bed. He checked for bugs in the mattress first, but not seeing anything, hoped for the best. If nothing else, he had his own pillows and sleeping bag with him, a habit he developed over the past year and a halfofmoving fromone friend’s good graces to another followingthe breakup withRoger.

  By the time he was done, he was ready for food. He sat on the back porch, munching on his tomatocheese-mayo sandwich and listening to the crickets. He remembered late summer in the South, even if he had not been back to the area since his parents died, and he enjoyed how pleasant early evenings could be before fallsnuck in. The propertywas barelyone-tenthofwhat encompassed the originalfarm. The last two generations sold it offpiecemealas farming became more expensive and less profitable but property values went up. It still put his closest neighbor nearly a mile distant, and after the crowded hustle ofChicago, it was a strikingchange. The sun set slowly, going yellow to orange to red before the sky dipped into the shallow lavender that he always associated with nights spent on his parents’ patio, eatingwatermelon, waitingfor the summer storms to rollin.

  Trying to formulate something resembling a plan of action, he decided that his main goal, now that he had a bed to sleep in, was to find out whom Harriet leased the pecan trees to, and ifthat contract was stillin effect, how muchit was worth. That meant attackingthe stacks of paperwork scattered erratically over the rolltop desk in Harriet’s bedroom, though, which was hardlyincentive to go back inside.

  He swung in the porch swing and thought about Roger. They had talked of moving out of Chicago a lot, sometimes agreeing to go as far south as Nashville, but nothing ever came of it. Roger was too tied to the salon he worked at, too attached to the safe working-class world he loved in the suburbs of the city. Gary doubted Roger would like the scenery in North Carolina, much less the people. If by some miracle he had taken the chance to leave Chicago, the colors and sounds and smells to be found sittingonAunt Harriet’s porchwould have never meant as much to him as they did to Gary. Roger always had trouble remembering Gary was from the South, despite Gary’s rol
ling and distinctive accent. Roger said he did not hear it anymore, that Gary sounded “normal” to him. The familiar ache of enforced loneliness pulsed as he watched the sunset. They broke up nearly two years ago, but until now, Gary had not thought too much about being alone, if only because he was never actuallyalone. Uncomfortably, he realized that between gigs for studio work and sleeping on other people’s couches, the only times he was actually by himselfover the past twentymonths was probablywhen he was inthe shower.

  Now the house was his, and along with his car and his guitars, he had nothing and no one else. It was hard to see it anyother wayas he sat onthe large porch of an empty house in the middle of acres of pecan groves, removed from the presence of any living soul but the animals that lived there too.

  ChapterTwo

  Backinside and washing the dishes, Gary looked at

  the clock and froze solid with the realization that it was only seven thirty. The house was getting chilly, and it was dark outside, but his internal clock was still set on “very, very awake.” The previous night’s sleep had caught himup fromwhat he had lost onthe road trip, so he stood in the bleak kitchen, with its one bare light bulb hanging fromthe ceiling, and realized that he really needed some distraction. Aunt Harriet was a very good Baptist, which meant there was not a drop of anything in the house stronger than the coffee he’d bought that afternoon, so his choices were unpacking his instruments to practice for a while or driving into Holden and taking his chances with a local bar. After a week devoted to planning and traveling, he really needed to practice, but the idea of playing lonely music in a spooky empty house, one that he refused to believe actually contained ghosts, creeped him out too much. Downing a cheap drink while being stared at by locals and listening to really bad modern country music off a jukebox was only marginally more attractive an option, but it was better than going to bed and staring at the ceiling.

  Back in Chicago, the solution was simple: call a few friends, meet up at a local bar, and end the evening at someone’s house watching DVDs of Battlestar Galactica, or whatever new movie was out on Netflix. Gary did not particularly want to stock the fridge with liquor—the temptation would be too great to start his days with a liquid breakfast, the way things were going —but he knew that his options in Holden were slim pickings. However, it looked busy enough when he drove through the day before, and Fred George had said that there was a tourist trade ofsome sort, so Gary figured, if nothing else, one of the nicer hotels would have a bar open until ten where he could get a drink and reflect on his dilapidated inheritance and genuine lack of job prospects. And maybe avoid the really bad moderncountrymusic.