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1
CASSANDRA
Achill goes up my spine, and I can’t tell if it’s because of the orange and white cat winding around my legs or the early autumn wind blowing in through the screen door.
Perhaps it’s the ghost that seems to occupy this house in vitriolic whispers of the deceased man who refuses to leave it out of pure spite.
Whatever caused it must know that I’ve never, not once in my twenty-eight years of life, felt welcome here. Not in this rundown one-story house with its peeling plaster and rotted wood porch, and not in Hope Crest.
The idyllic small town forty minutes outside of Philadelphia, where families pass on big old farmhouses to the next generation and millionaires take up residence in preserved stone-front mansions on the Delaware River, made up one half of my childhood. So, in the eyes of the elite of Hope Crest, I’m an outsider. A tourist who only stayed for a specific amount of time before being shipped back to my mother’s penthouse in the city, as outlined by my parent’s nasty custody battle.
I never fit in anywhere. Instead, settling for the uprooting of my life every few months. In a way, I understood my father when I could look past his angry nature. Some piece of him was missing, and he couldn’t figure out how to bring it back. That will do dangerous things to a person or cause them to turn a bitter eye on the world.
And now he’s gone. Dead at fifty-nine from cardiac arrest. It took three days for someone to come out here and discover his body, probably because he’d pissed off every last person in this town to the point where no one gave a shit about his wellbeing. It would not have surprised me in the least if the coroner, when he called to deliver the news, said my father died from a rotten heart. There has never been another person on this earth who hated it and everyone on it as much as my father did.
While he might be six feet under, his ghost surely isn’t, as evidenced by the lights that keep flickering and plunging me into darkness. I should have waited until morning to drive out here, maybe stayed in Philly and gotten up with the sun, but I couldn’t stand the noise.
One half of my childhood, and most of my adulthood, might have been spent in high-traffic cities with people everywhere, but I’ve always known that part of me connected more to the remoteness of this town. To the absolute silence of this dead-end gravel road and the peace, when my father wasn’t bitching about this or that, that could be found here.
“Meow,” the cat with creamsicle fur sounds at my feet, and I bend down to pet it.
“Friendly one, aren’t you?” I smile, happy that at least a smidge of positivity lives in this house.
As the only child of divorced parents, I’m the only person available to deal with funeral arrangements, will execution, and property handling. No matter that we hadn’t seen each other and had barely spoken in six years. I’m all he had, and his death comes at a time in my life when I have nothing but this to focus on.
Clearly, my father wasn’t a well-liked man in this town, and I forewent a public gathering in favor of a private cremation. Tomorrow morning, I plan to walk to the end of his property and scatter his ashes in the woods he liked to hike. There’s not much, In terms of his will, and I don’t need his money. What’s left will go toward paying off the mortgage and getting the house ready for sale. I plan on offloading the house as quickly as possible.
Or that was my plan, until I got here. My childhood abode is falling apart, with carpenter ant damage rotting the wood on the kitchen window to some funky odor coming from the master bathroom. The roof will definitely need to be replaced; I’m not an expert, but even I could tell it was in bad shape as the sun set over it when I initially pulled up.
Then there’ll be the task of finding a buyer, who would have to be an out-of-towner looking for a tear-down because no way in hell is one of Hope Hill’s residents going to buy the Mauer house. On principle alone, they’d never live in a place my father had. It’s not like I can say I don’t get it; Dad was a grumpy son-of-a-bitch who did nothing but harass the people of this town, and I kind of don’t blame them for hating him.
What I hadn’t been prepared for, in those three months I attended Hope Crest High School years ago, was that everyone would resent me too, simply for his blood running through my veins.
Something creaks, maybe a floorboard or something in the attic, and I jump. My city legs failing me, making me spook at the slightest noise.
“Come on, let’s get you fed,” I say to the cat, who happily nuzzles me as if I’ve uttered the magic words.
Another thing Dad left me to deal with? Two cats, a lazy St. Bernard who hasn’t budged since I, a literal stranger, walked in, a horse, and a goat. Animals that I either need to care for or find someone to take care of them. Since I have zero idea the last time someone fed or bathed any of them, I rounded up what I thought was appropriate nourishment for each. The cat and the dog were easy, their food had been in one of the filthy cabinets in the kitchen. Changing the litter box had also been easy enough, throwing it in the can in the garage that still has a manual door. Dad never did get around to modernizing anything.
After googling what horses and goats eat, because I never was a farm girl, I realized I’d have to run to the grocery store in town. One look in the fridge, and I nearly keeled over from the smell of the rotten food. I guess that clean out is a task on my to-do list for tomorrow.
My hand is on the strap of my purse, keys at the ready to drive over to the main shopping area of Hope Crest, when the back screen door groans.
Immediately, my heart is in my throat. I’m exposed, standing in the middle of the kitchen watching in horror as the door opens, a figure coming into view. The lights take the opportunity to flicker out at this exact second, and my brain registers that I’m defenseless. I could make a break for it, run for the front door, and hope timing is in my favor.
But the part of me most like my father, the dangerous part that leans into self-sabotage, just stands my ground. I’ve been making reckless, or what everyone else thought was reckless, choices recently, and apparently, I’m not done.
“Where are you, Nathan?” a deep voice whispers, footsteps thudding on the linoleum.
“Ah!” I can’t help the yelp that rises from my throat as the giant, shadowed, filled-out form fills the doorway.
Then the lights flicker on. And I realize I’m standing in my father’s kitchen with a man.
A man I know.
Or a boy I used to.
Patrick Ashton, well, a much more mature version of him, comes to a halt in front of me.
