Vincent Zandri - The remains

I caught my reflection in the body-length dressing mirror that stood on the opposite side of the room. Even to me my face looked pale, my eyes painted with worry.

Three more days; three more paintings.

One thing was for certain, if the paintings were Franny’s idea of a joke, it wasn’t very funny. But this was no joke because although Franny possessed a keen sense of humor, I felt that he was incapable of doing anything cruel to anyone or anything. Which in the end meant one thing and one thing only.

“My hunch was correct,” I said. “Franny is trying to communicate with me through his art.”

“He’s warning you, giving you a heads up.”

“And to be in tune with the five senses is to be aware of everything happening around you. That includes imminent danger, right?”

“That would be the idea.” Shrugging his shoulders; smiling. “Let’s see if he brings you another ten-thousand dollar gift tomorrow.”

Three more days; three more paintings; three more senses; three more warnings.

“You think Franny knows Whalen’s out of jail?”

“You might ask him, or his mother anyway. Or maybe he just senses that Whalen is out of jail.”

“I wasn’t aware that he even knew of Whalen.”

“It’s quite possible he knew about him, considering all three of you lived within a few miles from one another.”

This situation was getting more bizarre and disturbing the more educated I became; the more Michael speculated. I decided not to think about it for a while. If that was at all possible. I simply needed to get away from it.

“Can I make you something to eat, Michael?” I said after a beat.

Michael approached me, reached out to me with his hands, gently set them onto my shoulders. He didn’t have to say a word for me to know what was happening.

“Date?” I surmised.

“Sort of,” he said, as if it were possible to have a sort of date.

“Same love interest I presume?”

“Giving it a second round,” he said. “But I certainly would not call it love. Not by a long shot.” He pursed his lips. “I’ve known real love only once in my life and this is not it.”

I felt my eyebrows rise up at attention at the remark.

Leaving the bedroom, he grabbed his jacket and beret. When he came back in, he said, “Maybe I’d better cancel. I can stay… on the couch.”

I shook my head.

“It’s not nice to cancel out on a girl,” I said. “You just can’t do that.”

He stared down at the beret and the worn black leather jacket gripped in his hands.

“I’ll check in on you later?”

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “Now that I know where I stand.”

He nodded, shifted his gaze back down to his hands. For a moment, I thought he might start to cry.

He started for the back door. I followed him. When we came to the door, he turned back to me.

“I’m not feeling very good now,” he revealed. “I’ve never seen you so full of worry. I never knew about your past; never knew what you had to hold inside. I look at you, but I don’t know you.”

“Maybe you’ve never really seen me before,” I said trying to work up a grin. “Go now. Don’t keep Cinderella waiting.”

But he just looked at me quizzically as he opened the door.

“Promise me you’ll lock this when I leave.”

As my ex walked off into the darkness of the October evening, I closed the door behind him, dead-bolted it secure. Turning to face my empty apartment, I burst into tears.

For a change it had been a night without dreams, a night without voices, a night without texts. But then it had also been a night of sleeplessness. Or, when I did manage to sleep at all, I would wake up minutes later with a start, as if to sleep even for a minute was to let my guard down. My mind and my body were speaking to me, telling me I had to start getting to the bottom of the reasons behind Franny’s paintings. It meant that instead of going straight to work, I would go see Franny’s mother, speak to her face to face.

I called Robyn from the car just as I was crossing the Hudson River via the South Troy Bridge. I told her I’d be in sometime later that morning after I took care of some personal business. She told me “No sweat.” That she owed me for all those nights I closed up alone.

“Take the freaking day, Bec,” she insisted.

I told her I wouldn’t know what to freaking do with myself.

Ten minutes later I entered into what Michael would no doubt refer to as ‘Indian Country’. This was the rural farm-scape of Brunswick Hills and beyond that, the foothills that eventually turned into the blue mountains of Massachusetts. I cruised U.S. Rural Route 2 that paralleled the winding path of the Postenkill, a stream as wide and deep in parts as a river. It always ran fast and frothy white in early October from the September rains that soaked the region. Trooper Dan taught us to fish for trout in the stream back when we were twin pups. While I never caught much of anything (the only thing I hated more than touching a live fish was a worm), Molly never made it home without a fish or two in her creel (she loved the feel of live fish and worms). Thinking back on it, her fishing prowess made my Dad proud, especially in light of my, ah, girlish apprehension. For years I’ve sometimes wondered if Molly might have been the boy Dad never had.

After a while I made it through the small town of Postenkill with its two or three antique shops, general store and one-bay firehouse. From there I continued along Route 2 until I came to Garfield Road where I hooked a sharp right at the Civil War cemetery.

It had been a long time since I’d made a trek back to this country and I felt the years piling up in my stomach like so many bricks. Ten bricks to be exact-one for every year I’d been away. Ten years that coincided with Molly’s death. It’s not that I made a conscious decision never to return. It’s just that there was nothing left for me here. Nothing other than the shell of a house that had been handed down to me by my parents upon their deaths along with the land that went with it, including a major chunk of Mount Desolation.

I hadn’t been entirely neglectful.

I paid the taxes on the property, even paid a local carpenter to keep the house up and to mow the field grass. But since Molly passed on, I hadn’t been able to get myself to return to the old homestead, as if some invisible force-field was holding me back-the never too distant memory of a monster who once lurked inside the deep woods. Not even Michael, my former husband, had laid eyes on the place.

So why then, after all this time, had I come back to the Brunswick Hills?

Frances Scaramuzzi and his mother had been my neighbors; which in this unspoiled country meant that our respective spreads were located a good three miles from one another. Out of sight but not out of mind.

The sun was shining bright as I pulled into the driveway of Franny’s two-story white clapboard farmhouse. I cut the engine on the Cabriolet, got out. Immediately I was struck by the smell of the land, of the century old trees that surrounded me, their leaves golden and shedding in the fall breeze.

Just like my parents’ place, the Scaramuzzi farm no longer supported any livestock or animals. But the barn and the fields beyond it were still there. The fields of tall grass seemed to go on forever until they touched the foothills just a mile eastward.

Walking over the gravel drive I made my way up onto the wood porch, reached my hand out for the doorbell. But before I could press it, I heard a car pulling up behind me onto the gravel drive.

Caroline. Franny’s mom.

She drove a blue Chevy pickup that had to be ten years older than me and that still looked to be in tip-top shape. Stenciled on both the driver and passenger side doors were the words ‘Scaramuzzi Farms’ on behalf of the vegetable-slash-art stand that Mrs. Scaramuzzi used to set up on the front lawn from spring to late fall. The art part of the enterprise came about when Franny started selling his original oil paintings alongside the ears of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers and summer squash, plus homemade apple and blueberry pies.