Gina Ranalli - House of Fallen Trees

Smiling to herself, she answered the phone again. “Hello?”

“Hi…,” A stranger’s voice, male, fairly young. “Can I speak to Karen Lewis?”

No longer amused, Karen said, “Probably not. Who’s this?”

“Uh…my name is Rory Luden.” The voice paused, sounding far away, which brought the strange dream back to Karen. “I was your brother’s partner.”

The words snapped Karen back to the present like a hard slap to the face.

“What?”

“Umm…Sean and I were partners.”

“Partners,” she repeated, as though she were unsure of the word’s definition. “What does that mean exactly?”

Rory didn’t answer the question, but instead said, “I was going through some of his stuff and I found an old shoebox full of papers. I don’t know how much you knew about your brother’s life here in Washington, but we’d just bought an old place out in Fallen Trees that we were planning to renovate into a bed and breakfast.”

Karen’s mind was racing. A bed and breakfast? “My parents went out there…to Washington, I mean. Did you talk to them?”

“No. We never met, but I knew they were here. The police asked me if I wanted to meet them, but given how they felt about Sean’s lifestyle, I figured it was probably best that we keep our distance.”

“His lifestyle,” Karen murmured thoughtfully.

There was an awkward silence for a long moment on the other end of the line. Finally, Rory Luden broke it by saying, “You did know he was gay, didn’t you?”

Is this part of the bizarre dream?

“I…I kind of knew, I guess,” she said at last.

“Well, the reason I’m calling is that in that shoebox I just mentioned, there was a handwritten will. Sean’s. In it he wrote that if anything should happen to him, he wanted his half of the bed and breakfast to go to you. Now, I know you’re probably not going to be interested in it, but I thought it was only fair to let you know about it.”

“My parents never said anything about a bed and breakfast.”

“Sean didn’t want them to know. He said they would try to fuck me over if anything happened to him. You know how laws are in regards to gay couples, I’m sure. Parents swoop in all the time and steal everything out from under the partner left behind, even when they wanted nothing to do with their own child when he was alive.”

Head reeling, Karen had no idea how to respond to this news.

“Okay,” she said, lamely. It was the only thing she could think of.

“Anyway, like I was saying, I know you’re probably not interested, but I wanted to be fair and at least let you know about it. I’m perfectly willing to buy out your half of the B&B. It would actually make my life a lot easier.”

“I own half of a B&B?”

The young man on the other end of the line sighed impatiently, as if this conversation was taking all of his energy and he didn’t have much left for inane questions. “That’s right. But it would probably be best for everyone involved if you didn’t mention any of it to your parents. Sean was pretty adamant that they not know too many details about his life when he was alive and I think we should respect his feelings in death as well.”

“Okay,” she said again. The words “alive” and “death” were echoing in her head like shrill church bells.

“So…if you want I can have the papers drawn up and overnight them to you. How’s Monday sound?”

“I think it sounds…fast. Maybe I should give this some thought before committing to anything.”

“You can’t be serious.” Rory scoffed. “What’s to think about? It’s not like…” He trailed off and Karen could tell he was trying to keep his temper in check. “How much time would you like?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I’m just hearing all this for the first time. Do you think you can give me a few days to register what you’re telling me? I don’t even know what the hell is going on here. This is completely out of the blue.”

“I understand. It took me by surprise too. Frankly, I don’t understand why Sean did it this way. Why he didn’t just will his half to me. But whatever. Like I said, this will, if you can even call it that, is just handwritten on notebook paper. I’m pretty sure it’s not legally binding. But, I’m trying to do the right thing here and respect his wishes.”

“I appreciate that,” Karen’s voice softened, thinking of Sean. “I’d like to respect his wishes too.”

Another pause, then, “So, you want to think about it then?”

“I’d like to, yes. What did you say the name of the town was again?”

“Fallen Trees. It’s a tiny town in northern Washington. Impossible to find on a map, but it’s quaint.”

Karen began digging around in the stuff on the end table, searching for a pen. She finally found one and began to frantically scribble information in margins of an old issue of TV Guide .

“Fallen Trees,” she repeated. “And your name again?”

“Rory Luden,” he replied, not sounding particularly happy.

When she finished writing it down she asked him for a phone number and address where he could be reached and he gave her both, somehow managing to contain his grumbles.

“Okay,” she said. “I guess I’ll give you a call in the next day or two.”

“Sounds good,” he replied.

But before he had a chance to hang up on her, Karen blurted, “How long were you and my brother together?”

She could sense him debating on answering the question, mulling it over, but at last he said, “About five years.”

Karen let out her amazement in a low whistle. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” he repeated. “Wow.”

A good ten seconds passed with neither of them saying anything.

“Well,” Rory said eventually. “Thanks for taking my call. It was…uh…nice talking to you.”

“Yeah. Likewise.”

Rory said goodbye and Karen remained on the line, listening to nothing, feeling dazed and half asleep, wondering what had just transpired. She stood that way for a long time, until the phone began to bleat in her ear and then she hung up, wondering what to do with herself.

After chewing her lip for an unknowable amount of time, she decided it was time for a drink. There was a bottle of red in the refrigerator that had been begging for attention for quite some time and she was going to rectify that situation right now.

She had learned long ago that when companionship is lacking — you have no lover, no friend, no dog, no cat, no canary — a candle flame makes for better company than some might think.

Every flame, she’d discovered, has its own unique personality. Some are wild and strong, anxious to take over the world if you let them. Others are shy, barely wanting to make themselves known, quick to extinguish their own lives the moment your back is turned. But most are somewhere in the middle — content, lazy and relaxed, flickering brightly now and then, like a dog lifting its head to listen to a far off siren, or a cat, tail slowly thumping in an absentminded half-doze.

Her laptop open on the bed beside her, completely forgotten, Karen stared into the candle flame on her night table, wineglass in hand, corked bottle standing stoically on the floor, three quarters empty.

She drained the last of her glass, contemplating what she had learned about the town of Fallen Trees, Washington. After spending nearly an hour searching the Internet for information, she wasn’t left with much. The town, established in 1899, had been built in the middle of a vast forest, in a clearing most probably caused by a forest fire speculated to have occurred at least a century prior to the first settlers coming upon it.

Though the town population had never grown much beyond a few hundred occupants, those few made a good living mining the nearby hills for copper and silver, a rarity in the Northwest. The locals were intensely secretive about the location of said mines, refusing to allow outsiders in on their profits and keeping the discovery of the mines among the initial settling families, said to number only in single digits.