From Afar

FROM AFAR

Jennifer Olmstead

Volume IV

THE VIRGINIA SOUTHERN POINT COLLECTION

ABOUT JENNIFER OLMSTEAD

Jennifer Olmstead is the creator and author of THE VIRGINIA SOUTHERN POINT COLLECTION, featuring contemporary stories as unique as their setting in the beautiful southernmost region of Virginia, where the pastoral farms of Back Bay meet the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. MEN AMONG SIRENS, THE STRAY, and EARTHBOUND CREATURES are Volumes I-III in the collection.

It’s fiction you wish was reality. ©

WWW.JENNIFEROLMSTEAD.NET

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Copyright ©2023 Jennifer Olmstead and Titian Press

All rights reserved worldwide.

ISBN: 9798352131831

DEDICATION

For Patrick Amory

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Mary Ann, David, and Patrick for their unflagging love and support, and J. Michael, forever a part of every single day. A special thank you to readers and consultants: Sharon Prescott, Cousin Jan Kelly Reynolds, Sandra Baker, George Brehm, Suzanne Lownsbury, Brad Butkovich, M.D., Dr. Michael Hall, Sgt. Scott Gray of the VBPD, Fran Rodgers, USN Ret., Anonymous, the wonderful folks at Seton Youth Services, T.K. for a quote so good everyone who reads it believes it’s fiction, Elaine Spencer of The Knight Agency for always giving a read, and to the late Professor Cummings of Chatham University, to whom I should have listened the first time.

FROM AFAR

Chapter One

I

sabel Christoff swept open the double doors of her linen closet and surveyed its contents. Bottom shelf: two sets of white sheets, one gray paisley quilt. Second shelf: empty. No clean towels. Top shelf: window cleaner, soap, lavender bath bombs, tissues, and assorted supplements. Back to the third shelf: two sky blue wool blankets mimicking the color of her eyes, and one Ruger Blackhawk .41 magnum revolver with a polished Rosewood grip, circa 1973, minus its safety holster. A family heirloom of sorts, the gun had made its way to Isabel months earlier via her youngest older brother, Scott, gifted as an added measure of security for life on a remote homestead.

Tucked between the blankets, the Ruger stared at Isabel, its black barrel a dilated pupil, daring her to rouse it from hibernation within the folds of blue fabric. Forged from seven different metals, more like iron than ordinary steel, its chamber held six hollow-point bullets constructed with soft metal jackets, designed to mushroom upon impact, to shred and pulverize flesh, muscle, and life-sustaining arteries. Her heart raced from fear. Fear that she could not stop her hand from picking up the heavy gun, retracting its hammer, and aligning its barrel with her right temple. No. Wrong. Put the barrel in her mouth. Years before, her husband Jack had described the mechanism behind that technique. How should she angle the gun’s barrel? Straight back, or toward the roof of her mouth? One way would kill her—the other would condemn her to life support. She forgot which way did what. Tasting salt on her upper lip with the tip of her tongue, she held out her hands, fingers splayed, willing them out of their fine tremors. She had promised her brothers to call them if the time came when she could no longer cope with life alone on the farm. But making that one-to-two-minute call would change everything, transforming her from the adult sister they loved, and whose insight they respected, into a responsibility, a burdensome child to hover over, to monitor. Here and now, she could end the hopelessness, the exhaustion, the dead silent nights—jet black—when she kicked the bedsheets off her body, driven to be free of gravity. Then, a craving for the weight of Jack clinging to her, mooring her down, the two of them adrift in those same sheets. Empty. She was empty, bled out dry of his presence. Her eyes were hungry for the sight of him. But Jack was dead—incinerated—reduced to a carton of gritty ashes she had sifted through her fingers and committed to the murky trunk of Moody Creek, his favorite fishing and plotting and dreaming spot. The day after Jack died, she ripped the pillowcases off the pillows from their bed and stuffed them into a plastic bag to preserve the smell of his hair for as long as possible. In the months following, she became addicted to huffing the contents of the bag, cupping it over her nose and inhaling the trace particles inside like they were oxygen, bringing Jack back to her for a few breaths in time. Everyone talked to Isabel about God’s will—Jack’s death happening for a reason—that reason being a lesson of unknown purpose. They told her to take life moving forward without him one step—one day—at a time. They reminded her of how lucky she was, how memories could carry her through the rest of her life. Memories that she should embrace and feed upon to survive. She knew memories would never be enough. She wanted more than survival. Some days she struggled to make it through a single hour, let alone the entire day, without screaming and running out of meetings, or the post office, or the grocery store. She wanted Jack, the man. Flesh and blood, warm, strong—alive. If that was impossible, she had the power to end wanting him. She touched the polished wood grip of the pistol and slipped her index finger through its oval trigger guard.

Bur-ruf! A guttural bark cut into her stream of consciousness, stealing the moment from her, snatching her hand back and away from the gun. She grabbed at one of the blue blankets, drowning the Ruger in its soft yarn, and slammed the closet door shut. Maybe tomorrow I’ll end this, she whispered, but not today.

Bear! Isabel called out the open back door, panicked by the dog’s barking. She whistled two quick low notes and a third high note, her scarlet lips pulled tight against her teeth. She stood barefoot on the stone doorstep in an off-season white cotton shirt dress, her russet hair reaching to her waist. Bear! she called again, shuddering as the chill of the late January morning penetrated the soles of her feet and moved through her body, as numbing a cold as Jack’s forehead when she kissed it for the last time after identifying his body at the morgue. She pictured the blood spatter the .41 caliber round would inflict on the blinding white dress she wore today. Then she thought of Bear, how she would leave him unloved and alone in the world, with no prospect for survival, as he was when she found him. Or rather, he found her one October night, three months earlier. She figured she had just enough love left in her to give to the dog.

◆◆◆

A rhythmic scraping sound had awakened Isabel from a precarious sleep at 3:42 a.m. on a Thursday, one month to the day before Thanksgiving. A fresh widow—three months in—she was alone in her empty house. Sitting up in bed, she held her breath and closed her eyes, blocking out the jack hammering of her runaway heart. She listened. Dead silence. She held her breath, squeezed her eyes shut tighter, hugged her knees, and froze in place. A Great Horned Owl screeched and hooted in the woods somewhere behind the house, boasting of the night’s successful hunt. Then the scraping sound came again. She tracked the source to the other end of the house. Too loud to be a mouse, rat, or raccoon. Quiet enough to be an intruder. She grabbed her Ruger .41 from the linen closet and tiptoed to the kitchen. Pressed against the wall, cloaked in shadow, she saw it. A broad, dark form hunched outside the kitchen’s exterior door, its body pressed to the seam between the door and the door frame, scratching and digging at the sliver of space, determined to get in the house. When the creature—an enormous dog—caught sight of Isabel through the kitchen door’s paned window, it rose higher on its hind legs and began whimpering and wagging its tail. The dog was the color of mud, with flat ears and a round head the size of a soccer ball. Its short, crimped coat in no way masked its formidable jaws and muscular legs, the front two of which were leading an attempt to bore out the door and holding the potential for success. She put her gun on the counter, grabbed her phone, and placed a call to the Southern Point Animal Control dispatch office. With no animal control personnel officers on duty at 4 a.m., a male police officer responded to the call. Surprised by the sight of the uniformed officer in her front yard, Isabel pushed back against her emotions. The dog made its way from the deck to the front of the house and darted skittishly to her side, ducking away whenever the police officer made the slightest movement. Looks like it’s got Lab or Chesbay Retriever in it, and some Mastiff, too, the officer said. I have seen that mix before—but not that big. Holy heck!

Oh, God! Isabel cried. That’s an electrical cord tied around its neck. The sight made her sick. Look, you can see a plug on the end! The cord’s plug dangled like a bell from the thick, knotted yellow extension cord. She hadn’t noticed it earlier because a spiked leather collar had partially obscured it. She imagined what conditions the dog had escaped, what hell it would endure if its owners found and claimed it. Since he or she didn’t appear overtly aggressive, its fate could be that of a bait dog, used for training fighting dogs to kill in the fighting pit.

The dog approached her again, wagging its tail. With the officer and his loaded pistol providing a measure of safety, she took a chance and squatted on her front sidewalk. The dog ran to her and sat in front of her, leaning against her knees. She gingerly patted its neck, knowing it could rip her face off at any second. It didn’t, and she easily coaxed it into the shed next to her house, where it stayed, feasting on a bowl of cold canned soup until animal control arrived three hours later.

As the animal control truck drove off with the dog—which was determined to be a male—locked in its cramped holding compartment, Isabel told herself that it was ridiculous to sense a bond with the animal. She reasoned that raw grief over her dead husband resulted in her empathizing and projecting human emotions onto a stray animal. She held that argument for half an hour before calling the city kennel and applying to adopt the dog. A week later, with no ownership claim made on three-year-old Canine Male Number 086971, she brought him home.

◆◆◆

Isabel’s white dress fluttered around her legs as she stood in the frigid breeze. Bear bounded toward her from one of the fallow fields behind the house, barking as he lurched at the sky, at war with a yellow crop-dusting plane that had dipped low from a dense cloud formation above the house. The plane completed a steep descent before banking a turn and climbing again. Bear jumped at the sky, snapping and growling. The plane dove a second time, skimming the low brush in Isabel’s uncultivated creekside field. My God! she gasped, covering her face with her hands, bracing for the impact of the crash. No!

Again, the plane vaulted up into the sky, this time holding altitude and continuing to another airborne destination. Jesus Christ! That guy is crazy, Isabel told her dog, trembling from anticipation of what she prepared herself to witness. Crazier than me. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and checked her watch. It was 9 a.m.

Bear shook mud in every direction, splattering Isabel’s dress from knee to waist in gritty muck. Seriously? she groaned. You little shit! He dropped onto his haunches and mopped the sidewalk with his thick tail. The damned dog. He’d saved her. Saved her from herself—from her darkest grief-borne impulses. Never again, boy, she told him, taking a long breath and puffing it out. I’ll be here. I’ll take care of you. She pulled a broken dog biscuit from a pocket in her dress and let it fly. Bear caught it mid-air and lay in the grass, chewing contentedly. It was a small piece of good she had to hold tight against herself. She had to hold on to anything that felt normal, hopeful—that felt like life before July 27th.

Chapter Two

I love you, Isabel whispered to Jack, as he slid sideways off her and back to his side of the bed, their naked bodies glossed with sweat. Southern Point’s mid-summer humidity posed a challenge for even the latest, most efficient HVAC system, set at the coolest setting. The converted barn that Jack and Isabel Christoff called home featured one of the oldest, least efficient systems still in operation—a boiler-powered heating unit and several antiquated plug-in window air conditioning units that produced more noise than chilled air. Jack’s fascination with the inner workings of the boiler-powered heater and his sentimental attachment to the window a/c units stemmed from his memories of summers at his grandparents’ mountainside cabin. I dig everything about these old box coolers, he told her. I swear, I’m comin’ back as one in my next life. Love me, love my old clunky a/c unit! His affection for the outmoded system meant replacing it with a more energy-efficient unit was far into the future. For now, the exertion of their early morning sexual antics meant changing the sheets, blasting