I passed my exit. Didn’t even bother to slow down when the sign read Amherst 1 Mile. I knew what the hell I was doing, but that didn’t mean I was going to explain it to her. My cell phone buzzed on the passenger seat. Normally quiet, the incessant droning reverberated in my runty Toyota. I cranked up the stereo where Carly Simon crooned You’re so Vain, which is a song that perfectly suits my mother. I drove another hundred miles, faster than I intended. In a hurry to get there, but why? What was left of my childhood home? I’d not intended this journey, so there wasn’t any Googling or planning to know for sure even how to get there, and there certainly wasn't yet a per diem. Instinct drove me passed my mother's exit and kept me going. A sudden onset of nostalgia, a morbid undeniable curiosity steered my chuttering, smells-of-burning-oil beige Toyota Corolla (circa 1990) off the sixteenth exit where signs told of wineries and roadside diners. I observed Seneca Lake, which loomed for miles, gleaming and glistening a long stretch beside me. I stole glances of it as my car sputtered around winding roads. I watched it from my rearview mirror. Although I have long since shred my childish form and grown into a woman, the lake retains its miles of majesty which fill me with childlike wonder. Great, powerful, spread out, and so vast that I still felt small when presented with it. Bigger than a lake, as vast and deep as an ocean, it made me and my compact time-worn Corolla feel microscopic in the universe. I reached for my depression medication, a moderate dose of Zoloft, before I remembered I'd been weaned off the pills in the weeks prior. It was my choice to stop taking them and somewhat against the advice of Dr. Susan, my therapist. What is it about the lake that's held my heart captive all these years? Was it the strength of the swells after stormy weather? The lull on days like today, patient and inviting? Was it because the lake was a backdrop for my father’s scurrilous criticism or his sudden, inconsequential death? The smell of pine was overwhelming and reminded me of summers riding my bike on this hilly winding road, but I can’t for the life of me remember its name. Everything is so eerily familiar, my tired scrawny legs pushing against metal pedals. The wind forcing my long brown hair in every direction. Racing to get home before curfew, so dad wouldn’t fly into a rage. He’d have to find someone else to be mad at. Nostalgia is magical, but not the kind that comes from a fairy godmother. It's the sort of chaotic neutral magic that wily shadow men cast in dark alleys. "All magic has consequences, some good and some bad." The mystics whisper. "It always comes with a price." I tried to focus on the music, to stop myself from such maddening dark thoughts and twisted feverish memories. Well, you're where you should be all the time...And when you're not, you're with some underworld spy...Or the wife of a close friend. Wife of a close friend…

I sang along to the last little bit before commercials took over. Tall trees cast shadows across the road. I couldn't help but be reminded me of darker times, the shadows in my memories, the stuff I couldn’t remember and wasn’t sure if I wanted to. Mom and dad fighting. Doors slamming. Rubbery cold dinners, cold as his damned heart. The egg smell of hard water, but also the earthy odor of Concord grapes mixed with the pine. That's what flowed into the Corolla through open windows and air vents. (The air conditioner broke eons ago). I longed for a glass of wine, a crisp Chardonnay or Pinot Noir. Across the country, in California, they’d scoff at our Vitis Labrusca, but Seneca Lake’s wines have drawn in Jewish tourism for decades and kept wineries and lakeside restaurants in business. The fox grape, aptly named for its wild, distinctively animal musk, is kosher. Fancy sommeliers, plenty of whom I’ve known throughout my travels as a food and drink reporter, often scoff at Concord or Catawba wines. I never did because I grew up on labrusca varieties. It’s something home offers.

The road turned bumpy, forgotten by time. In my youth, it was newly paved and well-trafficked. My banana seat bicycle would fly down the hill and into wide turns, giving my scrawny youthful legs a break, but my tires crunched over  forgotten rubble and cracked cement. My legs (still scrawny and the reason I disdain floor length mirrors) shook, the car chugged along like a tug boat. My cell phone bounced on the seat beside me, still intermittently buzzing from texts and unanswered calls. The radio’s promo noted I was now enjoying the “Sounds of the 80s, 90s, and today.” Easy listening isn’t my favorite, but it’s either that or yacht rock which is even less tolerable. Frankie Valli came on as the lake disappeared behind a dense tangle of trees. I was edging in on my childhood home now. It was late afternoon and the sun was glinting off the treetops, leaving me sometimes blinded and sometimes shrouded in the darkness created by a canopy of leafy, overgrown tree tops. 

You’d be like heaven to touch. I wanna hold you so much.

I pictured my father singing over a hot stove, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He loved Frankie Valli. And I thank God I’m alive… You’re just too good to be true… Can’t take my eyes off you…

The stereo seemed to almost choke on these lyrics. A faint fuzz creeping into the background and distorting the big band sounds. To say I felt a bit freaked out and pitched into sudden, creepy afternoon darkness is to put it mildly. Something was off, and it wasn’t just the burden of nostalgia, long-forgotten memories which were so suddenly defibrillated and brought back to life. A gentle tugging in my brain threatened to relive my father’s last moments. I pushed down on the gas pedal, but my old Toyota barely gained speed on the cracked cement and rocky roadway. A noise in the backseat that caused me to look up into my rearview where there was a ghastly woman looking back at me. I deviated in my steering, launched the Corolla into the crippling side of a steep abandoned driveway. A woman in my backseat, raven-haired, greyish skin and dark eyes. As soon as she lifted her finger to her lips, hushing the scream that was building in my throat, she was gone. A quick look in the empty backseat did not convince me it was only a trick of shadows, but I didn't have time to worry about ghosts when smoke billowed from the Toyota’s hood. Countless times I was told to retire the old Corolla, that something like this was bound to happen and I’d be left stranded on some deserted road, but I was attached to the pile of rust and torn leather. My skin crawled with fleshy goosebumps. It was the car I loved, the car that had taken me on countless trips up and down the east coast. Besides, it was all I could afford. Print media never has paid well, and even less since people stopped paying for magazine subscriptions. My meager salary meant I was stuck with the old Corolla, but rather fond of her too. I didn't want to junk her like a farmer puts an old cow out to pasture, which is just code for vet assisted euthanization or worse dead by his own hand. Despite my adoration for my car, in that moment, I didn't want to be anywhere near her or whatever was haunting her in that moment.  

I was frightened by what I’d seen in the backseat. I grabbed my cell phone and stepped out into tall grass. One wheel was in a ditch, the other three in a flat patch of grass. I’d missed a gravel driveway by a few feet, but at least I’d not hit the tree. My phone had zero bars even when I headed back to the road and held it up to the sky. Minutes before it was glowing with my mother’s furious and frantic texting and now nothing. From the road, I got a better look at where I was. There was a sign strangled by vines, but I could just make out the words. 

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Molly Grange Inn. 

“It can’t be.” 

My whisper sliced through the silence. It was then I realized there wasn’t any sound coming from trees stilled by a nonexistent breeze or the  silent countless birds that must reside in them. I attempted to steady my hands, but couldn’t soothe their shaking. The air was impossibly dry and acrid. No sound or wind came off the lake which was across the road and not too far away. If not for the phantom woman, I’d have driven right by the old driveway, a winding drag that led to the inn. The stately mansion lay just at the end of the sloping driveway. My childhood home. I’d arrived much like I arrive at most of my destinations, going too fast and hoping for too much. I’d imagined rolling into a beautiful, maintained property but the mouth of the old drive looked abandoned, haunted even. I pushed my cell phone into my jean’s pocket, and carefully hiked down, noting every detail for an uncommissioned piece I planned to submit to the Niagara Gazette about my connection to wine country, to this place. 

A Knight Inn. That’s what the sign read when I was a kid. It was bigger too, etched in stately gold on a curvy piece of painted white cedar. Better name surely than Molly Grange Inn, which I hated. Perhaps if the owners hadn’t renamed it, people would have kept coming and the old road wouldn’t have fallen into such disrepair. Keeping the old name would have at least kept the property familiar with the locals. Everywhere I looked, it became clearer and clearer the place was hemorrhaging money. The birdfeeder was overgrown in vine, just like the signage at the road. It lacked water and was crumbling along its base. The trees were far too close to the driveway indicating that there’d not been any landscaping in quite a long time. Grandpa is rolling over in his grave right now, I made a tsk sound and kept walking. As I did, the sky erupted in a fluttering of sparrows,  blackened shadows against clear blue sky. Suddenly shaking limbs and bird noises were all I could hear.

No one would ever say, Oh that Miranda Knight's got nerves of steel. The few people that really know me know I am a chicken shit. I'm spooked easy. I triple check my locks and never walk alone at night. It had then occurred to me for the second time that I may be having a manic episode triggered by my now untreated depression. Probably Harry, my boss at the magazine (Erie county's second leading seafaring magazine All Sails Final) he'd say that I'm perpetually late, akin to using far too many semicolons, and that I was never on time or stayed long enough at his barbeques. He'd once asked if I were a lesbian. "You know Miranda," he said, "you can bring your girlfriend if you've got one. No one here cares about stuff like that." I wasn't offended and politely corrected him, but we'd known each other six years and I counted him among my closest friends when he asked. That should tell you something about my personality. I'm closed off is how my mom describes it. So what was I doing treading loose gravel when I should have been sitting at a formica table sipping tea with the world's chattiest Cathy, my mother who'd waited a good long time to see me finally? The birds' crying was a fading distant sound when my eyes finally settled on the sprawling mansion. Not so much had changed in the last twenty years, except some of the first-story windows were covered in lattice work. Morning glories crawled through the white criss crossed lattices, making their way up to the third story. I had to tilt my head all the way back to take it all in. The third floor, the window of my childhood bedroom.

Although much of the paint was peeling, the house was in decent enough condition. For a moment, I was able to set aside my petty anger over its name being changed and remember it as it was and appreciate the owner for not making too many external changes. The sculpted wood around my old window still featured a small arch and a few shingles on the eave. I always felt that was fitting, considering that room was my sanctuary, a real home when things were getting bad in the bigger parts of the old mansion. It had it's own little roof, the only window with one.

A woman, likely a guest of the inn or perhaps a maid, appeared in the window. I waved to her, but she rudely snapped the curtains closed. If she was a member of the staff, I prayed the rest of them were nicer. I still had no cell service and I was going to need a mechanic. I wondered if maybe she didn’t see me standing so far below and at an odd angle, and made my way toward the gigantic double doors that led to the lobby.

It was then that I heard a scream. It wasn't the wailing of hundreds of birds, but rather the singular scream of a distressed woman coming from somewhere in the hedge maze. It isn't the huge hedge mazes you see in near sprawling castles along the English countryside or in The Shining, but rather a small, dull maze with a broken fountain at its center. Even when I was little and the estate was in its full glory, the fountain didn't work. It was always dry. A work in progress my grandfather and father never finished.

I took a few more steps toward the door when I heard moaning. Certain someone was injured, I abandoned the inn and headed toward the hedge maze, my skin alight in goosebumps and chills cascading down my spine. My lack of nerves had me feeling rather sick, but I couldn't ignore the panicked cries coming from behind a row of spoiled evergreen bushes. Gingerly, I stepped around the first row and found myself in the most awkward of situations. Nancy and Frederick Showalter, I'd later learn, were counted among the inn's few employees. She the manager, and he the maintenance man. Perhaps bored by the lack of patronage, they'd taken to agoraphilia, which is the thrill of having sex outside. As manager, it was Nancy's duty to welcome all new guests, but this was not how I expected to be greeted. Frederick held Nancy in his lap, a passionate embrace. I kept snug to the bushes and thought long and hard how I could escape unseen. Nancy let out another piercing scream, which if you ask me was a bit of overacting on her part but did seem to excite her partner. She'd later admit to me how she loved to make whoopy (her words)  in the grass on hot afternoons. She was an oversharer, like my mother in that way and also the same age, but that's where the similarities ended. Nancy isn't a soft doughy woman like my mom. She's quite firm and athletic, a toned blonde with pointed memorable features. Frederick, who I guessed around twenty years her junior, also shared her love of fitness. It showed in his smooth arms and muscular legs both of which were somehow wrapped around his lover and frantically thrusting into her while she cooed and moaned. It was downright pornographic, the thing you'd expect to see on your male college roommate’s laptop. It didn't belong in the spooky atmosphere I'd come to know since landing at the Molly Grange Inn. Frederick’s hands slid up her stomach and firmly took hold of her breasts. He used them like pulleys to take her down so she was against him. He thrusted vigorously until he finished inside her, and for a while they just laid like that. It was all too voyeuristic, but I was certain I couldn't get away without being seen or heard. 

“Did you hear that?” Nancy asked. Frederick looked at her, confused for a second. Mortified, I turned and started jogging around the row of bushes to safety on the other side. Now, with only a couple feet of dense bushes between us, I could hear them but was out of eyesight. "I thought I heard a car a bit ago. Sounded like tires squealing." I breathed a sigh of relief. It was my accident they'd heard, not me stumbling awkwardly into their privacy. As I headed back toward the inn, I could hear them gearing up for round two or three. Who knows how many times they'd done it that afternoon. I'd soon come to know that Nancy and Fred were insatiable as rabbits in springtime.

Finally, I found myself in the empty lobby of the inn. I felt transported back in time, another rush of nostalgia flooded me with memories good and bad. Twenty years hasn't exactly flown by and yet it was as vibrant in my memory as witnessing Nancy and Fred's lovemaking not five minutes earlier. The ghosts of my past haunted me like echoes in my arteries. Before I could really process my surroundings, in stormed  Bellinger.