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  What looked back at me from Ralph and Minnie’s bathroom mirror was enough to make me take a step back and nearly gasp at the sight of myself. Its not that I hadn’t seen my reflection in a mirror since Amy’s death, but those glances were usually quick and usually just from the neck or chest up, much like I had just seen brushing my teeth and looking into the mirror above the sink. This was the first time I had seen myself captured in full-form. The image was sickening.

  My hair was long, longer than it had ever been, falling around my ears and forming a wannabe mullet in the back. My once broad shoulders now were nearly non-existent and slouched. My arms, which my t-shirt sleeves used to hug tightly, were now skinny and pathetic, my sleeves now dangling loose and freely. The rest of me was much the same. Places where muscles were once prominent had shrunken. My stomach, which I tried hard to keep fit with diet and routine crunches had now transformed into a bit of a pouch. My legs were like toothpicks protruding from my shorts.

  Yeah I had lost a lot of weight, a lot of weight, and as discouraging as that was, it wasn’t the scariest part. My skin was a ghastly, milky white. I looked like I had just spent the whole winter hibernating with the bears from the elementary school film-strip. I looked like a ghost.

  I shuddered once, maybe twice, and then ripped open the bathroom door.

  "Mornin’, Dan. You hungry?"

  I stopped and looked down the steps. There Ralph stood, looking just like he did the night before only now he had traded in his flannel shirt for a once solid white t-shirt that looked to be about as old as he was and held a grungy grayish-yellow color to prove it.

  I didn’t attempt to smile and be polite. I was still shaken after seeing myself.

  "No," I said. "I’ll be heading out here in a few minutes. Just as soon as I get dressed."

  "Oh nonsense," Ralph said, stern and serious. "Ain’t no place so important you can’t let Minnie make you some breakfast. How do you like your eggs?"

  "Ralph, really. I’ll grab something a little la--"

  "Scrambled it is." He turned then, heading down a hall and yelling, "Minnie, Dan’ll have two eggs scrambled. I’ll start the toast."

  I wanted to shout back, really I did. I wanted to yell Damnit you old fool, I said I didn’t want anything. You think you can just force me to eat?

  But as I was thinking these hateful thoughts about Ralph, my stomach let off a loud rumble. I was hungry. No sense in turning down a home cooked meal. I thought about my image in the mirror. I should have told Ralph to make if four eggs.

  Chapter 14

  After changing into some cargo shorts and one of my many Virginia Tech t-shirts, I made the bed, packed up the rest of my belongings and headed down the steps, following the aroma of fresh coffee.

  The kitchen was large and sat on the back of the house with big windows looking out into a backyard and then a field that seemed to have no end. A good-sized barn sat on the back corner of the yard and I could just make out Ralph opening one of the big doors and disappearing inside.

  Minnie stood with her back to me at the stove, scraping eggs out of a small frying pan and onto a plate, which already held two pieces of toast. The food looked delicious. Minnie looked like a small planet; large, round, and taking up a lot of space. The saying is you can’t judge a book by its cover. I’d like to make an amendment that states you also can’t judge a person’s body by their voice. The feeble and squeaky voice, accompanied by the name--Minnie--are a complete decoy to the actual size of this woman.

  Minnie was a few inches shorter than Ralph, but probably outweighed him by a hundred pounds. She had thinning white hair that she wore in tiny curls and had on a bright yellow house-dress. The calves that stuck out at the bottom of the dress bore an all to close resemblance of holiday hams. Her skin was white, almost transparent, and I could make out all her veins running up and down her legs. She turned to put the plate of eggs and toast on the table and saw me for the fist time. I had clearly been staring and it was all I could do to throw on a fake smile and wave saying, "You must be Minnie."

  She gave me a big, warm welcome smile and sat the plate down on the table, pulling out a chair and nodding for me to sit. She either hadn’t noticed my rude stare, or perhaps she was just old and all to used to it.

  "And you must be Dan. How’d you sleep?"

  My first thought was that I’d slept better than I had in a long, long time, but I vocalized a simpler answer that wouldn’t require any further explanation. "I slept great. Very peaceful out here."

  "Always has been. S’why Ralph and I never left. Born here, and I ‘spect we’ll die here."

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I took my seat and picked up the fork.

  "You want jam, butter, or both for your toast?"

  "Just jam, please."

  "Strawberry, grape, or blueberry?"

  "Grape, please."

  She sat a small jar of grape jam on the table, poured two cups of coffee from the pot on the counter, and then joined me at the table, sitting across from me and sliding one of the coffee cups my way.

  I didn’t often eat with an audience, and with Minnie sitting across the table, staring at me while I ate, I suddenly felt extremely self-conscious. I was very hungry, but didn’t want to appear like a pig and start shoveling food in my mouth like my arm was motor-operated. So, instead I took two careful bites of egg, one of toast, swallowed, and then took the lead on the apparently desired conversation.

  "So what did you and Ralph do before you opened the B&B here?"

  Minnie seemed visibly excited that I had given in and wanted to talk with her. I imagine they didn’t get a lot of company back then, and they would have no way of knowing about the flood of people who would soon be flocking to their door. Reporters, investigators, curious…fans, I guess. They would all arrive not too terribly long after my first breakfast there. Minnie held her coffee cup with both dough-like hands, leaned back in her chair, causing a few squeaks and creeks, and looked up as if watching their past and relaying the events to me.

  "Well, lets see… I taught at the elementary school, fourth grade for most of my time, fifth my last few years. Finally retired about the same time they started pumpin’ computers into every room. I figured that was my sign. Students didn’t want to learn from some fat lady scribblin’ on a blackboard with chalk any more. Alls they wanna do is go on that Internet. I didn’t mind though, the worlds moving on, it’ll do the same to you one day."

  I swallowed my last bit of egg and sipped my coffee. I picked up my second piece of toast. My world has moved on, I thought. My worlds buried six feet under the ground.

  Minnie kept going.

  "And Ralph, well Ralph worked as a Sheriff’s deputy for a few years longer after I retired. I think he worked longer than he should have, s’why he had the heart attack a few years ago."

  I looked up, about to offer some required "Oh no," or "that’s terrible," that people are supposed to say at conversation points like that, but Minnie held up a hand quickly.

  "But don’t you worry. Was just a tiny little thing. Even drove himself to the hospital, that idiot." She giggled and her multiple chins danced a bit. Irony had scored again that morning with the fact that it was Ralph who had had the heart attack instead of the squishy woman who was before me.

  "Ralph loved his job though, and he was good at it. Jacob’s Bluff is a small, quiet town, in case you haven’t noticed yet. And the crime rate has always been just as small. But regardless, there wasn’t a single robbery or act of vandalism, bar fight or traffic mishap that Ralph wasn’t a part of during his time on duty. He always got things sorted out, he just sorta had a knack for it."

  I nodded. I had finished my food and was still hungry.

  "What do you do, Dan?"

  I had thought of the answer to this question long before I even pulled out of my driveway back in Hillston. I wanted this to be a trip of anonymity, a trip to just get away from my old life and start anew. If people recognized me, fine
, nothing I could do about that. But if they didn’t, well, there was no sense in stirring up any unwanted conversations.

  "I’m a consultant." It was the crown jewel of an open-ended answer; one that said it all and at the same time said nothing.

  Either satisfied with the answer, or simply not one to pry, Minnie got up from the table--a feat not without effort--and grabbed my plate.

  "I’ll make you some more eggs," she said. "You’re too skinny for a young man your age."

  I didn’t protest. One thing was for certain about Ralph and Minnie; they definitely had no shame in expressing themselves.

  Minnie made me two more eggs--just as delicious as the first two--and we made small talk a little while longer while I ate. When I was done, I thanked her for the food, assuring her that it beat the pants off what they are passing off as breakfast at some of the other places I’d stayed in the past, and then politely excused myself to go upstairs and get my things so I could hit the road. While I had been eating I never noticed the huge black mass of clouds that were appearing on the horizon.

  I heard the first clap of thunder in the bathroom while I was retrieving the tube of toothpaste I had mistakenly left behind from my visit earlier that morning. I ignored it, telling myself that there was no way there was another storm coming after the little hurricane we had had the night before.

  When I looked out the window in the bedroom, though, there was no ignoring it. The sky that had been brightly lit only a short hour ago was now depressing shades of gray and black with no sun in sight. A bolt of lightening struck off in the distance and I cursed under my breath.

  A phone rang twice somewhere and that made me remember my cell phone. It had been off for most of my trip, and I was just fine with that, thank you, but a little bit of reason seemed to have been injected in me at some point the previous night and that morning I realized that there were probably some people that were going to need to talk to me eventually, and I them, and I should at least give them the benefit of screening their calls. I found my cell in my suitcase and powered it on. I had seven voicemails waiting. I stuck the phone into my shorts. I’d deal with the voicemails later, I thought.

  With my bag packed and everything accounted for, I went out in the hall and headed down the stairs.

  I had just reached the bottom step when I heard Ralph’s voice coming from the kitchen.

  "Ok…Ok. Thanks, Al. Good lookin’ out. I’ll be talkin’ with you later. You still thinking of helping me paint the barn?" He waited. "Sounds good. Bye, Al."

  He started walking towards the stairs and yelled, "Da--, Oh…There you are. Thought you were still upstairs."

  I smiled. "Nope, here I am." I reached into my back pocket for my wallet, meaning to pay him for my stay.

  "Uh, Dan, you might want to hold off on checkin’ out for a bit."

  "Really, I should get going."

  "I’m afraid I can’t let you do that right now. Well… of course I can’t stop ya if you mean to go, but you see that storm coming out there?" He pointed back to the kitchen and I guess out the windows. "That there’s a pretty bad storm, says the weather folks. My friend Al just told me he’s heard that they’re sayin’ might be few twisters touchin’ down around the area. If you don’t absolutely need to get goin’ right this here moment, I really wish you’d stay till the storm passes. I’d hate for something to happen to ya, honest I would. Ain’t no conditions to be driving in."

  I remember thinking, Did he just say twisters? People really refer to tornados as actual twisters? I wasn’t in Kansas anymore…although maybe that’s a bad joke, given the circumstances we had on hand.

  I sat my bag down and walked down the hall past Ralph, into the kitchen and stopped to look out the windows. The black clouds were getting much closer and the wind had picked up a great deal, shaking the house now and then with whistling gusts.

  Minnie, who was still sitting at the table where I’d left her, a new cup of coffee and some sort of pastry in front of her said, "Ralph and I been through these things time and time again. You’ll be safe here with us. Trust me. Gonna take more than a little storm to blow us away."

  I imagined it would take quite a lot to blow Minnie anywhere. I sighed. I didn’t have anywhere to go was the truth of the matter, and judging by the weather outside and the stares of the people inside, what choice did I have?

  "Well," I said. "I hope you two don’t mind a little company for the day."

  They spoke in unison. "Don’t mind at all."

  Chapter 15

  I don’t know if the location had anything to do with it. If there hadn’t been the storm and I would have been able to leave Jacob’s Bluff as planned and head off to my next unknown stop would I have done what I did? Who knows? But I’ve grown all too tired of thinking about the what-ifs of life. Ralph was right, though. If I had started to drive away that morning it would have been a matter of minutes before I would have been pulled over on the side of the road, or worse, maybe slammed into a ditch, wishing I had never left The Sanderson Homestead.

  The storm hit quickly, and it hit mercilessly.

  Ralph asked if I’d help him with some things real quick before it was too late. I agreed of course and was actually kind of amused at what I discovered. The shutters on Ralph and Minnie’s house actually shut, offering the windows some protection from strong winds and flying objects that might be carried by said winds. I had to chuckle a little, where I came from shutters were unmoving objects and merely decorations, put in place to add some color, or simply because a window appeared unusual without a shutter beside it, like an eye without an eyebrow. Whether Ralph’s shutters where real shutters because of the age of his house, obviously built back in a time when people focused more on function than fancy, or because out in Oklahoma twisters--I still feel like Uncle Henry from The Wizard of Oz when I say that--were a hell of a lot more likely than way back in Virginia, it was a first for me.

  Once all the shutters were safely secured, Ralph said that I could pull my Jeep into his barn, to keep it from possibly being damaged. I jumped in the driver’s seat and Ralph started up his Oldsmobile sedan that was parked around the back of the house, and we drove through the back yard and up to the barn.

  The barn was much larger up close that I had originally thought it to be looking out from the kitchen. Ralph got out to open both the doors, making more than enough room for somebody to drive a car through, and then got back in his car and pulled forward. I followed right behind him. Inside the barn was huge and open, like a large concert hall. There was a tractor in one corner and some stalls where horses might have been kept at one time, only now they were deserted. But I’ll touch more on the barn later.

  We started back towards the house and a deafening boom of thunder caused us to both pick up the pace a little. The ominous clouds were right above us now and we just reached the back door to the house when the rain started. It came down fast and hard, not bothering with any drizzling foreplay.

  All three of us stared out the tiny window on the back door, looking at everything through the blur of the wind and rain. Strong gusts would slam drops into the glass making a loud and sudden SPLAT noise and I jumped a little each time. It took me a little bit to realize that I was the only one still standing by the door and I found Ralph and Minnie down the hall a ways in the living room. It looked much like the so-called lobby I had seen the night before, only larger and more relaxing. Minnie sat in a recliner on the left, Ralph in one on the right. A small table in-between the two. There was a coffee table in front of them and a large High Definition television mounted on the wall that looked terribly out of place, as if it was sent from the future back to a simpler time.

  "I’ve got almost every season of M*A*S*H on Blu-Ray," Ralph said, a grin on his face. I was stunned for two reasons: first because I don’t at all see the merit of watching M*A*S*H in high-definition. And second because not only did Ralph know the phrase "Blu-Ray" at his age, but he actually owned it.

  "Plus
I’ve got the MLB package through my satellite. I never miss a Yankee game."

  I could only nod my head.

  "I’ve got everything unplugged right now though, ‘case of lightenin’. You play chess?"

  I did play chess. So I pulled up a chair from the kitchen while Ralph set up the game board on the coffee table. The first game was over quick, my chess skills being a little rusty. The second game took much longer, each of us taking our time and thinking about our next moves, all while the sounds of nature's fury screamed outside. A few times it sounded like something big and heavy was thrown against the house. I jumped up the first time, nearly knocking over the pieces on the board.

  "Don’t worry," Minnie said, looking up from the scarf she was knitting and speaking with a mouthful of potato chips, "always sounds worse than it is."

  I sat back down and finished the game. Ralph got me in checkmate right about the same time the storm was headed out of town.

  By the time the rain fully stopped and Ralph deemed it safe to call the storm over it was early in the afternoon. Minnie made us some sandwiches while I helped Ralph go around and open the shutters. From what I saw while walking around the house everything looked pretty much just like it had before the storm hit, with the exception of everything being freshly wet, and there were a few shingles strewn about the back yard. Ralph collected these and looked up to the roof. "Just add these to the pile I guess. I keep meanin’ to get up there and replace the missing ones. But hell, if the worst damage I gotta worry about is a few missing shingles, I can live with that." He then went on to explain that up on their hilltop, he and Minnie never really had any trouble with the storms. None of the tornadoes had ever gotten to close, and the worst they had was lightening strike the barn one time, but Ralph had fixed it up good as new.