Taryn's Camera: Beginnings: Four Haunting Novellas by Patrick-Howard Rebecca

Author:Patrick-Howard, Rebecca [Patrick-Howard, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Mistletoe Press
Published: 2016-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Want to follow Taryn Magill’s adventures at the old house?

Check out Book 1 in Taryn’s Camera,

Windwood Farm

http://www.rebeccaphoward.net/windwood-farm.html

Stella

A Taryn’s Camera Prequel

* * *

Rebecca Patrick-Howard

Stella thought the night would never end. She hated everything about the night these days–being alone in her house with all its strange noises, the fact that it meant another day had gone by and another one was coming, the impenetrable darkness…

When she’d bought the house in the country with her husband two years ago the seclusion and quietness had promised to be peaceful. But then he died only two years later. A heart attack at sixty-five.

Now she was alone.

Bill had been gone for six months. It was the longest period of time Stella’s ever lived by herself. She’d gone straight from her parents’ house to Bill’s parents’ house where they’d lived for a year and a half at the beginning of their marriage. They’d been married forty-five years. She still wasn’t sure she knew how to live without him, or without anyone. She’d been taking care of someone all her life. She’d never not had someone there to depend on her, whether it was her frail father who’d suffered from severe arthritis and muscle weakness or, much later, her two daughters.

“Mother, I don’t understand why you want to live in this old thing by yourself,” her daughter, Millicent, had scolded her. She’d walked around the house the day after the funeral, her nose wrinkled in distaste at the creaky floorboards, peeling paint, and faint scent of dampness.

Sarah, her older daughter, had been more understanding. “Mother loves this house,” she’d chastised Millicent. “And Daddy did, too. He’d want her to stay here and enjoy it.”

She could’ve sold the house, moved in with Millicent in Nashville until she figured something else out, but Stella was stubborn. The pristine white farmhouse on twenty acres had been Bill’s dream. He’d wanted it so badly. It didn’t feel right to just give it up. Besides, her relationship with her daughter was strained at best. She’d stay there at the house on her own.

But she didn’t like it.

There were things in Stella’s house. She’d felt them the day they’d first walked through with the realtor. She’d known as soon as she walked through the front door that something wasn’t right, just by the way her skin prickled. Stella’s scent was strong but it was more than the home’s age and earthy setting that accosted her.

Stella scented death. Death and something else. Anger perhaps? A strange mix of anger and love.

It had unnerved her, that first walk through the rooms, but she’d tried to ignore it. Bill knew it was “the one” and she couldn’t ruin it for him. “Can’t you see it Stella,” he asked with excitement in his eyes. “Can’t you just see us out here on the porch, watching Taryn play in the yard? Maybe get some chickens! And that antique store in Murfreesboro? The sideboard? Wouldn’t it look great there in the entryway?”

She hadn’t been able to deny him, never could.

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