Ashlyn's Radio Read online

  And for the first time since she got here, as she dried off the last wide spoon and lined the cutlery up in the drawer and Maudette wiped down the table, Ashlyn felt the stirring of real affection for the old woman.

  “So was Mom here when you started breeding Airedales?” Ashlyn asked. It was as good of a conversation starter as any.

  Maudette straightened, a little surprised at the question.

  “Your mother never told you?”

  “No,” Ashlyn said.

  Maudette nodded, a little sadly.

  “She talked about you though, Maudette. And her dad and the Junction and things like that. It wasn’t as if—”

  “No,” Maudette cut in. “Leslie was gone to Toronto when I got my first Airedales. I’d always wanted a dog. My late husband was allergic to all animal dander. So I didn’t get Tippy-girl and Towzer — those were my first two — until after Oscar died.”

  Maudette sat at the table. She folded the dishcloth and set it down in front of her.

  Ashlyn closed the utensil drawer and wiped her hands on the dishcloth before hooking it onto the stove. Then, drawing just the smallest of breaths, she sat down with Maudette Caverhill.

  “Do you like it here?” Ashlyn asked her. “Do you like Prescott Junction?”

  Maudette shrugged. “Well enough, I guess. I’ve been here all my life. In this very house, in fact. When my older brother was killed in the war — that was the big one, WW2 — it was just my mother and me. I was only five then, but still, I knew…. My mother wasn’t … she wasn’t a well woman. I stayed with her all her life. I only married Oscar when he agreed to move in here with us. He wasn’t from the Junction originally, but from Bangor. He was a bank inspector, always good and tight with money, and I was a cashier at Prescott Junction First Trust. Funny how often that little bank got inspected after Oscar caught my eye.” She chuckled warmly, and Ashlyn liked the way that sounded. “It wasn’t young love. Heck, I was thirty when we married; thirty-five when your mother came along. And Oscar was five years older than me! But it was good love. We kept to ourselves. Kept to my poor mother too, of course, until she passed away. But we had a happy life. We had picnics out under the oak tree, the one just past the kennels. And we both loved fishing — I could outfish him any day. Oscar was a wonderful cook, and every Sunday he fixed up the nicest dinners while I went off to church. And sometimes we’d dance. Right there in the living room. We both liked the same kind of music—”

  “From the war era, right?” Ashlyn offered. “I hear you playing that music some nights. Upbeat songs about boys going over there, marching home, boarding the—”

  “No!”

  Ashlyn’s gaze flew to her grandmother, whose face had drained of all color. The old woman’s eyes grew moist and wide and she stared terrified at Ashlyn.

  “You don’t….” Maudette wet her trembling lips. “You don’t hear anything.”

  “Oh, but I do. I know I hear music. Scratchy and old, like it’s coming from one of those old-fashioned Gramophones, but I do hear it, Maudette.”

  “You have to stay in bed at night, Ashlyn. No matter what you … think you hear. Everyone does in Prescott Junction. We all have to.”

  “Oh, not that again!” Ashlyn flared. “We all have to stay in bed? Are you freakin’ kidding me? Since when did I sign up for this Podunk Junction collective?” She felt the anger like tightening bands around her chest. Just when she thought she might be getting a bit close to the old lady, just when she was really trying, the old bat had to go and say something crazy again. “This is just stupid!”

  Maudette’s lips tightened and she turned away. “There are things you don’t understand, Ashlyn Caverhill.”

  “And there are things I do understand, Maudette Caverhill. And one is that you’re hiding something. No wonder Mom couldn’t wait to get out of here the minute she turned eighteen! No wonder she never came back for so many years! And the one time she does, she ends up….”

  Ashlyn couldn’t go there. She was sorry she’d taken it as far as she had. But there was no going back now. “I’ll … I’ll be out of here as soon as I can too. As soon as I turn eighteen.” Ashlyn stormed from the kitchen and raced for her bedroom.

  Over the pounding of her feet on the stair treads and the thudding of her pulse in her ears, Ashlyn heard her grandmother’s sad reply. “Well, I guess that would be best.”

  God, her own grandmother wanted her gone!

  Well, she couldn’t wish it half as much as Ashlyn did. Not a fraction as much.

  Her own tears made her even angrier as she slammed the bedroom door. She did hear music at night. And she did hear those trains.

  Stay in bed?

  “Like hell,” she grated.

  Then and there, she decided that the next time she heard that music playing, or that train whistle blowing, the very last thing that she would do was stay in bed.

  But somehow as she made this resolution, she felt a warning chill shudder across her shoulders. The wind picked up and thin branches tap-tapped against her window, as if they too wanted to join in the ominous warning.

  Chapter 3

  ASHLYN DIDN’T SPEAK TO her grandmother the rest of the evening. And apparently Maudette Caverhill had a stubborn streak just as wide as Ashlyn’s, for the old woman wasn’t exactly thumping up the stairs to make amends herself. By the time Ashlyn came down for breakfast the next morning, exhausted from a crappy night’s sleep, her grandmother was already outside with her Airedales.

  Huh. Showed where she fit in the scheme of things.

  Except when she turned to the cupboard to dig out some cold cereal for breakfast, she saw there was crisp bacon fried up and left in the pan with some home fries — her favorite — and her lunch sat in a bag on the counter.

  Dammit, why’d Maudette have to go and do that? It was hard to resent someone when they did thoughtful stuff for you.

  Hard, but not impossible.

  As she ate her breakfast alone, Ashlyn managed to work up a good head of righteous indignation again. All she had to do was think about how unfair this whole stupid situation was, getting stuck here in the outback of the outback of Maine. God, she missed her friends. Zoey and Cordell and Hoopz. She missed noise and smog and the smell of the city and yes, even the bone-chilling wind that blew in off Lake Ontario.

  Unable to swallow past the lump in her throat, she pushed her plate away.

  The rest of the day didn’t go any better. Mr. Maggs really was a dick. A dick who apparently delighted in singling out the least capable students for the hardest questions, thereby publicly embarrassing them. He tried it with Ashlyn, testing her, his avid eyes betraying his sadistic hope that she’d flub it. A hope that had a pretty good chance of being realized. Math was not her strongest subject. Fortunately, it was a geometry problem. When Maggs called her to the board, she’d killed it. Much to his chagrin. With any luck, it would take him a while to figure out he’d just been unlucky with his choice of pitch, lobbing a soft one right into her wheelhouse. Her admittedly limited wheelhouse. Until then, maybe he’d leave her alone.

  The English teacher turned out to be a sub, so that class, which she was kinda sorta looking forward to, sucked. They didn’t even discuss the first act of Othello. The substitute teacher, who looked barely old enough to be out of high school herself, instructed everyone to just read quietly to yourselves. Then she spent the period sweating and watching the clock while the kids yakked with each other, painted their nails or listened to their iPods.

  At noon hour, Ashlyn opted to take her bag lunch outside, rather than go through that whole cafeteria dance of where-shall-the-new-girl-sit. She chose the empty bleachers out by the football field, but that proved to be a mistake. A jock wandered over.

  Brian Caldwell. He wasn’t so bad looking, but definitely not Ashlyn’s type. A little too much testosterone, as evidence by the high face and aggressive square chin. Besides which, he always reeked of booze. He sat two seats behind her in math class, and she
could smell it from there.

  “Hey, Ashlyn,” Brian said thickly. His smile looked painfully wide and his breath carried an odd combination of beer and breath mints.

  “Hi.” Zero encouragement. Short and sweet answers. That was the plan.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  Well, it was overcast and damp, but to answer correctly would have required more than the monosyllabic response she was determined to give. “Yep.”

  “Ashlyn, how’d you like to go to the fall formal with me?” Still smiling, drunkenly, Brian nodded as if it were now a done deal. “I’ll pick you up at six.”

  She wanted to scream, “What’s wrong with you? I don’t know you from Jason-freaking-Voorhees, for God’s sake! Why would I want to go to a dance with you? Why would I want to go to a stupid dance, period?” Instead, she took a deep breath and declined, politely but firmly. The absolute last thing on her mind was dating. She was here to put in her last year of school, just killing time until she could make her own choices. Whereupon she would choose to get the hell out outta here.

  “Bitch!” he spat, then stormed away, red-faced.

  Even detention after school was non-eventful. Oddly, that was the part of the day Ashlyn had been most anticipating. But Rachel was like a whole different person, sullen, too quiet. And she looked like hell, like she hadn’t slept since yesterday. Her face was pale and the dark circles under her eyes were deep. She’d missed morning classes and Ashlyn had thought she’d maybe just overslept, but clearly that wasn’t the reason. Even when Mr. Berg left the detention room to meet Ms. Degagne, the librarian, in the hallway, Rachel didn’t turn around to talk, didn’t even smile across the room. Not even when Ashlyn offered a smile.

  By the time Ashlyn walked home alone along the tracks, she saw no one, not even the Caldwell boys, thanks to the after school detention. Which was just as well. Despite that small mercy, Ashlyn was tired and cranky and damn well fed up with Podunk Junction.

  And now she had to face her grandmother again.

  Maudette was in the kitchen when she walked in. Ashlyn let the screen door slam shut behind her.

  Maudette looked up from the paperwork she was doing at the kitchen table.

  “Hello, Ashlyn.”

  “’Lo.”

  “Dinner’s in the oven. Should be ready at five.”

  A pause while Ashlyn’s conscience wrestled with her carefully nursed indignation. Her conscience won. “Need help?”

  “No, got it under control.”

  “’Kay. I’ll be in my room.”

  With that scintillating exchange, Ashlyn climbed the stairs to her bedroom, threw her bookbag on the desk, and flopped herself down on the bed. She closed her eyes, and the first thing that impinged on her awareness was how fresh her room smelled. Experience having taught her how hot and stuffy the upstairs of the old house got in the afternoon, she’d left her window open a few inches this morning when she’d left for school. There was a gentle breeze coming in now. And with one hand over her flat stomach and the other over her tired eyes, Ashlyn lay back to try to enjoy the first real bit of peace she’d felt all day.

  The wind blew through the full trees out back, rattling the leaves on the oaks. The caw of a crow punctuated the rhythm every so often, and there was something about that call — it felt so right to the place. Oddly comforting. Ashlyn heard the happy bark of a couple of the dogs. Maudette could tell each dog by their bark, and swore they had distinctive ones — happy barks, stranger barks, hungry barks and even low lonesome barks, which Maudette would respond to by going out to the kennels just to sit and pat her dogs. Ashlyn, on the other hand, couldn’t yet tell one dog from the other, though she thought she could distinguish Lolly-Pup, a young female who’d taken a particular shine to Ashlyn. She could, however, certainly tell a dog’s angry bark from a friendly one. Like now. The dogs were barking delightedly.

  Ashlyn closed her eyes. Very soon, she felt herself dozing off. Felt that lovely pull of sleep as the breeze blew through the trees. The crows seemed to be calling for her to relax, and even the dogs’ happy whines and occasional woofs wove their way into a sleepy afternoon soundtrack. Then a deep male voice broke into her consciousness—

  What the heck?

  A joyful male laugh lifted up, carried on the breeze.

  Sleep forgotten, Ashlyn slid from the bed and crossed to the window.

  Situated at the back of the house, her bedroom overlooked the kennels, a fact she wasn’t too pleased about initially. (Hello? Dogs barked.) But today she was very, very grateful for the bedroom’s positioning.

  The dogs had all been turned out into the ginormous fenced dog run behind the kennels, and a young man strode through the area. The big Airedales bounded and jumped around him like he was a doggie Pied Piper, and Ashlyn knew how they felt. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. He’d peeled his shirt off in the afternoon heat, and though his muscled chest and torso suggested familiarity with physical work, he didn’t have the filled-in, bulked-up look of a full-grown man. His dark skin seemed to absorb the sunlight, and his laughter was like sunlight itself.

  But if he was a teenager, how come she hadn’t seen him at school? She was pretty certain she’d have noticed him. Towns didn’t come any WASPier than Podunk Junction. He’d stand out like a … well, like a black kid in a sea of white faces.

  As she watched, he drew a tennis ball out of a bag and threw it. Several dogs raced after it. Chuckling, he drew out another and another. Soon all the dogs were either racing after a ball or returning one. He praised the dogs when they returned a ball and rewarded them by throwing it again. And he laughed easily and often, clearly a fan of the breed’s innate silliness.

  Ashlyn found herself smiling. The pull to go down there and join him was incredibly powerful. So powerful, she instantly rejected it. When it came to guys, caution was advised.

  Besides, how would she pull that off smoothly? She never visited the kennels before supper. That after school/before supper period was her decompression time. To depart from her schedule now would be totally transparent. And for some reason, she didn’t want anyone — her grandmother included — to glimpse her feelings. She just wanted to hug this little buzz of awareness to herself and think about it.

  So instead of going down there, she contented herself with watching. For twenty minutes, he exercised the dogs. Then he disappeared into the roofed kennels, the Airedales hot on his heels. A short time later, probably after kenneling and feeding the dogs, he emerged through the barn’s front door, latching it behind him. Ashlyn’s eyes followed him as he crossed the backyard to a bicycle he’d left leaning up against the big oak that shaded the barn from the noon-day sun. She watched as he strapped a helmet on and threw a leg over the bike.

  Then he turned his face up to her window and smiled.

  Ashlyn released her grip on the window curtain and leapt back.

  Crap! She’d been caught.

  When she dared to peer out the window again, he was gone.

  Caden Williams. That’s what his name was.

  In their initially stilted conversation over supper, Ashlyn had asked casually who that was in the kennel earlier. Maudette told her his name, indicating she’d just hired him to help with the dogs. He was a high-school senior, like Ashlyn, she’d added. Which gave Ashlyn the perfect opportunity to remark that she’d never seen him at school. Maudette explained he was being home schooled by his professor father, who was here on sabbatical from NYU researching World War II troop trains. That’s what had brought the Williams family to Prescott Junction. Caden had come knocking on Maudette’s door a couple weeks back wanting to take pictures of her dogs. No charge, no scam. Please and thank you, ma’am. He was just an avid photographer who happened to love dogs. He’d brought the pictures over to show Maudette today and the two of them started talking. She’d wound up offering him a part-time job helping with the terriers in exchange for one of Lolly-Pup’s pups when she was bred in the spring.

  Ashl
yn figured that was a pretty good deal for both of them. A Caverhill Airedale was a valuable dog, and from what Ashlyn saw, Caden Williams was a hard worker. Competent. Kind to the dogs. Totally ripped too, but in that nice, lean way she liked….

  After dinner, it had taken a while to settle to her homework, but once she found her focus, she completely lost track of time. She was exhausted by the time she closed her book and changed into her pajamas. She only meant to put in a little extra time with Othello, but found herself going way beyond the assigned next act. It was midnight before she turned her light out. Sleep came to her easily, in that head-hitting-the-pillow kind of way. In no time at all Ashlyn was fast asleep — dreaming of city lights and her mother, blue balloons and waterfalls, howling dogs and dancing music — until she realized she wasn’t dreaming at all. At least not entirely.

  Her eyes shot open and Ashlyn was instantly awake. The dogs were howling beyond her open window, and she was hearing the music. Loud enough to wake her. But still not loud enough that she could easily make out the words.

  Ashlyn recalled her grandmother’s warning. You’re supposed to stay in bed at night, Ashlyn. Everyone does in Prescott Junction. We all have to.

  Then she recalled mumbling a few words of her own. “Are you freakin’ kidding me?”

  Ashlyn stood up and turned her light on. She walked to the door, expecting the music to sound louder there, but it didn’t. She moved around the room. There! By her bed. She glanced up at the tin cover on the wall where the stovepipe used to run though the house. Of course! The music was coming up from there. And the tune. My God! She knew that tune from — oh, wow, like kindergarten.

  Carefully, she removed the tin cover. And the sounds almost doubled in volume. The music crackled as if coming from ancient speakers or a very scratchy old record. Or both. And she could make out the lyrics now too, though they were strange to her.