The Gatekeeper: Chapter One

Chapter One



“Your mother is still alive.”

He was joking.  It had to be a joke.  My mother had been dead for twelve years.  She’d died when I was only six years old.  It was impossible.  But Dr. Chester Fleming was never the kind of person to make up such an incredibly stunning lie.  He was a typically stoic, grey-haired country doctor who’d seen the worst things that life and death had to offer. 

“Dr. Fleming, that can’t be right.”  My voice sounded strangely hollow, the voice of a timid stranger.  Me, the courageous Sarah Brightman, who had fought day after day to keep an Indiana B & B from being swallowed by bank debts and a dozen other miserable setbacks, was frozen in shock.

The doctor had looked up at me and shook his head sadly, “I’m sorry, Sarah.  Your father told me just a few minutes before he passed.”

“That was three weeks ago.”  I replied.

“I had to get more information before I came to you with this, honey.  I wanted to be able to give you an address and her full name.”  He hesitated at this part, slid his glasses into the front pocket of his white shirt and shook his head again, “She’s been harder to track down than I first thought.”

“Track down?”  I couldn’t seem to catch up.

“She’s been in California for the last six years or so.”

A bitter lump had begun to form inside my chest and I pressed one hand against it, feeling the rapid beat of my heart underneath my cotton blouse.  No, no.  That couldn’t be right.  She was dead.  If what the doctor was saying was true, then that would mean she had left on purpose all those years ago.  That would mean she left to find something better.

“Your father wanted to tell you everything himself but he didn’t want his last days with you to be ruined by buried secrets.  He told me to give you this.”  He held out a small book, bound by fine brown leather and wrapped with a black cord of rawhide.

I didn’t take it.  After a long silence, he put the book on the table next to me and rose from his seat.

“I’m real sorry, Sarah.”

I heard the front screen door open and close again with a squeak and then his footsteps treading across the front porch and down the stairs.  The engine of his battered Pontiac roared to life.  I concentrated on the steady ticking of my father’s old wind-up clock that sat on the stone mantle of the fireplace.  Tick, tock.  Tick, tock.

A resounding crash and the splintering of glass from the kitchen startled me, pulling me back to the present with a wrenching clarity.  Apparently, some catastrophe had just occurred.  I heard Nellie’s quiet curse of frustration and then, “Sarah!  I need a little help here.”

Leaving the hateful brown book where the doctor placed it, I rose and went to resolve the issues going on in the kitchen.  I was running a business and there was no time to be sitting around feeling sorry for myself.  Or feeling abandoned by a mother or betrayed by a father’s lies.  The tears might come later.  But there was too much to do.  Back to work.



I’d just finished folding a load of towels when I heard a commotion going on out back.  It was growing very late.  Normally, I’d lock the doors, turn out the lights and head up to bed by eleven at night.  But our only guests, a New York couple by the name of Gregory and Sarah Purser had invited over a few acquaintances for dinner and they’d all lingered after dessert, the men smoking cigars on the front porch and the ladies gossiping over coffee.  I reluctantly tackled folding the towels to wait them out.  Nellie had offered to stay up and help, but I insisted she head up to bed.

Nellie had worked for our family for nearly twenty years.  She was a warm and pleasant companion in the kitchen, could bake the most wonderful pies, but had a terrible fear of most animals.  I had once seen her take a wide berth around Whiskers, my excessively lazy cat and glare at him as if he were planning her complete destruction.

She was the one who had brought up me and my younger sister, Katie.  When I fell off the back of our old horse, she was there with a comforting smile, a hug and a rag to clean the mud off my arms and hands.  She was there at night to read to us from our favorite books and press goodnight kisses on our weary young brows.

Even at five years old, she had me eagerly fetching things for Papa or digging up potatoes from our garden or snapping peas.  As we grew older and bigger, she taught us both the more difficult chores we would be expected to do around the inn.  She was patient and kind throughout our lessons and was the glue that held our routine together.  It only took a meaningful glance towards one of us and a jerk of her head towards the dining room to remind us that we had guests who needed tending.  This was often effective when Katie and I were fussing at each other.

“Miss Brightman!  Come quick!”  Our handyman Joe called from the back porch.

I hurried to the screen door and found Joe holding a bloody rag to the head of a stranger who was lying very still just outside the door.

“What happened?”  I knelt beside Joe and took the rag from him to examine the wound. 

“I’m not sure.  Found him by the road a few minutes ago.”  Joe took out his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his forehead, “He hasn’t said a word yet.”

“His head doesn’t look that bad, but you’d better call Dr. Fleming and have him come take a look.”  I said quietly, covering the shallow scalp cut again with the rag, “First help me bring him in, Joe.  We’ll put him in Papa’s room for now.”

Between the two of us, we managed to get him into the house and up the stairs.  I woke Nellie and explained the situation.  Before long, she was taking control, dealing out instructions and orders that were quickly followed by both myself and Joe.  The stranger was placed comfortably on Papa’s old bed; his soiled shoes and clothes removed and clean bedding covered him.

We tended to the stranger’s wound as best we could and waited for Dr. Fleming.  Nellie agreed that the cut didn’t look serious and headed downstairs to get some clean bandages antiseptic.  I sat on the edge of the bed, studying the stranger who was still inert and unresponsive.

The golden locks of hair that fell across his forehead and nearly down to his wide shoulders were unfashionably long and silky.  His face was pleasant but pale.  The bone structure was nearly feminine in its symmetry, but the three-day’s worth of beard proclaimed his male essence clearly.  His body was well-formed and I imagined him to be somewhere around twenty years old.  He seemed unusually thin and I called down to Nellie, asking her to heat up some broth for him, hoping that he would awaken and be able to eat something.

When I leaned forward to check his wound again, my arm brushed against his bare shoulder and I paused as some strange fog descended over me.  A heavy crushing weight seemed to be pulling me down, dragging me suddenly to a bone-chilling halt.  The room seemed to be growing darker.  My chest tightened and hazy haunting images rose up before me like some dreaded demons from the depths of hell.  These figures were pure pain, tortured, hopeless souls.  The fright sparked by these entities was something new to me and I cringed back in horror.

They were calling me in hopeless dreary tones.  Calling my name and pointing towards some distant scene that was somehow familiar to me, even through the panic and fear that seemed to consume me from within my own heart.  The moaning echoed around me, pining me down and holding me fast while my eyes desperately sought out some escape.

Then I saw it.  A field of green, one lone oak tree, several huge boulders and a fast-moving stream of clear water became solid things in this vision.  I focused on it, trying to push my fears behind me as the field became clear.  I knew every little facet of the meadow.  I knew that Canadian geese liked to congregate at the edge of the stream in the early fall.  I knew that the leaves of that tree turned an incredible shade of gold in late September.  I knew that the four huge boulders had strange symbols on them that you could only see if climbed to the top of each one.  I knew this place so well.

It was the north meadow and had been my favorite place when I was a child.  Situated about a half mile from the main guest house of the inn, it totaled about seven acres.  It had been a wonderful place for me as a child.  I’d climbed that tree.  I had waded in that stream and struggled mightily to the top of each of those strange rocks.  I had puzzled over the meaning of the symbols engraved on them.  I had curled up under that tree to read my favorite books and play with my doll.

When the vision released me, I found myself on the floor in Papa’s room and a pair of startling green eyes was staring down into mine.  Manly fingers were cupping my chin and the warmth of that contact was disconcerting, sending waves of pulsing heat through my face, neck and arms.  I flushed and forced my eyes away from him.  I’d never actually seen a man naked before.

“Are you alright?”  He asked, completely unfazed by the effect his lack of clothing was having on me.

“I’m…”  Sitting up made me dizzy and unable to finish my sentence but I had to move.  I struggled to get back my equilibrium and groaned when Nellie came rushing in, fussing about me being on the floor and the young man out of bed.

“Sarah, what in the world happened?  Get yourself back into bed, young man!  What are you thinking?”

I rose unsteadily and held onto the dresser across from the bed for support.  The stranger had retreated, climbing slowly back into the bed with a hand pressed to his head wound.  He groaned softly when he looked under the covers and discovered he had jumped out of bed without a stitch on him.

Embarrassed for him, I murmured “I didn’t see anything.”

He grinned a little, showing a row of perfect white teeth and shrugged, “My own fault if you did.  I’m Alex, by the way.”

“Alex.  Nice to meet you.”

“You too.  Sarah, right?”

I tried to busy myself with straightening the blankets on the bed, “Some people call me that but I prefer Sarah.”

Nellie shook her head and checked Alex’s head to see if it had started bleeding again.  Satisfied, she tucked the covers up around his shoulders and crossed her arms, “Young man, if you get out of that bed again before Dr. Fleming gets here, I’ll take a switch to you.  Head injuries can be very serious.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You understand me?  Is your hearing alright?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She shook her head again and motioned me out of the room before her with a waving hand, “Come on now, missy.  To bed with you, too.  It’s late.”

“But Dr. Fleming will be here soon.”  I protested, feeling like a little whining kid.

“And he certainly won’t want you wearing yourself out.  So go to bed and you can talk to our guest in the morning.”  She said, guiding me down the hall towards my room, “I’ll make sure that the Pursers get settled in for the night and lock everything up.”

She hesitated at my bedroom door and gave me a curious look, “What happened in there, hon?”

“I’m not sure.” 

She followed me into my room and sat down at my dressing table while I rummaged around for a pair of pajamas in my antique oak dresser.  I didn’t want to remember the vision.  It wasn’t just scary.  It was terrifying.   

I looked at myself in the polished mirror over the dresser.  There was some indefinable difference there somewhere.  My eyes were usually a pale blue shade but now they were bright with fear and confusion.  I wondered what Alex had thought of me, this strange young woman collapsing in front of him.  I probably looked like an idiot.  Looking in the mirror, I felt a little better that I’d been lucky enough to be blessed with long dark eyelashes and somewhat decent eyebrows that matched my light brown hair.  My hair fell to the middle of my back when I left it down, which wasn’t often because the weight of it was always ridiculously hot on my neck when I was cleaning or doing laundry.

“You going to be okay?”  Nellie asked, her kind eyes watching me with concern.

I felt my hands tremble slightly as I said, “When Dr. Fleming was here earlier, he told me something… Surprising.”

“What was that?”  I noticed the tiny flinch of surprise in her reflection in the mirror as she spoke.  My breath caught painfully in my throat as I realized that she’d known about my mother.  All this time.  All those long years, she knew that my mother was alive.  She too had said nothing.

It was too much.  Above everyone else in my life, I had trusted Nellie.  Desperate to maintain control of the emotional riptide pouring through me, I shrugged and pulled out a pair of soft cotton pajamas with little moons and stars printed on them, “He left me a journal.  I haven’t read any of it yet.”

After a few quiet moments, she came and pressed a gentle kiss on my cheek and went to the door with a frown on her face, “You get some rest.  We’ll talk more in the morning.”

“Okay.  Goodnight.”  She closed the door behind her and I turned back to the mirror.

My mind raced back to my conversation with Dr. Fleming and the pressure in the center of me grew heavier.  My throat ached as I remembered my mother.  I didn’t understand how a person could leave her own children on purpose.  A Mom was supposed to stick by her kids no matter what happened.  For so long, I’d believed that she had been parted from me by death.  Now I knew it was something far worse.  She had chosen to leave Papa and us girls.  She made the choice to abandon us and hadn’t tried to contact us in twelve years. 

Something broke apart inside me.  A huge chasm had opened up inside of me and I felt like I was drowning in darkness.  With my father dead and gone and my mother living her own life away from me by her own choice, I’d become an orphan. 

Tears slid down my cheeks as I pulled off my jeans and shirt.  The sobs didn’t fully erupt until after I had settled down into my bed with my head on my pillow.  I tried to keep them muffled so Nellie wouldn’t hear and come to check on me.  I didn’t want anyone to see me like this.  I felt like I’d been broken into a dozen pieces.  And I didn’t know how to put them back together.