Betwixt

Chapter One

Kate awoke with a start. The night was calm and quiet, and her sister Alexandra was still soundly asleep in the bed next to Kate's, a fact proven by the slow rising and falling of the patchwork quilt thrown haphazardly across the bed. Kate listened closely, but the only sound was the of the old wooden house creaking softly in the slight summer breeze. But Kaitlyn Jane Ellis had lived her entire thirteen years in the same house in the same tiny town, and with a view of the world no bigger than a few cornfields and some scattered wooden shacks, Kate could tell when something was amiss.

Then she heard it. A soft pounding, like metal hitting wood.

Kate slid silently out of bed, her bare feet landing on the worn rag rug her mother had made for her before she was even born, then onto the smooth oak floor. Her thin, faded cotton nightdress tickled her ankles as a cool breeze drifted in through an open window between the beds, making the grayed lace curtains wave like ghosts in the wind. Kate tiptoed out the door, skipping with trained feet over the creaky floorboards that lay between her door and the next down the hall. She peeked into the bedroom her three older sisters shared, but nothing seemed amiss. Three brunette heads lay on three white pillowcases on three wooden beds. Sarah's slippers were lined up neatly next to her bed, Anna's were kicked under the bedskirt, and only one of Caroline's was visible, thrown upside-down in the middle of her noticeably messier third of the bedroom.

Nothing seemed out of place. The room was the same way it had always been as long as Kate could remember. Changes were rare in Kate's hometown of Marion Springs, a town consisting of the Marion Springs general store on one end of the road and a rusty old pickup truck with the words "Now Leaving Marion Springs" painted on the driver's side door parked in Kate's friend Daniel's yard at the end of the road. So as Kate continued her tiptoed walk down the hallway, she felt a strange sense of excitement.

It wasn't the way she had felt when she, Alex, and Caroline had jumped off their barn roof into the snow, and it wasn't the way she had felt when their grumpy orange cat, Rosie, had had a litter of kittens the summer when Kate was nine. It was more the way she had felt when Daisy Halloway, Anna's best friend, had moved in across the road with her millions of glittery bracelets and sparkly eyeshadow and pink cell phone and a blue streak in her blonde hair. Something new, something Kate had never seen before. So as Kate turned the corner into the kitchen, it was excitement that filled her, not fear.

But the kitchen was as it always was, with the old white washbasin on the counter and the rack of pans hanging above the red stove that mama and papa had bought after their wedding. When Sarah had first told this story to Alex and Kate, Anna had joked that the stove had stuck around a lot longer than mom and dad had. Nobody thought Anna's joke was funny and now Kate couldn't look at the stove without thinking of her older sister's words.

Kate searched around in the dimly lit entryway for a moment for a stray pair of shoes, but after a moment of searching only resulting in Alex's way-too-small rubber boots, she gave up and swung open the wooden kitchen door, stepping out onto the cold, damp stepping-stone pathway with her bare feet. She turned to shut the door behind her, and as she turned back towards the moonlit lawn to survey the situation, she froze.

The doorway of the lean-to, which stood off to the side of the small barn where the girls stored an ancient snowmobile they used to haul groceries home from the store in the winter and some gardening tools, was propped open, This might not have seemed like something out of the ordinary, but the lean-to had been locked and bolted shut as long as Kate could remember. Sarah, Caroline, and even Anna had prefered to keep it that way, "It was mom's place", they'd always said. Alex and Kate had never questioned this- whenever Anna and Sarah had the same opinion, it must have good reason.

But now the shed's door was wide open, swaying slightly on its rusty hinges in the cool breeze. The soft banging sound that Kate had heard from her bedroom seemed to be coming from inside, but before she had a chance to investigate, the doorway of the shed was flooded with the glow of a flashlight beam. Kate ducked instinctively behind the overgrown shrub next to her front door, curling herself as compactly as she could against the house.

Kate could see her front yard through the bush, and as she continued watching the shed's doorway, a pair of feet emerged, illuminated in the pool of light cast downward. A pair of workboots still covered in wet, dark mud, with torn blue jeans tucked inside. Everything above the mysterious figure's knees was still obscured in darkness. Kate was frozen. She had no idea what was happening. This was the most scared she'd been in her entire life, but somewhere deep down inside her, where feelings grow and spread their flowering stems into hearts and brains, the roots of this new fear were watered by curiosity and excitement.

The figure stepped out into the yard, and, illuminated by the city's lone streetlight that stood across the road from Kate's house, the rest of the body was revealed. It was enough to make Kate's mind, already frostbitten with terror, positively freeze.

The figure was a woman, thin and tall like Anna and Sarah, with curly dark hair that wisped it's way down her back. Her skin was tan, and with her clothing consisting only of torn jeans, brown boots, and a faded flannel not unlike the one Kate often wore under her overalls, she could have been mistaken for half of the other women in Marion Springs. Except Kate knew every woman, man, child, and animal that had ever set foot into their town, and this woman was as unfamiliar to Kate as the ones that graced the pages of the magazines that Anna brought home from Daisy's.

The trees rustled in the wind, and the woman turned to look back at the shed. Her eyes wandered over the lawn until they fell upon the house, with its rippled glass windows and tin roof. Kate felt eyes rake over her hiding place, and she dared to glance upward through the bush to get a better look at the woman's face.

Her cinnamon skin was dotted with freckles dirt brown in color, not unlike the ones that danced their way over Kate's own upturned nose. Her eyes were green, something that struck Kate as familiar- those were the eyes of herself and her sisters, the same shade that greeted her each morning as she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the washbasin in the kitchen, the same emerald color she saw in Alex's eyes as she gave her her lunchbox in the schoolyard each day at noon, the color of green leaves in spring and green beans in fall. The shade of green that shone in the eyes of her mother in her parent's wedding picture hung above the fireplace.

Kate realized a moment too late that the pair of eyes was meeting her own. She stood to run, in which direction? Her paralyzed brain wasn't sure. She saw an expression of terror that likely mirrored her own crossed the woman's features, then one of confusion.

"Kaitlyn?" said the woman, in a voice that was simultaneously cinnamon-sweet like Sarah's, lilted like Caroline's, and silvery like Anna's.

The realization hit Kate like a fall out of Daniel's barn loft. But before she could call out, the woman was gone, running across the yard and down the road. Before Kate's mind had thawed enough to think of anything besides those striking green eyes and her name flowing from a voice both strikingly familiar and decidedly foreign, she heard the clanking rumble of an old truck starting, followed by the sound of it's hasty retreat down the gravel road.

Kate was on fire. There hadn't ever been this many thoughts in her mind at once, swirling around like sparks from the woodstove when a new log has been added. She jumped to her feet and threw open the door, running as fast as she could through the kitchen and down the hall to her older sisters' room. She ran over to the farthest bed, tripping over Caroline's slippers and a pile of laundry, and all but thorough herself on top of Sarah. Her eldest sister awoke immediately.

"Kate! What's the matter? Are you and Alex alright?" Caroline and Anna awoke at the commotion.

"Sarah!" panted Kate, still trying to catch her breath. "Sarah."

"What is it, Kate?" exclaimed Sarah frantically.

"Sarah," Kate repeated once more. "Sarah, mom was here. I saw mom."