Song of the Tree Hollow: Book One in the Verdant Souls Series Read online

  Song

  of the

  Tree Hollow

  by

  Karen Hugg

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

  --Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”

  Prologue

  1992

  Jeremy and Charlie rode their bikes in circles that summer day, bored by the neighborhood of clean streets and trimmed lawns and people washing cars, so they decided to explore the ravine. At the street’s dead end, it rose in a cloud of trees and dark mist. They parked by Mr. Holman’s house and walked the skinny trail down into the shaded woods, talking about strategies of their favorite video game. When they came to the trickling creek at the bottom, they took off their shoes and waded aimlessly as they skipped stones and turned over small logs to search for centipedes. Jeremy lobbed a huge rock in the water, smiling at the loud “plop” sound and giant splash. A crow landed on the branch of a tall tree. At the tree’s base, a triangular hole rose in the bark. Its inner blackness hovered like a ghost.

  “I dare you to go in there,” Charlie said. He often dared his friends to do what he called “legendary” stuff: jump off a garage roof, hold a hand over a lighter, enter a yard where a scary dog lived.

  Jeremy shrugged and slogged out of the creek. With wet feet, he climbed up the far bank and onto a flat area, stepping through sword ferns before crouching at the tree’s hollow. He batted away a clump of dried maple leaves and crawled inside.

  Charlie waited, his bare ankles frozen. After a minute, he called out. “What’s in there?”

  No answer.

  “What’s in there?”

  Charlie struggled over the slippery stones.

  The crow cawed.

  “What’s in there?” In a hurry, he struggled up the silty slope. “Jeremy!”

  Silence.

  He pushed through the ferns that grew to his waist.

  As he neared the hollow, his heart beat. The black hole blurred his vision.

  Jeremy popped out. “Look what I found.”

  A cassette player. The kind Charlie’s uncle had a few years ago, rectangular with the square buttons on the end and a silver speaker built in the top.

  “An old Panasonic,” Charlie said. “Does it work?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeremy hit the Play button. “The wheels aren’t turning.”

  “Maybe it needs new batteries.”

  “Maybe.” Jeremy hit the Eject button. The clear lid opened slowly. “It’s got a tape.”

  “What is it?”

  He read the long word, written in cursive, on the white label. “I don’t know. It’s weird.” He handed it to Charlie. Charlie tried to decipher the word but was stumped. “It’s like, in another language.”

  Jeremy hit the other buttons. They all seemed to work.

  “Let’s take it and see if it plays with new batteries,” Charlie said.

  Jeremy glanced around. The ravine’s slopes rose with trees and thick shrubs. The crow cocked its head, stared at him with one eye. “I guess we could. I doubt anyone is looking for it. It’s been here awhile.”

  The crow cawed.

  They went through the brush toward the creek. The water, inches deep, bubbled over the stones. Jeremy stepped in, holding the player under one arm. Charlie studied the weird word. Strange combination of letters. Nothing that made sense. If the word was in another language, that meant the music must be too. He tossed the tape. It spun around and landed by a log, in the crook of its curve, underneath the roll of bark.

  After the boys left the creek, they hiked to their bikes and rode to Charlie’s house. They never visited the ravine again but the tape lay in the nook of a log, protected from rain and wind, for years.

  Chapter 1

  2012

  On a chilly January afternoon, Vero Leclaire returned to her childhood home yearning to be a new person though who that person was she didn’t know. She only knew she’d rather forget the last two years. Graduate school hadn’t gone so well. She’d completed her classes and earned good grades but suffered egotistical professors and competitive classmates and complex projects whose minutiae overwhelmed her. She’d taken on a mountain of student loan debt. She and her boyfriend had broken up and now her mom, on that very day, had checked into rehab. As she paid the moving guy, really a distant friend with a van who’d hauled her clothes and bits of furniture from Corvallis to Seattle, she hoped her mom would straighten out her life. In the meantime, she’d take care of the house and their sweet old cat who was battling an infection.

  In recent weeks, Sophie had contracted a urinary tract infection and lost a lot of weight. Picking her up felt like picking up a tissue. She was listless and abnormally quiet. Vero dutifully squirted antibiotics in her throat and refilled her food bowl every few hours, snuggling Sophie with a warm blanket on the sofa. As she applied for jobs on her laptop, she noticed the ragdoll calico mostly slept and moaned under her breath. For two days, Vero thought little of the symptoms, expecting her to soon feel better. But on Sunday morning, Sophie disappeared.

  Vero couldn’t find her anywhere, not on the cat bed atop the piano, not on her mom’s sewing table, even the basement with its boxes of sheet music and ancient clothes. In her bedroom, she knelt on the floor and lifted the bed skirt. Sophie was crouched by the nightstand in the farthest, most enclosed corner. The black pupils of her green eyes were round and wary. “Sophie, come,” Vero said. The cat remained. After minutes of coaxing, Vero went around and slid her out. But once in Vero’s arms, Sophie didn’t respond to touch.

  In the afternoon, Vero gave Sophie her favorite wet food. Sophie ate a few bites and threw up in the dish. An hour later, she did it again. Despite offerings of fresh water, she refused to drink. Sophie hid for another two hours until Vero got worried and called the animal hospital.

  “Oh, that’s not good,” the vet tech said, “bring her in, like fast.”

  Those words startled her. She hurried to the basement, dug out the dusty crate and laid a towel inside. Sophie lumbered in without complaint and curled into a ball. Her eyes were tired slits. With no time to change from purple overalls, a long underwear shirt, and flowery rubber shoes, Vero locked the crate and hopped in her mom’s car. Britt’s sporty sedan accelerated easily and within 10 minutes, she arrived at the hospital. She hurried into the reception area where a vet tech in scrubs stood ready. The tech baby-talked at Sophie before taking her to the large examination room. As the door fell gently closed, Vero stood in a helpless huff, barely recognizing her empty arms, looking around for something to do.

  The Seattle Emergency Animal Hospital smelled like nothing and looked like less. The room waited quietly for visitors with bland yellow lamps and abstract paintings. Bamboo paneling covered the walls, beige rugs warmed the floor. Vero guessed the hospital didn’t want to stimulate already overly stimulated pet parents. She sat in an arm chair by a coffee table with two neatly fanned magazines, a New Yorker and Real Simple, both of which were too intense for her mood. One would reveal the injustices of the world, the other how poorly she’d organized her life. So, she stared at the gas fireplace, her stomach in a pinch.

  Her phone dinged. An email from her dad. Glad he’d replied to her request, she opened it. “Yes, my Veronique, I did have aviator sunglasses when you were a girl. Here’s the pic you were thinking of, plus a few others.” The snapshot showed Vero and her mom chasing her dad with squirt guns in Papy Jacques’s garden. Vero was ten-years-old, laughing, wearing a hot pink bathing suit. Britt,
had put Vero’s hair in a braided bun, just as she wore it now. Her dad, Luc, shielded his face with a hand, his chest skinny and tan, his sunglasses sprayed with water. Britt raised an arm in victory. She wore a sundress she’d made and macramé sandals.

  Vero smiled.

  The exam room door swung open and a doctor burst through.

  “Hi, Ms. Leclaire? Can you come with me?” The doctor, a squat lady with curly hair, square glasses, and a pink complexion, spoke with a Brooklyn accent. Her face was constricted, as if she’d bit into a rotten peach. “I don’t know what happened.”

  Vero stood. The doctor didn’t know what happened?

  She held out a hand, “I’m Doctor Zimmer.”

  They shook quickly.

  Vero’s eye caught the fireplace. The orange flames flashed and bounced, as if they might swallow her. The black void where they shot up and disappeared enlarged and shrank, like a breathing triangle. She shifted her eyes away from the void.

  “We finished her exam and she seemed okay,” Doctor Zimmer said, “but then she let out the most blood-curdling howl and went into cardiac arrest.”

  Vero blinked. Cardiac arrest.

  They hurried to the table, passing enormous kennels with big Labs and small kennels with woozy cats.

  “Cardiac arrest,” Vero said. Those words were foreign. The only time she’d heard them was by an actor or reporter on television. “Like a heart attack?”

  “Yes, but we revived her. She was gone for almost a minute but now she’s come to. Her heart rate’s slow and unfortunately not strong.”

  Cardiac arrest. The arresting of a cardiac, a heart. Her cat’s heart. Sophie, her cat, the cat she’d been given a month after that squirt gun fight with her parents.

  At the room’s center, a metal table stood with a white lamp overhead. Portable machines crowded around with blinking lights. Sophie was on her side, a folded towel beneath her, another wrapped against her back. She was already thin but with her little mane of black and tan hair somehow wet, she looked pathetic. A plastic mask covered her mouth and nose. Her torso struggled to rise and fall. Two young women in scrubs huddled. One pushed a vial of fluids into the IV on her leg and one monitored her heart rate. Sophie lay dazed, staring at nothingness.

  Vero’s heart collapsed. She hunched over. “Sophie, Sophie,” she squeaked. She touched her head, the smooth cold fur.

  A tiny black circle in Sophie’s green eye wiggled and swelled like an amoeba dancing.

  “I’m here,” she said, “Vero’s here.” Her voice caught in her throat. My cat died. She’s only twelve-years-old, she’s too young to die.

  Vero believed Sophia had always been a special cat. The runt of a litter who tended to stare off in dreamy ways and often gurgle in friendly conversation. Her fur was wispy, mottled in tan and black with white paws. A black splotch cloaked her eyes and nose. Against her tan fur, it resembled a Carnivale mask, which gave her an air of mystery and intrigue. With her light green eyes beaming from the mask and a dappled coat, she seemed created by a magical king with an enchanted paintbrush. Because of this regal beauty, her mom had suggested the name of a queen. Right now, Sophia did not seem like a queen, rather a sack of bones with matted fur, a cartoon cat that had fallen by accident in a toilet.

  “The exam went fine,” Doctor Zimmer said. Her voice wavered. “I mean, we turned her over and that’s when she let out the most desperate screech.” She shook her head a little. “We’re not sure why she collapsed.”

  Doctor Zimmer’s description pierced Vero’s chest. She wanted to leave with Sophie, right then and there. If she was going to die, she was going to die in her arms, quietly, at home.

  “We’d like to put her in an oxygen kennel to help her regain her functions. Giving her oxygen is critical.”

  Sophie’s pupils expanded and shrank, as if watching events the corporeal world couldn’t see.

  “Is this normal?” Vero pointed at her eyes.

  “That’s her brain readjusting to what’s going on. It’s common.”

  “Will she have brain damage?”

  “Hopefully not. But it’s too early to tell.”

  Vero stroked Sophie’s head.

  “Here, that’s in the way.” Zimmer took off the mask. “Hold this in front of her nose.” She gave Vero a small cube to hold by her nostrils.

  “We’ll have to keep her overnight,” Zimmer said. “But there is an extra cost for that and housing in the oxygen kennel.”

  Extra cost. She already had 25,000 dollars in student loan debt. But Sophie, her sweet Sophie… “Money isn’t an issue.”

  Sophie’s neck was so thin, Vero could lock her middle finger and thumb around it. She stared at the cat’s tiny triangular nose. After ten minutes, Doctor Zimmer suggested Vero leave so Sophie could rest.

  Vero didn’t want to leave.

  “When cats go into cardiac arrest it’s common they suffer it again within 48 hours. We want to monitor her until she’s stable.”

  With an ache, Vero took off her sweatshirt and gave it to the tech to put in Sophie’s kennel. She kissed the cat on the forehead and forced herself to turn and walk out of the room.

  In a daze, she drove home, telling herself she would see her cat again. She would survive the night. She had to. With a silly expectation that she could feel her love, Vero silently encouraged her to stay alive. She stopped at a red light, remembering how unexpected Sophie’s arrival had been. Vero was in fifth grade, her parents were together, barely. She often felt nervous coming home. Sometimes she’d walk in and Luc would be home early from work, yelling, “And you can’t accept me for who I am and what I’ve done!” But that day, she entered a quiet kitchen. Vero hung up her backpack, took off her shoes. She sat at the table, ready for the usual cheese and apple. Instead, Britt told her to close her eyes.

  “I have a surprise for you,” she said.

  Vero thought it would be a ukulele because she’d wanted a ukulele, but what her mom put in her arms wasn’t a piece of hard wood. It was furry and squishy. A kitten, six months old. The last of a litter a neighbor needed to give away. Sophie’s body radiated warmth and innocence, her eyes bright and otherworldly. She sank in the crook of Vero’s arm and fell instantly asleep, her soft paw pushing at her chest. That kitten would grow into a cat that saw her through the roughest times in her life: a tough middle school with bullies, her parents’ divorce, and most difficult of all, her mother’s alcohol problem.

  She pulled into the driveway and shut off the car, her eyes on the headlight beams in the dark. “At least she wasn’t an angry drunk.”

  Britt drank like a classy drunk, if there was such a thing. It started after she and Luc had divorced. While Vero struggled through eighth grade, Britt met other moms for “lunch,” which was a two-hour visit at the local café with bottles of chardonnay and salads. As those long lunches grew more frequent, she connected her cocktail hour to the lunch hours until, as Vero started college, she drank at whatever time she’d “had enough of this crap world.”

  Vero had missed what her mom called the “last two years of dump pit drinking” since she’d been in graduate school at Oregon State University. While Vero created landscape designs in a university-farm town, Britt reunited with Jeff, her high school flame, in Seattle. In her mind, Vero called him “lightswitch Jeff,” because one minute he’d be amazed and overjoyed by an obscure film or a spiced coffee and the next, diving into dark frustration and irritability. He’d once forced her and her mom to walk out of a fancy dinner at an expensive restaurant because the waiter had forgotten the side of broccolini he’d ordered. On his “On” days, he could be charming and funny, and thankfully, they were mostly “On,” at least when Vero was around.

  Britt’s final and worst drinking episode had happened a few weeks earlier on a lonely New Year’s Eve. Jeff had to fly to China on business and Britt and her friend Gail had gone to a party at the café. When the café closed at two, the owners called her a cab, but she didn’t take the c
ab, preferring to drive herself, and ended up with a DUI. It was that DUI, given to her by a police officer who’d been a boy she’d known 20 years ago, a boy Britt had knitted a baby blanket for, that shamed her into changing her life.

  At home, Vero sat at the kitchen table, staring at her phone in the dim. She had to call her. She’d want to know. But the news might worry her. Hesitant, Vero dialed the phone, waited through the rings. A wilted daisy, a hybrid she’d grown at school, sat in a vase of water. The bellis perennis petals sported a light pink color but the color often drained to white after a few days so it wasn’t a success. The failure felt like a reflection of her time at school. She’d finished her Masters in Landscape Design but couldn’t compete against the wealthier design students. She’d doubled her class load in spring and summer so she’d graduate in winter, to get it over with, and didn’t intend on participating in the June ceremony.

  “Hello?” a voice said.

  “Mom?”

  A breath. Ambient chatter. The phone died.

  Vero stared at the screen, waiting for an explanation, hit the button again. She twirled the daisy in her fingers, remembering the presentation of her final plan. Felicia, a young woman with glittery blue eyes and metallic blonde hair, had incorporated a reflecting pond, a night garden, and an oversized tropical garden with hardy palms and bananas into her design. The main feature of Vero’s was a series of arches made from wisteria, which as Carson, the handsomest guy in the program, pointed out didn’t make sense since the wisteria would grow too quickly to behave as an arch.

  He lectured her on how if she had built it as a tunnel, it would have been a brilliant choice, forming an interweaving path of lavender blooms. Vero hadn’t done that because it had been done before. She thought it too cliché. Her fellow students and teacher nodded in agreement with Carson. She stood there, in the shadow of the projection screen, trying to gain control of her breath, her face warm, her hands trembling.