See Me in My Dreams

By C.J. Mutch

Frustrated by the fact that since the accident that garnered her an orphan she had been plagued by visions that left the doctors and psychiatrist scratching their heads. While she had been told to ignore them, with time before she intended to head back to law school she had another idea. Rachel decided to let those visions lead her to what would assuredly give her the answers she needed to heal and possibly get on with her life. From the time she landed in the quaint little town of Gainsborough, a town she had never been to but had visited often, things had gotten out of control. The visions were now turning into a nightmarish late night walk abouts putting her into dangerous situations.

It was clear by the way people looked at Rachel that almost everyone in town was upset by the young girl's arrival but what they feared most assuredly was what they wanted hidden might be exposed. The same could not be said for Emily, the owner of the B&B, who wanted nothing more than to bring the towns sordid past out into the open but at the same time wanting to protect the young girl that she felt an immediate bond with. Ben, the town's young attorney’s chance meeting with Rachel had opened the old wounds of a mystery never solved but also brought hope to the possibility of laying his own ghosts to rest and finding new love. One by one the secrets would be revealed making it impossible to keep what was buried from surfacing. Page by page revealing that the only thing that is certain is that nothing is as it appears.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.J. Mutch
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781777678005

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Copyright © 2020 by C.J. Mutch

ISBN:978-1-7776780

This book is dedicated to all those who continued to go to work every day putting on a brave face to get the job done keeping people fed and stocked with the essentials needed to maintain daily lives. Especially the front-line workers that tirelessly gave of themselves whether it was in saving lives or holding the hands of those in their final hours as they lost their fight without family to comfort them. Writing this book helped me to escape my anxiety regarding the chaotic world that was out of control around me by throwing myself into its pages. I hope that it will give the reader that same sort of escape and also the realization that while I have had no formal writing experience the need for a diversion was my catalyst. I want to thank my daughters Alexis and Michelle for their patience throughout this journey with my many questions but alas you two are the experts and I appreciate you both. Also, thank you to Tracey for showing me that it was a journey worth taking. And last but not least my Uncle Joe my literary inspiration, you opened my world. 

Chapter 1.

Rachel was relieved to see the road sign that read, Gainsborough 30 miles. It had been a long drive for the 25-year old that had only been away from the city limits one other time, but this one had her driving through the night without stopping. She wasn't entirely sure making this trip alone had been the right choice, but really there was nobody else. It was the first week after the long September weekend and the traffic had been light just as she had suspected. She had packed all of her belongings, into her silver 2003 Mazda wagon, at least the ones that meant something to her, like her journal loaded with years of memories that she didn’t want forgotten over time.

She was a pretty girl with soft features, the kind that required no makeup to get her second looks, a natural beauty. She at times added a hint of blue to her long dark brown hair just to change things up, despite her over protective father's disappointment. Furthermore she had only a couple of times put some mascara on the long eyelashes that surrounded her large light blue eyes and that was all it took to have both men and women transfixed by her beauty. It was always apparent that her father was uncomfortable when they were out together and people would look her way. Rachel would just purse her full lips and crinkle her tiny turned up nose and look away. Rachel sometimes worried about how her father would adjust once she met that special someone. For as long as she could remember it had been just her and him, and he seemed to worry about her all the time. She was a petite girl but also strong and had trained for years at the local karate studio that had been owned by a friend of her fathers.

Rachel knew from the time she was a little girl that her father had once been a truck driver but had changed careers to be home with his daughter after her mother had died suddenly during childbirth. Rachel’s father Ronald had worked for the local post office for as long as she could remember, and she was glad that he was home with her every night, it would have most certainly been different had he still been driving. It was obvious to Rachel that even after all of those years her father struggled with the loss of his wife's untimely death. Special days and holidays always made him quiet, she wrote. One year on Mother's Day she asked him if they could go and visit her mother's grave and her father became enraged by her request. She had been only eleven at the time and wasn't sure if he had been upset with her or possibly God for taking his wife. He had reacted in that same manner when she asked permission to join the choir at a nearby church. As a result I will never bring either subject up again for fear of retribution, she had written in bold.

The writing she did was in a journal she had kept from the time she was a young girl. It was filled with stories of her mother that her father told her but also of good times with her dad that she wanted to remember. At lonely times she could go back and read them making her feel closer in some ways to the woman that had given her life but also the man that made her his priority. Her father had always been happy telling Rachel stories of how he met the woman of his dreams. He was twenty years old and had just narrowly avoided enlisting in the military. As hard as he had tried there had been no jobs of any substance to be had, Ron knew that if he didn't find something soon he would have had no other alternative but to join. A friend of his had an uncle that had just bought a small fleet of trucks and was looking for some ambitious young men to haul grain to the mill, for some neighbouring farmers. She recalled just how her father's blue eyes lit up every time he told the story. He had been driving all night back and forth to the Grain Mill just on the outskirts of a city. Rachel recalled that he had always neglected to mention the name of the city, but she didn't care, just seeing how happy that memory made him was all that mattered to her.

The Mill had been backed up, as it was harvest season, and he’d been so hungry he and his friend decided to leave their trucks, heading into town to grab an early lunch. He and his companion walked into a small diner and ordered a burger and fries along with a couple of milkshakes. It was the first week of September and the new school year had not yet started. He noticed at the booth in front of him a couple of young ladies, they were whispering and giggling and seemed to be looking back at him and his lunch buddy.

"He was transfixed", he confessed, "on the most beautiful brown eyes I’d ever seen." Rachel loved it when he told this story, it never ceased to put a glimmer in his blue eyes. She always made sure she leaned in when he told it, so he would know just how much it also meant hearing it.

"Hello," he had said with a wink and a smile in her direction. The girl cocked her head to one side smiling back at him, twirling her long brown locks around her finger. He took it upon himself to apologize for not inviting them to sit at their table but the fact that their clothes were soiled from farm dirt made them inappropriate company for two girls wearing pretty dresses. The girl in the booth sitting with her back to them turned and asked,

"Why don't you two boys sit on one side of the table, and we will come and sit on the other?" Ronald’s cheeks flushed, and he smiled at his daughter as he reminisced of just how easily the conversation had flowed over their lunch and just how much he felt a connection to this beautiful girl named Beverly. He'd admitted just how little of their first conversation he remembered due to the fact that he was hypnotized by that small turned up nose covered in sun kissed freckles and yes those large brown eyes. He was always quick to add that at one point Bev had winked at him and for a few seconds he had not been able to feel his feet. Ronald laughed when he told Rachel how angry his boss had been that his two new drivers had left their trucks for over four hours.

"When I said goodbye to her that day at the restaurant we had exchanged phone numbers". And as always he was quick to remind Rachel these were telephones that hung on the wall or sat on a table not the kind that people now carried with them everywhere. They had spent hours talking on the phone once Bev's parents went to bed.

I’m not saying it was okay to lie to her father. He said as if warning Rachel that none of that would be tolerated. Her father, a very strict baptist minister, would have never approved of his daughter's relationship with a boy that was older.

"Heck he would not have approved of any boy!" he told Rachel with a sly smile coming to his face. Rachel would read the words she had written as if they were a love story.

"Well, he exaggerated, she fell so deeply in love with me that I had to take every opportunity to see her, so as not to let her down". The truth was, Ronald was so in smitten with Beverly, that the more her father tried to keep the two of them apart the more they felt the need to be together. Beverly would cry at the fact that being together with the man she loved always meant she had to lie to her father, a man she respected but also feared. It had never been easy, especially when her father had been so involved with many people in the community. The fact that she was always being watched meant so much sneaking around and having to leave town just to be together, even for the shortest of times.

"Your mother was so beautiful and also so funny." Ronald had told Rachel. Despite the restriction they were dealing with there had been much laughter through tears. Beverly, who was wiser than her years had her own ideals about life and as much as she hated to admit it she felt her father's religious rules were outdated. Ron had conceded to his daughter that Bev had taught him to mature in many aspects and as far as he was concerned she was the best thing that ever happened to him. She wrote about the stories of long drives they would take in his souped up 1969 Chevy Nova and how Bev would sit right beside him, lay her head on his shoulder and let her bare feet dangle out the passenger side window. They would play music of the 80s, which was not allowed in the Reverends home. Bev would smile and say,

"My father's head must be exploding right now." While they would laugh about it, Ron could tell that it made her sad.

"We will never be able to bring our love into the open, Bev would cry. Ronald had tried many times to make Beverly see that it wasn’t natural for her father to act that way, but she would always say. He’s in control. They were young Ronald thought and someday when they were older things would be different.

"Summer was the best'' Ron had reminisced, Your mom filled the best picnic baskets! They had spent many hours at parks in neighbouring towns, near streams in out of the way wooded areas where they could laugh and run holding hands and just be in love.

"I always said someday we would head to California and walk along the ocean beaches, that was our dream," he reminisced. Rachel remembered how she cried when she wrote about her parents' marriage and how Shakespeare had nothing on them.

"We celebrated our one-year anniversary by eloping, your mom was only 18, and I was 21, but we knew we belonged to each other and no amount of time would change that." At this point Rachel always felt sad, she knew this is where things began to fall apart for her parents and his face would become somber. She knew that despite being married Bev had been too scared to leave her parents home or even tell them and as a result their union was a ceremony that only involved the two lovers but would never be known to those around them. Every time she read her words she remembered how with tears in his eyes he talked about just how beautiful she looked in her prom dress on their wedding day. She had bought a short veil to make it look matrimonial and had carried a small bouquet of white and yellow chrysanthemums infused with mature winter wheat.

"The wheat had been what had brought the two together in the first place and holding it tightly on the courthouse steps made her look the perfect autumn bride." He admitted.

Their honeymoon had been at a small hotel in a nearby college town where her parents believed that she and a couple of friends were checking on next winter’s curriculum. By Rachel's calculation she must have been conceived on their wedding night because the following June 1985 she was born. Ron was always somewhat melancholy when he talked about her mother's pregnancy as if for him, it had been the countdown to losing her. Rachel often wondered if when she was a small baby her father blamed her for her mother's death, however these days, it seemed at times he blamed himself. She thought about how difficult it must have been dealing with his loss and having to care for a newborn without anyone to help out. Sure there had been babysitters as she recalled but for the most part they had only had one another. Just me and my dad, she wrote, he has been such a caring man, I have always felt so secure, he is most certainly someone I could count on.

Now an orphan, she had heard over and over how lucky she was to be alive, she wondered if anyone of them knew what it felt like to really be alone. Rachel’s memory of the accident had been very vague. She remembered the tree that had come through the window leaving her the only survivor in the car. It had been the last entry she had made in her journal after the accident that caused her father’s death, along with. The fact that I had awoken from near death with no family to hold my hand had proven to me that my father had been telling the truth all of those years when he told me we really and truly had no one but each other. And that had reiterated the stories he’d told her years before about his own childhood. It had been a long but significant post in Rachel’s journal after all it was really the only thing she knew about her fathers roots. He had been an only child that had been adopted by his elderly grandparents when his mother had turned him over to the state in order to leave the country with her new boyfriend. His mother, barely seventeen when he was born wasn't equipped to care for a new baby. It wasn't until his grandfather's deathbed confession that this information came to light, along with the fact that she had even ever existed, had been all very shocking to him. Up until that day Ronald thought the man that lay gasping for his next breath was his father. Rachel remembered him telling her that he felt too sorry for his heartbroken grandmother to bring the subject up for fear it would push her over the edge. Rachel had written about the pain in his eyes when he had shared that story with her, and as a result never asked questions, just listened. She wondered if his mother leaving and his wife's untimely death had made him shy away from relationships with women.

As far back as Rachel remembered he had gone out on dates but never had he ever brought anyone home. He wasn't a plain looking man, his blond hair and piercing blue eyes made him unique. He wasn't overly tall at five foot eleven, but at the same time not short by any means. I had always hoped as a child that he would marry again and bring me someone that could be a mother figure. There had been times as a young teenage girl when she had talked with her friends' mothers about female issues not wanting to embarrass her father with questions that she felt he probably didn't know the answer to anyway. Once in a while Rachel would joke with him as he got ready to go out, asking if it was someone special, he would laugh and say she was his special girl. Her father had always been so good to her, making sure she had everything she needed and when on her 18th birthday he surprised her with a new car her friends were all jealous. Along with that generous gift he made it very clear that she was to go through a driver training course before she was able to get behind the wheel even though she had had her driver’s license for over a year.

They had lived in a nice house in the town of Plover mills but once Rachel had been released from the hospital, she found out that the house was a rental and the owners had packed up the Anderson's belongings after a month of not receiving rent and placed them in a storage container. Rachel had stayed with a few girlfriends in the months that followed, but was well aware by the time her father's will was read, she had to make some hard decisions. Her father had a $200,000 life insurance policy that had doubled because he had died in the accident. And while the money had helped, it was no compensation for her loss.

Rachel had always been careful with money, and had her sights set on a career in law, but after completing four years as an undergrad with the money her father had saved for her education, she began working as a Court Reporter at the Plover Mills Courthouse. It had always been her goal to save enough money to go to law school to finish her degree. She had almost enough money saved and had just had a conversation with her father about heading back in the fall. He had been so happy that she was going to follow that dream, that he had planned a special dinner where the two of them would celebrate. My dad was so happy when I told him that I would be heading back to school in the fall to finish my law degree. He said we are going to celebrate, and I told him we have so much to celebrate. I have asked him to keep Saturday open for a father daughter day and a surprise I have for him. That had been their last time together. She wiped the tears from her tired eyes thinking about what could have been as the faded welcome sign of Gainsborough came into view.

It was a cute little place that looked as though it was straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The main street was like a big circle of century buildings all surrounding a park directly across the street. The park garnered many statues and a very large white gazebo that was trimmed with mill work of a gingerbread design. Rachel brought her car to a stop in one of the many available spaces, and blew a puff of air through her lips sending her bangs floating through the air. That Gainsborough sign looked so familiar to her, she felt herself being flooded with anxiety as she looked around at a town that Rachel had never been to but since the accident had thought about often. I need something to eat, she thought to herself. She hadn't even considered stopping throughout the night and now as she exited the car her legs felt weak deprived of circulation. Rachel stretched as she watched a couple of children drive past on the bicycles. She remembered just how much fun she had as a child riding along trails with her father. She would tease him about having a hard time keeping up, and he would laugh and act as though he was going to fall. Likewise, she smiled at the memory, but was quickly reminded of his death by the distant cemetery that came into view.

It was a little after nine o'clock in the morning as she looked for signs of a restaurant where she might get something to eat. Crossing the street she could hear the busyness of the small town replicated in drills, hammering and the sound of school buses no doubt having just finished delivering their precious cargo. The town while small was bustling with people walking here and there and cars on their way too wherever. She raised her hand to visor her eyes against the bright morning September sunshine, to see if she could find somewhere to fill her stomach and use their facilities to empty her very full bladder. She took her phone out of her purse and decided maybe looking it up would be faster. She saw a couple messages from friends frantically wondering if she had made it to her destination that she knew she should answer.

You look lost said a voice from behind her. She turned looking up from her phone to see a tall but older lady looking in her direction.

I'm actually looking for a place to get some breakfast, and possibly a place to rest. she begged. A