Tailypo: Book One of the Tess Trilogy of the Sourwood Mountain Series

By Jenni Lorraine

She's been told time and again to stay out of the woods and away from the old mine, but eleven-year-old Tessie Rowe has an imagination bigger than her mother's back yard. Since she was old enough to read, she's done nothing but absorb information about monster lore from across the globe- and she's become

• Language: English
• Publisher: Primedia eLaunch LLC
• Release date: Feb 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088215456

Book preview

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

With love and dedication to my children.

To my childhood best friend, Stefanie.

And to childhood, itself.

May we always out-wit our monsters.

Prologue

The night before Mama killed Daddy, I laid awake in my room listening to the sound of the coyotes squalling across the creek bed. I had only just turned six years old and me and Mama and Daddy had been living in the Colby Holler house all of my little life. We were five miles outside of Adelaide, Virginia and night out there was as dark as blindness. That’s because it didn’t matter what window you looked out of, all you saw was trees in the daytime.. There wasn’t a neighbor  that me and Mama knew around for miles except for the Westpoole brothers across the creek, and that might as well have been ten thousand miles to me. We were at the end of a long red dirt road, buried back in the woods where God himself couldn’t have heard us cry for help.

You couldn’t see the red dirt that night, though. It was covered in a blanket of snow. It was mid-November and winter had come earlier than usual.

​The oldest of the brothers, Charlie, had been by the house earlier delivering half a deer he killed. To us, deer was a treat. Mama fed me mostly on squirrels and rabbits she caught in traps around the house and vegetables she pulled from the garden on account of the fact Daddy didn’t give her much money and we didn’t have a car or even a telephone. There was no way to call and ask for a ride to the store from anyone. It was 1990 and humanity was supposed to be empowered in a modern era of technology and forward thinking, but you wouldn’t have known it by meeting us. She and I hardly ever left our little property back then and that was by Daddy’s own design.

​He didn’t want her talking to anyone. He kept her black and blue. I should have already been in school by then, but I wasn’t. Some people from the county had come out to check and Daddy told them he’d put me in the next year- that I was too sickly to go just yet on account of having been born early, but it wasn’t true. I could have gone. I wanted to go. But, like with Mama, he couldn’t have me talking. God only knows what the long -term plan might have been for my education. Fortunately, he wasn’t home any more often than he was.

​That night, I ran to Mama’s room and crawled in the bed beside her. I told her I could hear howling out the window and it must be a werewolf or a changeling, like she’d read to me about in a book once. She chuckled at me and said there was no such thing. She reached over me to pull the curtain back from the window and show me the moon, which was just short of full. See? she said. It can’t be a werewolf. Even if they were real, it’s not the right time for them.

What about a real wolf? I asked. A big bad one!

She ran her hand over my back. Ain’t no wolves in Virginia but a lost and wanderin’ red wolf here or there, she said. If it was anything at all, it was likely a coyote, but it’s the wrong time of year for them to be out howling. Must be a mama that can’t find her pups. She’ll find them directly and hush up.

And I figured she was probably right. In my mind, she always was. Only now, I was worried about the poor mother coyote. Mama didn’t seem to hear her, but I could. Mama fell right back to sleep after she quit talking. I bet I was up half the night hearing that squall.

​Daddy came in the next morning with three dead coyotes in the back of his truck. He tossed them on the porch and was gloating about it as he walked in the house, carrying his shotgun and leaning it up against the kitchen wall. He said he’d shot them the day before and was going to have them skinned and mounted to hang up over the fireplace. Mama turned her nose up and he got mad and punched her a few times good and hard, then took off down the road into town. As soon as he left, she hauled those dead pups to the burn pile and lit it up.

​She stood there, all of five-foot-nothing and freckled from head to toe. Her red hair glowing against the blaze of that pile, she smiled over at me with her swelling lip. See how he likes that, she winked.

​He’s going to be madder ‘n hell when he gets back, I warned, twisting my own red hair through my fingers, wondering if it glowed the same as hers did. Everyone had always said I looked like her. We had hair and freckles the same, but I always thought she was prettier. I had a lot of my daddy in me- his crooked nose and his big old ears, but my heart wasn’t like his. It wasn’t like hers much, either, though. She was tougher than me. I was shy and scared of everything back then.

She told me to watch my mouth and that he could be as mad as he wanted to be, he’d have to just go ahead and kill her because she was not going to hang dead dogs up in her house.

​Mama was always a little bit like that- smart-mouthed, even when it didn’t do her any good. Granted, she wasn’t much older than I was.

​She was only fourteen when she had me and barely twenty at the time and Daddy was double her age. At thirteen, Mama was in a hurry to get out of her own mama’s house. I never did know much about those people other than they were from somewhere over in Kentucky and Mama never wanted to see them again. Daddy was twice divorced at thirty-three years old with kids he’d barely even looked at scattered all over the country, but when he told her he could take her to Georgia and marry her without her parents’ permission and she’d never have to go back to Kentucky, she thought she’d found her Happily Ever After.

A few years in the Virginia woods with a baby, though, and she’d learned a whole lot more about living than just trapping squirrels. But she also knew she was stuck again. She’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire and there wasn’t much of a way out.

​Everyone in town knew about the situation she was in, but everybody minded their own business, mostly. That is except Charlie. He’d come around once in a while with a half a deer he killed or a bag of flour he said he’d bought extra by mistake. She never let him in the house. She knew Daddy would kill them both if she ever did, but I knew enough even at six to know she and Charlie were smitten with one another. I could see it in the way she looked at him and even a child knows a man isn’t out buying extra groceries for the fun of it.

Charlie lived across the creek with his brother, Joel. And for as sweet and gentle as Charlie was, Joel was wild and loud.

Everyone in Adelaide was forced to drink at the same bar on account of the fact that the town wasn’t big enough to have two. A little dive named Rowdy’s was all there was and when Daddy left the house that day, he went straight over there. He had been there drinking all day, I’m sure, when Joel got done working and made his way in.

Daddy hated the Westpooles on account of a property dispute they’d had a few years before. I was just a baby when that happened and don’t know all the details. I just know that by the time they wound up in front of the judge, the Westpooles had made their case and Daddy wound up owing them a few thousand dollars that he settled up by offering his motorcycle to Joel in trade. They accepted and it pissed Daddy right off that he didn’t sell it for the money. Instead, Daddy got to see Joel ride that Harley up and down the red dirt a dozen times a week.

That redneck’s got more motorcycles and cars than he does sense, Daddy would grumble. And it was true. The Westpoole yard was full of other methods of transportation that Joel could have used instead of rubbing that bike in Daddy’s face. But he didn’t.

​Joel knew what he was doing and he loved it.

​Did you hear my Harley when I pulled up? he asked Daddy, settling himself up to the bar.

​I wasn’t there and am only recounting this from stories I’ve heard, of course, so I don’t know for sure what all happened after that except that it resulted in a screaming match where Joel called Daddy a worthless deadbeat and Daddy declared, You don’t know what you’re talking about! My wife and kid have a roof over their head. They eat!

​That’s when Joel countered back, Well you can thank my brother for that, and it was on. Fists flew and glass broke and then Daddy stormed out of the bar and got in his truck and headed back for the house.

​When I saw the truck coming down the road and it still being daylight, I knew he was mad about something. He never left the bar before dark unless it was to beat on Mama for this, that, or the other. I should have run inside to warn her, I suppose, but I did what I always did when he was acting scary and ran into the trees to hide. I was able to scoot down into a snow drift and laid there watching the house, shivering as I gazed through the billowing of my breath when he stomped up the front porch and swung the door open, hollering for her.

​I heard him call out for her. Jo! Where you at?

Mama was inside taking a bath when he went into the house. When he found her, he grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her into the hallway beating on her and kicking her. I could hear him outside, shouting, You fucking Charlie Westpoole, you bitch?

​She kept telling him no and yelling for him to stop. Then I heard him yell, Where the hell are my coyotes? What he hunts is good enough but what I hunt ain’t? Is that it?

​I remembered what she said.. He’ll have to just go on and kill me… and I knew I couldn’t let that happen to her. I grabbed up the biggest stick I could swing with my little arms and ran back into the house. I couldn’t see my mama’s face through all the blood and she was naked as the day she was born leaned up against the wall in the hallway, crying.  He was hovering over her grabbing her by the scalp trying to make her look at him as he yelled.

​I don’t know why- I guess in the spirit of the wildness I felt within me at that moment, I let out a coyote howl and swung that stick as hard as I could against the back of his skull. It was enough to startle him, but not much else. He let her go, though, and took off running after me and I ran out the back, letting the screen door slam shut behind me.

​I heard her yell again. Come back here! she said. Beat on me all you want, but leave her alone!

​I could tell he wasn’t listening to her, though. Even though he wasn’t saying anything to me, I could sense him behind me. I heard the crunch of his heavy boots through the snow and every hair on my little arms was standing straight up- aware, I guess, that a predator was on my heels.

​I circled the yard and ran back into the house through the front door where Mama stood in that hallway, still bloodied and naked. She’d grabbed the shotgun from the kitchen and I ran by her, right under her left elbow as she lifted the butstock of the gun to her shoulder. The next I heard was the blast.

​She blew a hole through the screen and blew him right off the front porch steps. He didn’t yell. He didn’t even groan. She walked out naked into the December snow to check on what she’d done. Her bloody footprints made a path across the frosted wood planks to the edge, where she leaned forward and watched for his breath.

​Tessie… I need you to do something for me, baby, she said over her shoulder.

​Yeah, Mama? I asked.

​She turned to me and as calmly as if she were asking me to check the mailbox, she said, Mama’s got to go get dressed. Head on up the road for me and get Charlie, if you would, please?

​And I did.

Chapter One

​Me and Mama were still living in the same house in the summer of 1995. Daddy’d been dead five years, leaving Mama the house and everything in it. She even got his old truck. She took back her old last name, though, and was going by Jo Bradley. She had tried to get my name changed to Tessie Bradley at the same time, but they told her it would be a