Resurrecting Anastasia

By Roberta Olsen Major

Emma is skating. She does her homework, puts in hours at her uncle's roller rink, and still hangs out with the same kids she's known since middle school. She's living in the present and ignoring the future—until, one stormy night, the past comes back to haunt her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wings ePress, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781590883778

Book preview

One

Emma

It was a dark and stormy night.

Okay, it wasn’t that dark, but it was definitely darker than it should have been at a little past five in the evening.

And yeah, five o’clock isn’t exactly night.

But it was definitely stormy.

Of course, stormy happens a lot around here. In fact, my Uncle Ray says Houston weather forecasters have the easiest job on the planet because it’s either as hot as hell and humid as all get out, or there’s thunder, lightning, flash floods and tornadoes—which any fool can see by just looking out the window.

And that’s exactly what I was doing on the aforementioned dark and stormy night.

Only it wasn’t exactly a window I was looking out either.

Uncle Ray is not a weather forecaster. He’s actually the owner of a roller skating rink called Rockin’ Roll. And he’s pretty mellow about everything except forces of nature.

I work for him after school on Thursdays and Fridays, and pretty much all day Saturday, wearing a dorky striped skate guard shirt, selling concessions, blowing the whistle at kids who are doing what old people tend to call horseplay, scrubbing wheel marks off walls, scraping gum off the hardwood floor, and whatever else Uncle Ray tells me to do. He says he likes having a sweet young thing to boss around. He says the sweet part because I’m his niece—and he likes to think sweetness runs in the family. Also, good looks. (He’s wrong on both counts.) But he’s got the bossing around part right. And I can’t exactly bad-mouth the boss behind his back because he’s my mother’s brother.

Nepotism has its drawbacks.

This particular day was Thursday, which is Family Day at the rink. But there was such a huge thunderstorm going on outside that the only family to show up for our reduced rates was Mrs. Ferguson and her five kids. Uncle Ray had already sent the other two skate guards, Jerry and Will, home, since we weren’t exactly swamped with customers.

Swamped. Ouch. Bad choice of words, considering the rain.

The window I was looking out was actually the two sets of front doors, which Uncle Ray had propped open in case the power went out.

Rockin’ Roll can be a scary place even with all the lights on—all those leering happy face posters and pictures of old dead singers like John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix stuck to the wall. Really old songs pour out of the speakers, sung by groups with weird names like Three Dog Night. As I said, it can be scary even with the lights on, but when the power goes out, as it does around here regularly during thunderstorms, it goes beyond scary.

Which is why I had just made another safety announcement over the sound system for the benefit of Mrs. Ferguson and her string of ducklings, to the effect that if the lights go out, stop skating immediately and sit down right where you are until the lights come back up.

Uncle Ray can’t stand the sight of blood any more than I can.

Anyway, it was a kind of dark and very stormy evening, and I was looking out the propped open doors and wishing we could just close early so I could finish my math homework in peace, when I saw a minivan slide into the rear of a really nice-looking pickup. The pickup shot into the ditch.

Uncle Ray, someone just had a wreck! I skated over to the open doors, but not outside since I didn’t want to get drenched. Besides which, Uncle Ray has an absolutely no skates in the parking lot rule.

Uncle Ray pushed his wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose and headed over to the doorway in his tie-dyed tee shirt, looking like an aging hippie—which, in fact, he is. Then he went straight for the phone to call the accident in to the police.

I saw someone get out of the mangled truck and someone else get out of the minivan.

The rain was coming down fast now. Grampa Reese would say it was raining cats and dogs.

But I wasn’t going to think about Grampa Reese. He was dead, and thinking about him still hurt, even after all these years. Some things you just don’t get over.

Is anyone hurt, Emma? Uncle Ray asked me.

The drivers got out. They look okay from here.

No, Uncle Ray said into the phone, doesn’t look like there are injuries. He finished his call and hung up, then started rummaging for his jacket.

You’re not going out there? I said.

Need to make sure everybody’s okay. He draped his jacket over his head and stepped out into the downpour.

Uncle Ray is like a lot of guys when it comes to umbrellas. He wouldn’t be caught dead with one. And in weather like this, death by drowning is always a possibility...

Rockin’ Roll is just down the street from the police station. It wasn’t long before a cruiser pulled up, lights flashing, just as Uncle Ray reached the drivers, and an officer in rain gear unfolded himself from the driver’s seat of the police car.

He joined the crowd and pulled out his little clipboard thing, which was, of course, soaked in seconds. I hoped the ink in his pen was waterproof.

Tow trucks started arriving right away. There were probably four of them within about sixty seconds of each other, like vultures circling around the carcass of some poor animal that didn’t quite make it across a highway.

I was sorry for the drivers, of course, but this was turning out to be the most exciting evening I’d had at work in a very long time. Kind of like reality TV without the TV. (Uncle Ray does keep a small television at the rink. He likes to follow the network news, even though it raises his blood pressure.)

Everything got figured out pretty quickly. Uncle Ray was back inside as soon as he saw that nobody was hurt.

You’re a witness, he told me, drying off with a faded towel from the stack he kept folded in the office. The fuzz will want to get your statement.

By the fuzz, Uncle Ray meant the patrolman.

My uncle is stuck in a time warp, so I know more about the early seventies than any sixteen-year-old girl on the planet has a right to know.

At least he didn’t say pig and start oinking, which has been known to happen.

He was right, though. The patrolman sloshed over to the front door of the rink and got me to identify myself, then asked me what I’d seen.

The minivan slammed right into that truck, I said. There wasn’t any place else for the truck to go but into the ditch. Is everybody really okay?

The patrolman nodded, jotted a few things down on his dripping clipboard then, after thanking me, ducked back out into the downpour.

The minivan driver got lucky, I guess. She got back into her van and drove away, a ticket from the policeman in her hand and a big scowl on her face.

The other driver wasn’t so lucky. I watched one of the tow trucks hitching up the mangled remains of the pickup—which was obviously headed off to its final resting place. Even CPR wasn’t going to bring that pickup back to life.

The pickup driver watched for a minute, then turned away as if it hurt to look. He glanced around then, spotted us and splashed over.

I couldn’t tell much about him at first, except that he was not a girl. The rain had plastered his hair to his scalp and his shirt was sticking to his chest. His voice, as he shoved hair, already beginning to curl, out of eyes that turned out to be brown, was nice. I was just rear-ended by a minivan full of Brownies, he said. Can I use your phone?

Brownies, I said. Yum.

Not that kind, Uncle Ray said as he handed the pickup driver another one of the old towels he keeps on hand. Usually, those towels are used for sopping up spills and the occasional puddle of barf. Uncle Ray almost always washes them between uses.

As the guy (who looked to be about my age) ran the towel over his head and face, our eyes met—and I shivered.

His eyes reminded me of someone. Someone who was dead.

NO, EMMA CAROLINE REESE, Scotty may not sleep over tonight.

But why, Mom?

Emma honey, you’re almost eight now. You and Scotty are getting too old for sleepovers.

Why?

Because Scotty is a boy and you are a girl, and boys and girls don’t have sleepovers together.

Why?

Because they just don’t.

But Mom—

How about a compromise?

What’s a compromise?

How about if we have Scotty over for videos and popcorn, then we drive him home at bedtime?

Please, Mom? Please? Please, please, please, can Scotty sleep over?

Videos or nothing, Emma. Take it or leave it.

Videos.

Good choice.

THANKS. THE PICKUP driver was a little drier now. He fidgeted with the wet towel like he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

Here. I took it from him.

Thanks, he said again.

I was still staring at him, especially his eyes. What is funny about that is that he was staring right back. This doesn’t usually happen with guys. I am not that interesting to look at, despite Uncle Ray’s comments to the contrary.

Not that I care. Having no social life is less complicated. Better.

Phone’s behind the counter, Uncle Ray broke in.

Right. The phone. Thanks. Still, he didn’t move. I’m Sam, he said to me.

Emma, I answered as I fumbled with the wet towel. He kind of smiled.

And then it happened. For just a second, it was like I recognized his smile.

Then it was just an ordinary smile again, from a nice-looking, soaking-wet stranger who wanted to use my uncle’s phone.

Sam headed toward the phone behind the concession stand just as there was yet another huge rumble of thunder. The lights flickered and went out. In the sudden darkness I could hear Mrs. Ferguson yelling at her kids to sit down. There was a little squeal or two and an oof as someone plowed into someone else, but I was pretty sure they were going to be okay. The way the Ferguson kids pound on each other all the time has toughened them up over the years—turning them into five calluses of graduating sizes. They’re pretty much held together by Band-Aids anyway.

Uh, Sam? I said.

Yeah, he said. Over here. I can’t find the phone.

Stay put, I said. I’m good in the dark.

When he chuckled, I caught how that sounded, and felt my face get hot.

I skated over to the counter by the very little bit of light coming in from the propped open doors and fumbled around until I got hold of Uncle Ray’s phone. It’s the old-fashioned rotary kind, in keeping with Raymond Gelber’s suspicion of technological advancements.

I’m kind of a technophobe myself, which proves Grampa Reese’s saying that the apple don’t fall far from the tree.

Anyway, a cordless phone would be useless with the power out. At least Uncle Ray’s old black desk model still had a dial tone, so there is something to be said for sticking to the basics.

I held it out to Sam. "Can