#lasttimeon

Joanie's mother was usually imperturbable to the point where it was hard to get her attention. Now she flitted about the apartment  like a moth near a Christmas tree.

And Joanie couldn't believe her mother had asked Joanie for encouragement. "Mom, you look fine," she repeated. "Anyway, you said I could come over, and I had something important to talk about."

"Thank you dear. Now I'm sorry, but you'll have to go. I'll call you soon," her mother said. She was lashing the wall-mounted television with a feather duster now.

Joanie picked up her purse. "Who is this guy who's coming over, anyway?"

"Your mother still deserves to have a few secrets, dear."

To Joanie, that felt like the last straw. There just so many things they never talked about. "You always said your chili was special. You said we had to be careful who we gave it to. I thought that meant we should save it for people who were important to us."

"Oh, Joanie," her mother said. "You don't understand. The chili... it's like a gift."

"What do you put in the chili, Mom?"

Her mother dropped the duster and looked at Joanie directly for once. "He's in the building," she said. "You have to go now."

"I'm not leaving till we talk about this."

Her mother took a deep breath. "Joanie Gunderson, every one of us answers to a higher power. This is mine. I have protected you from this with every fiber of my being, and I'll be damned if I'll see you harmed now. I will call you tomorrow. But you have to leave now." With that, she opened the door.

Joanie stepped outside, slowly, trying to show with every move that she was serious about this even as she was being ushered out the door.

Then the building shook. She could hear footsteps on the stairs above her. Joanie went down half a landing, thinking she might be able to catch a glimpse of this mystery man who had made her mother so afraid.

But the flourescent lights in the stairwell flickered once, twice, and went out.

You're the Keeper, not me, Frank thought as he watched Carolyn dig a big spoon into the casserole dish. She heaped scalloped potatoes into a bowl and shoved it into the microwave, slammed the door and pressed Start, then turned to him in satisfaction.

"Can't have you going hungry," Carolyn said, ignoring the fact that he'd said he wasn't, that he just wanted to get out there and find out what the Walker wanted. But she was the Keeper, and he felt obliged to defer. She'd been the one who stayed to watch the Watcher and his kind.

He looked at a Wonder Woman figure on the glass coffee table in the living room. Carolyn' also been the one who married. Who moved on from the vigil without actually leaving.

Was that a thin layer of dust on the figure?

"Where are Gavin and the kids?" he asked. The house was quiet save for the hum of the microwave. Carolyn stared at the white bowl turning inside through the yellow-tinted window.

"What?"

"Gavin? The kids?"

"Oh, Gavin went to his mother and took the girls with him."

"Really? How long have they been gone?" He tried not to emphasize the last bit.

"A while. It's never been so quiet here, not since we moved in," she said. The farmhouse had been offered to her on the cheap by the elder Saunders before he passed away, something he inherited from a cousin. Both Frank and Carolyn regarded it as the town's way of saying thank you to their Keeper.

The microwave beeped and she yanked the bowl out, dropped it in front of him on the kitchen table. He raised his fork, then paused. "You know we have to go out there," he said. He could have been at the opening of that new fusion Aussie/Japanese place on Burnet Road.

"Dude, you just got here," Carolyn said. "Look, I admit it. It's lonely here without the girls around. And you haven't even been to see Aunt Edna yet. You know she's going to want to see you."

"I bet she's already heard I'm here?"

"Not from me."

"Well, I know how good her network is. I think Lizzie at the airport called her as soon as I was out of sight."

"There you go," she said. "Now you've got a time limit. You've gotta see her."

"Your letter said they were back. Does that not mean what I think it means?"

She'd pulled a cake mix out of the pantry and was staring at the instructions on the back of the box. "It's a problem, sure. I didn't know how quickly you'd get here, though, so I took a few steps. It'll hold for a few days.

He did want to see Edna. And he could tell Carolyn was wound like an old watch. He didn't want to be responsible for breaking any irreplaceable springs. "I could go see Edna right now if you've still got your bike," he said. There were still at least three hours of daylight left. "Then we could go to the Saunder farm tonight."

He was back to offering her trades, just like when they were kids. She looked up from the cake mix. "Deal," she said. He grinned, and headed out to the barn, texting Gavin a query on the way.

The old Indian wasn't as shiny as the last time he'd seen it, but someone was clearly taking care. He knew Gavin loved the old machine as much as Carolyn did. The motor purred into action easily.

When he got to the corner store at the crossing, he stopped and checked his phone. Gavin had replied. "I've been away for a month, yeah," Gavin wrote. "Didn't want to air dirty laundry but yeah, things aren't good right now."

Last time on Cryptid Keepers, Joanie decided to confront her mom, but when she arrived at her mother's downtown apartment...

"Mom?" Joanie asked. She'd never seen her mother so agitated. She was running the vacuum cleaner back and forth.

"He's coming to visit," her mother said. "You shouldn't be here, Joanie. I mean it. I don't want him to see you."

"You don't want WHO to see me?" Joanie asked, but her mother just dropped the vacuum cleaner and started fumbling with the stack of bills she usually kept on the kitchen table. She shoved them in a drawer.

"I haven't seen ...it's gotta be twenty years," she fretted. "Do you think I look all right?"

Right now, her mother mostly looked frantic. Her hair had a tumbleweed quality. But most of the time Joanie envied her mother her looks and vigor. She hardly seemed to have aged a day since Joanie finished high school.

Sure, she'd put on a little weight. Her mother had always eaten well. But the woman was remarkably well-preserved. Why hadn't Joanie ever noticed that before?

"They're back."  Seven times over the course of a decade they'd repulsed the Walker from the Woods. Five years since the last incursion. Frank'd thought they were free. That he was free.

"They're back." He'd had to pay almost twice as much for a nonstop ticket from Austin, but it was worth it. Carolyn was safe, at least. And now he could wait no longer.

"They're back, you said. When did you know?" He didn't ask how. He knew the signs as well as she did. Bloodstained bark on the windowsill. A cow gone missing. A child.

"It's different this time," Carolyn said. The drive from the airport had been long but she didn't take her eyes off the road now. Soon they would be in Seney. "There's hardly anyone left in town. You expect people to leave."

"But the trees are gone," he said. "How could the Walkers come back now, after all this time?" He was thinking of his job at the University of Texas. Petrochemistry had taken him as far away from Seney as he could imagine, to one of the largest cities in the country. Now the Walkers were pulling him back.

"They started planting trees at Saunders Farm. I didn't even hear about it for a year. I didn't think we had to worry. The hills were dead, everyone said so. But this nonprofit came in with drones and seeds. It was like it grew up overnight."

If it grew up overnight, Frank thought, then maybe it could die overnight. He knew a thing or two about toxic substances. But Carolyn wasn't listening.

The ride home from the airport with his sister was awkward. She didn’t say anything about what she’d mentioned in her letter. And Frank was reluctant to bring it up. Now that he was back in the Upper Penisula, all the old inhibitions were coming back, too.

“Something’s wrong with her chili? Dude, don’t even joke,” Bash said. He turned the spray nozzle from the sink against the convex inside of his bowl and succeeded in splattering himself with water and food. “Dangit!” 

“Why not?” Joanie asked, raising an eyebrow.

 “I shared some of that last batch with my dad and he took it to the county chili cookoff.”

Not good. Not good at all. Joanie tried to think. She needed more information. She took the bowl from Bash and handed him one of the baby-blue dishtowels her mom gave them for Christmas. “Why on earth would he do that?” The main thing she knew about Bash’s father was that he’d sold Bash’s bike when Bash was fourteen, after Bash tricked it out with metallic stickers in an Iron Man scheme. He’d been endlessly proud of the bike but to Joanie it sounded like the dorkiest thing she could imagine. 

“Two reasons,” Bash said, waving off the towel. Instead, he took off his shirt. 

“One, he thinks your mom hates him, and he figures she’d appreciate the trophy. Although I don’t know why he thinks she’ll like the fact that he entered it in his own name.”

“And B, he’s determined to beat Gretchen Cosgrove for once.”

“What, your dad has a nemesis?”

“Listen, do not even mention Gretchen around my dad unless you’ve got a comfortable chair to sit in, ‘cause you’re in for the long haul.” Bash stretched both arms out and Joanie wondered at his physique. The guy ate like a teenager whose parents were in Europe, and to hear him talk he’d been King Nerd as a kid. But Joanie hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him when she saw him at Zilker Park. 

She shook her head. She needed to focus. “How much chili did your dad take, anyway? I only gave you that one quart.”

“You know how much I liked it. And I need brownie points with your mom, too. I asked her for more and she gave me three containers.”

Last time on “Cryptid Keepers”: Joanie finds out her mother may be a secret Wendigo, but is more bothered by the fact that Grandma’s secret chili recipe came off a can label…and also involved a lot of long pig.