Homing
Title: Homing (1 of 3)
Author: sophiap
Recipient: dragonsinger
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: c.24,000 words. For the prompt asking for Ellen's entry into the hunter world, with a passing nod to the prompt asking for Jo hunting on her own. This sails into some dark territory along the way to its destination, but I hope it's to your liking.
Summary: Ellen's story is no more and no less tragic than any other hunter's.
One nice thing about this part of Nebraska, there's not a blessed thing between you and the horizon. Outside the Roadhouse, the blacktop may only stretch north and south, but dead north takes you up to Highway 91. South, it's only a couple of turns and if you've kept your eye on the signs, you're right there on Route 2.
All you need then is a decent map and enough sense to know which interstates run north-south and which run east-west, and you can go anywhere.
Anywhere at all.
Any time you need.
* * *
Most days, "anywhere, any time" means Ellen might take the truck up to Brewster to stock up on groceries or make an emergency pretzel run. Sometimes, she'll go to a diner about twenty miles out, someplace she's been often enough to be considered something of a regular, and let someone else wait on her for a change.
A careless "Ash, I'm headin' out," as she lifts the keys off their nail, and she's on her way. Simple as that. She may not be going far or be gone for long, but the thing is, Ellen could keep on going.
If she wanted to. Which she doesn't, but there are times when the thought won't leave her alone.
It would only take a bit of a whim and she could be having dinner in Omaha or Lincoln or even in Denver if she really wanted to. Or, if Jo just happened to call one of these days out of the blue, and say she was in Chicago and in trouble, Ellen could get there in less than a day, no problem.
She could just grab her keys and go.
The thought is either comforting or troubling, depending on what kind of mood she's in. Either way, the thought always strikes deep.
* * *
People--meaning hunters--generally don't give much thought to where Ellen came from. It's where she is that matters to them. To them, Ellen means Roadhouse. Some hunters who pass through talk as if they know for a fact she grew up there, waiting on tables and sweeping up, and no doubt teething on the pool cues. A few idiots figure she started catering to the hunting crowd only because Bill had pulled her into it.
It's fine if they think that. Her story's none of their damn business. It's no more and no less tragic than what got most of the Roadhouse regulars into the hunting life.
Her father died; a ghost was to blame. End of story.
As stories go, Ellen would say it was nothing special; nearly everyone who passed through the Roadhouse could play some variation on that particular tune.
A werewolf savaged Diana's son, and when she was drunk enough she might let slip that she was the one who wound up putting a silver bullet in her baby's heart. Gordon's sister was taken by vampires. Roger had the rotten luck to go digging in the wrong place. John's wife was slashed open and burned to a crisp by a demon. Linda Jean made a stupid deal and has been looking for a way out of it ever since. Ash's best friend got himself possessed and damn near killed Ash before getting killed himself.
At least, these are the stories she's actually heard. There's probably a bit more to the tales than people let on, but that's just the way of it.
She suspects the real stories are hidden in the way Gordon used to sit hunched over at his bar stool, glaring angrily at something no one else could see. There are probably dozens of stories in the tarot cards Diana deals over and over and over again as she tries to find an ending she can live with. She thought she heard a hint of one in the way John snapped his phone shut after barking orders to one of his boys like he was their commanding officer and not their father. She can read a hell of a lot into the way Ash stays lost in his research or lost in beer and television, never growing up, never moving on from college and the moment his life got turned upside-down.
Her story is tucked away and all but lost in the way she's been at the Roadhouse for two decades and change, rarely going far and only occasionally hunting, but always, always looking at the maps the hunters bring in to plot their next hunt, tracing the best routes to Denver, Seattle, New York, Chicago.
It's a story she doesn't think about much, not unless the wind is coming down from the north, moving through in crashing pulses through grass, through trees. She'll jerk awake, then, convinced she can hear the ocean just outside her window.
Even after she's had a good listen and told herself five, six, seven times it's just the wind, she'll get up and wrestle the window shut and yank the shade down so far the return won't work the next morning.
She'll eventually manage to get to sleep again, but it's not a restful one. It's too full of big rooms and narrow staircases and the same persistent, hissing, crashing sound that's too much like a heartbeat. The wind doesn't whistle across a tin roof the same way it rattles against cedar shingles, but that makes no difference in dreams.
In the morning, she'll be tuckered out from too much dreaming, and groggy from the stifling air and filtered sunlight.
The fact that Bill's not there to gripe about the heat or having to fix the shade doesn't help matters any.
* * *
Back when Bill was alive, Ellen could count on the fact that sooner or later, anyone who knew them would eventually ask her if she ever got tired of him being gone all the time.
"Haven't got tired enough to ask him to stop," she'd say, hardly bothering to be polite about it. She rarely looked at whoever asked the question. She'd just keep on doing whatever it was she was doing--pulling a beer, putting away glasses, wiping the bar, paying the bills. Her and Bill, it was none of anyone's business.
After he died, she wasted some time wondering what might have happened if things had been a little bit different. If she'd stayed on the road with him. If she'd pulled him back from the road bit by bit over the years. If she'd put her foot down and made a fuss, maybe even using their daughter as an 'or else'.
In the end, she knew 'what if' was a stupid game. She had a daughter to raise, and dozens of people who looked to her for food, drink, information, and a place to rest and trade stories. She stopped wondering. She wasn't going to let herself become a ghost trapped in a human body, always running over the same ground, re-living the same hurt over and over again until she was so deep in that rut that she couldn't move on.
Still, she managed to forgive John Winchester a long time before she could forgive herself.
* * *
Ellen is practical to the bone; too practical to think that if things had gone just a little bit different that year, that if her tenth year had ended just as peacefully as all those years before, she'd have met Bill just the same.
See, there's an argument to be made that her father's death was just the first link in a short, solidly forged chain that led her straight to William Harvelle's side. As arguments go, it's a fairly convincing one.
Despite that, and even though she knows the dangers of 'what if,' Ellen sometimes daydreams about how she might, when she was Jo's age (no, a little older, just because), have finally had enough of her father's lollygagging and freeloading and failed ambition and taken off to make something of herself.
What she makes of herself in these fancies doesn't matter. What matters is that she'd find her way to someplace very like the Roadhouse, never mind the details of how or where. Maybe she'd have stopped in for a drink after a long, hard day. Maybe she'd have been working there, putting up chairs and sweeping under the tables just like she might be doing as she daydreamed, and there'd be one last chair to put up--only someone would be sitting there.
The man would be hunched over his beer like he'd just lost his job or his dog or his best friend, but he'd look up at her, and she'd see a glint in those deep-set eyes that said he was only slouching because that's how he chose to sit. Nothing more, nothing less.
These days, Ellen can't imagine seeing Bill and not immediately knowing in blood and bone that she loved him. Truth was, it wasn't that simple. It took nearly three years before she allowed herself to think of him as anything but Bobby's friend.
Now, more people than she's ever met know her as the woman who runs the Roadhouse, as Bill Harvelle's widow. Just how, thirty-four years ago, she found herself being dragged to potlucks and cocktail parties as the writer's daughter, as David Mitchell's little girl.
Ellen imagines her mother would have railed at her for letting people define her as belonging to someone else. David Mitchell's little girl. Miss Sylvia's foster daughter. Bud and Katie Corrigan's apprentice. Bobby Singer's sometime helper and courier. Bill Harvelle's wife. Jo Harvelle's mother.
Ellen supposes she can see that, and when the thought crosses her mind, she can't help but smile a little. Janis (always 'Janis,' never 'Mom') would have had a point, but also would have missed another one, a big one.
Or maybe Janis would have learned by now. Lord knows it took Ellen long enough to get there. Or maybe the real Janis, not the Janis who only exists in fragments in Ellen's memory, would have known the right of it all along.
And as for that argument that everything that happened to her--that every choice she made--led straight from losing her father to finding Bill, she doesn't much care for it.
It wasn't like she chose to trade her father's life for her life with Bill, for being Jo's mother. How could she, seven years before she even knew Bill existed? Still, even though it wasn't logical, or even possible, she sometimes feels like she did choose.
All she did was close a door and run down a flight of stairs, but it was a choice. And it's a game of 'what if' she will never play.
* * *
Ellen still dreams of steep, open staircases whose welcoming, sunlit landings terrify her more than any dank and shadowy basement stairwell ever could.
If she thinks about it too much, she can even conjure up the smells that carried down the stairs as she sat halfway up and halfway down like in that Milne poem. In her memories, the sound of pounding surf mixes with her father's voice as he recited the verse from memory, casually and expertly teasing out the natural rhythm, pushing the rhyme just enough to make it stand out.
A breeze always cut down the stairs and through the house, carrying the seaweedy, mineral smell of ocean along with wisps of wild rose, dry grass, and occasionally, the cloying sweet smell of pot.
It was nothing like the must and damp of that one basement she helped Bill clear out, all close and dark, both of them gagging on the scent of rot. It was horrible, and once they'd dug up and torched the bones (too many of them, all so very small) the two of them silently went back to a motel room whose reek of cheap air freshener and decades of cigarettes was refreshing by contrast.
They didn't talk until after showers. As they dried off, they told each other emphatically that this was it, this was the last time they would do anything like this, and they allowed themselves to believe it for the night. Ellen fell asleep quickly enough, all told. Bill was the one taking it worse, which surprised neither of them. That was always the case, with child ghosts.
But Ellen was the one who woke at two-thirty a.m., shaking and shuddering, clamping the heels of her hands to her ears to shut out the roar of traffic on the interstate. Bill sat up beside her and tentatively rested a hand on her shoulder, not knowing yet if comfort would make things worse or better.
After a minute, but before Bill could draw his hand back, Ellen lowered her hands and leaned into his touch, groaning in misery and pleasure as he took his cue and kneaded into the tightness that always settled in the crook between shoulder and neck.
"That'd give anyone bad dreams, El," he said plainly, no pity in his words.
She didn't tell him she'd been dreaming of the feel of sunlight on her back, the taste of root beer candy, the smell of Coppertone and bug spray, the hardness of the step under her tailbone, the pleasure of a lazy summer day reading, and the sound of the ocean thrumming like a heartbeat.
* * *
That summer, her tenth summer, Ellen re-read each and every one of the Little House books. Some of them twice. As ever, her father pushed and pushed her to read Tolkein and Bradbury, but it never took. She'd much rather read about cozy, homely things, especially if those things were a struggle first to win and then to hold on to. Even then, the stories of how to churn butter or how to build a house and make a home the struck her as far more fantastic than magic rings or haunted carnivals.
For her, the lives of Laura Ingalls or Caddie Woodlawn or Anne Shirley were pure magic. They were old friends, they were as comfortable as old socks. As for the other books, the ones that everyone said were supposed to be magic and wonderful and mind-opening ("pathways to other, more wonderful worlds," her father always said), she didn't even get as far as Frodo leaving the Shire before giving up in sheer apathy. The whole birthday party scene was fun enough, but other than that... no.
That was when Ellen started sneaking off to the staircase to read Little Women for the third time. It was just too hard to avoid her father, otherwise. It wasn't that he disapproved of what she read; it was that he'd keep on coming up to her, smiling and bright-eyed, asking her how far she'd gotten in Fellowship and what did she think of it, who was her favorite character, and oh! had she gotten to Moria yet? No? What about the Council of Elrond? Had she even met Strider yet... He was so anxious to hear just how much she loved the book that Ellen wanted to curl up and vanish.
She'd tried telling him, of course. Tried telling him she didn't like that kind of thing--no, not even Peter Pan, really--but the look on his face (puzzled, then hurt, then puzzled all over again) left her feeling like she'd carelessly stomped a duckling to death.
* * *
It's been a while since she's read anything that wasn't for work. Newspapers from all the surrounding states and a few known hot-spots, carefully scoured for odd patterns in obituaries and the like. Reams of stuff Ash prints out for her when she asks him to help gather information on a case.
If Ash finds something real good (or real bad), he'll often come scrambling out of the back, holding out his laptop and forcing her to read for herself right off the screen, no matter what she happens to be doing at the moment.
She has a couple of reference books with Post-it notes sticking out every which way, and a few things she's held onto for sentimental reasons, but the bookshelves in the Roadhouse aren't as full as they could be.
Most of Bill's old books have passed into Bobby's keeping, but that's okay. It really is. There's more than a few of those books that are probably safer at Bobby's place, all told. A few of the safer ones have made their way back to the Roadhouse over the years, given that she's a convenient way for Bobby or Jim to get things to people who don't have anything resembling a fixed mailing address.
Ellen figures it doesn't hurt to look through the books again as they're passing through, taking a moment to say 'hello,' as it were. She might smile when she sees a note in the margin, run her finger under a familiar scrawl.
When the time comes, she'll hand the books over to people who need them more than she does.
* * *
Back in her bedroom, Ellen keeps a wooden cigar box filled with notes, postcards, birthday cards, and other oddments. There is a faded purple bookmark, folded in thirds and falling apart. There are six poems, still with the ragged edges from where she tore them out of a spiral notebook. She doesn't read them, but she knows they're there. It's enough.
There are several photos perched up on top of the television. They've been there so long that she's fallen out of the habit of looking at them regularly. And when something does happen, and she does stop to look at them, enough time has passed that it hits her anew just how handsome Bill was, or how tiny Jo used to be. Whenever this happens, she'll lose a good twenty minutes or so to woolgathering before she shakes her head sharply and tells herself that there's work that needs doing and there's only one person to do it.
There are other things around that make her think of her family more frequently--and with less a sense of dislocation--than the photographs.
On the refrigerator, there are forty-two magnets, little rubber or plastic ones with raised edges and print, each shaped like a different state, plus British Columbia. They're arranged more or less as they would be on the map. Less, rather than more, because Vermont is the same size as Texas, and at one point Bill forgot he'd already sent her Colorado. Alaska and Hawaii are missing, of course. So's much of the deep south. Rhode Island should also be there, but Bill said he couldn't find a magnet. He'd been calling from a police station in Providence, though, so Ellen always suspected there was a little more to the story than that.
Ellen has been to most of the states on her refrigerator, has hunted in many of them, even lived in a few, but when she thinks of South Dakota, her first thought is often of a deep burnt-orange outlined in white, not of junked cars and rooms upon rooms of books. Nebraska is a cool, pale green, despite the dryness of the summer-burnt prairie surrounding the Roadhouse. Missouri is fluorescent yellow. Kansas, hunter orange.
Massachusetts, however, is not gold. Not gold at all.
The day the Roadhouse burns down, Ellen gets a small padded envelope in the mail. There's no return address, but the loopy, too-neat handwriting is the same as that on the handful of postcards she's got stashed in the cigar box.
This is much more than a postcard, though. Those don't do much more than tell her that Jo's alive and sends her love. She rips the envelope open right there by the mailbox, hands trembling and breath stilled. There's no letter, no note, and just when she thinks her heart might contract to a nothing in her chest, a small blue and silver object slides out onto her palm.
Jo has sent her North Carolina.
Ellen's fist closes around it tight enough to leave behind dents in her palm when she finally kisses the back of her hand and relaxes her grip. It takes her a few moments of staring at the ground and concentrating on her breathing before she lets herself head back inside.
She's not sure if she'll put the magnet on the old map or start a new one, maybe up on the freezer door.
Once she makes it inside, though, it's only to find an argument that's about to tip over into a brawl. She shoves the magnet in her jacket pocket and stomps over to shout some sense back into some folk who should damn well know better.
It settles, although it almost doesn't, and it leaves her shaken enough that she forgets about the magnet. She almost remembers when she slaps Maine back into place after Ash borrowed it to pin up some McDonalds coupons or something else equally stupid, but annoyance pushes the memory aside until later.
Goddamn Ash. Things were always turning up where they shouldn't when he was around.
* * *
The first time one of the Staffordshire figurines from the mantel showed up on her landing, Ellen thought it was just her father being stupid. She carefully put it back where it belonged, thinking that was the end of it. It wasn't.
These days, of course, she'd know better. Hell, Jo would have known better at her age, but Jo'd grown up knowing all about the kinds of dangers they'd never talk about in PSAs at the end of Rescue Rangers.
"C'mon El, there's no need to get into that now. She's too young to be hearing about this," Bill said once or maybe twice, but Ellen didn't even need to argue. A steely, steady look was all it took. Besides, he knew better.
So, Bill taught Jo how to clean a gun and care for a knife. He even gave her one of his good knives for her very own, holding it out to her hilt-first even though the blade was strapped into a thick leather sheath.
It wasn't quite what Ellen had in mind by way of preparing their little girl, and maybe Bill knew that. Maybe he was trying to make a point. Once you know about something, after all, you'd better be prepared to deal with it.
He'd looked at Ellen after he handed over the knife, one eyebrow raised as if to ask if she was sure about all of this. Ellen wasn't sure, and she wasn't happy (the way she crossed her arms over her chest let Bill know that without any doubt).
No, she didn't like it, but Jo needed to be safe, and Bill knew what he was doing. Mostly.
* * *
"So, what's your story?" Bill asked her the first time they met. He'd settled on Bobby's couch, long legs splayed out and arm draped across the back as if he'd laid claim to the thing long ago. She wanted not to like him, but it was a lost cause from the start.
She'd brought him coffee, of course, while Bobby rummaged through his books in search of something that might give them something they could use against what might be a skinwalker.
"Just crashing here for a few days. Lost my last job 'cause I took too many 'days off' while I was hunting down a weeping woman." Ellen shrugged as she leaned against the door-jamb, cradling her own cup in both hands. "Managed to get rid of her before she drowned any more kids, though, so I'm not counting it a huge loss."
He nodded and sipped at his coffee. His mouth twisted in amused disgust. "Bobby still water this stuff down with holy water?"
Ellen's was not similarly fortified. She'd been the one who'd brewed it, after all. "What do you think?"
The look he gave her over the rim of his cup, dangerously close to a wink, said he thought she had a good point. It also said that he knew she hadn't really told him her story, but that he'd let it go for the moment.
Only for the moment, mind you.
Ellen swallowed, hard, a too-big gulp of coffee making a rough journey down. Not pleasant, but at least she had something she could blame for the sudden, burning fullness in her chest.
* * *
Bill was twelve years older than she was, something that bothered her at first. After all, they'd met when she was seventeen, and six months afterwards he'd tipped over into his thirties while she was still in her teens.
No wonder that when she first felt that twist deep in her gut the next time she saw his truck pull up to Bobby's porch, she told herself to drop it, to leave it alone.
And she did. For a while, anyhow.
Bill Harvelle was too old and too scrawny, she reminded herself whenever the daydreams began to creep in around the edges. Handsome enough, but a bit shopworn, with the crows-feet already setting up camp around the corners of those deep blue eyes. Too many scars. She was quick to notice the layered scars across his knuckles and the pale pink of a burn scar reaching up the side of his neck.
Then there was a deep, straight scar low across the small of his back. She'd noticed it when his shirt rode up as he was reaching to pull a book off a high shelf. Noticed, and remembered a little better than she should have, perhaps.
"So, what's your story?" she finally asked him, when she'd gotten tired of telling herself to ignore what was damn well obvious.
It took her three years to find her way, but she finally got there.
* * *
That summer (it was always that summer) Ellen spent most of the trip from Philly to Woods Hole reading. Well, trying to read, anyhow. Her father kept on interrupting her with all kind of stories about how much fun they were going to have together once they got to the island.
"We'll have all summer together, Nelly-belle."
The nickname had appeared out of nowhere while Janis was in the hospital and he was desperate to keep things cheerful, and Ellen hadn't worked up the courage to tell him how much she hated it. After all, she'd gained no more fondness for Nellie Olson on this re-reading of the Little House books. He should have known better, as far as she was concerned.
"Just you and me, right?" he said, looking over the back of the seat and nearly swerving into the oncoming lanes before a blaring horn snapped him back to reality.
Ellen scootched further down on the back seat, raising her book to cover her face. She wasn't reading, though. She tried, but couldn't get past the next line.
They were cozy and comfortable in their little house made of logs, with the snow drifted around it and the wind crying because it could not get in by the fire.
Normally she could imagine herself right there in that cozy cabin, but not today, not when the sun had turned the station wagon into an oven, and her sweaty thighs first stuck to then kept slipping on the vinyl seat. Her story, her means of escape to a home that wasn't, had turned into nothing more than words on a page.
She kept the book raised, though, because she really didn't want to talk. But the more she stayed silent, the more his hands spun through the air and the louder his voice got as he talked about fishing trips, or all the concerts there were on the island, or rainy days where she could spend the day reading while he spend the day writing, or mornings spent walking the beaches with their heads bent looking for wampum or beach glass or pirate gold or keys to lost cities and maybe hunting ghosts and hey... are you listening, Nelly-belle?
"I can't wait."
He was quiet for a while after that, and that was fine by her, even though it was a pointedly hurt quiet.
Why'd he have to go and remind her it was just the two of them? It wasn't like she didn't know that.
Ellen tried to lose herself in the story of Ma and Pa and a little log cabin on a wide, wide prairie and forget that she was lying down in the back of an old station wagon, with everything she owned stowed in the wayback.
According to her father, they were on their way to a new life, and a new home, but as far as she was concerned, it was just another one of his stories.
* * *
Bill was just full of stories. Or, as she often told him, just plain full of it.
"No, I swear to you I'm not making this up. I saw it for myself when I was in-country."
Ellen flicked her eyes at him, wanting to glare but not wanting to take her eyes off the road. Bill was lounging in the passenger seat, hands laced behind his head. His elbow was only one sharp turn away from knocking her in the ear.
"Bill, when you tell me you saw something 'in-country,' you know I'm going to know it's half made-up."
He laughed at that, something she felt in the slight shaking of the bench seat rather than heard.
There were more than a few veterans who'd drifted into hunting when they returned to the States. Most of the vets she'd encountered would ostentatiously clam up or get real, real somber if anything about 'the war' came up. Bill, though, Bill would tell you his war stories at the drop of a hat and keep on telling them until you had to damn near threaten violence to get him to stop. She'd heard the one about the pig more times than she cared to count. Then there was the one about the Special Forces guy and his dog. Or the stories about the crazy games the SEALs attached to his unit would play.
Sometimes, though, he came up with something that wound up being more than just background noise.
"Cao dai Buddhism," he said, the foreign words coming out unaccented through the Midwest twang. "I shit you not, El, Victor Hugo was one of the big three saints."
"Right. In Vietnam. They made a French author a saint." She tried to sound stern and sarcastic--she was still feeling prickly towards him for taking such a damn fool chance when they were shutting down that haunt--but a laugh crept out through the cracks.
"Best French food I ever had was in Saigon," he pointed out. "But anyhow, we were out on the Plain of Reeds--like a prairie, but it flooded every year so that the river was damn near everywhere, more like a lake, you could barely see the horizon--and anyhow, we'd be out on patrol, just going quiet through the water, and every now and again there'd be these little shrines sticking out of the water. Damned if some of them didn't have a picture of Victor Hugo right there in the middle. Strangest thing." He waited for a comment, but didn't seem offended when one didn't arrive.
"One of the guys swore he saw pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt and Will Rogers in a couple of those shrines." There was a perfectly timed pause. "Course, he was so full of shit his eyes were brown."
Ellen shook her head and laughed, just like Bill meant her to. She couldn't stay mad at Bill for long, not even when he'd nearly gotten himself killed.
That night, she dreamed of dozens of shabby little houses sticking up out of the water. The water wasn't still, not the way Bill had described the Plain of Reeds, but gray and churning, rocking the little houses this way and that.
Ellen stood at the top of a steep meadow that spilled down to the sea, gold and brown, dotted with the red of rose-hips and poison ivy. The little houses were so far away, and she could do nothing about it as one by one, they were taken by the waves until there was only one left.
A little man--an author, but by no means a saint--stood in the doorway of the house. He waved at her, and she didn't know if he was telling her to go away or telling her to come save him. Maybe he was only waving hello. Or goodbye.
Not knowing what else to do, Ellen raised her hand and waved back.
The little house disappeared under the waves, and she was left at the top of the meadow with no way to get home.
* * *
"Well, here it is, Nelly-belle. Home."
Her father dropped his duffel bag on the porch as if it meant they were there to stay. Ellen knew better, of course.
"I thought you said we were only staying here for the summer," she said. They'd be on the road again by mid-August. Still, she was impressed. The house was hidden from the road by a hedge that was half again as tall as her father. She guessed it was privet, because that's what most hedges were made of in the books she read, and she did know enough to recognize yew.
There had been yew hedges in front of the house in Pennsylvania, and Janis had been the one to go out, resentful and grumbling, to hack them back with a big pair of dull hedge shears after they'd nearly grown shut across the front walk.
No, this wasn't yew, and when her father made the sharp turn up into the driveway, she saw that this house wasn't anything like their last house. That had been a little brick box with blank, bare windows, squat and ugly behind the overgrown yew hedges and lumpy, patchy lawn. This house swept up three whole stories from a perfectly flat green lawn. Rather than brick, it was covered with dove-gray shingles and trimmed in clean, tidy white and a deep, almost black green that each shone in the sun in its own way. A covered porch wrapped around one half of the house, from halfway across the front and all along one side, turning to disappear across the back. Best of all, the windows actually had diamond-shaped panes, and weren't just dead, expressionless slits of cheap glass bordered in aluminum.
The sunlight danced off these windows, so old that the panes were set at slightly different angles. Later, her father would point out the way the glass rippled, and how that meant it was old. He even found a circle that showed where part of the glass had once been attached to a glass-blower's pipe.
"Let's go round the back," her father said, holding out a hand. Professor Jameson says you can see the Cape across the water if the day's clear enough."
Ellen was so enamored by the house and by the idea that she'd be staying here that she didn't even hesitate before taking her father's hand and letting him lead her to the back porch and a narrow strip of garden that ended at a steep bluff.
Her father walked them right out to the edge of the bluff, where a lichened split-rail fence and a hedge of wild rose was all that kept them from a nasty fall down onto rocks and a small scrap of beach. Ellen wished he wouldn't lean forward so much, hanging halfway over the fence, but of course he did.
It was a hot, sunny day, but so hazy that try as they might, all they could see was silver water leading out and out and out to a blank horizon. She could barely even see the line where sea turned into sky.
They stayed out there just long enough to watch the ferry chugging back towards an invisible mainland. Ellen watched it intently, her fingernails digging deep into the salt-softened wood of the fence.
It was a relief to head back to the shelter of the house. The sun twinkled off the diamond-paned windows, making it look like the house was smiling down at them indulgently.
For a moment, the way the sun reflected off one of the rippled dormer windows made it look as if there was also someone in the house looking down at them. Ellen stopped so quickly she nearly twisted her ankle. She started to warn her father, but the passing cloud moved out of the sun's path and the figure was gone.
The next morning, they were in the middle of breakfast when her father snapped out of his morning haze into full wakefulness, his mouth in the weak 'o' that meant he could have forgotten anything from the utility bills to the fact that he was supposed to be leading a tutorial.
Ellen braced herself for the inevitable panic and loud declarations of how stupid he was, but instead he grinned slyly.
"Maybe it's a good thing I forgot to tell you last night--especially your first night in your new home--but Professor Jameson told me that the house is haunted."
He took another sip of his coffee, and then the sly grin broadened into a genuine smile. "Isn't that great?"
* * *
At first, like most hunters who weren't out hunting down a specific something, she and Bill mostly worked haunts. The salt-and-burns began to run into each other over the course of those two years. She does remember a few details here and there, mostly out of context.
The time they had to use nearly a gallon of lighter fluid because of the damp. Broken blisters from shoveling without gloves, her palms stinging so badly she couldn't curl her hands shut more than a little. The time they had to get the box containing a murdered woman's bones out of an attic and down four flights of stairs, and the resulting string of arguments and accidents like outtakes from a Laurel and Hardy movie. The smell of scorched earth, and the frown on Bill's face and the flicker in his eyes as he silently ran through the handful of war stories he wouldn't tell. Cursing out paper matchbooks and cheap cardboard matches that bent all to hell and back when she tried to light them.
Specific incidents ran together with all the repeated ills and boredoms of the job until she had to stop and think before she could remember which job came before which, or if she broke her collarbone on the Omaha job when a poltergeist threw her into a wall, or if it was the one up near Billings, when a ghost-induced blind panic made her run and fall down into a culvert.
In general, their jobs all ended in much the same way, barring any kind of incidental injury that might send their usual routine off the rails with hasty retreat to the motel room for a session with the first aid kit or--in more than a few cases--to the emergency room.
Ellen would put all their tools and weapons away in the truck and Bill would erase any signs that might lead the law to them. It wasn't quite housekeeping on her part, and it wasn't quite being back on active duty on his, but it felt like business as usual. It also meant they were about to go home.
* * *
It took Ellen years to get used to the Roadhouse without Bill. Yes, once she stopped actively hunting and started running the place, Bill was gone nearly half the time, but being gone wasn't the same as never coming home.
After a while, she no longer turned to talk to him. She stopped looking up with anticipation when she heard truck tires turn off asphalt onto gravel. It didn't mean she stopped missing him, though.
Some days, she misses him so much she can hardly breathe from it.
These days, she's back to waiting for the phone to ring. When it does ring, she gets very still, trying not to hope. You'd never know from the crisp, almost unwelcoming "Harvelle's" when she does answer that she's desperate to be able to follow that up with a "hey, Jo-baby, where are you? How are you? When are you coming home?"
So far, there hasn't been any such call.
Jo's just trying to follow in her daddy's footsteps, Ellen tells herself. Or maybe she's trying to follow in Ellen's. Ellen was younger than Jo when she set out on her own, much younger, but Jo doesn't want to hear that's how Ellen knows Jo is too young, much too young for the work.
Jo grew up around hunters, even more than Ellen did. She heard their crazy stories, learned about the difficulty and necessity of what they do. Although no one ever knows what they're getting into when they get into hunting, Jo's got a better handle on it than most beginners.
Even experts die. This is something Ellen also tells herself, although she tries hard not to listen. She also tells herself that Jo is desperate to prove herself, desperate to build something that is hers.
Sometimes, Ellen tells herself that maybe Diana's right, and all this is some sort of way for Jo to try to get her daddy back. When she tells herself this, she also turns around and tells herself to shut the hell up. It doesn't matter how you go about it--raising the dead is never a good idea, even if there are no spells, no devil's bargains involved.
She tries to tell herself that all she can do is wait, but every hour or so, Ellen pulls her cell phone from her pocket and checks the charge and the signal strength. Ash just rolls his eyes at her if he catches her, but he knows better than to say anything.
Ellen does her best not to dig at what she did wrong in trying to do right by her daughter, but it's hard not to wonder if Jo going on the road was less about hunting and more about leaving the Roadhouse.
"Not under my roof," was the immediate answer when Jo insisted on hunting. It was one of those things said more in anger than in reason, a threat that might have worked if Jo was still twelve.
But Jo wasn't twelve, and Jo took her at her word. Then she took off before Ellen could gather her wits about her.
Afterwards, Ellen tried to tell Ash that she never believed Jo would actually leave like that. He opened his mouth to make a smart remark, but she narrowed her eyes at him and he slammed it shut again. He should know better than to comment, after he helped Jo cover her tracks the first time she left.
Ellen tells herself she should have known what would happen. Jo had left once before, after all. She knew, but she somehow still didn't believe that her baby would really leave.
* * *
She didn't believe her father, of course. Still, when he told her that the house was haunted, her "really?" was more curious than sarcastic.
"Don't be surprised if you find things in different places than where you left them," he said. The twinkle in his eye warned her that he was likely to try to be clever when she wasn't looking.
"I won't." She was surprised to find that she was a little disappointed that it was all probably a trick, and just another way for him to try to keep her from being sad. Besides, the house didn't seem the kind of place that would be haunted. The house seemed to catch every bit of sunlight, even though it had a covered porch. Her bedroom (not really hers, she reminded herself, just the one she was using) was so bright that the sun woke her at five that morning.
She could have gone back to sleep, maybe, but there was such a racket of birdsong she wondered how on earth she'd slept through it until now. Once awake, she was hyper-sensitive to every noise. There was the sound of the old Moon Beam alarm clock chipping its way through the minutes, and the occasional creak of wood against wood as boards and beams adjusted to warmth and wind. It was all new, and yet all normal. Still, it kept her half-awake and attentive enough that she didn't miss the sharp double-tap of the screen door snapping shut and bouncing against the door frame. She was out of bed and hustling downstairs in less than ten seconds. Her father shouldn't be awake this early. He'd sleep in until ten or eleven, the way he always did.
If he was up this early, it meant something had happened, like maybe there'd been a phone call from the doctor or something, or he'd been out late and was only just now coming back and that was never good...
By the time she made it down to the kitchen, Ellen was awake enough to remember that they'd had all the bad news there was to have, and she and her father were now creating this wonderful and amazing new life with just the two of them.
Ellen looked around the cozy kitchen, with its lace curtains and scarred white countertops, and realized she had no idea if Janis would have loved it or hated it.
She thought it over for a bit, and after a while it wasn't at all hard to see Janis standing there, long brown hair pulled back beneath her blue bandanna as she fried up onions and peppers for some spaghetti sauce, swaying and singing along to the radio and not minding as grease and onion spattered all over the stove and counter.
It wasn't even six o'clock, but Ellen still went out onto the porch. If her father was up, she didn't want him to catch her crying. If he thought she was sad, he would do everything and anything to make her not sad, never realizing that it only made things that much worse.
She let the screen door snap shut behind her. It was the same sharp, doubled sound as before, but it only got a turn of the head and a scowl. She wanted to be miserable and spiky, damn it, not chasing down a stupid ghost story that probably wasn't even true.
"I wanna go home," she grumbled, sitting down on the porch steps. She said it again, not even minding that she didn't know what or where she meant by 'home.' After a minute or two, one--just one--of the rocking chairs on the porch began to rock back and forth, back and forth.
Eventually, she gave in and got up from the porch steps, going to sit in the rocking chair, never mind how much pollen got all over her nightshirt. It was a good thing she knew they were going to leave in a few months, otherwise she'd start thinking of this place as home. And it couldn't be home, not with the two of them the way they were.
When she finally went back inside, her father was still asleep, but three coffee mugs, two cereal bowls, and a colander had appeared on the kitchen table. A cast iron skillet sat on the stove, as if waiting to be filled with peppers and onions.
Ellen stared at them for a moment, then took one of the bowls and fixed herself some cereal.
* * *
No matter how many times she yells at him, Ash keeps on leaving his dirty dishes in his room, or depositing them in a teetering tower next to the sink and its dishpan full of suds.
Jo used do the same thing. So did Bill.
"Goddamn pain-in-the-ass genius..." It would be easier to replace some of these dishes than wash them.
"Probably won't wipe his own ass unless he's told..."
Much as she'd like to kill him sometimes, at least Ash is still around to make a mess, Ellen thinks as she scrubs at dried-on cereal and scrapes pizza crusts into the trash.
"I swear, that boy was raised by hyenas."
She doesn't know much about how Ash was raised, only that he came here in search for answers to what happened to his friend. Ellen's still amazed at how much Ash was able to piece together on his own, once Caleb gave him a few suggestions of where and how to start looking.
Ash is still looking, even after he's found his own answers, and there are many who are thankful for it. In the past few weeks alone, he's found things for Diana that even she didn't know about werewolves. He's gotten a bead on where Gordon is these days, so Ellen can be sure to tell the Winchester boys to steer well clear of him. From the sound of things the past few days, Ash might even have a lead on something really big, but he's being close-mouthed about it, for a change.
Ellen raises an eyebrow when he comes out of his room, trying to look all smug but only succeeding in looking as if he's had way to much coffee. She asks him if he could walk out to get the mail, but he's waiting for a phone call, he says.
So, Ellen heads out, and it works out just as well that she does, because there's a padded envelope waiting for her out there, with it's little bit of blue and silver.
Sometimes, she's tempted to ask Ash what his story really is, but she's fairly sure that all she'd get would be a nicely camouflaged version of the truth.
At least the boy's got a place to be now, dirty dishes and all.
Part Two
Author: sophiap
Recipient: dragonsinger
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: c.24,000 words. For the prompt asking for Ellen's entry into the hunter world, with a passing nod to the prompt asking for Jo hunting on her own. This sails into some dark territory along the way to its destination, but I hope it's to your liking.
Summary: Ellen's story is no more and no less tragic than any other hunter's.
One nice thing about this part of Nebraska, there's not a blessed thing between you and the horizon. Outside the Roadhouse, the blacktop may only stretch north and south, but dead north takes you up to Highway 91. South, it's only a couple of turns and if you've kept your eye on the signs, you're right there on Route 2.
All you need then is a decent map and enough sense to know which interstates run north-south and which run east-west, and you can go anywhere.
Anywhere at all.
Any time you need.
* * *
Most days, "anywhere, any time" means Ellen might take the truck up to Brewster to stock up on groceries or make an emergency pretzel run. Sometimes, she'll go to a diner about twenty miles out, someplace she's been often enough to be considered something of a regular, and let someone else wait on her for a change.
A careless "Ash, I'm headin' out," as she lifts the keys off their nail, and she's on her way. Simple as that. She may not be going far or be gone for long, but the thing is, Ellen could keep on going.
If she wanted to. Which she doesn't, but there are times when the thought won't leave her alone.
It would only take a bit of a whim and she could be having dinner in Omaha or Lincoln or even in Denver if she really wanted to. Or, if Jo just happened to call one of these days out of the blue, and say she was in Chicago and in trouble, Ellen could get there in less than a day, no problem.
She could just grab her keys and go.
The thought is either comforting or troubling, depending on what kind of mood she's in. Either way, the thought always strikes deep.
* * *
People--meaning hunters--generally don't give much thought to where Ellen came from. It's where she is that matters to them. To them, Ellen means Roadhouse. Some hunters who pass through talk as if they know for a fact she grew up there, waiting on tables and sweeping up, and no doubt teething on the pool cues. A few idiots figure she started catering to the hunting crowd only because Bill had pulled her into it.
It's fine if they think that. Her story's none of their damn business. It's no more and no less tragic than what got most of the Roadhouse regulars into the hunting life.
Her father died; a ghost was to blame. End of story.
As stories go, Ellen would say it was nothing special; nearly everyone who passed through the Roadhouse could play some variation on that particular tune.
A werewolf savaged Diana's son, and when she was drunk enough she might let slip that she was the one who wound up putting a silver bullet in her baby's heart. Gordon's sister was taken by vampires. Roger had the rotten luck to go digging in the wrong place. John's wife was slashed open and burned to a crisp by a demon. Linda Jean made a stupid deal and has been looking for a way out of it ever since. Ash's best friend got himself possessed and damn near killed Ash before getting killed himself.
At least, these are the stories she's actually heard. There's probably a bit more to the tales than people let on, but that's just the way of it.
She suspects the real stories are hidden in the way Gordon used to sit hunched over at his bar stool, glaring angrily at something no one else could see. There are probably dozens of stories in the tarot cards Diana deals over and over and over again as she tries to find an ending she can live with. She thought she heard a hint of one in the way John snapped his phone shut after barking orders to one of his boys like he was their commanding officer and not their father. She can read a hell of a lot into the way Ash stays lost in his research or lost in beer and television, never growing up, never moving on from college and the moment his life got turned upside-down.
Her story is tucked away and all but lost in the way she's been at the Roadhouse for two decades and change, rarely going far and only occasionally hunting, but always, always looking at the maps the hunters bring in to plot their next hunt, tracing the best routes to Denver, Seattle, New York, Chicago.
It's a story she doesn't think about much, not unless the wind is coming down from the north, moving through in crashing pulses through grass, through trees. She'll jerk awake, then, convinced she can hear the ocean just outside her window.
Even after she's had a good listen and told herself five, six, seven times it's just the wind, she'll get up and wrestle the window shut and yank the shade down so far the return won't work the next morning.
She'll eventually manage to get to sleep again, but it's not a restful one. It's too full of big rooms and narrow staircases and the same persistent, hissing, crashing sound that's too much like a heartbeat. The wind doesn't whistle across a tin roof the same way it rattles against cedar shingles, but that makes no difference in dreams.
In the morning, she'll be tuckered out from too much dreaming, and groggy from the stifling air and filtered sunlight.
The fact that Bill's not there to gripe about the heat or having to fix the shade doesn't help matters any.
* * *
Back when Bill was alive, Ellen could count on the fact that sooner or later, anyone who knew them would eventually ask her if she ever got tired of him being gone all the time.
"Haven't got tired enough to ask him to stop," she'd say, hardly bothering to be polite about it. She rarely looked at whoever asked the question. She'd just keep on doing whatever it was she was doing--pulling a beer, putting away glasses, wiping the bar, paying the bills. Her and Bill, it was none of anyone's business.
After he died, she wasted some time wondering what might have happened if things had been a little bit different. If she'd stayed on the road with him. If she'd pulled him back from the road bit by bit over the years. If she'd put her foot down and made a fuss, maybe even using their daughter as an 'or else'.
In the end, she knew 'what if' was a stupid game. She had a daughter to raise, and dozens of people who looked to her for food, drink, information, and a place to rest and trade stories. She stopped wondering. She wasn't going to let herself become a ghost trapped in a human body, always running over the same ground, re-living the same hurt over and over again until she was so deep in that rut that she couldn't move on.
Still, she managed to forgive John Winchester a long time before she could forgive herself.
* * *
Ellen is practical to the bone; too practical to think that if things had gone just a little bit different that year, that if her tenth year had ended just as peacefully as all those years before, she'd have met Bill just the same.
See, there's an argument to be made that her father's death was just the first link in a short, solidly forged chain that led her straight to William Harvelle's side. As arguments go, it's a fairly convincing one.
Despite that, and even though she knows the dangers of 'what if,' Ellen sometimes daydreams about how she might, when she was Jo's age (no, a little older, just because), have finally had enough of her father's lollygagging and freeloading and failed ambition and taken off to make something of herself.
What she makes of herself in these fancies doesn't matter. What matters is that she'd find her way to someplace very like the Roadhouse, never mind the details of how or where. Maybe she'd have stopped in for a drink after a long, hard day. Maybe she'd have been working there, putting up chairs and sweeping under the tables just like she might be doing as she daydreamed, and there'd be one last chair to put up--only someone would be sitting there.
The man would be hunched over his beer like he'd just lost his job or his dog or his best friend, but he'd look up at her, and she'd see a glint in those deep-set eyes that said he was only slouching because that's how he chose to sit. Nothing more, nothing less.
These days, Ellen can't imagine seeing Bill and not immediately knowing in blood and bone that she loved him. Truth was, it wasn't that simple. It took nearly three years before she allowed herself to think of him as anything but Bobby's friend.
Now, more people than she's ever met know her as the woman who runs the Roadhouse, as Bill Harvelle's widow. Just how, thirty-four years ago, she found herself being dragged to potlucks and cocktail parties as the writer's daughter, as David Mitchell's little girl.
Ellen imagines her mother would have railed at her for letting people define her as belonging to someone else. David Mitchell's little girl. Miss Sylvia's foster daughter. Bud and Katie Corrigan's apprentice. Bobby Singer's sometime helper and courier. Bill Harvelle's wife. Jo Harvelle's mother.
Ellen supposes she can see that, and when the thought crosses her mind, she can't help but smile a little. Janis (always 'Janis,' never 'Mom') would have had a point, but also would have missed another one, a big one.
Or maybe Janis would have learned by now. Lord knows it took Ellen long enough to get there. Or maybe the real Janis, not the Janis who only exists in fragments in Ellen's memory, would have known the right of it all along.
And as for that argument that everything that happened to her--that every choice she made--led straight from losing her father to finding Bill, she doesn't much care for it.
It wasn't like she chose to trade her father's life for her life with Bill, for being Jo's mother. How could she, seven years before she even knew Bill existed? Still, even though it wasn't logical, or even possible, she sometimes feels like she did choose.
All she did was close a door and run down a flight of stairs, but it was a choice. And it's a game of 'what if' she will never play.
* * *
Ellen still dreams of steep, open staircases whose welcoming, sunlit landings terrify her more than any dank and shadowy basement stairwell ever could.
If she thinks about it too much, she can even conjure up the smells that carried down the stairs as she sat halfway up and halfway down like in that Milne poem. In her memories, the sound of pounding surf mixes with her father's voice as he recited the verse from memory, casually and expertly teasing out the natural rhythm, pushing the rhyme just enough to make it stand out.
A breeze always cut down the stairs and through the house, carrying the seaweedy, mineral smell of ocean along with wisps of wild rose, dry grass, and occasionally, the cloying sweet smell of pot.
It was nothing like the must and damp of that one basement she helped Bill clear out, all close and dark, both of them gagging on the scent of rot. It was horrible, and once they'd dug up and torched the bones (too many of them, all so very small) the two of them silently went back to a motel room whose reek of cheap air freshener and decades of cigarettes was refreshing by contrast.
They didn't talk until after showers. As they dried off, they told each other emphatically that this was it, this was the last time they would do anything like this, and they allowed themselves to believe it for the night. Ellen fell asleep quickly enough, all told. Bill was the one taking it worse, which surprised neither of them. That was always the case, with child ghosts.
But Ellen was the one who woke at two-thirty a.m., shaking and shuddering, clamping the heels of her hands to her ears to shut out the roar of traffic on the interstate. Bill sat up beside her and tentatively rested a hand on her shoulder, not knowing yet if comfort would make things worse or better.
After a minute, but before Bill could draw his hand back, Ellen lowered her hands and leaned into his touch, groaning in misery and pleasure as he took his cue and kneaded into the tightness that always settled in the crook between shoulder and neck.
"That'd give anyone bad dreams, El," he said plainly, no pity in his words.
She didn't tell him she'd been dreaming of the feel of sunlight on her back, the taste of root beer candy, the smell of Coppertone and bug spray, the hardness of the step under her tailbone, the pleasure of a lazy summer day reading, and the sound of the ocean thrumming like a heartbeat.
* * *
That summer, her tenth summer, Ellen re-read each and every one of the Little House books. Some of them twice. As ever, her father pushed and pushed her to read Tolkein and Bradbury, but it never took. She'd much rather read about cozy, homely things, especially if those things were a struggle first to win and then to hold on to. Even then, the stories of how to churn butter or how to build a house and make a home the struck her as far more fantastic than magic rings or haunted carnivals.
For her, the lives of Laura Ingalls or Caddie Woodlawn or Anne Shirley were pure magic. They were old friends, they were as comfortable as old socks. As for the other books, the ones that everyone said were supposed to be magic and wonderful and mind-opening ("pathways to other, more wonderful worlds," her father always said), she didn't even get as far as Frodo leaving the Shire before giving up in sheer apathy. The whole birthday party scene was fun enough, but other than that... no.
That was when Ellen started sneaking off to the staircase to read Little Women for the third time. It was just too hard to avoid her father, otherwise. It wasn't that he disapproved of what she read; it was that he'd keep on coming up to her, smiling and bright-eyed, asking her how far she'd gotten in Fellowship and what did she think of it, who was her favorite character, and oh! had she gotten to Moria yet? No? What about the Council of Elrond? Had she even met Strider yet... He was so anxious to hear just how much she loved the book that Ellen wanted to curl up and vanish.
She'd tried telling him, of course. Tried telling him she didn't like that kind of thing--no, not even Peter Pan, really--but the look on his face (puzzled, then hurt, then puzzled all over again) left her feeling like she'd carelessly stomped a duckling to death.
* * *
It's been a while since she's read anything that wasn't for work. Newspapers from all the surrounding states and a few known hot-spots, carefully scoured for odd patterns in obituaries and the like. Reams of stuff Ash prints out for her when she asks him to help gather information on a case.
If Ash finds something real good (or real bad), he'll often come scrambling out of the back, holding out his laptop and forcing her to read for herself right off the screen, no matter what she happens to be doing at the moment.
She has a couple of reference books with Post-it notes sticking out every which way, and a few things she's held onto for sentimental reasons, but the bookshelves in the Roadhouse aren't as full as they could be.
Most of Bill's old books have passed into Bobby's keeping, but that's okay. It really is. There's more than a few of those books that are probably safer at Bobby's place, all told. A few of the safer ones have made their way back to the Roadhouse over the years, given that she's a convenient way for Bobby or Jim to get things to people who don't have anything resembling a fixed mailing address.
Ellen figures it doesn't hurt to look through the books again as they're passing through, taking a moment to say 'hello,' as it were. She might smile when she sees a note in the margin, run her finger under a familiar scrawl.
When the time comes, she'll hand the books over to people who need them more than she does.
* * *
Back in her bedroom, Ellen keeps a wooden cigar box filled with notes, postcards, birthday cards, and other oddments. There is a faded purple bookmark, folded in thirds and falling apart. There are six poems, still with the ragged edges from where she tore them out of a spiral notebook. She doesn't read them, but she knows they're there. It's enough.
There are several photos perched up on top of the television. They've been there so long that she's fallen out of the habit of looking at them regularly. And when something does happen, and she does stop to look at them, enough time has passed that it hits her anew just how handsome Bill was, or how tiny Jo used to be. Whenever this happens, she'll lose a good twenty minutes or so to woolgathering before she shakes her head sharply and tells herself that there's work that needs doing and there's only one person to do it.
There are other things around that make her think of her family more frequently--and with less a sense of dislocation--than the photographs.
On the refrigerator, there are forty-two magnets, little rubber or plastic ones with raised edges and print, each shaped like a different state, plus British Columbia. They're arranged more or less as they would be on the map. Less, rather than more, because Vermont is the same size as Texas, and at one point Bill forgot he'd already sent her Colorado. Alaska and Hawaii are missing, of course. So's much of the deep south. Rhode Island should also be there, but Bill said he couldn't find a magnet. He'd been calling from a police station in Providence, though, so Ellen always suspected there was a little more to the story than that.
Ellen has been to most of the states on her refrigerator, has hunted in many of them, even lived in a few, but when she thinks of South Dakota, her first thought is often of a deep burnt-orange outlined in white, not of junked cars and rooms upon rooms of books. Nebraska is a cool, pale green, despite the dryness of the summer-burnt prairie surrounding the Roadhouse. Missouri is fluorescent yellow. Kansas, hunter orange.
Massachusetts, however, is not gold. Not gold at all.
The day the Roadhouse burns down, Ellen gets a small padded envelope in the mail. There's no return address, but the loopy, too-neat handwriting is the same as that on the handful of postcards she's got stashed in the cigar box.
This is much more than a postcard, though. Those don't do much more than tell her that Jo's alive and sends her love. She rips the envelope open right there by the mailbox, hands trembling and breath stilled. There's no letter, no note, and just when she thinks her heart might contract to a nothing in her chest, a small blue and silver object slides out onto her palm.
Jo has sent her North Carolina.
Ellen's fist closes around it tight enough to leave behind dents in her palm when she finally kisses the back of her hand and relaxes her grip. It takes her a few moments of staring at the ground and concentrating on her breathing before she lets herself head back inside.
She's not sure if she'll put the magnet on the old map or start a new one, maybe up on the freezer door.
Once she makes it inside, though, it's only to find an argument that's about to tip over into a brawl. She shoves the magnet in her jacket pocket and stomps over to shout some sense back into some folk who should damn well know better.
It settles, although it almost doesn't, and it leaves her shaken enough that she forgets about the magnet. She almost remembers when she slaps Maine back into place after Ash borrowed it to pin up some McDonalds coupons or something else equally stupid, but annoyance pushes the memory aside until later.
Goddamn Ash. Things were always turning up where they shouldn't when he was around.
* * *
The first time one of the Staffordshire figurines from the mantel showed up on her landing, Ellen thought it was just her father being stupid. She carefully put it back where it belonged, thinking that was the end of it. It wasn't.
These days, of course, she'd know better. Hell, Jo would have known better at her age, but Jo'd grown up knowing all about the kinds of dangers they'd never talk about in PSAs at the end of Rescue Rangers.
"C'mon El, there's no need to get into that now. She's too young to be hearing about this," Bill said once or maybe twice, but Ellen didn't even need to argue. A steely, steady look was all it took. Besides, he knew better.
So, Bill taught Jo how to clean a gun and care for a knife. He even gave her one of his good knives for her very own, holding it out to her hilt-first even though the blade was strapped into a thick leather sheath.
It wasn't quite what Ellen had in mind by way of preparing their little girl, and maybe Bill knew that. Maybe he was trying to make a point. Once you know about something, after all, you'd better be prepared to deal with it.
He'd looked at Ellen after he handed over the knife, one eyebrow raised as if to ask if she was sure about all of this. Ellen wasn't sure, and she wasn't happy (the way she crossed her arms over her chest let Bill know that without any doubt).
No, she didn't like it, but Jo needed to be safe, and Bill knew what he was doing. Mostly.
* * *
"So, what's your story?" Bill asked her the first time they met. He'd settled on Bobby's couch, long legs splayed out and arm draped across the back as if he'd laid claim to the thing long ago. She wanted not to like him, but it was a lost cause from the start.
She'd brought him coffee, of course, while Bobby rummaged through his books in search of something that might give them something they could use against what might be a skinwalker.
"Just crashing here for a few days. Lost my last job 'cause I took too many 'days off' while I was hunting down a weeping woman." Ellen shrugged as she leaned against the door-jamb, cradling her own cup in both hands. "Managed to get rid of her before she drowned any more kids, though, so I'm not counting it a huge loss."
He nodded and sipped at his coffee. His mouth twisted in amused disgust. "Bobby still water this stuff down with holy water?"
Ellen's was not similarly fortified. She'd been the one who'd brewed it, after all. "What do you think?"
The look he gave her over the rim of his cup, dangerously close to a wink, said he thought she had a good point. It also said that he knew she hadn't really told him her story, but that he'd let it go for the moment.
Only for the moment, mind you.
Ellen swallowed, hard, a too-big gulp of coffee making a rough journey down. Not pleasant, but at least she had something she could blame for the sudden, burning fullness in her chest.
* * *
Bill was twelve years older than she was, something that bothered her at first. After all, they'd met when she was seventeen, and six months afterwards he'd tipped over into his thirties while she was still in her teens.
No wonder that when she first felt that twist deep in her gut the next time she saw his truck pull up to Bobby's porch, she told herself to drop it, to leave it alone.
And she did. For a while, anyhow.
Bill Harvelle was too old and too scrawny, she reminded herself whenever the daydreams began to creep in around the edges. Handsome enough, but a bit shopworn, with the crows-feet already setting up camp around the corners of those deep blue eyes. Too many scars. She was quick to notice the layered scars across his knuckles and the pale pink of a burn scar reaching up the side of his neck.
Then there was a deep, straight scar low across the small of his back. She'd noticed it when his shirt rode up as he was reaching to pull a book off a high shelf. Noticed, and remembered a little better than she should have, perhaps.
"So, what's your story?" she finally asked him, when she'd gotten tired of telling herself to ignore what was damn well obvious.
It took her three years to find her way, but she finally got there.
* * *
That summer (it was always that summer) Ellen spent most of the trip from Philly to Woods Hole reading. Well, trying to read, anyhow. Her father kept on interrupting her with all kind of stories about how much fun they were going to have together once they got to the island.
"We'll have all summer together, Nelly-belle."
The nickname had appeared out of nowhere while Janis was in the hospital and he was desperate to keep things cheerful, and Ellen hadn't worked up the courage to tell him how much she hated it. After all, she'd gained no more fondness for Nellie Olson on this re-reading of the Little House books. He should have known better, as far as she was concerned.
"Just you and me, right?" he said, looking over the back of the seat and nearly swerving into the oncoming lanes before a blaring horn snapped him back to reality.
Ellen scootched further down on the back seat, raising her book to cover her face. She wasn't reading, though. She tried, but couldn't get past the next line.
They were cozy and comfortable in their little house made of logs, with the snow drifted around it and the wind crying because it could not get in by the fire.
Normally she could imagine herself right there in that cozy cabin, but not today, not when the sun had turned the station wagon into an oven, and her sweaty thighs first stuck to then kept slipping on the vinyl seat. Her story, her means of escape to a home that wasn't, had turned into nothing more than words on a page.
She kept the book raised, though, because she really didn't want to talk. But the more she stayed silent, the more his hands spun through the air and the louder his voice got as he talked about fishing trips, or all the concerts there were on the island, or rainy days where she could spend the day reading while he spend the day writing, or mornings spent walking the beaches with their heads bent looking for wampum or beach glass or pirate gold or keys to lost cities and maybe hunting ghosts and hey... are you listening, Nelly-belle?
"I can't wait."
He was quiet for a while after that, and that was fine by her, even though it was a pointedly hurt quiet.
Why'd he have to go and remind her it was just the two of them? It wasn't like she didn't know that.
Ellen tried to lose herself in the story of Ma and Pa and a little log cabin on a wide, wide prairie and forget that she was lying down in the back of an old station wagon, with everything she owned stowed in the wayback.
According to her father, they were on their way to a new life, and a new home, but as far as she was concerned, it was just another one of his stories.
* * *
Bill was just full of stories. Or, as she often told him, just plain full of it.
"No, I swear to you I'm not making this up. I saw it for myself when I was in-country."
Ellen flicked her eyes at him, wanting to glare but not wanting to take her eyes off the road. Bill was lounging in the passenger seat, hands laced behind his head. His elbow was only one sharp turn away from knocking her in the ear.
"Bill, when you tell me you saw something 'in-country,' you know I'm going to know it's half made-up."
He laughed at that, something she felt in the slight shaking of the bench seat rather than heard.
There were more than a few veterans who'd drifted into hunting when they returned to the States. Most of the vets she'd encountered would ostentatiously clam up or get real, real somber if anything about 'the war' came up. Bill, though, Bill would tell you his war stories at the drop of a hat and keep on telling them until you had to damn near threaten violence to get him to stop. She'd heard the one about the pig more times than she cared to count. Then there was the one about the Special Forces guy and his dog. Or the stories about the crazy games the SEALs attached to his unit would play.
Sometimes, though, he came up with something that wound up being more than just background noise.
"Cao dai Buddhism," he said, the foreign words coming out unaccented through the Midwest twang. "I shit you not, El, Victor Hugo was one of the big three saints."
"Right. In Vietnam. They made a French author a saint." She tried to sound stern and sarcastic--she was still feeling prickly towards him for taking such a damn fool chance when they were shutting down that haunt--but a laugh crept out through the cracks.
"Best French food I ever had was in Saigon," he pointed out. "But anyhow, we were out on the Plain of Reeds--like a prairie, but it flooded every year so that the river was damn near everywhere, more like a lake, you could barely see the horizon--and anyhow, we'd be out on patrol, just going quiet through the water, and every now and again there'd be these little shrines sticking out of the water. Damned if some of them didn't have a picture of Victor Hugo right there in the middle. Strangest thing." He waited for a comment, but didn't seem offended when one didn't arrive.
"One of the guys swore he saw pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt and Will Rogers in a couple of those shrines." There was a perfectly timed pause. "Course, he was so full of shit his eyes were brown."
Ellen shook her head and laughed, just like Bill meant her to. She couldn't stay mad at Bill for long, not even when he'd nearly gotten himself killed.
That night, she dreamed of dozens of shabby little houses sticking up out of the water. The water wasn't still, not the way Bill had described the Plain of Reeds, but gray and churning, rocking the little houses this way and that.
Ellen stood at the top of a steep meadow that spilled down to the sea, gold and brown, dotted with the red of rose-hips and poison ivy. The little houses were so far away, and she could do nothing about it as one by one, they were taken by the waves until there was only one left.
A little man--an author, but by no means a saint--stood in the doorway of the house. He waved at her, and she didn't know if he was telling her to go away or telling her to come save him. Maybe he was only waving hello. Or goodbye.
Not knowing what else to do, Ellen raised her hand and waved back.
The little house disappeared under the waves, and she was left at the top of the meadow with no way to get home.
* * *
"Well, here it is, Nelly-belle. Home."
Her father dropped his duffel bag on the porch as if it meant they were there to stay. Ellen knew better, of course.
"I thought you said we were only staying here for the summer," she said. They'd be on the road again by mid-August. Still, she was impressed. The house was hidden from the road by a hedge that was half again as tall as her father. She guessed it was privet, because that's what most hedges were made of in the books she read, and she did know enough to recognize yew.
There had been yew hedges in front of the house in Pennsylvania, and Janis had been the one to go out, resentful and grumbling, to hack them back with a big pair of dull hedge shears after they'd nearly grown shut across the front walk.
No, this wasn't yew, and when her father made the sharp turn up into the driveway, she saw that this house wasn't anything like their last house. That had been a little brick box with blank, bare windows, squat and ugly behind the overgrown yew hedges and lumpy, patchy lawn. This house swept up three whole stories from a perfectly flat green lawn. Rather than brick, it was covered with dove-gray shingles and trimmed in clean, tidy white and a deep, almost black green that each shone in the sun in its own way. A covered porch wrapped around one half of the house, from halfway across the front and all along one side, turning to disappear across the back. Best of all, the windows actually had diamond-shaped panes, and weren't just dead, expressionless slits of cheap glass bordered in aluminum.
The sunlight danced off these windows, so old that the panes were set at slightly different angles. Later, her father would point out the way the glass rippled, and how that meant it was old. He even found a circle that showed where part of the glass had once been attached to a glass-blower's pipe.
"Let's go round the back," her father said, holding out a hand. Professor Jameson says you can see the Cape across the water if the day's clear enough."
Ellen was so enamored by the house and by the idea that she'd be staying here that she didn't even hesitate before taking her father's hand and letting him lead her to the back porch and a narrow strip of garden that ended at a steep bluff.
Her father walked them right out to the edge of the bluff, where a lichened split-rail fence and a hedge of wild rose was all that kept them from a nasty fall down onto rocks and a small scrap of beach. Ellen wished he wouldn't lean forward so much, hanging halfway over the fence, but of course he did.
It was a hot, sunny day, but so hazy that try as they might, all they could see was silver water leading out and out and out to a blank horizon. She could barely even see the line where sea turned into sky.
They stayed out there just long enough to watch the ferry chugging back towards an invisible mainland. Ellen watched it intently, her fingernails digging deep into the salt-softened wood of the fence.
It was a relief to head back to the shelter of the house. The sun twinkled off the diamond-paned windows, making it look like the house was smiling down at them indulgently.
For a moment, the way the sun reflected off one of the rippled dormer windows made it look as if there was also someone in the house looking down at them. Ellen stopped so quickly she nearly twisted her ankle. She started to warn her father, but the passing cloud moved out of the sun's path and the figure was gone.
The next morning, they were in the middle of breakfast when her father snapped out of his morning haze into full wakefulness, his mouth in the weak 'o' that meant he could have forgotten anything from the utility bills to the fact that he was supposed to be leading a tutorial.
Ellen braced herself for the inevitable panic and loud declarations of how stupid he was, but instead he grinned slyly.
"Maybe it's a good thing I forgot to tell you last night--especially your first night in your new home--but Professor Jameson told me that the house is haunted."
He took another sip of his coffee, and then the sly grin broadened into a genuine smile. "Isn't that great?"
* * *
At first, like most hunters who weren't out hunting down a specific something, she and Bill mostly worked haunts. The salt-and-burns began to run into each other over the course of those two years. She does remember a few details here and there, mostly out of context.
The time they had to use nearly a gallon of lighter fluid because of the damp. Broken blisters from shoveling without gloves, her palms stinging so badly she couldn't curl her hands shut more than a little. The time they had to get the box containing a murdered woman's bones out of an attic and down four flights of stairs, and the resulting string of arguments and accidents like outtakes from a Laurel and Hardy movie. The smell of scorched earth, and the frown on Bill's face and the flicker in his eyes as he silently ran through the handful of war stories he wouldn't tell. Cursing out paper matchbooks and cheap cardboard matches that bent all to hell and back when she tried to light them.
Specific incidents ran together with all the repeated ills and boredoms of the job until she had to stop and think before she could remember which job came before which, or if she broke her collarbone on the Omaha job when a poltergeist threw her into a wall, or if it was the one up near Billings, when a ghost-induced blind panic made her run and fall down into a culvert.
In general, their jobs all ended in much the same way, barring any kind of incidental injury that might send their usual routine off the rails with hasty retreat to the motel room for a session with the first aid kit or--in more than a few cases--to the emergency room.
Ellen would put all their tools and weapons away in the truck and Bill would erase any signs that might lead the law to them. It wasn't quite housekeeping on her part, and it wasn't quite being back on active duty on his, but it felt like business as usual. It also meant they were about to go home.
* * *
It took Ellen years to get used to the Roadhouse without Bill. Yes, once she stopped actively hunting and started running the place, Bill was gone nearly half the time, but being gone wasn't the same as never coming home.
After a while, she no longer turned to talk to him. She stopped looking up with anticipation when she heard truck tires turn off asphalt onto gravel. It didn't mean she stopped missing him, though.
Some days, she misses him so much she can hardly breathe from it.
These days, she's back to waiting for the phone to ring. When it does ring, she gets very still, trying not to hope. You'd never know from the crisp, almost unwelcoming "Harvelle's" when she does answer that she's desperate to be able to follow that up with a "hey, Jo-baby, where are you? How are you? When are you coming home?"
So far, there hasn't been any such call.
Jo's just trying to follow in her daddy's footsteps, Ellen tells herself. Or maybe she's trying to follow in Ellen's. Ellen was younger than Jo when she set out on her own, much younger, but Jo doesn't want to hear that's how Ellen knows Jo is too young, much too young for the work.
Jo grew up around hunters, even more than Ellen did. She heard their crazy stories, learned about the difficulty and necessity of what they do. Although no one ever knows what they're getting into when they get into hunting, Jo's got a better handle on it than most beginners.
Even experts die. This is something Ellen also tells herself, although she tries hard not to listen. She also tells herself that Jo is desperate to prove herself, desperate to build something that is hers.
Sometimes, Ellen tells herself that maybe Diana's right, and all this is some sort of way for Jo to try to get her daddy back. When she tells herself this, she also turns around and tells herself to shut the hell up. It doesn't matter how you go about it--raising the dead is never a good idea, even if there are no spells, no devil's bargains involved.
She tries to tell herself that all she can do is wait, but every hour or so, Ellen pulls her cell phone from her pocket and checks the charge and the signal strength. Ash just rolls his eyes at her if he catches her, but he knows better than to say anything.
Ellen does her best not to dig at what she did wrong in trying to do right by her daughter, but it's hard not to wonder if Jo going on the road was less about hunting and more about leaving the Roadhouse.
"Not under my roof," was the immediate answer when Jo insisted on hunting. It was one of those things said more in anger than in reason, a threat that might have worked if Jo was still twelve.
But Jo wasn't twelve, and Jo took her at her word. Then she took off before Ellen could gather her wits about her.
Afterwards, Ellen tried to tell Ash that she never believed Jo would actually leave like that. He opened his mouth to make a smart remark, but she narrowed her eyes at him and he slammed it shut again. He should know better than to comment, after he helped Jo cover her tracks the first time she left.
Ellen tells herself she should have known what would happen. Jo had left once before, after all. She knew, but she somehow still didn't believe that her baby would really leave.
* * *
She didn't believe her father, of course. Still, when he told her that the house was haunted, her "really?" was more curious than sarcastic.
"Don't be surprised if you find things in different places than where you left them," he said. The twinkle in his eye warned her that he was likely to try to be clever when she wasn't looking.
"I won't." She was surprised to find that she was a little disappointed that it was all probably a trick, and just another way for him to try to keep her from being sad. Besides, the house didn't seem the kind of place that would be haunted. The house seemed to catch every bit of sunlight, even though it had a covered porch. Her bedroom (not really hers, she reminded herself, just the one she was using) was so bright that the sun woke her at five that morning.
She could have gone back to sleep, maybe, but there was such a racket of birdsong she wondered how on earth she'd slept through it until now. Once awake, she was hyper-sensitive to every noise. There was the sound of the old Moon Beam alarm clock chipping its way through the minutes, and the occasional creak of wood against wood as boards and beams adjusted to warmth and wind. It was all new, and yet all normal. Still, it kept her half-awake and attentive enough that she didn't miss the sharp double-tap of the screen door snapping shut and bouncing against the door frame. She was out of bed and hustling downstairs in less than ten seconds. Her father shouldn't be awake this early. He'd sleep in until ten or eleven, the way he always did.
If he was up this early, it meant something had happened, like maybe there'd been a phone call from the doctor or something, or he'd been out late and was only just now coming back and that was never good...
By the time she made it down to the kitchen, Ellen was awake enough to remember that they'd had all the bad news there was to have, and she and her father were now creating this wonderful and amazing new life with just the two of them.
Ellen looked around the cozy kitchen, with its lace curtains and scarred white countertops, and realized she had no idea if Janis would have loved it or hated it.
She thought it over for a bit, and after a while it wasn't at all hard to see Janis standing there, long brown hair pulled back beneath her blue bandanna as she fried up onions and peppers for some spaghetti sauce, swaying and singing along to the radio and not minding as grease and onion spattered all over the stove and counter.
It wasn't even six o'clock, but Ellen still went out onto the porch. If her father was up, she didn't want him to catch her crying. If he thought she was sad, he would do everything and anything to make her not sad, never realizing that it only made things that much worse.
She let the screen door snap shut behind her. It was the same sharp, doubled sound as before, but it only got a turn of the head and a scowl. She wanted to be miserable and spiky, damn it, not chasing down a stupid ghost story that probably wasn't even true.
"I wanna go home," she grumbled, sitting down on the porch steps. She said it again, not even minding that she didn't know what or where she meant by 'home.' After a minute or two, one--just one--of the rocking chairs on the porch began to rock back and forth, back and forth.
Eventually, she gave in and got up from the porch steps, going to sit in the rocking chair, never mind how much pollen got all over her nightshirt. It was a good thing she knew they were going to leave in a few months, otherwise she'd start thinking of this place as home. And it couldn't be home, not with the two of them the way they were.
When she finally went back inside, her father was still asleep, but three coffee mugs, two cereal bowls, and a colander had appeared on the kitchen table. A cast iron skillet sat on the stove, as if waiting to be filled with peppers and onions.
Ellen stared at them for a moment, then took one of the bowls and fixed herself some cereal.
* * *
No matter how many times she yells at him, Ash keeps on leaving his dirty dishes in his room, or depositing them in a teetering tower next to the sink and its dishpan full of suds.
Jo used do the same thing. So did Bill.
"Goddamn pain-in-the-ass genius..." It would be easier to replace some of these dishes than wash them.
"Probably won't wipe his own ass unless he's told..."
Much as she'd like to kill him sometimes, at least Ash is still around to make a mess, Ellen thinks as she scrubs at dried-on cereal and scrapes pizza crusts into the trash.
"I swear, that boy was raised by hyenas."
She doesn't know much about how Ash was raised, only that he came here in search for answers to what happened to his friend. Ellen's still amazed at how much Ash was able to piece together on his own, once Caleb gave him a few suggestions of where and how to start looking.
Ash is still looking, even after he's found his own answers, and there are many who are thankful for it. In the past few weeks alone, he's found things for Diana that even she didn't know about werewolves. He's gotten a bead on where Gordon is these days, so Ellen can be sure to tell the Winchester boys to steer well clear of him. From the sound of things the past few days, Ash might even have a lead on something really big, but he's being close-mouthed about it, for a change.
Ellen raises an eyebrow when he comes out of his room, trying to look all smug but only succeeding in looking as if he's had way to much coffee. She asks him if he could walk out to get the mail, but he's waiting for a phone call, he says.
So, Ellen heads out, and it works out just as well that she does, because there's a padded envelope waiting for her out there, with it's little bit of blue and silver.
Sometimes, she's tempted to ask Ash what his story really is, but she's fairly sure that all she'd get would be a nicely camouflaged version of the truth.
At least the boy's got a place to be now, dirty dishes and all.
Part Two