Free Windwood Farm (Taryn's Camera) by Rebecca Patrick-Howard Page A

were a problem. Taryn always had problems with nights. She’d prowled as a child, something her parents were concerned enough about to take her to the doctor for over and over again growing up. A team of medical experts had diagnosed her with everything from sleep paralysis to nightmares and insomnia and later the ambiguous “night terrors.” Some nights she couldn’t sleep at all. She’d lay there and toss and turn and stare at the ceiling, a million thoughts running through her head at once, scrambled through her head like a remote control stuck flipping through all of the channels at high speed. When she’d explained this to one psychiatrist he’d decided she’d had ADD (no ADHD when she was a child) and she’d been put on medication. That made it worse. Some nights she went into an instant sleep and had nightmares so terrible she woke up screaming, grasping at the sheets in anguish and then wouldn’t sleep for days, terrified at the thought of closing her eyes. She wouldn’t dare tell anyone of the images she saw when she closed her eyes. The only one she came close to confiding in was her grandmother on her mother’s side; someone who also has somewhat of an inkling of what she was going through.
    When Taryn was eight, her grandmother pulled her up into her fluffy featherbed on a hot summer night and comforted her into her saggy armpits (that always smelled like baby powder) and whispered words into her ears she couldn’t quite remember these years later but, at the time, were comforting. Taryn had drifted off to sleep in the scent that was a little musty and a little sweet and had slept the first dreamless night she’d had in almost a year. She was only supposed to be there for a weekend, but her parents let her stay for a week and later, for a month. Probably relieved to be away from the drama, they ended up letting her stay there for her fourth grade year and enrolled her in school in the small town of Franklin, Tennessee, convincing themselves it was probably better for her to be out of the big city of Nashville anyway and since they were both out of town so much for research, Taryn ended up spending the rest of her childhood with her grandmother until she passed away eight years later, only a year after Taryn’s parents.
    Nobody, not her friends and especially not her boyfriends, knew Taryn continued to sleep with her grandmother until the day she passed away and that, in fact, Taryn had been in bed with her at her time of death.
    As an adult, she still found it difficult to sleep alone.
     
     
    T aryn was tired when she showed up at the house early the next morning. She stayed up the night before watching some show on the Lifetime Movie Network about a woman who sued another woman for stealing her husband. Taryn wasn’t completely sure why the women were fighting over the man in question, he didn’t seem like that much of a prize, but at two o’clock in the morning, it had seemed like a fine idea to stay up and watch it, and now she was paying for it. When she was this tired it was hard to focus and the world felt off-kilter, just a little bit more unreal.
    It rained sometime during the night and the grass was still wet. Her boots were sticking in the ground and clumps of mud stuck to the bottoms with every step she took. She was glad she’d ditched her usual summer sandals and was wearing something more practical.
    The house looked even more ominous in this light, set against the gray sky, but there were peaks of sunlight trying to squirm through the clouds and there were prickles of heat against her skin telling her it would still be a hot day if given the chance. It would burn off the fog soon enough. Such was Kentucky.
    Within a few minutes , she had set up her easel and paints and started working on the masonry, the hardest part of the house. Since part of the house had fallen down so many years ago, it was hard to imagine what it might have looked like, but the stones were still there and