Maeve didn’t believe in karma. At least the bad kind. At least the bad kind when it came to her.
But something was going on.
In the space of eight weeks, she’d lost everything!
I don’t understand.
What had happened? What is happening?
One thing was clear. If karma didn’t have it out for her, somebody did.
But who?
Beau Strank topped Maeve’s list. Following the Donkey Days disaster, he’d ghosted her, blocking all her calls and texts. She hadn’t found him at his office, his condo, the Broadmoor Golf Club or any of his other usual haunts.
He was obviously somewhere, though, since two weeks past an eviction notice had been posted on her front door.
“How can this be?” Maeve cried. “I’m not a common renter.”
Turns out, she was.
Maeve hadn’t actually purchased 212 Canyon Street. She’d signed a lease with option to buy. Before they’d ever been an item, Beau had arranged financing, no easy feat, he’d said, since banks were reluctant to lend money to the self-employed. Maeve had been so grateful after he’d put together the deal, particularly the way he’d patiently explained the contract while she’d scribbled her initials in dozens of places. When her parents had suggested she hire a real estate attorney just to be sure, she’d answered a bit snarkily, “Mr. Strank is a real estate broker. He knows what he’s doing!”
“You broke the terms of the lease,” Padrick said, after she’d called him in hysterics and he’d driven down Ute Pass, implementing a big brother rescue. (Padrick might be a pain, but he was the smartest guy Maeve knew and she couldn’t afford a legal consultation.)
“The lease is null and void if you miss any payments, which you did—"
“But I made them up, and I never got any notices.” (That she knew of. Maeve wasn’t always on top of opening her mail.)
As it turned out, Beau Strank was the actual owner of 212 Canyon Street. “Right there, legal as you please.” Padrick tapped the first page of the contract. Maeve was grateful her brother didn’t castigate her for being so stupid and when he said, “I’m gonna kill the fucking bastard,” she spent several pleasant moments imagining Padrick squishing Beau Strank like an overripe tomato before he intruded on her fantasy with, “Didn’t you put two and two together?”
Maeve blinked herself back to the present. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you know your own history?” Padrick had forced her to shower, after which he’d dragged her into the kitchen where he’d wrestled up a meal from the few unspoiled ingredients remaining in her refrigerator. Maeve certainly no longer looked like Pop Diva Princess, which was okay, but he wished she’d lose that hangdog expression.
Between bites of a cheese-and-something omelet, Maeve assured Padrick she was familiar with the origins of the Mooney clan, as well as bits and pieces of the Orange Rebellion and she at least recognized the Battle of the Boyne involved the Irish…
“Not that history. The foundation beside the White Rabbit. Horace Strank built the original mansion in 1900. Bloody hell, Maeve, didn’t you ever listen?”
Maeve placed her head in her hands. Once she had, but she’d prided herself on erasing all that blue collar propaganda from her mind. “Gawd, I’m trapped in a nightmare.”
“You know what I think?” Padrick removed her plate and continued tidying up her sadly neglected kitchen. “Beau Strank finagled a visit to Shamrock Ranch thinking he could talk us into selling and then buy it himself. That’s the piece of shit he is.”
Maeve felt like pulling out her hair, though that was already happening because her tape-in extensions were shedding like Mutt in the summer.
“We’ll move you back home this weekend,” Padrick said before leaving. “Store your furniture in the tack room and ready your old bedroom. You know Mama and Daddy will be thrilled.”
After Padrick left, Maeve tottered back to bed where she examined the titanic-sized disaster that had become her life. Night after night, her mind endlessly racing until she fell into an exhausted sleep.
Determined to count her blessings, Maeve reminded herself that at least she wouldn’t be homeless. Which would otherwise be a real possibility. Because losing her home wasn’t the end of her problems. Sabrina Darling, fabulously successful social media influencer, was pretty much out of business.
From earning hundreds of thousands a year to subscribers demanding their money back because her fitness program was a rip-off and she was a scam artist who hadn’t provided the promised personal consultations regarding their fitness “journey.” Oh yeah, and subscribers were upset because Sabrina Darling’s response to their whiny texts with their whiny questions had been pretty much a generic version of, “You’re doing great, girlfriend!” Not to mention the diet pills and other products she—and dozens of other influencers, so don’t blame me—had promoted on behalf of a company now being investigated by the FTC.
Maeve felt particularly betrayed by Tommy, her Domino’s Pizza deliverer, who’d posted several detailed accounts of her penchant for late night food orders.
Maybe I should have tipped him better.
After deleting her platform—which meant starting the process, but it was too complicated right now so she just disabled her comments—Maeve burned up countless mental calories trying to uncover who, other than Beau Strank, was hell bent on destroying her.
Grade school classmates who’d been mean to her for no reason?
Some heartbroken guy she’d slept with during her “body count” phase?
Jax Ajax, her long ago personal trainer who’d taught her everything she’d needed to know about physical fitness in order to bypass all that silliness about certification? But she and Jax quit fooling around after he got engaged, and why would he pop back up after all these years?
Kaitlyn, the waitress from the Golden Bee who’d smashed her car windshield after accusing Maeve of stealing her boyfriend? Which she kind of had, but Roy had been a computer nerd who’d helped her set up Better Best and he hadn’t seemed upset when she’d dumped him. He’d seemed almost relieved, in fact, if she could remember that far back.
Her college interns? They should be grateful for learning how to launch their own businesses, rather than, well, some of them had been downright bitchy.
The workers who’d remodeled her kitchen and bathroom? When you’re paying out that much money, you have a right to expect perfection.
What more could go wrong? Maeve wondered. She tried not to think about it because that might be poking the karmic gods and they’d already caused enough havoc.
Still, she wasn’t at all surprised when she turned on the local news to hear its anchor report: “Beau Strank announced his run for Colorado’s governor. With his new fiancée at his side.”
Before pulling her blankets over her face, Maeve whispered, “I’m definitely going to vote Democrat.”
***
“In the gardens of memory, in the palace of dreams, That is where you and I shall meet.”
Maeve and her niece had snuggled against the pillows propped against Maeve’s headboard reading Through the Looking Glass, when she’d come across the phrase that had once so captivated her, a phrase she’d long forgotten. “In the gardens of memory...” Maeve read slowly, savoring each word along with the images they evoked. She found herself catapulted back to her ten-year-old self, when she’d marveled how someone as eccentric as the Mad Hatter could utter such an exquisite sentiment in such exquisite fashion, though she hadn’t been sure what any of it meant.
After copying it into my journal, I underlined it so many times I tore the paper.
The realization awakened a yearning inside her, too ephemeral to articulate, though she couldn’t dismiss it as sentimentality or self-pity because her life had become a catastrophe.
What exactly would a memory garden smell like? Maeve had wondered. Would a palace of dreams be made of cobwebs or ice? What would “you and I” do after they met? She’d imagined herself, when she was grown and possessed of a garden full of memories rather than a handful of potted plants, as a wraith-like form draped upon a shadowy window seat, gazing out at a smudged grey landscape in a musing sort of way. While tracking the rain drops slipping like tears down the windowpane, she would contemplate the identity of that “you.”
How had “you” morphed into Beau Strank? How had all those shining possibilities degenerated into peddling fitness subscriptions when, let’s get real, Maeve’s actual credentials consisted of sleeping with Jax Ajax and adapting his training sessions? Selling questionable vitamin supplements and made-in-China merchandise? Purchasing a hand carved five thousand dollar Chistopher Guy bathroom mirror so she could brag about it to her “besties”? Believing money—the getting and spending of it—was the most important measure of success?
In the three months Maeve had been home, she’d roamed her psyche the way she’d roamed Shamrock Ranch, the way she’d played Chopin’s “Funeral March” for hours on end, the way she’d hidden herself away in her old bedroom with its faded flowered duvet and matching sheets edged with pretty little ruffles grown limp with time. She was vaguely aware that the entire Mooney clan kept the outside world at bay. If there were lawsuits being filed, news reports aired, Sabrina Darling TikTok haters by the thousands, her family never let on.
Still, Maeve wasn’t entirely disconnected. She didn’t need her parents or Padrick to tell her she’d lost her home, her business, her reputation, her intended fiance—okay, that was definitely a plus. All of which had brought her to the following painful, but undeniable conclusion.
I’m to blame. My bad choices. My pursuit of wealth and status, my manipulation of others for my benefit. My upside down priorities.
All of that’s on me, no one else.
Well, maybe one other person, Maeve had concluded: Nana Grace.
Since Mama worked full-time at the county courthouse, Nana had been Maeve’s primary babysitter. And as Maeve disassembled her past, she realized how toxic her grandmother had been. Selfish and self-deluded and ready to punch the world in the face at the slightest provocation. Had it begun with her disillusionment over her marriage?
“Never marry a handsome face,” she’d lectured Maeve, “for they’ll mistakenly believe a seductive grin, a twinkling set of eyes and a silver tongue will make all of society bend its knee.”
And:
“If it hadn’t been for your daddy working from the time he was knee high to a grasshopper, Brady Mooney would’ve drunk and gambled away Shamrock Ranch or sold it to finance some get rich quick scheme, you mark my words.”
Marriage had also kept Nana Grace from fulfilling her own potential. At various times, she could have been a doctor, a lawyer, a real estate mogul, a fashion designer or model, if she hadn’t been tied down young to a whiskey-guzzling dreamer and a child.
Nana Grace’s opinions found fertile ground in Maeve’s young mind. She’d diligently soaked up the superstitions; the fabulisms used as much to frighten as to entertain; the caustic view of humankind in general and men in particular; the endless lectures on all matters right and wrong, according to Grace O’Connor-Mooney’s moral code.
Maeve Mooney, Nana Grace in the making.
Not blaming her. Simply trying to understand.
Which is what had brought Maeve here to the White Rabbit on this moonless, starless night. Around her, God’s wild creatures had taken possession of Shamrock Ranch. Foxes and raccoons crept near the chicken coops, hoping to find them unlocked; coyotes yipped upon the ridge, claiming the moon; mountain lions stalked the deer and elk that had drifted down to graze the meadows.
Maeve couldn’t remember an evening so black or so still, like stepping into a painting: Black on Black on Black. Was this what hell would be like, not only the absence of God, but the absence of light?
Maeve remained Catholic enough to believe in hell, but best not to think of it out here when she was quite alone and who knew what might be observing her? She thought of the Great Horned owl, all glowing eyes and razor talons, that had nested seemingly forever in the lone pine near the mansion ruins.
Owls, harbingers of death. Liaisons to the Otherworld.
Maeve shivered. She buttoned the pink and blue plaid shacket she’d shrugged over her wool sweater in order to blunt the November cold. Retrieving her smartphone (no longer connected to WiFi) from her Levi’s, she clicked the flashlight app to maneuver the complicated latch.
Maeve stepped into the enclosure, her booted feet releasing the petrichor from a recent rain. She paused at the approximate spot where she’d discovered her grandmother that terrible day.
“From the moment we’re born, we walk toward death,” Nana Grace was fond of saying, and this was where her walk had ended. (Not literally. She’d died two days later in Woodland Park’s UC Health’s hospital.)
Which was why Maeve was out here, in the wee hours, when her parents and Granda were long to bed, as she would normally be.
Maeve had been contemplating Nana Grace’s last disappearance, or more precisely, obsessing over it. What if, like Maeve’s own life, Nana’s disappearance wasn’t at all what it had seemed at the time? Or all the times she went off chasing whatever caught her fancy, with no one caring enough to really question. Simply relieved to enjoy time away from her judgments.
What if what had seemed a tragedy had been a reprieve? What if Nana Grace had embarked on some grand exploration—though how a grand exploration could end near a dirt hole Maeve had no clue--and her last words, “Wonderland… it’s not what you think….” hadn’t been deluded ravings, but the solution to a puzzle whose pieces Maeve was supposed to assemble?
Such peculiar thoughts one has, when one has thoughts to think. It sounded like something Lewis Carroll would have written, which pleased her.
A flash of gray. With a whisper of its outstretched wings, the Great Horned Owl skimmed the foundation of the burned out mansion, seeking mice cowering in the tall grass.
Padrick had chastised Maeve for being ignorant of the history behind the ruin, but Nana Grace had filled Maeve’s head with so many crazy fables--largely knockoffs from the “auld sod”--that the commingling of the two were enough to confuse any child. Nana had tied the mythical mansion to ghost tales from an Irish castle called Leap, when an eleven-year-old named Emily had fallen from its battlements—or had an identical thing happened here?—and her poor sister Charlotte, was left to drag her deformed leg behind her. (Maeve had imagined carting an amputated limb around like a piece of luggage.)
“They live on as ghosts because that’s what happens when you think you know better than your elders,” Nana had finished ominously.
No wonder Maeve had nightmares. No wonder she’d an aversion to the ruin.
Yet, Maeve remembered another conversation right on the ruins of the mansion, one she hadn’t thought about for how many years? After Nana Grace had returned from one of her earlier “walkabouts.”
Tapping her temple. “You can bend time to your will,” she’d said. “We in the O’Connor clan. The magic’s been passed down.”
“I don’t understand.” So Maeve had been young enough to yet be intrigued by her grandmother’s nonsense.
“If we were not here, but in Leap Castle, that very place. I might say, ‘Take me to the Bloody Chapel,’ and there I’d be. With the murdered priest lurking in the stairwell, before he became a ghost. Or a later or earlier incident, if I chose.” She’d paused dramatically. “Once I located the portal.”
Maeve had looked around, at the White Rabbit, its shadow nearly reaching the ruins as the sun inched behind them. “What’s a portal?” she’d asked, a reminder of her youth.
That’s when Nana Grace had reverted to the nasty piece of work with whom Maeve was most familiar. “You’ve obviously got not a drop of the O’Connor mystic in your veins. I’ll not be wasting my breath on the likes of you. Forget we’ve had this talk.”
And she had.
Maeve shivered. Even now, more than a decade after her grandmother’s death, she couldn’t puzzle her out. Why had Nana Grace possessed such a malicious heart? She always said she loved Maeve, loved them all. (Except for her husband.) Wasn’t that the sadness of it? How we rationalize our cruelties and call them love?
I don’t want that. I want to be different.
While it was easy to make promises when one was sheltered from the consequences of one’s bad decisions, Maeve whispered, “Right here, right now I will change my ways.” She imagined her words rippling out into the darkness, stirring awake magic she no longer believed in.
Maeve closed her eyes. She realized, for the first time in how long, her stomach didn’t hurt; her heart no longer felt perpetually squeezed. A sense of peace enveloped her, a determination that she was on the precipice of a new beginning. She would embrace it and she would triumph over all the challenges awaiting her after she ventured beyond her current haven back into the real world.
A gentle brushing of her cheek. Fingers? A feather? The breath of a breeze? A rustling in the undergrowth beyond the enclosure, the plaintive hooting of her owl. Followed by something so indistinct, it didn’t immediately register. Music? More an impression than actual sound. She held her breath, listening. A distant radio? But the farmhouse remained dark. No restless residents on the prowl. Then she heard the faintest tinkling of a piano, like distant windchimes. Louder. A plaintive melody, familiar, yet its identity eluded her.
Maeve cocked her ear to better hear. The music seemed to increase in volume. Her gaze swung in the direction of the White Rabbit. Was it her imagination, or was the darkness less intense? Could the music be emanating from there? From a dry hole? But what if it wasn’t a dry hole? Maeve wasn’t sure anyone had ever actually inspected the shaft, at least in her lifetime. Could there be a kernel of truth among all the folk tales and superstitions she’d been fed?
Oddly, Maeve felt not fear, rather a sense of anticipation.
Am I being offered a new adventure?
She suddenly thought of the fairy rings that sometimes grew right beyond the enclosure. Fairies danced inside the rings and used the mushrooms as dining tables, though Nana Grace warned her never to step inside lest she be kidnapped and whisked away, never to be heard from again. Padrick explained that fairy rings were caused by a fungus, but what if the truth of fairy rings, of all those tales, lay somewhere in between?
One step closer to the light, to the shaft. Maeve imagined the night leaning forward along with her, curious to see what unfolded.
“It was fascination
I know
And it might have ended
Right then, at the start”
A female, singing a song she indeed recognized. “Fascination.” Granda always requested it when the family gathered round of a Sunday for a sing along. “Though,” Granda would say, “Nobody can sing it as smooth and mellow as the late great Nat King Cole!”
“Just a brief romance
And I might have gone
On my way
Empty hearted”
Huh. Goosebumps rose on Maeve’s arms. She recognized the wistfulness, the longing behind the woman’s singing. She’s in love and he doesn’t love her back…
She wanted to weep at the thought.
Maeve dared another step closer; still not close enough to see the origin of the glow. A waltz tempo. One, two, three, one two three. If she gazed down into the hole or the shaft or whatever it was called, would she see, far below, men in black tie and women in long dresses, strong arms around corseted waists, couples gracefully swirling around a candlelit ballroom?
Had Nana Grace heard something similar the day she’d disappeared? Had she been passing the White Rabbit, decided to explore the origin of the sound, and then… what? Might there actually be some sort of portal to another world as Nana claimed? Could you fall down the hole the same way Alice had on her own adventure? Is that what Nana had meant by “wonderland?”
It was fascination
I know
Seeing you alone
With the moonlight above
Maeve fancied she could see the words drifting up from the shaft, swaying gently, as if buoyed by a draft.
“Enchanting,” Maeve breathed, captivated rather than frightened. That was the kind of night it was.
“Photos,” Maeve breathed, removing her smartphone from her back jeans pocket. Is that what this was all about? Some benevolent being had led her here to present her with a new and exciting business opportunity, a platform that explored paranormal phenomena? A social media Ghostbusters? Maeve snapped several photos, anticipating how this would work. Later, upon close examination, she would see faces or dancing lights or maybe even a string of musical notes emerging from the hole. And, voila, a new career!
“Then I touch your hand
And next moment
I kissed you
Fascination turned to love.”
Maeve tiptoed closer. Wouldn’t it be lovely to spend time in a world so different from her own? Where orchestras played “Fascination,” dance partners bowed and curtsied and were oh, so, polite, and nobody knew Maeve’s identity, where her mistakes were decades in the future, where the karmic gods granted her a do-over?
Another step and the toe of Maeve’s hiking boots edged the lip of the hole. I’m going to look! Heart racing in anticipation, she leaned over the hole, hoping she might view…
The ground beneath Maeve’s feet crumbled. Too quickly for her to jump back to safety. She lost her balance, grabbed onto…nothing for there was nothing to hold onto and before she could even shout, Maeve Mooney was falling, falling down, down, down…