LITMIR.BIZ

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and harsh.

      Cleo pouted and ordered Mother, “Tell him we can’t move!”

      She turned to make eye contact with Cleo and said quietly, “Of course we won’t.”

      “I’m serious.” Father squinted, the headlights looming as they approached the curving bridge that spanned Boxer Creek as it cut through the canyon some fifty feet below.

      “You can’t be!” Cleo unbuckled her seat belt and leaned forward, pleading, touching his tense shoulder gently. “Don’t even joke about it. I won’t move.”

      “Honey, we aren’t moving anywhere. Your father’s a foreman at the mine. Now, come on, let’s not worry about this.”

      Then, “What the hell?” Panic tightened their father’s voice as the oncoming vehicle drew closer. “Dim those lights, you son of a bitch.” He flashed his own lights.

      “Hank,” their mother reproved. Headlights, two blinding orbs, flooded the interior with harsh white light. “Hank! Watch out!”

      Too late!

      Trying to avoid the imminent collision, Father cranked on the steering wheel, and the car began to slide. Out of control. The passing truck hit their rear end and sent the Volvo spinning crazily.

      Cleo screamed and was flung across Grace.

      Grace’s head hit the side window. Pain exploded in her skull.

      Mother was yelling, “Watch out, watch out, oh, God!” as the wagon hit the rail, bounced back onto the slick pavement, and skidded ever faster to the other side of the bridge.

      The reeling Volvo crashed through the guardrail in a horrifying groan of twisting metal, popping tires, and splintering glass.

      Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…

      Down the car plunged!

      Cleo was screaming.

      Mother prayed.

      And Father cursed as Grace lost consciousness.

      She didn’t feel the crash that snapped her mother’s neck and caused broken ribs to puncture her father’s lungs. She hadn’t been awake to witness Cleo being flung from the car and pinned beneath it, crushed to death.

      Eighteen days later, Grace awoke in a hospital to learn that the rest of her family was gone. Dead. She’d managed to live, though she’d been half frozen in the creek waters, her body temperature dangerously low, only a few bruises from the seat belt and a concussion to indicate she’d been in the deadly wreck. No other driver or damaged vehicle had ever been located and when she was advised that her family was dead, she’d simply answered “No.”

      Because she saw them.

      Talked to them.

      All of them: Father, Mother, and Cleo.

      Even now. Forty-some years later.

      Of course, the hospital staff were sure she was crazy, hallucinating, her brain conjuring up images.

      If only, she thought now as the dog rounded a corner and she saw her small house, flanked by snowdrifts and dark as sin, sitting on a small hillock just off the road. Rubbing her arms, Grace picked up her pace and told herself that even if she told someone about her latest vision, she’d be disregarded. Sneered at.

      Before the accident, as a child, she’d sometimes been lost in daydreams. Had been left on the playground more than once, never hearing the bell or the hoots and laughter of the other children.

      Then, she’d been teased and had often run home crying, only to hear her mother say she was “special,” while Cleo cringed at “the weirdo” who was her sister. Those days her dreams had been labeled as nothing more than the fantasies of a “gifted” child. There had been no medical reason that she sometimes blanked out. And though her IQ tests and exams had placed her right in the center of normal, her mother had always whispered to her that she was smarter than the others who cruelly taunted her, that they, the ones who called her “retard,” were to be pitied.

      But the playground barbs cut deep and after the accident, when Grace still spoke to her dead parents and sister on a regular basis, worrying her aunt Barbara, and after she adopted her first puppies—two wolves who had lost their mother to a poacher—her visions had increased. Become more real, more definitive.

      Those school bullies were right. Her condition was weird.

      Now she made her way up the path to her door and found it ajar. Inside the house was cold, the ancient furnace unable to keep up with the frigid arctic temperature swept inside by the howling wind. Locking the door behind her, she turned on the lights and kicked off her boots.

      She was keyed up. Edgy. Nerves strung tight.

      After hanging her coat in the closet, she found her robe and cinched it tight about her waist. She lit a fire from kindling she’d stacked near the grate, then rocked back on her heels and watched the eager flames devour the paper and dry wood. As the flames ignited, crackling and hissing, promising warmth, Sheena curled up on a thick bed that Grace had sewn.

      “Good girl,” she said, warming her hands as she spied the clock on the mantel, near the fading, framed photograph of her family. It was morning, a few hours before dawn, and the images of Regan Pescoli were still with her.

      The fire burned bright, golden shadows shifting through the small living area in the house where she’d resided all her life.

      “An onus,” she confided in Sheena, who was lying down, great head on her paws, eyes focused on Grace. No wonder she took the heat she did.

      Rod Larimer, owner of the Bull and Bear, an inn of sorts in town, had referred to her as “our resident looney.” And Bob Simms, the hunter who had killed the she-wolf twenty years earlier, had been known to say, “Crazy as a fruitcake. A real nutso. Should be locked up, if you ask me.” Manny Douglas, a writer for the Mountain Reporter, had once described her as one of “Grizzly Falls’s local color.” Manny had kindly lumped her in with the likes of Ivor Hicks, who’d thought he’d been abducted by aliens in the seventies, and Henry Johansen, a farmer who fell off his tractor and hit his head only to claim he could read other people’s minds.

      Like you? she asked herself while staring at the flames.

      Not all of the townspeople thought she was crazy. A few actually liked the whole clairvoyant thing, found it, and her, fascinating. Sandi Aldridge, the owner of Wild Will’s, was always kind, and Aunt Barbara, though disgruntled at having to move here to take care of her brother’s only surviving child, had always told her to accept the gift God had given her.

      Hah. Now Grace grabbed a poker and jabbed at the fire, causing sparks to dance and red embers to glow a little more brightly. Going to the Pinewood County Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t be pleasant. Not at all. Sheriff Dan Grayson wasn’t a fan and Pescoli’s partner, Selena Alvarez, seemed icy and remote. But then that woman had secrets, held them close. Grace was certain of it. And she didn’t like the idea of trying to convince Grayson, or Alvarez, or anyone associated with the police about her vision. She didn’t want to suffer the ridicule that was certain to be thrust her way.

      “What should I do?” she asked the dog and in that moment Grace heard her father’s voice, clear as a bell. “Be smart,” he advised gruffly. “Keep your damned mouth shut.”

      But her mother, as she had in life, disagreed with her husband. “Don’t worry about what anyone says about you. A woman’s life is at stake. You owe it to her to tell what you know.”

      “I don’t know anything,” Grace argued, feeling some warmth return to her toes.

      “Don’t you?” Her mother seemed close enough to touch, but, of course, Grace saw no one, not even a transparent ghostly outline. Just heard voices. As ever.

      Straightening, she picked up the picture from the mantel. Staring at the photograph of her family clustered on the front porch pulled at her heart-strings.

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