CHAPTER 24

      VIOLA PEABODY, THE WAITRESS WHO HAD served lunch to me and Terri at the Grille just eight eventful hours ago, lived only two blocks from Camp’s End, but because of her tireless gardening and painting and carpentry, her home seemed to be a world away from those dreary streets.

      Although small and simple, the house resembled a fairy-tale cottage in one of those romantic paintings by Thomas Kinkade. Under the gibbous moon, its walls glowed as softly as backlit alabaster, and a carriage lamp revealed the crimson petals of the flowers on the trumpet vine festooning the trellis that flanked and overhung the front door.

      Without any apparent surprise that we arrived unannounced at this hour, Viola greeted Stormy and me graciously, with a smile and with an offer of coffee or ice tea, which we declined.

      We sat in the small living room where Viola herself had stripped and refinished the wood floor. She had woven the rag rug. She had sewn the chintz curtains and the slipcovers that made old upholstered furniture look new.

      Perched on the edge of an armchair, Viola was as slim as a girl. The travails and burdens of her life had left no mark on her. She did not look old enough or harried enough to be the single mother of the five- and six-year-old daughters who were asleep in a back room.

      Her husband, Rafael, who’d left her and who’d contributed not one penny to his children’s welfare, was a fool of such dimensions that he should have been required to dress like a jester, complete with silly hat and curled-toe shoes.

      The house lacked air conditioning. The windows were open, and an electric fan sat on the floor, the oscillating blades imparting an illusion of coolness to the air.

      Leaning forward with her hands braced on her knees, Viola traded her smile for a look of solemn expectation, for she knew why I must have come. “It’s my dream, isn’t it?” she said softly.

      I spoke quietly, too, in respect of the sleeping children. “Tell me again.”

      “I saw myself, a hole in my forehead, my face ... broken.”

      “You think you were shot.”

      “Shot dead,” she confirmed, folding her hands together between her knees, as if in prayer. “My right eye bloodshot and swollen all ugly, half out of the socket.”

      “Anxiety dreams,” Stormy said, meaning to reassure. “They don’t have anything to do with the future.”

      “We’ve been over this territory,” Viola told her. “Odd ... he was of that same opinion this afternoon.” She looked at me. “You must have changed your mind, or you wouldn’t be here.”

      “Where were you in the dream?”

      “No place. You know, a dream place ... all fuzzy, fluid.”

      “Do you ever go bowling?”

      “That takes money. I have two colleges to save for. My girls are going to be somebody.”

      “Have you ever been inside Green Moon Lanes?”

      She shook her head. “No.”

      “Did anything in the dream suggest the place might have been a bowling alley?”

      “No. Like I said, it wasn’t any real place. Why do you say the bowling alley? You have a dream, too?”

      “I did, yes.”

      “People dead?” Viola asked.

      “Yes.”

      “You ever have dreams come true?”

      “Sometimes,” I admitted.

      “I knew you’d understand. That’s why I asked you to read me.”

      “Tell me more about your dream, Viola.”

      She closed her eyes, striving to remember. “I’m running from something. There are these shadows, some flashes of light, but none of it is anything.”

      My sixth sense is unique in its nature and its clarity. But I believe that many people have less dramatic and undiscovered supernatural perceptions that manifest from time to time throughout their lives: presentiments that come sometimes in the form of dreams, as well as other moments of uncanny awareness and insight.

      They fail to explore these experiences in part because they believe that acknowledging the supernatural would be irrational. They are also frightened, often unconsciously, by the prospect of opening their minds and hearts to the truth of a universe far more complex and meaningful than the material world that their education tells them is the sum of all things.

      I was not surprised, therefore, that Viola’s nightmare, which earlier in the day had seemed likely to be of no consequence, had proved to be a matter of importance, after all. “Do your dreams have voices, sounds?” I asked her. “Some people’s don’t.”

      “Mine do. In the dream, I can hear myself breathing. And this crowd.”

      “Crowd?”

      “A roaring crowd, like the sound in a stadium.”

      Baffled, I said, “Where would such a place be in Pico Mundo?”

      “I don’t know. Maybe a Little League game.”

      “Not such a big crowd at one of those,” Stormy noted.

      “Wasn’t necessarily thousands of voices. Could’ve been a couple hundred,” Viola said. “Just a crowd, all roaring.”

      I said, “And then, how is it that you see yourself shot?”

      “Don’t see it happen. The shadows, the flashes of light, I’m running, and I stumble, fall on my hands and knees ...”

      Viola’s eyes twitched behind their lids as though she were asleep and experiencing the nightmare for the first time.

      “... on my hands and knees,” she repeated, “hands in something slippery. It’s blood. Then shadows whirl away and light whirls in, and I’m looking down at my own dead face.”

      She