A Touch of the Beast. Linda Winstead Jones
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brother-in-law is coming to town for the festival,” Debbie said much too casually. “Maybe you can show him around while he’s here.”
“No, thanks,” Sheryl responded, not at all surprised or dismayed. Debbie was always trying to fix her up, and she was forever raving about the joys of marriage and motherhood. Sheryl had learned to take the friendly interference in stride, just as Debbie was learning to accept the fact that her new friend wasn’t at all interested in the things that made her own life complete. She wasn’t quite there yet, though.
When she’d moved to Wyatt, Sheryl had never expected her new best friend to be eleven years older than she, a married woman with three kids and an unnatural fixation for The Home and Garden Channel.
The Home and Garden Channel gave Sheryl a headache.
After talking to Debbie for a few minutes more, Sheryl headed for her own house, ready to kick off her shoes and plop down in a comfortable chair. She’d have to feed and water the animals first, but once that was done they’d let her have a breather. A short one.
Her own yard was not as well kept as Debbie’s, and was not nearly as large. Sheryl had bought the smallest house on the block, but it was more than sufficient for her needs. The clapboard ranch was square and ordinary, but there was something warm about it. The previous owners had painted the house a pale yellow, and she liked it. She had never thought of herself as a yellow-house person, but this one… She loved it. Inside there was a large kitchen, a spacious living room, a dining room, two large bedrooms and a big bathroom that needed updating but was functional and roomier than most modern ones. The attic was unfinished and strictly for storage, but the extra space was nice. After years of living in apartments, she found the yellow house was a real luxury.
Laverne waited on the deep front porch, her gray tail swishing with impatience. Sheryl collected her mail from the metal box beside the door, but waited until she’d unlocked and opened the door before leafing through the envelopes. Bills, ads, a letter from her dad.
There had been a time when something as simple as leafing through the mail had made her heart beat too fast. After she’d broken up with Michael there had been too many angry letters waiting for her in the mailbox, too many unwanted messages on her answering machine. She hadn’t heard from her ex-fiancé in four months, but still every now and then she expected him to rise up out of the bushes.
Yeah, romance was nice enough, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle.
As she walked through the front door, a chill ran down her spine. She felt as if someone was watching her. Sheryl turned around slowly, and her eyes swept the empty sidewalk. Debbie was busy working in her flower bed again, and no one else was in sight.
She brushed off the odd feeling, attributing it to unpleasant memories of her ex, and closed the door behind her.
“It’s such a long shot,” Cassie said as Hawk threw sloppily folded clothes into his suitcase. “And North Carolina is so far away. I can’t believe you’d listen to a crazy woman who accosts you in the pharmacy.”
“What makes you think she’s crazy?” Hawk glanced up as he closed the suitcase. His sister was pacing near the door, her hands clasped tightly. She wasn’t usually so tense, but with everything that had happened lately, she had just cause.
“Everything you told me about her,” Cassie snapped. “The way she dressed, the way she sneaked up on you, the completely insufficient note. An address, that’s it. How do you know that address even exists? She might’ve made it up or it might be the address of a dry cleaner or a bakery or some poor person’s house. What she said about you looking like our mother, that’s definitely crazy. What do you think you’ll find at that address, anyway? Another weird woman offering riddles about the past?”
Compared to Hawk, his sister was tiny. But the vast difference in their body mass had never stopped Cassie from standing up to him and speaking her mind.
“I don’t know what I’ll find.”
Cassie ran a nervous hand through her hair, brushing the black strands away from her face. “I know you, Hawk. You think you’re going to drive up to a house with a white picket fence, knock on the door, and our biological mother and father will come to the door with open arms, wondering where we’ve been all these years.”
He’d quit expecting anything like that years ago, though there had been a time when he’d been absolutely obsessed with finding his birth parents. “You’ll be okay while I’m gone.”
“I know I’ll be okay,” she said, a little bit calmer than she’d been a few minutes ago. “It’s just…I can’t talk to anyone else about what’s going on. They’ll think I’m nuts! And I am worried about you, you know. I don’t want you to go all that way and be disappointed when you don’t find what you expect to find.”
“I don’t expect to find anything.”
“Yes, you do,” Cassie said softly. “Hire someone to check out the address for you. You can find a private detective in North Carolina and have him check it out. That way you can stay home and no one gets hurt.”
“And what exactly would I tell this private detective?”
Cassie just pursed her lips. She knew too well that they couldn’t bring anyone else into this mix.
“I’m not a kid anymore,” Hawk said. “I don’t expect to find anything but answers about your condition.”
“My condition,” Cassie scoffed. “I hate having a ‘condition’!”
“Call me anytime you need to talk. I’ll have my cell phone on twenty-four/seven.”
His sister almost pouted. “It’s not the same.”
Cassie Donovan wasn’t one to pout, not for any reason. But the episodes were tough on her. She’d always had dreams that seemed more real than dreams, but something unexpected was happening with these seizures.
She was seeing a few minutes into the future immediately after each convulsion. It was hard to swallow, impossible to explain. But over the years they’d learned to accept that some things were just that way.
Impossible.
Cassie sighed, apparently resigned to the fact that he was going to North Carolina. “If you insist on making this trip, you could fly instead of driving,” she said as she followed him down the long hallway. “It would be much quicker. Fly over, visit this address, fly home.”
“I don’t know how long I’ll need to be there, and besides, flying would only save a day or two.” He glanced down at the dog who walked beside him. “Baby hates to fly, and I can’t leave her here. Last time I went on a two-day trip, she didn’t eat the whole time I was gone.”
“You love that dog more than you love me,” Cassie said, sounding very much the way she had at the age of twelve.
Hawk hid a smile. “You know that’s not true.”
“What if I tell you that I won’t eat until you get home?”
He laughed. “The way you’ve been eating lately, I know that’s a hollow threat.”
Cassie hit him lightly on the arm as she danced around him. “That’s not very nice.”
“But it is true.”
Again she seemed to pout.
Hawk dropped the suitcase and took his sister’s face in his hands. His tough, tanned hands only emphasized her paleness. There were dark circles under her eyes, and while she’d been eating plenty lately she wasn’t gaining weight. The thinness of her face told him that she’d lost a few pounds. She might not like it, but he had to do something.
He couldn’t possibly sit around here and twiddle his thumbs and just wait for something to happen. If he could find an explanation for what was happening to Cassie, maybe even a cure, then he could rest easy. Maybe.
Protests