High Country by Nevada Barr

Author:Nevada Barr [Barr, Nevada]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781472202192
Google: X6k4AgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B000O76OQS
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 2005-02-02T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

12

A perfect dream of warm sand and blue ocean was being repeatedly interrupted by a need to scrape stinging jellyfish off of her left foot. After what seemed a lifetime of fruitless washing and scratching, the irritation dragged her from the sunlight and the shore. Opening her eyes to the darkness Geppetto must have known in Monstro's belly, Anna had no idea where she was. Several times she tried to fix her mind on the problem, and several times she drifted away to the delicious heat on the white sand beach. Each time the stinging jellyfish brought her back, unfriendly fire burning her ankle. She tried to think and could not. She tried to move and could not. With a herculean effort she succeeded only in stirring up pain so sharp she heard herself whimper. Make a noise and you die, one part of her brain informed another. The whimpering ceased. I'm already dying. I like it. It's warm, the brain answered itself, and Anna smiled. It was warm.

Dying. Vaguely she remembered promising someone she wouldn't do that. Molly. It must have been her sister, Molly. With the blink of a mind's eye Anna was looking through Molly's window then and saw her seated in the tiny kitchen of her Upper West Side apartment, her husband's long legs bent out like a grasshopper's from beneath the Barbie-sized table. The two of them were sipping fancy coffee, heatedly and happily arguing politics. Molly was okay. Molly was good. Frederick was there to take care of her.

Anna turned away from that airshaft window above Manhattan's streets and wafted toward her beach. Sunlight shattered on the waves, the glitter as bright as mirror shards. She walked toward it.

Not Molly, came an intrusive voice. Paul. She'd promised Paul she would not die, not this time, not this trip, not this assignment.

Without thought or effort, she was in Mississippi. For some reason it was raining, though it hadn't been when she'd left. Paul was not in his beautiful historic home in Port Gibson with its hardwood floors and marble-tiled fireplace, stretched out on his overstuffed couch, as she might have expected. He was in her dreary Mission 66 government housing-built in the mid-sixties as part of a grand plan-in Rocky Springs campground, carport full of spiders, backyard full of Baptist Church groups and Boy Scouts.

Hovering above the cracked cement of her front walk, she watched him through the living room windows. Unlike with her sister and brother-in-law, she could not hear him, but his lips were moving and his face was animated as if he spoke to someone.

Piedmont, her old orange-striped tomcat, came out from the kitchen, his tail hooked in its customary question mark. Paul squatted down and the cat trotted over to be petted. Cats liked Paul. A sign of favor from the gods. Taco, her three-legged dog, wasn't in the scene. When she'd left, Paul had promised to look after her family. Taco, valuing real estate over personality, went to Port Gibson to live in style.

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