She took a couple of minutes to get herself together. I didn't have any tissues nor did she, and the only cloth in that room would be so full of dust it would probably have suffocated her. So she sniffed a lot.

"I'm sorry," she said at last. "You'll never believe this, but my dad said I never cry. Not even as a child. It was a joke between us. He used to say, 'What kind of tragedy would it take to make you cry?' Of course I bawled my head off at his funeral but-"

When she looked up at me, she saw that this was more than I wanted to hear. I had enough grief inside me. I didn't need to add anyone else's.

"I had a dream," she said.

I looked toward the door. Had I been insane to invite this stranger to live with me? Was I now condemned to daily recitations of her dreams? Was she p.r.o.ne to nightmares? Was she going to wake me in the middle of the night screaming?

Then I'd have to comfort her and-I looked at her. She was more cute than pretty and she seemed to fluctuate, at random, from being nice to having a tongue like a razor blade. However, she also had a beautiful voice and a round little f.a.n.n.y that was quite nice. And yesterday at a pit stop she'd started doing some contortions worthy of a performer at Cirque du Soleil.

"What was your dream?" I heard myself ask, which annoyed me because I hated dreams so much that when I was reading novels that told of the hero's, er, ah, protagonist's, dream, I'd skip the pa.s.sage.

"It was-" she began, then stopped. Getting up, she opened an old box that had ancient, dried-out tape on it.

I think she meant not to tell me, but she couldn't stop herself. Turning, she sat down on the box and I heard something inside rustle, like old leaves crunching.

"It was just so real," she said softly, "and I was so helpless." When she looked up at me, her eyes were hollow-looking, and I was silent. I'd never had a dream I could remember past breakfast, much less one that upset me this much.

"You and I were in your car," she said, "driving along a mountain road, and when we rounded a sharp curve we saw an overturned car. Four teenagers were standing by it, and they were laughing. You and I could see that they were happy because, even though they'd just been in a wreck, they were safe and unhurt. But the next second the car exploded and pieces of it flew everywhere."

Putting her hands over her face for a moment, Jackie looked back at me.

"You and I were safe in your car, but those kids were... They were cut apart by the flying pieces of steel. Arms, legs, a... a head went flying through the air." She took a breath. "What was so horrible was that we could do nothing to save them. Absolutely nothing."

It did seem like an odd dream. Weren't most people's nightmares about something that was trying to get them? But Jackie had been perfectly safe in her dream. Sure, flying body parts were horrible, but she'd been upset because we could do nothing to help those poor dismembered kids.

I don't know why but it pleased me that she'd said "we." It was as though she believed that I would have helped if I could. In her dream she didn't think I was the kind of person who'd see an exploding car and think only of getting myself to safety.

I'm sure it was awful of me, but her dream kind of made me feel good.

I smiled at her. "How about if we have breakfast, then go buy some appliances? Refrigerator, washer, dryer, microwave. You want a new stove?

Hey! How about some air conditioners?"

Sniffing, she looked at me with an expression that made me think I'd said something wrong. " Window air conditioners?" she asked.

I played dumb. "Sure. We'll stick them out the windows and paint them purple to match the house."

Her eyes widened for a second, as though she believed me, then she relaxed. "Why don't we tear out that big colored-gla.s.s skylight over the stairs and put in an air conditioner up there?"

"Great idea," I said enthusiastically. "Think they carry them that size locally?"

"The Victorian Historical Society carries them," she said, smiling. "You just tell them what you plan to do and they take care of you." She made her hand into a gun as though some Victorian-loving zealot would shoot me.

When we laughed together, I was glad I'd been able to take her mind off her bad dream.

"Come on," I said, "I'll make you an omelet."

I didn't cook, but I set the table and cut up some fruit per Jackie's directions, and she told me about what she'd seen in the attic. There were old clothes and boxes of broken toys, and costume jewelry from the fifties plus lots of old phonograph records.

"There are some nice things up there," Jackie said, "and someone, somewhere, would like to have them. Even those old magazines in the hall are of interest to somebody."

"EBay," I said, my mouth full of an omelet filled with green and red peppers. No ham. At the grocery, Jackie had made such a fuss about the high fat content of ham-all while glancing down at my stomach-that I'd not bought any. "Hey!" I said. "You take photos, so why don't you photograph all this"-I waved my hand-"and auction it over eBay?"

"Before or after I research a book for you?" She put two potato pancakes (cooked in some no-calorie spray) on my plate. "Before or after I get an auctioneer to clean the excess furniture out of this house? Before or after I cook three meals a day for you?"

"I'll have to get back to you on that," I said as I bent my head and filled my mouth with food.

After breakfast, I suggested we also buy a dishwasher and hire someone to install it.

"Good idea," Jackie said, drying her hands on a paper towel. "And when do we start trying to find out about the devil story?"

"Let's talk about it in the car," I said, and minutes later we were driving.

I must say that buying things with Jackie made me remember my childhood. She was as in awe of spending money as I had been when I was a kid-or I was at her age, before my books were published.

Jackie's delight at being able to buy several major appliances at once was infectious. She made me understand how good dirty old men felt at buying their young mistresses bags full of jewelry. We bought vacuum cleaners (one for each floor), lots of k.n.o.bs for the kitchen cabinets, and enough cleaning supplies and equipment for a hospital. I was getting bored until we got to the gardening and tool section where I felt more comfortable.

"I thought you hated machines," she said, leaning against a shelf and flipping through a book on landscaping.

I didn't answer but just smiled.

"What?!" she said.

"I never said that so you must have read my books."

"Never said I didn't," she replied, wedging the book into the already-full cart. "Who's going to do the cleaning and the gardening? And don't look at me. And, by the way, you still haven't told me how much you're paying me or what my hours are."

"Twenty-four/seven. And what's the minimum wage now?" I said, just to see her sputter.

But she didn't sputter. Instead, she turned around and started walking toward the front door of the store. She was moving so fast the big gla.s.s entrance doors had slid open before I caught her arm. "Okay, so what do you want?"

"Nine to five, twenty dollars an hour."

"Okay," I said. "But are you on or off the clock at breakfast and dinner?"

After a look of disgust, she shrugged. "Who knows? I can't figure out anything about this job."

"Excuse me," said a woman loudly.

Jackie and I were blocking the exit and the woman wanted out, so we stepped aside.

"Okay," I said quietly. "How about a grand a week and we play the hours by ear? If you want time off I'll stay home and take care of the furniture."

I got a tiny smile out of her at my joke, and we went back to our overloaded cart.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out why I was putting up with her cantankerousness. I hadn't put up with anything from the other women who'd worked for me. One second of bad temper and they were out of there.

But each time Jackie bit my head off, I remembered her story about the Pulitzer prize. That had been insightful and creative. And I remembered the way that lovely little Autumn had sat down in the middle of the room and cried-and I wondered if she'd done it just to get Jackie to tell a story. If so, what other stories had Jackie told?

As I looked at weed whackers, I thought, Jackie can research the devil story and I'll research Jackie.

We had lunch at a fast-food place, where Jackie had a salad and I had about four pounds of sandwich and curly fries. Through the whole meal, I could tell she was dying to lecture me on fat and cholesterol.

By two, we were on our way back to that monstrosity of a house, the car loaded nearly to the ceiling, appliances to be delivered tomorrow, when I couldn't resist telling her she should eat more. It was like I'd turned the crank and the jack-in-the-box sprang out. She started in on arteries and saturated fat until I was yawning and wished I'd not said anything.

But we both came alert when I drove around a hairpin curve and there before us was an overturned car. In front of it were four laughing teenagers, obviously laughing in relief that they hadn't been hurt in the accident.

For a second both Jackie and I sat frozen to our seats; we were seeing her dream come to life. The next second we had thrown open the car doors and were screaming, "Get away from the car!"

The four teenagers turned to look at us, dazed from having just been tumbled about, but they didn't move.

When Jackie started to run toward the kids, I ran after her. What the h.e.l.l was she going to do? Get torn apart with them?

I don't think it occurred to me to doubt that, any second, that car was going to blow up, and anything near it was going to be sliced into pieces.

When I reached Jackie, I grabbed her by the waist and held her on my hip like a sack of cornmeal. Even in that position, she didn't stop screaming at the kids, nor did I, but I wasn't going to let her get any closer to that belly-up vehicle.

Maybe it was that I wouldn't get closer to the car or that I wouldn't let Jackie run toward them, that finally got through to one of the kids. A big, good-looking boy with lots of black hair finally seemed to understand what Jackie and I were saying and moved into action. Grabbing one of the girls, he nearly threw her across the road, where she began rolling down the steep hillside. The other boy grabbed the hand of the girl beside him and started running.

Like something in a movie, the three kids leaped toward the far side of the road just as the car exploded.

I got behind the safety of a big rock, holding Jackie's trim little body against mine, and covering her head with my arms. I bent my head and ducked under an overhang of tree roots.

The sound of the explosion was terrifying, and the brilliance of the light made me close my eyes so tight they hurt.

It was all over in seconds, then we heard pieces of steel falling onto the road, and the car began to burn. Still holding Jackie, I waited to see if it was really over.

"I can't breathe," she said, struggling to lift her head.

It was finally hitting me that she'd seen all of this. And her prophetic dream had just saved the lives of four kids.

She seemed to know what I was thinking because when she pushed away and looked at me, her face was beseeching. "I didn't know the dream was real. I've never had anything like this happen to me before. I-"

She cut off when one of the boys came over to say thanks for saving their lives. It was the boy whose fast actions had saved all of them. "How did you know?" he asked.

I could feel Jackie looking at me. Did she think I was going to betray her?

"I saw a spark," I said. "By the gas tank."

"I sure do thank you," he said, putting out his hand to shake as he introduced himself as Nathaniel Weaver.

"Let's call the police from your cell phone," Jackie said. There was so much grat.i.tude in her voice that I didn't dare look at her or I would have turned red in embarra.s.sment.

In the end, it took the rest of the day to straighten everything out. The girl Nate had thrown-"Like a football," she said, looking up at the boy with eyes full of hero worship-had a broken arm so I drove her to the hospital while Jackie stayed with the other three kids until the police arrived. The police gave her and the kids a ride home.

After the girl's parents arrived at the hospital, I drove back to the scene of the explosion and looked around. The wrecked car had been towed away, but I picked up a piece of metal from the side of the road and sat down by the rock that had protected Jackie and me from flying metal.

For the last two years I'd been reading ghost and witch stories that were littered with tales of fortunetellers and people who could see the future. This morning Jackie had told me of a dream of something that was going to happen. Yet she said she'd never glimpsed the future before.

Was it just my writer's imagination or was there a connection between the fact that Jackie had returned to a place she seemed to remember and her dream of the future?

A pickup truck going by brought me out of my thoughts. My car was still loaded with mops and brooms and a microwave, and tomorrow a truckload of appliances was to be delivered. I had to leave.

CHAPTER SIX.

Jackie I was determined to forget the whole dream thing. I've never really liked the occult and I certainly didn't want to partic.i.p.ate in it. Yes, I used to scare the wits out of people with my highly-embellished devil story, but I still didn't like anything occult. One time when we were at a fair, my friends went to a tarot card reader, but I refused to go. It wasn't my future I didn't want to see but my past.

Of course I didn't tell my friends the truth. I told them I didn't believe in fortune-telling so I didn't want to waste my money. Only Jennifer looked at me hard and seemed to realize I was lying.

As I grew older, it became second nature to me to tell people as little as possible about myself. The only person I really remembered living with was my father, and since he made such an effort to keep secrets, he had respect for mine. If I came home late, he never asked me where I'd been or what I'd been doing. If he'd yelled at me, I could have rebelled like a normal teenager, but my father had a way of silently telling me that I had only one life and it was up to me whether or not I screwed up.

I guess that's why I grew up so "old." The other kids in my cla.s.s were always being punished for spending too much, "borrowing" the car, staying out too late, or doing any number of childish things. But I never got into trouble. I didn't spend too much money because I'd balanced the bank account since I was ten years old. My childish handwriting was on all the checks and my father signed them. I always knew how little there was in the bank and how much went for bills. I was amazed when I heard my cla.s.smates talk about money as though it just appeared. They actually had no idea how much the family water bill was. They'd make two-hour long-distance calls, then get yelled at by their parents and "grounded." The kids would laugh about it and plan their next long-distance call. I often thought their parents should turn the bank account over to them for a few months and let the kids see how much it cost to live.

Anyway, maybe because my situation at home was so different from everyone else's, I learned to keep my mouth shut. And maybe because my father seemed to be hiding so much, I learned to ask few questions, and answer even fewer.

By the time I was a teenager, I'd learned that it was useless to ask my father about my mother and why he'd left. If he did answer, he'd contradict himself. For years I lived in a romantic dream that he and I were in the government's Witness Protection Program. I made up a long, complicated story in which my mother had been killed by bad guys, my father had seen it, and to protect us, we were moved from one state to another.

But, gradually, I came to realize that the truth was known only by my father, and no outside agencies were involved. Eventually, I decided that whatever the truth about my mother was, it was probably better that I didn't know it, so I avoided psychics who might be able to tell me about my past.

However, secrets have a way of revealing themselves, whether you want them to or not. From about twenty miles outside the little town of Cole Creek, I began to recognize the area. At first I didn't say anything to Newcombe, but then I began to point out things that seemed vaguely familiar. The first time I said anything, I held my breath. If I'd said such a thing to my friends they would have squealed and started prying. Kirk would have ignored me as he had no curiosity whatever.

Newcombe seemed interested, but he didn't pretend to be a psychoa.n.a.lyst and try to get me to tell him more. He listened and made comments, but he didn't act as though he was dying to find out everything about my life-and as a result, I ended up telling him more than I'd told any other person.

And he could get to the heart of a matter in seconds! The first night we were in the house, I nearly fainted when he asked me if I thought maybe my mother was still alive. It's what I'd been thinking since I saw the old bridge a few miles out of town. I could almost see myself as a little kid walking across that bridge, holding the hand of a tall, dark-haired woman.

Was she my mother? My father had told a couple of stories about how she'd died, so maybe the fact of her death was a lie.

The good thing about Newcombe was that he didn't judge. Jennifer would have told me my father was a bad man since he'd kidnapped me and taken me away from my mother. But Jennifer's mother was loving and kind, so Jennifer couldn't comprehend that not all mothers were like hers.

All I knew for sure was that whatever my father had done, he'd done it for good reasons. And he'd done it for me. I knew he was intelligent and educated, and that he could have had better jobs than selling shoes at a discount store. But how could he get a better cla.s.s of job if he couldn't provide a resume and a transcript of his schooling? Yet to do so would have left a paper trail so he-and I-could have been found.

It was after I had the dream about the kids and the car that I began to wonder if maybe my father had been running away from something evil.

And I began to wonder if Cole Creek was someplace I should never have returned to.

But twenty-four hours after the incident happened, I managed to calm down enough to conclude that, obviously, I'd lived in Cole Creek longer than my father said we had, which is why I remembered things. As for the dream, lots of people'd had dreams of the future, hadn't they? It was no big deal. Someday it would make a great dinner party story.