The Athena Effect, Page 4

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  “Are you sure it’s the right thing to do?” Mrs. Brown fretted.

  “She doesn’t know anyone around here. She should be with a relative.”

  “But she’s never even met the woman.”

  He cleared his throat. “It’s her only family.”

  “It’s not right, the way they raised that child,” she huffed. “You should have done something about it sooner.”

  “Like what?” he asked. “Take her from her parents? They may have been a little different, but they loved that girl. …” His voice was drowned out by the low hum of a furnace turning on, yet another alien sound to Cal’s ears.

  She lay suffocating in a midnight blue pool of grief, listening numbly from the guestroom bed as Sheriff Brown and his wife discussed her fate in the next room. The past few days had gone by in a blur, and the crushing pain in her chest still made her feel as though she could scarcely breathe.

  Her parents had been on their way home from the farmer’s market when their motorbike suddenly swerved right into the path of a logging truck. They were killed instantly. The driver was beside himself, but there wasn’t anything he could have done to avoid it. Cal suspected that a flashback had caused them to lose control, and blamed herself for not doing something to forestall it. She remembered the eerie feeling she had gotten that fateful morning.

  The good people of the town had pitched in for the burial, laying her parents to rest side by side in the local cemetery. Cal stood in shock, watching the last few shovelfuls of dirt cover the only two people in the world who loved her. A few strangers stood by silently, surrounding her with clouds of pale blue sympathy laced with lemon curiosity.

  Sheriff Brown had done a little research at the county courthouse, hunting for any information about her next of kin. He finally came across a yellowing antiquity of a deed, and discovered that after being orphaned himself, David Mackenzie had been adopted, and had a sister who was living to the south of them in Santa Rosa.

  Cal wouldn’t be eighteen until the fall, so the aunt had grudgingly agreed to be her guardian up to her birthday, upon which David’s land would officially go to the girl.

  Arrangements had been made for Cal to move into her aunt’s condo. The chickens were taken to a local rancher and the little cabin was boarded up. She watched it all happen in a daze, swept away before she even had a chance to say goodbye to Jesse. She wondered if he would notice when she stopped making her random visits.

  Carrying a bag with some clothes and a few treasured books, Cal boarded a smelly bus to the big city. She looked out the window, silently saying goodbye to the only home she’d ever known. I promise I’ll be back, she thought, wishing she could see her parents one last time.

  Sheriff Brown and his wife watched the bus pull out of the station.

  Mrs. Brown turned to her husband. “My goodness, those eyes of hers,”

  “I know,” he replied, waving goodbye to the sad, beautiful face in the window. “God bless her.”