It seems that Nettie McNeil (known to her friends as Ned) has one harrowing experience after another. In this partial chapter, she returns home, exhausted, troubled, and sad after finding…well, you’ll just have to read Moonlight Can Be Murder to know what she found.
By the time I turned into my long driveway, the sun had disappeared behind gray, scudding clouds. Wind whipped the bare limbs of trees. The new bulb in the dusk to dawn light flickered on even though the hands of my watch pointed to half past one. Oklahoma’s weather was as changeable as a moody person. If this had been May instead of December, I would have suspected a thunderstorm was in the offing.
Those Christmas lights Jackie and Pat had strung along my porch railing welcomed me as I parked by the yard gate. Inside the house, Penny greeted me as she usually did, meowing and doing figure eights around my ankles.
“Oh, Penny,” I said to my welcoming committee of one, “this has been quite a day and it isn’t even finished. Would you like a bowl of half ‘n half or do you have crunchies left?”
By answer, she trotted into the kitchen, her tail ramrod straight.
Surprised that I was actually hungry after the devastating morning, I built a fire in the fireplace then made a sandwich of some chicken salad and poured a glass of tea. Sitting down at the kitchen table, I munched my sandwich while Penny, her tail now curved sedately around her hindquarters, lapped up her bowl of cream.
Quiet reigned throughout the house except for the popping of the fire and Penny, finishing off her treat. Try as I might, I could not rid my mind of the image of Pastor Williams, head on his arms, looking as if he had simply fallen asleep.
A tremendous crash rattled the windows. I must have jumped six inches off my chair. My heart racing, I glanced out the window. Unbelievably, rain peppered down and dripped off the eaves.
“Penny,” I said when I could speak, “that was thunder. Can you believe it?”
But my little cat had vanished, probably upstairs under my bed or under Uncle Javin’s bed. I gathered up my glass and plate, carried them to the sink, and gazed out at the rain. The snow would soon melt under this onslaught. While I watched, lightning sliced across the dark clouds and another clap of thunder echoed through the heavens.
Maybe Penny had the right idea. Maybe I should go hide too, shut out the world and all its horrible happenings. The best way to do that, I had always found, was to lose myself in a book. Constance Reilly’s journal came to mind and there was no better day to go back a hundred years or so to a quieter, saner time.
The rain sounded louder in my room upstairs. I went next door to the unused bedroom, dug Constance’s journal out of the desk, and carried it downstairs to read it by the fireplace.
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