Lost Melody (11 page)

Jill’s cheeks warmed.

“Do you feel better, honey?” Nana’s anxious face peered up into hers.

She nodded, then waved a hand around the room. “What’s all this?”

“It’s for your campaign.” Mrs. Tolliver jerked a single nod, as though that explained everything.

Jill frowned. What in the world was the woman talking about? “You mean Greg’s campaign?”

Nana dismissed that with a flick of shiny red fingernails. “We have months before the election. No, dear, we mean your campaign. We’ve decided to help you spread the word.”

She stooped to retrieve her handiwork, and Jill saw she’d been painting a sign. Hand lettering in neat bold print announced: EVACUATE SEASIDE COVE ON DECEMBER 6.

Jill’s jaw went slack. They were going to put up yard signs?

“What —” Too many questions crowded her mind. She closed her mouth, shook her head, and tried again. “I don’t understand.”

“We’ve been talking about it all morning,” Nana said, “and we decided if you say something terrible is going to happen in the Cove on December 6, we believe you.”

“And we want to help.” Mrs. Tolliver’s watery blue gaze held Jill’s.

“Help?” Jill’s voice squeaked.

Nana nodded. “Myrtle’s grandson used to be in real estate so he had all these signs.”

“He
pretended
to be in real estate.” Mrs. Montgomery’s wrinkled lips pursed with sour disapproval. “Never sold a single house. Gave it up and moved to Alaska to sell used dogsleds, or some ridiculous story.” Her gray eyebrows arched and she said in an aside to Mrs. Tolliver. “I think he’s living in sin with a disreputable Eskimo woman, but nobody will admit it.”

Nana gave her a commiserating look and continued. “Anyway, he had about a hundred signs stored in Myrtle’s garage, and we were just trying to see if we could cover them with poster board and use them.”

“I paid for them. Might as well get some use out of them.” Mrs. Montgomery’s grumble earned her a sympathetic pat on the arm from Mrs. Tolliver.

“We’ve got other ideas for spreading the word, too.” Mrs. Cramer held up a spiral notebook filled with writing. “We’ve got to cover every avenue possible, so no one can say they weren’t warned.”

Momentarily speechless, Jill stared in turn at each of the six elderly ladies, and received encouraging smiles and nods of support. So much for ignoring the feeling in hopes it would go away.

“But why?” she finally managed to squeak. “I must have sounded like a lunatic last night, jumping up and ruining Greg’s meeting like that.” She turned on Nana. “When you tucked me in bed, you said you didn’t believe in my dream.”

Nana wagged a finger. “I never said any such thing. After you fell asleep I had time to consider everything you said, and to pray about it.”

“We’ve all prayed about it.” Mrs. Tolliver’s voice dropped into mysterious tones. “You know what the Bible says, don’t you?
It says in the last days
our young people will dream dreams.”

“It doesn’t either.” Mrs. Montgomery’s mouth became a hard line of disapproval. “If you’re going to quote the Bible, Edna, at least get it right. It’s the old men who are supposed to dream dreams. The young people are supposed to prophesy and see visions.”

Mrs. Tolliver’s nose tilted and she gave an offended sniff. “Prophesies, dreams, they’re all related. Anyway, that’s what Jill did last night. Prophesy. And it also talks about disasters like earthquakes and pestilences and so on.” She leaned eagerly toward Jill. “What kind of disaster is it going to be, honey?”

An expectant hush fell upon the women. Their eyes fixed on Jill, glittering in anticipation of the gruesome details. Jill didn’t know what to say. Part of her felt flattered that someone had actually listened to her, that they didn’t think she was crazy. Another part of her thought, with the fiendishly zealous expressions they wore, none of these ladies looked particularly sane themselves at the moment.

“I — I really don’t know.” Jill folded her arms across her middle. “I’m pretty sure there’s a fire. And heat, followed by freezing cold. And people screaming.” She shuddered, the screams loud inside her head. “That’s all I know.” Their stares became disappointed. “I’m sorry. I wish I knew more.”

“No pestilence?” asked Mrs. Cramer hopefully.

Jill only vaguely knew what a pestilence was, so the only answer she could give was an apologetic shrug.

Nana slapped her hands together. “Well, the fire is something. Maybe it’s going to be like the fire that destroyed Chicago, or San Francisco. Regardless, people have got to be warned, and we’re going to help you do it.”

Jill looked around the room, touched in spite of herself. First, these ladies dove enthusiastically into making her wedding day
special, and now this. They believed in her, in her dream, and wanted to stand with her, no matter how crazy it made them look.

But only part of the wedding committee was here.

“Where is the rest of your knitting circle?” She asked. “Mrs. Lewis and the others?”

Nana busied herself with fanning the wet paint on her sign and didn’t meet Jill’s gaze.

“Skeptics.” Mrs. Tolliver dismissed them with a flick of her fingers. “They’ll be sorry.”

So, her dream had divided the knitting circle. Somehow she doubted theirs would be the only group in the Cove to split before this was over.

“But what if I’m wrong?” Jill’s voice broke on the last word. “What if I really am just stressed out because of last year’s accident and the wedding and — everything?”

Nana stepped forward to pull her into a hug. “If you’re wrong, then we’ll all have egg on our faces next Tuesday when nothing happens. Won’t be the first time I’ve played the fool in this town.” Nana released her and ran a hand briskly over Jill’s arm, ending with a pat. “Being considered eccentric isn’t so bad. You get used to it.”

The ladies all nodded and fixed her with wide smiles, as though welcoming her into their private club. A club Jill was pretty sure she didn’t want to join, no matter how much she loved the redheaded leader. Somehow she didn’t think Greg would view an eccentric fiancée as an asset to his political future.

Greg. Now that she’d finally gotten some sleep she could think more clearly, and she needed to talk to someone levelheaded. Someone not — she looked around the room from one eager, wrinkled face to another — eccentric. She needed to talk to Greg.

“I’ve got to make a phone call.” She edged backward toward the entry hall.

“You don’t want to help us paint signs?” Mrs. Montgomery waved to indicate the boxes near the fireplace. “We have plenty.”

“Unfortunately, I have some errands I need to run.” She gave a halfhearted laugh. “I slept half the day away, you know?”

“You go ahead, Jill.” Nana waved her off with an absent smile as she stooped and picked up her paintbrush. “We’ll get a few done before our meeting with the minister.”

That halted Jill’s retreat. Surely they weren’t going to try to enlist the aid of the minister in their sign-painting campaign. “The minister?”

“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Cramer stopped in the act of removing another yard sign from the box to explain. “Someone has put obscene pictures on the bulletin board in the Fellowship Hall, and we want them removed.”

“Pinups of teenage girls.” Mrs. Montgomery’s voice dropped and took on a tone of outrage. “In
bathing suits.”

“We tried reasoning with the youth director, but he insists there’s nothing inappropriate in pictures of the youth group’s swimming party.” Mrs. Tolliver’s eyes gleamed with purpose. “We’ll see what Reverend Hollister has to say about that.”

With a thought of sympathy for poor Reverend Hollister, Jill escaped up the stairs to her apartment.

J
ILL’S PANTRY WAS SUFFERING FROM
a state of neglect, but she didn’t want to return downstairs and risk having a paintbrush shoved in her hand. She grabbed a half-full bag of Doritos and a tub of pimento cheese to dip them in, and took them into her living room with her cell phone.

Greg’s secretary, Teresa, answered the office phone and informed Jill that Greg was in a meeting with a client. Was it Jill’s imagination, or was there a touch of disdain that hadn’t been in the coolly professional voice yesterday? She couldn’t be sure, but she didn’t think she’d ever heard Teresa sound quite so condescending. Jill left a message for him to call when he was free, and hung up.

She was still staring at the cell phone thoughtfully when it rang. A vaguely familiar number with no associated name in her contacts.

“Hello?”

“Jill? This is Doreen Davenport.”

Surprised, Jill didn’t at first respond. In all the months she’d been meeting weekly with the therapist, Doreen had never called her. Not once. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the reason for this call.

“I guess you heard about the meeting last night, huh?”

“Oh, yes. That’s quite an article. You made the front page, even.”

The front page? Between sleeping past noon and then watching Nana and the ladies plan a communication campaign, Jill hadn’t had a chance to read the newspaper. “I haven’t seen it yet. Does it make me sound like a lunatic?”

“Well.” Doreen paused, then went on in the tone of someone searching for the appropriate words. “Apparently, the reporter who wrote the article wasn’t convinced about the validity of your dream.”

“Terrific.” Jill slumped down on the sofa cushion and propped her feet, knees bent, on the edge of the coffee table.

“Listen, I was calling to find out if you’ve made that appointment with Dr. Bookman.”

She winced. This had definitely never happened before, Doreen feeling the need to push her into the shrink’s office. “I haven’t had a chance to do that yet. But I did try to relieve some of my stress, like we discussed. That’s what last night’s announcement was about.”

“I figured as much. Did it work?”

“Sort of. I got a great night’s sleep and didn’t have a single dream.” She thought of the troop of geriatric sign painters at the bottom of the stairs. “But the feeling that I need to warn people about a coming disaster is still there. Just not quite as urgent as it was before.”

“Why don’t I have my receptionist set up the appointment with Dr. Bookman for you? I really do think it’s best if you talk to him. When Greg was here this morning, he seemed to think —”

Jill shot upright on the cushion. “Greg came to see you?”

“Well, yes.” She seemed embarrassed. “I assumed he would
tell you, because he mentioned asking you to sign a release form.”

So he could get a report on her progress after every appointment? Check her sanity level, maybe?
Sooo
not happening. “What did he want?”

“He was very concerned about you. He was afraid the stress from the upcoming wedding might have clouded your judgment.”

“He thinks I’m nuts.” Jill’s voice was flat. He’d been so understanding last night, so concerned. He’d sung to her, watched over her. Hovered outside her door. Turns out she’d been right last night after all. Greg thought she was mentally unstable.

“He didn’t say that.”

“But he thinks it,” Jill insisted. “Otherwise, why would he go to my therapist behind my back?”

Doreen didn’t answer, and in the ensuing silence, Jill heard her own words replay in the pinched tone she’d used. She sounded paranoid. Like a crazy person.

She inhaled a deep breath through her nose and forced herself to let it out fully before replying. “I’m sorry. I know he’s worried. He has every right to be. I just wish he’d discussed this with me instead of you.”

“That’s exactly what I told him. In fact, I offered to do a joint session with the two of you. You can bring him with you on Friday, if you like. In the meantime, my receptionist will set up an appointment with Dr. Bookman and call you. Sound good?”

Did Doreen honestly think she couldn’t make a simple phone call for an appointment? No, she was worried Jill wouldn’t make the appointment at all.

What if she said no, just to be obstinate? But getting obstinate with a therapist when her sanity was already in question might not be the wisest course of action.

She forced herself to answer evenly, even pleasantly. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“Good.” Doreen sounded relieved. “If you need to talk before your appointment on Friday, please call me. Otherwise, I’ll see you then. And Jill? Bubble baths are great stress reducers. Maybe you should try that.”

Jill promised to give bubble baths a try and pressed the button to end the call.

Where did Nana put that newspaper? Downstairs, probably. She shoved a loaded Dorito into her mouth and settled in on the couch, waiting for the sound of chatting voices downstairs to stop. She’d gone through nearly the whole bag when silence from the main part of the house told her the ladies had left, so the coast was clear. Nana stacked her newspapers on the screened porch behind the kitchen when she finished reading them, so that’s probably where this morning’s edition was. On the way past Nana’s front room she glanced inside, and saw that the ladies had painted four more signs before leaving to torment Reverend Hollister.

She found the paper and spread it on the kitchen table. After one look at the picture, she almost couldn’t make herself read the article. It was like one of those purposefully unflattering snapshots of famous celebrities on the cover of gossip magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle. And that headline. The “End of the World”? That made her sound like a kook.

Still, what else could she expect? She
did
sound like a kook. Her stomach grew more and more uneasy with the Doritos and pimento cheese as she read the account. The reporter had dug up a few details from her career, and though he never said the accident that ended it had thrown her mentally off balance, the implication was hard to miss. The only good part was that Greg
didn’t come off as badly as she feared. The reporter obviously didn’t know about their engagement, thank goodness.

There was almost no mention of Greg’s plan. Did the journalist not include anything about that? She flipped a couple of pages. Ah, there. Way back on page four, sandwiched between a report of the police responding to multiple car eggings and a lengthy notice on the planned replacement of the Cove’s recycling bins. The story did a good job of recapping Greg’s meeting and outlining the main points of his proposed tourism plan, but he probably wouldn’t be happy about it. Her performance had taken top billing over his proposal.

Perhaps she should get Greg some bubble bath as an early Christmas present.

The ringing of the doorbell sounded from the front hallway. Jill left the paper on the table to head for the front door. Two blurry figures stood beyond the frosted decorative glass. Probably selling vacuum cleaners or something. She wiped orange Dorito cheese from her fingers on the seat of her jeans and opened the door to find an unfamiliar couple standing on the front porch.

“That’s her!” The woman’s finger waved in Jill’s face. “She’s the one.”

Uh-oh.
Jill’s grip on the door knob tightened.

The man’s head cocked sideways as he studied Jill through narrowed eyes, clearly skeptical.

“You’re Jillian King, aren’t you?” The woman didn’t wait for an answer, but rushed on, slightly out of breath. “I heard you play the piano once when we lived in Montreal.”

Tension rushed out of Jill’s muscles. A music fan. She smiled into the woman’s flushed face. In all the years she played on the concert circuit, she’d never had a fan show up at her front door. “Yes, that’s right. I’m Jillian King.”

“We moved to Seaside Cove a few months ago, and I heard you lived here. I recognized you at the meeting last night.” The woman leaned forward, her eyes wide. “Tell my husband about your dream.”

Jill’s mouth dried. Her words stumbled over a tongue gone suddenly awkward in the face of the man’s scowl. “I, uh, had this dream about — well, it’s hard to describe really — it’s more like a feeling than anything.”

“And there’s going to be a terrible disaster on December 6, right?” The woman was so excited she rose on her toes like a child. “The whole town is going to die in a horrible earthquake.”

Jill shook her head. “Wait a minute. I didn’t say anyth —”

The woman brushed away her words with a hand in the air. “Or maybe it was a hurricane. Whatever. Jillian said we have to leave before December 6 or we’re all going to die.” Her gaze fixed on something over Jill’s shoulder, and her eyes went round as life preservers. “Lance, would you look at that?”

Before Jill could stop her, she brushed into the house. Stunned, Jill turned to watch as she ran into the living room, seized one of the freshly painted signs, and held it up in front of her, eyes shining like she’d found a treasure at a half-price sale at Sears. “It’s true! I knew it was true!”

“Gina, get out of there.” Lance’s voice boomed into the house. He seemed to swell to bear-sized proportions as he glared down at Jill. “You had to get her started, didn’t you?”

“Can I have this one?” The woman turned a pleading expression Jill’s way. “I’ll put it in my yard, where lots of people will see it. Okay?”

“S-sure, I guess so.”

“Thank you!” She rushed through the open door and held the sign out for her husband’s inspection. “Jillian King painted this.”

Jill didn’t dare correct the woman or she might come back inside. Instead, she pushed the door closed, twisted the deadbolt, and collapsed against the thick wood. The woman’s excited tones grew distant as she and her husband retreated down the sidewalk.

First Nana’s knitting group had taken up her cause, and now a complete stranger. What had she started? And more importantly, where would it end?

The time was nearly four o’clock when Jill entered her mother’s room at Centerside Nursing. Greg hadn’t yet returned her call, and Jill hesitated to call again. She told herself that she didn’t want to bother Greg during what must be a busy day, and that her reluctance had nothing to do with avoiding the stiffness in Teresa’s voice again.

The soft strains of classical piano music filled Mom’s room. Jill recognized the piece instantly, and shut her eyes against a stab of pain. The nurses liked to play Jill’s CD on the portable stereo in Mom’s room, because they said it soothed her when she was restless.

The wheelchair faced the window, but Mom’s head drooped forward, her eyes closed and her body pressed against the restraint belt that kept her safely in the chair. If she’d been restless earlier, apparently the music had done its job. Jill pressed a button on the stereo, and when the music stopped, her mother’s eyes fluttered open.

“Hi, Mom.” She bent to press a kiss on the slack cheek. “Sorry I’m late. I overslept.”

She laid her coat across the colorful quilt that covered the
hospital bed and scooted the guest chair to her mother’s side. Dull eyes followed her progress but failed to focus on her when she settled onto the cushioned seat.

A noise behind her drew her attention. She turned to find the nurse standing in the doorway.

“I heard the music stop, and I was coming to turn it back on.” The woman’s glance slid to the CD player, and did not return to Jill.

“She was napping when I came in, so I turned it off.” Jill smoothed a fold out of the bib around her mother’s neck. “Has she had a good day?”

“Yes.” Her voice sounded odd, stilted. “A fine day.”

Instead of bustling into the room as usual, the nurse hovered in the doorway. Jill studied the normally friendly woman. Her fingers flexed nervously at her sides, and then as if she realized her fidgeting had been noticed, she folded her arms across her chest.

“Is her cough better?” Jill asked.

“Oh, yes. Fine. We haven’t heard her cough at all.”

Their eyes finally connected. An antiseptic smile flashed onto the nurse’s face, and then disappeared just as quickly.

She’s seen the newspaper article.

Jill’s neck grew hot and sticky beneath the collar of her sweater. The nursing home staff probably all thought she was nuts. Judging by the concerned glance the nurse kept flicking toward Mom, they might even be worried about leaving their charge alone with her. The thought sent heat flooding into her face.

“I’m relieved.” Jill turned her back on the woman and settled in the chair again. She reached over and grabbed her mother’s hand. “We’re just going to visit for a little while. I’ll turn the music back on when I leave.”

“All right.”

Jill did not turn around, but watched the nurse’s figure in her peripheral vision. She hovered in the doorway for a moment, but finally left. The squeak of her white nurse’s shoes on the polished floor faded. Jill’s lungs deflated with an audible
whoosh.
What were they afraid of, that she’d hurt her own mother? How incredibly insulting. And humiliating, too.

With an effort, she forced a smile for Mom.