“Look,” Grant said. “You owe it to yourself to explore this. You’ve…got unusual abilities. If…if nothing else, you’ve got to learn how to live with them, to understand them better. They’re not going to go away. I know. If you want to get away from them, you’re going to have to get the hell out of the business. Get completely out of police work, because now that you’ve used them they’re not going to leave you alone. It’s like an artist recognizing that he’s a gifted colorist. He can’t help himself. It’s just going to happen. You might as well learn how to control your gift, discipline it.”
Palma held the cold drink in her hands and looked at the brilliant orange and yellow blooms of lantana across the path from her. High in the water oaks and catalpas the cicadas rasped against the dead heat of late summer, the throbbing, metronomic rhythm of their droning reminding Palma, as always, of loneliness. She didn’t know what to say or she would have said it. She didn’t even understand what she was feeling.
“I’d like you to consider it,” he said again. “It’s a year,” he repeated.
She took her eyes off the lantana and looked at him. “Is this why you’re down here?” she asked. “To tell me this?”
He gave a short nod. “I came to talk to you,” he said.
She continued looking at him, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to say anything else. Then he said, “Look, I just don’t want to seem totally irresponsible, is all. You know what I’ve gone through this past year, and it seems to me I might have come across to you as pretty frivolous…or, maybe, I don’t know. I just don’t want…you…to misunderstand me. We’d have a year. You could get to know me in a year.”
Palma looked at him. Yes, she thought, she could get to know him in a year, but she didn’t think she could possibly feel any differently about him then than she did at this very moment. With an enormous sense of relief, the first she had felt in over two months, since Grant had returned to Washington, she was thankful that he had been wiser about their silence than she had been. If he hadn’t come back, she wasn’t sure she would ever have understood what had happened between them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David L. Lindsey is the author of six novels, including A Cold Mind and In the Lake of the Moon. In 1989, In the Lake of the Moon was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family.
Table of Contents
Title
Publisher
Description
Review
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
PART ONE
Prologue
FIRST DAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
SECOND DAY
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
THIRD DAY
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
FOURTH DAY
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
PART TWO
FIFTH DAY
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
SIXTH DAY
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
SEVENTH DAY
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Epilogue
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mercy Page 66
