by Ninie Hammon
“Even when we didn’t hear, Mama knew. In the same way Bailey ‘connected’ to Macy Cosgrove.”
“You’re saying if Bailey had done nothing, if she had ignored you … which any sane, rational person would have done, and Macy had drowned, then the connection would have broken?”
“Yep. Bailey might still be on the line but Macy’d hung up her end.”
T.J. could see Brice connecting the dots.
“But your mother made no connection to Bailey, one way or the other. She couldn’t have because Bailey hadn’t even been born.”
“That fire Mama painted, that’s why she killed herself. I thought so at the time and I still do. But as a kid, I didn’t understand the whole why.”
“We all knew the Monroe family. They had a brand-new baby, wasn’t even a week old.”
“Mama even held it, a sweet little baby girl.”
“They were asleep when the fire started and the whole family died.”
“Mama knew the when. There was charred Easter baskets in the painting. We seen them baskets sitting out on the porch when we passed by their house that afternoon.”
“Knowing it was going to happen … and doing nothing.” Dobbs shook his head. “How hard would that be to live with?”
“Wasn’t just guilt. She lived it, burned to death with those people — and that was the final straw. She just wasn’t able to go through that kind of thing time and time again.”
T.J. took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked toward the house where Bailey was “returning the Watford House to its former glory.”
“Now, I think it was something else, though, pushed her over the edge.”
He was quiet for so long, Brice finally asked, “What else?”
“The only time my daddy ever knowed about the things Mama painted — that one time with the little girl who got strangled — he told Mama she was a witch. And she b’lieved him. What else was she s’posed to believe? She maybe went through third grade in school, lived her whole life two miles from where she was born. What other explanation was there?”
T.J.’d been staring out into space as he spoke but now he turned to Brice.
“When I say my mama changed after she started painting them pictures, I mean more than just being freaked out by livin’ pieces of other people’s lives. She changed. Everything ‘bout her changed. She had this horrible power and not a soul in her life to tell about it. She couldn’t share the burden of knowin’ something awful was about to happen, not understandin’ why she knew. She was isolated, afraid, ashamed and alone. I think that’s what really killed her.”
He stopped then and his face hardened.
“That, and…” T.J. stopped and took a breath. He never allowed himself to think about his father. His grandmother, who’d come from Nashville to look after the children, found their father passed out in the snow, froze to death the following winter. “The night my daddy found the painting that almost got him hung, he told Mama she was a witch. He also told her if he ever caught her painting another one of them pictures, he’d kill her … he would take her out into the backyard where we burned the garbage, where she burned untold numbers of canvasses he never knew nothin’ ‘bout … and he’d pour gasoline on her and burn her at the stake.”
T.J. saw Brice stiffen at the mental image.
“I b’lieve my daddy meant ever word of that. My mama b’lieved it, too. And I think after she lived through the fire she painted, lived it, she … didn’t want to die that way. And she just couldn’t go on, not all by herself.”
He stopped and looked pointedly into the faces of the other two men standing by the cruiser.
“They’s three other people in the world ‘sides Bailey who know what she can do, believe she’s not making somethin’ up and ought to be hauled off to St. Somebody’s Home for the Bewildered. Bailey ain’t alone like Mama was, carryin’ that awful burden by herself. That’s why we got to stick close.”
The sheriff understood, looked like he agreed, but couldn’t see the kind of urgency in the situation that T.J. did.
“But you heard her when we brought her home. She said she was never going to paint another painting like that — ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if she locked up her paints or threw them out.”
“Then she’ll just doodle a picture with a crayon on the back of a grocery sack,” Dobbs said.
“Or take a piece of charred stick out of the fireplace and draw on the floor,” T.J. said.
“You’re saying she can’t—”
“I’m saying she can’t not paint.”
Ice water started to inch down T.J.’s backbone. He could almost believe he heard the hollow sound of it drippin’ from one vertebra to the next.
“Something … reaches out through Bailey’s canvas. Same thing as usta reach out through my mama’s. And it messes with stuff happenin' out here in the real world. That something — it’s calling the shots. Bailey’s just along for the ride — in one of them cheap, chewing-on-your-knees seats in the back of the bus.”
THE END
The Series Continues…
A boy vanishes from a Shadow Rock school playground and Bailey offers to help. But when she attempts to paint a portrait of the missing boy, she paints a little girl instead. Who is the mysterious little girl? What’s her connection to the boy? As more children disappear, Bailey races the clock to unravel a twisted web of lies before the children are lost forever.
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A Note from the Author
Thank you for reading Black Water.
If you enjoyed this book. would you please consider writing a review of it on your favourite bookseller’s website so other readers might enjoy it too. Just a couple of sentences. That would mean a lot to me.
Thank you!
Ninie Hammon
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Also By Ninie Hammon
Through The Canvas Series
Black Water
Red Web
The Unexplainable Collection
Five Days in May
Black Sunshine
The Based on True Stories Collection
Home Grown
Sudan
When Butterflies Cry
The Knowing Series
The Knowing
The Deceiving
The Reckoning
Stand-alone Psychological Thrillers
The Memory Closet
The Last Safe Place
Nonfiction/Memoir
Typin’ ‘Bout My Generation
About the Author
Ninie Hammon (rhymes with shiny, not skinny) grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, got a BA in English and theatre from Texas Tech University and snagged a job as a newspaper reporter. She didn't know a thing about journalism, but her editor said if she could write he could teach her the rest of it and if she couldn't write the rest of it didn't matter. She hung in there for a 25-year career as a journalist. As soon as she figured out that making up the facts was a whole lot more fun than reporting them, she turned to fiction and never looked back.
Ninie now writes suspense--every flavor except pistachio: psychological suspense, inspirational suspense, suspense thrillers, paranormal suspense, suspense mysteries.
In every book she keeps this promise to her Loyal Reader: "I will tell you a story in a distinctive voice you'll always recognize, about people as ordinary as you are--people who have been slammed by something they didn’t sign on for, and now they must fight for their lives. Then smack in the middle of their everyday worlds, those people encounter the unexplainable--and it's always the game-changer."
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