Energized by Mary Behre Read Free Book Online

covered.”
    Fucking perfect.
    *   *   *
    H ANNAH CLASPED THE heart-shaped sterling silver locket in her hand and allowed the psychometric vision to take over. All around her, present-day Tidewater dulled to gray shadows and muted sounds. Her consciousness spiraled down to the world captured in the metal between her fingers.
    Instantly, she was in someone else’s body. Thinking someone else’s thoughts. Feeling someone else’s feelings. It was bittersweet, because for the moment, she was in her mother’s body.
    Her
first
mother. The woman who’d loved and nurtured her until Hannah had been three years old. Until the breast cancer had snuffed out the woman’s life just shy of her thirty-firstbirthday. And this was the closest Hannah could come to touching her. Dipping into the memory carried by the energy wrapped in the locket.
    Clutching the pendant tighter, Hannah let go of the modern world and delved further into her mother’s memory. The scent of the magnolias sitting on her mother’s table was fragrant and sweet. The hazy watercolor painting of three roses hanging on the wall came into sharp focus. And the connection was complete.
    Love overwhelmed Hannah as she watched through her mother’s eyes, while the woman carefully cut and glued the picture of three little girls into the pendant’s right half and her own picture in the left. “Never forget me, my darlings. Momma loves you.”
    Less of a participant and more of someone who had no control over the body she temporarily inhabited, Hannah mentally stepped back and just observed. Her mother’s consciousness mingled with hers and she temporarily became her mother.
    She glanced out the front window. Across the street, a royal blue Geo Metro was parked in front of a pitched-roof brick church. A circular stained glass window depicted Jesus dressed in white robes with arms spread wide, as if beckoning welcome to all who passed by. A pair of three-foot-high Japanese maples stood as proud red-leafed bookends on either side of the front steps. The small patch of neatly trimmed bright green grass lined the walkway to the front door. Someone had even taken care to edge the white public sidewalk.
    Pain stabbed from the center of her left breast. She sucked in a breath and held it as she glanced from the pictures of her daughters to the church across the street. Her chest ached and not just where the doctors had stitched her up after the biopsy earlier that week. Slowly, she expelled air and pain. Not much longer now. Two months or two years, the doctors weren’t certain. But what hurt most was the knowledge she’d never see her daughters marry in their church.
    In the distance, a horn beeped rhythmically five times.
    â€œTwo bits,” she sang, finishing the seven-note musical couplet out of habit.
    Her heart sank as realization set in. Earlier that day she’d learned exactly what kind of selfish bastard he was. Her husband, the father of her children, was a polygamist. And she’d thought the cancer diagnosis was bad.
    Sick to her stomach, she watched the old green Chevy truck turn into the driveway and debated her decision. If she did this, her daughters would have no father and, all too soon, no mother either. But she couldn’t live a lie and the selfish jerk had hardly been there since Hannah had been born.
    The man behind the wheel tugged off his baseball cap, revealing a swath of hair so black it appeared almost blue with the sunlight beating on it through the windshield. He wore large sunglasses, had a bushy black mustache and a weary smile. He hopped out of the truck just below the Woodshire Avenue street sign. He carried a small red-wrapped package with a silver bow.
    A gift from his trip. Another lie meant to convince her their life was something it wasn’t. The sight of it made her stomach pitch and seemed to ignite the pain in her chest again.
    Aching and gasping with