Page 54 of Your Every Wish
“Shall we dig in?” I hand her a plate and motion for her to go first.
After piling our plates with goodies, we take our seats at the dining table, an oval teak number with six cane chairs, another item we inherited from Ginger.
It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask Misty about the former park manager when she spontaneously offers, “She was a pain in the ass.”
“Who was?” Kennedy asks, confused. “Did I miss something?”
“Ginger, the woman who lived here before us,” I say and lock eyes with Misty. “She died of a heart attack.”
“In here? Oh my God.”
Misty touches Kennedy’s hand. “In her golf cart, dear. Harry tried to save her, but unfortunately it was her time.”
For some bizarre reason the image of Ginger’s golf cart pops into my head. If no one claimed her belongings, what happened to it?
“It’s in the storage shed, dear.”
I do a double take. Did I say that out loud? No, of course I didn’t.
“What’s in the shed?” Kennedy asks.
“Ginger’s golf cart,” I say, and turn to Misty. “Are you reading my mind?”
“Not intentionally. But your thoughts are overwhelmingly loud today.”
Without a word, Kennedy gets up and walks to the front door.
“Where are you going?”
“To the shed.”
It’s a storage building behind our trailer. Too small to be a garage but large enough for bikes and lawn mowers and Costco toilet paper. And if Misty’s correct, there’s enough room in there for a golf cart. I’ve never been inside because honestly the structure looks ready to be condemned, and I’m guessing it’s filled with lizards.
Kennedy returns a few minutes later. “It’s there.”
The fact that the golf cart is there is not the point. Half the residents at Cedar Pines Estates are probably aware that the buggy was stashed there after Ginger’s untimely death. What’s astonishing is that Misty could hear what I was thinking.
“Can you always do that, read people’s minds?” I ask her.
“Not always and not everyone. But I can with you girls.”
“Me too? Okay, what am I thinking?” Kennedy closes her eyes in concentration.
“I’m not a trained monkey,” Misty says.
“Of course you’re not. Kennedy didn’t mean to be rude. But it is kind of . . . well, hard to believe.” I mean, it isn’t out of the realm of possibilities that Misty merely guessed what I was thinking. It’s logical that while we’re sitting at Ginger’s old table, thoughts of the deceased woman would flash in my head. Or while we’re talking about her dying in her golf cart, I would wonder where the golf cart is. Misty could simply be an extremely intuitive person.
“How long have you been able to read minds? And if I’m prying feel free to tell me to shut up,” I say.
Misty smiles. “Since I was a teenager. And you’re not prying. I have a unique skill and it only stands to reason that you would be curious about it.”
“How did it start?” I push the plate of deviled eggs toward her and help myself to a second one.
“With my teachers in school. One in particular. She was a nasty piece of work, always judging and jumping to conclusions about students she knew nothing about. For example, Calico Sterling. She was convinced Calico would run off to some ‘godforsaken city’ and become a stripper because her mother worked in a pool hall and let Calico wear revealing clothes to school. As it turned out, Calico did run off to a big city and later won a Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe.
“For much of my youth it came and went. But by the time I went to college, I could not only hear what people were thinking, I could also see things.”
“Like what kind of things?” Kennedy says.
