Page 13 of Christmas Past
He didn’t know what was going on. Absolutely didn’t believe in any psychic detective hogwash. But, she wasn’t playing him. Every instinct he had told him so.
Whatever they called it…psychic wanting to help, witness to a horrible accident that her psyche was running from, or someone who’d committed a horrible crime that her mind wasn’t acknowledging, she knew something.
“I’m responsible for one death,” she said now. “I can’t live with another…”
“You aren’t responsible for Jenny killing herself, Bella,” he said now. He knew details from the investigation. “She was suicidal before she ever met you.”
“But I told her I felt like she should try to contact her mother one more time. I told her that I felt like her mother was ready to forgive her.”
It had been a good guess. A likely guess.
“You had no way of knowing her fragile state of mind,” Chad said now.
“I knew she was upset. I thought it was sadness due to her mother.”
“You knew her a total of five minutes, Bella, there’s no way you could have known.”
“And no way I should have been doling out advice, either, for that very same reason.”
He wasn’t there to debate her past life. Or even her current one. He was there to bring a child home alive.
“I need your help.”
“My help? I can’t help you find her, Chad. I don’t know how.”
“This stuff you say you feel…”
With tears in her eyes, she said, “I don’t want to feel any of it, Chad. That’s what my new life is about…”
“A child is abducted in the United States every forty seconds.” He didn’t have time to tread as softly as he might have liked. “Of those found alive, seventy-nine percent of them were found within the first three hours. After twenty-four hours, the chances drop significantly.”
Tears dripped slowly down her cheeks.
But she didn’t offer up the child.
“I need your help, Bella.”
She nodded.
And he breathed his first positive breath since he’d answered his phone to hear that a child had been abducted from right under their noses.
Chapter 6
The next hours were a blur for Bella. A confusing haze of feelings as she allowed herself to experience every sensation, trying to discern which were her own, driven by her own, impeded by her own, and which might be of use in the saving of a little girl’s life. If there really were any that could help.
“I’ve spent the past two years disassociating from any feelings that I could not immediately own,” she told Chad as they sat over a mostly untouched tray of fresh cut vegetables grown in her laundry room green house.
“What about before…when you were working as a gypsy, giving readings. What did you do then to…get stuff? You said you believed you had a gift.”
She nodded. Resisting. And yet forcing herself to listen.
“So what did you use to do to access that gift? How did you know what to tell people when they came to you for help?”
“I know this is going to sound crazy, but I used to think about Christmas.”
“Christmas?” He looked around and she figured he had to be noticing the lack of anything holiday-esque in her home. Hers was probably the only home in Christmas Town not decorated for the upcoming holiday.
“When I was little my mother would make a huge deal over Christmas. We’d decorate our trailer, our truck, our tent, wherever we happened to be camped…she’d cook from morning until night, making my sisters do so as well, and then give away everything they made. She said it was her way of thanking the heavens for my gift. It was the Christmas spirit to give, she said. To reach out to everyone around us in love. She’d wrap up packages of beads she’d strung, of shirts she’d weaved, and leave them on doorsteps with no notes. Because people had to believe in the magic in order to be able to believe in other things they couldn’t see. Like hope. They needed to be loved by strangers in order to understand faith…” Her voice trailed off as her heart filled with hopelessness.
