by Jody Sharpe
To Catch an Angel
The sight of the stars makes me dream
- Vincent Van Gogh
- (1823-1890)
Jody Sharpe
Copyright © 2017 Honey Star Publishing
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1541247256
ISBN 13: 9781541247253
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016913142
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina
In Memory of my husband, Steve
Contents
Dream Angel
Chapter 1 Madam Norma’s Parlor
Chapter 2 Apple Tortes & Noah’s Ark
Chapter 3 An Angel And A Rose
Chapter 4 Angels Calling
Chapter 5 Moon Bathing
Chapter 6 The Meeting And The Moon
Chapter 7 The Wiley Ways Of Psychic Ladies
Chapter 8 Past Meets Present
Chapter 9 The Man I Used To Love
Chapter 10 The Wind, The Awakening
Chapter 11 Rainy Winds Of Night
Chapter 12 Noah’s Angel
Chapter 13 The Warmth Of The Fire And You
Chapter 14 The Sweetest Of Days
Chapter 15 One Psychic Summer
Chapter 16 Smoke And Orange Skies
Chapter 17 The Rose
Chapter 18 The Wiley Ways Return
Chapter 19 Once Upon A Dream
Chapter 20 I Run To Him
Chapter 21 The Last Chapter Of One Psychic Summer
Chapter 22 Goodbye
Chapter 23 Songfest For The Angels
Chapter 24 Bees Fill The Yard & August Weddings Bloom
Chapter 25 Changing Winds Of September
Chapter 26 Shadow On The Moon
Chapter 27 June Again Once Upon A Time
Dream Angel
It’s after midnight as she dreams of me, her guardian angel. Will she remember the dream she had of me so very long ago? She sleeps on the chaise of her tiny apartment patio near Los Angeles. I whisper,“ Maggie, it’s time. Jeb’s spirit will follow.”
When she awakens, her heart is full of emotion. The night sky is filled with stars and slow moving clouds. Amid the starry darkness, the twinkly lights of a jet move north. For north is where she will go now. My message is clear. She’s waited for the sign from above. In her dream I have called her home to Mystic Bay.
She will go without Jeb, her beloved dog, and Brian, her first love. Losing Jeb then breaking up with Brian has left her despondent and homesick. Yet tonight seeing me in her dream, she has hope for a new beginning. She says her goodnight to God and the sacred sky. She says goodbye to the perfect little life she tried to create, the white picket fenced life never coming to fruition.
At home she will hear again the gentle hum of trees. She always hears them in Mystic Bay. It’s her psychic side. She can hear the hum of life in her childhood surroundings, a town known for its psychic angelic ways. The mighty windswept pine in her backyard will hum, whispering its welcome. With Jeb’s spirit and me, her guardian angel invisible by her side, dear Maggie Joy Malone will finally come home . . .
1
Madam Norma’s Parlor
The cloudy last days of California gloom never bother me. They burn off by afternoon, giving way to blue skies and cotton puff clouds. King, our shepherd mix, and I walk down the steps of the back porch toward the gate. Our blue shuttered house has a small white sign out front with gold lettering that reads, Madam Norma’s Parlor. A few psychic readings go on weekly there by Gram, and GG, my grandmother and great grandmother. These lovely older ladies are known as the psychic team, Miss Marilyn and Madam Norma. They raised me well with an easy breezy style and plenty of love. It’s a peaceful setting, our back yard, our secret garden with its well-mown lawn, birds at the feeder, and bunnies in the bushes. The majestic Bishop Pine with the flowered bench glider near waits for Gram and GG to sip their afternoon tea under its shade. I touch the pine tree I love. I grew up playing in the garden feeling comforted there. I’ve cried and dreamed so many hopeful dreams, lying on the ground looking up at the tree’s magnificence. It was my escape, my dreamy place. I look at the quintessential garden with its hedges and garden jewels, flowering roses, pansies, sweet pea, iris. It’s the place where I belong.
Our town is known for its psychics. It is quite the norm here to have a psychic vibe. But I keep my quirky abilities with nature to myself. Only Gram and GG know the extent of my communication with my surroundings. I even water them down when speaking to my dear friend, Jenny. “Was my mother psychic?” I asked GG years ago. “Not at all,” my great grandmother replied wistfully. “Your similarities lie in your beautiful face. You are altogether quite different.” Then the conversation stopped. How sad, I thought. Gram and GG are so kind. How could my mother’s life have ended that way?
Life has a way of taking you places to learn lessons, I ponder, as we walk out the gate to the alley that leads to the side road towards the beach. King’s head goes up in the air, his black ears flap back in the breeze. We won’t stay long but stand on the crest of a little dune for a moment looking at the sea. Gloom or not, it’s a sight to behold; the vast Pacific with boats in the distance and formations of seagulls scouting the sea. Seeing a grandmother walking a baby in a stroller, I think about Gram and GG. Their love almost made me forget my biological mother left me in their arms twenty-six years ago, never to return. Like I was a pair of ill-fitted shoes, she cast me off leaving for Hollywood. Lyla Jasmine, (her stage name) never contacted us. The years I lived in LA, I worried I might run into her. Of course she wouldn’t have known me and I didn’t comb the hot spots of the rich and famous either. Odd to some, I brush her from my world, trying not to make her absence a big thing in my life. How can I miss someone I don’t remember, who never cared about me? I push her out of my mind but if she’d only stay there. And then it comes again, the angst, especially now when I’m home again.
People here know the story of my biological mother, Lyla Jasmine, the pretty Malone girl, born Polly Ann Malone. She left her baby with her mother and grandparents, never to show her face again in the quaint and psychic town of Mystic Bay. People don’t gossip here. It’s that kind of place. Pushed back in my mind, I try to forget she wouldn’t tell them who my father was. Gram and GG wrote persistent letters over several years pleading with her for information, for my sake. She never wrote back. I’ve wondered about it to obsession; who is my father? Lyla Jasmine catapulted to fleeting fame on the long running TV crime show, Courtroom 77. Married to her fourth husband, according to Jenny’s love for celebrity gossip, she lives a privileged life in Beverly Hills. She and some unknown man are the reason I’m here in this world, but honestly, all I need are Gram and GG and the stories of my late Great Grandpa Joe. The photos of me as a toddler sitting on his knee are treasures. A good man, he loved his wife and daughter and me. He died when I was four; Gram and GG carried on, saying his spirit was near, keeping us strong. GG sees him sometimes at the end of her bed sending loving thoughts our way. The only memory of him I have is when I smell cigar smoke. “That man loved his cigars almost as much as he loved me,” GG says misty-eyed, remembering him. She still keeps in her closet some of the suits he’d wear to court because a hint of cigar still lingers when she opens the closet door. He was the town’s country lawyer and he and GG shared an office in the front parlor. Days it was a lawyers’ office and nights it was two psychics’ parlor. GG kept the sign out front long after he died.
John Joseph Gilbert Attorney at Law
& Madam Norma’s Parlor
20 Moon Road
“I never knew my mother’s father, my Grandfather Sean Malone. His whereabouts are unknown still. He was a
philandering traveling salesman with looks like a movie star. He left Gram with my mother, Polly Ann, when she was five. Apparently, he stole Great Grandpa Joe’s treasured ‘57 Chevy and fled. Oh, Great Grandpa Joe got it back all right; Gram still drives it today. Great Grandpa Joe made him sign the divorce papers right then and there or he threatened he’d get his friends in the Mystic Bay Police force to throw him right in jail. “It must be in the genes,” GG said of my mother’s parting. “She always blamed us her father left. We took her to psychologists, but her anger escalated. She tried to find him to no avail. He had black Irish looks with bright blue eyes, and sweet Gram was smitten. It took her a long time to get over him. But now she has a gentleman caller, as GG calls him. “One marriage is enough,” Gram states emphatically, yet she has a lovely romance. They’ve been together for nearly twenty years now. Mr. Tim Thayer owns the local farmers’ market and Mystic Bay Cheese & Wine. Both seventy-five, they were in high school together and now share movie and dinner dates on Friday and Saturday nights. I’m glad Gram has someone for her heart clearly breaks at the mention of Polly Ann’s departure. She’s packed the photos of her away…all but one. It’s her high school photo. A fair beauty she was, like Gram’s younger photos. I look at it as if a stranger looked like me a bit. History repeated itself when Polly Ann, aka Lyla Jasmine, left me.
“Why did she have me then?” I couldn’t help asking them when I was in high school.
GG admitted, “She didn’t know she was pregnant until she was far along. We didn’t handle it well, Dear. We told her we would raise you so she could continue and go back to college.” She went back all right. She never returned. She quit and moved to LA to pursue acting…a thoroughly different life. But I must resemble my father mostly, for my hair is dark and wavy and my skin a deep olive. We concluded he might be from a Spanish background. But where? Who is the mystery man who is my father?
“Let’s jog,” I urge King. The big bright-eyed black and brown dog has the typical canine loving heart. Loving another dog is therapeutic for me since missing Jeb, my late great golden dog. I rescued Jeb outside a pizza restaurant my sophomore year at UC Davis. He was about six then. Someone in the parking lot was giving him away.
“Whoever wants this pain of a dog can have him,” the miserable young man shouted.
“I’ll take him,” I answered before thinking twice. In college my senior year I lived in a little apartment with Jenny Benfield, not far from Brian’s apartment. My grandmother and great grandmother thought Brian was polite enough and never said much, but Jenny was adamant. “No way he’s good enough,” she’d lecture when I was crying over a forgotten date on his part. “Lose that one, please!” I should have listened but after graduation, I followed Brian to LA to his first job as a law clerk in his uncle’s firm like a hug- starved puppy. Jeb came along too. But it was just Jeb and me, as Brian lived a few miles away with his doting hypochondriac mother. He was a total “Mama’s boy”. That should have been my umpteenth clue our relationship wasn’t going to work out. Wasting the years hoping Brian would commit to me was insane. At least during that time I was blessed to have loyal Jeb. I think he really could understand everything that was going on. I’d tell him all my troubles. When Brian and I broke up, Jeb was there for me with as many furry hugs as I needed. Then in a wink he was gone.
Gram and GG rescued King a few weeks before Christmas Eve. That was the day the July North Show came to town showcasing my friend Hannah Ryder’s book about Mystic Bay called The Town with the Angel Vibe. Hannah’s ex-boyfriend Sam Blakley had written a novel, My California Angel, hinting she and her father were real angels living as humans in California. Hannah and her family were besieged with media; the whole town had a circus-like atmosphere for weeks. Sam Blakley, also Hannah’s writing professor, admitted to TV talk show host July North he lied wanting to get Hannah’s attention by making people believe she was an angel. Hannah and her dad are, of course, humans like the rest of us mortals.
Subsequently, Hannah wrote a book about the town, how they rallied around her and her family. Her book is about the wonderful changes everyone made after July’s TV show revealed Sam’s lies. The town worked together imitating angels, doing good works for the benefit of others. There’s a big part of the town’s Angel Vibe Association (AVA) that rescues animals. So King, cold and hungry and left outside the door of Beachtails’ Animal Hospital one night, got lucky and was rescued in the morning by Hannah’s vet husband, Josh. Big King now lives happily with us in the town of extraordinary psychic and angel vibes. When I came home last Christmas, King and I bonded big time as I’d just lost my dear Jeb, and Brian, well, he was history. Rescuing here is almost contagious.
Looking to my left before I cross Beach Road, I see him jogging, the same guy I’ve seen out my window everyday for the past weeks I’ve been home. Do I know him? I can’t see his face, but he looks familiar jogging away with four dogs of various sizes and mixed breeds. He’s tall, dark, and handsome, as Gram would say, and a kind soul with a love for animals, but it doesn’t take a psychic to see that. The psychic gene was passed down to me; however, just a touch. I can’t put out a sign or read futures or tell people about their lives like Gram and GG. The only touch I have is my deep connection to nature, especially when I’m home here in Mystic Bay. I hear a faint hum around every tree, sensing its need for the sea’s fog and dew drops in the California morning as they seep into the bark and leaves. When it rains or the sunshine’s bright, the trees experience a bliss-like state, loving every breath. They are my lifelines. How do I know this? In this psychic town, it’s not uncommon to have abilities like my connection to other living things, like the birds and animals I’m drawn too, even insects. Gram and GG understand me of course, thinking it’s an extraordinary ability. But since I’ve been back, I feel a change. My psychic side seems to have escalated. The tree’s hums are more rhythmic, stronger. The deep connection I have is drawing in more experiences, more of nature’s connections. Yesterday, as I took a shower, a tiny bird came to flutter in the extra water spraying out the open window. The birds seem to fly closer to me now and the wild bunnies draw nearer too. The colors of the world seem more pronounced. I get almost mesmerized staring at the green trees, the beauty of the sea as it changes colors from dusk to dawn and, oh, the majesty of the sacred nights. I haven’t told Gram and GG this yet. I will. I am waiting to see what happens next. For my sixth sense says I’m evolving and it’s thrilling.
Yet, having ultra sensitivity has helped in other areas of my life like my career, teaching children with special needs. I already miss the students I left behind in LA. I hope their new teachers see their potential as I always did.
King and I watch the man with four dogs pick up the two smaller dogs then slowly jog up Bluff Road, then he trots up the hill towards The Sea Watch Hotel, the lovely structure recently completed. It overlooks the spectacular Pacific here in Mystic Bay where psychics and angel-like ordinary folk live. Gram said the jogging dog guy most likely is the son of the reclusive author, Marshall Greenstreet The author moved here two years ago with his ailing wife. He spent time here years ago, before I was born, writing his first psychic detective novel in the Connor Diamond series. He interviewed all the towns’ famed psychics, including Gram and GG. They say he was so very handsome then, a charmer. When the book became a hit, he gave them a nice monetary gift. A widower now, he is apparently quite ill himself. Gram absolutely loves all of Marshall Greenstreet’s Connor Diamond series. The last one published a few years ago, Diamond’s Luck, sent her into a reading marathon long into the night. Then she started reading all the books in the series again!
The dog jogger out of sight now, King and I sprint across the road towards the beach. I’m going to take him up to Dog Beach and let him run with the wind tomorrow for sure. More seagulls fly overhead. An older gentleman with red tinted sunglasses strolls towards us now. Do I know him? He looks familiar too. He tips his Mystic Bay cap and whistles a tune, the name I seem to fo
rget.
“Pretty dog,” he remarks, smiling, and moves on.
“Thank you,” I smile back as he walks away south. King turns to look back at him. Everyone is nice here like that whistling man. After Hannah wrote her book about the town even July North caught the town’s angel fever, adopted a baby and built a home near the new Sea Watch Hotel. I sigh, thinking about my decision to move back. Yes, everything is falling into place now. I’ll forget about Brian eventually. Gram, GG and Jenny bet their lives on it. Yet I’ll never forget Jeb and the love and comfort he brought me. I’ll see him in the precious photos I have and his special place tucked in my heart. Lucky for me, I listened to the angel in my dream. For now, I’ll get to see the angelic little faces of the students I’ll teach in September, a new job, a new start in the very town I grew up in. I’m babysitting one of my students today, little Emma Rose. I’m volunteering to care for her as needed ‘til school starts so her mother Elena can work and go to school. Elena never married Emma Rose’s father; she is the sole provider. She is in need of help and volunteering to care for Emma Rose is a privilege.
When we get back, I smell coffee brewing.
“Now Gram, I was going to make the coffee and you keep getting up making it for me!” I kiss my sweet white-haired grandmother who’s holding her fluffy white dog, Cookie. The old poodle mix looks comical wearing her little diaper with teddy bears on it. Hannah’s husband, Josh, our vet says, “Cookie’s just fine except she needs a little extra safety net,” a positive way to note her getting on in dog years.
“It’s such a happy kitchen,” I pet Cookie while surveying the sunny yellow walls freshly painted for my homecoming.
“It’s so wonderful having you home, Maggie Joy. I wanted to get up early today and have some time with you before you went to work. To hear you sing around the house again is heaven. We have a nine o’clock client today, early for us. Boy, I bet you’re excited about babysitting Emma Rose.”