Eye of the Beholder

by Shari Shattuck

  In the days that followed, she’d tried to put it out of her mind. She had been afraid that she was crazy, that people would think she was some kind of bizarre mental case. That she was some kind of mental case. And Sarah was fine, wasn’t she? The whole thing had been the product of an overactive imagination coupled with teenage angst, she told herself. As the days went by, the convincing reality of the vision faded.

  But two months after the vision, just after midnight on a cold Saturday night, the doorbell woke Greer from a sleep riddled with ugly dreams. She could hear her father’s muffled voice and that of another man conversing through the closed door, and then the sound of the locks being unlatched, the door opening, and her name being called.

  Confused, frightened, and sleepy, Greer was summoned to speak to the visitor, a police officer, in the kitchen. He wanted to know what she’d done earlier that evening. She told him that she’d gone to a coffee shop with her friend Sarah, that they had stayed until about nine and then said good-bye and gone their separate ways.

  The officer shuffled his feet, sighed, rubbed his eyes as though they pained him—or maybe he was trying not to cry—and then he told them.

  Sarah had been assaulted on the way home. She’d been knocked unconscious, sexually assaulted, brutally beaten, and left for dead in an empty lot. After a neighbor had heard moaning and called the police, she’d been taken to a hospital, where she was in critical condition. All they could do now, he had told them, was pray that she would pull through.

  Greer blamed herself, prayed until her knees were raw that Sarah would pull through. She had not.

  On the day of her best friend’s funeral, Greer sobbed out the story to her mother, and her mother took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes. Greer had never forgotten what had been said to her on that dismal day.

  “Listen to me. You have a gift. One woman in every generation of our family has had this gift for as long as anyone can remember. My sister had it. There’s nothing wrong with you, there’s nothing to be ashamed of or even afraid of, but you cannot run from it and you cannot make it go away. You have to use it, embrace it, and welcome it as best you can.”

  Greer also remembered what she had said in response. “So, if I had told you before, I could have saved Sarah’s life?”

  And her mother’s quick reply: “No.” Then she had paused, looking troubled, and Greer knew that her mother had told her a lie and couldn’t live with it, so she changed her answer. “Maybe. Some things you can change; some things you can only let go of.”

  That was it. Some things she could only let go of.

  Like Sarah.

  The forty-three-year-old Greer looked down at the woman on the massage table in front of her and knew exactly why she was remembering so vividly right now the feeling of terror that she’d had for Sarah so long ago.

  She was having it again.

  Chapter 2

  Sunday

  To reach the house, you turned off the twisting two-lane highway onto a patchily paved road and drove around a canyon shoulder and through a narrow track, then cut between the side of the hill and a thick cluster of pine trees until you came to an open gravel parking area. The house was grand: two-story mission style with thick stone supports holding up a large wooden porch. There was a cluster of four other cabinlike houses, smaller than Greer’s, just visible here and there through the trees; the group of five homes was hidden by canyon walls and oak and pine trees nestled within the national forest land. The tiny neighborhood was as isolated and quiet as you could get and still be only thirty minutes from downtown Los Angeles. Greer loved it, and she counted herself lucky to have found it. Today—Sunday—the salon was closed, and she was taking the rare opportunity to get her new house in order.

  The rain spattered, softly now, on the roof of the porch outside the kitchen window, and Greer was feeling a liberating relief that could come only from breaking down the last cardboard moving box marked KITCHEN when she heard a blast of music from one of the two upstairs bedrooms. Smiling, she walked down the hall, up the stairs, and stood in the half-open doorway. On the floor, teetering away from universally awkward pubescence and toward comfortable manhood, her seventeen-year-old son, Joshua, sat adjusting the controls of his CD player. The rest of his things were still mostly lying in piles on the floor or packed in boxes.

  “Now you can have some background music to get everything else unpacked,” Greer said to him.

  “Mom!”

  “The sooner you do it, the sooner it’ll be done.”

  “I know. But I was hoping to go hike up the trail first.”

  Greer looked at her offspring. Just as his father had been, he was handsome, and although he’d inherited, to a lesser degree, the fullness of her mouth, the striking green eyes were a strictly female trait in her family; his, also like his father’s, were hazel. His wavy blond hair was worn a little too long and unkempt, and his strong, tall, lanky frame was just beginning to solidify. As she always did when she noticed the physical similarity, she missed Geoffrey, Joshua’s father.

  “You’ll have to wait a little bit before you go hiking; we have a visitor coming over.”

  “Who?” Joshua asked, his eyes looking doubtful.

  “I think it’s a neighbor.”

  Joshua looked at his unusual mother and, cocking his head to one side, he asked bemusedly, “How do you know these things?”

  “I can just feel her focused on us.” The gift came so naturally to Greer that she still sometimes found it surprising that everyone didn’t have it.

  Joshua grinned impishly and said with a familiar, teasing cadence, “You are so weird.”

  “And you,” she finished the well-worn exchange with affection, “are such a teenager. Clean up your room.”

  As she went back to the kitchen, a crease deepened in her brow. She was thinking of her session with Leah and the prescience of danger that had come to her. She still felt the loss of Sarah, still suffered the wound of so many years ago and the desperate regret that she might have done something to prevent it. She must do something to at least warn Leah. But what?

  That was the problem. She sighed and shook her head, putting on a kettle for tea. This wasn’t the first time she had felt a powerful negative force in someone’s future, though it was only the second time she had felt this particular strain of danger. And you couldn’t just go up to someone and say, “Hi, I’m clairvoyant, and I’m pretty sure that some psychopath is going to attack you. Probably sometime in the next two months.” Not unless you wanted to be investigated by child services first and later by the local detective force.

  She would have to think about it. She sighed, reached for the china, and then paused. A new feeling came to her, also about Leah: Leah’s face flashed into her vision and then the number one. She smiled; that was good. Leah was meant to be the first of three new friends. More hopeful, she busied herself again and had just placed two cups with saucers on the wide oak table when the knock came on the door.

  “Hello, there!” said a friendly, plump-faced woman when the door was opened; her pitch was a bit unnaturally high, as though the visitor were wary that her overture might be perceived as an intrusion. Raindrops slid from her umbrella and splattered on the wide plank boards of the porch.

  Greer smiled her welcome and could see the woman relax. “I hope it’s not a bad time. I’m Whitney; my husband, Luke, and I live in the house right there.” She pointed with the dripping umbrella to a much smaller but charmingly neat and cozy home about twenty yards to the right. “I just wanted to stop by and say, ‘Welcome to Silver Line Creek.’ And, of course, find out who our new neighbor would be,” she added with a wry drop in her tone to a confessional note. Her comment was almost obliterated by the sound of a large pickup truck as it rumbled down the soggy road and stopped at the locked gate. Both women turned and watched through a silver veil of rain as a tall man got out wearing a long oilskin coat and a cowboy hat. He waved a hand at the two ladies and then went
on with the business of unlocking one of the many padlocks that secured the fire road for the exclusive access of the forest service and residents.

  As the man climbed back in the car, he shouted over the loud growling of his giant engine, “Welcome to the neighborhood!” to Greer, then added, “Hey, Whitney, tell Luke he owes me five bucks on the game!” before climbing back up into the raised cab and pulling through the gate.

  Turning back to Greer, Whitney said, “That’s Mike; he lives up the road. If you need any of your motors made bigger, louder, and more obnoxious, he’s got the best garage in town.” They both looked again as the truck revved its massive engine and pulled easily through the thick mud. “Actually, I shouldn’t be so antimale. He’s really good at fixing just about anything, and he’s helped me out plenty of times. Still, I never really understood that need to turbocharge everything.”

  Greer smiled, recognizing Whitney instantly as a woman who would be in easy sympathy with her, and she thought, Friend number two. What she said was, “Come in. How nice of you to come by; I’m making tea for us.”

  If Whitney noticed the presumption she didn’t register it as anything unusual. Instead she leaned the umbrella against the side of the house and held out a freshly baked loaf of banana bread as she stepped over the threshold. “That sounds great, thank you. Here’s something to go with it.”

  Greer took the bread, still warm and smelling deliciously of tropical comfort, into her arms and cradled it like a baby. She was watching Whitney’s face. The woman’s race was hard to read. She was dark-haired with olive skin that shone like her eyes. She could have been Asian or Hispanic or American Indian, or a blend of several races. Her body gave no distinct ethnic clues; she was well shaped, neither thin nor fat, but strong and smooth with rather more rounded hips and bottom than was generally celebrated by the beauty industry, but which Greer and so many men found far more attractive than the popular alternative. Whatever her origin, she stood there radiating a friendly glow, and Greer was warmed all the way through as completely as the bread in her arms. She took a deep breath, savoring the impending friendship before she introduced herself.

  “I’m Greer Sands. I’m sorry I haven’t been over to introduce myself, but between moving in and opening a new business, you’ll have to forgive me. Sit down, please. I want you to meet my son.”

  Joshua had come into the room and was hanging back with the slight uncertainty of a foal around a new mare. But when Whitney turned to him he saw a face without fences, a person whose manner was as open as the Montana sky. “Hi, I’m Joshua,” he said, and gladly extended his hand.

  “Welcome to Silver Line Creek,” Whitney countered, taking the offered hand and shaking it warmly. And then she added, laughing, “Well, it’s more like a river right now, with all this rain. Did you hear we broke the record for recorded rainfall? Luckily we both live on this side of the creek. Bill and Debra live across the creek bed, and they haven’t been able to get their truck out for a week. The road’s under three feet of water; it’s usually just a few inches deep at the crossing and they drive through it. They had the footbridge, which is farther down that way”—she gestured downstream to a place hidden behind the pines, where the banks were steep and high—“until last week. The trees keep getting uprooted and one of them smashed into it. Wiped it out.”

  “There goes my hike,” said Joshua.

  “How scary,” exclaimed Greer. “Are they all right?” She gestured to the table and Whitney sat down.

  “Oh, sure.” Whitney’s voice changed, sinking to a more comfortable place, naturally deeper, with a constant hint of humor around the edges of the words, and she waved one hand dismissively. “I went to the store for them on Tuesday and picked up emergency rations. Luke put the two cartons of cigarettes in a bag with a stone and threw the care package across to them, so they’ll be fine for a week or so. Then maybe they’ll need another drop. They might even want food next time.” She turned to Joshua, asking, “Are you going to Franklin High?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I transferred last week,” he answered politely.

  “You transferred? That’s got to be tough.”

  Joshua shrugged. “It’s high school.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “It’s big,” was his simple answer.

  “Luke’s daughter, Joy, goes there. She’s fifteen; you must be a little older than that.”

  “I’m seventeen, yes, ma’am.”

  Whitney fixed him with comically serious eyes. “Okay,” she said, “Now, I know that it’s polite to say ‘ma’am’ and ‘sir’ and all that, and I really appreciate it, but it makes me feel old, so you can call me Whitney.”

  “Can I call you ‘babe’?” asked Joshua so casually that they all laughed.

  “No,” Whitney said succinctly.

  “You have a daughter?” Greer asked Whitney, backtracking.

  “I inherited one. She’s with us half the week. It’s such a pleasure having a teenager around the house.” Her voice was heavily tinged with sarcasm.

  Greer smiled at her son. “I think so.”

  “Well, yours doesn’t seem to be in the I’m-theangriest-most-deeply-wronged-person-in-the-universe-no-one-has-ever-suffered-as-much-as-me stage. He also doesn’t have Pam for a mother.”

  In spite of Whitney’s cavalier delivery, Greer could sense the change in her tension. It was the way with so many of her friends with teenagers. She shared a warm, grateful look with her son, and poured hot water into a pot filled with loose tea leaves before saying, “That must be especially hard on you. How’s your relationship with her mother?”

  “The witch of Winona Boulevard?”

  “Not exactly copacetic, I’m guessing.”

  “Well, I mean, I just met you and I don’t want you to think I’m exaggerating, so let me just simply say . . . she’s the most vile, evil, insecure, bitter shrew that ever left a fat footprint on the North American continent.” Whitney smiled, all innocent sweetness. “Not that I don’t wish her well.”

  Joshua had eased into a chair across the table from Whitney, and he said, “So I take it you don’t make her banana bread?”

  Both of the women looked at him for a moment in surprise and then burst out laughing. “No, not anymore. Thank you,” Whitney said as Greer set a steaming teacup and saucer down on the table in front of her, and followed it with the warm, pungent loaf of bread, butter, and a knife. “I did try at first, for Joy’s sake, to get along with Pam, even though Luke warned me that it was a waste of time. And for a little while it seemed like I was making a difference in Joy’s life, but oh, no, that wasn’t allowed.”

  “Joy is your stepdaughter’s name?”

  Whitney looked up from the grain of the wood in which she had become intensely interested. “Yes, the light of my life,” she said, and into her voice dropped a dose of sadness that seemed not to belong there, as if a teaspoon of sorrow were an alien ingredient in a batter of constant cheerfulness. “It’s such a shame; really, she’s a great kid, but she’s not allowed to do anything but hate me.”

  Greer and Joshua both watched Whitney and waited. Finally Joshua said, “Ouch.” They all nodded, and then he said, “Could you pass me that knife?”

  “You want a piece of banana bread?” Whitney asked him.

  “No,” Joshua said with mischief in his voice, “I just think it would be safer if you weren’t sitting near anything sharp.” They all laughed again, and then he said, “Actually, that does smell really good. Can I trust you to cut me a piece?”

  Whitney cast him a wry look. “Sure, babe.”

  Greer was sipping her tea and watching the exchange. Her son had such an amazing way of setting people at ease. Perhaps it was because he had already suffered a life-shattering change and learned that life went on. He often reminded her that the anxiety she put herself through didn’t change a damn thing except to steal her happiness.

  He’d lost his father so young, and borne it so well. At first he had asked, �
��Why can’t Daddy come to see me?” And she had told him because he was sick. And then she had to tell him that his father wasn’t going to get better, and finally that he wasn’t ever coming back. “But he’s watching over you,” she had told him. “He will always be there.” And her wise, eight-year-old little boy had held her tearful face in his hands and said, “I know, Mommy; don’t cry. I won’t forget him.”

  And there was Dario. Thank God for Dario and the void he had filled in Joshua’s life, and vice versa. She knew that Dario missed Geoffrey as much as she did. Their relationship had been so close, so rare.

  “I’m sorry,” Whitney said pertly. “As usual, I’m running my mouth about myself and I haven’t asked a thing about you. Are you married?”

  “No.” Greer smiled softly. “I was once.” She remembered him fondly.

  “So, where’s your dad?” Whitney asked Joshua.

  Joshua shared a look and the bittersweetness of his mom’s memory before he responded. “He passed away when I was eight,” he explained, and then provided the disclaimer before Whitney could express her sympathy: “It’s okay; I got over it, and my mom’s partner became a second dad to me even before my real dad passed away.”

  Whitney looked questioningly to Greer, who filled in, “My partner, as in business partner. We own a salon together; in fact, we just opened a second one up here in Shadow Hills, on the High Street.”

  “Oh, my gosh, is that you? Cool. You’re right next to Jenny Sanchez’s place. She’s got the coffee shop next door to you. Have you met her?”

  “No, not yet. I’ve been so busy. Is she a friend of yours?”

  “Yeah, more like mutual customers so far. I like her salads and she buys my jewelry, but we keep threatening to get together socially. So, you’re a hairdresser?”

  Greer laughed. “Oh, God, no. Dario is the impresario in that department. I do reflexology, skin care, and Reiki healing. I don’t think I’d care for hairdressing, but I love what I do.”