Page 202 of Hidden Nature

She put on her Stetson—the straw one for the warmer season. And with it, put on the cop again.

She kept the cop on when she got home at the end of her day. Though she sat a minute or two in her car just smiling at the house. She’d put chairs on that porch, a little table, some flowerpots. She should do window boxes—just the right touch for the cottage look.

Inside, still in her jacket and hat, she ignored the kitchen and stepped through to the mudroom.

“Plumbing roughed in, thank you, CJ. Next, inspection, insulation, and drywall!”

She went back, hung up the jacket, stowed her hat, secured her weapon.

She took the Chinese takeout she’d picked up on the way home into her office. Sitting, she studied her wall, ate some noodles.

“All right. Where did I leave off?”

As Sloan ate and worked, Clara came home. She sat, took her crepe-soled shoes off her aching feet, and let out a long, deep “Ahhhh.”

She’d been running around all day, with barely a chance to think. And thinking’s what she had to do.

Maybe it was best to take another one first, before the witch. Gain some strength and insight from that.

She’d had one selected. The man had been struck by lightning and survived it. If that wasn’t a sign from the Almighty, she didn’t know what was.

What to do, what to do?

She took her shoes into the bedroom to put away, put on her house slippers.

She needed to make a meal for Sam. That was her sacred duty, and her sincere pleasure. Though her feet ached and her lower back with it, she went to the kitchen.

With the TV on for company, she put together a meatloaf, boiled some potatoes for mashing. Frozen peas would do fine with it, she thought, and set the timer on the meatloaf, turned the potatoes on low.

She needed just a short nap, just twenty minutes down, after this hard ten-hour day.

She lay on the bedspread, and fell instantly into a dream.

A vision.

She saw the man—his name was Terrance Brown, and brown he was, with a white mama, a Black daddy. A good-looking, well-built man of thirty. Head chef in a fancy restaurant in—it turned out—Heron’s Rest.

When the storm came, it filled the sky, shook the earth. The man,Terry they called him, went outside. He liked to take pictures, and wanted one of the lightning that pitchforked the sky.

“I didn’t know it was coming for me,” he told Clara. “I didn’t know.”

He moved away from the house, one he shared with a woman he got engaged to. Rain lashed, whipped over him, but he didn’t seem to mind it. He wore nothing but the boxers he’d slept in before the storm came.

And he lifted his phone toward the sky, waiting for the next strike.

It struck with a blast like a bomb, cleaving the tree beside him.

His body shook; his hair stood straight up. The tree split in half as he fell.

Clara smelled sulfur and brimstone.

The woman in a shirt and panties—and neither did much to cover her butt cheeks—ran screaming from the house.

She ran to him, dropped down, and shouting, started pumping his chest.

“Terry! Terry! Don’t leave me. I called for help, don’t leave me!”

The witch stepped up beside Clara and laughed.

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