a merciful distraction from the tear in his soul.
In a daze of misery, he mistook the brightening sky for some kind of reprieve, only to realize it was just the sun. It was too much. Fresh tears flooded his bloody throat and he ground his forehead against the soil and fell asleep cursing God.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jamison woke to the crow of a sick-sounding rooster. A second later, he was hit with cruel joke number one, and number two. Two thirds of the people he loved on this Earth had been taken from it.
He tried to roll over, but something held firm against his back. Cornstalks. The crop circle was gone. Of course.
With little sense of direction in the tall corn, he made his best guess and headed uphill. If he ended up spending the day finding his way out, who cared?
When he emerged at the end of the row, a tractor rolled past him. The driver, dressed in white, tipped his straw hat to him. Jamison flipped the guy off.
He made it to his car and opened the back door to find his change of clothes. Then he changed them, right there, in front of God and everybody. He folded the white clothes and put them in a neat little pile, in the dirt, and...peed on them.
The ladies were standing on the back porch. He didn’t care. Nor did he care how many Somerleds watched him drive over the now-yellow pile, then back over them, then drive over them one last time on his way to the road.
Granddad might have liked that. Or maybe not. But the old man wasn’t around to complain.
By the time he got to the gas station, it was no use. He pulled over and searched his car for his phone. He’d left it in the white pants, then he’d peed on it.
There wasn’t even a bit of change in the car for the phone booth. Hell, there wasn’t even a phone booth to use.
Just as he was trying to remember what his mom had packed in the picnic—so he might trade the attendant something tasty for the chance to use his phone—a pickup pulled in next to him.
Somerleds. Too bad his bladder was empty.
Buchanan jumped out of the back of the truck and walked to Jamison’s window. He considered ignoring him, but rolled his window down an inch instead.
“Yeah?”
“Scoot over.” Buchanan opened his door before he ever thought to lock it and started to sit on him. He escaped to the passenger side just in time. Buchanan’s big white butt missed him by a hair. “You just sleep. We’ll get you home.”
But Jamison couldn’t sleep. He had too much crying yet to do.
***
Seven months later...
“You’re such an idiot.”
Ray grinned as he watched his paper airplane glide out the glassless window to join two-dozen others wedged in the baby cornstalks below, and Jamison was swamped by a wave of déjà vu.
He imagined a flash of brilliant red and yellow leaves covering the ground between tall drying stalks, a smattering of magazine-page airplanes adding to the chaos. Though considering all the times they’d sat up there in the tree house as kids, doing just what they were doing, it was no wonder he’d witnessed this scene before.
His memory blinked and he saw a crop circle superimposed on the field ablaze with afternoon light, but he knew there was only one time of day when most crop circles appeared...and disappeared. Three a.m., the exact hour he’d awakened every night for the past seven months. It was the hour when spirits moved between Heaven and Earth, or so he’d been told. Nurses at his granddad’s Recovery Center had confirmed that more often than not, a patient died between the hours of three and four in the morning.
Jamison believed some spirit brushed past him at that hour every night. He’d sit up, heart racing, eyes and ears straining to catch any little disturbance in the air. It had been getting worse lately. He could swear someone was thumping on him, trying to wake him up. Every night. Like clockwork.
Nothing ever happened. He’d get a drink of water and go back to bed, never feeling the presence again. Was it Granddad? Or was it a young girl in white, forever in white, dancing in his dreams, waking him with a kiss, then gone?
More like a bum internal clock, reset last fall, never to be reset again.
He’d known it was going to be hard to live without her. Bad days were expected, but