Joan Pickart – Texas Moon (страница 2)

So, okay, he’d start at the beginning.

The first night he’d seen a shadowy figure with no discernible features, or a clue as to whether it was a man or woman. Swirling around the figure was a dark maze of what appeared to be beads or balls of some sort.

The second night the maze had been clearer. The dark cloud had become brightly colored beads, as well as buttons. The beads had separated into straight rows. The shadowy figure had been far from clear, but it was most definitely a woman.

Then tonight there had been even more. He’d had a glimpse of a sign that read: Buttons and Beads.

He’d also seen the woman. She had dark eyes and a wild tumble of black hair that fell to her shoulders in curly disarray. She was very lovely with a gypsylike appearance that was accentuated by a bright blue shawl she’d been wearing.

She’d been holding out her hands, as though pleading for someone to come and help her, and tears had flowed down her pale cheeks.

And on all three nights, he’d sensed the cold chill of danger.

“Lord,” he said, and pulled his hands from beneath his head and dropped his arms heavily onto the bed.

He needed a plan of action. The thought of enduring a fourth night like this held no appeal. Whatever was triggering his psychic powers had to be stopped before he went nuts.

“Buttons and Beads.” He rolled onto his stomach, punched the pillow, then lowered his head again with a weary sigh.

First thing in the morning, he thought, as sleep began to creep over his senses, he’d track down a place named Buttons and Beads. Even if it meant talking to every telephone information operator in the country, he’d find it.

Nancy Shatner finished counting the glossy red beads, then scooped them into a plastic bag. She slipped the bag through a slot in a small white machine that sat on the table, heat sealing the bag.

Next came a sticker with the name, address and telephone number of the shop, which she pressed into place in the lower right-hand corner of the bag.

After checking off the red beads on an order form, she carried the rectangular hard-plastic bin to the front of the store and set it in its designated place, returning to the rear work area with a bin of blue beads.

Settled once more at the table; she checked the order form, nodded, then lifted a handful of blue beads from the bin to a large felt mat. Using what was actually a frosting spatula, she began to quickly move beads two at a time from one side of the mat to the other.

“Two, four, six, eight,” she said aloud, then continued to count silently.

She made piles of twenty beads, which she would recount before sealing them into a bag.

After making five piles of twenty, she took a sip of tea from a ceramic mug, wrinkling her nose as she discovered it was cold. Setting the mug to one side, she stretched her arms above her head, then dropped her hands to her lap, smiling as her gaze fell on the stack of orders she was filling.

Business is booming, she thought. Her reputation for quick service and a product of superb quality was growing. Her mailorder catalog with colored photographs of the buttons and beads was worth the extra money she’d crossed her fingers and paid.

Nancy switched her gaze to the far end of the large table where she was just beginning to start the assembly of a new catalog, which would have a special sale section to mark the celebration of Buttons and Beads being officially two years old.

The walk-in trade, she mused, was increasing nicely, much to her surprised delight. The area of town where she was located wasn’t exactly a high-class shopping mecca. It wasn’t a high-class anything, for that matter.

The decision to set up the front area attractively for whatever retail business she might garner had been a good one. It was easy enough to tote the bins to the rear area to fill mail orders, and she considered every face-to-face sale a bonus.

“Life is a bowl of cherries,” she said, then laughed. “Or whatever. Get to work, Ms. Shatner.”

Over the past two years, she’d perfected the knack of being able to count with one section of her brain, and think about whatever struck her fancy with the other part of her mind.

A fact, she thought merrily, that had probably kept her from turning into a blithering idiot from spending her days counting two, four, six...

Life is a bowl of cherries? she mentally repeated, as she slid blue beads from one side of the mat to the other. Now that she really thought about it, that didn’t make much sense. What if a person didn’t like cherries?

The bottom line was that her life was in shipshape order. She was happy, fulfilled and contented. Her fledgling business was doing well, and she had marvelous friends in the store’s shabby, run-down neighborhood. She had everything she wanted and needed.

Well...

Nancy frowned slightly as she continued to count the beads.

There were moments...not often, but once in a while... when she was a tad lonely. Sitting alone in her little apartment above the store, watching a romantic movie on her minuscule television, sometimes caused her to wistfully yearn for a special man, a wonderful man, to take her into his arms.

“Hush, Nancy,” she said. “Eighteen, twenty,” she added, completing a pile of beads.

She stared into space.

It was perfectly understandable, she reasoned, that she’d have fleeting thoughts of being loved and loving in return, of having a child that was a miraculous result of that love. She was, after all, a normal, healthy twenty-five-year-old woman.

But the fleeting thoughts were just that... fleeting. She valued her hard-won independence far too much to relinquish it for any reason. To enter into a relationship with a man would require her to give away a part of her being, and to be accountable to someone other than herself.

No.

Never again.

“Stop it,” she scolded herself. “You’ll make the bowl of cherries gloomy by thinking about that stuff.”

Blanking her mind beyond counting, she began to hum a peppy tune.

Tux stood across the street, frowning as he stared at the store with the sign hung on the top front that read Buttons and Beads.

It was a typical June morning in Houston, hot and humid, but Tux was oblivious to the trickle of sweat running down his back beneath his cotton shirt.

It had been ridiculously easy to find the store with the sign he’d seen so clearly in the images in his mind. He’d simply opened the Houston telephone book to the yellow pages, and there it was.

He folded his arms over his chest and leaned one shoulder against the chipped bricks of the front of the deserted building behind him, sweeping his gaze along the street.

It was a mishmash of structures. Some, like the one he’d propped himself on, were empty, the whitewashed windows and crumbling brick walls covered in spray-painted graffiti. Others had professionally produced signs like the one announcing Buttons and Beads, sparkling clean windows and walls, and nicely painted front doors.

He could see a variety of businesses—a bakery, a used clothes store called The Second Time Around, a pawnshop, a small grocery store, and some others he couldn’t quite decipher from where he stood.

The height of the buildings, combined with the curtains in the upstairs windows of the occupied ones, indicated that the owners, or possibly other renters, lived above the stores.

There was pride of ownership there, as well as evidence of broken dreams and a failure to succeed. But the effort of sprucing up that the tenants or owners had made couldn’t erase the section of the city they were in.

Dangerous.

“Damn,” he muttered.

He did not want to cross that street and go into Buttons and Beads. There was a knot in his gut the size of a bowling ball caused by the dread of what he might find.

Tux shook his head in self-disgust.

Some former government agent now a private investigator he was. He was shaking in his shorts over what he might discover beyond the door of that shop. The woman he’d seen in the visions, that beautiful, gypsylike woman, had been in danger, had been pleading for help as she cried tears of fear.

His psychic powers didn’t see into the future, never had. He could glimpse only what was taking place at the actual moment, or had very recently occurred.

Why the foggy and confusing images of what might have taken place in that store had reached him without him bidding them to come, he didn’t know. Hopefully it was a fluke that would never happen again.

Maybe... Yeah, that was a comforting thought. Maybe the scenario he’d witnessed had occurred years before, and had accidentally landed in his brain.

. Granted, the card on the door of Buttons and Beads said Open, but it could very well be that he’d walk in there and find a little old man running the place.

The old guy would relate a sad tale of a robbery years before that had caused the young woman, who then owned the shop, to be slightly...very slightly....harmed. She’d hightailed it out of there after recovering from minor injuries suffered during the assault, and was now happily married with five kids.

Tux blew out a puff of air from a pent-up breath, then told himself to cross that street.