Hanging by a Thread Read Online Free Page A

grounded.
    That night, I tried to talk to my mom about what had happened, and she lost it. She started yelling, and then she apologized, making me promise to forget what had happened and to tell no one about it, ever. She said it was like a disease, but if I ignored it, it would go away.
    So when we drove down to Winston for Thanksgiving a few weeks later, I waited until my mom was busy with her laptop in the den, and whispered my forbidden questions to Nana. She took me into the kitchen with a worried look and, after cutting me a slice of pumpkin bread, told me that she’d always known I was special. That was when I found out what really happened to Alma.
    “The baby who was born the night Alma died was my mother, Josie,” Nana said after telling me the story of Alma’s murder.
    “Did she have it? The … 
gift
?” I wasn’t sure what I thought of Nana’s term for it yet, especially since Mom’s reaction had convinced me it was something terrible.
    “I’m almost certain she did, though my memories from that time aren’t very reliable. She died when I was still in my teens. But Mama always seemed to know things about people in town. And why wouldn’t she? People brought clothes to the shop all the time. She’d take up a hem or alter a neckline or a sleeve, and once in a while she’d learn something about the person who wore it. I remember there were some families she wouldn’t sit close to in church … a few kids whose houses she wouldn’t let us go over to.”
    “Didn’t you wonder why?”
    “Well, I had bigger things to worry about. People said that our family was cursed. They started up all that nonsense about the shop being haunted. Kids at school used to tease me and Mary and Agnes; they said they could see Alma’s ghost following us around, that kind of thing. I thought Mama was just trying to spare our feelings. After all, she grew up an orphan—she was raised by one of her aunts—and she was determined to give us a loving childhood.” She smiled sadly. “I still miss her sometimes. Lord, but it’s been a lot of years.”
    “But what did she say when you started doing it? When you had your first vision?”
    “Well, I didn’t call it that, of course. What happened was, we had a neighbor boy who was nothing but trouble. We lived a couple of miles out of town back then, next to a sheep ranch. Out where Via Loma cuts through now. Anyway, someone was leaving the gate open and the rancher had lost half a dozen sheep. That boy left his jacket over at our house one day, and when I touched it, I saw he was the one who’d been doing it—out of plain old meanness. I got a look inside his head that … Well, it’s no surprise he ended up being nothing but trouble. Moved away a few years later, and I can’t say anyone missed him.”
    “Did you tell your mom what you saw?”
    “I did, and I’ll never forget what she told me. She acted like it was the most natural thing in the world to see things in clothes, but said it was my choice whether to do anything with what I saw. She made it very clear that ifsomething like that happened again, it wasn’t my job to fix other people’s mistakes, or to get involved at all.”
    “So did you? Get involved?”
    “Sometimes I did. I learned that the greater the wrong, the stronger the vision could be. If someone had hurt someone else—if I thought there was danger of it happening again—then I’d try to help make it right. And years later, when I tried to stop, I learned that it was possible … just very difficult.”
    “What do you mean? How do you quit?”
    “If you never do anything about what you see, if you make sure that you never get involved, never alter your behavior because of a vision, they’ll slowly fade away and you won’t get them anymore. And that’s just fine,” she added, in a voice that seemed tinged with sadness.
    “Is that what happened to you?” I knew without asking that Nana didn’t have the visions anymore. She