CHAPTER 20-2
579 Words
Mara fiddled with her napkin and silverware as she sat at the large round table in the back of Anda!—a Spanish tapas restaurant that she and Ping had taken to frequenting, largely because it was a quiet place, especially after one o’clock when their short lunch rush appeared to end. Ping spoke into a cell phone, apparently to a vendor who provided some finished baked goods of one kind or another. Lost in her own thoughts, she wasn’t really paying attention. She was starting to get the sense that life was spiraling out of control again, as it had after the crash of Flight 559. Not that life had ever gotten back to normal, but things did quiet down for a couple weeks. At least until a child’s voice starting coming out of the radio casing and out of Melanie Proctor. That was bizarre.
Ping tapped the face of his phone with a finger and put it down on the table. “Sorry about that. Now, where were we? Oh, right, I don’t think me keeping that old radio shell is going to do anything to resolve anything.”
“Ping, keep it for the time being. The last thing I need to deal with right now are disembodied voices coming from who-knows-where.”
“Eat your food,” Ping said. He picked up a grilled shrimp impaled on a toothpick and waved it at her. “Hiding the radio is not going to help you figure out what is going on. More likely than not, the voice is associated with you, not the radio. After all, the voice we heard come out of Mrs. Proctor was the same, was it not?”
“Yes.” Mara sulked and pushed some paella around on her plate. “But why should I have to figure out what it wants?”
“It sounded to me like the child was calling to you.”
“It was calling to Mar-ree, not Mara,” she said.
“I got the impression it was a childish mispronunciation.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“No, but it’s as good a guess as any, don’t you think?”
“Whatever. I suppose.”
“Mara, don’t stick your head in the sand. You need to figure out what this is. It could be very important. These things don’t just happen. There’s usually a reason for them. Something is going on, and you may need to be prepared to address it.”
“What would you suggest I do?”
“Did you try to address the voice when you heard it in the shop?”
“No. I was too freaked-out to strike up a conversation.”
“Perhaps we should try to contact whoever it is and see what she wants.”
“How would you propose we do that? Post something on f*******: and see if she comments?”
“I would recommend that we spend some time together at the warehouse. I told you the other night that you needed to engage with your abilities, to practice. Not only will it help you deal with your issues around the shop, with things fixing themselves without you consciously wanting them to, but maybe we can figure out what to do about this voice that is haunting you.”
“Haunting? Haunting?” Mara’s eyes bugged out.
Ping raised his hand and lowered it. “Not so loudly. A bad choice of words. I did not mean to imply that you were being contacted by a dead person. That’s probably unlikely.”
“Unlikely?”
“Mara, we don’t know who it is, if it is a who. What I do suspect is that, if you keep ignoring or hiding from it, you are leaving yourself open to an unpleasant surprise. Why not try to figure it out, together?”
Mara relaxed and sat back in her chair. “Okay. How about tonight? I might as well face up to whatever it is sooner rather than later.”
“Drop by the bakery when you close up the shop, and we’ll drive over,” Ping said.
- Writer
