Free Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb by Carolyn Jourdan Page B

okay.”
    At first Phoebe was confused and wondered how Waneeta could possibly know she’d had a bad dream, but then she shook off the fog of sleep and realized it was still the day of her boyfriend’s funeral.
    “Yeah,” Phoebe mumbled, “I’m okay.”
    “Well, don’t worry about anything, honey, if you wanna take some time off I’ll find somebody to cover for you.”
    “You don’t have to do that. I’d rather stay busy.”
    Phoebe’d learned long ago that taking care of other people was the best way to keep her mind off her own problems.
    “Well, if that’s what ye want,” Waneeta said. “I’ll be thinkin of ye . Call if ye need anything.”
     Phoebe thanked her and hung up the phone. She laid on the couch for a few more minutes offering a brief heartfelt prayer for Sean and for the girl she’d seen in her dream. Then she got up and went into the kitchen to make dinner.
    The sun was setting as she scrambled a couple of eggs and ate them on thin slices of whole wheat toast. As she chewed she stared longingly at the little gallery of Nikola Tesla photos on the refrigerator.        
    There was a formal portrait and also a couple of pictures of him at work. They were all in black and white. Tesla had such a handsome face. Phoebe was in love with him.
    They’d never met, because he’d died more than a decade before she was born, but she loved him anyway. She stared at the photo of him sitting calmly reading, while beside him an electrical monstrosity threw out sparks and lightning bolts every which way.
    To Phoebe’s way of thinking Tesla was the perfect man. He was beautiful, brilliant, and geeky. He loved animals and lived off crackers and milk. He could’ve been the world’s first billionaire, but he wouldn’t take the time to sign the paperwork because he didn’t want to be distracted from his work.
    For the similar reasons he’d chosen to be celibate and unmarried. People who didn’t understand him said all kinds of goofy things about him, but his work spoke for itself. Some of the most famous scientists and inventors in history had stolen their best stuff from him, Edison for one. Tesla was the guy who was actually responsible for electricity and radio.
    Nikola was possibly one of the reasons Phoebe had never married. She didn’t dare tell anyone, though. They wouldn’t understand. Sometimes she thought she might be in contact with his spirit because whenever she thought of him for more than a few seconds, it made her dizzy and she could see visions of rainbows shaped like doughnuts and other things that didn’t actually exist as far as she knew.
    Reading the letters of Keats did something similar. She always got the feeling Keats was sitting next to her in bed, reading along with her, and really enjoying himself. Keats was pleasant company, but it seemed like a weird way to live and it wasn’t anything she could talk to anyone about.
    She took a hot bath with a few drops of spikenard in the water. Spikenard was the essential oil that Mary Magdalene poured over Jesus’s head in the incident that set Judas off. Just a couple of drops filled the room with a powerful, complex smell that had a hypnotic, tranquilizing quality. She could only imagine the effect of emptying a whole bottle of it onto someone.
    It was the calming aspect that Phoebe needed, although she naively hoped her trials were behind her. She stayed in the bath for quite a while, adding hot water several times before daring to go back to her bedroom. On the way she searched out a book from her small library.
    She climbed into her tall antique iron bed and got under a quilt covered with a pattern of small red roses. She sat propped up by four pillows and began re-reading Rudolf Steiner’s matter-of-fact explanation of why some people were able to communicate with the dead and others weren’t. And why some people had dreams that would come true the next day.
    It made Phoebe feel slightly less crazy to read Steiner’s