Free Holding Court by K.C. Held Page A

sweaty hair off my forehead and says, “Want to tell me about it?”
    “It was the dead girl from the passageway. Except she was alive.”
    Gran doesn’t say anything, just continues to stroke my hair.
    “The girl I saw was dead, Gran. I’m sure of it.”
    “You don’t have to try to convince me, Juliet.”
    “You still think I should go back to Tudor Times?”
    “It’s your decision. But I’ve always been a big believer in the notion that things happen for a reason, which means there’s an important reason you found that girl. And if I were you, I’d want to know why.”
    “You’re not worried about whoever killed her coming after me?”
    “As of right now whoever killed her is getting away with it. There’s no body. No proof. If he, or she, takes you out they’ll have the police all over them.”
    “Gee, that’s comforting.” I sit up. “I don’t get it, Gran.”
    “Get what?”
    “I understand your gift. You help people find their soul mate, and that’s super awesome and people are über-grateful for what you do. And Mom uses her gift to make a living and keep people from getting swindled and all that. But what good is my PTS? What’s the point of having my gift if I can’t prevent dead bodies from disappearing or, more importantly, keep someone from getting killed in the first place?”
    “Juliet, there’s no way you could have prevented that girl’s death. You’d never even met her.”
    “I know, but if I had I probably would have told her something like, ‘Beware the purple garden gnome!’ or ‘You’re going to fart in yoga class!’ The stuff I say is ridiculous. All it does is embarrass me or the person I yell it at. It’s beyond pointless.”
    “I doubt very much that the things you say are pointless, Juliet. I like to think you have the gift of butterflies.”
    “What the hell does PTS have to do with butterflies?”
    “I think the things you say work a bit like the butterfly effect. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings somewhere in the rain forest and it causes a tornado in Iowa?”
    “You’ve totally lost me.”
    “You can’t see the changes that come about because they’re so small to begin with. I’ll give you an example. When you were six years old you were sitting in the bathtub and all of a sudden you shouted at me, ‘The weevils are going to ruin everything!’ and started crying. After I put you to bed I got to thinking. And I went into the kitchen and opened the flour and sure enough, there were weevils in it. I would have never noticed the damn things without my reading glasses on. And it just so happened I’d promised to make my famous caramel cake for the engagement party of one of my clients the next day.”
    “So I saved some people from weevily cake? Woo-hoo.”
    Gran holds up a hand to silence me. “So I ended up going to the store to buy flour at nine o’clock at night and I ran into Charlene Plimpton in the produce section and we got to talking, and we must have stood there for half an hour shooting the breeze. Well, Charlene called me the next day to tell me the old oak tree in front of her place fell down that night and landed in her living room. She said if she hadn’t run into me at the store she probably would have been sitting on her couch watching Survivor and the tree would have smashed her flatter than a flapjack. My point is, Juliet, your comments aren’t pointless. But there’s no way of knowing what might happen as a result of the things you say. It’s fascinating, really.”
    “Why can’t I just say, ‘Don’t be in your living room at nine fifteen or you’ll get squashed by a tree’?”
    “Would you really say that? I think you have Psychic Tourette’s Syndrome, as Cami so indelicately puts it, because it makes you say the things you need to say. I’ve always wondered if you were more willing to pay attention to your gift, instead of trying to quash it, whether you’d have more control. Haven’t you noticed that some