“Same old, same old. I’ll be here if you need me, but what I really want is for you to be safe and happy. I don’t think you can do that here.”
Dawn scooted to the edge of her bed next to her grandmother and laid her head on her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere unless I can take you with me.”
Annette chuckled. “That’s sweet, child. But I don’t drive and I don’t want to be a burden. I’m too old to start over somewhere else. You’re not. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
Dawn hardly knew what to say. Her grandmother wasn’t old, and she could start over, but convincing her to try seemed like more of a struggle than it was worth, at least for the time being. Once she’d saved enough, then she would think about it. Her mother would be in jail for another five years, but Dawn couldn’t wait that long. She would have enough money saved up in a year, and she and her grandma could move to Florida, Texas, or Arizona, and then when her mom got out of jail, they would have a nice home set up for her to come to.
“I’ll think about it, Grandma.”
Annette smirked. “I’ve heard that before. It usually means ‘I just want you to stop talking about it.’”
The woman was insightful. She might be psychic but had never explained it much. If the sight was inherited, it must’ve skipped a generation. Her mother wouldn’t have landed in jail if she had known the SWAT team was about to jump out of a nearby van while she was being used as a mule carrying heroin and meth.
“Grandma? Do you have more than just a psychic sense?” she asked abruptly.
Annette’s eyes grew wide. “What makes you ask that, child?”
“I…I can sometimes feel things. Sometimes even see things in my mind—as if I’m looking out of someone else’s eyes. And I can sense when something is going to happen ahead of time. And I dream…about things that happen.”
Her grandmother heaved a deep sigh as though she were carrying a secret burden. “Well, I’ve never told you this, and I have no proof if it’s true or not, but I was told that my grandmother was some kind of powerful witch.”
Dawn’s mouth dropped. Why had Annette never shared this with her before? “As in casting spells and all that?”
“I don’t know. I was told my grandmother learned magic from a voodoo priestess. My mother refused to follow her ways. She left New Orleans when she was sixteen and traveled up north with a salesman. By the time she got to Boston, she was expecting me.”
Dawn knew the rest of the story, how Annette’s mother, Fleur, had run off with the salesman with the dimples, gotten pregnant, and then was left to fend for herself. Fleur had worked hard her entire life but could never make ends meet. She died before the age of fifty of a stroke while she was mopping the steps. Annette had been thirty-three at the time with her own daughter, Elise, or Lissie as they called her. Lissie got pregnant at a young age and had Dawn.
It seemed the women of their family all had babies when they were little more than children themselves, and all had terrible luck with men. Dawn vowed not to let that happen to her. She’d made it to the age of twenty-two without any pregnancies and had managed to extricate herself from the gang she’d run around with when she was a teenager.
“What happened to your grandmother?”
“My mother wrote to her a few times. The old woman made a living telling fortunes in New Orleans’ tourist trap—Jackson Square. I don’t know what happened to her. They drifted apart. My mother didn’t approve of ‘hocus-pocus’ as she called it.”
Annette’s eyes teared up as Dawn put her arms around her and hugged her close. There was more to the story than Annette had shared. Dawn could feel it in her gut. Her grandmother had had a rough childhood, and she’d sacrificed her future to help Dawn. Her own daughter, Lissie, seemed to be a lost cause, but at least being in jail gave her access to a drug treatment plan and she was working on getting clean.
“So what do you mean by sometimes you can feel things and see things?”
“I don’t really understand it. I’ve never told anyone much. Once in a while, I’ll just mention something to a friend if I think they’re going to make a mistake. They don’t always appreciate it.”
Her grandmother smiled. “Welcome to my world.”
* * *
As Luca walked out of the briefing room for his next shift, the sergeant smirked directly at him, as if he knew something Luca didn’t. His thoughts traveled back to the strange girl he’d met by the Christian Science Plaza—and her prediction.
Could the sergeant, aka Lisa’s father, have found out about their relationship and talked Lisa into breaking up with him? He still couldn’t really make sense of it. Two years down the drain.
He didn’t have time to ruminate. He and Joe had barely started patrolling when the radio dispatcher had an assignment for them. Screams had been reported at a nearby apartment building, and the ten code signaled a possible domestic dispute.
“Shit. I hate those,” Joe said. “I’ll go in first.”
“Only if you want to. I’m perfectly willing to give it a try. Might as well get some experience, and it would be a chance to practice some of the techniques I was taught to de-escalate these situations.”
Joe laughed. “You sure? I’d hate for you to be killed your second day on the job. It wouldn’t look good for either of us.”
Luca smiled. “I won’t get killed. I promise.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, kid.”
