AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Still holding my breath, I placed the tip of my index finger against the globe’s surface, feeling the little bumps and flat areas pass by. The globe spun, then slowed.
Came to a stop.
The breath escaped my lips as I leaned in close, eyes taking in the familiar outlines of the place where my finger had landed.
Arizona.
A to Z.
I wanted to laugh. The pendulum had been as literal as it could be, and I still hadn’t gotten its message.
Okay, Arizona. That wasn’t so bad. No, I wasn’t big on heat, but from what I could tell, the place where the globe had stopped wasn’t in Phoenix. I narrowed my eyes, trying to figure out exactly where I was supposed to go. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything in that particular spot, just mountains and desert.
What, was I supposed to go live like a hermit in a cave or something?
Obviously, a little more research would be required.
I picked up the globe and set it on the floor, then opened my laptop and logged in. My plan was to look at a map of Arizona online, something that would provide a lot more detail than the major cities called out on the toy globe’s surface.
With a map displayed on my laptop’s screen, I zoomed in on Phoenix and started moving slowly to the east and north, since that seemed to be roughly the direction where my finger had landed. Slowly…slowly….
And then I stopped, an unwilling laugh escaping my lips.
Talk about literal. Once again, I’d completely missed the point my pendulum was trying to get across.
Because there it was, staring up at me from the screen.
Globe, Arizona.
2
Online Shopping
I’d never heardof Globe, Arizona. A few minutes of research told me the reason why. It was a tiny place, just a little more than seven thousand people. Hell, my high school had been bigger than that.
What was I supposed to do in an isolated former mining town tucked away in the mountains east of Phoenix?
Hide, of course. It did seem like just about the last place where Lucien Dumond would think to look for me.
I did a quick image search on Globe, just to know what I was getting into, and what I found relieved some of my anxiety. Sure, the town was small, but the downtown area looked very cute, like something out of a Hallmark Channel movie, and many of the houses were restored Victorian and Craftsman homes, darling and brightly painted as they stood on Globe’s narrow, hilly streets. Over the years — mostly when watching holiday movies on Netflix — I’d sometimes harbored idle dreams of getting out of the L.A. rat race and relocating to such a place, but that’s all they’d ever been…daydreams and nothing more.
Well, until today.
Looking at the houses made me realize I needed to research the housing market there. A few minutes on Zillow told me that renting wasn’t really an option, since the only things currently available were a junky studio apartment and a very expensive ranch retreat on the edge of town.
No, I’d have to buy something.
That actually wasn’t as big an issue as it could have been, since I’d won the lottery a year earlier, thanks to a prosperity spell that had turned outextremelywell.
Okay, it wasn’t as if I’d won a huge Powerball lottery. I wasn’t sitting on millions or anything. No, I’d won one of the low-end lotteries, the kind that still left me with a little over three-quarters of a million dollars after taxes. And that, I realized, would buy a heck of a lot of real estate in a place like Globe.
Only…what did I really want to buy? If I was going to sink my not-so-hard-won winnings into a place, I needed to make it count. After all, what was the point in starting over again if I wasn’treallystarting over? If I got something I didn’t love, then I knew I wouldn’t be emotionally invested enough to make it work.
At first glance, there wasn’t a lot to love. A few of the houses looked as though they had potential, but did I want to spend the next six months or more with my bathrooms and kitchens torn up while they were brought into the twenty-first century? My star chart had me pinned as a Gemini, but I was right on the cusp of Cancer, and that meant I tended to be a homebody. Throw in both a moon and ascendant in Libra, and that made me even more averse to any kind of chaos in my environment.
So…I needed something basically turn-key. And there didn’t seem to be much like that in Globe. Well, not for someone as picky as I was. Sure, you could argue that a woman on the run didn’t have the luxury of being too choosy, but I knew my limitations, and that was definitely one of them. My Libra moon had me making Pinterest boards of all sorts of interior decorating schemes, and I already had in my head what I thought of as my “dream” house, even though I’d never seriously thought about buying a place. Those Lotto winnings would have gotten me a small condo on the Westside of Los Angeles…most likely a fixer-upper. I just couldn’t see myself blowing all that money on something that wouldn’t make me happy, which was why I’d stayed in my rent-controlled duplex despite having a chunk of change in the bank.
But at least I already had a good idea of what I thought would make me happy.
